User:DaleSteinhauser/Harold W. Percival

The Word Magazine (1904-1917)

Our Message

• In the future, man will act justly and will love his brother as himself, not because he longs for reward, or fears hell fire, or the laws of man; but because he will know that he is a part of his fellow, that he and his fellow are parts of a whole, and that whole is the One: that he cannot hurt another without hurting himself.

• This is the Message we would bring: the strength to free the mind from ignorance, prejudice, and deceit; the Courage to seek the truth in every form; the Love to bear each other’s burdens; the Peace that comes to a freed mind, an Opened Heart; and the Consciousness of an undying life.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, October, 1904

Brotherhood

• No words will describe this consciousness. The world becomes illuminated. A consciousness of the Universal Self awakens in that one. He is a Brother. He is twice-born; he is a twice-born one.

• As the cry of the infant awakens in the mother a new life, so also to the quickened man is a new life opened. In the noise of the marketplace, in the stillness of the moonless desert, or when alone in deep meditation, he hears the cry of the Great Orphan, Humanity.

• This call opens to him a new life, new duties, new responsibilities. As the child to its mother so is humanity to him. He hears its cry and feels his life go out. Nothing will satisfy him except a life given up to the good of humanity. He wishes to provide for it as a father, to nourish it as a mother, to defend it as a brother.

• The neophyte, through many lives of aspiration and yearning for spiritual light, at last reaches the moment when the light breaks in. He comes to this goal after many days on earth, after many lives in all phases, conditions, circumstances, with many peoples, in many countries, during many cycles. When he has gone through all, he understands the traits and sympathies, the joys and fears, the ambitions and aspirations of his fellow men -- who are his other selves.

• Man has not yet come into full consciousness of brotherhood, but he may at least theorize about it, and begin to put his theories into practice.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November, 1904

Christ

• There is another, an Invisible Sun, of which our sun is but the symbol. No man can look on the Invisible Sun and remain mortal. By this light the consciousness of the material is transmuted into the consciousness of the spiritual. This is the Christ, who saves from ignorance and death him who primarily accepts and finally realizes the Light.

• We are not, as we fancy, living in a world of reality. We are asleep in a world of shadows.

• Every human being is a messenger, a son of the Invisible Sun, a Savior of the world through whom the Christ principle is shining, to the extent that he understands and realizes the ever-living consciousness within.

• From one who is conscious of this Consciousness we may have the true Christmas gift--if this is what we seek. The Christmas Presence is the entrance leading to the undying eternal life. This Presence may come while we are still in shadow-land. It will awaken the sleeper from his dreams and enable him to be unafraid of the surrounding shadows. Knowing the shadows to be shadows, he is not afraid when they would seem to enfold and overwhelm him.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, December, 1904

Cycles

• For the mind the purpose of life is to acquire a knowledge of its relation to the universe…

• Through thought in the mind the soul came into the world, through thought the soul became bound to the world, through thought the soul becomes freed.

• The brain is the workshop of the body, the thoughts which are fashioned from this workshop pass into space to return after a longer or shorter while to their creator. As the thoughts created affect the minds of men of a nature like unto the thought, so they return to their creator to react on him as they had acted on others.

• Thoughts of hatred, selfishness and the like, compel their creator to go through like experiences and bind him to the world.

• Thoughts of unselfishness, compassion, and aspiration, act on the minds of others and, returning to their creator, free him from the bonds of recurring births.

• This knowledge can only come to the man who becomes as "wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove."
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, January, 1905

Glamour

• THE soul is an eternal pilgrim, from the eternal past, and beyond, into the immortal future.

• Desiring to detain the soul in her domains, nature has provided for her immortal guest many varied vestures which she has cleverly woven together into one body.

• It is through this body that nature is enabled to throw her glamour over the soul and to dull the understanding. The senses are the magic wands which nature wields.

• How naturally the soul is beguiled. How readily ensnared. How innocently it is enchanted. How easily a web of unrealities is spun about it. Nature well knows how to hold her guest.

• When one toy ceases to amuse, another is cunningly proposed by which the soul is led ever deeper into the meshes of life. It continues to be amused, occupied and entertained in a continual round of change, and forgets the dignity and power of its presence and the simplicity of its being.

• It tempers itself and becomes immune against the magic of the wands.

• The talisman of the soul which will break the spell of the enchantress is the realization that wherever or under whatever condition, It is permanent, changeless; immortal, hence that It can neither be bound, be injured, nor destroyed.

• The wresting of the wands from nature brings to the soul two other wands: the knowledge of the relation of all things, and the knowledge that all things are One.

