Each new year contains within its time-span unforeseen joys, challenges, and perhaps sorrows, but 2012—and specifically, 21st December 2012—is a date awaited with a particular sense of expectation...

The sword, like Excalibur, has still to be pulled from the stone, the concrete boulder of the lower mind. The Great Invocation can be seen as the Excalibur that is released from the stone and comes to life for all who apply the will-to-good to use it—the sword in the stone waiting to be seized and fulfill its destiny, the promise of paradise regained.

Thoughts on the Reappearance of the Christ, By Alice A. Bailey, June 1949

THE QUESTION is often asked, What is Sin? The subject is too vast for me to answer fully but I can and will give a series of definitions of it, for when a matter is defined, those whose minds are functioning have therein that on which they can ponder.

THE THING WHICH is happening in the world today is the inauguration of a new consciousness. The consciousness of human beings is radically different from the consciousness of animals, and is not static but is a progressive state of being.

THE USES OF PAIN are many, and they lead the human soul out of darkness into light, out of bondage into liberation, out of agony into peace" (Discipleship in the New Age, Vol.1, p. 677).

IT IS STRANGE HOW STRONG an influence age, physical age, the age of the body, not of the soul, has on what could well be crucial points of discipleship training.

It has been said in Alice Bailey's book, The Reappearance of the Christ, that if we look for the Christ as He was two thousand years ago, we will fail to recognise Him when He reappears to continue His work in the Aquarian age.

In these brief notes have been jotted down in a simple and direct manner the admonitions, the intuitions, the reflections, the resolutions of a soul, as they have been received by it spontaneously during its "silent conversations".

The distinctions to be made fall into two main groups—those which concern the outer form and its inner teaching, or the esoteric and exoteric aspects of truth, and those which are the outcome of the old age which is passing and which indicate the coming influence of the new age.