Letters on Occult Meditation

by Alice A Bailey

  A Master of the Wisdom is One Who has effected the transfer of polarisation from the three atoms of the personal life—as included in the causal body—into the three atoms of the spiritual Triad. He is consciously [260] spirit-intuition-abstract mind, or atma-buddhi-manas, and this is not potentially but in full effective power, realised through experience. This has been brought about, as earlier said, through the process of meditation.

  A Master of the Wisdom is One Who has found not only the chord of the Ego, but the full chord of the Monad, and can ring the changes therefore at will upon all the notes from the lowest to that of the monadic. This means occultly that He has now developed the creative faculty, and can sound the note for each plane and build thereon. This power—first to discover the notes of the monadic chord and secondly to use those notes in constructive building—is first realised through meditation occultly performed, balanced by service lovingly administered.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who can wield the law in the three worlds and can dominate all that evolves on those planes. By learning the laws of mind through the practice of meditation, He expands the laws of mind till they embrace the laws of the Universal Mind as demonstrated in lower manifestation. The Laws of Mind are mastered in meditation. They are applied in the life of service which is the logical outcome of true knowledge.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who has passed out of the Hall of Learning into the Hall of Wisdom. He has there graduated through its five grades and has transmuted lower mind into mind pure and unalloyed, has transmuted desire into intuition, and has irradiated His consciousness with the light of pure Spirit. The discipline of meditation is the only way in which this can be accomplished.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who, through knowledge acquired by means of the five senses, has learnt [261] that synthesis exists and has merged those five senses into the synthetic two, that mark the point of attainment in the solar system. Through meditation the geometrical sense of proportion is adjusted, the sense of values is clearly recognised, and through that adjustment and recognition, illusion is dispelled and reality is known. The practice of meditation and the inner concentration there brought about awakens the consciousness to the value and true use of form. Thereby reality is contacted and the three worlds can no more ensnare.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who knows the meaning of consciousness, of life, and of spirit. He can pass—by the line of least resistance—straight to the “bosom of His Father in Heaven”. The approach to the line of least resistance, the direct path, is found through the practice of meditation.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who has resolved Himself from the five into the three, and from the three into the two. He has become the five-pointed star, and when that moment is reached He sees that star flash out above the One Initiator, and recognises it in those of equal place to His. He has sanctified (in the occult sense) the Quaternary, has used it as the foundation stone upon which to erect the Temple of Solomon. He has grown beyond that Temple itself and has come to recognise it as limitation. He has withdrawn Himself from its confining walls and has entered within the Triad. He has done this always by the occult method, that is, consciously and with full knowledge of each step taken. He learns the meaning of each confining form; then, He has assumed control and wielded the law upon the plane consistent with the form. He has then outgrown the form and has discarded it for other and higher forms. Thus He has progressed always by means of the sacrifice and death of the form. Always [262] it is recognised as imprisoning; always it must be sacrificed and must die so that the life within may speed ever on and up. The path of resurrection presupposes crucifixion and death, and then leads to the Mount whence Ascension may be made. In meditation the value of the life, and the confines of the form, can be appreciated and known, and by knowledge and service can the life be set free from all that limits and trammels.

  A Master of the Wisdom is One Who has chosen to stay upon our planet to help His fellowmen.... All who attain the fifth Initiation are Masters of the Wisdom, but all stay not and work as servers of the race. They pass to other work of greater or equal importance. To the general public the significance of the term lies in the thought that They choose to stay and limit Themselves for the sake of men who are pressing forward on the wave of evolution. Through meditation has the Great One reached His goal and (which is a thing not so oft comprehended) through meditation, or the manipulation of thought matter, and by work on the mental bodies of the race, is the work carried on that aids the evolutionary process.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who has taken the first initiation that links Him up with the greater Brotherhood on Sirius. As afore I have told you, He is an Initiate of the First Degree in the greater Lodge. He has attained an expansion of consciousness that has admitted Him into touch with the solar system in many of its departments. Now He has ahead of Him a vast reach of expansions that will eventually take Him beyond systemic consciousness into something far greater and wider. He has to begin to learn the rudiments of that cosmic meditation that will admit Him into a Consciousness past our conceivable surmise. [263]

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who can consciously function as part of the Heavenly Man to Whose Body He may belong. He understands the laws governing groups and group souls. He governs a group soul consciously Himself (a group on the path of return and formed of the lives of many sons of men) and He knows His place in the body systemic. He realises the centre in the Body of the Heavenly Man by means of which He and His group are kept in sympathetic vibration, and conducts His relationship with other groups in the same Body under certain definite laws. The value of meditation as a preparation for this activity will be realised by all thoughtful students, for meditation is the one means whereby the sense of separateness is transcended, and unity with one's kind occultly comprehended.