• The ordinary human life is a series of shocks from infancy to old age. By each shock the veil of glamour is pierced and riven. For a moment the truth is seen. But it cannot be endured. The mist again closes in. And strange, these shocks are at the same time made bearable by the very pains and delights that produce them.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 5, February, 1905

Food

• Food is an occult essence. It may not appear so to the men of our times, but in the future man will see and appreciate this fact and discover a food which will change his body into one of a higher order. The reason why he fails to do it now is because he does not control his appetites, does not serve his fellow-men, and does not see the deity reflected in himself.

• The universe is food.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, March, 1905

Consciousness

• Of all subjects, consciousness is the most sublime and important

• there has lived no one however great who has solved the final mystery of consciousness.

• The universe is embodied consciousness.

• The purpose of evolution is the transformation of matter until it finally becomes consciousness.

• Through continued effort each of us will at last reach the golgotha of suffering and be crucified between the matter of the turbulent underworld and the glories of the over-world. From this crucifixion he will arise a new being, resurrected in consciousness from the individual self-conscious mind, to the I-am-Thou-and-Thou-art-I soul of collective humanity.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 6, March, 1905

Motion

• The purpose of motion is to raise substance to consciousness.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 8, May, 1905

Substance

• Consciousness is in no way different in a lump of clay than in a saviour of the world.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 9, June, 1905

Breath

• All physical disease is due to over or under oxygenation of the blood.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10, July, 1905

Life

• Our earth is like a hollow and spherical sponge in a current of the ocean of life. We live on the skin of this sponge.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 11, August, 1905

Form

• Forms do not exist for the purpose of ensnaring and deluding the mind, although forms do ensnare and delude the mind. It is really the mind itself that deludes itself and allows itself to be deluded with form, and the mind must continue in delusion until it shall see through forms and the purpose of forms.

• there are two Paths: the Path of Form and the Path of Consciousness. These are the only paths. Only one can be chosen. No one can travel both. All must choose in time, none can refuse. The choice is as natural as growth. It is decided by one's underlying motive in life. The path chosen, the traveller worships as he travels.

• The larger form absorbs the smaller, be the forms physical or spiritual, and worship hastens the process. The concrete forms which are worshipped by human minds give place to worship of ideal forms. The smaller gods are absorbed by larger gods and these by a greater god, but gods and the god of gods must, at the close of the eternities, be resolved into homogeneous substance.

• When one can remain steadily, fearlessly, and without anxiety in the point of alone-ness, there is this mystery: the point of alone-ness expands and becomes the all-one-ness of Consciousness.

• Entering the life-stream of the world, wrapping itself in grosser and denser matter, sinking into the senses and drugged into forgetfulness by the emotions, the mind is encircled, hemmed in, bound down and held a prisoner by form.

• Through form the senses have grown into seeming realities, have forged about the mind invisible cords of the emotions that are stronger than bands of steel, but so delicately have they been fashioned that they seem akin to all that is dear in life, to life itself.

• Form is now God …Who dares renounce allegiance to the God? Who knows and dares and wills, can dethrone the false god, and use it to diviner ends; unshackle the captive; claim his divine inheritance; and begin the path that leads to the All-one-ness of Consciousness.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10, July, 1905

Sex

• The bodies of the first great period had somewhat the appearance of crystal spheres and were less material than sunlight. Within the crystal sphere was the ideal of the future man. The beings of this race were sufficient in themselves. They did not die, nor will they ever cease to be so long as the universe shall last, for they represent the ideal forms after which all forms have been and will be built.

• The duty to the world is that two beings of opposite sex should blend into one being to produce a perfect type, which type would include both father and mother within itself.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 1, October, 1905

Desire

• When the mind first begins to incarnate it is terrified and repelled by the animality of desire.

• Desire is an octopus deep-seated in the organs of sex… with blind selfishness of the vampire it draws out the forces of the very body through which its hunger is appeased, and leaves the personality a burnt out cinder on the dustheap of the world.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 2, November, 1905

Thought

• No thought can be killed at once as is sometimes erroneously believed…But if it is refused sustenance each time that it returns it will gradually lose power and will finally fade away.

• …man is the victim of his thoughts, who pursue him throughout life. Man thinks and nature responds by marshalling his thoughts in a continuous procession while he looks on with wondering gaze, unmindful of the cause.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, December, 1905

Individuality

• thought is karma.

• As the spider's world is limited to the web of its own spinning, so a man's world is limited to the thoughts of his own weaving.

• He lives in his own universe, the confines of which he builds. And what he believes to be realities are the thought pictures with which he fills it. As the web may be swept away and the spider remains to build another, so in each life the individuality causes to be built for itself a new universe, though most often the personality knows it not.

• The personality is a form, a costume, a mask, in which the individuality appears and takes its part in the divine tragedy-drama-comedy of the ages now being again played on the stage of the world.

