There's something concerning the disciplines of the personality I'd like to tease out of this discussion. Highrculling nailed it with the Ra quote. I'll add a few more and include the one Highrculling mentioned earlier.
39.10
Ra Wrote:The indigo ray, though precious, is that ray worked upon only by the adept, as you would call it. It is the gateway to intelligent infinity bringing intelligent energy through. This is the energy center worked upon in those teachings considered inner, hidden, and occult, for this ray is that which is infinite in its possibilities. As you are aware, those who heal, teach, and work for the Creator in any way which may be seen to be both radiant and balanced are those activities which are indigo ray.
52.7
Ra Wrote:Acceptance of self, forgiveness of self, and the direction of the will; this is the path towards the disciplined personality. Your faculty of will is that which is powerful within you as co-Creator.
54.25
Ra Wrote:While it is a primary priority to activate or unblock each energy center, it is also a primary priority at that point to begin to refine the balances between the energies so that each tone of the chord of total vibratory beingness resonates in clarity, tune, and harmony with each other energy. This balancing, tuning, and harmonizing of the self is most central to the more advanced or adept mind/body/spirit complex. Each energy may be activated without the beauty that is possible through the disciplines and appreciations of personal energies or what you might call the deeper personality or soul identity.
71.15
Ra Wrote:The indigo-ray energy center is fed, as are all energy centers, by experience but far more than the others is fed by what we have called the disciplines of the personality.
74.11
Ra Wrote:The heart of the discipline of the personality is threefold. One, know yourself. Two, accept yourself. Three, become the Creator.
Among other things, we can see that, by definition (in 39.10), an adept is a person who, for whatever reason, desires to do indigo-ray work. Now this, by itself, is interesting to me. I've met many people who pursued indigo ray work but whose desire to do such work was impure in the sense that it came from some childish desire or another (proving yourself, escaping reality, etc.). In fact, I've been one of those people. So I don't think it's enough to simply say that an adept is someone who desires to do indigo ray work. I think we have to distinguish a flaccid wish from a deep desire. Others might want to distinguish between the ego self and the true self, or between a lower desire and a higher desire. In any case, we probably shouldn't think of an adept as someone who is doing half-assed work for all the wrong reasons.
We can also see from these quotations that what makes indigo ray work distinct from work in other energy centers is that it depends more heavily on the disciplines of the personality (71.15). So the disciplines of the personality are the stomping grounds of the adept.
Ra gives us three directives that form the heart of the disciplines of the personality: know yourself, accept yourself, become the Creator. All three of these directives are vague to the point of being nearly incomprehensible. So I'll say a bit about each, based on my own experience.
Balancing the chakras does not have to involve visualizations of rainbows in your body. You don't have to know which chakra you are balancing when you do it. All you need to do is to take the time to reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and actions whenever you feel emotionally affected or you see that you have emotionally affected someone else. Learn as much as you can about yourself through these experiences, and accept whatever you find. Acceptance is only simple if you have the tools assembled for accomplishing the task. One tool that has been very helpful for me is the pleasure principle: what feels right is right. If you can abide this principle, acceptance becomes easier, especially since it allows you to stop worrying about whether you'll achieve the 51% STO threshold. The pleasure principle allows you to trust yourself much more deeply than any set of ethical rules.
The method you use to accomplish these tasks does not matter. In fact, I have found that the more aware you become of yourself, those you interact with, and your environment, the more compelled you will be to engage in balancing exercises. It's not something you need to force yourself to do. I think we all desire to do so when we feel emotionally affected. We want to make sense of these emotions and become more whole in doing so. This is all that is involved in balancing the chakras and it is also all that is involved in "knowing yourself" and "accept yourself"
"Become the Creator," however, is the challenging one. This directive is easily the most opaque of the three, and I don't think I had a clear sense of what it might mean until some recent experiences of my own intervened. I used to think that become the Creator necessarily involved some kind of sitting meditation or arcane practice. I'm sure it can, and that there is nothing stopping any of you from becoming the creator while sitting quietly doing nothing. However, meditation is only a tool to accomplish the task, and it is not even a necessity. This third directive is only possible
after the first two have been reasonably achieved. Now maybe this seems obvious to you, but as an overachiever who has always liked to do steps 1, 2, and 3 simultaneously, it was not obvious to me.
