AAB: Continuing our discussion about the Sacred Word, we have here a little more about it � something far more practical. The trouble I have with the Word is that I do not find it practical.

M: What do you mean when you say �practical�?

AAB: I can take the phrase, �the Word made flesh,� and I can appreciate that the goal ahead of us is to become God incarnate, but the daily use of the Word in my meditation � I don�t know where it gets me or where I get with it. I hope I get results, but I haven�t the slightest idea what they are.

RK: I don�t think what you get matters as much as what the OM does to you. Something like sunshine, it brings you out.

M: Something practical would probably apply to this concrete plane, but OM belongs to the upper reaches also. It must be doing something to us if we believe the law.

AAB: I find it difficult to tell beginners why they are going to use the AUM. I give a learned discourse, but I am not convinced myself.

P: It is the great symbol of triune energy in unity, and if you throw yourself into it, it brings results. I don�t think we sound it with sufficient power. I think it does something to your mind to sound a symbol of that kind, if you will intentionally realize it is a symbol of triune energy in unity.

AAB: I can tell you what it means, but I wonder whether it would make a lot of difference if I never used it.

FB: I know from my own experience that the use of the Sacred Word can be very practical. If I am trying to achieve mental stability, I can stabilize myself by sounding the Sacred Word mentally. It has a definite specific effect, and you can use it in your meditation to help you achieve alignment and hold it.

AAB: I suppose my problem is that I came into occultism through the Christian tradition and therefore �the Word made flesh� means more to me than the Word. If we can keep in mind that the Word is simply the symbol of the �Word made flesh,� then we have something.

RK: It is much more than that. I don�t sound it. I listen to the sound of the complete being in whom I live and move and have my being. I listen to that and become like Him.

AAB: I am interested in our really knowing what we are doing as we teach it to students and use it ourselves.

P: I like the symbol of a mountain pool with the lotus in bloom and the sun coming down through the �M,� being the vibration in all manifested life, the music of the spheres. It is the Will, the Word made flesh, and it goes out in the �M� throughout all created life.

N: In The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3, pages 411-412, mention is made of 

�an all-powerful Brahm-Atma, the Supreme Chief of all those Mahatmas. This pontificate could be exercised only by a Brahman who had reached a certain age, and he it was who was the sole guardian of the mystic formula, and he was the Hierophant who created great Adepts. He alone could explain the meaning of the sacred word, AUM, and of all the religious symbols and rites... But there existed, and still exists to this day, a Word far surpassing the mysterious monosyllable, and which renders him who comes into possession of its key nearly the equal of Brahman. The Brahm-atmas alone possess this key, and we know that to this day there are two great Initiates in Southern India who possess it. It can be passed only at death, for it is the �Lost Word.�

Extreme secrecy is maintained, and the only way to understand the meaning of the Word is through high initiation.

AAB: I wonder why.

RK: Don�t you think the reason they didn�t divulge it is that it is like the science of today? If we had held back scientific knowledge from people who prostitute it, it would have been safer. It is dangerous to the Plan and so cannot be divulged. Scientific knowledge is being brought through by people not pledged to such secrecy.

M: The key is simultaneously thinking, breathing and sounding. Whatever is to be produced will be done by those three things simultaneously, and if we can do it, if it should be done, we will discover some of the secrets.

RK: That is the way we should be sounding the Great Invocation.

JL: The Mahachohans must be members of the Hierarchy and therefore know the missing word.

P: I think the reason it isn�t divulged is because, by its very nature, it cannot be told, but it has to be evolved from yourself. That is the meaning of occultism. It is occult only because people don�t have the vibration that would enable them to receive it.

AAB: I have always wondered whether the Lost Word isn�t the Lost Sound rather than the Lost Word. [Reading from The Rays and the Initiations, p. 57]:

The Word, however, with which we are now dealing is not the Sacred Word itself, but a signal or sound of acceptance. It is translated in this Rule by the phrase: Accepted as a group. This refers to aggregates and blended combinations through which the Soul in relation to personalities, the Monad in relation to the Spiritual Triad, the Master in relation to His Ashram, and Shamballa in relation to the Hierarchy, can work, expressing plan in the initial stages of contact, and purpose in the final stages. Bear in mind that the analogy holds true all the way through. A personality is an aggregate of forms and of substantial lives which, when fused and blended, present a unified sum total, animated by desire or aspiration, by plan or purpose, and functioning in its place under the inspiration of a self-initiated inner program. Progress, from the larger angle and from the standpoint of Those Who see life in terms of ever enlarging Wholes, is from group to group.

