Treading the Path II
Teachings of the Sea Gods
The Adept and the Path
By
Valerie Bonwick
And
Jonathan Bigras
Tools of Positivity
There are a few useful hints that we include at this time, which we refer to quite seriously as evolutionary tools. By their practice alone, they might not lead to adeptship or mastery over the self, but it is a foregone conclusion that no Quester ever became an Adept or a Master without achieving proficiency in their practice. Therefore, we will spend in a little time in discussing them:
1. Honesty
2. Truth in Action
3. Decision Making
4. Accepting Responsibility
5. Power of Perception
6. Memory Training
7. Harnessing Imagination
8. Creative Visualization
9. Focusing Awareness
10. Practicing Consciousness
11. Expanding Consciousness
12. One-pointed Concentration
These evolutionary tools are ours to use, each and every one of us in greater or lesser degree. Because they sound rather inconsequential when defined in everyday terms, these tools often lie neglected, yet the practice of their potential can add to the enrichment of everyone’s day-to-day or long- term lifeplan.
Their justification for inclusion in this chapter rests on the fact that they because they appear to be so simple, they are often overlooked in preparing one for more ambitious undertakings. Sound common sense demands that you refresh your acquaintance with these hints in training, otherwise taken for granted. Do not be misled by the seeming simplicity, even Masters and Adepts evaluate their own character traits when they have been in contact with the physical plane for a prolonged period of time.
Do you consider yourself to be mentally alert? You certainly need to be, to take advantage of the opportunities for spiritual growth as they come your way, but to not confuse mental alertness with mental excitement in which your emotions influence your mental state. Look at yourself objectively and subject yourself to an honest self-examination of your habitual behavior.
1. If you wish to attain, practice honesty in all areas of your life-pattern. Be honest with yourself, laying aside self-deception is a priority.
2. If you wish to become, practice truth in action to the best of your ability in every field of endeavor.
3. If you wish to achieve, practice decision making and avoid the frustration which arises from procrastination.
You may very wisely, decide to wait until you are sure that your decision concerning a matter of importance is correct or a solution to a problem presents itself, but to not postpone the time of the decision until it is superseded by ineffectuality. To do so is a negative practice which becomes habitual, leading to a paralysis of decision making which can affect every area of your life.
Decision making and the quality of your decisions are important in the life of every Quester, for it is the ability to make decisions correctly and promptly that so often separates a would-be Adept from a future Adept.
The ability to make up your own mind, to come to a conclusion or resolve an uncertainty is not arrived at overnight, it demands practice, as does the courage to withhold judgment until all terms and conditions you consider necessary to the wise verdict are known to you.
It is indeed true that wise decision is one of the marks of the Adept, but it is equally true to say, the inability to follow through on the making of the decision, is a serious block your progress on any level of your life.
Very simply, every time you debate within yourself as to the pros and cons concerning an issue at stake and fail to come to a decision, you are wasting your energy and diminishing your vitality in what is called “scattering your forces.“ An accurate verbal definition, these “forces“ are vital as a safeguard to your physical health, they help to preserve your mental well-being and serve as a springboard of sorts which reinforces your spiritual aspirations.
As an Adept, you become responsible for making immediate decisions without prompting from your superiors, but for which you are fully accountable to those same superiors.
As a Master, you are often responsible for making decisions which affect both your disciples and your colleagues, sometimes with repercussions affecting large groups of people.
Whereas, the Hierarchy does not commit tasks to any disciple before he or she is ready, neither do you become a Master or an Adapt before you are ready. Correct timing is important in all matters, as students of history will bear witness. To decide the moment when to recommend a purpose or initiate a plan of action, leaves little margin for error if it is to succeed.
4. Accepting responsibility for your words, actions, decisions and their results will simplify your immediate task, which is to acquire the harmony which results from positive intent in practice. A trained sense of responsibility releases you from dubious quandaries arising from weakness in your projected goals.
5. Sharpening your powers of perception. If your powers of perception are dull or lying dormant through disuse, remember they are skills which can be intensified by practice.
Take note of detail for instance, when you enter room. Register changes in the seasons from the point of view of the birds and flowers, not just from your own comfort or discomfort. Study the behavior of the tiny ant’s in the sidewalk and enjoy the encompassing breadth of the horizon. Take nothing that you see for granted and you will soon discern meaning and portents in everyday signs that you previously overlooked.
There is nothing esoteric in training your perception to the maximum and when fully trained, it reinforces your sensitivity and receptivity. You register the necessity for improvement and reasons for improvement are clarified, concerning every level of day and-to-day life-patterns and your inner being on more rarified planes of existence.