  A Master of the Wisdom is He Who has entrusted to Him, by virtue of work accomplished, certain Words of Power. By means of these Words He wields the law over other evolutions than the human, and through them He co-operates with the activity aspect of the Logos. Thus He blends His consciousness with that of the third Logos. Through these Words He assists with the building work, and the cohesive manipulating endeavor of the second Logos, and comprehends the inner working of the law of gravitation for attraction and repulsion) that governs all the functions of the second aspect logoic. Through these Words He co-operates with the work of the first Logos, and learns, as He takes the sixth and seventh Initiations (which is not always done) the meaning of Will as applied in the system. These Words are imparted orally, and through clairvoyant faculty but must be found by the Initiate Himself, by the use of atma and as He attains atmic consciousness.... When atmic consciousness is developing by means of the intuition, the [264] Initiate can contact the stores of knowledge inherent in the Monad, and thus learn the Words of Power. This ability comes only after the application of the Rod of Initiation as wielded by the Lord of the World. Therefore by the higher stages of occult meditation does a Master of the Wisdom increase still further His knowledge. Not static is His consciousness, but daily embracing more. Daily does He apply Himself to further expansion.

  A Master of the Wisdom is One Who has earned the right through similarity of vibration to work with the Heads of the Hierarchy of this planet, and in conjunction with analogous Heads on two other planets connected with our chain. When He has taken other initiations He can contact and work in conjunction with all the seven Planetary Logoi, and not just the three in control of allied chains. The whole system can be embraced by Him, and His consciousness has expanded to include the entire objective solar system.

  I could enumerate still other definitions, and further elucidate the matter for you, but that imparted today suffices. The point reached by a Master is high, but only relatively so, and you must not forget that when attained by Him it seems low indeed, for He measures it up with the vista expanding before Him. Each expansion of consciousness, each step upon the ladder, but opens before the Initiate another sph
ere to be embraced, and another step ahead to be taken; each initiation achieved but reveals still higher ones to be mastered, and never comes the point where the aspirant (be he an average man, an initiate, a Master, a Chohan, or a Buddha) can remain in a condition static, and is incapable of future progress. Even the Logos Himself aspires, and even the One to Whom He aspires reaches up to a Greater. [265]

  What happens in the system transpires likewise on cosmic levels, and what is mastered here must be repeated on a vaster scale in the cosmos itself. In this thought lies inspiration and development and not despair or weariness. The reward that comes with each step forward, the delight that lies in increased comprehension, rewards the struggling aspirant in adequate fashion.... Tomorrow we will deal with the more practical side, that of the man who aims at this high calling.

  September 16th, 1920.

  2 - What access to the Master entails.

  We deal today with the second point in our eighth letter, and we have to look at the subject in two ways, briefly from the standpoint of the Master, and rather lengthily from the viewpoint of the pupil.

  We have in these letters given a broad outline of the magnitude of the task that lies ahead of the man who proposes to attain. Much that has been written has no interest for the man who is only of average development, but chiefly concerns the man who has reached a specific point in evolution, and stands upon the Path of Probation. Much that might be said upon this matter has been covered in that earlier series I communicated to you. I seek not to cover the same ground here, but to deal more specifically with the internal relationship which exists between Master and pupil.

  That relationship exists in four grades, in each of which a man progresses nearer to his Master. These four grades are as follows and cover the period wherein the man is under training until the time when he himself becomes an adept.

  They are:—

  a. The period wherein he is on probation. [266]

  b. The period wherein he is an accepted disciple.

  c. The period wherein he is regarded as the Master's intimate, or—as it is esoterically termed—the “Son of the Master.”

  d. The period wherein the final three initiations are taken, and he knows himself as one with the Master. He ranks then as the “Beloved of the Master,” a position analogous to that which John, the beloved disciple, held in the Bible story.

  All these stages are governed by two things:—

  a. Similarity of vibration.

  b. Karma,

  and all are involved in the ability of tie man to develop group consciousness.

  On the planes of the higher mind, on the second subplane you have a reflection of what can be seen on the highest planes of our solar system. What have you there? The seven Heavenly Men are there to be found, each of Whom is composed (from the standpoint of form) of group souls,—those group souls being made up of the individual human and angel units of consciousness. On the second subplane of the mental plane you have the groups belonging to the Masters, if so I may express it. These groups are animated and vitalised from the atomic subplane where the Masters (when manifesting for the helping of the sons of men) have Their habitat,* just as the Heavenly Men have Their originating source and the cause of Their life on the atomic plane of the solar system, that which we call the plane of adi, or the first plane. These groups are formed around a Master, are enclosed within His aura, and are a part of His consciousness. They include people whose egoic ray is the same as His, or whose monadic ray is the same.

  * Since 1920, great changes have occureed. Now (1949) there has been a shift to the Buddhic Plane. (A.A.B.)

  [267] This means that two types of people are concerned:—

  1. Those who are preparing for the first and second initiations, taken upon the ray of the Ego, and

  2. Those who are preparing for the two next initiations, which are taken upon the ray of the Monad. You have here a cause of the transference of people from one ray to another. It is only an apparent transference, even though it entails passing into the group of a different Master. This takes place after the second initiation.

