1. What are your reasons for wanting to be "straightened out"? This phrase, though an ordinary colloquialism, has deep significance, for it indicates the recognition of the need of alignment.
2. What brought this need to your attention and evoked in you the desire for a specific process of interior adjustment?
3. Realizing the nature of the inner constitution of man, in which vehicle is there the need for the bridging process? Where is the point of cleavage, and, therefore, the point of present crisis? Is this difficulty a major or a minor crisis?
4. What are the five ray energies conditioning the subject?
5. How far does the man's life pattern, his life vocation and his innate coherent desires, coincide with the trend set by
   1. The soul ray type of energy,
   2. The personality ray type?
      With disciples much of the difficulty will be found to lie in this area of expression.
6. In what period of the present life expression did the cleavage make its appearance? Or has an achieved integration brought about the difficult situation? Is this problem
   1. One of cleavage, requiring a bridging process, and leading thus to a fusion of energies?
   2. One of integration, requiring right understanding of what has happened, and leading to right adjustment of the fused powers to environing conditions?
7. Is the man at the point where he should be
   1. Integrated as a personality and, as a result, becoming more strictly human. [447]
   2. Developed as a mystic and taught to recognize the higher aspect and its relation to the lower, with a view to their unification.
   3. Trained as an occultist and brought mentally to such a state of consciousness that the higher and the lower natures or aspects begin to function as one? This involves the blending of the forces of the personality and the energy of the soul, and fusing them into one divine expression of "the part within the whole."
8. What, in the last analysis, must be done to make "the lighted area" of the immediate consciousness of such a nature that the subconscious part of the man can be "lighted at will by the ray of the mind", and the mind itself can become a search light, penetrating into the superconsciousness and thus revealing the nature of the soul? It is in fact the problem of the expansions of consciousness. A wide field of psychological investigation lies ahead in connection with the use of the mind as constituting the "path of light between the subconscious nature and the superconscious nature, and yet focusing both as a brilliant point of light within the conscious nature."

To esotericists, this whole problem of the at-one-ment is closely connected with the building of the antahkarana. This name is given to the line of living energy which links the various human aspects and the soul, and it holds the clue to the occult truism that "before a man can tread the Path, he must become the path itself." When the cleavages are all bridged, the various points of crisis have been surmounted and passed, and the required fusions (which are simply stages in process) have taken place, then unification or at-one-ment occurs. New fields of energy then are entered, [448] recognized and mastered, and then again new areas of consciousness open up before the advancing pilgrim.

May I remind you also that these cleavages are cleavages in consciousness or awareness and not in fact? Is that too difficult a matter for us to grasp? Let us ponder upon it.