Vol. 52 No. 5 - Elizabeth Clare Prophet - March 1, 2009
Discipleship: Five Steps of Initiation
under the Living Word
Part 5
Christ I
The fifth level of relationship is Christ—the full incarnation of the Word, who is one’s Guru.
What prevents people from moving forward in these steps? I have noticed something that has come up in various instances when I have disciplined people and entered into levels of their psychology. In some cases it has taken me many years to understand what I was dealing with as I would go after what we usually term the carnal mind. I want to tell you about this because it is a step beyond which any number of individuals cannot go. This is based on specific counseling of one and also of others.
Usually when the masters mention a specific example or I do, in the next week any number of people will come up and say to me, “That was so-and-so, wasn’t it? I knew that that was so-and-so they were talking about.”
It doesn’t matter who it is. It’s the generic chela. The point is that the lessons and teachings of life come out of the crucible of experience. You just don’t pull down balloons from the sky. Teaching is based on what is happening in the day-to-day evolution. And so if a situation with a lesson occurs, I bring it to your attention. It’s important to get the lesson and to know that everybody has to pass through what we’re talking about. So let’s concentrate on ourselves and say to ourselves, “This could be me. And if it is me, I better understand this and better see to it that I master it, that I get past it.”
The Intellect and the Psychic Sense
So what could apply to you, and this is definitely true of many people, is a condition where the intellectual mind (being of a superior intelligence, background and education) has been found by the individual to be sufficient for all his wants and needs, not for centuries but for thousands of years. A person could conquer his environment, his economy, his life, live successfully, get everything he wants out of life by merely the exercise and use of the intellect, having no need to tap the universal Mind or the Christ mind.
I am grateful that I am not an extraordinary genius, so it is easy for me to see that I have need of the mind of God. The mind of God that I see so clearly couldn’t possibly be contained in my mental body. I don’t consider my mental body or my intellect sufficient to get me through the day, but a lot of people have believed, for a long time, that these are sufficient for them.
To complement their intellect, they have also developed a psychic sense, an intuitive sense. By psychic I mean that which comes from the soul, the psyche. Highly intuitive, very much attuned in a vertical sense to the things going on in the world, they have developed those soul faculties. But soul faculties are not spiritual faculties unless they are put to a spiritual use. They are five senses that can probe and understand what is going on, almost like an animal sense or a sixth sense.
So between the intellect and the psychic senses that they are tuned into, they can read people, read situations, sense coming events and dangers. And between the two, the intellect and the psychic sense, which means the mental body and the emotional body and the soul (the soul not yet purified and made white), they have become good navigators in this and other planetary spheres.
Not needing the Christ mind therefore, they’ve never had to slay the dweller-on-the-threshold. They’ve had no motivation to do so: “Why should I get rid of my pride? Why should I get rid of my this, my that or the next thing? I have no limitations and I am a really important person. I have an ego, I am proud of that ego, and that’s where I want to be.”
This is true of a lot of people, in fact most people who are successful today. They’re very much positioned in their homes, their clubs, their businesses, their professions. They don’t have a need for anything, and you don’t see them breaking the doors down to get to hear the teachings of the ascended masters. They think they don’t need them!
Furthermore, they don’t want the masters’ teachings because these teachings will upset their entire existence. For the day we challenge the beast, there is war until God in us, through Christ, wins. Armageddon is raging where we are, whether or not it is also on the sphere we’re inhabiting. It so happens that both are going on simultaneously—this war is within as well as on the planetary body.
Passing through the Labyrinth
What happens, then, is that this person with the intellect and the psychic ability has enough sense at a certain point to know that he needs a teaching and a path and a teacher. So he embraces the Path and comes along a certain way; he intellectually knows the teaching and also knows it by the psychic sense.
Now the student comes to the place where he is going to become a chela. And this doesn’t mean a chela merely by rote obedience, merely by attempting to box in the Guru and tell the Guru that “I am doing what I am doing because this is what you said” a hundred years ago or five months ago or five days ago—always wanting to have a list of rules, regulations and systems to follow as a point of obedience rather than to have to apply directly to the heart of the teacher or the messenger for the creative solution to various continuing problems or to a new phase of an ongoing service.
So out of fear but also out of not having the inner capacity, the individual is not able to enter into a co-creative relationship with the Guru, the messenger or the masters. And it is excellent and good that that one, according to the capacity that he does have, makes every effort, is striving, is decreeing and is doing a credible and worthy job of his service.
It so happens, however, that if he has attached himself to this activity, this messenger and the ascended masters, then the messenger and the masters will not leave him where they find him. And therefore, the spell must be broken so that the divine Mediator may appear, and appear to that one as the Christ of the messenger as well as the Christ of himself.
What happens here can be cataclysmic in the world of the individual—where in order to now begin to draw forth and become the Christ, he has to leave the moorings of the safe harbor of the intellect and the psychic senses. He must be able to board the ship of Maitreya and trust the captain to know that the universal Mind in him (and if not in him, then through the masters) will guide him through the labyrinth that he must pass through in order to fully internalize that mind himself.
The labyrinth is the electronic belt that you pass through from the seat-of-the-soul chakra on your journey to the heart chakra and the secret chamber of the heart. And that includes all of the human creation that came out of wrong desire—out of the desire body that’s attached to the solar plexus. All negative karma comes from wrong desire.
