"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

"A Parenthesis in Eternity" pdf file

Chapter 20 - The Meaning of Initiation

Initiation is an act of Grace bestowed on individuals at a certain time in their unfoldment, lifting them into the master-state of consciousness. There is far less opportunity for a student to attain initiation in the Western World than in the Eastern because in the West we are brought up from childhood with the idea of equality. We are taught that we are all equal, and therefore we do not have the correct understanding of the role of a spiritual teacher, or what spiritual consciousness is. We do not realize that while we may have political and economic equality, we are far from being equal in spiritual development.

We of the Western World do not lend ourselves to becoming students of a spiritual teaching. Oh yes, we are very eager in the first year or so to jump up from the status of a beginner into being at least a master, and then going on from there. Attaining the spiritual life, however, does not come so quickly: it is a life of continuous dedication to that which is greater than we are.

Personally, I do not believe that a student can consciously prepare for initiation, nor have I ever seen anyone who had initiation as his goal achieve it. Rather the goal must always be the attainment of that mind that was in Christ Jesus without any thought of receiving initiation or experiencing the effects of initiation.

As the student takes his first steps on the Path leading to illumination, he leams to meditate on the indwelling Spirit. Initiation carries him from one step to another into the awareness of the Presence, on and on and on, purifying him to the extent that he no longer wants God to destroy his enemies, but is willing always to forgive and love them because he knows that it is only through their ignorance that evil is being expressed. He is purified to such a degree that he no longer wishes to gain his ends by any personal sense of might or power. In way after way his life becomes so purified that it is lived in dedication to others.

The world loses its attractions for him, not because he planned or willed it so, nor because he studied to bring it to pass. Rather has an experience taken place within him. The Spirit of God has begun to come alive; his Soul-center is being opened, and instead of indulging in the pleasures of the world, he now finds himself more at home with persons who are spiritual-minded and with books of an inspirational and spiritual nature. He has not yet reached the Absolute, but having been elevated above human consciousness, he is now partaking of the nature of, and living in large measure in, the divine Consciousness, being fed and clothed by It. The activity of this Spirit is making of him a better human being and is making of his human life, a better life.

Now comes the period that is described in the mystical literature, both of the East and of the West, as "dying daily." This is the experience of putting off mortality and putting on immortality. It is an experience in "death," an experience that comes to very few, but when it comes, it carries them further along the Path up to illumination.

On the spiritual path we have to "lose" our life before we can gain spiritual life, that is, we have to lose our physical sense of life, that sense which believes that we are alive because the heart is beating or because the lungs and the digestive and eliminative tracts are functioning. We have to come to a point where life is living the body, not the body living the life. At present it is not we who are living our life. The body tells us, "I have a cold"; "My heart is not functioning properly — or my liver, or my lungs." It is constantly telling us about all the things that are threatening our human sense of life.

How stupid can we be? Life is eternal. The life of God is eternal. The life of God is infinite. There is only one Life, and therefore that eternal Life must be your life and mine. The very life that we are living is infinite and eternal, and it is not dependent upon the action of the body: the action of the body is dependent upon life. Such a realization leads us to the period of transition where we move from existence in the body to an existence which is external to body, and yet which governs the body.

Before this transition is complete, usually so much good has come into our experience that we think we have entered the land of milk and honey. We have become accustomed to good health, and if we have not achieved it, at least we would like to experience it. Probably sometimes we envy the people who are forty, fifty, or sixty years of age, and have never had a day of illness in their lives. We wish we could be like that, but it is not to be so — not on the spiritual path.

To most persons this is as far as they go on the Path in any one lifetime, unless they have made some progress in a previous existence and are now ready to go beyond it. It is a shock for them to discover that when all is apparently going so well, that is just when their real problems begin. Now the really deep ones come — problems of life and death.

Sometimes I find myself smiling a little sadly when I read in my mail of the number of people who want initiation. I wonder what would happen to them if they came up against real initiation and had to go through some of those fiery trials that are included in every initiation of the spiritually illumined. How many Lot's wives there would be to turn around and look back at the good old city!

