When an aspirant becomes voluntarily affiliated with a Master, he is said to have become a disciple. Discipleship arises out of the basic laws of spiritual life. The relation between Master and disciple is primarily a relation between the lover and his Divine beloved. From the spiritual point of view it is the most important relationship in a person’s life. The love which constitutes the core of discipleship is different type of love from that prevails in ordinary social relations. Mundane love is interplay between two centres of God-unconscious; but the love implied in discipleship is the love of God-unconscious for God-conscious. Everyone is God, but some are unconscious of their divinity and are conscious only of the body-state, some are partly conscious of it and a few are fully God-conscious. 

The Master is the Divine beloved, and when the disciple meets his Master, all that he has to do is to love him. He should love in spite of his weaknesses and not tarry till he can purify his own heart. The Master is the very source of purity, and to set one’s heart on the Master is the beginning of self-purification. When the disciple has whole-hearted devotion for the Master without any reservations, all his weaknesses are consumed in this fire of divine love of which he thus becomes the recipient, and thus attains incorruptible and infinite purity.

Complete self-surrender and unquestioning love becomes possible when the disciple achieves unswerving faith. Faith has to be short of direct experience until the aspirant realises God for himself. One of the essentials of the aspirant’s life is that he should have faith. Faith may express itself through diverse forms. A strong and vital faith is bound to take the aspirant beyond the external forms of religion and help him to eschew the husk and get at the kernel of true spiritual life

Once God is realised there is no question of faith at all, just as there is no question of faith when a man knows himself to be a man. But till this state of realisation is attained, the faith which the disciple places in the Master is his most reliable guiding light and is comparable to the steering wheel of the ship.