AAB: We have been taking up some unpublished writings of the Tibetan that are concerned with the training of initiates: [Reading from The Rays and the Initiations, p. 100]:

Let the group see that all the eighteen fires die down….

The eighteen fires refer to the eighteen states of matter that constitute the personality. They are:  seven physical states of matter, seven emotional states that enable the astral body to function on the seven subplanes of the astral plane, and four states of matter for each of the four conditions of the concrete mind – (7, 7, 4 = 18). These are eighteen grades of substance, eighteen vibratory groups of atoms, and eighteen aggregates of life that form the bodies of the lunar lords (as The Secret Doctrine calls them), which in their totality form the body of the Lunar Lord, the Personality. The above is the very ABC of occultism and a familiar truth to all of you. What is referred to here has, however, no reference to processes of purification, of control or of discipline.   

In these instructions the Tibetan is dealing with a training that has no parallel and no relation to the usual training that we read about in books like The Path of Discipleship and The Outer Court, as they prepare people to take certain great steps. This carries us on into a realm of thought and teaching and of realization that requires Soul perception, intuitional understanding and the very highest that we have to bring to the consideration of these things. [Reading further on p. 100-101]:

What is referred to here has, however, no reference to processes of purification, of control or of discipline. These have been much earlier considered and are regarded as the necessary processes instituted upon the probationary path, and should have reached a point prior to the stage of accepted discipleship where – rapid or slow in expression – they are nevertheless automatic in action, sure and inevitable.

The first sentence in this fourth rule refers to Detachment – the detachment of the Soul from the body or the institution of those activities that bring about what is called in the Bible “the second death.” It is not detachment as the aspirant practices it. It is the scientific breaking of all links and the ending (through completed use) of all contacts that are now regarded as militating against liberation. It is in reality a scientific process of ending karma; it is individual and national karma that brings a person back into a physical vehicle and clothes him with the qualities and aspects of substance. This must end while he is a member of the Master’s Ashram and is preparing himself for the triumph of the fourth initiation. This is brought about by the automatic, ceaseless and unquestioning fulfillment of duty, from the angle of recognized service.

It might be stated that an intelligent understanding of this sentence will lead to those actions that “produce the death and dissipation and final dissolution of the personality through the ending of karma.” It must be remembered that a Master has no personality at all. His divine nature is all that He has. The form through which He works (if he is working through and living in a physical vehicle) is a created image, the product of a focused will and the creative imagination; it is not the product of desire, as in the case of a human being. This is an important distinction and one that warrants careful thinking. The lesser lives (which are governed by the Moon) have been dispersed. They no longer respond to the ancient call of the reincarnating Soul, which again and again has gathered to itself the lives that it has touched and colored by its quality in the past. The Soul and the causal body no longer exist by the time the fourth initiation is undergone. What is left is the Monad and the thread, the Antahkarana, which it has spun out of its own life and consciousness down the ages and which it can focus at will upon the physical plane, where it can create a body of pure substance and radiant light for all that the Master may require. This will be a perfect body, utterly adapted to the need, the plan and the purpose of the Master. None of the lesser lives (as we understand the term) form part of it, for they can only be summoned by desire. In the Master there is no desire left, and this is the thought held before the disciple as he begins to master the significance of the fourth Rule.

In this Rule two main ideas are to be found, both of them connected with the first divine aspect: the thought of Death and the nature of the Will.

Detachment is “the scientific breaking of all links and the ending through complete use of all contacts that are now regarded as militating against liberation.” That is one reason why humanity is beginning to learn to work in group formation, because group work does not militate against liberation. Personality work does. I am talking about group work that isn’t just organization but is based on inner relationship with an outer expression.

CH: That phrase, “through complete use,” I would like to know what it means.

RK: “Use” has reference to the initiating will. It flashes forth and takes substance to itself. Substance takes form, and by the time the will expresses itself, that form has been redeemed and there is nothing more to do. It has to do with will.

AAB: I imagine it has, through complete use. You are talking from the level of the Monad. The natural interpretation would be through complete use of all experience, of all contacts. You took it up where it belonged, that the Monad stops all contacts – the Spiritual Triad, the Soul and the personality as its expression.

M:   What do you suppose a Master has in place of desire? Is it will, something that causes him to come down here and work for humanity?

AAB: Isn’t it love?

GR: Wouldn’t it be transmuted desire?

AAB: If you carry the thing back far enough, you arrive in the long run at what? Desire and will are the same thing. Desire is a distortion of will, isn’t it?

CH: The Tibetan speaks of studying love in three ways – in personality, in Soul and in Monad.

RK: Love in the personality is desire.

AAB: The Master has no personality at all; his divine nature is all that he has. So that until there are certain aspects of the divine nature developed in us, it is impossible for us to contact a Master.