It is not usually taught that before there can be an ascension there must be a crucifixion. It is comforting and comfortable to accept the theological belief that Jesus was crucified for us, and that therefore we can experience the ascension without the crucifixion. That we should never believe. No, to experience the ascension, we have to take all the footsteps that Jesus showed us including the temptations and the crucifixion.

These temptations do not come only when we are lowly mortals. Jesus' three temptations in the wilderness took place after he was well-established in his spiritual life. Knowing that he had glimpsed the secrets of life and could do many miraculous things, now came the temptation to use this power. How could such a thing have happened to Jesus Christ at his advanced stage of development? How could he have been tempted to glorify himself, to enrich himself, to use personal powers? If we study this experience of Jesus, we will understand why it is that just when we think we are entering the kingdom of God, our trials begin, and our temptations.

The temptation of Gethsemane came to Jesus when he was a fully ascended Master, and that of Golgotha when he was already a Saviour. Even he did not attain the infinity of his being until after the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension that finally lifted him completely above material sense or finite form.

Had Jesus succumbed to those temptations, there would be no Christian teaching today because he would have failed the tests required of him for his initiation. Every initiate on the way to the Absolute reaches the place where he is tempted to accept the fortune that is awaiting him, if only he wants to reach out for it; even' initiate is tempted to accept the world's fame. These temptations come to all those on the spiritual path, and usually at a time when they have reached the place where they are good human beings and are about to shed their humanhood.

With a small degree of illumination, it is not too difficult to achieve fame or to gain fortune. Many opportunities open to those who have attained some measure of spiritual light, and it is when these temptations in the form of such opportunities present themselves that a choice must be made: whether to bend every effort toward the acquisition of wealth and fame or to renounce all ambition to be numbered among the great and powerful. While there is nothing wrong about name or fame that comes of its own accord without seeking it, those individuals who use the knowledge or power that has been given to them for that purpose lose their way on the spiritual path. All of humanhood must be renounced, and every person on this Path must "die" and come to this point of absolute realization:

Of my own self, I am nothing. There is a Spirit within me that does the work; there is a Presence; there is a Power.
I am a beholder of this invisible Presence and Power at work. I watch how It goes before me and witness the miracles It performs.

When this spiritual way of life begins to change our nature and we find ourselves being cut off from society, we do not always realize that we are going through a transitional period and that once this transition has been made and we are completely isolated from our former associates, we will be led into the companionship of those of our own spiritual household. But as long as we are still tabernacling with the world, we are not going to meet those of our own household. It is only when we have "died" to the world that suddenly out of this whole universe one person crosses our path whom we recognize as a kindred soul, and then another and another.

If our lives are cluttered up with the social activities in which our friends and relatives have involved us, however, we are not free to enjoy the companionship of that one, two, or more who eventually cross our path, nor are we free to make the journeys that are sometimes necessary to be in their company because we may not always find that one, two, or three in our own community. It is true that we may see these companions only once in a year or once in three years, but that will not make any difference because this is a spiritual companionship that takes no thought of time or space, and even if there were years in which we were physically apart from those of our spiritual household, upon the next meeting we would be wholly atone.

The student who is at the stage of witnessing his friends and relatives drop away, and for that matter the whole world, sometimes becomes fearful and lonesome and begins clutching at something or someone, and very often he is clutching at the wrong thing or the wrong person. And why? Because he cannot take aloneness, and if he cannot endure aloneness, he cannot enter into this life.

As spiritual truth begins to reveal itself in a person, a silence descends upon him, an inability to speak and to be a part of the world's gabble, gabble, gabble, and this of course makes everyone feel that he is odd. Even those who are starting on the Path cannot quite understand that desire to be still, that total inability to say anything and yet to impart and even to receive, and so this, too, which is another form of that inability to endure aloneness and quietness, breaks up many a student's progress on the way.