There are two things there that I want to throw open for discussion. One is how purpose materializes in an inner program in the individual life and an inner program for a group. And, two, I was much impressed by �seeing life in terms of ever enlarging wholes,� and �progress is from group to group.� The reason a Master can externalize his Ashram, which is an inner group, is because there are today enough outer groups through which the flow can come. I have sometimes wondered whether our work as a group, whether you call it the Arcane School, the Lucis Trust or World Goodwill, is work that should be done from group to group rather than from individual to individual.

I can see Roberto Assagioli standing up here and talking about every individual having an inner program to which he adheres. That inner program for the beginner is adherence to the plan put forth for the disciple � identification with the purpose, Purpose and Will � Plan and Activity. Progress is from group to group from the standpoint of those who see life in terms of ever enlarging wholes. The world is full of groups. Can we reach groups or is it our part to struggle laboriously along with individuals? What does the Tibetan mean when he says that? He is talking of that which works out when we understand the distinction between Plan and Purpose. [Reading further on pp. 57]:

This pronouncement, issuing from a point of tension, is the Word of the Soul as it integrates with the threefold personality when that personality is consciously ready for such a fusion.  The hold of the Soul upon its instruments of expression, the network of the seven centers and the subsidiary centers, becomes intensified and energy pours in, forcing the acquiescent personality fully to express the ray type of the Soul, and therefore subordinating the ray of the personality (and its three subsidiary rays) to the dominating Soul energy.  This first great integration is a fusion of force with energy.

In all Theosophical teaching and in the teaching we give beginners, we lay emphasis upon the Soul grasping the personality via its three bodies. But here the Tibetan is addressing people supposedly in training for initiation. �The hold of the Soul upon its instrument of expression, the network of seven centers and subsidiary centers.� He has shifted the orientation away from the control of the mental, emotional or physical nature onto the etheric level, and he says that the Soul grasps its instrument, the personality, through the network of the seven centers. This great integration is a fusion of force and energy. Instead of mental control, struggling with the emotional nature, and physical disciplines, focus on the grasp of the Soul upon the seven centers of the body.

R: How would you bring in the parts on mental and emotional planes?

AAB: I visualize that I am the Soul seeking to take hold of the center of energy I am sending down by creativeness on other levels.

R: The Tibetan teaches that the vibration of the etheric body is synchronous with that of the Soul.

AAB: I think the secret of immortality lies there. If your center is in the etheric body when you die, there is no death. You have been dealing with the control of forces by an inflowing energy, which means that your focus of tension is in the Soul and that the Soul is looking at the etheric vehicle, and where the eye looks energy follows. We are going to shift to the concept that energy follows the eye, not the eyes.

N: I read somewhere that, of all our knowledge, 35% of it has been acquired through the eye, so that what you say has profound meaning.

AAB: The whole story of the life of a disciple is directing Soul energy into his own vehicles so that those vehicles become simply a channel for the expression of Soul. It is directed into the mental body, and the mind becomes illumined; into the emotional nature, and glamor fades away and there is clarity of sensitivity; into the physical body (etheric or vital body) and that enables you to function as active Souls in spite of everything.

G: If I try to control my mind or emotions, I know what I am trying to do, but if I try to control centers, I haven�t the slightest idea of what I am doing.

AAB: You will think of the centers � according to the direction of Soul energy as it pours in � an aspect of yourself that is composed of a mass of forces in seven different areas. If you do this you will have gotten away from the material aspect. You will try to sweep force into activity and your emphasis is on force or energy, which is an expression of Soul, and not upon your vital body. It shifts your attention away from the opposite thing. If I try to control my mind, I am thinking of my mind. If I try to control energy, I am thinking of the Soul from which the energy comes, and if I bring that in, it should sweep out the forces that are opposing it, and the strength of the incoming energy will be dependent upon my Soul contact and upon the clarity of my direction.