RK: The Masters use as a personality the persons in their ashrams, the disciples and initiates. That is why the Masters work in groups.

AAB: I was looking at it from the selfish angle. As he has no personality, what is there in us that can contact him?

N: Love.

AAB: We know the Master can be contacted. Perhaps he picks his lamas carefully. The only thing that will take anybody into a Master’s ashram is that some part of him is purified and divine, and that will take him into the ashram.

RK: He may be divine, but in appearance there is the form, like the garment you wear.

N: I believe, when we identify ourselves with that divine substance, we will in that way contact the Master. If love is put to intelligent use in the living things and made to assist evolution in its ultimate ends, I believe we will contact a Master.

RK: It means that spirit comes into it as well as will.

GR: We are not swept by desire. We must apprehend and know if we are to be focal points of force and not be swept emotionally.

LM: Identification is the key to understanding.

GR: We have to identify ourselves with the spiritual will.

AAB: I think LM means identify ourselves with that which is in ourselves.

LM: The greater reality in whatever form it is.

AAB: I had an interesting talk today with a woman who is quite a notable person in the field of botany and astronomy. She is becoming clairvoyant, and it bothers her. She wanted me to know that she did not believe in astrology, and I said, “What we do believe in is that everything that is living on this planet is all part of a great whole, and when we can identify ourselves with the whole, then we are free. We are living and manifesting in a great life.” She asked me what this belief was called, and I said “hylozoism.” I said, “I can accept the fact that this planet is a living thing because I know it is, but the rest is pure speculation.” It is a question of great expansions of consciousness that we get to that death. As we die to this and to that, we are released into something bigger all the time; the death of an attachment it may be.

RK: Death through complete use.

AAB: Through that death we are released into something.

RK: I believe some of us hold on to habits.

AAB: We were talking about somebody who had difficulty giving up something, and one of us said that if it is a desire you can give it up easily, but if it is a habit it is not so easy.

In this Rule, two main items are both connected with the first divine aspect – the thought of death and the nature of the Will. Death is a crashing entrance into the unknown. We find our group in the Master’s ashram and then begin to master that. I think this whole subject of death is wonderfully interesting, and I think it is something the Arcane School has to tackle someday. People are so afraid of death.

B:   Would you read the Fourth Rule again?

AAB: [Rereading on pp. 96]:

Let the group see that all the eighteen fires die down and that the lesser lives return unto the reservoir of life. This they must bring about through the evocation of the  Will. The lesser wheels must not for aye revolve in time and space. Only the greater Wheel must onward move and turn.

RK: On the same idea, there is a great entity known as the Solar Logos, and this identity is realizing Himself through experience, and when He has experienced fully, we are He; we have become identified, and all the fragments that humanity is and all other types of life become omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. When we can align ourselves with that identity and know that in our own little way by our contact with each other, then we begin to be big enough to contain Him. That is why we have to accept each other and fuse and merge. Reincarnation continues until He is completely revealed and we become obscured and no longer are. That is the way things are.

AAB: Death and initiation go together. This morning I was getting a lesson ready for one of the courses in the Fourth Degree. It dealt with the Planetary Logos, and it said that this present crisis was brought about because the Planetary Logos is taking an initiation, and there is death on a large scale because of the greatness of this initiation.

RK: A thought on “taking initiation”: That phrase has been haunting me this week, and I discovered a new meaning. The way we are taught these things, we are given a conception, a picture, a hint, for the training of initiates. I really become an initiate by taking the hint and initiating for myself those activities, processes and thoughts that will make me realize what it is. When I have taken that hint and embodied it in my life, I am an initiate as far as that concept or picture is concerned. I take the initiative to make myself ready to take it. I take the seed and make it grow through me.

GR: Initiation is an “entering into.” Entering into what? Into another plane of consciousness. Initiation is like a certificate given to a graduate; the knowledge is the work that has been done. It is in recognition of what we have done. One of the outstanding phrases for me was activity of form and activity of the divine spirit within the form, and that is what we must first of all identify ourselves with, with that spirit, and increasingly identify ourselves with the higher plane of consciousness.

AAB: If you do that, the form dies.

GR: This group is being prepared as a seed group by the Hierarchy so that we may come back and sow seeds in humanity. It is death, a dying to the lower and being born to the higher.

RK: It is a spiritual bucket brigade. Only it isn’t water we are transporting from one to another; it is radiation.

GR: We must pass on what we receive. It is my experience that you cannot give too much, just whatever is the next step for them.

AAB: The problem is to determine how much they can take.

CH: The Tibetan says that an initiate is not the result of evolution; he is the cause of it.

RK: That also has relation to “complete use.”

M: What is meant by the “lesser lives”?

AAB: These are the lunar lives, all aspects of form nature. We call it physical death, but you can have death just as much while still in the body. The physical mightn’t have any hold on us; we can live detached from it.