Many do not realize that the "my own" which "shall come to me," referred to by John Burroughs, is contingent upon an attained state of consciousness which is absolute stillness and peace. When that is attained, all a person has to do is to be a beholder and watch the whole world come to him. Most persons go through life frustrated because their own does not come to them: their own companion does not come, their own opportunity for service, their own opportunity for showing forth God's grace. They do not realize that "my own" will not come to a human being. It will not come except by being still and knowing that I is God, and then letting the awareness that the I of our being is Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience perform Its work.

This can be attained only in the degree that each one of us realizes that I am I, that I am Consciousness, that I am the Consciousness which brought me and every individual being forth into expression, even including the trees and all that is. This does not mean that we have conscious dominion over things in the external world; it does not mean that we can "mentalize" anybody and everybody and thereby bend them to our will. The indulgence of human thought in the direction of control is domination and often ends in tyranny and destruction — usually self-destruction — and is such a form of egotism that it almost borders on insanity.

When we realize that all dominion lies in not exercising that conscious dominion which in the end becomes domination, it is because we know the truth of the I-AM-ness of our being. To know that since I is God and that I is the very I that I AM, then that I AM has dominion over everything on the earth, above the earth, and beneath the earth. To be still and know that I am God makes way for a divine Presence to go out before us, prepare mansions for us, and draw unto us our own When we know the I, we will know that 1 is the creator, but there must be no egotism connected with that. That, too, is one of the great temptations.

Very few initiates succumb to these temptations and fall by the wayside after a certain point in their development, but up to that time, even though the teacher knows that the aspirant is ready, the aspirant does not always fulfill that readiness, largely because personal sense is still in the saddle.

As long as there is any personal sense of self, we try to protect it, and whenever anything seems to threaten it, we rise up to do battle. Such a reaction may cause us to fall by the wayside because on the spiritual path we are not permitted to take up the sword. Judas, who was so close to the Master as to be his treasurer, retained enough of a sense of personal selfhood that he wanted to be "top banana," he wanted to be the most important disciple, and as soon as any of the others seemed to gain the favor of the teacher, he rose up to protect his position.

The personal sense of self that has left in it even a trace of ambition, envy, or jealousy is enough to trip up a student at any stage of his development. Until he has completely lost all sense of self and there is no further possibility of falling away, every initiate faces the temptation of fame or money, and if it is not a mad ambition for money, it may be just the ambition foT enough money to ensure security. These are the devil-tempters. The enlightened consciousness has no need for safety or security and no need to be concerned about a future, but until one has attained that state of consciousness, the temptation is certain to be present, and there is always the possibility that the initiate may yield to it.

The fabric of every temptation that assails us consists of some form of personal sense. It is only with the final illumination, that final experience of God incarnating as individual man, a revelation that has come to so few people in all the world, that personal sense is dead. At this stage of unfoldment there is none of the human self left. Fame means nothing, fortune means nothing, safety means nothing. Does God need safety? Does God need security? Impossible!

But students on the Path have not attained that final revelation of God incarnated as the Self, the revelation that enabled the Mastes to say, "He that seeth me seeth him that sent me." How few there are who can make the statement, "You are looking at God"! And until they can do that, there is some measure of personal sense reitiaining that could cause them to fall. After that, when all personal sense has been eliminated, when there is no "I," "me," or "mine," there is only God, there is only the Light Itself, and this is Self-supporting, Self-maintaining, and Self-sustaining, needing no help from any human source.

The final step for every initiate is the command to "die." No one attains the heights until he reaches a complete surrender of self, a willingness to give up the human sense of self, give it up completely — if necessary to jump off the cliff into the ocean, to swim out to sea, to keep swimming and never turn back, to do what the Master commanded: "lose" his life, "die" to his human sense of life.

