Theosophical Notes, May 1955
Examination For Chelaship
Echoes of the ways of the Mystery
Schools are to be found numerously in popular customs, one of the most obvious
is of course the initiation systems of the various secret societies.
There is another equally interesting echo in certain academic methods.
In a previous issue we mentioned the difficulty that
collegiate instructors have in bringing home to students the fact that the
borderlines of knowledge are uncertain, without discouraging them entirely.
In this connection, we mentioned our acquaintance with various members of
the professorial fraternity. Since then we had a few hours
conversation with two of them on a train trip, in which we were immensely
interested in the "weeding out" process employed in their institution for
candidates to take postgraduate work leading to advanced degrees.
The oral part of the examination is carried out by two
professors. The student is amiably drawn out concerning his past achievements
and future hopes, and finds everything so pleasant that he decides his reputation
has preceded him and he is going to have a walkover to the coveted ranks.
The first trick catches him quite unaware. It is a question on some
point which he presumably should have at his finger-tips - and thinks he
does have. He answers confidently. Prof. No. 1 looks at him quizzically.
"Are you sure?" The weeding out process has set in. The greater
number of students, disconcerted, respond with something like: '"Well
... er ... that is . . . " fearing that some horrible slip has taken place
somewhere, and trying a little mind-reading to arrive at the right answer
- that is, the one which will please the Professor. The Professor
becomes quite merciless at this point, shaking the poor wretch from one
position to another until he about decides that if such a thing as real knowledge
exists, it is not for him.
Another type sticks his jaw out belligerently and stands
firm: "Yes, I am!" The problem for the professors here is to
sort out the good bluffer from the man who really knows, sometimes a rather
complicated problem when both give the right answers. The candidate
who passes this point is treated to another terror. After giving some
answer- timidly or confidently as the case may be - forthwith the two professors
themselves disagree violently as to the right answer, and engage in a prolonged
debate on the pros and cons, while the unfortunate student listens with mouth
agape. Even these lordly Beings, he realizes, can disagree!
Where then does that leave him?
At this point we have another sorting out. There
is the student who says to himself, with budding elation: "Aha!
As I always suspected! They don't know half as much as they pretend
to do; but how foolish to give themselves away!" His ego begins
to swell a bit; but the Professors are all set to take care of that
too in due time.
The more acute student, really sure of what he knows,
having something more on the ball than merely having read a book or listened
to somebody else, begins to pick up a rather obvious jesuitry here and there
in the discourse, and realizes that he is "being had." Thus by degrees,
the student with a real thinking brain - according to the friends referred
to, about one in several thousand of those who enter college, and one in
three of the candidates for advanced studies - is sorted out and enters the
new course. After which his real troubles begin. The method described
was easily understood by the writer; though he has never taken a Ph.D.
or other degree than simple Bachelor, he has had occasion to sit in at the
examinations of candidates for commercial research positions. The
system is much the same.
One of his surprising experiences was as member
of a board examining in such manner an individual of many year's experience
in a certain line of technical activity; a gentleman well known in
the field, and conversant with every detail of its practice. But a
half hour of harrying of this nature brought out the fact that the gentleman's
brain was simply a cold storage bin of large capacity. In all his
many years of experience, he had not acquired a single original principle.
He knew how everything was done, but possessed not a single real why.
He had observed facts not told him by others, but had neither tried to explain
them or investigate them. He was an able operative but constitutionally
incapable of finding out anything new all by himself. The writer,
at that time relatively new to research, was surprised to learn from his
colleagues that such was the rule rather than the exception. There
were many such industrious and retentive minds in research; but all
they did was under direction from somebody else, and no new knowledge arose
from it until their facts thus derived under guidance were put together
by some thinker above them in the research hierarchy. This thinker
then got the credit for the new theory or discovery, and the poor hardworking
fellow was usually apt to give out with the grievance that after he had done
all the hard work, somebody else got the credit...
All of this goes to show, again, the manner in which
the exoteric imitates the esoteric. The object of the Professors was
to develop the power of independent thought in the candidate. This is
the sine qua non for the candidate for occult chelaship also; but the
mistakes are vaster, the depths of the knowledge to be reached infinitely
greater, and the ordeal correspondingly more severe.
In the examination for entry into studies for a university
doctorate, the candidate underwent upsetting and uncomfortable experiences
in the process of enlightenment. But the upsets that the chela-aspirant
must undergo may well cost him his life or sanity. It is an
absolute necessity that he be tried to the limiting range of his temptations
and to the ultimate of his endurance; in no other way may even a Mahatma
know his nature well enough to trust him with the tasks of the "Guardian
Wall."
