Excerpt:

 In various courses in the instruction of the School of the Natural Order we have laid out a road map for taking the journey—treading the Path—but we are not content to have a good road map and imagine, by looking at the road map, that we have taken the journey. Each of us individually must accomplish taking the journey. It is a fascinating experience and so full of interest that it is impossible for me to conceive anything as valuable, as interesting and as exciting as taking the journey. I have been over that Path not only once, but I have turned back and gone over it again and again and every time I go over the route, tread the Path, I get so excited and carried away—it is like a perennial joy song that sings louder and louder. So, to me, it is the most important ‘thing’ in the world; everything else is subsidiary, secondary—“suffer it to be so now,” etc.—to the actual process of taking the journey. With this lesson we will give a description of how to take the journey.

 

 First, let us set the goal. We are getting ready, packing our car and we want to get all of the paraphernalia and provisions in before we start out. We have an objective. Where are we going? We are going to the Mind level and we are going to a particular and a minute point on the Mind level. By the term Mind level, we mean the lowest division, the lowest state, or level, of what we are pleased to call Lights’ Regions. It is a vast, almost illimitable region. I say almost illimitable because I have not as yet found one who has encompassed the limits of Light’s Regions, and I have met a few who have gone a long way in Light’s Regions. But in this lesson when we say Mind level, we mean the lowest stratum of Light’s Regions. 

 

 The particular spot that we are going to is the Individualized point of each in relation to the organization which obtains in Light’s Regions. Each one has a ‘spot’, a place in a vast and thorough organization in Light’s Regions and each one must find his place. You can think of the most rigorous organization in the so-called objective world in which most of us live and have our existence, and that organization is only a dim reflection of the completeness of the organization that obtains in Light’s Regions. The organization in Light’s Regions is implacable. It is like the “hand that writes” and all our grief and tears cannot alter or change it the least little bit. That fact constitutes its great value—the same yesterday, today and forever, without variance or change. This is something to anchor to now when everything else is going to pieces, even to our culture and civilization. Each one has to find his spot, his place, in the great Hierarchy. That is one way of setting the goal.

 

 Here is another way of setting our goal, the objective on this journey. Each and every one of us is more or less concerned with this elemental, animalized-self, plus its propulsions and its urges and its demands which attract our attention, because we have to feed it and wash its teeth and comb its hair and dress it, etc. etc.; it demands a lot of attention. But while we are concerned with supplying its needs and trying to avoid falling under its baleful influence we are developing a personality out of our loving and hating, acting and reacting, and are more or less involved in and concerned about the moil and turmoil in the psychic side; we are also struggling to lift our sights above the demands of the elemental self and the emotional turmoil of our loving and hating. At the same time we are struggling to develop altruism, the milk of human kindness; we are trying to develop an intellectual understanding of the world in which we live; we are trying to keep up culturally with the educational goals in the world and we are trying to develop interest in mental, intellectual processes and are endeavoring to be something more than subservient to the animal part of us and the lower psyche perturbations. We are trying to develop the higher personality, the higher psyche. These three things, phases, or stages of development are going on in each of us all the time, night and day.

 

 While we are having our up-swings and down-swings, there is a Power-to-be-conscious on our higher-level struggling to be aware of itself, struggling to be aware of itself in Mind, in Light, in Truth, in Reality; struggling to emerge out of this embryonic phase as distinct, a Be-ing among Be-ings. To express it another way: the objective of the journey, the goal, is to intelligently cooperate with the Individualizing Process, to help instead of hindering the development of our Be-ing, the development of conscious immortality.