P: We were taught that energy becomes force the minute it makes contact with matter, and what we are doing when we do this is to go back to the source, away from first one manifestation and then another. The glands have etheric vibrations behind them, and that is the real vitality. You can try to pour this high energy, to focus it, upon these vibrations of the etheric body, and then you don�t have to wonder about the physical.

AAB: A disciple begins up there and sweeps down. The difference between an ordinary person and people like us, who are in training for expansion of consciousness, is that incoming Soul energy has to deal with active forces. These active forces are not made by incoming energy contacting matter; they have been made over eons of time, they are actively functioning, and they oppose the inflow of spiritual energy. We don�t get anywhere by keeping our eye down here, but rather by keeping our focus up there. For us, energy is the expression of vision, not energy follows thought.

RK: What the eye is doing is not to focus on the centers, but on a purpose that can be accomplished by energy pouring through. It is the purpose that holds the eye.

JL: There are two parts of us that are parts of larger wholes. Our etheric body is part of the etheric body of the solar system, and our Soul is part of the One Soul.

R: The mind is.

AAB: The mind goes; the etheric never goes. I think JL has hold of an idea � not completely or perfectly. The etheric body automatically produces the physical body, and the eye is a focus. Those two together produce whatever manifestation there is. I think we have something here that is worth thinking out.

RK: Somewhere in White Magic or Cosmic Fire it says that when the Soul comes into incarnation the sound it makes creates two things � the mental body and the etheric body.

AAB: Two important things: Soul and etheric substance. I think what hinders our activity is that we get too mental, too emotional, but we can never get too vital. Actually, I don�t know much about it.

H: This question of immortality � hasn�t it to do with continuity of consciousness?

AAB: Immortality always involves dualism. If we can shift consciousness outside the physical plane into the etheric, which is in the head centers, then we shall know the meaning of immortality.

H: The Tibetan speaks of continuity of consciousness between the mental, astral and physical, but that is not consciousness of immortality, right?

AAB: It would be immortality because the physical wouldn�t matter anymore. The whole idea of immortality is identity with the familiar. You can be identified with the etheric because it is a big sum total.

H: The only way continuity could be developed is to continuously hold that high point of tension, your consciousness of yourself as Soul.

AAB: Yes, if you can hold the highest point of consciousness of which you are capable, then there is no death.

M: The Tibetan somewhere said something about holding thoughts of energy to such an extent that the force wouldn�t matter. Having a physical disability, you could still carry on and it would never hinder you.

AAB: That is a portion of immortality.

M: He meant to think of all things in terms of energy and force, and if we so oriented ourselves that everything was energy to us, the force that made the body sick would not hinder us.

AAB: Yes.

P: I have pondered the statement, �Let the forces of light bring illumination to mankind.� I wonder why it isn�t energy. Perhaps the energy of light becomes force in its impact upon the human mind.

AAB: Light is a force and not an energy. As the Tibetan says, �light and matter are synonymous terms.� Energy evokes light. The masses of mankind couldn�t stand energy, so it has to be in the form of force. But it has been evoked by energy. [Reading further on pp. 57-58]:

This first great integration is a fusion of force with energy. Here is a statement of deep import, embodying one of the first lessons an initiate has to master. It is one that can only be properly comprehended through life experience, subject to interpretation in the world of meaning. Some understanding of what this implies will come as the disciple masters the distinction between Soul activity and the action of matter, between emotion and love, between the intelligent will and the mind, between plan and purpose. In so doing he acquires the capacity to find his point of tension at any given moment, and this growing capacity eventually brings him consciously to recognize group after group as units with which identification must be sought.

JL: Does he mean a group works with another group on the same level, or does he mean that you progress as a group and finally find yourself part of a greater group?

AAB: The Hierarchy works with us. We work in many directions.

P: Each group should be looking up to the one ahead and back to the one below.

AAB: Yes, the Hierarchy reaches up to Shamballa and down to groups like the Arcane School.

G: As group works with group, they become units of greater synthesis.

AAB: I think perhaps there is some mode of work with which we might begin to experiment. We have been talking about finding groups and about fusing groups in order to help humanity. Maybe we can begin to do it on a higher spiral, and incidentally we may find groups that have the same vision and we can help guide them.

AD: Doesn�t each group perform a certain part in the whole and together form a greater being?

AAB: We talk that way, but we don�t do it. We don�t want to give anything up.

RK: You don�t need to. If you see something to do, then you do it. And I do something else so we don�t duplicate efforts.

P: But there never will be the same vision.

RK: I don�t mean vision of process. I mean right human relationships.

AAB: The small welfare groups have a vision of right human relationships. I am talking of esoteric groups with spiritual vision, which works out in right human relations.

RK: A group like this ought to know what other groups are doing so that there may be no duplication. We only need to work with them where they stop short. We complement them.

AAB: They think we stop short. We think we are about the most advanced in the world, and we want to help all the other groups, but we are hanging on to our ways. We may find groups that are better than we are.

R: Don�t you think we need to try to understand other groups as a step toward identification, whether that group is beyond us or below us?

AAB: I think so. It is a question of breaking through our boundary. Humanity is struggling with the fight over boundaries in Europe.

JL: But we are looking at just the emotional or mental body of a group and not at its Soul.

AAB: I was thinking of their vision and their fidelity.

JL: A lot of people bind us etherically with their group, and we may not like them.

AAB: Provided they have spiritual vitality and a vision in which we can participate, then we have to realize that we form one group.

JL: A lot of them have no group consciousness.

AAB: Have we?

JL: We have tried to.

FB: We have been told about seven specific groups in the Tibetan�s teachings. We are one of those. We are an esoteric group, and an esoteric group should be working with other groups consciously. We are a part of esotericism.

AAB: In every financial group and in every Theosophical group there is an esoteric group, and we have to find them.

FB: This matter of working with groups and what we should do � there is an implication that we are falling down on our group activity. It is up to us as esotericists to have a broad enough vision so that we can work intelligently with these seven major groups. We will do it by finding esotericists in these groups.

AAB: What about their putting life and strength into us too?

FB: It is a two-way street.

RK: I think the Tibetan doesn�t mean physical plane groups, but grouping of force.

AAB: We have to begin on all levels � religious, psychological, esoteric. It is with them that we should work because they could give us much, and we could enrich them.

R: Would our function be to work with groups or individuals? If we did this work right, the individual would have the same coloring that his group had, so that if we reached the group we would reach the individual.

B: Just as the Milwaukee group has learned from us and we from them, is there some lesson in that?

AAB: They are our own people.

B: There is two-way action there.

N: Mr. L. has a group of 25 people that he periodically instructs in subjects along this line. I had that group in my studio and gave them a talk. It was remarkable. I did not have to step down the truths. At the end they did not want to leave. They said, �now we recognize many things that before we did not know.� I just spoke informally as the occasion presented itself. It seems to me that on the lower levels we can do much.

AAB: Talks like this in which we open doors to other people and other groups are good. [Reading further on pp. 58-59]:

He finds his Soul through the fusion of Soul and personality; he finds his group through the absorption of this fusing Soul-form with a Master's group, and finally he is absorbed into the Master's Ashram; there he, in concert with his group brothers in that Ashram, is fused and blended with the Hierarchy and hears the extension of the Word, spoken originally by his Soul: Accepted as a group. Later, much later, he participates at that august recognition which comes when the Voice issues forth � as annually it does � from the center at Shamballa and the seal is set on the acceptance of the Hierarchy, with all its new associates, by the Lord of the World. This acceptance involves those initiates of the third degree who have been integrated more closely into the Hierarchical life than ever before. This is the signal to them (and to their Seniors Who have heard it year after year) that they are part of the instrument whose purpose is to fulfill the Plan. Thus the great syntheses are slowly taking place. It has taken many eons, for evolution (especially in the earlier stages) moves slowly.

In the post-war period and when the new structure of the coming world order is taking shape, the process will be speeded considerably; this will not, however, be for a hundred years, which is but a brief moment in the eternal history of humanity. From synthesis to synthesis the life of God passes. First the synthesis of the atomic lives into ever more perfect forms until the three kingdoms of nature appear; then the synthesis in consciousness, enabling the human being to enter into the larger awareness of the Whole and finally to enter into that mysterious event which is the result of the effect of all preceding developments and to which we give the name of Identification. From the first identification, which is the higher correspondence of the stage of individualization, progressive absorption into ever larger wholes takes place, and each time the Word goes forth: Accepted as a group.