CH: I have always wondered what the actual state is of the mayarupa, which the Master creates at his will. If the eighteen lesser fires don’t respond, then of what substance is it created?

AAB: The body of light. It is above and different from the eighteen fires. It is atomic substance from the atomic level of all three planes.

RK: It is made of causal substance. It causes things to be.

ES: The eighteen fires are the fires of the subplanes below the atomic: 3 times 6 equals 18.

AAB: For us it is physical 7, astral 7 and lower mental 4. That is really very interesting. You have to remember that the Tibetan is living in the body in which he was born. He has only just taken his final initiation. He was born in that body, which is the body we see. The Tibetan can contact us more easily because his is an ordinary body and not one created at will by a Master.

AP: I would like to mention five words from the last meeting: “Death is spirit in action.” I think that is the most tremendous aspect of all. When the spirit takes control, that is initiation, and it is spirit in action. There is nothing to add to it. You can elaborate it with the lower mind, but if you let your creative imagination ponder on these words….

RK: The first aspect can function only in synthesis. That is why relationship must be entered into in love before the first aspect can function. When it functions now, it causes death. I think that this thought was behind the meaning of Christ’s words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He didn’t want the first aspect to come in on them because they weren’t ready for it. They must know what they do before the first aspect comes in. Will and knowledge.

N: Nothing is more wonderful than watching the seed put in the ground, and dying, and in the spring coming out with flowers.

AAB: “Except a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (John 12:24)

GR: The purpose of life is an expression of spirit through form, and when the form becomes crystallized, it must crack so that the spiritual force can be released.

AAB: How are we going to get the subject of death into a right focus in the minds of humanity? The literature on death, on the spiritualists, etc. is such complete piffle. None of it seems adequate. I think what the Tibetan says is about the best that has ever been written.

RK: Don’t you think it would be practical to take everything the Tibetan has said on death and put out a brochure on it?

AAB: I have always meant to do it.

CH: I think that is the way to bring a lot of subjects to people’s attention. I have noted things on education, on life cycles and on psychology. It would make it available in an easy form.

ES: A follower of the Tibetan’s writings had the idea of getting across to the public mind a realization of the unreality of death and the fact of the continuity of life. He decided that there was enough scientific data to make a case. He put together the different scientific facts known, and it made a very impressive argument.

AAB: There is a difference between survival and immortality.

ES: In a way, he is working for immortality. He shows that nothing is lost, and if there were not continuity of life and continuity of growth everything would be lost.

RK: That is a very good viewpoint for those with scientific minds. The Tibetan’s writings evoke the intuition, and that is their value.

AP: We are far too tentative about it. The real point of view calls for a complete turning in another direction along the line of their saying from the other side that they consider birth a form of death and death a form of birth into life.

FB: I think AP’s idea is good, and you could experiment with it by writing a piece in The Beacon and give a new idea about death having value. It can be applied to one’s own life, to when one has died to some experience, some habit. We recall that it was painful, but we can now see that it had a tremendous value. Anyone that has had the same experience and identified it as analogous to death will see it must be so.

GR: Not the resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of recognition.

AP: We have had all these things in philosophy. In his poem entitled “Give All to Love” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “When half-gods go, the gods arrive.” And still the difficulty is that we don’t know the “half-gods,” and we dread to let go of the familiar.

AAB: “That men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.” [Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”]

JL: You drop off one thing and become something else. Everybody being selfish is not going to stop.

CH: He mentions eighteen fires, eighteen states of matter, seven subplanes of physical, seven of astral and four conditions of the concrete mind. What are they?

JL: It is four subplanes of the mental plane.

CH: What are the conditions?

AAB: I do not know. I know the general condition of the concrete mind, but I could not tell the four conditions.

RK: Precipitator, condenser….

CH: I think of them as chains of activity that always involve certain types of substance.

AAB: I have thought of it as the two lowest mental and the two highest astral planes.

RK: The highest plane of the astral is atomic, so kama manas wouldn’t be that. The four lowest of the mental correspond to the four lowest of the astral and the four lowest of the physical. Somewhere in Letters on Occult Meditation the Tibetan says that most of us no longer have the lowest two subplanes of either physical or astral in our makeup. We shift away and die to it. Animals and minerals have them, but we don’t.

AAB: I think that most of us are further along than that. I think that intelligent humanity is free of that.

BG: When you get beyond the first three physical subplanes, don’t you get to the etheric?

AAB: That is part of the physical body. The highest three condition the lower four. The Tibetan says that the etheric body is responsive to certain types of force, and those types of force condition the automaton that is the physical body. The further on you go the more you can identify yourself with all the planes of life, and therefore you would have to have the substance of those planes.

RK: The Tibetan says that we recognize that we have had every sort and so can help others.

AAB: I would like for us to do something about death in the Arcane School. Now is the time to do it. People are so frightened.