… man is literally one who thinks. Our obligation as human beings is to know and to think, to use our mind, to be agents for God’s Plan on Earth. We can’t do that if we don’t think.
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 subject today is the seven rays—part 6, and today we’re talking about ray five in particular. When we speak about rays, we’re speaking about subtle nuances of the universe that affect us, and I think with the most recent scientific discoveries, especially quantum physics, we are finding out there are so many things that have an effect on a human being. No longer can the five senses be looked at as a barometer for measurement as to what reality is. So, with that in mind, today we’re going to explore ray five—the ray being these energies or frequencies that do have an effect on us. Our thought today is from our founder, Alice Bailey: “There is one Life which expresses itself primarily through seven basic qualities or aspects, and secondarily, through the myriad diversity of forms. These seven radiant qualities are the seven rays.” Before we go forward, I’d like Sarah and Dale to recap for our audience what’s been said so far. Would you do that for us, please?
Sarah: Well, very briefly, as I’ve mentioned on earlier programs, this science of the seven rays is extremely complex and there’s no way that we can really do it justice even in a series of radio programs. All we’re trying to do is introduce people to some of the basic ideas of the seven rays, and then if they’re interested they can perhaps study some of the writings of Alice Bailey about this science on their own. As the opening quote said, there is one Life which expresses itself as seven basic qualities. Dale used the analogy of a prism which breaks down light, which is one light, into seven colours, and in a sense this is the expression of divinity in our world. It’s broken down into seven essential energy patterns. And to remind people of the seven rays, there’s the first Ray of Power, the second Ray of Love and Wisdom, the third Ray of Intelligence, the fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict, the fifth Ray of Knowledge, the sixth Ray of Devotion and Idealism, and the seventh Ray of Order, Organization, and Ritual. All of these seven rays express divine energy as it manifests in the outer world. We could say no ray is better than another ray; they’re all equally divine.
Dale: And the last time, we talked about the fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict and that is the ray that teaches the art of living in order to produce a synthesis of beauty, and the emphasis is upon achieving harmony out of conflict. In other words, achieving a balance between the polar opposites.
Sarah: That seems to imply that conflict can be productive and creative.
Dale: I think it can, and I think that’s a good way to see conflict. We tend to get horrified and depressed by a lot of conflict, but if we can see it as a positive thing, as an obstacle to be overcome, an opportunity to move forward to the next step that a person must take, I think that would be one way of looking at conflict in a more positive way.
Sarah: We touched on that in our discussion last week, that conflict sometimes can create enough agitation and questioning that you reconsider some of your favorite dogmas and perceptions about the world and about yourself. So, it can kind of throw things up in the air and allow you to see reality in a new way, and out of that emerges harmony.
Dale: Right, and the fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict is also considered to be a bridging energy because it helps to bridge between the lower and higher aspects, like the lower kingdoms and the upper kingdoms beyond humanity.
Sarah: Humanity is ruled and governed by the fourth ray; that’s why conflict is so familiar to us.
Dale: Right. And it’s our duty as human beings to achieve a bridging between the lower kingdoms and the higher kingdoms, and that’s really where the energies of this fourth ray come into play.
Robert: I’m trying to understand the rays and how we’re affected. What I’m looking at now and what I understand at this point is that—let’s take myself for example—I’m predisposed to a particular ray based on my personal evolution, and perhaps based on my reincarnation, karma and where I am at this particular point, and the sum total of all those things would predispose me in this particular life experience to a particular ray. Is that correct?
Sarah: Well, to some extent, but I don’t want people to have the sense that there’s any competition in trying to have a certain pattern of ray energies diagnosed in one’s makeup. One ray is not better than another, and to use them to stereotype and perhaps to peg people in a way that’s negative or critical is a misuse of this very sacred teaching about the seven expressions of divinity. But yes, in the sense that we get what we deserve and what we need, we have all the attributes in our make-up psychologically that enable us to express and achieve what we are capable of. But there are some people who might be governed, for example, by the ray of power in a way that they use power for truly magnanimous ends, and then there are other people who are governed by the ray of power who use it for selfish purposes. So, it all depends on one’s level of evolution.
