A spiritual initiate is someone who has reached a significant point on the Path to awakening, the stage of the First Mountain where parts of the Being began to be incarnated within. He or she remains being an initiate until the end of the Path, and perhaps even beyond it if they continue to take on themselves more Work.

For inspiration and insight, I would like to include here an excerpt from a chapter from a book called The Doctrine of Judas by a Gnostic teacher who, during his lifetime, used the name Lakshmi Daimon. In that book, he speaks about an apostle in relation to the Path. An apostle in this sense is not only referring to those people who were most closely associated with Jesus, but it also refers to everyone who take up the work seriously and reach incarnation of the various parts of the Being; in other words, those who were initiated into divine knowledge and complete inner transformation.

Here goes the excerpt:

“He who denies himself is that person who renounces all he has been and what he is; which is to say, he understands his world; his body and his mind are controlled by the forces of an exterior world which condition him to live in a certain way.

He who denies himself must profoundly understand that he, who continues directing all the events of his life, is his Interior Christ; that Being which is beyond the good and the bad; beyond affection.

That’s why, mere human inclinations, our earthly sentiments, must bow before the Work our Christ begins to realize as testimony of the Work of The Father being done in the person of he who lives and practices this Doctrine.

The Apostle lives to teach; teaches to learn; takes care of Life in order to live; gives Love to receive Love; stops thinking in order to feel; keeps silent in order to hear; walks to rest and rests to walk; looks to the Sun to ask for help; looks to the Earth in order to walk; feels Christ in order to know the Father.

He asks the Father to teach him to know the Son.

He finds his Mother in his feelings.

He finds the Christ in Love.

He finds the Father in his Wisdom; he sees Humanity as the expression of God.

He sees God in the people; he sees a drama on the Altar; he calms his thirst with the Holy Eucharist.

He prays to converse with God; he meditates to be with God.

He sees his Mother in Nature; he sees God in the profoundness of space.

He sees the silence of the nights as reflection; he sees the light of the day as the Prayer which fecundates the heart of Man; which is to say, he is the man who loves the Nothing; he seeks nothing because he knows that God is the Nothing and looks at the Nothing in order to fill himself, since it is known that the world of forms is limited, it is finite, that is to say, not everything is in it.

There, we shape ourselves into humans, as men who look for that day to make the great leap towards Infinite Space.

~ Lakshmi Daimon