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Man, the average human being, is a sum total of separative tendencies, of uncontrolled forces and of disunited energies, which slowly and gradually become coordinated, fused, and blended in the separative personality.

Man, the Solar Angel, is the sum total of those energies and forces which are unified, blended and controlled by that "tendency to harmony" which is the effect of love and the outstanding quality of divinity.

Man, the living Monad, is the veiled reality, and that which the Angel of the Presence hides. He is the synthetic expression of the purpose of God, symbolised through revealed, divine quality and manifested through the form. Appearance, quality, life—again this ancient triplicity confronts us.

What is Initiation? Initiation might be defined in two ways. It is first of all the entering into a new and wider dimensional world by the expansion of a man's consciousness so that he can include and encompass that which he now excludes, and from which he normally separates himself in his thinking and acts. It is, secondly, the entering into man of those energies which are distinctive of the Soul and of the Soul alone—the forces of intelligent love and of Spiritual will. These are dynamic energies, and they actuate all who are liberated Souls. This process of entering into and of being entered into should be a simultaneous and synthetic process, an event of the first importance.

THE GROWTH OF SOUL INFLUENCE

It should be borne in mind that individual separative success is in itself an evidence of Soul activity, for every individual is a living Soul, actuating the lower sheaths of bodies, and proceeding to:

1. Build sheath after sheath, life after life, that will be increasingly adequate to its own expression.

2. Produce that sensitivity in the sheaths—sequentially and finally simultaneously—which will enable them to respond to an ever increasing sphere or measure of divine influence.

3. Integrate the three sheaths into a unity which for three and sometimes seven lives (occasionally eleven lives) will function as a dominant personality in some field of wide expression, using the energy of ambition to bring this about.

4. Re-orient the lower individual self so that the realm of its desires and the satisfaction of personality achievement will eventually be relegated to their rightful place.

5. Galvanise the self-assertive man into that realisation of new achievements which will direct his steps on to the Path of Discipleship and eventually on to the Path of Initiation.

6. Substitute for past, necessarily self-interested and personal ambition, the needs of the group and the goal of world service.

Here are indicated two crises in the subjective life of the Soul:

1. The crisis wherein the Soul, blinded, limited and handicapped by form, begins to work in the quarry of experience, far from its own country, with inadequate tools, and in complete temporary self-imposed ignorance of the design, or pattern.

2. The crisis which comes very much later in the Soul's experience, wherein the Soul knows more clearly the design, and in which much material has been prepared. The Soul is no longer blind, and can now work in collaboration with other Souls in the preparation of the material for the final Temple of the Lord. The Soul, incarnate in human form, places in that Temple his particular contribution to the whole, which might be stated symbolically to be:

1. A stone placed in the foundations, typical of the consecrated physical life.

2. A column in the Temple itself, typical of the desire or aspirational life.

3. A design upon the tracing board, which coincides with the Great Design, and which is that fragment of that design which the individual had to supply and in search of which he went forth.

4. A radiance or light, which will augment the Shekinah, the light which "ever shineth in the East".

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