(A.A. Bailey, The Externalisation of the Hierarchy, pp. 673-681, 1957 — SECTION FOUR, STAGES IN THE EXTERNALISATION OF THE HIERARCHY.)

"September 1949

In my previous instruction upon this theme I dealt with the various energies which would be brought into activity or utilised when the Masters emerged from the silence in which They have guarded Themselves for so many thousands of years. The point to be grasped is that the energies with which I dealt will be used in a new and more vital manner. These energies are ever present and ever active, but they swing into activity sequentially and under law and order, and some are more prominent at one time than others; they act vitally and energetically in the needed programme which the plans of the Hierarchy may entail in any particular cycle.

These energies bring about what we idly call the "events" of the day; they condition our passing civilisations and are so much a part of the world in which we live and move and have our being that events, as expressions of directed energies, mean little to us, except in so far as they may affect adversely our personalities. They connote simply a way of life in any specific time. These energies were started on their activities in the very night of time; they established—each of them—their needed cyclic rhythm; they are responsible for the activity of substance on matter or of the action of the vital or etheric body upon matter; they are the lowest formulated expression of the creative Intelligence, embodying the principle of life or livingness because they essentially are life itself and life in action. Forget not that dense matter is not a principle; it is only that which is responsive to the creative principle.

When, however, the externalisation of the Hierarchy begins to take place (and it will be spread over quite a long period of time), the impact of these substantial energies on matter will be radically altered because they will be—for the first time in history—directed from etheric levels, from the etheric body of the planet in the three worlds; hitherto, these energies have been directed from the buddhic plane which is the lowest of the cosmic etheric levels. Fundamentally, direction will still be from the buddhic plane, but the detailed and focussed direction will be given from within the three worlds and upon the physical plane; this will be the task of the externalised Ashrams, organised to function openly.

It was the knowledge that this important development was imminent which made the Hierarchy in the last century widen the area or the scope of its teaching activity and thus bring to the consciousness of modern man the knowledge of what occultism essentially means. The keynotes upon which the occult philosophy is built are:

1. There is naught in manifestation except organised energy
2. Energy follows or conforms itself to thought
3. The occultist works in energy and with energies.

The thought of God brought the universe of energies into organised form upon the highest of the seven planes, or upon the first cosmic etheric level. These energies have for untold aeons been directed from the fourth or lowest of the cosmic etheric planes, the plane which we call the buddhic and regard as the first definitely spiritual plane, in our usually erroneous thought; this direction has been under impression from Shamballa, and the Masters have "manipulated these energies in conformity with the Plan, which is the blueprint of the Purpose."

In the great Approach of the Hierarchy to humanity and its imminent appearance upon the physical plane, the centre of direction will also necessarily approach still nearer, and—as a result of the future hierarchical manifestation—centres of energy direction will be found wherever the Ashram of a Master is located in any part of the world. This is a statement of profound significance; it is an indication of hierarchical policy and a mode whereby modern science (working as it does with energies) can be brought into cooperative association and relation with an Ashram upon the physical plane, knowing it for what it is—an entirely new departure.

Earlier I stated that the physical plane areas or localities which constitute the present modern exits for energies, through which directed energies can pass to carry out the creative process, are five in number: New York, London, Geneva, Darjeeling and Tokyo. These five form a five-pointed star of interlocking energies, symbolic of the major divisions of our modern civilisation. I would have you bear in mind that all that I am here giving you anent energy is in relation to the human kingdom and to nothing else; I am not relating these energies to the other kingdoms in nature; I am here concerned with physical plane utilisation of energy through the power of directed thinking and on behalf of the evolution and well-being of mankind. At each one of these five centres one of the Masters will be found present, with His Ashram, and a vortex of spiritual forces will there be organised to hasten and materialise the plans of the Christ for the new and coming world cycle.

The organising of these five centres will be done slowly and gradually. A senior disciple will appear and will work quietly at the foundation work, gathering around him the needed agents, aspirants and assistants. All these workers at any particular centre will be trained to think, and the effort now present in the educational and social world to force men to think for themselves is a general part of this training process. Until a man can do his own thinking and deciding, he cannot be an intelligent, willing and understanding cooperator, working with an ashram and controlling and directing the creative process. If the new heavens and the new earth are to be a fact in manifestation and in reality, it means a great recreating process must get under way, and this is the concept lying behind the teaching anent the five centres on Earth and the part which they will play in rebuilding and reorganising the world.

As the next few years bring into focus the hierarchical intention, disciples and aspirants must look for those men and those few women who will be working as a group along spiritual lines in or near one or other of these five localities.