• The personality is an animal which the individuality, the traveller of the ages, has bred for service and which if nourished, guided and controlled, will carry its rider through desert plains and jungle growths, across dangerous places, through the wilderness of the world to the land of safety and peace.

• Here the alchemist magician consumates the great work, the mystery of the ages - of changing an animal into a man and a man into a god.

• These are the voices of the personality, and the one which speaks the loudest will usually prevail. But when the heart asks humbly for the truth, that instant a single voice is heard so gentle that it stills dispute. This is the voice of one's inner god - the higher mind, the individuality.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4, January, 1906

Soul

• At certain moments in the lives of an individual there wells up from within a conscious expansion of consciousness… In a breath, in a flash, in an instant of time, time ceases and this interior world opens out from within. More brilliant than myriad suns it opens in a blaze of light which does not blind or burn. ...he has seen the light, he has felt the power, he has heard the voice.

• Thus he lives to help others; and so while living, acting, and loving in silence, he overcomes life by thought, form by knowledge, sex by wisdom, desire by will, and, gaining wisdom, he gives up himself in the sacrifice of love and passes from his own life into the life of all humanity.

• After first seeing the light and feeling the power and hearing the voice, one will not at once pass into the realm of soul. He will live many lives on earth, and in each life will walk silently and unknown over the path of forms until his selfless action shall cause the realm of soul again to open out from within when he will again receive the selfless love, the living power, and the silent wisdom. Then he will follow the deathless ones who have travelled before on the deathless path of Consciousness.

• The sum total of a life time's thoughts is the destiny or inheritance of the future incarnation.

• Man cannot have or use will freely who is not himself free, and no one is free who is attached to his actions or the results of his actions. Man is free only to the degree that he acts without attachment to his actions.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 5, February, 1906

The Zodiac

• Man was circular before he came into the physical world.

• It shows that the progenitors of early humanity have watched the development of early humanity during all the races and their cycles, until finally some have descended and taken up their abode in the dwellings provided.

• Capricorn is the sign of individuality, having attained which the human fulfills his obligations to others and becomes a god.

• The physical world is the arena or stage on which is played the tragedy-comedy or drama of the soul as it battles with the elemental forces and powers of nature through its physical body.

• That one who brings on miscarriage or abortion is in turn made the victim of like treatment when his or her time to incarnate comes.
  • The Word Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1, April, 1906

• Birth-Death-Death-Birth

• It is well that we cannot solve the mystery. To do so might destroy our shadowland before we can live in the light. Yet we may get an idea of the truth by making use of analogy. We may apprehend "Whither we go?" by taking a glance along the perspective of "Whence we come?"

• After asking the twin questions, "Whence and Whither?" and "How do I come?" and "How do I go?" there comes the soul-awakening question, "Who am I?" When the soul has earnestly asked itself this question, it will never again be content until it knows.

• This, our, world, with its atmosphere-the dregs of eternal Substance-is as a speck floating in infinite space. The soul comes from the eternal, but has lost its wings and its memory while coming through the earth's dense atmosphere. Arrived on the earth, forgetful of its true home, deluded by its vestures and the fleshly coil of its present body, it is unable to see into the beyond on either side of the now and here. Like a bird whose wings are broken, it is unable to rise and soar into its own element; and so the soul dwells here for a little while, held a prisoner by the coils of flesh in the time-world, unmindful of its past, fearful of the future-the unknown.

• The visible world stands between two eternities as a great theatre in eternity. The immaterial and the invisible here become material and visible, the intangible and formless take on a tangible form, and the Infinite here appears to be finite as it enters into the play of life.

• The paste, the paint, the costume, the footlights and the play cause the soul to forget its being in eternity, and it is immersed in the littleness of the play.

• From the time of copulation until the birth into the physical world the reincarnating ego is concerned with the preparation of its vestures, and the building of its physical body which it is to inhabit. During this time the ego is not incarnate, but it is in contact with the mother through the emotions and senses, either consciously superintending the preparation and building of its body or it is in a dream state. These conditions are determined by the previous development of the ego as to its powers and capacities.

• Each soul lives in a distinct world of its own, and of its own making, which it relates to or identifies with itself. The soul builds a physical body within and around a portion of itself for a sojourn and experience in the physical world. When the sojourn is at an end it dissipates the physical body by the process called death and decay.

