AAB: What we are going to emphasize tonight is that we are a group that is definitely under a certain phase of the teaching. It is a group teaching; for years the Tibetan has emphasized this new thing � groups. Groups have only been around since the Middle Ages. They began in Elizabethan times � groups of poets and writers � and they have grown until it is possible for a group to function in a new way � not function around a leader, as heretofore, but function as a group. This group, along with other similar groups, can function as an outpost of the inner ashram of the Master. 

I have been dealing with the necessity for right relationships with this group. Tonight we are passing on to another emphasis that is perhaps more difficult to grasp.

[Reading from The Rays and the Initiations, p. 28]

�What therefore should be the group will in any ashram or Master�s group? Is it present in any form vital enough to condition the group relations and to unite its members into a band of brothers � moving forward into the light? Is the spiritual will of the individual personalities of such strength that it negates the personality relation and leads to spiritual recognition, spiritual interplay and spiritual relation? It is only in consideration of these fundamental effects of standing as a group in �the head�s clear light� that it is permissible for disciples to bring into the picture personal sensitivities and thought, and this only because of a group temporary limitation.�

Here you have a very practical thing, because we are all personalities working together. We are all dreadfully personal because we are all at the point in our development where we are integrated. The more integrated a personality is, the more difficult it can be in a group, and the more help it can be in a group if the integrated personality functions always in the consciousness that it is part of an inner spiritual group. If you and I are functioning as Souls, just in so far as our link with the Soul is strong, we become definitely a part of the Hierarchy, and that is what we have to grasp. We have to work in full consciousness of that fact. The Tibetan emphasizes in his last pamphlet, �My Work,� the fact that we have to emphasize everywhere and always that the Hierarchy exists. The only way that we can do that is by our own inner knowledge, our own inner capacity to sustain a recognition. It is that sustained recognition that leads to lives that make an impression upon the world.

[Reading, Ibid., p. 29]

�All [disciples] desire to move forward and possess a strong inner spiritual life � hence my finding the time to work with them. But the group Antahkarana is still incomplete, and the aspect of pure reason and of the heart does not control. The evocative power of the Spiritual Triad is not, therefore, adequate to hold the personality steady, and the invocative power of the personality is nonexistent.�

An interesting subject because this group can be a very potent and powerful group if we build the right link with the Hierarchy and the world in which the Hierarchy manifests, which is the world of the Spiritual Triad. We are for the first time giving out teaching in connection with the Triad and the personality. The only reason that we are permitted to play with this idea is that, supposedly, after all these years we have definitely linked up with our Soul, and if we have done that, we are definitely part of the Hierarchical manifestation. That link is a sustaining link.

[Reading, Ibid., p. 29]

�[The Spiritual Triad] can only become a potent factor if certain personality relations are adjusted and inertia is overcome. Then and only then can �the group stand.��

I have always liked working with occult paradoxes. We are told to develop energetic moving forward, and then we are told to stand.

I do not quite understand what he means by �Is the spiritual will of the individual personality of such strength that it negates the personal relation and leads to spiritual recognition, spiritual interplay and spiritual relation, � in the head�s clear light it becomes permissible to bring into the picture personal sensitivities and thought, and this only because of a group temporary limitation.�

The possibility of what might be gained is worth the risk. It probably means this: If our personalities emerge into the light of the group it is just too bad, but it is very educational and is due to the fact that we are temporarily limited. We are not yet a perfect group. Again and again I emphasize the fact that in a group of disciples there can be no reticence, but there should be such a group relationship among all the members of the group that we really know each other. It ought to be welcomed by us as a demonstration of group possibilities, of group blending, but that can only be if whatever we know about each other has no effect; there is no emotional personality reaction of any kind whatsoever. Take an ashram. The Master is at the center, and initiates of the fourth, third and second degree working together. You will have those who have just taken the first initiation, disciples and those who are only being prepared for discipleship, and on the very periphery aspirants who are being considered for initiation. You have a group of imperfect people whose imperfections show up more and more because of the perfection of those higher up. The senior initiates and the Master know exactly what is going on if they choose to look into the matter. They don�t want to as a rule; they are too busy. But a group of beginners is being subjected to a stimulation that comes because they are under the impression and influence of senior disciples. Curiosity and personality reactions crop up all the time. An ashram is not composed of perfect people, but it does not matter.

