These are the three essential energies and without their synthesis in the disciple's mind or in one of the three [709] higher centers, there can be no true revelation of the higher order or related to the processes of initiation.

In the earlier stages on the Path of Discipleship, the disciple works with that measure of the energy of his soul ray to which he can be receptive, plus as much of the energy of the personality ray as is responsive to that soul energy. In doing this a great measure of discrimination can be developed, and it is one of the first places where the value of the injunction, "Know thyself" can be seen. The nature of the soul ray at this time determines the nature of the revelation; the nature of the personality and its ray is, at the same time, either helpful or a hindrance.

The second group of energies are those coming to the disciple from the Spiritual Triad. These are relatively new [710] to him and embody divine qualities of which he has hitherto known nothing; even theoretically he knows little, and his attitude towards them has hitherto been largely speculative. Since he first put his foot upon the Path, he has been trying to build the antahkarana. Even that has meant for him an act of faith, and he proceeds in the early stages with the work of building, yet scarcely knowing what he does. He follows blindly the ancient rules and attempts to accept as factual that which has not been proven to him to be a fact but which is testified to by countless thousands down the ages. The whole process is in the nature of a culminating triumph of that innate sense of Deity which has driven man forward from the most primitive experiences and physical adventures to this great adventure of constructing a pathway for himself from the dense material world into the spiritual. These higher spiritual energies have hitherto been recognized by him through their effects; now he has to learn to handle them, first of all, by letting them pour into and through him, via the antahkarana, and then to direct them towards the immediate objective of the divine plan.

Hitherto he has worked primarily with the thread of consciousness; this is anchored in the head, and through that consciousness his personality and his soul are linked together until he has become a soul-infused personality; he has then attained unity with his higher self. Through the building of the antahkarana another thread is added to the soul-infused personality, and the true spiritual individual is linked with and comes under the direction of the Spiritual Triad. At the fourth initiation the soul body, the causal body (so called) disappears, and the thread of consciousness is occultly snapped; neither the soul body nor the thread are any longer required; they become now only the symbols of a non-existent duality. The soul is no longer the repository of the consciousness aspect as hitherto. All that the soul has stored up of knowledge, science, wisdom and experience (garnered in the life cycle of many aeons of incarnation) are now the sole possession of the individual [711] spiritual man. He transfers them into the higher correspondence of the sensory perceptive apparatus, the instinctual nature, on the three planes of the three worlds.

Nevertheless he still possesses awareness of all past events and knows now why he is what he is; much of the information anent the past he discards; it has served its purpose, leaving him with the residue of experienced wisdom. His life takes on a new coloring, totally unrelated to the three worlds of his past experience. He, the sum total of that past, faces new spiritual adventures, and has now to tread the Path which leads him away from normal human evolution on to the Way of the Higher Evolution. This new experience he is well equipped to face.