The trouble with climbing high is that it means you can look down on others.
One of the most difficult challenges prior to the third degree is mental pride, and it occurs for just this reason.
The first mountain peak is on the higher mental plane in the causal body or Temple of Solomon. Mental polarisation before integration means we have had to value mind over emotions and body. Already that has meant swimming against the current ( most of humanity is astrally polarised ) and as we climb, it is natural to encourage others to get into mind and make the ascent as well. Because we are the disciple ( or personality in the process of being solarised ) we cannot yet see with the eyes of love and so it looks like everyone below our station on the mountain needs to climb. We call them all to the heights.
Once the peak is gained however then Light Supernal – “the Light of Life” – breaks forth, and the personality falls to its knees so that a radical transition of identity takes place, and the disciple becomes the soul and can see with the soul’s eyes. One of the first things seen is the need to turn ones back on that Supernal Light and descend the mountain, as a soul. Now a different picture opens up. It is like one of those magic eye books where the image comes in to focus. Now it is not just where a person is on the mountain that one is capable of seeing, but the motivation for being there – because we can see with the eye of love as well as the eye of intelligence.
The climbers and descenders appear in different colours and shades of nuance. Stages of development in intelligence are balanced with stages of development of the love principle. Some of those at the bottom of the mountain for example, are now seen as lovers who have climbed the mount in previous incarnations and are dispensing that love in the desert.
The Seventh Ray incoming and the global descent of the love principle from the mental to astral, and now physical plane, also means that ‘the capacity to transform in place’ – what we have called the feminine path of initiation – is also more prevalent.
And now there is another mountain rising to the temple of Ezekiel on the atmic plane. This is climbed by simultaneous descent to the physical plane by the soul centred in the causal body. The middle principle expands in both directions. Once that mount is obtained then another transition in identity takes place – from soul to monad, and now the eye of spirit opens. Now the whole field of the cosmic physical plane is seen in a threefold manner. Each identity has a location – a grade of matter that they are working in – a plane. They also have a ray and degree of love that they are expressing, and a degree of Life that is operating through them or they are able to realise and transmit.
Now the emphasis naturally shifts to synthesis and triangulation to balance the three aspects. Seen from the cosmic astral this is simply one event as the inflowing energy of synthesis has effects on every level.
So neither the activity one is engaged in, the direction they are moving, or the height achieved on the mountain, can be used to assess someone else’s journey. This does not mean we stop using our intelligence but we definitely stop investing our perceptions with universal truth claims. Our hearts too will guide us to what is right for us, now and in this situation so that love is served – but they make no claims on the next unfolding moment.
Life, this wild cosmic adventure, is out of our control. Mastery is not mastery over life, but the management of our fear of losing control, and the gradual development of the wisdom to surrender more fully and more gracefully to it so that we are lived, permeated, soaked in Life, wrapped in love, and dancing wherever we may find ourselves on the mountain of initiation.
Bruce Lyon