The "death" of the self is explained in different ways in different teachings. In the older teachings, in addition to the story of Osiris and the Phoenix rising up out of their own ashes, there are accounts of the crucifixion of six spiritual masters before the time of Jesus, each of whom rose again. In the wisdom schools the final attainment was always dependent on the "death" of the student. Every student of a wisdom school was required to go through a "death," be "buried," and "resurrected" — raised up again—before he was given the spiritual status of a master. In the ancient Egyptian teachings, as well as those of Greece, there is always the "death" of the master, followed by his resurrection and rebirth. Many fraternal teachings include, as a part of their ritual, the "death" of the initiate, and his being raised up again. This "death" of the self is exemplified in the Master's experience by the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension above all personal selfhood.

Crucifixion can be an actual physical crucifixion, and resurrection can be an actual resurrection from the grave, but not necessarily so. They may be symbolic to show the "death" of the self and the raising up of that divine Selfhood which we are, out of the dust of that corpse, out of the tomb. In other words, the crucifixion, which is the "death," or the crossing out of the self, may come in any dark night of the Soul when the last trace of selfhood is being swallowed up and there is nothing left but the light of the divine Selfhood — no vestige left of any "I," "me," or "mine," just the I that is the I of us.

Whether during this particular lifetime on earth or in another, the day must come when we "die"—not in the sense of a physical death as the result of disease, age, or accident, but a "death" to all human sense. We can know how rapidly we are "dying" by the degree to which we insist on the preservation of our human self which is said to be the first law of nature. If we are at the stage of consciousness where we would shoot to death a burglar who had entered our home, we have not yet "died": we are still in humanhood, still living a life of self-preservation. If we believe that in the event of any conflict our country should throw a bomb before the other country does, we have not yet started on the spiritual path: we are still under the law of self-preservation. The connotations of that law are terrifying to contemplate. It is another way of saying that our life is more valuable than that of others.

On the spiritual path, and particularly as we rise high enough above and beyond all personal sense of self, we are able to understand that when the Master commanded his disciple to put up his sword it was as if he had said, "I know that they are going to crucify me, but what is the difference whether I die, or this soldier dies? Is it not the one Life? Is it right to kill him in order to protect me? Life is life, whether it is his life or my life. I have taught you to lay down your life that you may find it. I know what my fate is, but do not take someone else's life to protect my life because then all that I have taught you is lost."

Only in the degree of our self-surrender, only in the degree of what we give up, will we ever find our Self, and if we think to preserve or save our life by taking that of another, we have given telling evidence that we have not advanced very far spiritually. It takes only a little spiritual light to see that the life of one person cannot be more important than that of another, for life is life. The truth is that my life is your life, and your life is my life; and when you die, I die; when I die, you die.

We are never on the spiritual path until we have risen above the pairs of opposites, above good and evil, above "me" and "mine," above "thee" and "thine," until we have risen to the place in consciousness where there is One. When there is One, and One only, we can feed the multitudes and have twelve baskets full left over, wc can heal the multitudes, we can forgive the multitudes, but not while there is a sense of a little self that is seeking for itself.

That which originally caused us to be cast out of our spiritual home into a material sense of the universe was duality—the belief in a selfhood apart from God with its belief in, and fear of, two powers. It is not in someone else that this belief is overcome: it is overcome in us, and by us.

The overcoming is never the overcoming of something out here: it is always the overcoming of a belief that has been accepted in our consciousness. The overcoming is within our own consciousness. The longer we postpone that overcoming, the longer will we postpone the day of our final initiation when we become the master of our experience.

No one attains the spiritual heights except those who have been in the lowest depths. When we are going through our darkest human experience, very few of us actually believe that God is with us. Most of us are convinced that He has forsaken us. But God has never forsaken anyone — not even those in the lowest depth of sin imaginable. God is just as much omnipresent with the sinner as with the greatest saint.

When Moses was leading the Hebrews through their forty years of wilderness-experience, I doubt that many of the Hebrews around him would have acknowledged that God was present; but Moses himself surely must have known during all those forty years that the place whereon he stood at any given moment was holy ground. Had God not been with Moses, would there have been an end to those forty years in the wilderness and the next step into the land of milk and honey?

