The emergence of imperfection and the planned effort of evil have been paralleled by the appearance of the New Group of World Servers and by the preparation which the Hierarchy is making towards its externalisation upon the physical plane. The Hierarchy is at this time exceedingly powerful; its Ashrams are full of initiates and disciples, and its periphery or magnetic field is drawing countless thousands of aspirants towards it. The war struck a mortal blow to material evil, and its hold on humanity is greatly weakened.
Confound not evil with the activities of the gangster or the criminal. Criminals and gangsters are the result of the emerging massed imperfections: they are the victims of ignorance, mishandling when children and misunderstanding down the ages of right human relations; the Law of Rebirth will eventually lead them on the way to good. Those men are truly evil who seek to enforce a return to the bad old ways, who endeavour to keep their fellowmen in slavery of some kind or another, who block the expression of one or all of the Four Freedoms, who gain material riches at the expense of the exploited, or who seek to hold for themselves and for gain the produce of the earth, and thus make the cost of life's necessities prohibitive to those not richly endowed. Those who thus work, think and plan are to be found in every nation, and are usually of prominence because of their riches and influence; however, they sin against light and not through ignorance; their goals are material and not spiritual. They are relatively few compared to the countless millions of men, but are exceedingly powerful; they are highly intelligent but unscrupulous, and it is through them that the Forces of Evil work, holding back progress, promoting poverty, breeding hatred and class distinctions, fostering racial differences for their own ends, and keeping ignorance in power. Their sin is great and it is hard for them to change, because power and the will-to-power (as it militates against the will-to-good) is a dominant all-controlling factor in their lives; these men are today working against the unity of the United Nations, through their greed, their determination to own the resources of the earth (such as oil, mineral wealth and food) and thus keep the people weak and with inadequate food. These men, who are found in every nation, thoroughly understand each other and are working together in great combines to exploit the riches of the earth at the expense of humanity…….
I have used the above illustration so as to make my theme somewhat clearer. The whole problem of evil is, however, too vast to contemplate here, nor is it advisable or wise to discuss the source of evil (not of imperfection), the Black Lodge. Energy follows thought, and the spoken word can be potently evocative: therefore, until one is a member of the Great White Lodge, it is the part of wisdom to avoid consideration of forces potent enough intelligently to use the latent imperfection in humanity and to impose the vast evil of war, with all its results and far-reaching effects, upon humanity. The Black Lodge is the problem of the White Lodge, and not the problem of humanity. For aeons the Hierarchy has handled this problem, and is now in process of solving it. It is essentially, however, the main consideration and problem of Shamballa, for it is connected with the will aspect, and only the will-to-good will suffice to blot out and annihilate the will-to-evil. Goodwill will not suffice, though the united and invocative appeal of the men of goodwill throughout the world-increasingly voiced through the Great Invocation-will serve "to seal the door where evil dwells."
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You will notice that I said that the power of the Dark Brotherhood is dominant apparently on the physical and emotional planes. Not so is it on the mental, which is the plane on which the Brothers of the Light work. Mighty dark magicians may be located on the lower mental levels, but on the higher, the White Lodge dominates, the three higher subplanes being the levels that They beg the evolving sons of men to seek; it is Their region, to which all must strive and aspire. The Dark Brother impresses his will on human beings (if analogous vibration exists) and on the elemental kingdoms of involution. The Brothers of Light plead as pleaded the Man of Sorrows for an erring humanity to rise upward to the light. The Dark Brother retards progress and shapes all to his own ends; the Brother of Light bends every effort to the hastening of evolution and—foregoing all that might be His as the price of achievement—stays amid the fogs, the strife, the evil and the hatred of the period if, in so doing, He may by all means aid some, and (lifting them up out of the darkness of earth) set their feet upon the Mount, and enable them to surmount the Cross. [LETTERS ON OCCULT MEDITATION p137]
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Paralleling all the activity of the Great White Lodge (as was always the case and is the case today) was the activity of the dark forces. Their effects had to be brought about through the medium of the sacral centre, and thus a most vicious situation came about which weakened the stamina of the human body, which greatly increased the demands of the sex nature through the stimulation of the sacral centre, artificially brought about by the Black Lodge, and which produced many unholy alliances and widespread evil relations. [ESOTERIC HEALING p229]
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I would point out also that even the black magician possesses these qualities, for they are the sine qua non of all magical art, both black and white; the black magician passes through the door of initiation as it opens twice for the first two initiations. He passes through on the strength of his will and his character accomplishments and because the group-conscious aspect of the soul is active in him as in his brother seeking affiliation with the Great White Lodge. The love aspect is, however, lacking in the black magician. Forget not that all is energy and there is nothing else. The energy which is an aspect of the soul and which we call magnetic attraction (the group-building quality) he shares with the spiritual aspirant. He is essentially group conscious, and though his motives are separative, his methods are those of the group, and these he can get only from the soul.