Initial opposition to the founding of these centres of clear thinking men and women, working freely and understandingly with one of the Masters or senior initiates, is already unhappily present; it is to be found in the narrowness, the biassed information and the lack of freedom of the totalitarian schools of thought. This was inevitable, for the Black Lodge ever endeavours to parallel, offset and undo the work of the White Lodge, and hitherto quite successfully. But the cycle of success is slowly closing because the energy of goodwill, emanated by the Will-to-Good, is rapidly becoming effective.

In London, in New York, in Geneva and Darjeeling and in Tokyo, a Master will eventually be found, organising a major energy centre; at the same time His Ashram will continue to function upon buddhic levels, for the entire personnel has not been alerted for externalisation. The Ashram will therefore be working on two levels—and yet that is not a correct statement of fact, as there are no levels, as well you know, but only states of consciousness. Ask me not how this can be; ponder on the relation of this dual and simultaneous appearance by attempting to grasp the nature of the manifested form of the planetary Logos in the Person of Sanat Kumara. Sanat Kumara is not the personality of the planetary Logos, for personality as you understand it is not existent in His case. It is not the soul of the planetary Logos, because that soul is the anima mundi and the soul of all forms in all kingdoms. Sanat Kumara, the Eternal Youth, can be seen by Those Who have the right, presiding, for instance, over the Council in Shamballa, yet at the same time He is present as the life and the informing intelligence upon and within our planet.

You have therefore five points where the externalisation of the Ashrams will take place and eventually be focussed. From these points, as time elapses, other Ashrams, subsidiary in nature, will be found emerging, sponsored and founded by disciples and initiates from these five Ashrams, and representing the three major rays and two minor rays. To start with, they will be founded through the presence in these localities of some senior or world disciple; it must be remembered that the forerunner of all movements which appear upon the physical plane is an educational propaganda, therefore some disciple upon the second ray will come into action, first of all, in all these five points; he will be followed by a disciple upon the seventh ray. All world movements are, as well you know, externalisations of subjective ideas and concepts and of phases of formulated thinking; and the appearance of the Hierarchy upon earth in tangible form is no exception to this rule.

Disciples in these Ashrams have been in training for nearly one hundred and fifty years to do this work; some have managed to keep the originating idea and impulse clear and untainted by their own thinking, and have adhered—even in their own intimate thoughts—to the hierarchical programme, as presented to them by their Masters or the senior initiates. Others have not possessed so clear a reasoning faculty or so active an intuitive perception and—whilst grasping certain major concepts such as world unity or hierarchical gradations and control—have distorted the truth and produced the many ideologies which have wracked the world during the past century; even this distortion is, however, being turned to good, for it produced a redoubled effort on the part of the Hierarchy to offset it; it led to an increased forcing process by means of which many earnest and willing aspirants reached the grade of accepted disciple; it produced also a ferment of thought in the world which has served to awaken the mentality of the masses to possibilities and to horizons hitherto only visioned by advanced and initiate thinkers. The man in the street today has absorbed ideologies to an unforeseen extent, and the attempt to make him an active factor in our modern civilisation is not too harmful in view of the time element, as divinely conceived, and from the point of view of the staunch and basic integrity of the divine human being. Time and divinity, events and instinctual goodness, will in the long run triumph. The intermediate agonies are distressing but not final, and they are not triumphant from the angle of the dark Forces. These Forces face (as a result of the war and of the resurrecting human spirit) a vista of nearing and inevitable defeat.

Already the centres in London and in New York are showing signs of life, and disciples are active in both places and along all lines of human expression. The centre in Geneva is also active, but not so thoroughly and inclusively; it waits for a greater calm and a firmer sense of security in Europe.

The centre in Darjeeling is what is termed occultly "vibrating", but this is in response to the relative nearness and propinquity of the Himalayan Brotherhood; whilst in Tokyo there is small activity as yet, and what there is is of no great moment. The work at this centre will actually be brought into being through the work of the Triangles. By that I do not mean that it will be a centre of the Triangle work, but that the concentrated meditative activity of the people engaged in the Triangle activities will magnetically draw out that which must appear when a centre is organised. They are in fact creating the needed atmosphere, and that is ever a preliminary step. Once the atmosphere or the air in which to breathe and move is existent, then the living form can appear.

