In the esoteric wisdom, the continuity of revelation is an axiomatic concept. Through Their beneficent earth service, all Avatars, World Teachers and Saviours of humanity—past, present and future, enable humanity, with each successive age to take its next step forward along the Path of Evolution.
Eternally
down the ages, and at every great human crisis,
always in the hours of necessity, in the awakening
of a prepared humanity to a new and wider vision,
the Heart of God, impelled by the Law of
Compassion, sends forth a Teacher, a world
Saviour, an Illuminator, an Avatar, a transmitting
Intermediary, a Christ.
Such a Teacher brings the message which will heal,
indicating the next step to be taken by humanity,
which will illumine a dark world problem, thus
providing humanity an expression of some hitherto
unrealized aspect of divinity.
This
doctrine of Avatars with its corollary promise of
the continuity of divine Revelation is found in
all the basic world religions, in every culture
and throughout the ages. It appears in the
doctrine of the Avatars of the Hindu faith, in the
teaching of the return of Maitreya Buddha or the
Kalki Avatar, in the belief in the Western world
in the return of Christ and His Advent or second
Coming as well as in the prophesied return of the
divine Prophet of the Moslem world.
It is upon the fact of this continuity, this
sequence of Messengers and Avatars, and upon
humanity’s need at this time, that the worldwide
expectancy of the reappearance of the Christ is
based.
Related to this Doctrine of Avatars, in the East
there is an ancient legend which conveys the
unique and exceptional relationship between the
Buddha who predates His Great Brother by 600 years
and the Christ. It concerns a service which,
the legend says, the Buddha will render the
Christ:
“In symbolic form, the legend runs that when the Buddha reached enlightenment, and experience on Earth could teach Him no more, He looked ahead to the time when His Brother, the Christ, would be active in the Great Service—as it is called. In order, therefore, to aid the Christ, He left behind Him (for His use) what are mysteriously called ‘His vestures.’ He bequeathed and left in some safe place the sum total of His emotional-intuitive nature, called by some the astral body and the sum total of His knowledge and His thought, called His mind or mental body. These, the legend says, will be assumed by the Coming One and prove of service, supplementing Christ's Own emotional and mental equipment and providing Him with what He needs as the Teacher of the East as well as of the West.”2
Here it might be helpful to consider the fact that in the ancient archives, before Christianity came to be, the term, “Christ” was a title, attributed to the purified or Initiated One. Just as the title of Buddha was given to Siddhartha Gautama as a title of attainment indicating his ability to access buddhic consciousness, so the title of Christ indicates the attainment of the 7th degree of initiation, which makes possible a love so inclusive that it encompasses the souls of all life on the planet, which is why this Office is translated as World Teacher and why the Christ is referred to in the esoteric wisdom as the Teacher of Love and Unity, the Unifier of East and West and the Master of the Masters.
As taught within the esoteric wisdom, it was in June 1945 that the Christ definitely and consciously took over His duties and responsibilities as the Teacher and Leader during the Aquarian solar cycle, being thus, the first of the great world Teachers to cover two zodiacal cycles—the Piscean and the Aquarian.
His
major task in this Aquarian Age will be to help
guide humanity into a civilisation and a state of
consciousness in which right human relations and
worldwide cooperation for the good of all will be
the universal keynote; the unity of the human
family will become an accepted fact, and the
scientific basis for the brotherhood of humanity
will be fully understood.