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These steps will include:
LAW X
Hearken, O Chela, to the call which comes from the Son to the Mother, and then obey. The Word goes forth that form has served its purpose. The principle of mind then organises itself, and then repeats the Word. The waiting form responds and drops away. The Soul stands free.
Respond, O Rising One, to the call which comes within the sphere of obligation; recognize the call emerging from the Ashram or from the Council Chamber where waits the Lord of Life Himself. The Sound goes forth. Both Soul and form together must renounce the Principle of life and thus Permit the Monad to stand free. The Soul responds. The form then shatters the connection. Life is now liberated, owning the quality of conscious knowledge and the fruit of all experience. These are the gifts of Soul and form combined.
I have wished to make clear in your minds the distinction between disease and death as experienced by the average man, and certain corresponding processes of conscious dissolution as practised by the advanced disciple or initiate. These later processes involve a slowly developing technique in which (in the earlier stages) the disciple is still the victim of disease-producing tendencies of the form, as of all forms in nature. This tendency produces subsequent death, through the stages of modified disease and peaceful, consequent death, on to the other stages where death is brought about by an act of the will— the time and the mode being determined by the Soul and consciously recorded and registered in the brain. Pain is demonstrated in both cases, but upon the Path of Initiation pain is largely negated, not because the initiate endeavours to avoid pain, but because the sensitivity of the form to undesirable contacts disappears, and with it pain also disappears; pain is the guardian of the form and the protector of substance; it warns of danger; it indicates certain definite stages in the evolutionary process; it is related to the principle whereby the Soul identifies itself with substance. When the identification ceases, pain and disease and also death lose their hold upon the disciple; the Soul is no longer subject to their requirements, and the man is free because disease and death are qualities inherent in form, and subject to the vicissitudes of form life.
Death is to man exactly what the release of the atom appears to be; this the great scientific discovery of the release of atomic energy has demonstrated. The nucleus of the atom is split in two. (This wording is scientifically incorrect.) This event in the life experience of the atom releases a great light and a great potency; upon the Astral plane, the phenomenon of death has a somewhat similar effect and has a close parallel in the phenomena brought about by the release of atomic energy. Every death, in all the kingdoms of nature, has to some extent this effect; it shatters and destroys substantial form and thus serves a constructive purpose; this result is largely Astral or psychic and serves to dissipate some of the enveloping glamour.
My proposition will serve to show you some of the relationships between death and constructive activity, and the wide usefulness of death as a process in reconstruction. It will convey to you the idea that this great Law of Death—as it governs substance in the three worlds—is a beneficent and corrective event. Without enlarging upon it, I would remind you that this Law of Death, which governs in such potency in the three worlds of human evolution, is a reflection of a cosmic purpose which governs the cosmic Etheric planes of our solar system, the cosmic Astral plane and the cosmic Mental plane. The death-dealing energy emanates as an expression of the life principle of that greater LIFE which enfolds all the seven planetary systems which in Themselves express the Life of our solar system. When, in our thinking and in our effort to understand, we enter this realm of pure abstraction, it is time to call a halt and draw our minds back to the more practical ways of planetary living and to the laws governing the fourth kingdom in nature, the human.
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