REQUIREMENTS OF INITIATION

Translated by ARIEL Magazine from the book: “Discípulos y Maestros, o los Factores de la Iniciación Espiritual”.  The Tibetan. Spanish original.

The Disciple never ceases to be a Disciple, no matter what attitude he may adopt against his Master by mistake or malice. The case of Judas is characteristic and will always be exemplary.

Nor can the Master fail to be so with regard to his disciples, even if he assumes the most severe corrective attitudes against them, using his paternal rights and spiritual prerogatives.

The bond that is established between the Master and the Disciple has indissoluble and indelible magical proportions, despite the most adverse and fateful circumstances. Initiation has its demands. The Master, for his part, has to fulfill an unavoidable mission, and the Disciple has to respond to motives and aspirations that, if not heeded, would be the cause of intense and bloody internal tortures.

It is precisely Initiation that aims to establish the most intimate contact between the Disciple and the Master, which the former freely chooses. As we have already said, the Master can never fail in the spiritual part of his mission, but the Disciple can. When the latter allows himself to be led astray by his passions and illusions, incurring in all kinds of blunders and clumsiness, it is natural that the initiatory process itself, in the internal forums of human nature, as well as in the sublime of the higher planes, must inevitably suffer the corresponding consequences.

It is not uncommon, in fact, to notice that a Disciple, sometimes the most distinguished and appreciated of his Master, assumes arrogant and perverse attitudes, claims to have reached sufficient perfection, shies away from all kinds of moral responsibility and, abandoning his life, until then exemplary, behaves villainously and basely, clumsily and even criminally, despising the sublime teachings he received from his Master, whom he even goes so far as to revile, deny and insult despite the fact that until the day before or minutes before he considered him as the model of the most finished divinity.

For the Disciple always fully enjoys his prerogatives of conscience, without the Master ever interfering with it, unless the Master expressly requires or asks for it. It also often happens that the Disciple tires of being sincere or despairs of not quickly attaining his illusory desires, encourages vain purposes or responds to passionate imperatives or to ill-controlled desires of his ill-cultivated mind; in such cases he does not tolerate reprimands from his Master, refuses to bow to the perfective discipline that he proposes to him and finally, behaves like a freedman, becoming an insolent tyrant and impertinent know-it-all, who does not stop lying in means to satisfy his wounded vanity and his thirst for revenge, which invites him to make amends for his until then, coarse appetites were inhibited. At such moments the beast arises in him, fiercer than ever.

The Master's entire action towards his disciples is aimed at taming this beast. Such is the first phase of Initiation.

The second phase of Initiation is constituted by the purpose of transforming that beast into an "angel", by sublimating overcoming. But, unfortunately, not all Disciples are sincere enough to endure this cultural domestication of the first term, and if, congratulations, they still have to go through the immense tragedy of destroying in themselves the instinctive or original ancestral beast, and there are few souls strong enough to endure this experience, to want it and even more to achieve it.

Hence, the work of the Master is always unproba, because if he manages to tame and tame the ancestral beast that is in every human being, he still has the tremendous task of dealing with the beast until he transforms it.

This superlative work of the Master is understood by few Disciples, because few are those who have enough patience to attain the triumphant fullness of the Spirit through Initiation. Hence the ingratitude and dull resentments, the secret envy and hurtful hatred that many Disciples usually feel towards their greatest benefactor, the Master. In reality, they are like slaves freed before their time, who do not know what worthy use they can make of their freedom, and so they continue down the slope of their murky passions and deluded whims and prey everywhere without understanding the extent of their weaknesses and perversions.

The work of the Master is very similar to that of a professional hygienist, in the mental and spiritual sense. He finds in each individual a veritable walking garbage dump, and from such material he has the obligation to make a piece of heaven, a paragon of moral, mental, and spiritual perfection. The task cannot be easy or pleasant, especially when it is known that the Master does not really gain anything by fulfilling his Mission, except for his own intimate satisfaction, since He has already reached the limit of evolutionary perfection.

A bad Disciple is very much like the wolf in the fable. Long deprived of acting on the impulse of his instinct, because absolute sincerity was demanded of him as an initiatory means, as soon as he frees himself from the dignifying tutelage of the Master, he begins to prey at will and without contemplation. The beast, weary of so much sanity and subjection, then shows itself cynical, destructive and malicious with great force and fury, because its long fasts of bestiality and ferocity finally find an opportunity to be satisfied. This is what makes such a Disciple then launch himself with all ease and nonchalance against all that is pure, sublime and sacred that minutes before he had considered the most noble and divine.

The evil Disciple, then, is not an extraordinary phenomenon, but a natural thing, for where there is insincerity, unworthiness must flourish. Worse still if the Disciple refuses to follow the dignifying norm suggested by the Master, and prefers not to study and leaves to his imagination the care of making up for his defects. Illusion is never a good advisor. Thus it happens that when the Disciple rebels, even after years of tacit acceptance of the Master's sublimating tutelage, he dissociates himself from all his commitments with resounding sentimentality and resorts to all the tricks of his sick imagination to justify his attitude. He then says that he is freeing himself from a tyranny, accuses his Master of being a liar, unjust, evil, and there is no lack of some with starving gonads that accuse him of sexual perversion, and others ambitious of other people's goods that brand him as an exploiter.

The manumitted slave has been and always will be the worst enemy of his class and of his legitimate masters. The little souls must be led and managed by the larger and higher ones. The worst and tragic thing happens when a Master grants confidence to a Disciple and teaches him to behave with dignity, honesty and his own personality, and he chooses his own benefactor as his first victim.

It could be argued, of course, that weak souls, zealots, should not be given such weapons or authority, and that the Master should avoid such disastrous situations. In fact, the Master is always blamed for this, because it is not understood that the Disciple needs to be trained and if he is not provided with the means, his initiation could be a simple illusion, instead of a discipline. But in reality, the fault does not lie with the Master, but with the unworthy, abusive, and perverse Disciple, for what he believes to be his weapons, vengeance, and hatred, otherwise execrable and clumsy, cannot really affect the Master, and always return to their original promoter and driver. The victimizer, in this case, is the safe and worst victim.

In the eyes of the profane public and of vain and evil souls, the Master will assume a repulsive and execrable personality, which is very difficult to avoid; but with the passage of time, truth always triumphs over perversity and ignominy. Hence, the superiority of the Master is always linked to infinite compassion.

The profane, the vulgar, cannot understand these transcendental things of Initiation. But if you compare well the personality of Jesus Christ and his adventures with his disciples, you will have an idea of what this implies. Reading Zanoni, the famous novel by Lord Bulwer Lytton, as we have already said, will also give transcendental clues as to all that has to do with Initiation and its meaning. The human beast, no matter how well-groomed with civilization it may be, is always fierce when it comes to contradicting it in its passions and instincts, and behaves like any virus when an antidote is applied to it: it protests, kicks, rebels and resolves itself more incisively!

However, life continues its course and the Masters of Wisdom, in their infinite sanity and equanimity, do not reject their mission or their Disciples, since they live in harmony with the Infinite and fully benefit from their identification with the Universal Spirit, who is the Eternal Verb, the Omniscient God, and hence,  in spite of their terrible experiences in this world - which is not their own - they are always ready to give a beneficent and inspiring Blessing.

It is unquestionable, however, that the Master is a living example of dignity, wisdom, and nobility. The infamous wood of calumny and ingratitude may be raised a thousand times to sacrifice it for the sake of gross worldly passions and morbid ignorance, but all this, or nothing, will never succeed in silencing the Universal Consciousness or overcoming the unfading power of the Truth.