The objective for which life takes form is the unfoldment of consciousness or the revelation of the soul.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you, the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the Ageless Wisdom, and before we begin, I want to give credit to Alice Bailey the founder of the Lucis Trust Organization. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show is based on the works of Alice Bailey. This thought comes from a book by Natalie Banks, who’s a very serious student of Alice Bailey. It’s from her book, The Golden Thread. “The constant reappearance of the Ageless Wisdom handed down from remote times has been compared in symbol to a golden thread, a spiritual lifeline waxing and waning in clarity from century to century.” I want to just repeat something that we ended with during our last show on the Ageless Wisdom, and it had to do with the esoteric thought that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. My question was to you, Sarah, how does that relate to the Ageless Wisdom?
Sarah: We were talking about how the Ageless Wisdom is hidden. It’s not trotted out for public consumption, and that relates to the familiar statement that you’ve just made about the student being ready and then the teacher appears. The Ageless Wisdom has always been available to humanity in a form that was appropriate for the particular period. Going back to the dawn of human evolution, this body of spiritual truth has always been present on earth, but one has to search it out. That is because coming upon it prematurely would be useless. The person wouldn’t appreciate the teaching for what it really is any more than a small child would appreciate a strand of pearls above a set of plastic toys. You have to have inner resources to be able to respond to the significance of the Ageless Wisdom. This preparation of the student we were talking about last time. We commented on the statement in the book, The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley that only those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit, are ready for the Ageless Wisdom. I think that’s true. We have to be somewhat purified in our consciousness and in our character and in our behavior before we can begin to respond to this inner doctrine of teaching that is present in all the world’s religions. It’s found in the mythologies of the different cultural traditions. It’s even found in science. One of the interesting things today is that modern science is becoming, I think, more etheric, you could say, less materially focused. One of the interesting things about the recent period of the last century, or perhaps the last two centuries, is that human resources were devoted almost totally on perfecting life on the physical plane: matters of hygiene, understanding the known visible world, travel. All of this is the glory of the human mind, but it also focused us on the physical plane. The Ageless Wisdom has to do with another level of reality altogether, the subjective underlying realm that stands behind outer manifestation. It’s that invisible conditioning level of Reality, with a capital R, that the Ageless Wisdom says stands behind the outer world of form and personality. So, with human evolution having been focused on the material level of life, we were not so responsive to the Ageless Wisdom, but I think even science is pointing toward a more subjective or etheric level of knowledge now, don’t you think?
Dale: Well sure, especially with nuclear physics, and we’re exploring the inner core of the atom, and that’s all at the etheric level. So yes, very much so.
Sarah: What is interesting is that all of this outer paraphernalia of life is representative of and symbolic of the inner reality if we know how to read the signs and symbols of the outer world. All of this can teach us something, but we mustn’t mistake it for the real significance of life. That lies behind the outer world. Why we have to deal with this physical, tangible world is one of the great mysteries, but apparently it has to do with the bringing together of spirit and matter. The redemption of the world—speaking of the physical world—comes about only through the human mind’s awakening to the inner spiritual significance of this outer world. So, we need both, but we need to learn how to read our outer world for its real significance, and this is what the Ageless Wisdom points to. We talked last time about one of the core doctrines of the Ageless Wisdom being the idea of the One. Behind the whole incredible diversity of manifestation, there is One. This concept goes way back in human history. I think it was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten that first registered this realization that the source of life is one, and that everything derives from this one.
Dale: Yes, it was related to the sun god, and he was the first that probably really introduced that idea of oneness, but it only lasted as long as his lifetime, and as soon as he departed from the scene, then his followers went back to their old ways again. So, it’s just the way the Ageless Wisdom waxes and wanes because it depends so much on the people and where their consciousness lies at the moment.
Sarah: I think it’s something that you have to awaken to through faith and also through cultivating the habit of mind and spirit of looking for this essential underlying oneness within all of the manifestation that you encounter and specifically within all the human beings that you encounter. Try looking at a crowd of people the next time you’re in a mass of people whom you don’t know and remembering that all of us derive from one God, one Source, one Creator—whatever you want to call it—and then take that realization and extend it to the whole visible physical world, animals, vegetables, minerals. The whole outer world of manifestation is a veil, a blind for an essential One Reality that is working out through this myriad of forms for purposes that are beyond most of our minds to grasp, but with this premise, we make our start in understanding the Ageless Wisdom. Another essential point about the Ageless Wisdom is that it has to do with personal experience and validation. We’re not just talking about the study of theory and doctrine, or of spiritual texts or scriptures. It can start with that, but ultimately it has to work its way into an experience. This is why I think Pythagoras—whom we talked about in our last program—required that his students undergo two years of silence before he would teach them anything. Not because they misused speech—that’s one possibility—but I think more importantly that cultivating that outer silence made them turn to their inner resources through meditation and reflection and contemplation, and that’s where you begin to open up the direct experience of this reality we’re talking about.
Dale: His direct experience of the soul was the focus of Pythagoras’s school, or at least that aspect of the religious training that students received in his school. It’s bringing through the soul energies and the realization of the soul that eventually, as he says, enables one to escape from the wheel of birth.