• In the early stages of humanity the gods walked the earth with men, and men were ruled by the wisdom of the gods. In those times humanity copulated only at certain seasons and for the purpose of giving birth to beings. In those times there existed an intimate relationship between the ego who was ready to incarnate and the egos who were to provide the physical body. When an ego was ready and willing to incarnate it made known its readiness by asking those of its own kind and order who were living in the physical world to prepare a physical body in which it might incarnate. By mutual consent the man and woman thus approached began a course of preparation and development which lasted until the birth of the body. The preparation consisted of a certain training and a series of religious ceremonies which were considered to be solemn and sacred. They knew that they were about to re-enact the history of creation and that they themselves were to act as gods in the august presence of the universal over-soul. After the necessary purification and training of body and mind and at the particular time and season suited for and indicated by the ego to incarnate, the sacred rite of copulative sacramental union was performed. Then the individual breath of each merged into one flame-like breath, which formed an atmosphere around the pair. During the rite of copulative union the glowing germ of the future physical body shot forth from the sphere of the soul of the ego and entered the sphere of the breath of the pair.

• This was the way when wisdom ruled humanity. Then child birth was attended by no labor pains, and the beings in the world knew of those who were to enter. It is not so now.

• But the invisible germ, although out of its place in the world of the soul, is not cut off from the world of the soul.

• …for every part of the body of man there is a corresponding force and entity in nature, which is the body of God, and the beings who take part in the building of the body are bound to that part which they have built and must respond to the nature of the function which that part is commanded by the incarnated ego to perform.

• Each part of the body is a talisman to attract or guard against the powers of nature. As the talisman is used the powers will respond. Man is verily the microcosm who may call upon the macrocosm according to his knowledge or faith, his image-making and will.

• Thus is lived the round of birth and life and death and birth again. But this will not go on forever. There comes a time when the ego insists on knowing who and what it is and what its purpose is in the whirl of life and death? After much pain and sorrow the light begins to dawn for him in this land of shadows. Then he will see that he need not be ground down by the wheel of life, that he may be free from this wheel even while it continues to revolve. He sees that the purpose of the turning of the wheel through joy and sorrow, struggle and strife, light and darkness, is to bring him to the point where he may see how and desire to overcome death. He learns that he may overcome physical death by spiritual birth. Even as physical birth is attended by pain, so also does travail and much labor attend him who would help on the tardy race to which he belongs by bringing about and attaining his spiritual birth and thus becoming consciously immortal
• The explorer into the new world of immortality must not be less courageous than the adventurer into new fields who risks his life and spends his substance and endures mental and bodily hardship and privation and failure, in the hope of discovery.

• It is not different with the one who would enter the spiritual immortal world and become an intelligent resident thereof. Greater dangers will attend him than any adventurer in the physical world, and he must be possessed of the endurance and strength and valor and wisdom and power to cope with all obstacles and difficulties. He must build and launch his bark and then cross the ocean of life on to the other shore before he can be numbered among the immortal host. In the course of his journey, if he cannot endure the jibes and ridicule of his race, if he has not strength to withstand the fears of the weak-kneed and faint-hearted and to continue even while those engaged with him fail utterly or leave him and return to the beaten track, if he has not the valor to ward off the onslaughts and attacks of his enemies who would interfere with or prevent his work, if he has not the wisdom to guide him in the great work, if he has not the power to overcome, and if he has not, withal, an unswerving conviction in the virtue and reality of his quest, then he will not succeed.

• But all these are acquired through effort and repeated effort. If the efforts of one life do not succeed, they will add to the success of a future life of him who admits defeat only to renew the fight. Let the motive be unselfish and for the good of all. Success will surely follow the effort.

• Then instead of copulating only for the purpose of furnishing human bodies for the egos of their own high order and like character, they listened to the promptings of lower entities and copulated out of season and for their own pleasure. Thus were born into the world beings who were crafty and cunning and who made war against all human kind and among themselves. The immortals withdrew, humanity lost the knowledge and memory of its divinity and of its past. Then came loss of identity, and the degeneracy from which humanity is now emerging. Entrance to the physical world was given to inferior beings through the door of human passion and lust. When passion and lust are controlled and overcome there will be no door through which maleficent beings can come into the world.

• What was done in the early ages of humanity may be done again in our age. Through all apparent confusion runs a harmonious purpose. Humanity had to become involved in materiality that it might gain strength and wisdom and power by overcoming matter and raising it to a higher degree in the scale of perfection. Humanity is now on the upward evolutionary arc of the cycle, and some may, some must rise to the plane of the immortals if the race is to progress.

• It was easier for humanity to become involved into matter and held in bondage than it is to gain freedom from that bondage, because bondage comes by natural descent, but freedom is gained only through self-conscious effort.
• He who is informed concerning the law of spiritual development and birth, even though he be willing to comply with all requirements, should not rush madly on when wise men stop to ponder.

• The requirements for immortality are a sound mind in a healthy and adult body, with the idea of immortality as the motive in a life of unselfishness and of living for the good of all.