Elijah, too, must have had a little feeling, for a time at least, that perhaps God was not present when he was out in the wilderness and was being so persecuted. But if God had not been present, ravens would not have fed him, or the poor widow, nor would he have found cakes baked on the stones in front of him. Regardless of the problems through which Elijah went, had there not been Omnipresence, Elijah would perhaps never have been heard of again.

What an inspiration it is to us when at the end of his trials and tribulations, God reveals to him, "'Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal' — I have saved out your completeness, your perfection, your harmony, and your mission in life." God always saves out for us, too, our completeness, perfection, harmony, and mission in life.

If God had not been with Jesus, even on the Cross, could there have been a Resurrection? Separate and apart from God, does man have powers of good, powers of resurrection or ascension? It is important for those of us on the spiritual path to recognize that wherever there is the restoring of the lost years of the locust as in the case of Elijah, Isaiah, and Joel, wherever there is an experience, such as the ministry of Jesus Christ culminating in the Resurrection and the Ascension, there must be Immanuel, God with us, there must be Omnipresence, even though there have been those intervals in which the appearances were not outwardly testifying to the Presence.

Watching Paul in his persecution of the Christians and in his many attempts to eradicate them completely, it would have been hard to believe that God was with him. If we had been part of that Christian band, we would have looked on Saul of Tarsus as a devil But he was not so great a devil that God was not with him. In fact, God was with Paul awaiting recognition and realization even in the years of his ignorance, in the years of his persecutions and what the Christians would have called his deviltries. God was with him when he received the light and when he became a major factor in the founding and teaching of the Christian faith.

Peter and John were imprisoned, but God must have been with them in the prison, or else there would have been no escape for them. But there was an escape, and there was a whole ministry awaiting them because of Omnipresence, and not so much because of That as because of their recognition of It.

There is no one anywhere, at any time, without Omnipresence. There is no one anywhere, at any time, who does not have the fullness of the Godhead within him, regardless of what crosses, trials, or tribulations, regardless of what years of ignorance, sin, fear, or evil may be his lot. And but for these trials there would be no rousing out of mortality, out of humanness, out of evil humanhood, and later on there would be no rousing out of good humanhood, although eventually, both of these steps must be taken.

In the beginning of our spiritual experience we are merely coming out of the mortal or erroneous sense of life, usually into a good sense of human life—healthier and more abundant. But that is not the ultimate of life-, the ultimate of life is spiritual realization. To attain that spiritual realization, the primary responsibility of the student is the practice of meditation. It is in meditation that he loses the self with a small "s," and gains the Self with a capital "S." It is in meditation that he is developing, enriching, and unfolding his inner Self, but not while the human mind is busy with the ambition or desire for attainment.

The preparation for spiritual attainment, if there is any, therefore, is to forsake a goal. Let us suppose that initiation came to a student at this moment, and then he was told never to appear in public again, never to let himself be seen, but to find a cabin in the woods somewhere, and pray. How would he feel if he were a master and nobody else knew it, and he could not even wear a robe? Everyone who has attained that high realization has been given something to do that, while he was doing it, made it impossible for him to have name or fame. The Master Christ Jesus was not known as the Saviour or the Messiah during his own lifetime: he was a simple rabbi walking up and down the streets and villages of Palestine. Later, he was given the honor of being the Saviour, but only later.

Certainly, then, a prime requisite in the preparation for initiation on the spiritual path is the understanding that the aspirant is ready to be unknown and to be nothing. If he is instructed to sit in silence the rest of his days, he will sit in silence. If he is bidden to go off somewhere and pray for the world, he will do that, and above all things, he will never let his neighbors or friends or anyone else know that he is a person of spiritual attainment. That is a denial of attainment.

A real master does not look anything like a master: the real master is more like the servant who comes knocking at the door, asking, "Can you give me a little food?" and if we have the vision to recognize him as a master, there is a great blessing in it for us.