Robert: And then in another incarnation, we may go on to being predisposed to a different ray. So, it is true what Khalil Gibran says—that when we discover the truth about ourselves, that it’s only a truth, and there may be an infinite number of truths to discover. We have another thought by Alice Bailey that I like a lot about the fifth ray: “The fifth Ray of Concrete Knowledge and Science is steadily increasing in potency and the result of its influence will be to guide humanity into increasing knowledge. Its energy beats upon the minds of men and women at this time and produces that stimulation which lies behind all the scientific approach to truth in all departments of human thought.” Well, that’s a profound thought that we can spend the whole show on, but we have to move on. Is the energy of the fifth ray really possible for all scientific investigation today?
Sarah: Well, I think that the fifth ray probably is the urge to know, to investigate, to explore; we can see that behind all scientific procedures and pursuits. I think of the fifth ray as the kind of energy that probably drove the early explorers out to the North Pole, for example; uncharted territory beckoned to them and they had to know about it. The Bible says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” To me, that’s the essence of the fifth ray as a spiritual, compelling energy.
Dale: I don’t know if you can make a blanket statement that all scientific investigation today is responsible because of the fifth ray, but a good part of it is. I mean, after all, this energy provides the quality that stimulates scientific study and research and the souls that come in along this particular line of energy are open to scientific research. It’s in their character, it’s in their makeup, they’re born with these characteristics. So yes, they simply follow the line of pursuit that is most natural to them, and that happens to be along the path of a concrete knowledge or of scientific investigation.
Sarah: It’s said in the writings of Alice Bailey that this energy of the fifth ray is what is causing the human intellect to develop exceedingly rapidly. We can see this in a study of history that even one hundred years ago the mass literacy rate was much lower than it is today worldwide. The United Nations Development Program charts the growth of literacy among the world’s peoples and it’s really encouraging to see how it’s grown exponentially in the last few decades and certainly in the last century. This is, I think, implied in that opening statement, that this energy of the fifth Ray of Concrete Knowledge and Science beats upon the minds of men. It’s a compelling spiritual energy that makes people want to know, to think, to discover, to have the freedom to think for themselves. We start out as human beings doing it in rather strange ways, because the fifth ray is what’s behind, for example, the ideologies like socialism, fascism, and communism. Those are distorted presentations of a code or a doctrine that would enable a right civilization to develop. But we learn through the experience of failure as well as through success, and these ideologies are a stab by human beings to use the mind to ground ideas and to present governing principles. We can also see this fifth ray in fundamentalism of any kind and the fundamentalists aren’t just found in religion.
Dale: No, but also we have to always keep in mind that these are divine qualities and they are qualities that are just a part of this greater plan that’s working out on Earth. Each one of these ray qualities, these ray energies, provides a certain quality that is needed to round out the working out of this plan, and that’s why the scientific investigation and research is so important at this time, in this part of the world. So, that’s why we have such a prominence of this ray energy working out in the world today.
Robert: Well, certainly I can see that the last one hundred years has seen such a tremendous growth in science interest and so many discoveries. Do only scientists respond to the fifth ray energy, and who would be a typical example of someone working on this ray?
Sarah: Science includes a lot more than just, for example, chemistry, physics and so on. It would include economics and the social sciences, so it’s a broader term than one might think. I have an example, but I know you do too.
Dale: Well, yes, I think we have to include people like Einstein in that category, and certainly Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
Sarah: Edison’s a good example because we talked about him before, how he carried out many investigations that failed before he finally figured out the light bulb.
Dale: Right, and these inventors worked with electricity and that’s very much aligned with this ray energy. And, also, Marconi who gave us the radio and the wireless radio and Alexander Graham Bell who gave us the telephone, of course; all these great inventions that came out in the nineteenth century. This was a tremendously stimulating period and of growth in science.
Sarah: I have another example, though, that’s more recent. It’s a man who’s been written up in the National Geographic three times in the past year for a really major experiment that he’s conducted in Africa. His name is Michael Fay; some of our listeners might have read about him. I think the experiment took over a year to carry out, where he conducted what I think is called a transect. He transected a thousand miles of previously unexplored African jungle and the National Geographic wrote about his transect, which means simply, as I understand it, a line that’s charted through a particular region, and the scientist follows that line, not deviating from it, and documents everything in the natural world that’s found in that particular path. So, he and his helpers carried out a journey through the African jungle, a direct line from the Congo to the Atlantic Coast, of over one thousand miles through jungle and mangrove swamps. It was a very physically difficult journey. He kept piles of notebooks, he charted everything he saw, discovered new species of flora and fauna. To me, that’s an excellent example of the fifth ray—of the scientific mind.