• The immaculate conception is attended by a great spiritual illumination; then the inner worlds are opened to the spiritual vision, and man not only sees but is impressed with the knowledge of those worlds. Then follows a long period during which this spiritual body is developed through its physical matrix, just as the foetus was developed in the womb. But whereas, during the foetal development the mother feels only and merely senses vague influences, the one who is thus creating a spiritual body knows of all of the universal processes which are represented and called upon in the fashioning of this immortal body. Just as at the time of the physical birth the breath entered the physical body, so now the divine breath, the holy pneuma, enters the spiritual immortal body so created. Immortality is thus attained.

• The Word Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, May, 1907

I in the senses 1907

• What is conscious without the senses is I. THE ZODIAC.

• We create ideals which are based on sensuous perceptions. The ideals become idols and we idolators.

• Left to the senses we should be circumscribed and shut in by the world of our senses; we should feed, act, live and die like animals in the world of our senses. But there is the "I" who is the dweller in the senses - on whom the senses depend for their keenness of sensation - and though the senses are his present masters, there will be a day when the "I" will awake from his stupor and will arise and throw off the chains of the senses. He will end his term of slavery and claim his divine rights. By the light which he radiates he will dispel the powers of darkness and dissipate the glamour of the senses which had blinded and lulled him into forgetfulness of his divine origin. He will quiet, subdue, discipline, and develop the senses into superior faculties and they will become his willing servants. Then the "I" will as the divine king reign with justice, love and wisdom over the universe of the senses.

• The "I" will then know of the realm within and beyond the senses, which is the divine source of all things, and will be partaker of the ineffable presence that is the One Reality in all things-but which we, while blinded by our senses, are unable to perceive.

• In the beginnings of the universe the one homogeneous substance differentiates, and through its one attribute, duality, manifests as spirit-matter. From and as spirit-matter are produced all forces. Thus comes into existence a universe without form. In the course of involution the forces produce the elements as their vehicles. Each force has its corresponding vehicle. This vehicle or element is the grosser expression of the force. It is the reverse side of its force, just as spirit-matter and matter-spirit are the opposite poles of that which was substance. All forces and elements are not manifesting at once in the beginning, but manifest only as and in the degree in which they produce the conditions for manifestation.

• "I" will awake from his stupor and will arise and throw off the chains of the senses. He will end his term of slavery and claim his divine rights. By the light which he radiates he will dispel the powers of darkness and dissipate the glamour of the senses which had blinded and lulled him into forgetfulness of his divine origin.

• The "I" will then know of the realm within and beyond the senses, which is the divine source of all things, and will be partaker of the ineffable presence that is the One Reality in all things-but which we, while blinded by our senses, are unable to perceive.

• From and as spirit-matter are produced all forces. Thus comes into existence a universe without form. In the course of involution the forces produce the elements as their vehicles. Each force has its corresponding vehicle. This vehicle or element is the grosser expression of the force.

• There are seven forces, with their corresponding vehicles, seven elements.

• The elements are involuted into bodies and become the senses of the organized body.

• These elements with their forces are entities, they are not chaotic nothings. They are brought together and unite to produce the body of man with its senses. The senses in the animal are governed and controlled by their corresponding elements, but in man the "I" offers resistance to the entire control by the elements.

• The signs of the zodiac represent so many great classes or orders. At the head of each class or order is an intelligence too sacred to make more than mention of to us. From each such great intelligence there gradually proceed in orderly procession all the forces and elements which make up man's body, and each such has its correspondence in the body of man as stated.

• The senses are distinct from the real I and cannot be identified with it. As the I comes into contact with the body, the senses delude it, they intoxicate it, they bewitch it and throw a glamour of enchantment around it which it is not well able to overcome; The I is not to be perceived by the senses; it is intangible and impalpable. As it comes into the world and is associated with the senses it identifies itself with some or all of the senses, because it is in the physical world of forms in which there is nothing to remind it of itself, and it is not until after long suffering and many journeys that it begins to identify itself as distinct from the senses. But in its very effort to distinguish itself it at first becomes even more enamored and deluded.

• The I is not to be perceived by the senses; it is intangible and impalpable. As it comes into the world and is associated with the senses it identifies itself with some or all of the senses, because it is in the physical world of forms in which there is nothing to remind it of itself, and it is not until after long suffering and many journeys that it begins to identify itself as distinct from the senses. But in its very effort to distinguish itself it at first becomes even more enamored and deluded.

• Losses, poverty, pain, sickness, sorrow, trouble of all kinds, throw the I back on itself and away from their opposites which attract and delude the I. When the I is strong enough it begins to argue with itself about itself. Then it is possible for it to learn the meaning and the real use of the senses. It then learns that it is not of this world, that it is a messenger with a mission in this world. That before it can give its message and perform its mission it must become acquainted with the senses as they really are, and use them as they should be used instead of being deluded and controlled by them.