Objectively, therefore, the second ray work of teaching is the first to be organised. Subjectively, the first ray workers are already active, for the work of the first ray with its disturbing and destroying activity prepares the way; pain and disruption ever precede birth, and the agents of the first ray have been working for nearly two hundred years. The agents of the second ray started their preparation around the year 1825 and moved outward in force soon after 1860. From that date on, great concepts and new ideas, and the modern ideologies and arguments for and against aspects of the truth, have characterised modern thought and produced the present mental chaos and the many conflicting schools and ideologies, with their attendant movements and organisations; out of all these, order and truth and the new civilisation will emerge. This civilisation will emerge as the result of mass thinking; it will no longer be a civilisation "imposed" by an oligarchy of any kind. This will be a new phenomenon and one for which the Hierarchy has had to wait, prior to reappearing. Had the Hierarchy come before this era of thought and of massed discussion and the fight to further creative ideas, the tenets and the truths for which the Hierarchy stands could be regarded as being also "imposed" upon humanity, and therefore as infringing human freedom. This will not now be the case, and the Hierarchy will come forth into exoteric manifestation because humanity has, of its own free will, developed a quality analogous to that of the Hierarchy and therefore magnetic to that spiritual organisation. Goodwill will draw forth from its holy secret hiding place the Exponents of Love, and thus the new world will come into being.

These subsidiary ashrams are already being attempted in various parts of the world. It is necessary for you to remember that the members of these ashrams will not all be on the teaching line, but will be composed of disciples upon many rays; the attempt to form coherent and integrated ashrams is based upon the recognition of the initial difficulty of the various ray aspirants to comprehend each other's point of view and mode of working, and to think in the many differing terms and modes of thought. There are, however, three fundamental requirements which must condition and colour all the ashrams, no matter what the ray:

1. An internal group unity, conducive to a synthesis of understanding between the various ashrams.There springs out of a unified group objective a sense of loyalty to the Hierarchy and a uniformly disciplined life. I said uniform, brother of mine, for the discipline is that of spiritual inclination and an inspired intention which produces a similarity in the livingness of the units in the ashram; this is, of course, diversified by the ray quality of the aspirants and disciples and by personality tradition. Ponder on those last two words.

2. Similarity of objective. By that I mean an apprehension and appreciation of the hierarchical Plan andof the contribution each ashram has to make for its materialisation on earth; to this must be added an united ashramic similarity of instinctual and intuitive telepathic rapport with the senior Members of the ashram—the Masters and initiates of high degree, and through Them—with the Christ. I would here call to your attention that the mental inclination of all the esotericists in the world for the past one hundred years has been directed towards individual rapport with a Master, and this because of the necessity of discovering the ashram with which the aspirant must make contact.

This attitude has now widened in its approach mentally, by the many diversified disciples in the many different ashrams, into a group movement or a group inclination towards the Christ, the major and most important factor in the implementation of the hierarchical Plan. This mental approach is not the same thing as the constant aspirational preoccupation of the earnest Christian follower with the thought of Christ. It is something quite different.

It is a unified group endeavour, generated in each ashram and fostered by all alike, to bring the entire group—as a band of world servers—into the aura of the thought currents of the Christ, as He formulates His ideas, creates the thoughtform needed prior to manifestation, and makes His arrangements for His reappearing. This is not the same thing as establishing a telepathic rapport between an individual disciple and the Christ, for that is not needed or desirable. The unity of aim, the desire to serve, the recognition of the present focussed intention of the Hierarchy (under the guidance of the Christ), become an invocative, magnetic state of group consciousness; this evokes from the Christ and His informed Masters an identification of Their united thought with the group aspiration. This is the higher spiritual correspondence of what is called in the three worlds kama-manas.

This is not, I realise, an easy thing to understand when divorced from the usual Christian concept of the relation of Christ to the individual aspirant. The idea may perhaps be clarified for you by reminding yourselves that some of you who read these words know me and have found your way into my Ashram, under the guidance of your own soul and my ready recognition. Others all over the world, through their spiritual intuition and their desire to serve and to know, have brought into their recognised area of consciousness the teaching which is given in my books. Their relation to me is symbolic of the type of relation which disciples and aspirants can and do establish with the Christ. Though the analogy is far from perfect, it is possible to recognise the correspondence in its many gradations of reciprocal sensitivity.

3. A fundamental and basic similarity of sympathetic response by the units in all ashrams to the needsof humanity, to the quality of the programme for their development which the objective demands, and to the nature of goodwill and understanding (intelligently applied); all these qualities are not handicapped by undue emotional sensitivity.

These three conditions will be found in all the ashrams and will unite the members within any ashram to those in other ashrams in a measure or rhythm of telepathic relation. From this unified and central position a rapidly deepening telepathic relation will inevitably be established and sustained by the group, with the ashram and with the Christ, on the one hand, and with humanity, on the other. With this as a foundational and conditioning quality, the work can proceed as required.

You will note, therefore, why I have so consistently emphasised, during the past thirty years of teaching, the necessity for the development of a truly spiritual and psychic sensitivity, plus the unfoldment of the faculty of a scientific telepathic rapport. I have thereby laid the foundation of the Science of Impression, with the illumined and rightly oriented mind as the interpreter, the analyser and the transmitter." [681]

♦

The full text is available free of charge online reading on the Lucis Trust website: