Theos-Talk Archives (April 2012 Message tt00060)

In the final chapter of his book `The Seven Rays', Mr. Ernest Wood explains the `stages of Self-Realization' thus:
1.	There is the set of material bodies, the physical body with its companions on subtler planes. This provides a limited instrument for the consciousness, and coming into incarnation with it is distinctly an act of Concentration.
2.	The personality. It is not the set of bodies, but something that has grown up with them. That personality is or ought to be an instrument, something fine and god and strong and pure and definite, and useful especially for some distinct walk in life, whereby decided and valuable experience may be obtained through it. Yet it should be an instrument through which the man himself can think and love and will; not one set of only in the habit of response to external habit of response to external things, but also open to the man within.
3.	Self-personality: if the consciousness in man has become submerged in that personality, thinking "I am this" to the exclusion of all else, then that personality usurps the throne of the self within, and the life is lived in the interests of its prolongation and its physical, emotional and mental comforts and ambitions. Then the man of ideals, the true man, is starved for the rest of that incarnation. Personality is a good thing, but self-personality is the greatest curse.
4.	The conscious man: His true interest in life is in the activities of one of the Rays, which are described earlier, in the pursuit of one of the ideals. Insomuch as he can destroy self-personality while keeping his personality strong will his incarnated life be fruitful. With arduous training and self-purification he will be able to produce in the personality such essential habits of emotion and thought that in its rest it will be open inwards rather than outwards, interested in ideals, not merely in personal things. ---
A material thing cannot change and yet be the same, because of its space limitation, but this conscious `you' can so remain through a series of changes in which your thought and feeling and will have ever greater scope, and constantly grasp a greater portion of the material world.
5.	One who has had a vision of this truth, or has realized it, looking back upon his human career will see that the personality and the body were part of the material world. You were a part of the conscious world, a portion of something that was not your real self, but was the great consciousness to which no limits can be assigned. It was here that was to be found the reaping of all the sowing that was done within the limits of personality. Every new achievement brought an enlargement of consciousness, so that it became a bigger part of the universal consciousness than it was before. ?Yet even this was not the end, however great became the expansion of your consciousness. --- There is the threshold of the true Nirvana, when man rises above consciousness, as long before he rose above matter, and in that moment you will be no longer "you," but "I," and the universe grows "I"."
A student of the occult science should attempt an understanding of the working system of the Rays and be a beneficiary.
Fraternally,
Dr Ramanujachary