More on the Masters

I've not written anything about the Masters for a while and, since drawing attention to their existence was the original purpose of this blog and its parent book, I will remedy that now with some thoughts on what they are not. This might seem a strange way to approach the subject but some of the problems preventing a wider acceptance of such beings among serious spiritual seekers come about because of the travesties and simplifications that have been associated with their name over the last century or so. I wrote about this a bit in the book but it's an important matter so I would like to consider the question at further length here.

There are a number of individuals and groups claiming contact with elevated supernatural beings whom they may or may not designate as Masters. But practically always these beings speak from a vaguely New Age kind of perspective and that the Masters who spoke to me never did. Their teachings, and they themselves, demonstrated the best of tradition but carried forward into (I consider) a higher form suitable for the current time in which the spiritual goal is to know God within while, at the same time, being fully aware of his transcendent reality. That is to say, to take the steps required for full divinisation of the soul which was never denied as in some Eastern religions but regarded as something like a seed planted in matter that could eventually grow into full spiritual bloom.

My teachers were not overtly Christian in the way they presented themselves, but their teaching fell solidly into a traditional spiritual pattern. There was no talk of an upcoming Aquarian Age (as so often was the case with psychically received material at the time) and no modernist rationalisations in which a God-centred spirituality is subordinated to humanistic ideals. These teachers were advocates of timeless truth, not in any way aligning themselves with a 20th century mentality under the guise of being up to date. My feeling is that any spiritual communication that accepts or endorses any of the modernist revolutions, sexual, political, cultural and so on, and disruptions to the natural order should be regarded with suspicion. That is not to say that some of these may not be reactions to new impulses raining down on humanity from higher planes but they are usually so distorted that they become parodies of the influence that has inspired them. A prime example would be contemporary leftist beliefs which are clearly materialistic misinterpretations of spiritual impulses. Minds unable or unwilling to comprehend and acknowledge spiritual reality react to its energies on a material level thereby totally distorting its truths. Indeed, worse than that, they increasingly invert these truths by applying them where they have no basis in reality. They treat the material as the spiritual which means the real spiritual is driven out.

Many modern versions of Masters are derived from Theosophy which means either Madame Blavatsky or her successors Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant who purported to be talking about the same beings as Madame B. but presented them in a very different guise. I don't doubt their sincerity or belief that what they were promoting was true, but I think they were led astray by their psychism in that they (especially Leadbetter) could not distinguish the real from the unreal when it came to what was revealed to them through their psychic powers of clairvoyance, clairaudience and the like. This is a very common problem and accounts for a large number of false claimants to contact with the Masters. In my view no modern Theosophical or Theosophically derived or inspired group is in touch with the true Masters though they may be with their so called astral reflections. To make sense of that phrase we have to understand that the next world has many levels and in these the energy of emotion or thought can create external manifestations of itself. These thought forms can then be built up into apparently real objective things and assume the likeness of a real being which is even able to dispense standard spiritual wisdom though only on the level of those whose energy has fed into it. This is why you never get much that is truly profound out of them.

Groups carrying on in the Theosophical mindset and supposedly in contact with the named Theosophical Masters such as Morya, St Germain etc, are undoubtedly victims of this 'astralitis' or at least their leaders are. Any bona fide energies behind that movement (and I am prepared to believe there may have been such at one time) have definitely withdrawn themselves from it as it descended into a fascination with signs and wonders and lost touch with genuine spirituality.  That's why Krishnamurti rejected it all as shallow and spurious though he went to the other extreme and threw out the idea of Masters altogether just because of false and illusory representations of them. He had the misfortune of being brought up in a spiritual circus and understandably reacted against that though he might have been wiser to sort out the wheat from the chaff since wheat there most certainly is even if there is considerably more chaff as manifested in this world.

A few years ago, out of curiosity, I went to a talk by a modern claimant to contact with the Theosophical Masters. Some of what he said made sense but both he and the bulk of the audience were far too focused on occult marvels and the incidence of apparently miraculous events in their lives, either real or imagined. This hearkened back to the sensationalism of an earlier time and is a perennial problem with those drawn to the occult and esoteric. I am reminded that "it is a wicked generation that asks for a sign", though perhaps spiritually immature would be a fairer description. But most of the audience seemed to assume that just because they believed in higher truths they were, in the jargon, initiates, and the person giving the talk clearly thought himself to be such.  Unfortunately, one of the Masters with whom he claimed to be in contact was JMH who features in the books by Cyril Scott and is an obvious invention. Scott's books are a pious fiction and, while he may have had some psychic contact with a Master, his character JMH who dispenses occult wisdom in the polite early 20th century society of London and Boston is a fantasy of his own, a composite from various sources. Of course, this fantasy may have acquired a kind of psychic existence because it was believed in by a number of readers of the books just like Long John Silver or some other popular literary personage might do, and that is what the lecturer would have contacted and maybe communicated with, believing himself to be in touch with a real being. But it was merely a sort of psychic hologram on the astral plane, that world between the physical and the spiritual in which matter is sufficiently fine to be manipulated by thought, a non-physical but still completely phenomenal world. Another explanation would be that some discarnate spirit assumed this identity for its own ends. In neither case would a real Master be involved.

True Masters do not identify themselves with any particular earthly personality. Their sole aim is to teach the truths of the spirit to their disciples. They do not resort to occult or esoteric terminology nor to mystification and nor do they sensationalise in any way. All these things tend to glamorise and direct a pupil's mind away from spiritual truth in its essence to a concern with phenomenal things. In sharp distinction to the false variety, a genuine spiritual Master does not encourage focus on himself but directs it always to God. Perhaps this above all is what marks out the real coin from the counterfeit.