• The I learns that the senses are really the interpreters of the universe to it, the I, and as such should be given audience, but that the I must learn their language of interpretation, and use them as such. Instead of being beguiled by their influence, the I learns that only by the control of the senses is it able to interpret the universe through them, and that by their control, it, the I, is performing a duty by giving form to the unformed and helping on matter in its involutionary and evolutionary processes. The I then still further learns that behind and above the elements to which he speaks through his senses there are intelligences and presences with which he may communicate through new and unused faculties which come into existence and are acquired by the proper use and control of his physical senses. As the higher faculties (such as perception and discrimination) are developed they take the place of the physical senses.
• That which remains conscious after the senses have been eliminated is I. In that brief moment of time man is illuminated in Consciousness. He has knowledge of the I as I, distinct from the senses. This will not last long. He will again become conscious of the senses, in the senses, through the senses, but he will know them for what they are, and he will carry the memory of his real being with him. He may then work on with and through the senses towards the time when he will no longer be their slave, but will be himself always himself, will always be I in the proper relation to the senses.

• One who is afraid of death and the process of dying should not engage in this practice. He should learn somewhat the nature of death and of his mental processes before thus going in search of I.

Personality 1907

• The first great race is presented by the sign cancer. The beings of that race were breaths. They had no such forms as have our present humanity. They were crystal-like spheres of breath.
• This first root-race did not die as did the races which followed; it was and is the ideal race for those to follow.
• The breath race did not live on the dense earth as our bodies do; they lived in a sphere which did and does still surround the earth. The life race existed within the breath sphere, but it also surrounded the earth. As the life race developed and put forth bodies, the virgo hierarchy of the breath race projected forms from its sphere into which the life race disappeared or was absorbed. The astral forms so projected lived in a sphere within the life sphere, which we may correspond to the atmosphere of the earth. As they became denser and solidified, they lived, as we do, on the solid earth. The breath sphere as a whole may be said to be the fathers of humanity, known in the Secret Doctrine as the "bharishad pitris."
• The forms absorbed life as the plants do and gave birth to themselves by passing through a metamorphosis analogous to that of the butterfly.
• Up to this period, physical humanity was without individual mind. The forms were human in shape, but in all other respects they were animals.
• The human animals into whom mind had thus incarnated, attempted to control the Minds, even as a wild steed might attempt to run away with its rider. But the minds who had incarnated were well experienced, and, being old warriors, they brought the human animal into subjection and educated it until it became a self-conscious entity,
• Unlike the first class of minds, this second class was unable to control the animal, and so the animal controlled it. At first the Minds who thus partially incarnated, were able to distinguish between themselves and the human animal into which they had incarnated, but gradually they lost this discriminative power, and while incarnate they were unable to distinguish between themselves and the animal.
• The third and last class of Minds, the scorpio class, refused to incarnate into the bodies in which it was their duty to incarnate. They knew that they were superior to the bodies and desired to be as gods, but although refusing to incarnate, they could not withdraw entirely from animal man, so they overshadowed him. As this class of physical humanity had reached its fullness, and as its development was not carried on or guided by mind, they began to retrograde. They associated with a lower order of animal, and produced a different type of animal, a type between the human and the monkey. This third class of Minds realized that they would soon be without bodies if the remaining race of physical humanity were allowed to thus retrograde, and seeing that they were responsible for the crime thus allowed they at once incarnated and were entirely controlled by the desire of the animal. We, the races of the earth, are made up of a physical humanity, plus the second and third class of Minds.
• What we have termed the world of the soul, is the breath sphere of the first humanity, which physical man enters at birth and in which "we live and move and have our being" and die.
• The ordinary man is a mask through whom the real man endeavors to speak. This mask or personality is made up of life, form (linga sharira, in which are the five senses), gross physical matter in the form of sex, and desire. These make up the mask.
• The fact is that all the early races are not merely things of the distant past, they are actualities of the very present.
• How may it be shown that beings of past races engage in the building and maintenance of composite man? The breath race is not encased in the flesh, but surges through it and gives it being. The life race is the atomic spirit-matter which pulses through every molecule of the body. The form race, as the shadows or projections of the bharishad pitris, acts as the molecular part of the physical body, and enables physical man to sense matter on the physical plane.
• One may distinguish his entity from the breath race by an assurance or sense (not intelligence) of his being, which comes in the everpresent coming and going of breath. It is a sense of ease and being and rest. We notice it when going into or coming out of a peaceful sleep. But the complete sensing of it is experienced in deep refreshing sleep only, or in a state of trance.
• The life principle is to be distinguished from the others by a joyous outward impulse as though one could from the sheer joy of life rise out of himself and fly with delight. It might at first be perceived as a tingling sense of pleasurable unrest which pulses through the entire body that feels, if one is sitting or reclining, as though he could rise up without moving from his chair or expand while still reclining on his couch. According to temperament, it may act spasmodically, or make itself known by a sense of forcefulness, but a calm and gentle forcefulness.
• The entity of the third race, the form entity, may be known as distinct from the physical body by the feeling of one's form within the body and similar to the feeling of the hand in a glove as being distinct from the glove, although being the instrument by which the glove is made to move.
• The desire principle is readily distinguished from the others. It is that which surges as passion, and lusts after objects and gratification with the tyranny of unreasoning force.
• Uniting with all these entities, or principles, yet distinct from them, is the thought entity.
