Vol. 52 No. 1 - Elizabeth Clare Prophet - January 1, 2009
Discipleship: Five Steps of Initiation
under the Living Word
Part 1
Student
There are five levels of affiliation that you may seek with an ascended master, with a Guru, with your Holy Christ Self. These correspond to the acceleration of the five secret rays. The first is the level of the student. I will preface each step of initiation with a definition of that level.
Under this phase the individual studies and becomes a student of the writings and the teachings of the master. He is free to come and go and has declared no particular responsibility to the person of the master. He has taken no vows, made no commitment, but may be studying to “show himself approved”1 in order to be accepted as a servant (otherwise known as “chela”) of the master.
The largest body of people affiliated with this movement are students. They study our books, which are sold all over the world and printed in a dozen or more languages.2 People study these teachings readily. But at the student stage, they have not yet had the desire or the love for the master whose words they are reading to enter in to a relationship of chela at the level where the messenger (or the office and mantle of Guru that I wear) might be the intercessor between themselves and that master.
So the student level, which is important, is the place where the individual reads. Whether he is reading the true teachings or the false teachings, he can be sorting and sifting. And it is entirely dependent on who that individual is and what he is made of as to the choices he makes. Given the same information, people will make different choices. For example, a false messenger of Saint Germain purchases many of our books, which he uses in classes he conducts with people affiliated with him. Recently he distributed to all of his students the Studies in Alchemy book.3 And it was reported to me that out of the many who received that book, there were a few, maybe three or four, who upon reading Saint Germain’s dictations saw through this teacher, left him and came to the true path.
Therefore the level of the student is where the individual is looking for the teacher who is part of his own tradition of many lifetimes. People gravitate to this teacher or to the teacher that they are ready for.
Getting Stuck
Many teachers in the world today have a goodly percentage of truth in their message. There is a goodly percentage of truth in all faiths and in many of the New Age paths. The problem arises where the error comes in and it is a psychic hook by which the student who is searching gets locked into a feeling of obligation, subservience, even dominance and control: “You can’t make it without me,” and so forth.
And so even though there is error, by intimidation or by whatever distortion of the true path is taught, the individual feels obligated to stay with a teacher from whom he has perhaps learned some basic principles of truth, but who cannot take him all the way up the spiral of the spinal altar from the base to the crown, all the way up the mountain. And so, initiations stop.
Without exception, teachers who have not had the initiations of the Great White Brotherhood do center their teachings around themselves, and they attempt very quickly to cause students studying their work to become tied to them. They do it through personality, through a lot of human interaction, praising and flattering, and letting their students know that they, the teachers themselves, are the key to their advancing steps. They take advantage of new people who should be on the true path.
Many more lightbearers get tied up in these byways (that are not so evil but at the same time not so good either) than those who ultimately affiliate with the real absolute-Evil false gurus. Therefore lightbearers are caught in the byways, the dead-end roads of these various levels of teaching, and they are stuck there by something in their own makeup, perhaps their enjoyment of the social life to such an extent that it has become more important than spiritual progress.
So when we make the calls in our sanctuary for the cutting free of the lightbearers, the lightbearer who is worth his salt is already seeking, already looking but may be stuck anywhere. There are other lightbearers who, because they’re on a different ray, have not sought progress and evolution through a religious path but through another path that follows the line of their profession, their calling, their karma and their ray.
People at the student phase, then—the children of God and the lightbearers—need the greatest protection. As in any of the five stages, here a person may decide that he is comfortable and does not want to go beyond that place. Or perhaps it’s not a place of comfortability but a place of accommodation. When it becomes too difficult to challenge the not-self, the individual will simply go no further.
The Need for Divine Intercession
If Jesus had not given to us the dweller call, the judgment calls, the ruby ray and the progressive teachings, many of us here would have stopped somewhere along the way, not understanding what the dweller is. The dweller is more powerful than the soul that is giving birth to itself. That dweller has developed for many thousands of years. And the soul is not able to deal with it without divine intercession, without the ascended masters, without the mantle and all of the teachings.
So had I not been called by El Morya, had he not appeared to me in Boston, had he not raised me up and disciplined me to be a messenger, it is a question how far I would have gotten in the understanding of all of this, much less the mastery of it and getting beyond it. And this is true for many of us. I can confess before you that without the living Guru El Morya and his living mouthpiece Mark Prophet, I could not be where I am today. And that is why the love of the Guru is so great—one has one’s real God-identity here in form because of the teacher.
Continued in Part 2, published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 52, no. 2.
“The Summit Lighthouse Sheds Its Radiance o’er All the World to Manifest as Pearls of Wisdom.”
Elizabeth Clare Prophet delivered this lecture, “Discipleship: Five Steps of Initiation under the Living Word,” on Sunday, August 14, 1988, during the Sunday service “Mother’s Response to El Morya’s Dictation: ‘Free El Morya!’” which was part of a prayer vigil for El Morya. The next four parts of this lecture are published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 52, nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
1. II Tim. 2:15.
2. The ascended masters’ teachings are published by Summit University Press in over 30 languages.
3. Studies in Alchemy is now part of Saint Germain On Alchemy: The Science of Self-Transformation, by Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
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