The Light of the Soul

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. 

The Light of the Soul offers a paraphrase, with commentary, of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the ancient text underlying the school of Raja Yoga, traditionally described as “the kingly science of the soul.” By the Tibetan's own account, he gave the English paraphrase of the Sanskrit sutras himself, with Bailey contributing the commentary. It follows Patanjali's own four-part structure – the problem of union, the steps to union, union achieved, and illumination – and centres throughout on the mind as the instrument of the soul: trained and controlled, the mind becomes the means by which the aspirant is illuminated and personality itself is released. Bailey and the Tibetan present this training of the mind as fundamental to present-day needs, not a discipline belonging only to the past.