C: Our sincerity is shown by our being willing to live in a house of glass.

AAB: Yes, with no resentment.

JL: Is a perfectly functioning ashram supposed to be composed of enough people with different capacities so that all the capacities possible are represented?

AAB: All the rays are subrays of the Second Ray, and therefore it does not matter much. I presume that in a First Ray ashram there are more First Ray disciples because in another life the members may have developed a great deal of the First Ray. An ashram is composed of people properly rounded out and also those not so rounded. People on minor rays shift onto major rays. It is a very disturbing thing to the individual and the ashram. For example, we have here a group of 18 or 20 working together. We know that we can begin to pattern ourselves upon an ashram, and if we do that we may become part of one. Then we have to begin to study the normal developments that come as the result of our coming together as a group. It leads to results. The results are often unpleasant because everything gets intensified in our lives and our equipment.

There is a very interesting subject for discussion right here in the words of the Tibetan: �The invocative power of the personality is nonexistent in many disciples.� How invocative is your life in invoking a downpour from the world of spiritual energies? If your life is invocative, there will be an automatic reaction from the spiritual world.

M: What is an invocative life?

RK: In Letters on Occult Meditation the Tibetan, in discussing the law of supply, used three words: use, demand and take. �Use� is the invocation.

AAB: I think you�re quite right.

N: I had an experience seven years ago. I was desperately ill with ulcers of the stomach, and the question came up whether I should go to the hospital. I said I have that divine power that has seen me through up to now, and in that I put all my trust. I stayed home and rested, and within four days I was able to go back to work; since then I have had no more ulcers.

AAB: I don�t think that that is an invocative idea because it must apply to a group. The group becomes invocative when what can be said of the individual in the group can be said of the group, that the life is so magnetic in its effect, so radiatory of everything that it has of purpose, will, love and understanding that it becomes a focal point of power that works in two directions. If you are invocative in your life you will normally attract to you the people you can help, and gather around you the people that can work with you at the same time. That potency you have developed, that invocative something, becomes so great that it attracts spiritual power, force and knowledge from sources far out beyond the normal. Your potency goes on increasing all the time.

P: We think of invocation as being a matter of intention, whereas the real invocation comes as the unconscious power of your state of being.

AAB: You can be invocative in various ways. You can be magnetic in stupendous matters and yet not do much good. It is the spiritual invocativeness that we are dealing with. It is opening a door and giving out so much that the greater Life pours in. You are a straight clear channel.

N: When we are at our best, we all probably experience such things happening. I have had the curious experience on at least a dozen occasions in the last ten years of something happening. One of the things I have tried to do in my spiritual effort is never to demand anything for myself personally, except the very minimum for carrying on the work. I have always felt that that was legitimate as long as I always put the group life first � not only the group life but that which the group serves.

AAB: That is what we need. If we can build a group that is universal in outlook, then our group will be so invocative of spiritual force that all the enterprises of the Arcane School will be something extraordinary, not because we have planned to do thus and so, but because we are so invocative as a group that matters come to us and we meet them automatically.

HR: That will be our group purpose.

AAB: So we come back to what we started with. What is the will of this group? I do not know. What do we come here every Friday evening for; what is our purpose in coming; what are we generating here?

HR: Group sensitivity.

AAB: To do what?

HR: To work along intuitive channels.

AAB: That plus what?

HR: Plus light upon what our group purpose is.

AAB: That is very good.

C: Isn�t it integration that we are after?

AAB: Integration for what purpose? What are we doing it all for � to spark each other�s minds, to develop group purpose?

M: What is the immediate next step for humanity?

AAB: We are taking three months to find out.

C: Isn�t it non-separateness, to realize union and oneness, the meaning of internationalism?

HR: Sharing?

AAB: I think you are right, but those words have been used so often. If we can agree on our purpose � why we are doing what we do � we will be a terrifically potent group.

P: I said last week: to create an unobstructed channel for the inflow of the spiritual will on the one hand, and on the other to try to create the right vibration to be able to receive and record that will so that it may work out in service.

ES: Someone said something to the effect that our group purpose should be to be a channel for registering and serving the purpose of the Hierarchy.

AAB: That is another way of phrasing the same thing.