So you see, it is a labyrinth. We go round and round and round the spirals of that electronic belt daily on our cosmic clock, and we are carving tunnels out of granite every single time we are decreeing, doing Astreas and doing violet flame. And each day we’re getting closer and closer to the place of union. But on the way we have to slay all the beasts on those lines.
Friends on the Path
In the process of reuniting with God and going through such a strenuous path, the individual senses the desire for consolation. He doesn’t have the Friendship with a capital F, which is that point of coequality with the Guru. He is in a state of being disciplined.
So he looks for the human friend, someone of like place on the Path, and that is understandable. The disciples were friends. The holy circle of men and women were friends. We find friends on the Path with whom we can relate and who understand our own plight. The danger comes when that association of friendship is so satisfying that through conversation and the consolation and comfort a person receives from the friend, he is relieved and delivered of the burden of moving upward to slay the not-self and finally enter into the heart of the master.
This path that the soul must take between the seat-of-the-soul chakra to the safety of the secret chamber of the heart is arduous. To get into the twelve-petaled heart chakra (and have mastery on the twelve lines of the clock in some measure and transmutation of the electronic belt in some measure), to get into the eight-petaled secret chamber of the heart—this requires Buddhic affiliation, Buddhic friendship. So in the meantime, there is the sense of loneliness.
Sometimes the friend is sought in a marriage relationship, and often this can produce fiery chelas charging together. Or it can be a mutual consolation whereby there is a softening of the blows that come with the direct encounter with the Guru, the master or one’s karma. And through that consolation, one can fail to perceive the severity of a test or the karma or the initiation. Any friendship we enter into inordinately that displaces the real and living presence and fire of the Guru—and tends to mitigate what it does to us to stand in that encounter with Maitreya—becomes a friendship that is not lawful, where it is a substitute for spiritual progress.
People engage in human conversation to such an extent that it becomes a substitute for the Path, for decrees and for a real conquering of a situation. When you have a conversation, energy is exchanged, compliments are given. There may be the bolstering up of your sense of a sagging self or despondency, depression. You are given a sense of happiness. The friend takes care of you. The friend sees you’re down and out, takes you out to dinner, takes you here, takes you there, makes you forget about it. Now, that is very nice at times. But if it goes too far, what happens is that you are being cushioned, even as a parent will spoil a child and cushion that child from the hard work it takes to grow up and create himself from the moment of birth on.
The Doman Track
Not too long ago, we had a lecture on the Doman method, which teaches, among other things, that from the time of birth to perhaps four months or longer, children are very mobile and they crawl on their bellies. That’s why we who’ve had children notice that we always find them at the head of their crib, because they’re moving forward as hard as they can move.
So Doman created the idea of a track, which the baby is put on during the first days of his life.1 And that baby is inching his way along the track and every day getting stronger and stronger to go farther and farther, until by the time he’s four months old he can do the whole thing.
Pretty soon the babies outgrow the track and you just put them on the floor. They will crawl on their bellies for a long time before they crawl with their hands and knees. And both ways of crawling are absolutely essential for the development of the brain, coordination, and the five secret rays. Later they pull themselves up and stand.
I have noticed that with some parents who have decided to use the Doman track, at first they have not understood that when the baby is trying to move forward, as he knows he’s supposed to, it takes all of his might and strength to crawl one or two inches. So he gets on the track and what does he do? He cries. He struggles. He huffs, he puffs. His heart is being accelerated. He gets red in the face and he’s still not getting anywhere. And his crying may be a part of expressing himself at just how difficult this task is.
So seeing this, parents will quickly run to pick up the baby and comfort him because he is crying. But crying is not always a sign that the baby needs to be picked up or is in distress. It is his expression. He doesn’t talk yet. He can’t say, “Boy, this is hard!” So he makes this sound.
As I have watched this process go on in recent weeks, it has been the most amazing thing to see the physical development of a child, how that exercise of putting out all of his forces causes the baby to grow, to increase in weight. The character of the Christ shows in the face of the child. The face changes. There is a greater awareness, just as when we exercise and get a lot of prana and oxygen into our system.
That struggle, if you allow the baby to go through it, will be second nature to him when he is grown and needs to become a chela and fight the force he has to fight. It is second nature to him that if he wants to make the goal and get something out of life, he will have to put forth the maximum effort, as it says in the Bible, to “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, all thy soul, all thy strength.”2
That is a tremendous quality to allow the child to develop. And when we don’t, we get flabby chelas on the other end who want human comfort, human consolation, human reprieve, time out: “This is too hard. Time out. I am going to go do this. I am going to go do that.” And in going to do this and that and treating yourselves to this and that, you lose momentum! You lose your momentum. You lose your rhythm. It’s just like a runner in a marathon or in the Olympics. You just don’t leave the track and say, “I’ll be back and finish this race tomorrow.” When you’re onto this dweller and you’re going to cut through, you have a certain rolling momentum.
Continued in Part 5-II, published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 52, no. 6.
“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 other four parts of this lecture are published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 52, nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6.
1. For more on the Doman method and the infant crawling track, see The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, at www.iahp.org.
2. Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:30.
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