6. Memory training is a necessity and invaluable to any sensitive. It is easy to set yourself exercises by which to train your memory, but you will accomplish little of value unless you practice them regularly. For instance, give up the use of bookmarks when you are reading and try to memorize your page number. Write down your shopping list before leaving home to buy groceries, leave your list behind and when you return home, check how many items you have remembered or forgotten to buy.
These minor and mundane exercises are important in helping you to sharpen your memory and they remind you that when you graduate to working consciously with ashramic contacts, matters of lesser importance may gain inclusion into plans of greater importance, but they are not exempted by them.
Later on, there will be important concepts concerning many areas of learning that are important to your overall grasp of so-called esoteric lore, therefore, to expand your education in general is of the utmost value in preparing yourself to assist your colleagues and Teachers at some future date.
If your memory of everyday events is unschooled or unreliable, it will not be any more successful in retaining memory of training you receive in the sleep state, registering instructions precisely or even recalling guidance from your Master and much that is valuable will be lost to you.
A sound memory not only helps you to keep in mind the tasks that need to be accomplished on the next step of the Way, but the reason why the task is important will remain fresh in your consciousness. Most important is the fact that it is an alert memory which provides you with instant recognition of the most subtle vibration once it is experienced.
7. Harnessing your imagination is one of the most important tools that any Quester possesses and that power should never be underestimated.
To harness that power also demands that you can control your imagination. To benefit you, your imagination must not be allowed to run riot in imagined fears which can result in panic, neither can you allow it to indulge in vainglorious schemes which come to naught and sometimes cause confusion and discomfort in other people’s lives. Uncontrolled use of the imagination sometimes results in illusion and one must remember all times, the child of illusion is disillusionment.
It is however, a safe exercise to couple the use of your imagination with judicious study. From this combination many inspirational ideas proven beneficial to mankind have filtered down to the physical plane from the higher spheres. It is obviously easier for a Master to impress an idea of upon a Quester who has already developed an aptitude for a subject of study, rather the one who knows nothing about it. An experienced Quester who is already knowledgeable in a Masters particular field of interest, can register how something is to be accomplished with greater ease of effort on both sides. Imagination is the image-making faculty and without it, no one would invent, discover, pioneer, research, explore or even in some instances, survive.
8. Creative visualization is an essential ally to your positivity in your personal growth. By its practice and in particular the practice of exercises which you will receive in later chapters, you are enabled to achieve independence in many areas on various levels of your life.
Creative visualization combines with positivity to manifest the accomplishment of your goals. Creative visualization is instrumental in transmuting negativity into positivity and by remembering that “like attracts like“ you can create a positive “mini environment“ around yourself. If you wish to attract misery, create a miserable environment and realize that the reverse is also true. For instance, no one ever achieved optimum good health or well-being thinking themselves sick, but many brave patients have put their positivity to good use by visualizing themselves as appeared.
9. Focusing your awareness alerts you to why, when and where positive action is needed. It spotlights positive projects under way with which you may involve yourself through the power of positive thought and directing the expression of goodwill.
Unless you focus your awareness, your projection of positivity will remain a limp expression of ineffectuality.
On another level, if you cannot focus your awareness adequately, you will never be alert enough to catch the swift and fleeting movement of Devas, Angels or nature spirits if they enter your field of vision.
10. Practicing consciousness is a prerequisite if you wish to attain your crowning achievement your present incarnation. By practicing consciousness you learn to recognize illusion for what it is and thereby overcome disillusionment. You cannot experience an of expansion of consciousness if you do not practice consciousness. Consciousness is an integral ingredient in your spiritual preparation to win entrance to the Land of the Golden Light which is the waiting birthright of all incarnate or discarnate beings.
11. Expanding your consciousness. Many-would be teachers speak of “expansions of consciousness.“ Its use in written occult commentary seems to fill a stopgap. Whenever subject matter begins to flag in content the term is brought into use, perhaps is a form of occult patter, whether it is out of context or not.
Every expansion of consciousness is important, however small it might be. Therefore, let us include under this heading—breadth of vision, open-mindedness and goodwill or the will-to-good, the absence of which sometimes delays a long overdue expansion of consciousness because it is blocked by resentment or antagonism, although it may be very well deserved in every other respect .
A minor expansion of consciousness can sometimes take the form of the startling flash of insight, such as when realization which would have been beyond your mental reach earlier, suddenly becomes so obvious that you cannot understand why you did not comprehend it before . A major expansion of consciousness occurs when various influences and factors, as well as merit earned from your efforts on the Path of Initiation converge.
For a period of time following a major expansion consciousness, your understanding of life and perception of events as they relate to the higher spheres are intensified, you share in a tranquil and precise overview where all meaning you are capable of absorbing will be made clear to you. This sublime state of reception does not last indefinitely, although when you register it consciously as an elevated state of being, you are able to recapture spiritual upliftment which accompanied it.
