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Discipleship in the New Age I - Personal Instructions to Disciples - R.L.U.
October 1937

BROTHER OF MINE:

I have but a simple message for you today, and yet the methods whereby you may conform to the hints I seek briefly to give you are not by any means simple. Your major need is for an intensification of your inner spiritual aspiration. You need to work more definitely from what might be called a point of tension. Study, in the new group instructions, what I have said about tension and intensity. It is intensity of purpose which will change you from the plodding, fairly satisfactory aspirant into the disciple whose heart and mind are aflame. Perhaps, however, you prefer to go forward steadily, with no group effort, making your work for me and for the group an ordered part of the daily life, which you can adjust pretty much as you like, and in which the life of the spirit receives its reasonable share, in which the service aspect is not neglected, and your life presentation is neatly balanced and carried forward without much real strain. When this is the case, it may be your personality choice or your soul decision for a specific life, but it means that you are not the disciple, with everything subordinated to the life of discipleship.

I would like here to point out two things to you.

First: If you can so change your tension that you are driven by the life of the spirit, it will entail a galvanic upheaval in your inner life. For this, are you prepared?
Secondly: it will not produce any outer change in your environing relationships. Your outer obligations and interests must continue to be met, but I am talking to you in terms of inner orientations, dynamic inner decisions, and an interior organizing for service and for sacrifice. Perhaps you prefer the slower and easier way? If that is so, it is entirely your own affair, and you are still on your [539] way. You are still a constructive and useful person. I am simply here facing you with one of the crises which come in the life of all disciples, wherein choices have to be made that are determining for a cycle, but for a cycle only. It is pre-eminently a question of speed and of organizing for speed. This means eliminating the non-essentials and concentrating on the essentials - the inner essentials, as they concern the soul and its relation to the personality, and the outer ones as they concern you and your environment.

I would give you three key thoughts for deep reflection during the next few months; will you ponder on them, within the head, and, later, brood on them in the heart. These key thoughts are:

  1. The necessity for speed.
  2. The reorganization of standards of thought and of living.
  3. The expression of:
    1. Sincerity
    2. Sacrifice
    3. Simplicity

I would suggest then that at the close of this period and as a contribution to the life of your group, you write a paper giving your understanding of these five words - speed, standards, sincerity, sacrifice, simplicity - and their inner significance. One of the key words which I gave you when admitting you to the group was the word understanding. Mental understanding you have in large measure; it is the understanding of the heart to which I called your attention. You can go far along the Path of Discipleship, my brother and my friend, when your heart center opens and you can think with love. Do you understand the paradox of that?

As with the others, I will tell you what are the governing rays of your equipment. As you know already, your soul ray is the second; you will, therefore, see the reason for my emphasis upon the heart unfoldment, for it will necessitate the effort of your soul and mind, working in conjunction, to bring about this result. Your personality is on the fourth ray, and you have considered this as constituting for you the ray of the artist, of the creative worker. But it is necessary to remember that this is [540] also the Ray of Harmony through Conflict, and it is to this aspect of the ray in relation to your personality that I call your attention. This inner conflict, God-given and of deeply spiritual import, is a service.

Your mental body is on the fifth ray, giving you your grip of facts and your grasp of the contours of the occult sciences. But this mental body must be guided into being an instrument of illumination and not simply a recorder of facts; this only becomes possible when head and heart vibrate in unison.

Your astral body is upon the sixth ray. This gives you the one-pointedness which is such an asset to any disciple, but it also gives a measure of narrowness which at times handicaps you.

Your physical body is on the third ray. This gives you an active, intelligent grip upon life and a coordinated physical vehicle. Shift your focus of attention away, however, from the physical vehicle which, at times, engrosses your attention, and shift it also away from the mental body into that of the astral body. Use the force which will then come through into that vehicle in the task of understanding the "heart of things and of people," through the medium of your opened heart. Your rays are, therefore:

  1. The soul ray - the second Ray of Love-Wisdom.
  2. The personality ray - the fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict.
  3. The ray of the mental body - the fifth Ray of Concrete Science.
  4. The ray of the astral body - the sixth Ray of Devotion.
  5. The ray of the physical body - the third Ray of Active Intelligence.
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