These schools have, however, done one vital and important task: they have familiarized mankind with the general concept of initiation; they have therefore posited an impelling [430] goal, and they have consequently served. This must not be forgotten. It is really not the fault of the individual that he warps and distorts a presented truth. It is his point in the evolutionary cycle which makes that inevitable. The moment that such a point in the evolutionary presentation is twisted and distorted so that it is not progressive in its appeal, but serves only to feed individual pride and the sense of personality achievement, it is necessarily not spiritual.

In our approach to the entire theme of initiation I would ask you ever to have this in your minds; I would ask you to seek for the different and not the usual approach to this much discussed theme; I would ask you to question all that makes you personally feel adequate to the initiatory demands, and to look for that which will lead you to exert all that you have of intuition and spiritual perception. I would beg you to repudiate all that makes you feel a devoted follower of the individuality of any Master and which leads you to feel that you are in the vanguard of the evolutionary wave. I would like, in this instruction, to give you a new slant on the initiatory processes and thus to present to you a fresh incentive to constructive endeavor and towards a common sense approach to this subject. My reason for so doing was given you in our last instruction, when I said: "When the human crisis and the spiritual crisis coincide, there comes one of the major periods of opportunity and of decision. Hence the extreme gravity of the present moment." I would suggest therefore that we study this problem of the initiatory process from the angle of Penetration, of Polarization, and of Precipitation. These are words which have a practical usefulness if correctly understood; I would ask you to consider them from the angle of your individual approach to the Initiator. There are consequently two angles to this needed consideration: that of yourself, the individual disciple, and that of the group of which you should be (are you?) an integral part. Let us therefore take up these points and see what we can learn from them. What penetrates? Or into what do you, as a disciple, seek to penetrate? Where are you polarized? And what do you really mean when you use that word? What is [431] precipitated when you have succeeded in the processes of penetration? or when you have arrived at a measure of polarization? These are aspects of the teaching which are of importance; otherwise you are working with no intelligent perception and are using words without meaning.