Look at it this way. If we are given a plot of earth, our options are: to cultivate it, to leave it to get over grown, or to use it as a dumping ground.
If we choose to cultivate our plot, there are different ways in which we might do this. For example, we may lay it out so that it yields produce that we can eat, or plant herbs that have healing properties, or we may lay it out to be a source of beauty and rejuvenation.
Whatever our choice, we know that if we do not take a firm stand, we will lose out in battle to retain mastery of this place against nature’s sleepless, ceaseless activity.
If the choices are ours so too is the outcome: we will live with what, by design or default, we have created, whatever that is.
Our lives are plots of ground in time and space. We can either work on them or leave them for nature to do its work. We choose to work on ourselves for the same reason that we would choose to cultivate a plot of earth: it is more rewarding to human beings to live in a space that is organised and productive than not.
If we want a productive garden we have to work at it; if we want productive lives we have to work at them. Nothing is given except the opportunity and, sometimes, help when and if we ask for it.
We may abandon our plot to nature because the effort required is greater than we have to give, but to live in dereliction will not be a choice. For sure, we can plant thistles in the form of negative thought forms in our plot, and poison the soil with intellectual toxins, but why would we? Who benefits? It is obvious who suffers when we observe the quality of the life of anyone who has ‘killed off God’ with their intellect. They have killed off their own opportunity because, mistaking it, they took it to be an imposition.
In the West, through countless generations, we have been conditioned by the Sixth Ray presentation to perceive spirituality as ‘doing the right thing by God’. Spirituality is doing the right thing by ourselves. The individuating personality, who gets caught up in the dualism of the Sixth ray presentation, can make the mistake of assuming that the interests of God and man are in some way different and then the intellect may rebel at the idea of submission. God is the custodian of attributes that we are not yet able to express consciously. He holds them for us. The fewer responsibilities we take for ourselves, the more we leave with God as a basis for reproach and redress. The astrologer calls this aspect of God Saturn, but the Western astrologer knows also His other attributes, which are also our other attributes and which, gradually, we are learning to recognise and express.
Spirituality provides guidance in the matter of cultivating our plot and making the most of our opportunity. Spirituality is a process that uses figureheads, myths concepts and ideas, but it is, at the same time, something separate from all these things. Properly defined, spirituality is the refinement (distillation) of energy, and that distillation process is aback all the authentic spiritual systems that have ever been. Our interest may be in the fruits of this process rather than its working, but that there is a process aback our beliefs is something of which we need to remind ourselves when, for whatever reason, the results are not as we require them to be. Then we have a need to find out what is not working and why.
In this series of articles, we consider our situation now as the Sixth Ray, which has conditioned what we understand as spirituality, is being withdrawn. It considers the significance of this for the cultivation of the plot of earth that is us ourselves in time and space.
What does it mean for a ray to be withdrawn? It means that in worlds higher than our own, this ray is no longer being built into the design of the personalities coming into incarnation, who are not therefore receptive or responsive to it. These beings are therefore finding little or nothing engaging in the form that spirituality has taken in the West in the past two centuries.
When the form is no longer fit for purpose, then human beings are no longer inspired to transform energy in the way that our Planetary system requires and the number of overgrown and undeveloped plots increases. In these circumstances, a human being in incarnation talks about disillusionment and loss of faith before ceasing to talking about the matter altogether; and the Hierarchy recognises that it is time to make a new appeal.
