Thus, the lower concrete mind is the form building faculty. Thoughts are things. The abstract mind is the mind which receives the ideas and creates the “blue-prints” upon which the forms are modelled. Beyond that lies “the intuition” or pure reason, the faculty which enables man to enter into contact with the Universal Mind and grasp synthetically, to seize upon divine ideas or isolate some fundamental and pure truth.
Again, we can usefully compare the mind, as it builds though-forms in response to the emotional impulses, with the higher creative use of the same mind as it builds thought-forms based on divine ideas – emanating as intuitions and registered in the consciousness of individuals. By such comparisons we learn to see the mind as an instrument, to be used by the indwelling “I” gradually becoming identified as the soul.
The disciple achieves mental integration in the following way:
[1] He has to learn to think; to discover that he has an apparatus which is called the mind and to uncover its faculties and powers.
[2] He has to learn next to get back of his thought processes and form building propensities and discover the ideas which underlie the divine thought-form, the world process, and so learn to work in collaboration with the plan and subordinate his own thought-form building to these ideas. He has to learn to penetrate into the world of these divine ideas and to study the ‘pattern of things in the Heavens’, as it is called in the Bible. [The Secret Doctrine.] He must begin to work with the blue-prints upon which all that is, is modelled and moulded. He becomes then a student-symbolist and from being an idolater he becomes a divine idealist.
[3] From that developed idealism, he must progress even deeper still, until he enters the realm of pure intuition. He can then tap truth at its source. He enters into the mind of God Himself. He intuits as well as idealises and is sensitive to divine thoughts. They fertilise his mind he calls these intuitions later, as he works them out, ideas or ideals, and bases all his work and conduct of affairs upon them.
[4] Then follows the work of conscious though-form building, based upon these divine ideas, emanating as intuitions from the Universal Mind. This goes forward through meditation.
Each of the above stages has to be mastered as the aspirant treads the path and moves from one stage of integration to the next, and due recognition has to be given to the gradual nature of this process. Before integration comes contact; first a glowing series of contacts with some new aspect of life, then the ‘pull of opposites’ as the old vies with the new; and finally, the elimination of the old and the integration of the new into the individual’s total consciousness. For instance, if we consider the above four points, the practical question arises: “how far can each of us truly think independently as distinct from mental activity produced under the compulsion of desire or wishes? Or, how far can we think without the colouring and distortion of long established emotional habits?” This is not to imply that thinking impelled by emotional states is necessarily wrong, for desire transmuted into aspiration is the underlying driving force which sends individuals forward to seek their God or to transmute and transform their ways in line with their ideal of discipleship for Humanity.
Fearless recognition is the quality we required to tread consciously the way of integration; fearless recognition of all aspects of life within and around us; an understanding of process and of the impossibility of skipping any stages, coupled with the sure knowledge that the attainment of the goal is inevitable, given steady persistence and devotion to the highest recognised truth.
Based on the work of AAB and DK.
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