Discipleship in the New Age, Volume II

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 II picks up after the original group from Volume I was reduced and reorganised into what the Tibetan called “the new seed group,” working between 1940 and 1949. Its purpose was to anchor ideas for the coming Aquarian age and train a smaller number of disciples – twenty-two, rather than the forty-one of Volume I – as workers able to cooperate directly with the Hierarchy's plans. Foster Bailey's introduction is strikingly candid: individuals in the group benefited greatly, he writes, but “as a group achievement it was not a success.” The volume's teaching on initiation pushes back on two popular ideas – that initiation rewards good behaviour, and that it resembles the ritual 'initiations' of occult orders – presenting it instead as a progressive expansion of consciousness into ever larger wholes.