Your heart is intended to rule your head, your soul, your consciousness, your life, and the flow of energy which defines your identity in God. If you are to succeed on the path of initiation, the fires of your heart must be tended, intensified, and expanded. Now let me give an exercise to all who would make tangible this teaching¹ tendered from my heart to your heart in University Hall at the Royal Teton Retreat.

Maitreya's Fire Exercise

I want you to build a fire–yes, a physical fire. I want you to gather the logs and the kindling wood. I want you to arrange them carefully in your fireplace or in the fireplace of a friend. I want you to light that fire with a rolled paper on which you have written a note to me expressing your desire to be initiated in the cycles of life for the purpose of the integration of your soul with your Spirit. Take this note, roll it up like a scroll, light it with a match, and use it as a taper to light your fire.

This is an exercise whereby you anchor in the physical plane your meditation on the fires of the heart. The gathering of the wood is the gathering of the fuel of virtues manifest in life to increase the action of the sacred fire within your heart; it is also the gathering of the vices of the centuries to be consumed on the altar of the heart in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The kindling wood symbolizes the momentum of the holy Kumaras who come to earth to rekindle the threefold flame that flickers in the hearts of humanity. We would that that fire might become a conflagration of love, an all-consuming desire of God to be God in the center of the AUM. Thus in the center of your home, build a fire, meditate on the love of the avatars, on the coming of the Christed one, on the elementals who serve in the four quadrants of your being to move all energy and flow to the center of life that is your heart.

When you light your fire with the taper of your love, let it be the arcing of the light of your heart chakra with the heart of your Christ Self and the heart of your own I AM Presence. Then visualize the arc of our covenant as a geometric curve pursuing the curve of infinity, transcending time and space, and anchoring in the heart of Maitreya your love for the path of initiation. Over the arc of contact, I will send the lightning of wisdom’s fire, lighting the sky with God’s desire in you to be whole, to be free, to be disciplined by discernment, discrimination, and determination.

As you meditate upon the flames crackling, leaping, popping, and exploding, enjoy the action of the Holy Spirit burning through and through. Invoke and impel those fires, translated in your mind’s eye as sacred fires, into the etheric body and the vast subconscious of the mass mind, into the mental plane and the astral sea, into every physical cell and atom that must be purged of the laws of mortality.

The Three D's of the Initiatory Path

Now let us consider how the disciple of the Cosmic Christ takes the three d’s to implement his own divinity, carving the path of Deity by discernment, discrimination, and determination.

Take the faculty of discernment. It is the exercise of the yellow fire of the second ray. It is to separate with the mind, to recognize mentally, to detect with the eyes of the mind. Discernment is a faculty of the mind that enables the soul to understand the shades of difference as it examines manifestations in the relative plane of life and death, good and evil.

Once you have discerned the factors and the facts of a given situation, the torch is passed. And in the pink fires of the third ray, you exercise the action of discrimination; and by the penetration of the Holy Spirit, you isolate the distinguishing characteristics–the differences between qualities, person­alities, and choices in the planes of Matter. Discrimination is the assessment by love that results in the exercise of good judgment.

Thus the faculty of discernment in the mind becomes discrimination in the heart, and the resulting manifestation is the wise and judicious implementation of the best plan for the best results, given the circumstances of time and space. The assessment, then, of mind and heart becomes the judgment that is carried out through God-determination. By determination the disciple in the way of initiation delivers the thrust of the will of God, of action that becomes precipitation–good works bearing good fruits for a good harvest in the Lord.

Now let Morya’s chelas who have made their way to University Hall ponder the three d’s of disciplined divinity and invoke the balancing action of the sacred fire for the balanced threefold flame. Without mind and heart and the drive of action in hand, you will make little progress on the Path.

I leave you to your fires, that the material might become the spiritual through transmutation, that the spiritual might become material through initiation.

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Excerpted from Pearl of Wisdom Vol. 18 No. 50 by Lord Maitreya (December 14, 1975).

1. In this Pearl, the second on a series on initiation, Lord Maitreya reviewed aspects of the path of initiation and the “requirement of the law of life that you don the spirals of integration.”