Sensitivity and Release into Love

One of the natural outcomes of following a spiritual path is the development of an increased sensitivity to impression.  This sensitivity becomes the means by which we become attuned to the Plan and to the part that we can play, in cooperation with our group, in its realization upon our planet.  The Tibetan Master placed sensitivity first in the list of requirements for which he looked in his students because it is an indicator of availability.  Too often the inner teachers are hampered by their students’ preoccupation with nonessential matters and their consequent unavailability for the work that needs to be done. Those who possess a sensitive response to impression provide a valuable inlet and can be used if they learn to work with the requisite discrimination. Such an individual is “alive, alert, keen to recognize relationships, quick to react to need, mentally, emotionally and physically attentive to life and rapidly developing the power to observe upon all three planes in the three worlds simultaneously.1”

The harshness and crassness of the outer world, particularly at this time of the “withering of the law” and the general breakdown of society, present real challenges for all individuals who are sensitive by nature.  Sometimes such people are hampered by a too rapid reaction and response to contact which can render them ineffectual at times.  For long periods in our evolutionary development we take one step forward into greater light only to fall quickly back into the old patterns and rhythms that constitute our particular line of least resistance. Quite often an undue sensitivity is the result of childhood traumas or experiences that have been carried over from previous lifetimes.  As a result, the individual often builds up walls or shells that serve, at least temporarily, as a form of protection that enable us to maneuver through life.  But eventually we rebel against the constraints we have constructed that begin to feel like a prison house and the shells break down under the inflow of a burgeoning soul impression whose keynote is relationship.

Part of the training during a certain stage of the path becomes learning how to safely assimilate the inner impressions and utilize them as a means of expanding our response to life and its events.  It is helpful to understand that even the inner teachers are also undergoing a rigorous training period prior to their emergence onto the world stage.  They, too, are learning those techniques that will provide them with the means of handling the harshness of the outer planes which we are told causes them acute pain.

The higher, spiritual sensitivity develops through the cultivation of the way of the heart as we struggle and fight our way into a greater measure of light through the overcoming of our glamours. Eventually we find ourselves entering into the freedom to be who and what we essentially are—beings capable of ever-widening and deepening manifestations of ceaseless and boundless love.  Love is not really a personality expression but rather a spontaneous outflow of mind and heart that embraces all it encounters. When we love truly, freed from the grasping of the separated self, we are released from so much of the pain that has for so long colored the human condition.

How we manifest that love is part of the transformative process that is underway upon our planet during this transition period. Love is the goal—in both the personal and universal sense. And while we’re clearly not yet capable of expressing true spiritual love, we are irrevocably moving in that direction. As we traverse this way of compassionate unfoldment—which is the path of the bodhisattva warrior—we find that we need to summon the courage and strength of the inner warrior. This strength frees us to express the love of the bodhisattva without being crushed by the experience or deterred from its undertaking by the seeming obstacles and limitations that abound in our world.

1. Alice Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, Vol. I, Lucis Publishing Company, 1944, p. 47

(This material was quoted with the permission of Lucis Trust, which holds copyright.)