• The real entity, the individuality or mind, manas, is distinguished by the immediate and correct cognition of the truth concerning any thing, without using the ratiocinative process. It is the reason itself without the process of reasoning.
• Each of the entities referred to have their particular way of speaking to us, somewhat as described.
• The desire entity, as such, has no definite form, but acts as a seething vortex through forms. It is the beast in man, which possesses extraordinary though blind force.
• The personality acting as the brain mind through the senses by desire, has the faculty of thought and reasoning. This faculty it may use for two purposes: either to think and reason about things of the senses, which are of the desires, or else to think and reason concerning subjects which are higher than the senses.
• The personality is the sensitive being who is proud, who is selfish, who is offended, who becomes passionate, and would revenge himself for fancied wrongs. When one feels hurt by the word or action of another, it is the personality who feels the hurt. The personality delights in flattery of a gross or refined character, according to its disposition and temperament. It is the personality which educates the senses, and through them delights in their enjoyment. Through all this the personality may be discerned by its moral code. It, the personality, is the entity which formulates a code of morals for its own and others' actions, according to the high or low development of the personality, and it is the personality which decides the course of action according to its acknowledged code. But all the idea of right action comes by way of reflection from its higher and divine ego into this false ego, and this light reflected as personality, is often disturbed by the turbulent restless motion of desire. Hence the confusion, doubt, and hesitancy in action.
• The real ego, the individuality, is different and distinct from all this. It is not proud, nor is it offended at anything that may be said and done. Revenge has no place in the individuality, no feeling of pain in it results from spoken words or thoughts, no delight is felt by it from flattery, or experienced through the senses. For it knows of its immortality, and the passing things of sense are in no way attractive to it. There exists no code of morals as to the individuality. There is but one code, that is the knowledge of right and its action follows naturally. It is in the world of knowledge, hence the uncertain and shifting things of sense have no allurements. The individuality speaks to the world through the personality, through the higher faculties of the personality, as its duty is to make of the personality a self-conscious being instead of leaving it the reflective self-conscious being which the personality is. The individuality is fearless, as nothing can injure it, and it would teach the personality fearlessness through right action.
• The voice of the individuality in the personality is conscience: the single voice which speaks silently amidst the uproar of the voices of sense, and is heard amidst this roar when the personality wishes to know the right and will pay attention. This silent voice of the individuality speaks only to prevent wrongdoing, and is heard by and may become quite familiar to the personality, if the personality learns its sound and obeys its behests.
• Usually there are two periods in the life of the personality which are especially marked. The first dates from the moment it came to conscious memory, or its first recognition of itself. The second period is when in it awakens the knowledge of puberty. There are other periods, such as gratification by flattery, the gratification of pride and power, yet these are not such landmarks as are the two named, even though these two are forgotten or are seldom remembered in later life.
• There is a third period which is the exception in the life of the personality. It is that period which sometimes comes in a moment of intense aspiration toward the divine. This period is marked as if by a flash of light which illuminates the mind and brings with it a sense or prescience of immortality. Then the personality realizes its frailties and its weaknesses and is conscious of the fact that it is not the real I. But this knowledge brings with it the power of humility, which is the strength as of a child whom no one will injure. Its sense of impermanence is supplanted by the conscious presence of its true ego, the real I.
• That portion of the memory which partook of aspiration toward immortality or the real ego, is preserved by the ego, the individuality. This memory is the heaven of the personality, the heaven alluded to or pictured on a gorgeous background by religious denominations. This memory of the personality is the efflorescence, the glory of a life, and is preserved by the individuality, and spoken of in the religions of the world under many symbols. .
• …may learn the secret and power of death-then death teaches its great mystery and bears man above its realm where age is in immortal youth and youth the fruition of age.
• Not one of the races or principles, in itself, is evil or bad. The evil lies in allowing the lower principles to control the mind. Each one of the principles is necessary to the development of man, and as such it is good.
• Desire is not a force or principle to be killed or destroyed, for it can neither be killed nor destroyed. If there is evil in desire, the evil comes from allowing the blind brute force to compel the mind to gratify the whims and cravings of desire. But this is in most cases unavoidable, because the mind who thus allows himself to be deceived, has not had the experience and knowledge, nor acquired the will to overcome and control the animal. It must therefore go on until it fails or it conquers.
• But personality, however great and self-important and imposing and proud and powerful it may appear to be, is only as a whimsical child compared with the serene self-knowing individuality; and the personality must be treated as a child. It cannot be blamed for things beyond its comprehension, though as with a child its evil tendencies must be restrained, and gradually it must be brought to see as does the child that life is not a house of play or pleasure, with toys and the tasting of sweetmeats, but that the world is for earnest work; that all phases of life have a purpose, and this purpose it is the duty of the personality to discover and to perform, even as the child discovers the purpose of the lessons which it learns.
• Then learning, the personality becomes interested in the work, and in the purpose, and strives mightily to overcome its whims and faults, as does the child when made to see the necessity. And gradually the personality reaches up in aspiration to its higher ego, even as the growing youth desires to become a man.
• Constantly restraining its faults, improving its faculties, and aspiring to conscious knowledge of its divine self, the personality discovers the great mystery-that to save itself it must lose itself. And becoming illuminated from its father in heaven, it loses itself from the world of its limitations and finiteness, and finds itself at last in the immortal world.

