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Three Spiritual Realities
An Urgent Need for Understanding
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“A cyclic crisis in the spiritual life of our planet…
has been anticipated… for thousands of years...
[The forces of Light] are all striving in one vast movement for
an intensification of the Light of the World.”[1]
Alice A. Bailey
The idea that the crisis facing our world has been anticipated for thousands of years by the Great Ones casts new light on our times. If we could see the broad sweep of evolution as they see it, the sense of fragility about our future would dissolve into a vision of a light-filled world. They have known for millennia that all life forms on Earth would, at this time, be suffering through a crisis of emergence into a new age of light. And they sought to aid us through the painful tests and trials they foresaw.
In the early part of the last century, a warning was issued by a Master of Wisdom about the present time of transition from the old world to the new—from an old dimension of consciousness to a new more illumined state of awareness. The warning came from the Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul, the author of the modern wisdom teachings with his amanuensis, Alice Bailey. He cautioned that in order to avert the most devastating cataclysms during these times, it was urgent for humanity to recognize three spiritual truths—all of them core to the next stage of planetary evolution. By doing so, it was implied, we could ease the passage from the dying material order to the lighted world of the new era.
These three spiritual realties have to do with life on subtler dimensions of our planet. They are:
- The existence of the human Soul, the true self, the inner spark of divinity whose nature is inclusive spiritual love and whose efflorescence is the light of wisdom.
- The existence of a fifth kingdom in nature—known as the Spiritual Kingdom, the Spiritual Hierarchy, the Kingdom of God, the planetary Heart Center—whose members, Masters of Wisdom, guide the evolution of life on Earth.
- The existence of a divine Plan, formulated within the Spiritual Hierarchy, which contains the blueprints of all that is now occurring, has ever occurred, and will occur in the future of Earth’s evolution.
Since the time of the Tibetan’s warning, real progress has been made by humanity in coming to recognize the soul—the Christ consciousness or Buddha nature that lays dormant within the human heart until, in a given lifetime, it is stirred awake. In recent times, reflections of this higher self have begun to appear with some frequency on the screens that reflect our changing world back to us—TV, the Internet, and film.
We can see the soul’s inclusive love, for example, in the global struggles for truth and justice, in the ongoing battles to conquer poverty and disease, and in countless pioneering efforts to serve the common good. We can see it in the spread of compassion and the spirit of brotherhood, the rising concern for animal welfare, the growing appreciation of goodness, truth and beauty. Perhaps the most direct evidence of the soul’s awakening is the rising interest in meditation—the pathway to conscious recognition of the higher self and the inner realms of spirit.
This human-divine self has also been revealed through dramatic accounts of near-death and out-of-body experiences. These extraordinary occurrences demonstrate the undying nature of the soul, erasing any doubt that consciousness survives physical death—defined by the medical profession as the cessation of heart and brain activity. A voluminous body of evidence of the soul’s immortality has been compiled on the basis of thousands of accounts from people around the world whose souls have left and then reentered their bodies. Most who have had this experience testify to the existence of subtle dimensions of spirit infused with boundless light and love.
 As for the second and third spiritual realities deemed urgent for humanity to recognize by the Tibetan Master, there has been far less progress thus far. In fact, a great deal of illusory and contradictory information about the Hierarchy of Masters has been presented in books and on websites. Few of the portrayals bear any resemblance to the facts given about these Guides of the Race in the modern Ageless Wisdom teachings. To most of humanity the concept of the Masters of Wisdom remains either foreign or entirely unknown, as does the Plan of Evolution that They oversee.
The idea that there is an invisible kingdom beyond the human, that a spiritual kingdom of life actually does exist, would seem like magical thinking to most people outside of organized religion. In the Ageless Wisdom, however, this Kingdom of God lies at the heart of our planetary life. Its members are responsible for fulfilling the purpose of our planetary Logos, the God of Earth, at every phase of cyclical unfoldment throughout the course of history. They are perfected human beings of different ranks, at varying degrees of higher evolution, who form a Hierarchy of Light. Among them are the great Beings who are familiar to humanity—the Buddha, the Christ, Krishna, Moses, and Mohammed—plus countless others whose names are less well-known. All of Them ascended to this higher dimension of Reality by treading the spiritual Path from the human to the spiritual kingdom.
The Tibetan tells us that in the time of Atlantis, the Hierarchy of Masters walked among us but with the sinking of the continent They withdrew from the physical plane of Earth. Since that time, enlightened beings such as those mentioned above have come forth from the spiritual kingdom, at times of great crisis, to lead humanity from darkness to light. Their teachings led to the founding of the world’s religions. Though their followers assumed They ascended to realms far beyond ours upon their death, many have in fact remained on the subtler planes of Earth, from where They guide our planet’s evolution. And we are told, in the Ageless Wisdom, that They will reenter the world in the not-too-distant future to inaugurate the Age of Aquarius.
The Spiritual Hierarchy has been preparing for this new age for thousands of years, as mentioned earlier. It is seen as a culminating epoch in planetary history, during which the kingdoms “of heaven and earth”—the spiritual and human kingdoms—will draw closer to one another, creating an entirely new world. As the designers of the plan of evolution, they know its next stages. But They cannot predict how humanity will navigate this unprecedented planetary crisis. That depends on our sensitivity to the subtle changes in Earth’s energy field, our ability to understand their significance, and our willingness to reorient our lives accordingly. Human free will is the great unknown factor.
To prepare us for this momentous time, the Hierarchy has catalyzed humanity’s awakening in many different ways. Perhaps the most tangible of these is the set of books authored by the Tibetan Master with Alice Bailey. They are considered by many the most profound source of wisdom available about the shift between the ages. The Tibetan, alive in a human body not long ago, serving as head of a Tibetan lamasery in northern India, was and is a member of the Spiritual Hierarchy. On behalf of the entire hierarchy of Masters, under the supervision of the Christ—the Head of the Hierarchy—the Tibetan was asked to provide humanity with the teachings needed to make the shift in consciousness necessary to enter a radically new era. Making this knowledge available a century ago, with the publication of these books, was part of the Divine Plan.
As for the goal of the plan to be worked out during the Aquarian Age, the Tibetan expressed it with great succinctness:
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The Plan as at present sensed, and for which the Masters are steadily
working…is the production of a subjective synthesis in humanity…[2] |
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Subjective synthesis might be defined as the soul’s direct encounter with the seamless web of life on our planet; the life-altering realization that there is no “other,” there is only one Life. It is the recognition that “There is no inside or outside, no me or you, no above or below for the mind to grasp—there is only a sublime state of at-one-ment suffused with joy and permeated with a love that knows no bounds.”[3] Such is the promise of the future awaiting us as the Plan unfolds and the three spiritual realities take root in the human mind and heart.
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≡ May the truth of the Soul be recognized by humanity
≡ May the truth of the Hierarchy be recognized by humanity
≡ May the truth of the divine Plan be recognized by humanity
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Nancy Seifer
December 2013
[1] Alice A. Bailey. The Externalization of the Hierarchy. Lucis Publishing Company, 1957, p. 610.
[2] Alice A. Bailey. A Treatise on White Magic. Lucis Publishing Company,1934, p. 403.
[3] From “Seven Seed Reflections” by Michael Lindfield (michael.lindfield@comcast.net)
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