You see again another reason why the first and second initiations are not regarded by the Lodge of Masters as major initiations. Only the third is so regarded, because at that initiation the entire personality life is flooded with energy coming from the Spiritual Triad, via the "sacrifice petals" of the will and purpose aspect of the soul. [Illumination] To this type of energy the black magician is not responsive. He can and does respond to the knowledge—most ancient and hardly won—stored up in the "knowledge petals" of the souls he can appropriate and utilise the energy of attraction (erroneously called love by some students) stored up in the "love petals" of the soul, but he cannot respond to and use the energy of divine love, working out in the divine Plan which controls all knowledge and converts it into wisdom, and which actuates and clarifies the motive which brings loving magnetic attraction into action and which we call true group consciousness and group cohesion. It is at this point that the two ways—of darkness and of light—become widely divergent. Until the third initiation is taken, glamour may condition the attitude of those seeking to understand the life of a man upon the Path, and they may mistake the spurious for the real. The black magician leads a disciplined life, analogous to that of the spiritual aspirant; he practices purity for his own safeguarding and not in order that he may become a channel for the energy of light; he works with power (the power of magnetic attraction) with and in groups, but he does this for his own selfish ends and for the fulfillment of his own ambitious purposes. But at the third initiation there comes to the true spiritual initiate the revelation which is the reward of perseverance and purity rightly motivated—the revelation of the divine purpose, as the soul records it in terms of the hierarchical plan, though not yet in terms of the Monad. To this purpose and to the loving Will of God (to use a trite Christian phrase) the black brother cannot respond; his aims are different. You have here the true meaning of the oft-used and misunderstood phrase, "the parting of the ways."
But both groups of aspirants (the black and the white) stand before the door of initiation and take the needed steps to open it on two similar occasions. Both overcome glamour after the second initiation, and see their way clearly ahead; but their goals emerge as widely different; one treads the broad way which leads ever deeper into matter and materialism, into darkness and "black power"; the other leads to the straight and narrow way, to the razor-edged path which leads into light and life. One group has never freed itself from the principles which governed the first solar system. They were principles entirely related to matter and substance, and were at that time and in that period (so remote that the number of years of distance can be stated only in super-astronomical figures) the conditioning factors for the initiation of the time. Certain units of humanity—then existent—were so completely conditioned by these material principles and so deliberately unready for moving on to the comprehension of another set of principles (more expressive of the divine nature) that they remained of "fixed and selfish material purpose" and a planned distortion of the divine will was intelligently created by them. You have here a hint as to the nature of evil and a clue to a part (though only a part) of the mystery to be noted in the statement that evil and good are reverse aspects of the same one reality, and evil is that good which we should have left behind, passing on to greater and more inclusive good. Forget not that the black magicians of today were the initiates of a previous solar system. When the door of initiation is ready to open for the third time, the parting of the ways takes place. Some follow selfish intention and the fixed determination to remain with the separative condition of matter; and to others, the divine will is clearly impressed upon them and becomes the motivating power in their lives. It was under instructions from the Great White Lodge on Sirius that the door remains closed the third time to the dark brothers. Evil, as we understand it, has absolutely no place on Sirius.
To the black magician, at this third opportunity, the door of initiation presents an insuperable barrier and obstacle; to the true spiritual neophyte, the door connotes "overcoming." We shall not consider further the approach of the black brothers to that door, but shall confine ourselves to a consideration of the initiations of the Great White Lodge. [THE RAYS AND THE INITIATIONS p348/51]
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