The Sabian Path

Part Three: "The Vision"

Extracts of a chapter, "The Vision," from "The Sabian Way" by Jonas R. Mather. The text is pure Marc Edmund Jones, compiled from various primary sources.

What I am interested in is challenging people to stand up like men and women, face their problems, make something of themselves, and make a contribution to the world. I don't like flabbiness of character because I don't think it is godlike. We work toward a more intellectual understanding of our difficulties and a truer realization of their meaning, and, if anything, we seek deeper problems . . . We do not wish to make life easy but to find it interesting and satisfying in every depth of involvement.

The Sabian Assembly does as much as it can for each individual without making an individual cling to the group for support. The work insists that we are as prepared now for our spiritual service as we ever will be and that the call for service is to dedicate ourselves and give of ourselves as we are. Thus our major charge to the seeker is to give attention to the continual refinement of the higher or spiritual potentials that of necessity must be quickened in the pattern of his own individuality, but our minor charge, through which alone the major will be effectuated is to return to the practical world for the validation and realization of each new dimension of achievement within self. Absolutely everything in the Sabian work is designated to contribute to the individual creating the magic of it for himself.

The Sabian approach is an experimenting approach with the idea of establishing the best possible relationship in all situations — the capacity to make intelligent choices all along the line. Actually our work is the creation of an invisible fellow-feeling among us, and this is not directly social but rather is a real spiritual structure. . . . We are building a proving ground or practice field or experimental laboratory for pure personality.

The Sabian vision is not a picture; it is a doing. . . . We are interested in getting people to see that insights which once held them can hold them forever. We are not making the world over. We are not making people over. We are simply fulfilling people in terms of what they really are. The genius of the Sabian work is that we train people to orient themselves in their own already possessed experience primarily.

So we can say in the Sabian vision, Sabian work, Sabian enterprise that knowledge is our vital stuff. We interpret that a little differently in putting the emphasis not upon knowledge as a static deposit which has been preserved in books or can be engraved in the mind, subject to recall; . . . We are not denying the place of knowledge, but we speak more of knowledge as a capacity of knowing. Or, I put it in down-to-earth terms and say that knowledge ultimately or knowledge fundamentally is know-how.

. . . It [The Sabian Assembly] is not a cult, not a religion, not a science, but an intellectually cooperative group interested in these things and wanting to study them. The function of a spiritual work is to provide the social structure of interchange of conditioning of different order that works inward instead of outward or is directed to a culture of self's eternal center rather than an experience endured for the race and its shifting patterns that stultify personal considerations. Apart from the valuable and necessary discipline of true initiation, which the occult group must provide directly or indirectly in one way or another, the purpose of spiritual association is that an individual may have opportunity to practice self-presence and exercise adultship and spiritual competency.

The purpose of the work is to develop students who are interested in all this. And, who among them, will have those who can develop the capacity to do this sort of thing. That's my goal. The Solar path of initiation to which the Sabian Assembly is committed is the way of expression and outreach in which a given self remains irrevocably prior to all elements of its existence in every situation of question or issue. Nature herself evolves in the pattern of this Solar necessity, and according to convenience perhaps but really quite uncompromisingly always follows the path or function it has once established no matter how accidentally.

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