Letters That Have Helped Me

by William Quan Judge; Julia Wharton Lewis Campbell Ver Planck Keightley

This Lodge is not to be taken up in the pincers of criticism and analyzed or fixed. It is at once everywhere and nowhere. It contains within its boundaries all real Masters, students, guides, and Gurus, of whatever race or creed or no creed. Of it has been said:

"Beyond the Hall of Learning is the Lodge. It is the whole body of Sages in all the world. It cannot be described even by those who are in it, but the student is not prohibited from imagining what it is like."

So therefore at any time any one of its real teachers or disciples will gladly help any other teacher or disciple. But we are not to conclude that, because all are trying to spread truth and to teach the world, we, who call ourselves chela-aspirants or known chelas of any certain person whom we call Guru, can place ourselves at the same moment under the direct tutelage of more than one Guru.

Each man who determines in himself that he will enter the Path, has a Guru. But the time between that determination and the hour when he will really know The Master may be long indeed; in some cases it is very short.

We must now occupy a moment in some consideration of divisions.

Just as the merest private in the army has a general who guides the whole but whom he cannot reach except through the others who are officers, so in this order we find divisions of Gurus as well as divisions of disciples.

There is the Great Guru, who is such to many who never know Him or see Him. Then there are others who know Him, and who are Gurus to a number of chelas, and so on until we may imagine a chela who may be a known Guru to another chela below him.

Then, again, there may be chelas who are acting as Guru—unacknowledged, because pro tempore in function—to one or more other chelas.

Now he who makes the resolution above-mentioned, does thereby make a bond that rests in the highest Law. It is not a thing to be lightly done, because its consequences are of a serious nature. Not serious in the way of disasters or awful torments or such, but serious in respect to the clearness and brilliancy of those rays of Truth which we wish to reach us.