P: It seems to me that we should go back to the fount of the whole thing. We are working toward a complete spiritual reorientation, the reorientation of consciousness, belief in the inner life of the spirit as being the source from which all things spring, as opposed to the material, scientific attitude. I do not see how we can ever make the spiritual work in the world successful except by referring causation to a spiritual source.

AAB: To the Hierarchy.

P: We say we do, but we go right out and work with physical effects. There is no cause except what grows from above down, the inverted tree, and flowers down here in physical manifestation. The last words of Christ on Earth were, �All power in heaven and on Earth has been given unto me; I will share it with you.�

AAB: He inaugurated the period of sharing. HR said that our group purpose was to become sensitive to impressions from the higher spiritual levels, and ES said it was to work out the purpose of the Hierarchy as far as we can sense it, which fits right in with HR�s definition. I should think that the group purpose is to be a channel, an agent for the Hierarchy, in order to help humanity take its next step.

HR: We have to remember that we are a school and therefore be practical about it. The main idea we want to get across is primarily the importance of spiritual training.

AAB: In this group we are not working as a school; we are working here as disciples, and the school work is a by-product of the increased receptivity of each of us to the Hierarchy.

HR: I thought you wanted us to consider it as such; you called this the Headquarters Group and you emphasized our relation to the School.

AAB: I am not interested in anything in the School working out through this group. That would be an automatic reaction. What are we working for in this group?

C: Is it not true that humanity as a whole is not awake as to what its next step is to be? Isn�t it our function to help awaken them?

AAB: If this group along with other similar groups has a purpose, the group will do what? I am not talking about the result that will work out. I am talking of the �raincloud of knowable things,� the overshadowing group of the Hierarchy, and in between are the disciples of the world, and we are part of them. What is the group purpose as we stand midway between the Hierarchy and humanity?

AD: Is it for the group to work within the ashram?

AAB: We are the ashram if we rightly sense and work with group purpose.

RK: To include each other and the group and the three aspects that are in the world: Hierarchy, Disciples, Humanity. The Tibetan uses three words: energy, force, matter. The work of force is to become energy so that it can make matter forceful. That is our purpose. From one angle it is to become energy. From another it is to convert matter into force, to convert humanity into disciples and to become disciples ourselves.

AAB: I don�t want this group to deal with plans for the work, what we are doing in the School, etc. This should be the result of what we do here week after week. There should be such an increase in sensitivity, such an understanding of the Hierarchical purpose that automatically we will be and do what we should.

N: To align the consciousness of humanity so that it will recognize the reality of the spiritual self.

AAB: Yes.

FB: A great many of us really have some of the great desire that I conceive must be in the heart of the Tibetan, or else we would not have traveled this long road together. Our present function is to flower as a group. Most of us have been functioning in the group for very deep reasons. Our Souls have brought us here; our karma has brought us here; and on that basis we have been given the most amazing teaching and training. The time for the flowering of all that process, that inverted tree, has come, and we can take the consciousness of that and the desire that is ours and we will achieve it. If we want to help enough, and if it is our purpose that it shall happen, it will happen.

AAB: Yes.

RK: Don�t you think that is a process that requires burning? If we burn, there will be light.

AAB: [Reading from Rays and the Initiations, pp. 29-30]

�The burning ground has done its work.

�Here there is quite apt to be misunderstanding.  To most people the burning ground stands for one of two things:

�a. Either the fire of the mind, burning up those things in the lower nature of which it becomes increasingly aware.

�b. Or the burning ground of sorrow, agony, horror and pain which is the characteristic quality of life in the three worlds, particularly at this time.

�But the burning ground referred to here is something very different.  When the blazing light of the sun is correctly focused on or through a glass it can cause ignition.  When the blazing light of the Monad is focused directly upon the personality, via the Antahkarana and not specifically through the soul, it produces a blazing fire that burns up all hindrances in a steady, sequential process.  Wording it otherwise, when the will aspect streams from the Monad and focuses through the personal will (as the mind can grasp and realize it) it destroys as by fire all elements of self-will.  As the energy of Shamballa streams out and makes a direct contact with humanity (omitting the transmission via the Hierarchy, which has hitherto been customary), you have what has been seen in the world today, a destructive conflagration or a world burning ground.  When the Antahkarana of a group is rightly constructed, then the individualized group-will will disappear in the full consciousness of the monadic purpose or clear directed will.�

�The clear directed will.� It is an energy that we focus in some direction.

[Reading further on p. 30]

�These are points which the disciple preparing for initiation has to consider as he prepares for the higher initiations, and these are the points which any group or ashram in preparation for initiation has also to consider.

�The secret of the higher initiations lies in the trained use of the higher will.  It does not lie in purification or in self-discipline or in any of the expedients that have acted in the past as interceptors of the truth.  This whole problem of the Shamballic will is in process of revelation, and will eventually alter the entire approach of the disciple in the New Age to initiation.�

We are not accustomed to think of ourselves in terms of discipleship. Purification and your preoccupation with it would be an interceptor of the truth. Your attention would be deflected from the essential to the nonessential, but that is not a statement you can make to a probationer or aspirant. This constant emphasis on self-discipline is an interceptor of the truth. You become so preoccupied with those subjects that you have no time to be. You are building thoughtforms about self-discipline and purification instead of using the spiritual will in working out the purpose of the Hierarchy. �The expulsive and dynamic power of a new and deep affection.� When you care enough for the group work, for the Hierarchy and its purposes, when you love humanity enough, that will automatically expel out of your life every obstruction. You will be doing the expelling by the dynamic and expelling power of a new and deep affection.

C: It is a gift and not a labor.

AAB: It is will.

P: I think you have to work plenty hard to get it.

AAB: Won�t there come a point some day when you won�t have to work so hard?

RK: Like sound from a violin string, it is wonderful, but first the string has to be stretched.

AAB: Presumably you have all done that work. I think you can get a habit of discipline, then there comes a time when the habit should be dropped and you just be.

P: In modern psychology you do not try to remove the thing by fighting it, but by putting something else in its place. It is fundamental.

AAB: Resist not evil.

RK: When we are so busy disciplining ourselves or purifying ourselves, we are smothering that greater being. I am like the Planetary Logos; what have I got to do with RK?

M: Doesn�t it go back to spiritual orientation? Once when AAB was going to Europe she spoke to a small group of us and said, �See that you are oriented spiritually and everything else will fall into line.� All of this other that we strain and stretch for will be all right.

AAB: If you are aligned you are not worrying; the channel is there.

RK: As a matter of fact, we are also coming together to integrate because if I am the Master I can�t function unless I have you all together. That is why the Tibetan is trying to build triangles.

AAB: Here is a very practical paragraph. [Reading from The Rays and the Initiations, pp. 30-31]

�For long, aspirants have noted and have been taught the effect of the will upon the astral, or emotional body.  It is one of the primary and most elementary of the initial tensions, and is taught upon the Probationary Path.  It leads to the purifying and the reorganizing of the entire psychic and emotional life, as the result of its destructive action.  �If you will only think,� �if you will only use a little will,� and �if you will only remember that you have a mind,� we say to the children of the race and to beginners upon the Path of conscious Return.  Little by little, then, the focus and the orientation shift out of the astral life and from the emotional level of consciousness into the mental, and consequently into the reflection of the world of purpose, found in the three worlds.  When that stage has been somewhat developed, then there follows, upon the Path of Discipleship and of preparation for initiation, an effort to grasp and understand the higher aspects of this mental process, and the will aspect of the egoic life begins to influence the disciple.  The �petals of sacrifice� unfold and the sacred sacrificial aspect of life is revealed in its beauty, purity, simplicity and in its revolutionizing quality.

�Upon the Path of Initiation, the monadic will (of which the egoic will is the reflection and the individual self-will is the distortion) is gradually transmitted, via the Antahkarana, direct to the man upon the physical plane.  This produces the higher correspondence of those qualities so glibly spoken of by the well-trained but dense esotericist � transmutation and transformation.  The result is the assimilation of the individual will and the egoic will into the purpose of the Monad, which is the purpose � undeviating and unalterable � of the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.  This is the field of the true burning, for our �God is a consuming Fire.�  This is the burning bush or the burning tree of life of Biblical symbolism.  This highest of all the fires, this deeply spiritual and hitherto seldom recognized burning-ground, has its effects summed up for us in the next phrase or sentence of Rule I.�

Personality will, Soul will, spiritual will. I wonder if we know which it is in our own lives. I think one of the things we need to do is to estimate ourselves as Souls better than we do. We waste so much time being irritated with ourselves, our failures and our faults, and in thinking of other people�s failures and in criticism, and all the time that irritation and resentment show an ingrowing disposition.