Thankfully, that which you have learned to will remain with you permanently and can be mobilized to overcome future difficulties.
12. One-pointed concentration. There are all kinds of exercises you can contrive for yourself which will help to increase your power of concentration. There are Questers who neglect this aspect of their training, waiting for the all important and challenging project to materialize or hoping to be entrusted with a Master-bidden task, which they conclude will be worthy of their most complete, although inexperienced, concentration.
Never let an opportunity to intensify your power of concentration pass you by. Practice one-pointed concentration in your own life successfully, before expecting to be entrusted with demanding projects which will perhaps affect the lives of other people.
Remember, it is the ability to concentrate one-pointedly that is often instrumental in bringing projects to a successful conclusion.
Concentration is an integral ingredient of creative thought and a most important foundation for specific projects which demand ashramic consecration.
From Age to Age
You may very well discover the cycles in your life-pattern are integral to your personal evolutionary spiral, therefore, those of you who are down hearted at the continuance of problems which seem to become more complex with each repetition, might consider the following rarely discussed fact. The foregoing may constitute a pattern of experience which is also repeated on a higher turn of the spiral, one that is of value albeit unappreciated because misunderstood, in completing a particularly evolutionary concept which you yourself initiated long ago.
It is possible that you achieved high initiatory status during the time span of a previous root race, but your evolutionary progress had not quite reached the initiatory degree required to graduate off-planet before the end of that Age.
If such was your experience you may find that your initiatory progress did not necessarily continue smoothly from root race to root race when you reincarnated in a physical form, although you retained your true degree of advancement when you dwelt on the higher planes of consciousness between incarnations. Much depends upon the needs of the incoming Age.
When you reincarnate upon the physical plane within the social structure of a new root race, you repeat your tests, trials and tribulations within the framework of the new and different cultural environment, until you arrive at the equivalent point on the Path where you stood previously, recapitulating your experience and consolidating your previous progress.
In such a situation, your progress accelerates and you advance swiftly, with the knowingness which was previously absent. You express the level of that same initiatory degree with a greater depth of understanding backed by a wider experience than would have been possible for you before. Doing so, you then continue on your chosen, ascending Path of Progression to become an Adept or Master and graduate off-planet if that is your choice.
Sound judgment supports this practice. The psychological environment changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently with each new World Age and in practicing and exemplifying that which is been learned already, within a fresh initiatory structure, an Initiate gains in both experience and understanding and the Age in its infancy, is enriched by an Adept or a Master who not only expresses wisdom distilled from experience, but also embodies continuity of the planet’s consciousness.
Maturity
There may be times in your life when you experience self-doubt. Perhaps there is really nothing to complain about, yet the sameness of your day-to-day effort acquires a staleness that overshadows your Soul-work. In some ways, the advancement of recent technology which has made widespread dissemination of spiritual teaching possible, has also contributed to a feeling of ineffectuality.
Media coverage in its various forms reports important news, provides footage of dramatic of news, covers exciting worldwide news, but never dull news, lending a false air of non-importance to the average Questers life. This influence sometimes undermines one’s attitude of self-worth, until quite recently a woman was often queen of her home and a man’s home was is his castle, providing a secure anchor on material plane which endowed one’s life with one’s own sense of importance.
Purists maintain quite correctly, that the foregoing situation often lead to crystallization, but there is no reason that one cannot make spiritual progress in comfortable surroundings as swiftly as in discomfort.
It is maturity of purpose that spurs you on when your clarity of vision becomes blurred by a seemingly arid stretch of the Way. Many saints and adepts also experienced arid phases in their Soul-work prior to enlightenment, perhaps in greater anguish because entrapped in a life situation with fewer alternative choices than you.
In more dramatic terminology, this was sometimes called: “the dark night of the soul.“
Whether in a test of your faith, devotion to the Deity or your diligence in service, you are in good company, all Adepts and Masters have trodden these steps of the Way before you.
It is obviously important to any of you seeking to reach your spiritual goals that you assume responsibility for the results of your efforts, positive or negative, in success or failure. This is a test of your integrity and the mark of a mature individual and without maturity of purpose, you cannot reach a goal. You cannot escape responsibility, therefore you might as well assume it when it is yours and in so doing, reduce your karmic inheritance past and present and insure a sound future.
This is a challenge which you meet every day of your life, wherever you may happen to be and within what ever social structure you find yourself. While there are no personal situations in your life within which it is impossible to make some spiritual progress, there are many conditions in the world that sometimes seem almost impossible to surmount. In overcoming that illusion when you are inclined to feel ineffectual in your efforts, it is encouraging to remember that:
You progress in spite of the world
And because of the world.
Pages179-198
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