The DK Foundation

The Rage of Angels

If we take entry through the doorway in Cancer as the start, and the Sixth Initiation as the end of man’s experience in incarnation, then between these two points we can identify the Seven Ages of Spiritual man, the First Initiation representing childhood, the Second Initiation the teenage years and so on.

We all pass through the teenage years on the way to adulthood and we all pass through the Second Initiation on our way to the major initiations

With teenagers, initiates of the Second degree share the qualities of humourlessness, self importance, and intolerance and often add something more in the form of pomposity and prissiness

The Second Initiation focuses on emotional experiences without making those experiences answerable to a wider context. That comes later. The Second Initiation confers an awareness of the things that matter without an understanding of how best to achieve them. This is what it means to be a disciple. The Second Initiation is a place of emotional refinement but not yet of wisdom. No one who thinks he is right is wise, not when there are 60 billion personalities, each with their own reality. The personality may perceive Truth but it will never possess it, and so to have contacted Truth does not make one right. The disciple, however, has a proprietary and often bombastic attitude towards Truth and identifies himself with it.

The fact of the Second Initiation taking place on the astral plane means that disciples are backward looking, of necessity, and will find their inspiration in well-established traditions and antiquity. They have reverence for the simpler and purer. And the dead. The disciple, who is going to need a teacher in some form, loves a dead teacher because the dead teacher is a safe teacher: he will not change anything or issue any new challenges, and the accomplishments of the dead are not as threatening as those of the living. The Second Initiation is created out of the reaction of self to other: envy and resentment have to surface in order to be recognised. But we do not compete with the dead and their memory and for example give the disciple something non-threatening and enduring to which to cling. The disciple is suspicious and usually fearful of change which threaten the fragile refuge, which he has built for himself away from the madness of  daily life, where he is able to persuade himself that life is still worth living after all, where he binds the wounds he has received in love, and turns desire into aspiration. The disciple is only really interested in himself and the precious few who understand and empathise, which what he is doing in his refuge. That is what it means to be a disciple.

The other side of the Second Initiation, however, we will leave behind our refuges and the precious few, and our concern will become the unlovely masses which we have to rejoin because, the truth is, we never really left them. The sense of being special, different, transformed was only an illusion after all! At the Third Initiation we see the interconnectness of all things, and from this vantage point there is no place for specialness.

We also realise as we enter the adult years that we have to start sharing what we know and there is no point offering anything that will not be understood. So we start departing from the established sources and finding ways of making truths more accessible. We will lose a certain amount of reverence for the past, which stands to restrict us, and we will start investing in the future. 

As the Fourth Initiation looms and we understand the scale of the task we have taken on, we will almost certainly come by the unwelcome awareness that we are still the same old flawed personality. We may have a better, more reliable connection to a higher level, more understanding of what our spiritual family needs, a greater sense of commitment to meeting it, and more skill in handling ourselves and in holding down the sabotaging aspects of the personality, but there will be many occasions when these achievements will seem scarcely more adequate than a fig leaf.

So by the Fourth Initiation it is not a sense of specialness that is the spiritual liability but a sense of inadequacy in the face of the task to be done. The respect for the achievements of others, no matter how unorthodox and different, who have stayed the course will be very real because we will know by then that only a sound intention gives the strength to keep going. 

It is the disciple who has yet to get his astral energy under control and to understand his own shadow who will see false prophets everywhere and who will rant and rage and generate destructive, negative energy in the name of Love and Truth. I call this activity the Rage of Angels because that is how the disciple sees it but, of course, it is not: it is the fear and attachment of the vulnerable, compounded usually by envy and the resentment that the personality feels towards those who appropriate attention and recognition that he himself would like. 

If you encounter someone who you consider to be a false prophet then the thing to do, surely, is ignore him; deprive him of what he requires as you would cut off the air supply from a dangerous fire. Do not feed his cause with energy, drama and attention, and work yourself into a negative state in the process. How does this help?

Another danger in sounding off, as many teenagers discover, is that we may be heard by someone who understands where we are coming from rather better than we ourselves. For that reason I am withholding the name of the writer of our LOM who has also sent a number of vitriolic communications to Michael Mau.

The idea that Michael Mau is some kind of self -important megalomaniac is one of the few things that managed to make me laugh last year. Only projection could make a monster out of the man I know.