are a living command conditioning him whether he will or not. The inability to withdraw from the position taken is one of the first true results of hearing the Word spoken after passing the two tests. There is an inevitability in living the life of the Spirit which is at once its horror and its joy. I mean just that. The symbol or first expression of this (for all in the three worlds is but the symbol of an inner reality) is the driving urge to betterment which is the outstanding characteristic of the human animal. From discontent to discontent he passes, driven by an inner something which constantly reveals to him an enticing vision of that which is more desirable than his present state and experience. At first this is interpreted by him in terms of material welfare; then this divine discontent drives him into a phase of the struggle which is emotional in nature; he craves emotional satisfaction and later intellectual pursuits. All the time this struggle to attain something ever on ahead creates the instruments of attainment, gradually perfecting them until the threefold personality is ready for a vision of the soul. From that point of tension the urge and the struggle become more [60] acute, until Rule One for Applicants is understood by him and he steps upon the Path.

The key to this whole Rule lies in the injunction to the initiate that he add to his application three demands, and only after they have been voiced and correctly expressed and motivated by the dynamic will, does the further injunction come that he move forward. What are these three demands, and by what right does the initiate make them? Hitherto the note of his expanding consciousness has been vision, effort, attainment and again vision. He has therefore been occupied with becoming aware of the field - an [61] ever-increasing and expanding area - of the divine revelation. In terms of practical occultism, he is recognizing an ever widening sphere wherein he can serve with purpose and forward the Plan, once he has succeeded in identifying himself with that revelation. Until this revelation is an integral part of his life it is not possible for the initiate to comprehend the significance of these simple words. Identification is realization, plus esoteric experience, plus again an absorption into the Whole, and for all of this (as I have earlier pointed out) we have no terminology. Now a master of that which has been seen and appropriated, and being conscious of and sensing that which lies ahead, the disciple "stands on his occult rights and makes his clear demands."

What these demands are can be ascertained by remembering that all that the initiate undergoes and all that he enacts is the higher and esoteric correspondence of the triple manifestation of spirit-energy which distinguished the first and earliest phase of his unfoldment. That is the personality. I would like to call attention to the word "unfoldment," for it is perhaps the most explicit and correct word to use anent the evolutionary process. There is no better in your language. The initiate has ever been. The divine Son of God has ever known himself for what he is. An initiate is not the result of the evolutionary process. He is the cause of the evolutionary process, and by means of it he perfects his vehicles of expression until he becomes initiate in the three worlds of consciousness and the three worlds of identification.

According to ray type this unfoldment proceeds, and each triple stage of the lower unfoldment makes possible later (in time and space) the higher unfoldment in the world of the Spiritual Triad. What I am doing in these instructions is to indicate the relation between the threefold personality and the Spiritual Triad, linked and brought together by the antahkarana. Each of these three lower aspects has its own note and it is these notes which produce the sounding forth of the three demands which evoke response from the Spiritual Triad and thus reach the Monad in its high place of waiting in Shamballa. [62]