Remember that no man is a disciple, in the Master's sense of the word, who is not a pioneer. A registered response to spiritual truth, a realized pleasure in forward-looking ideals, and a pleased acquiescence in the truths of the New Age do not constitute discipleship. If it were so, the ranks of disciples would be rapidly filled and this is sadly not the case. It is the ability to arrive at an understanding of the next realizations which lie ahead of the human mind which marks the aspirant, who stands at the threshold of accepted discipleship; it is the power, wrought out in the crucible of strenuous inner experience, to see the immediate vision and to grasp those concepts in which the mind must necessarily clothe it, which give a man the right to be a recognized worker with the plan (recognized by the Great Ones, if not recognized by the world); it is the achievement of that spiritual orientation, held steadily - no matter what the outer disturbance in the physical plane life may be - that signifies to Those Who watch and seek for workers, that a man can be trusted to deal with some small aspect of Their undertaken work; it is the capacity to submerge [583] and to lose sight of the personal lower self in the task of world guidance, under soul impulse, which lifts a man out of the ranks of the aspiring mystics into those of the practical, though mystically minded, occultists.

This is an intensely practical work, on which we are engaged; it is likewise of such proportions that it will occupy all of a man's attention and time, even his entire thought life, and will lead him to efficient expression in his personality task (imposed by karmic limitation and inherited tendency) and to a steadfast application of the creative and magical work. Discipleship is a synthesis of hard work, intellectual unfoldment, steady aspiration and spiritual orientation, plus the unusual qualities of positive harmlessness and the opened eye which sees at will into the world of reality.