The Deep, Sustaining Centre of Ashramic Work
Elan vital is a term used by the philosopher, Henri Bergson, to describe the creative force responsible for growth and evolution in all organisms. A similar force is to be found at the heart of a spiritual group – a vibrant, pulsating idea that holds the group together and through which the energy of love ripples into the atmosphere of the personal life, clarifying the vision and lifting the spirit towards the archetypal realms of goodness, beauty and truth.
Group life is governed from the world of ideas and an interesting side-effect of this concerns health and well-being. The group idea is a shining sun that dissolves the brooding clouds of melancholia that can sometimes engulf the disciple in the current world climate, where large numbers of the population are suffering from widespread depression and lowered physical vitality. The nourishing power of ideas will eventually remedy this situation: “instead of drawing upon the resources of vitality stored in the soil, in food, fresh air and outer environing conditions, man is beginning to draw it from the etheric body itself.” One of the ways this occurs, is through the “galvanizing effect” of ideas.
Bearing this in mind, the lack of vitality that is sometimes experienced after a period of vigorous spiritual endeavour can be replenished without yielding to the personality’s tendency to drift into inertia. It is true that the life of discipleship is a testing one that places stress and strain on the disciple’s vehicles of expression, especially as the sphere of service expands into group service – for the Spiritual Hierarchy are in desperate need of channels of access into human consciousness and a group that is focused and working with the ideas embodied in the Ageless Wisdom teachings will be used to the full. However, the “galvanizing effect” of ideas enables the disciple to feed his etheric body at the group’s centre of power, a process that is already occurring on a lower turn of the spiral in practically every country as people begin to tune into the energy of mass thoughtforms embodying mass intention.
The spiritual intensity of group life is part and parcel of the training for discipleship. One of the questions asked in the entrance papers to the Arcane School is, “Have you counted the cost to the man or woman who treads the Path? Are you prepared to face the cost? If so, why?” The response to this question indicates more than any other whether the applicant is ready for discipleship training, for it penetrates to the heart with a direct enquiry as to whether the spirit of love and sacrifice abiding there suffices to make of him or her a “warrior in the light”. The responses to this question are frequently an inspiration and privilege to behold.
Typically, comments are made to the effect that it is felt that there is no real choice in the matter as not treading the path would be a much greater cost. One student, who summarizes the spirit of many, wrote: “it seems unlikely that I could know the full cost…but I am aware that it is a forcing process carried forward by the agencies of pressure and fire in order to bring the full flower of the soul to premature blossoming”. Another wrote: “From my current perspective I would consider that there is only cost where there is attachment, and the release of attachments, while painful, leads to a higher level of awareness, taking the focus from separation towards unity, which ultimately is what I am here to achieve”.
Such statements of intent reveal the first touch of Atma that ‘willingly’ embraces the cost of treading the path and uses the ‘testing fires of probation’ to transfigure life in terms of accomplishment. The self-forgetfulness that accompanies whole-hearted absorption in group work then removes, measure by measure, the lower sense of self that experiences pain and fatigue, and the disciple is liberated into the deep, sustaining centre of ashramic work.