Sri Sai Baba`S:Charters And Sayings

444 TALKS ON " AT THE FEET OF THE MASTER "

them is that man is a soul and the body belongs to
that soul. They do not realise that; they go on
thinking, (< I am angry, I am tired, I am jealous.""
You are none of these things* You, the soul,
could never be angry or jealous. The soul is not so
foolish, but the lower vehicles—yes, to any extent.
The first Initiation consists in making the lower
vehicles the channels of the higher life, so that, for
him who has passed that, it shall not be really possible
to think from the lower level, to think as a person-
ality. He might do so once or twice from mere
habit, but he would always in a moment know:

" That is wrong ; I am forgetting my birth-right; I
am doing that which belongs to a previous stage.??
He would think about everything from^the standpoint
of the ego, the Real Man within. That is what is
meant by the union of the higher and the lower self,
Yet that is a misleading phrase, because it treats
them as though they were two ; the truth being that
the lower self is only a fragmentary manifestation of
the higher which thinks of itself as separate. As soon
as it gets away from that mistake and realises that it
is only an expression of the higher, then the higher
can take command and work through the lower.
That means readiness for the first Initiation. Readi-
ness for the fifth Initiation means that the same thing
has been done with regard to the Monad and the
ego—that the ego in turn realises that he is only
a fragmentary representation of the Monad—that the