He must learn to stand utterly alone, no matter what
the odds; to wear out and face down Fear itself. He
must learn to choose without hesitation between the dearest of material objectives
and duty. He must reach that point where the thought of revenge or
resentfulness, no matter what the wrong done him, is impossible to him, for
otherwise he will never clear up his karma. All pride must be destroyed;
for this is the most deadly sin, and the basis of all the great and final
failures. The greatest, because it is the one which most effectually
separates him from his fellows and renders the realization of unity impossible
to him. In the course of discipleship, his past karma will be manoeuvered
in such style that every point of pride will be assailed and tortured beyond
endurance; he will have to undergo every humiliation to which he is
vulnerable. He may undergo, or be imminently threatened with, those
physical disasters which he fears by nature; and he may be struck at
through those most dear to him, by their own karmic misfortune and peril,
or by their unfaith, or treachery. This he must learn to undergo without
wavering from the chosen path, without hatred, resentment,
or recrimination. He will be placed in the most awful dilemmas of apparently
conflicting duties and loyalties; in order to teach him never to bo
deceived again. He will be placed where black seems white and white
seems black, and often discerns the real difference at the cost of most of
what he had thought to be true. He will find himself in one mental
labyrinth after another, where the sheer intellectual puzzles to be solved,
quite aside from apparent moral issues, will nearly drive him insane.
Where most flee instinctively from those who seem uncongenial, irritating,
or evil, he will be thrown into the proximity of such and have to endure
it until the lesson of Unity is learned. He will have to understand
that the Path is not followed in the company of those chosen by the personal
self, but of those chosen by karma - often hard karma; he will have
to see that the true food of wisdom is not likeness, but strangeness;
of brotherhood, not congeniality, but repellency.
In reality, all this is not unique to himself;
in degree it is the common lot. His own status is distinguished by the
intensity of the trials, and by the fact that he does recognize them as such,
and learns the necessary lessons. He is not really worse off, nor does
he experience worse things, than the run of the "man in the street'' of these
times. But his budding sensitiveness to higher experience, the necessity
that he shall learn to feel whatever experiences all and any other beings
have felt, render him infinitely vulnerable to the pain of others as well
as to his own - until the time comes when he slowly conquers the latter.
If the common lot, then, bears upon him with such especial hardness, there
is the reward that it also bears him somewhere. What to him are the
rough stones of the path, surmountable one by one, and each taking him toward
the goal, are to others the stones of an impassable barricade, or a tomb.
This is where he differs.
So great as is the ordeal, thus is the reward.
The reward is conscious immortality - but above all a crystal clear conscience,
and the knowledge that all things done by him are both what he most desires
to do, and what he should do; for the things that sway him in other
directions will have been burned out of him by acid and excised by razor-edged
steel - without anaesthetic.
The dreamers who imagine that by routine performance
of duties prescribed by some authority, by constant study and repetition of
book words, they will come consciously into the favor of the Masters and
forever under their benign protection against all ills! They have
not yet stepped upon the first real cobble of the Path. If one does
not find himself undergoing some few of these things, he is either a chela
who has passed all his trials or one who is at best at the beginning of
them. Who dares elect himself as the former? Heaven have mercy
on him, for karma will not!
Why try such a formidable task? If the mind contains
such a question at all, the answer is, don't try it! The only sufficient
reason is a compelling compassion for all that lives, that will not
let the man rest content, with any lesser goal than the highest service
to which he may rise, and will force him to take any and all risks toward
it. A disdain for the recognized pettiness of material life as we
live it, which some reach sooner, will help; indeed, such a disdain
mist be developed somewhere along the road, because real knowledge infallibly
brings it. But it is not enough in itself; it leads only toward
the Dharmakaya Path.
Men try to argue with themselves as to whether or not
they really wish to try chelaship; whether or not they really desire
to go that far, and undergo such trials. In reality, it is seldom
a matter of choosing at all. All are born somewhere along that road
on a place that may have a steep grade or an easy grade. The choice
has really been made long ago, and as the vicissitudes of life arise to
bring out what is in a man, or reveal what is not, he will follow according
to his self-created destiny. The accomplishment is not so much in what
he has to undergo, as in what he gets out of it; not so much in what
he is able to endure and overcome, as in what he understands of it.
A million devotees of utterly false causes have undergone
as much, so far as suffering and fortitude are concerned. The pirate
Blackbeard jested savagely and defiantly with his killers as his neck was
being severed with a dull knife. The man died utterly without fear,
and defiant of mortal physical pain. But what did he understand?
The entrance to real chelaship is an entrance to a rocky
and perilous road, whose only merit is that it is several million years
shorter than that commonly taken. Why try it? If that question
is in the mind at all, this path is not for him. The reason for trying,
by the time that it becomes important enough to cause the trial, will have
become a part of his nature; and its composition will be Compassion.
Any serious attempt will be met by tests that will strip all his motives
down to just that; and if there is not enough of it, he will fail.
If he fails honestly, the result will be humiliating, and it may involve
much suffering; but it will bring self-knowledge, and the opportunity
for another attempt at a wiser time.
The dread retribution is for him who fails, yet will
not admit it because of pride and vanity; he will insist on forcing
what the thinks is success, regardless of proven moral disability; and
then - facilis decensus avernus. If one would try - where look for
the entrance? To what "guru" or "leader?" If he harbors
that question in this period, he is not ready to try. The rules have
all been laid down long ago; what would be the sense of having some
particular person, or organization, repeat them over again as instruction
for chelaship? "When the candidate is ready, the Master will appear;"
and what is certain is that his appearance will be hard to recognize.
The aspirant need not seek the gate; the gate will seek him when he
is fit. Until it does, let him recognize himself as yet unfit.