HR: We have to remember that we are trying to do something here, something on Soul levels, the highest thing that we can produce. If we have that in mind and realize that we are going to work in this group with the purest matter we can form in this group, that will help us stop this thing that you have been speaking about.

AAB: You still have the dualistic idea. Here I am, and here is the group. We want to present a unified group to humanity. There is a life here in this group, but what that will produce I do not know. But I am not picturing a form; I want it just to be.

HR: You said it was unfortunate that we didn�t consider ourselves more as Souls. We should try to do that as a group.

AAB: That is the idea.

HR: So far we haven�t had a high enough idea of what we can do.

RK: We are not decentralized enough.

P: The Tibetan said we couldn�t go one step toward initiation without decentralization. I know so many people who have done nothing but sublimate their egotism.

AAB: KH says in The Mahatma Letters that he can do nothing with a group because they are so ambitious.

FB: We should strive for what HR was talking about and achieve a little bit of self-forgetfulness.

AAB: We have to get to the point where we are occupied with Hierarchical purpose and not with its effect upon us.

W: If we try to be Souls and forget personality, then we may stand some chance of being what the Hierarchy wants. That is the only way we can be agents.

AAB: Yes, if we are not a group of agents, but the group itself is an agent.

P: When we talk about acting as a Soul, there is no �a Soul.� When you are in Soul consciousness there is only one Soul. I never could do it; it makes me self-conscious. All this talk about �a Soul� and �the Soul� is a handicap. On the Soul plane all Souls are one and yet we are all focusing on our own Souls.

AAB: You are entirely right; when you get down to words you are handicapped. The only instrument with which we can register revelation and organize is the mind, and it is difficult to work as a Soul with the mind and yet not work with the mind.

N: I think we have worked as illumined minds in a small degree. If we can, we will illumine the dark labyrinth of the human mind and will awaken humanity to the reality of Soul.

RK Everyone is a piece of that mind, and if we could put the puzzle together, we would be that illumined mind.

AAB: [Reading from The Rays and the Initiations, pp. 31-32]

�The clear cold light shines forth and cold it is and yet the heat � evoked by the group love � permits the warmth of energetic moving out.

�In these words you have the key to group initiation. The light of the higher initiations can stream in when it is evoked by the group love. That light is clear and cold, but produces the needed �heat,� which is a symbolic word used in many of the world Scriptures to express living, spiritual energy.  I said �spiritual energy� and not soul force, and herein lies a distinction which you will some day have to grasp.

�This group love is based upon the egoic aspect of the will to which we give the name �sacrificial love.�  This does not connote happy relationships between individual members of the group.  It might, presumably, lead to unhappy outer, superficial interplay, but basically it leads to an unalterably staunch loyalty, underlying the surface of the outer life. The Master�s influence, as He seeks to aid His disciple, always produces transitory turmoil � transitory from the angle of the soul, but frequently appalling from the angle of the personality. Similarly, the projection of the life and influence of any senior disciple into the periphery or aura of the aspirant or lesser disciple is � in its degree � likewise disturbing and upsetting; this is a point which should be carefully borne in mind, both as regards the disciple�s own reactions and training, and as regards any effect which he may call forth in the life of a probationary disciple or lesser disciple in his own sphere of influence.  These intrusive influences and their consequent effects that are produced upon an individual or a group by a Master or a senior disciple are usually interpreted in personality terms, and are very little understood. They are nevertheless aspects of the higher will in some higher disciple and are beating upon the personality will and evoking the sacrificial will of the Ego, and hence lead to a period of temporary discomfort. This the aspirant and the inexperienced disciple resent and blame the evoking sources for their discomfort, instead of learning the needed lesson of receiving and handling force.�

This is a good thing for workers to get. If you are having no effect upon your students, if they are never angry with you, something is definitely wrong; your influence is negative. I mean that your radiation, your spiritual will should evoke from them the sacrificial will. If you were having the proper effect they would know they had to change and they would resent you. That is a very interesting thing. Christ himself had that effect, and that is why they killed him. They resented his being perfectly silent. He just stood there, and they condemned him to death. You have to have an effect if you are going to mean anything at all.

B: The successful commentator then is the one who has a group of unhappy students.

RK: It is not really unhappiness, but divine discontent.

AAB: You go through the burning ground yourself and provide a burning ground for other people.