The more of a master one becomes, the more of a servant he really is. There never has been a real master who called himself master, there never has been a master who did not realize that he was not a master, but a servant, a servant to all who came unto him heavy laden, to all who came seeking the Light He who has attained the consciousness of a master becomes the servant of everybody, and a person with such a high state of consciousness could never stoop even to have a lurking desire to set himself up to be bowed down to and worshiped.

When a person is identified by the title of master or guru, it is only a means of signifying that individual's spiritual attainment. The person we see is not the master. What constitutes the master is his divine Consciousness. Did not the great Master tell us in effect, "Do not call me master, do not call me good: there is but one Master, there is but One good"?

No one can take credit for attaining the spiritual heights because no one has done anything to deserve or earn it, even on the lower levels. I can remember the time of my entrance to the spiritual path when the first signs given me were that I cared no longer for smoking, drinking, or playing cards. I could not even go across the border and put a two-dollar bet on a horse. All of that disappeared. How foolish it would have been if I had taken credit for this, and boasted about how noble I was when I had nothing at all to do with it. These things were simply taken from me: there was no credit accruing to me.

As one goes higher on the spiritual path, he attains a humility and a complete freedom from worldly fear. Almost with the first spiritual experience, the fear of death disappears because in the realization of life eternal, it becomes of relative unimportance whether he lives on this plane or on that. No one attains spiritually while a fear of death remains in consciousness. But there again, how could a person possibly take credit for not fearing death, when it is something he did not accomplish, but something that was done for him by the Grace that was given him.

In order to attain the spiritual heights, every initiate must go down into the depths and go through a period known as "the dark night of the Soul," which may last months and months. This is a time of anguish, a period of barrenness in which he is torn apart and feels certain that God has forsaken him, that he is unworthy, that he has made a mistake, or that he has committed a sin, and God has therefore cast him into outer darkness. The reason for this desolation is not that God has thrown him off: it is only that a greater, deeper light is coming, and there must be an emptying-out process before that greater light can come.

There are many "dark nights of the Soul" on this Path until the final one. The final one, of course, is the real night of the Soul, and that very nearly costs some their life before they can pass through that particular experience and come out into the full realization of the light.

This "dark night of the Soul" culminates in the "death" of personal selfhood and the lifting of the initiate into the master-state of consciousness. In this experience the initiate may witness a tremendous light, a filmy cloud, or a pillar of cloud, descending as if from above and taking form on earth as an individual. In other words, he beholds God incarnating Himself as man, and in this vision I, God, is now I, man: the Father has become the Son, and now I am that I AM. I am He; I am He that should come.

With this revelation there exists forever after what the world calls teacher, saviour, or guru, but which is really the light of God manifested as man, and the power shown forth is the power of God which appears to others to be the power of a man. That is why so often an individual has been set up and glorified as God: it was not seen that it was not a man who was God, but that God was the man. There is quite a difference! A man is never God, but God becomes the man.

While it is true that there have been only a few full and complete God-incarnated-as-men on earth, there have been very many who have appeared as God incarnated on earth in a measure, and some in a very great measure. Otherwise the works they have performed could not have been performed because they were always works that a man could never have done. No man could have left as his contribution to the spiritual literature of the world the Gospel of John, the Advaita Vedanta, or any of the great original teachings that have become the spiritual heritage of man.

The Absolute is not a teaching but an experience. When it is given in words in a book, it is a revelation, but still not a teaching. Nobody can teach anyone to become the God-incarnated man, but after it has been revealed, it can be taken into consciousness, and the measure of the readiness of the student will be the measure of his experience of it.

Although there are some few in the history of the world who have come to earth so highly endowed spiritually that they have received the impartation of the Spirit directly by Grace without the intervention or help of a teacher, the vast majority of those who have attained the realization of the Absolute have attained it through a teacher.

