Alice Bailey

The teaching

Taught from the books she gave as the Tibetan's, above all Initiation, Human and Solar (1922) and A Treatise on the Seven Rays.

The Plan and the three centres

Her books teach that the earth has a purpose, the Plan, which works out through three great centres. Shamballa is the centre where the will of God is known, ruled by the Lord of the World, Sanat Kumara. The Hierarchy is the centre of love and wisdom: the Masters, men and women who have passed through the human stage and now serve the Plan, with the Christ at their head as World Teacher. Humanity is the third centre, of intelligence, through which the Plan is to be worked out on earth. The will of Shamballa passes through the love of the Hierarchy into the minds of men, and human history is read as the slow opening of that channel.

Soul and personality

A person, in her teaching, is a soul using a personality. The personality is made of three bodies: the physical with its etheric double, the emotional or astral body, and the mind. The soul stands above them on the higher levels of mind, and above the soul is the monad, the spark of spirit itself. The work of a life is to bring the personality under the soul's direction until it is soul-infused, and then to go on toward the monad.

The way has a name, the antahkarana: a bridge of light built between the mind and the soul, and on to the spirit, by meditation, study and service. It is built by thought and by living what is received, never by the personality's wish to rise for its own sake.

The seven rays

All that exists is shaped by seven rays, seven streams of energy. The first three are rays of aspect: the first of will or power, the second of love and wisdom, the third of active intelligence. Four rays of attribute follow: the fourth of harmony through conflict, the fifth of concrete knowledge or science, the sixth of devotion or idealism, the seventh of ceremonial order or magic. Every soul is on a ray, and so are its personality, its mind, its feelings and its body, often each on a different one; so too are nations. The first ray leads and breaks through, the second teaches and heals, the third plans and adapts, the fourth makes beauty out of struggle, the fifth seeks exact knowledge, the sixth gives itself to an ideal, and the seventh brings order into form.

The rays come in and out of power in long cycles. In her teaching the sixth ray, of devotion, which marked the age of Pisces, is passing out, and the seventh, of order and ritual, is coming in with the age of Aquarius.

The five initiations

Initiation, in her books, is an expansion of consciousness, not a ceremony. She names five great initiations and pictures them by the life of Christ. The first is the birth at Bethlehem, the Christ life born in the heart and the physical life brought under control. The second is the baptism in Jordan, the mastery of the emotions. The third is the Transfiguration, the personality flooded with the light of the soul. The fourth is the crucifixion, the great renunciation, in which even the vehicle of the soul is given up. The fifth is the revelation, after which the initiate is a Master.

Meditation, the full moons and the triangles

Her school teaches meditation as the way to the soul: the mind held steady in the light while a seed thought is pondered, then a receptive silence, then the carrying of what came into service. It keeps the full moons as times of special meditation, and above all three: the full moon of Aries, the festival of the risen Christ; of Taurus, Wesak, the festival of the Buddha; and of Gemini, the festival of goodwill. Its students also form triangles: three people who link in thought each day, see a triangle of light joining them and spreading over the earth, and say the Great Invocation.

All people of goodwill who serve humanity, of any faith or none, belong in her teaching to one New Group of World Servers, whether or not they have heard the name.

The Great Invocation

The prayer she gave out at the end of the war has four verses. The first asks that from the point of light within the mind of God light may stream into human minds and descend on earth. The second asks that from the point of love within the heart of God love may stream into human hearts, and that Christ may return to earth. The third asks that from the centre where the will of God is known purpose may guide the small wills of men. The fourth asks that through humanity itself the Plan of love and light may work out and seal the door where evil dwells, and the prayer ends by asking that light, love and power restore the Plan on earth.

She taught that the Christ, the World Teacher, whom other faiths await under other names, will reappear, and that humanity prepares his way by goodwill and right human relations.

What the books say of peoples, and why it is false

Her books keep the ranking of peoples that she took over from Theosophy. They set humanity on a ladder of root races, with the present one called Aryan, rank nations and peoples by rays and by spiritual age, and single out the Jews as a people held back by their separativeness and an old karma, whom they call on to give up their separate life. These are claims against peoples and against one people, and they are false.

All living people are one species, there were never root races, and the differences among peoples rank no one above another; the root races and their refutation are taught on the lost worlds art's branch Lemuria and Mu. The hatred of Jews has its own long history in the lies told about them, and the suffering it caused was the work of those who hated, never a debt owed by those who suffered it.