Does an initiator teach the truth? No man has the power to teach another the truth; man must discover it himself. What the initiator can do from his side is to say, "This is the path, do not go astray." The initiator will put his pupil on that path where the further he goes the more he will receive at every step; it is like a hand raising him upward. But the first step is the most difficult, and that step is taken by the help of an initiator on the earth.

What is it that the initiator teaches the initiated one? He tells the initiated one the truth of his own being. He does not tell him something new or something different. He tells him something which his soul already knows but which his mind has forgotten. There is a fable which illustrates this.

A lion walking through the desert found a little lion-cub playing with some sheep. It happened that the little lion had been reared with the sheep, and so it had never had a chance or an occasion to realize what it was. The lion was greatly surprised to see a lion-cub running away and being just as afraid of a lion as sheep are.

The lion jumped in among the flock of sheep and said, "Halt, halt!" But the sheep ran away and the little lion ran too. The lion only pursued the lion-cub, not the sheep, and when it caught up with it the lion said, "I wish to speak to you." The cub said, "I tremble, I am afraid, I cannot stand before you." The lion said, "Why are you running about with the sheep? you yourself are a little lion!" "No," said the little one. "I am a sheep; let me go, let me go with the sheep."

"Come along," said the lion, "come with me and I will show you what you are before I let you go." Trembling and yet helpless, the cub followed the lion to a pool of water. Pointing at their reflections in the pool the lion said, "Look at me and look at yourself. Do we not resemble each other closely? You are not like the sheep, you are like me!'

This lion is symbolical of the souls who become God-conscious, the souls who have realized the truth. And when they see the same divine spirit in another soul, their first thought is to take that soul by the hand and to show it that in it also there is the same divine spark which they possess. Therefore although outwardly it is an aristocratic picture, inwardly it is leading to democracy. The command of the lion to that lion-cub is apparently aristocratic, but what is the intention of the lion? It is democracy, it wants to make the little lion conscious of the same grandeur that the lion has. And that is the path of spirituality. Its outward appearance may not seem so, but its inner intention and its culmination are democracy.