What might be called the first revelation of the Absolute is accredited to Krishna, and while there are no proofs of his attainment, nor are there any manuscripts attributed to anyone by the name of Krishna, this name recurs again and again and again in religious literature, and is always in some way associated with the revelation of God as individual being, God as the only I AM, and that God, or I AM, constituting individual being.

We have no knowledge of how many attained this consciousness in the days antedating written accounts, but probably one of the first authentic records of such an attainment is that of Melchizedek. With Melchizedek there was no teaching; he taught nothing to anyone; and if he did impart his experience of the Absolute, there is no record of it. Our only information is that there was such a person as Melchizedek, he to whom even Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, paid tribute, that is, acknowledged as greater than himself— Melchizedek, never bom and never dying. Has anyone but God Itself never been bom and never died? No, only God is from everlasting to everlasting; therefore, it was the awareness of his identity as spiritual being, as God, as the I AM that was fully revealed as Melchizedek.

Moses, too, on the mountaintop, at the very height of spiritual revelation, received the awareness that I AM is God. He never taught the Absolute, however: he attained It. The teaching he gave to his followers was a very relative one. To try to reveal to them what he had attained was an impossibility, and the most he could do with his followers was to attempt to teach them to be good human beings, and this by means of The Ten Commandments.

Isaiah and John, also, undoubtedly attained the Absolute, but they never taught It: they merely revealed in their writings that they had attained It and Its truth. In one way or another, a teacher can show that he has attained the Absolute and can impart It in a measure, but he cannot teach It because It is not a teaching: It is an experience.

With Shankara, the experience of the Absolute became more of a teaching. While he probably did not achieve it in the same degree as Moses and John, and certainly not in the degree which Melchizedek attained, still he was able to leave behind him a wealth of writing which became the foundation of the Advaita Vedanta, the only absolute teaching of India.

Whenever an individual attains conscious union with God and realizes in some measure the I-ness of his being, he is in the Absolute, he is then the divine Consciousness expressing Itself. When this happens, he either decides that he has finished with this particular phase of existence, lays down his body, and departs, continuing his life in an incorporeal form, or he is given some specific mission on earth and continues working to accomplish that mission until it is fulfilled, because the Consciousness which he now is perpetuates him as long as the need remains for his earthly experience.

Moses took his people right to the Promised Land, and probably must have felt that that ended his ministry. Elijah undoubtedly completed his mission because he ascended and rose beyond visible manifestation without having to go through disease or accident. Jesus must have felt that his work was done because in the presence of his disciples, he "lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said . . . I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." John was given the mission of preparing the manuscript of the Gospel of John, so that that revelation might be preserved, and Shankara was enabled to complete his work of presenting the philosophy of the Advaita Vedanta of India.

Each one who attains some measure of the realization of the Absolute has a work to perform, and part of that work is imparting the Absolute to those few who are able to receive It. Not all are able to accept It because it takes, first of all, an evolved consciousness, and secondly, it requires the ability to leave all to follow the work. Scripture speaks of leaving mother and father, and sister and brother, for My sake. There are not many people who have done that, nor many who are, or would be, willing to do so. There are not many who, if asked to leave their "nets" and follow the Christ, would actually give up their jobs and leave their families to follow that Me. That does not mean, however, that there are not such, nor does it mean that it is not happening, because it is.

"Many are called, but few are chosen." There are many who receive some spiritual light, but instead of instantly saying, "Ah, I must follow this to the end," they usually are content to rest in the additional comfort gained. They accept the increased human good and are satisfied with it, rather than seeking to find the principle that brought it about.

Spiritual evolution comes about not in one lifetime: it comes about over a period of many, many lifetimes. There are those who receive some measure of spiritual light, but aside from using it to gain better health, more abundant supply, or more satisfying companionship, go no further with it. This, however, gives them such a firm foundation that in their next parenthesis they go higher, and it is possible that in the one following that, or the one after, they will attain the highest initiation and receive the illumination of the Absolute.

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