Sarah: It’s not only a matter of discovering that one has a soul and is an eternal being or immortal being beyond the physical body, but it’s through this realization of the soul that we find our connection to this One, and this is an essential concept of the Hindu religion that I find so fascinating. The Sanskrit formula, “that art thou” defines this realization. That— meaning this reality, this One that we are talking about—art thou. There is within each human being some atomic fragment of this One which exists within all of us, and awakening to that Divine principle which is at the core of our being is, I think, the whole purpose of the Ageless Wisdom teaching. That art thou, the Atman or the immanent eternal self is one with Brahman according to Hinduism, and Brahman is the absolute principle of all existence. So, the human being and the Divine creative force are in essence one.
Dale: It’s that seed that lies within each one of us, of course, that is the golden thread, and the thread unwinds from that little point of light that’s contained within each human being.
Sarah: That’s very good. You tied up that loose end really neatly.
Dale: With my golden thread. (laughter)
Sarah: Yes! Maybe at this point we could try to sum up the whole subject by pointing to four essential concepts or “postulates” as they’re called in the writings of Alice Bailey that she says really define the principles of the Ageless Wisdom so that our listeners will know what we’re talking about. She says that the first essential principle of the Ageless Wisdom is the teaching that there exists in the manifested universe the expression of an energy or a life which is the responsible cause of all the diverse forms that compose the outer world of manifestation, that this great life is the basis of the doctrine of monism, which is a term for the belief that God is one. Probably our listeners are familiar with the saying that God is one. But when you really think that through and start to try to live your life by it, it is transformative. This is the essential principle of the Ageless Wisdom: that behind the outer manifested world, there is One Life. This oneness is not easily recognizable because we’re told our consciousness is so fragmented and so fixated and engrossed with the outer world of diversity and form. That’s why the spiritual disciplines of detachment and discrimination and perseverance are so important because we have to prepare our consciousness in order to be able to perceive this One.
Dale: If you think about it, the power of the One Life to hold this whole world in manifestation at once—it’s a very subtle power, but a very tremendously powerful power. If you really stop and think about it, the idea that there is One Life and each of us are fragments of that One Life, then in this regards, when you study the Ageless Wisdom teachings you see that if there is only One Life, then life cannot be taken.
Sarah: Right. “Life is one and naught can ever take or touch that life,” it’s said.
Dale: That’s right. No matter, even at what we call death, life is not taken away. It just continues on in another phase.
Sarah: It also touches on two aspects of, or two ways of understanding God or the Creator: that God is both imminent—within every human being and literally within every fragment of the manifested world Divinity is present at the cellular level—and God is transcendent—greater than and apart from the whole created world. The Bhagavad Gita talks about that: “Having pervaded the entire universe with a fragment of myself, I remain.” This is the expression of God, both imminent within the created world and transcendent of it. This is the One we’re speaking about. The second postulate or concept of the Ageless Wisdom which is fundamental is that this One Life manifesting through matter produces a third factor, which is consciousness. Life or Spirit manifesting through matter produces consciousness, and this is known as the soul, the awareness of being both spirit and matter. Gradually the soul awakens; at the human stage we have the awareness of being created by God but also living within a physical world and part of that physical world.
Dale: Yes, and there’s another aspect to that because it’s the One Life that pervades all of these other kingdoms as well, not just the human kingdom, but it pervades the mineral kingdom and the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. It’s the same One Life that works through a plant or an animal that works through a human being.
Sarah: Yeah, the mystery isn’t just within the human experience but within all those kingdoms.
Dale: Right, and there is also a certain degree of consciousness related to this as the spirit enters and mingles with the material substance and this soul consciousness aspect arises. It’s actually the son—the father, the mother and the son aspect—that is produced from the coming together of the father and mother principles.
Sarah: And the consciousness is appropriate to the particular level or kingdom. In fact, we’re told in the writings of Alice Bailey that the vegetable kingdom on its own level and for its particular purposes is extremely developed and doing very well, thank you, in the evolutionary Plan of God. The third postulate of the Ageless Wisdom is that the objective for which life takes form is the unfoldment of consciousness or the revelation of the soul. This is the factor of light: that God takes form in the world through manifestation to produce light or awareness.
Dale: That’s the ultimate glory of God and when we talk about the glory of God, that’s what is meant. The irradiation of light coming, manifesting through form.
Sarah: Christ’s statement that, “I am the light of the world” is verification that the purpose of his birth was to bring light into the world. The fourth principle or postulate of the Ageless Wisdom is the idea of periodicity or cyclic manifestation. What I’m getting at is that all lives on any plane manifest cyclically. They come and they go. They wax and they wane. Everything that lives on Earth will die. Absolutely everything that is present now will depart— speaking of the form level. This realization is utterly good and beneficent in its purpose. The Bible touches on this. I think it’s Ecclesiastes that says, “to everything there is a season,” and this is part of the Plan; for most of us it’s a complete mystery, but death and rebirth, the coming and going in form is part of this waxing of light.
Dale: We shouldn’t be too upset by the departure of certain forms on Earth because it’s meant to be. They have reached their cycle just as every human being has a cycle to go through. We reach the end of the cycle, we die, we are reborn again at another time, and the cycle begins all over again. So, it’s one continuous process.
Sarah: For anybody that’s been intrigued by any of these concepts, there are various schools of training that focus on the Ageless Wisdom, and one of them is the Arcane School, which we conduct through our work in the Lucis Trust. It’s a school of training in the Ageless Wisdom leading to a life of service. The books of Alice Bailey are focused on the whole foundation of the Ageless Wisdom, and we have plenty of information on those books. So, if someone wants to make a study, that’s two places where they can begin, the books and the school.
Robert: You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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