IX. Expanding Areas of Conscious Interaction

The training given by the Masters in Their Ashrams to Their disciples has one main objective: to increase, develop and enable them to utilize in service their inherent and innate sensitivity. Let us, as we discuss these matters, avoid that much overworked word "vibration" and use instead the more simple and more easily understood word "impact". Response to impact is something we all register. Our five senses have opened to all people five great realms from which impact comes, and we are so familiar with them all that our response is now automatic and, though registered, is not consciously so, unless there is a planned reason and direction intended. We respond similarly and as automatically to emotional stimuli, and rapidly (very rapidly) the race is reaching out towards mental telepathy. Some few are beginning to work along the lines of spiritual telepathy. Few do more than register occasionally contacts emanating from a high source, and the result is usually also over-mixed with personality reactions.

Contact, with resultant impact from the soul, is also quite rapidly developing, hence the necessity for my laying the foundations of further knowledge which will clarify still higher contact, emanating from the Spiritual Triad and opening up areas of interaction hitherto known only to the Hierarchy. I refer here to the teaching which I have given out through a group of my disciples anent the Antahkarana. (Education in the New Age. A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Volume V.) All such developing contacts involve conditions covered by the two words: Contact and Impact. [59]

1. Contact can be defined (for our particular purposes) as recognition of an environment, an area of the hitherto unknown, of that which has somehow been evoked, of a something other which has made its presence felt. This something other than the Perceiver has usually been earlier sensed, has been propounded into a theoretical possibility, has later been invoked by the directed and conscious attention of the one who has sensed its presence, and finally contact is made.
2. <Impact is something more than simply registering contact. It develops into conscious interaction; it conveys later information; it is revelatory in nature, and can be defined in its initial stages as the guarantee to the one who responds to it of a new area for exploration and for spiritual adventure, and as the indication of a wider field wherein consciousness may expand more and more and register increasingly the divine purpose waiting to be more fully known.

Therefore, from the more normal field of what we may call ordinary telepathic perception (just now coming to recognition by ordinary science), through a slowly learnt process of invocation and evocation, to a state of consciousness distinguished by a trained sensitivity, the disciple moves. He unfolds a spiritual recognition which is controlled, understood, and directed to useful hierarchical ends. In these words, you have a very simple definition of the process to which we give, technically, the name: The Science of Impression.

Another point to remember is that this science is the basic Science of Sensitivity; it is the art of all responsiveness to phenomena and is peculiarly applied to the reaction, the recognition, the responsiveness, and the registration of all [60] phenomena to be found throughout the cosmic physical plane. This is the plane whereon our entire threefold planetary Life finds expression and which we have subdivided (for the sake of clear thinking) into the seven planes (so called) of our solar system - from what we call our lowest physical plane up to our highest plane, the logoic. In the earlier stages of responsiveness to the two phases of contact and impact, the first task is to develop the needed apparatus of contact, the medium of learning, the mechanism of registration, and then learning to use it constructively and intelligently. This work proceeds from cycle to cycle, in the earliest stages, with no conscious intention on the part of the unit of life, thus developing; yet field after field of consciousness is slowly recorded, and area after area of the surrounding physical, mental and spiritual worlds come within the arena of perception, and are mastered and controlled, until eventually the unit of life (I know not what else to call it) becomes the human being, self-directed, an individual. Finally the man becomes the Master, controlling and directing within the periphery of His wide awareness, in consonance with the divine Mind and Plan.