Discipleship in the New Age, Volume I

Readers drawn to the wisdom in our featured text by Alice A. Bailey, Serving Humanity, may wish to explore her wider body of work. 

In Serving Humanity, Bailey and the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul teach that true service is not effort or moral duty, but the spontaneous outflow of a loving heart and an intelligent mind, arising only once the personality has cleared and aligned with the soul. Compiled from across her 24 books, it moves from the qualities of the true server out to a larger vision: a Plan carried forward by a Hierarchy of advanced beings. On Earth, that Plan is worked toward by a New Group of World Servers, scattered across every nation and field of human endeavour. 

Discipleship in the New Age, Volume I collects instructions the Tibetan gave privately to a group of his disciples, alongside his detailed teaching on the Six Stages of Discipleship. In her foreword, Bailey explains why she published what had been private training. She wanted to show that the Hierarchy is real and offers a structured path, and to correct the public's picture of the Master-disciple relationship as authoritarian. She describes it instead as impersonal and inclusive, concerned above all with expanding consciousness rather than commanding devotion. Each of the group's forty-one disciples received individually tailored instruction, addressed to the rays conditioning not just their soul and personality but their emotional nature, mental equipment, and physical brain.