Knowledge and acceptance of self creates spiritual clearing in which the Creator may step in. What does that look like? Perhaps the best word I can use to describe it is a kind of reverie. By "reverie," I don't mean ecstacy; rather, I mean that your mind and body are moved without second-guessing. In reverie, your local will is given over to your unconscious will. If you have purified your unconscious will by sufficiently completing the first two steps, you will find within that hidden part of yourself, nothing but the sincerity of a pure heart.
This might sound like a basket of roses, but it's not. The thing about becoming the Creator is that you don't get to choose who you are. Your deep personality is already there, infinite and waiting, and all you can do is open your conscious self to it by trusting that its intentions are flawless. What you find may be shocking. The actions that this deep self leads you to take may be socially unacceptable, perhaps illegal. Even so, you feel no hesitation, because this is who you are.
The audacity of living out the deeper personality is, of course, a dangerous place to be if you are only lip-syncing the disciplines of the personality. It is very easy to act out an imbalance or a blockage under the pretense that you are becoming the Creator. I think that's why Ra stresses doing lots of lower work before turning to the indigo ray. In my experience, when you become sensitive enough (probably through lower energy center work), imbalances can be felt in your body. It's not difficult to see the difference between acting out an imbalance and becoming the Creator if you have this in-born imbalance thermometer activated. Sweating and shivering are the key symptoms my body gives me, though your thermometer is surely different from mine.
I think of becoming the Creator as analogous to being an angel. An angel is, according to Christian mythology, sinless. So, to become the Creator, you have to enter into a sinless state of mind. But sinlessness entails being without either shame or guilt. How can we be without shame? Accept yourself as you are, and never take any moral shortcuts. An example of a moral shortcut in my life: I've often opted not to help homeless people when I walk by them because I have no cash. The angel in me wants to help them, but I have not put her in a position to do so. I could, however, balance this moral account by always keeping a stash of $20 in small bills in my wallet, to be used only for giving away to the homeless.
All of this may be perfectly obvious to all of you, but it wasn't obvious to me.
Back to what Ra says. In 52.7 above, Ra gives another list that is meant to capture the essence of the disciplines of the personality: "Acceptance of self, forgiveness of self, and the direction of the will." Although there are surely distinctions between acceptance and forgiveness, I think it's safe to say that the two inner events are part of a single process. I'm not sure I know how to accept myself without also forgiving myself. Let's say that these two somehow capture the first two steps in Ra's other list: know yourself and accept yourself. This leaves us comparing "direction of the will" to "become the Creator." As I mentioned above, you can't really talk about desire (or will) in a spiritual context without drawing a distinction between two different kinds of desires. I have a healer friend who once said that we human beings have two wills: one in the yellow center and one in the indigo center. It is the indigo will that the healer (or adept) follows. I think of this as the will of the angel, or the true self, or what have you.
Finally, we have 54.25. Ra says, "Each energy may be activated without the beauty that is possible through the disciplines and appreciations of personal energies or what you might call the deeper personality or soul identity." It is reinforced to us again that removing energy blockages is a prerequisite to adepthood. I believe Ra calls this "minimal activation" of the lower centers, or something like that. What really interests me here is what Ra calls the "deeper personality or soul identity." Neither of these phrases appear anywhere else in the Ra Material. However, it does confirm the theory that there are two personalities at work here: there is the lower personality, or the personality shell, which Ra says falls away. We can think of this as a set of mental constructs designed to safeguard the self from trauma. Then there is the "deeper personality" which is revealed in the clearing created by fine-tuning yourself. The fine-tuning can happen when you attend to even the slightest signals given by your bodily imbalance thermometer.
Alright, I'll close this discourse. I hope it is helpful.