  A Probationer's three objects.

  During the period wherein a man is under probation, he is supposed to be developing three things:—

  1. The ability to contact his group, or in other words, to be sensible of the vibration of the group of which some particular Master is the focal point. He contacts it at times and at rare intervals at first. During the early part of his probation, whilst he is under observation, he can only sense and hold the group vibration (which is the Master's vibration) for a very brief interval. He will at some high moment link up with the Master and with the group, and his whole being will be flooded with that high vibration, and surge upward in an outburst of his group colour. Then he will relax, drop back and lose the contact. His bodies are not refined enough and his vibration is too unstable to hold it long.

  But, as time progresses (longer or shorter according to the earnestness of the pupil) the frequency of the times of contact increases; he can hold the vibration somewhat longer, and does not relax back to normal with so much ease. Then the time comes when he can be trusted to hold the contact fairly stably. He passes then to the second stage. [268]

  2. The second thing he is supposed to be developing on the probationary path is the faculty of abstract thought, or the power to link up with the higher mind, via the causal body. He must learn to contact the lower mind simply as an instrument whereby he can reach the higher, and thus transcend it, until he becomes polarised in the causal body. Then, through the medium of the causal body, he links up with the abstract levels. Until he can do this he cannot really contact the Master, for, as you have been told, the pupil has to raise himself from his world (the lower) into Their world (the higher).

  Now both these things—the power to touch the Master and the Master's group, and the power to polarise himself in the causal body and touch the abstract levels—are definitely the result of meditation, and the earlier letters you have received from me will have made this clear. There is therefore no need to recapitulate the earlier imparted data, save to point out that by strenuous meditation, and the faculty of one-pointed application to the duty in hand (which is after all the fruit of meditation worked out in daily living) will come the increased faculty to hold steadily the higher vibration. Again and again would I reiterate the apparently simple truth, that only similarity of vibration will draw a man to the higher group to which he may belong, to the Master Who represents to him the Lord of His Ray, to the World Teacher Who administers to him the mysteries, to the One Initiator Who effects the final liberation, and to the centre within the Heavenly Man in Whose Body he finds a place. It is the working out of the Law of Attraction and Repulsion on all the planes that gathers the life divine out of the mineral kingdom, out of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that draws the latent Deity from out of the limitations of the human kingdom, and affiliates the man [269] with his divine group. The same law effects his liberation from subtler forms that likewise bind, and blends him back into his animating source, the Lord of the Ray in Whose Body his Monad may be found. Therefore the work of the probationer is to attune his vibration to that of his Master, to purify his three lower bodies so that they form no hindrance to that contact, and so to dominate his lower mind that it is no longer a barrier to the downflow of light from the threefold Spirit. Thus he is permitted to touch that Triad and the group on the subplane of the higher mental to which he—by right and karma—-belongs. All this is brought about by meditation, and there is no other means for achieving these aims.

  3. The third thing the probationer has to do is to equip himself emotionally and mentally, and to realise and prove that he has somewhat to impart to the group with which he is esoterically affiliated. Think upon this: too much emphasis is laid at times upon that which the pupil will get when he becomes an accepted disciple or probationer. I tell you here, in all earnestness, that he will not take these desired steps until he has somewh
at to give, and something to add that will increase the beauty of the group, that will add to the available equipment that the Master seeks for the helping of the race, and that will increase the richness of the group colouring. This can be brought about in two ways that mutually interact:—

  a. By the definite equipping, through study and application, of the content of the emotional and mental bodies.

  b. By the utilisation of that equipment in service to the race on the physical plane, thereby demonstrating to the eyes of the watching Hierarchy that the pupil has somewhat to give. He must show that his one desire is to be a benefactor and [270] to serve, rather than to grasp and acquire for himself. This life of acquisition for the purposes of giving must have for incentive the ideals touched in meditation, and for inspiration those downpourings from the higher mental levels and from the buddhic levels which are the result of occult meditation.

  When these three results are brought about, and when the high vibration touched is more frequent and stable, then the probationer takes the next step forward and becomes an accepted disciple.

  Accepted Discipleship.

  The second period, wherein a man is an accepted disciple, is perhaps one of the most difficult in a man's whole period of lives. It is made so in several ways:—

  He is definitely a part of the Master's group, and is within the consciousness of the Master at all times, being kept within His aura. This involves the steady holding of a high vibration. I would have you ponder on what the effect of this would be. To hold this vibration is at all times a difficult thing to do; it frequently involves an intensification of all that subsists within a man's nature, and may lead (especially at first) to curious demonstration. Yet, if ever a man is to be able to hold the force that is the result of the application of the Rod of Initiation, he has to demonstrate his ability to do so at an earlier stage, and be able to hold himself stably and to move steadily forward when subjected to the intensification of vibration that comes from the Master.