Aim of Initiation

Initiation involves forging a conscious, working relationship with disembodied spirits and an existential knowledge of the way they work in our lives and our afterlives. It reveals the way they operate when we are awake, when we dream and when we are dead. We have seen that the histories we have been examining, such as the trials of Hercules, are structured according to different astronomical cycles—the journey of the sun through the months of the year and its precession through the galaxies. The point is that the same patterns that structure life on earth also structure the spirit worlds. Hercules and Job suffered trials in their earthly lives that have been recorded in the history of the world, but they will also have to suffer the same trials in the afterlife—unless they can learn to become conscious of them. And if they can’t, they will also have to suffer them in their next incarnation.

This is the aim of initiation: to make more and more experience conscious, to roll back the boundaries of consciousness.

In our individual lives—and collectively—we go round and round in the circles traced out for us by the planets and stars.

But if we can become conscious of these circles, if we can become conscious of the activity of the stars and planets in our lives in a most intimate way, then we are, in a sense, no longer trapped by them. We may rise above them, we are moving now not in a circle but in an upward spiral.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 10

Author’s emphases.