El Morya on Chelaship
From Chela and the Path
CHELASHIP... Just as there are many would-be chelas in the world, so there are many who could be chelas who know nothing of the path or of chelaship. There are still others who, for lack of outer contact with our representatives, walk the earth as chelas yet know not that they are as chelas nor that they have our guidance on the path. What, then, is chelaship?Chela is a term meaning student or disciple of a religious teacher. It is derived from the Hindi cela, which is taken from the Sanskrit ceta, meaning slave. In the Eastern tradition of chelaship, recognized for thousands of years as the way of self-mastery and enlightenment, one desiring to have the mysteries of universal law imparted to him applies to the Teacher, known as the Guru, considered to be a Master (through the ages the real gurus have included both ascended and unascended Masters) to serve that Teacher until he is found worthy to receive the keys to his own inner reality.
The great yogi Milarepa endured many hardships on the path, including the unlearning of the false teachings of the dark ones who imparted to him a knowledge of the manipulation of energy. Thus he had to overcome the practice of black magic and to balance the karma of his misdeeds whereby he had wreaked vengeance upon his neighbors who had deprived him of his patrimony, first causing the death of many and then a hailstorm which destroyed their fields of barley ripe for the harvest. When he finally earned the right to be the chela of a true Master, his pride had been broken and in humility he walked the way of attainment.
In the Eastern tradition, the chela is the slave of his Master for a good reason–not for the loss of his true identity, but for the replacement of the pseudoimage with the Real Image of selfhood. The chela, by submission, day by day is weaving into consciousness the threads of the garment of his Master. The Master's garment (as the much sought-after robe of the Christ) is synonymous with the Master's consciousness.
In return for illumined obedience and self-sacrificing love, the chela receives increments of the Master's attainment–of the Master's own realization of his Real Self. Through the acceptance of the word of the Master as inviolate, the chela has imparted to him the Christ consciousness of his Master, which in turn is the means whereby the base elements of the chela's subconscious and the momentums of his untransmuted karma are melted by the fervent heat of the sacred fire which comprises the Master's consciousness.
Thus, by freely and willingly setting aside the momentums of his human consciousness, the chela discovers that these are soon replaced by his Teacher's mastery, which, when he makes it his own, serves as the magnet to magnetize his own higher consciousness and attainment.
Those who have observed this process have remarked in their ignorance that the chelas of the Ascended Master or of the unascended Masters are somehow hypnotized, or duped, or perhaps even controlled like robots. They have not understood the path of surrender. They have not perceived the path as the shortcut to that enlightenment and that freedom which they still seek in the world, knowing not that the world can never impart to them the freedom and the enlightenment of their soul's desiring.
Thus one man's bondage is another man's freedom; one man's freedom is another man's bondage. In truth all mankind are prisoners of their own karma, and all mankind are liberated through their own karma. This means that the causes which mankind have set in motion in previous embodiments produce the effects that reverberate in the world of today from the personal to the planetary level. And that which seems to be happenstance or the configurations of astrology all have but one source–past actions coming full circle according to the law of cycles.
The true Teacher teaches the chela how to come to grips with his karma–past, present, and future. He shows him how to study the law of causation in his own life and to trace undesirable conditions of the present to the core of past actions and interactions with individuals, family members, and the world at large. Thus the reactions of the past produce the ramifications of the present; and step by step the chela is taught to withdraw from the fabric of consciousness the blackened threads of unwise sowings of the past, that he might reap a more abundant harvest in the karma of the future.
To do this the chela must transcend the former state of consciousness; else he will repeat the same mistakes. To transcend that state, he must break through the paper bag of his own finite awareness–the cul-de-sac of mortal reason in which he has been floundering for centuries of incarnations. Thus when the pupil is ready for the breakthrough, the Teacher appears".