The Armour of Light

“To change the focus of the mind is the most difficult part of this training, and so the volte face of Paul of Tarsus concerns us closely. His academic mind could not accept revelation. He had resisted and reacted strongly against the unorthodox teaching and behaviour of Jesus the Nazarene. He approved of the crucifixion, and did his best to prevent the news of the resurrection from being spread or believed. Then out of the blue came a Voice, on a sound wavelength from the source to the personal receiving instrument. It was such a shock to Paul’s orthodox system that he lost consciousness, but his wonderful moral courage, after this experience, in making a public avowal of it, gives every academic and scientific mind the knowledge that the capacity for such revelation is universal.

It was a shock to me to find out that what I had fondly hoped was an enthralling personal experience was to be shared publicly or privately with anybody wishing to receive it. This health-receiving Technique in Light can be universal and is in line with the scientific discoveries of our day. We take the telephone, radio, and television instruments for granted. We turn knobs, and voices speak; other knobs, and faces and figures appear. The prophets of the Old Testament were connected with cosmic sound wavelengths. St Paul was important only as a disbeliever, and yet, because of his capacity, he was called and chosen.

Christ calls and needs us for He cannot work without us. Some of us respond; some of us do not. He cannot force us.”

You can only give what you have first received; train yourself, day by day, to receive divine Light.

Olive Pixley teaches that your body was originally designed to receive and transmit divine Light – and that the capacity to do so can be restored. The Armour of Light is her step-by-step guide to that restoration: what she called ‘the Christian Initiation,’ given to her through direct spiritual contact beginning in 1917. The premise is precise: Christ, whom Pixley understood as the first human being to earth the full voltage of divine creative force in a physical body, made that radiation permanently available to all who know how to receive it. The Technique is the method of reception. Part I works through nineteen exercises, each paired with a talk – the exercises training the body to receive divine Light, the talks training the mind through the mystical theology and lived experience that animate them. Part II advances the training for those who have thoroughly absorbed the first work. If you feel yourself called to “strike the match” within and step into service as an instrument of Light, Pixley’s work offers a clear, sequential path to awakening your receptivity and divine healing power.

In The Armour of Light, Olive Pixley is direct from the outset: reading this book without practising it will do nothing. “Think of your blood like the oil in a lamp, and set it alight every day. Do not merely read the instructions, but, as it were, strike the match.” The Technique must be lived – and can only be known through daily experience of it in the body.

Each morning before you rise, you begin with the ‘Ritual of Light.’ Lying relaxed – especially in the head – you think a radiant ‘Figure of Light’ at your feet, soles touching soles: the Christ vibration, earthed at ground level, the necessary contact point for divine power to spark through the body. In the same instant you send your vision upward to an Infinite Point of Light above – God the Father, the Source. Then you flash a circle connecting them through your own consciousness. The whole thing takes a moment. “Don't let the mind wander, or dwell lingeringly; let it flash, and then finish.” From this threefold awareness – Source above, Christ at your feet, yourself as the receiving instrument between – all nineteen exercises unfold through your day.

The mind’s role throughout is visualisation, not direction or willpower. Pixley emphasises that the Light is not symbolic but actual – there are as many substances in Light as there are in matter, each with a specific function, each working on a different part of your body and being. Whether you see or feel them is beside the point: “When you think of it, it is there, whether you register it consciously or not, and you are bound to feel different.”

This is the pivot the whole book turns on. Pixley is not asking you to achieve anything, or become more than you are. She is asking you to become less – less defended, less self-directed, less insulated. The body as originally constructed was, she teaches, the most perfect instrument ever made for contact with God. What stands between you and that contact is not incapacity but accumulation: fear in the blood, subconscious resistance to love, the ego’s habitual insistence on controlling its own life. The exercises do not add something new so much as clear away what blocks the current. “The life force is pouring down into the world, but unless you identify yourself with it, as Christ did, you will not get it. You will get it only by receiving.” Fear, for Pixley, is not an emotion but a physical condition: “Fear is introvert, but love is extrovert; love is a radiation, and fear an inner tension that screws up and constricts the physical self.” The Technique does not fight it directly – it simply brings in something stronger. “It is no good trying to get rid of fear until you are able to receive confidence to supplant it” – and as the exercises take hold, “confidence is coming into your blood and being, and fear is going out.”

Pixley asks one thing above all: patience with the sequence. She was given the exercises one at a time, with long intervals between, and she asks the same of you. “I had to become familiar with the shape, substance, and functioning power of each lesson in Light, and feel a reaction in my body, before I received a further lesson.” Do not read ahead. Do not skip the exercises that feel harder. The Technique is exact, and what you omit will show – eventually – in what you cannot do. And it asks nothing of your outer life in return. “He has never asked me to give up anything. What He needs of all of us is that we should be normal, practical people, efficient in both worlds, enjoying both worlds, but being self-indulgent in neither.” Through consistent application of the practices – your ‘daily bread’ – you bring a new quality of energy into your ordinary circumstances. What you give to the world is only ever what flows through you. It is a simple truth clarifying the urgency of the work: “What one receives, one unconsciously gives out.”