Have I succeeded in giving you a somewhat wider vision of the significance of initiation in these brief expositions? Do you see more clearly the growing beauty of the Whole and the goodness of the Purpose and the wisdom of the Plan? Do you realize more deeply that beauty, goodness and wisdom are not qualities, as their inadequate nomenclature would imply, but are great facts in manifestation? Do you grasp the truth that they are not descriptive of Deity but are the names of Lives of a potency and activity of which men can as yet know nothing?

Some understanding of this must slowly seep into the mind and consciousness of each disciple as that mind becomes irradiated by Soul light in the earlier stages, and later responds to the impact of energy coming from the Spiritual Triad. Only when this is visioned, even if not understood, will the realization come to the struggling disciple that the words

Withdraw not now your application. You could not if you would; but add to it three great demands and forward move

are a living command conditioning him whether he will or not.

In the rule of applicants they were told to withdraw their application. In these rules they are told not to withdraw their application.

RK: Do the rules for applicants say withdraw or forget about them?

AAB: Withdraw.

FB: Withdraw and forget.

AAB: The Tibetan points out that the beginner is so preoccupied with the wonder of his application and the marvelous point he has reached. The disciple is supposed to have outgrown that and be able to work at his application.

M: To get back to the group thing, take for instance the great financiers [here they are referring to the 10 seed groups � S.E.S.] who must have some esoteric subjective life or they wouldn�t do the things they are doing; yet they don�t belong to any kind of an occult group. How could a group such as they belong to be contacted?

AAB: I think there are people in the group of financiers and in the psychological group who are ahead of us. I think the general level of spirituality may be higher in the esoteric groups, but we have not yet produced in esoteric groups men and women who can sway humanity like the great financiers and psychologists.

M: Why is that?

AAB: It may be a difference in function.

N: There have been waves of Souls incarnated at certain periods to express special activities, for example the Greek philosophers and artists. In the Renaissance there was a similar group. Perhaps in our time the financiers and psychologists have such a mission, to regenerate humanity along these lines.

AAB: It isn�t necessary for great statesmen or great financiers to be members of esoteric groups. I think it would be a comedown for them.

M: How can one take these groups and get them working together?

P: It is not necessary to contact them on the physical plane. If we are both on the Soul plane, we will contact them automatically.

AAB: I think it has to come right through to the physical plane. I think it would be a great mistake for some financier to be launched into an esoteric school. I think the thing for him to do is to give himself to some work that will forward human progress.

P: We get to talking about this as though it were a practical transaction. What we forget to do is to be the highest we can and we will attract that which is ours.

JL: Doesn�t an esoteric school take on the job of being a channel for vital force so that it may flow through them to other groups? Aren�t we the channel? Aren�t we the Antahkarana for the rest of the groups?

AAB: The Hierarchy works only through groups with an esoteric sense � through Leonardo da Vinci, Churchill, through the great men down the ages who are disciples, not in the sense that they belong to esoteric groups. Has any student in the Arcane School a wider vision of world unity than Churchill or Roosevelt?

M: The play, �The Patriots,� depicts Thomas Jefferson as not wanting public life, and yet he sacrificed everything for his country. He had come home from abroad to rest and build up his fortunes when Washington came to him and said he needed him and said, �this thing cannot die.�

JL: He had had an esoteric education from Benjamin Franklin.

AAB: Take a disciple like Plato; after several thousand years he is still conditioning our thinking. Aristotle is another great disciple.

FB: I wonder if we wouldn�t get the essence or key to cooperation with groups when we come back to the fact that the object of the Arcane School is to help the Hierarchy salvage humanity at the place where it is. The great financiers and men who do these things all have a plan and are producing certain definite effects. We were an esoteric school and were learning how to run one, and that was our purpose; but now we know that that was so we could help humanity. We take our knowledge and we make it available for the common good. You can approach these people with an inner unity of vision. The will to good is the key that will reach into every one of these groups and to the key people in them, and when they see that we wish to work for the common good, we will get a response. It is that response that will produce group action. Every single thing you do is done because you have come to have an ardent desire to do what you do for the good of humanity, to help the world. That is our key to the larger group action and what we are reaching out toward.

AAB: I think so.

RK: That would seem to be the right way of progressing from group to group.