Some More on the Masters

In the last post I asked two questions but only answered one of them, the question as to why I did not speak or write about the Masters sooner than I did. Here I wish to address the second. Why did the Masters not talk to other people through Michael, given that he was able to act as a medium for them, in the same way as they had done through the Boy, as related in the book The Boy and the Brothers?

As far as I know the incidents described in that book and its companion volume Towards the Mysteries are unique. Though various claims have been made in this respect I know of no other occasion when the Masters apparently just sat and conversed with members of the public through a medium.  They could have potentially done this through Michael but showed no wish to do so. The question is why not?

I have alluded to this before but it’s worth returning to because the answer reveals much about what you might call the mechanics of spirituality.

To understand the reason for the Masters’ seeming lack of interest in engaging publically with men and women in this world, even spiritually focused men and women, we must understand what they are and what their purpose is. Although they were first presented to the general public (by the Theosophists) as incarnate men, enlightened but in the physical body, what a Master really is is a spiritual state of consciousness.  That is the essential part of him and his outer form, by which I mean not just the body, if he has one, but the whole personal aspect of his being up to and including the mind, is a vehicle of manifestation belonging to the world of appearance. Now, this world to a Master is not real, or rather it is only relatively real, an outer garment visible to the mind and senses but in itself lacking true substance. It is the appearance of something real and true in that regard but is illusion if taken as existing in its own right. And not only is this world an illusion in that sense but so is the outer form of the Master.

The Masters have one purpose and one purpose only and that is to make us spiritually conscious. I can’t claim to speak on their behalf but in my view they are not particularly concerned with improving this world in the sense conventionally understood except insofar as that might lead to better conditions for spiritual realisation; and, of course, it is well known that better material or even social conditions are by no means necessarily conducive to the successful pursuit of the spiritual path. Sometimes they might even get in the way. Given that those who wish to misunderstand will often do so, I should add that this is not an excuse to ignore poverty or maintain the status quo. It merely points to the fact that the Masters’ only real concern is with the spiritual life of humanity and how to foster and develop that.

By spiritual life I do not mean the various religions or even schools of esotericism, though no doubt the Masters do seek to work through those and maintain them, as much as possible, as vehicles through which some people might rise higher than they are at present. What I really mean is something far less tangible and harder to define for the essence of spirituality is spirit and much that is called spirituality is actually just a human interpretation of it, just the outer form, just the appearance. This is not the field of the Masters. The something I allude to can only properly be conceived of symbolically and so I must fall back on the time-honoured custom of describing it as light, a certain quality of light that streams forth from the spiritual world via the Masters into the higher consciousness of humanity. There it is received by those able to respond to it and their task is to bring it down to the level of everyday awareness with as little distortion as possible. They must convert pure spiritual impression into something comprehensible by the mind but they must do so in such a way that the mind does not corrupt or contaminate it. An impossible task, in truth, but there are acceptable and unacceptable degrees of contamination and the difference between the two has to do with the amount of input from the mind/ego that is overlaid onto the original impression.

So the Masters’ main field of work lies in impression from planes above form and mentation which the incarnate disciple must translate according to his own understanding. As I have said before, the Masters are spiritual teachers in the purest sense and that is why they do not teach through words, which are concrete things that obscure as much as they convey, so much as through influence. And that is why they do not initiate contact, except in rare cases, on lower levels but prefer instead to speak soul to soul. In the cases where there is such contact one might surmise that it is a matter of readiness and karma, and even then it is likely to be a short-term thing. In my case I was told that verbal communication with them was a phase to be outgrown and would eventually cease, to be replaced by an inner non-verbal contact. That has proved to be the case. 

The Masters’ aim is to make us receptive to the spiritual plane, not the idea of the spiritual plane, and their primary purpose is to awaken the disciple's intuition. This they do by stimulating the higher bodies and then encouraging the disciple to, metaphorically speaking, stretch upwards beyond the everyday mind (through meditation, aspiration, self-forgetfulness and so on), and so become more responsive to those bodies hence more attuned to the soul. There are plenty of teachers in this world to do the still important but more preliminary work of reorienting those focused in their earthly personalities to the soul, but the work of the Masters lies with those who are already conscious of the soul as the dominating force in their lives but have not as yet become totally identified with it. That is why they work predominantly with the soul not the personality.

You can get an idea of their teaching methods by considering their own words.

Obey the impressions we fill you with and be true to your self. The more you respond to impression, the stronger it will become.

Note their choice of words as well as what they say. They use the word 'obey'. Obedience goes against the grain for the modern person as it appears to challenge our personal autonomy, and we are very self-centred (in the literal sense) people. We are individuals and we demand our freedom. But we are not free. We are slaves to the ego with its self-will, opinions and desires. Spirituality requires surrender and submission to the higher authorities, our teachers and our own soul. It requires obedience. Here's a novel definition of a Master for you. It is one who is perfectly obedient. Obedience makes us free.

I have attempted to explain here why the Masters do not normally engage publically with the world. In a nutshell, it is because they work with the soul as that is what they wish us to become. They don't want to make us spiritual people. They want us to realise our true identity as spiritual beings. Now I should perhaps explain why they sometimes do reveal themselves as they did through the Boy, and as Jesus and the Buddha did through their incarnations. In the latter two instances it was obviously to give the impetus for a new religion, a new revelation for a new cycle, one for the Western world and one for the Eastern. It was also to anchor something on the earthly plane, and that may even have been the more important aspect of their missions. On these two occasions it will have been a critical phase in a cycle that prompted (allowed?) the incarnation of a Master (not that I am limiting either Jesus or the Buddha to that epithet as I consider them both to be something more). These were momentous occasions of global significance on which depended the future spiritual progress of the whole of humanity.

But they were exceptional, even abnormal, cases. In the less eventful circumstances when Masters have revealed themselves to the world through a medium rather than by direct incarnation there are two points to consider. On a strictly practical level their appearances are limited anyway by the fact that they need a medium pure enough and spiritually robust enough to allow them to appear. The medium must be able to support their vibration without, so to speak, blowing a fuse. Both Michael and the Boy suffered great psychic strain in doing their work and, as the Masters told me, most mediums simply would not have been up to it. The available vehicles are few in number.

So for them to appear in our world is not easy but what is the purpose of such an appearance, if it can take place, given what I have said above? The basic rule remains, we must meet them on their own ground, at the level of their reality not ours, but rules, as they say, are made to be broken. Sometimes a little direct stimulus is required, either to give that extra push to take one to the next stage or else as an emergency measure when, without such an intervention, a hoped for result might not come about. If you don't catch the tide at the right moment you may have to wait some time for the next one. Moreover a desperate situation requires extreme measures. Looking at the condition of humanity in the 20th century one might speculate that both these factors applied. The general spiritual state of humanity was possibly the worst it had ever been but there were still many individual men and women who were thirsty for truth, and it was these people who called forth the Masters through their ardent longing. Yes, the Masters do work mainly with the soul because that is where they wish to bring us up to but on occasion, if karma permits and circumstances require, they may descend to the physical plane for a brief while.

However, as we know, this is rare. And yet to encounter the Masters is potentially open to us all. In order to do this, though, we have to raise ourselves in consciousness to their level, bearing in mind that, even if we succeed in that, any contact may not be registered as such by the physical brain. But if our intent is pure and we are sufficiently able to still the constant chatter of the mind then we will receive impression. And that is how the Masters speak to us.