Robert: That’s interesting. It’s fascinating too, how everything you’re saying just underscores the idea that the last one hundred and fifty years has been very dominated then by the fifth ray, in science. In what ways would the fifth ray express itself through a person?
Sarah: I suppose it would demonstrate in a commitment to truth above all other values. The fifth ray often governs the mind of an individual, although it can also govern the personality or the soul. But many people have a mind, a way of thinking that is governed by the fifth ray. They are people who appreciate detail, work with detail, respect truth without wanting to bend doctrines and theories to their own ideology.
Dale: Yes, and as we’ve mentioned many times before, for each of the rays there are special virtues that can appear through people and there are also the vices. One of the vices that tends to come out, particularly in some that are prominently attuned to the fifth ray, would be a narrowness of view, an arrogance, or maybe a lack of sympathy or something like that. These are just ways that we can understand the psychology of a human being—not necessarily someone who’s very neurotic—but just any human being will have these particular virtues and vices. So, these are ways to study an individual and look at their psychological makeup and understand where they’re coming from and what they have to work out.
Sarah: The fifth ray mind, as I mentioned, can be prone to discrimination. This is an example of something that can be used either constructively or in an unconstructive sense. We have to be able to discriminate between this and that. That’s part of the mind, to be able to perceive nuances and to distinguish one thing from another. Discrimination can also be used to develop a finely honed sense of values. We need that, we need to be able to recognize the greater and prefer it over the lesser value. But this same tendency can also, as I mentioned, turn into a fundamentalist approach. It’s interesting that a lot of people who have a naturally scientific approach to life tend to like to identify certain fundamentals. It’s a natural propensity of their character that they like to identify the fundamentals, the really basic things in life and when that’s applied, for example, to religion, it can be a kind of a crystallizing, a hardening of one’s viewpoint that creates walls and barriers.
Dale: Yes, there is that wonderful expression in the literature of Alice Bailey, that the mind is the “slayer of the real” and that would be the case perhaps in a strong fifth ray type who is so detail oriented that they’re not really open to anything that lies beyond, to the realities that underlie the form life that they’re working through and studying.
Sarah: I think the best way to avoid that tendency is to use the mind in two directions. The mind is the way we make sense of the outer objective world that we perceive through our five senses. The mind is also the way we penetrate to the inner side of life and to become open to ideas and principles that are more abstract. So, when we purposely try to develop the capacity of the mind to reach both inward as well as to deal with life on an outward level, maybe then we’re avoiding a tendency to become fixated or crystallized.
Robert: How is the fifth ray energy helping humanity advance spiritually?
Sarah: Well, as we’ve said before in our discussions, the spiritual is not necessarily the religious impulse. Spiritual pursuits can express in a number of different ways that people might not think of as being spiritual, and yet they are. For example, the tendency of the human being to want to discover new things about the Earth, to explore as Michael Fay did the jungle of Africa, where no human being had ever been before. That’s deeply spiritual because it shows the human mind and its quest to know, and because, as we’ve said, man is literally one who thinks. Our obligation as human beings is to know and to think, to use our mind, to be agents for God’s Plan on Earth. We can’t do that if we don’t think.
Dale: Yes, and we have to keep in mind that scientific investigation continues to probe into the inner secrets of the outer forms and towards the inner dimensions, and it’s helping to break down the veil of unknowing and ignorance that tends to separate the human kingdom and the inner kingdom of God, the kingdom of souls. So, that is deeply spiritual because it is advancing human awareness, it’s awakening human consciousness to greater and greater inclusiveness, and this is essentially what spirituality is. It isn’t necessarily religious because it’s that which opens human consciousness to the whole and to the whole of creation. That is essentially what the scientific investigation is doing—whether they are conscious of this or not, that’s something else—but technology is expanding our understanding of the world through the telephone, the Internet, computers, the radio and the wireless radio and all of that. We’re becoming more integrated and we’re beginning to realize more and more our interdependence and this is greatly enhancing our spiritual life in the world.
Robert: Do we have any more that we want to say it about that?
Sarah: Oh, there’s so much more to say, but we’ve run out of time. I guess all we can say is, if people are interested in this theory of the rays, they can read for themselves and try to get an understanding of how these energies affect them and the people closest to them.
Robert: And people influenced by the Ray of Concrete Knowledge and Science, they can continue to explore and reach greater depths. And as they look for the true nature of reality we have to remember that there really is no independent model, so this is the fact that enables us to go on in our scientific exploration. That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. 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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