Veil of Isis 1907

• In addition to the glamour of the senses, money-power, politics, and priestcraft are withholding from the people the knowledge of Isis to-day even as in the days of Egypt.
• Isis, our immaculate mother, nature, space, wove her beautiful veil that through it all things might be called into existence and given being. Isis began in her immaterial worlds to weave and as she wove she threw the texture of her veil, more delicate than sunlight, about the divinities. Continuing through the heavier worlds, the veil was woven accordingly until it reached down and enfolded the mortals and our world.
• Then all beings looked and saw from the part of the veil in which they were, the beauty of Isis through the texture of her veil. Then there were found within the veil love and immortality, the eternal and inseparable couple, they to whom the highest gods bow low in reverent worship.
• Mortals then tried to place these eternal presences (love and immortality, ed.) into form that they might keep and feel them in the veil. This caused the veil to be divided; on the one side man, on the other woman. In the place of love and immortality, the veil discovered to the mortals the presence of ignorance and death.
• Then ignorance threw a dark and stupefying cloud about the veil that unhallowed mortals might not violate love by their endeavor to enshroud it in the veil. Death, too, added fear to the darkness, which ignorance had brought, so that mortals might not entail unto themselves an endless woe in striving to outline immortality in the folds of the veil. Love and immortality, therefore, is now hidden from mortals by ignorance and death. Ignorance darkens the vision and death adds fear, which prevent the finding of love and immortality. And mortal, fearing that he might utterly be lost, hugs and clings closer to the veil and shouts feebly out into the darkness to reassure himself.
• Isis still stands within her veil waiting until the vision of her children shall be strong enough to pierce it and see her beauty undefiled. Love is still present to purify and cleanse the mind from its dark stains and wounds of selfishness and greed, and to show the fellowship with all that lives. Immortality is for him whose gaze stops not within, but who looks steadily through the veil of Isis, and beyond. Then finding love he feels akin to all, becomes a defender, a sponsor for, and the savior or elder brother, of Isis and all her children.
• Isis, pure and undefiled, is homogeneous primordial substance throughout boundless, infinite space. Sex is the veil of Isis which gives visibility to matter though it clouds the vision of beings.
• According to the laws by which our world is ruled all beings who come into the world do so by sanction of Isis. She weaves for them the veil which they must wear during their sojourn here. The veil of Isis, sex, is spun out and woven by the fates, whom the ancients called the Daughters of Necessity.
• Souls take the veil of Isis because without it they cannot complete the cycle of their journey through the worlds of forms; but having taken the veil, they become so enmeshed in its folds that they cannot see as the purpose of its weaving, anything other than social or sensual pleasures which it gives.
• It is not to be wondered at that the human mind is so impressed by the thought of sex. It has taken long ages to mould matter into its present forms, and the mind who has had to do with the various changes of the forms of matter must necessarily be impressed by them.
• Though often impulsively, gradually, and unthinkingly, yet, nevertheless, the responsibilities of the veil are taken. The bulk of humanity to-day are like men-children and women-children. They come into the world, live, marry, and go through life without knowing the cause of their coming nor of their going, nor the purpose of their stay; life is a garden of pleasure, a hall of vice, or a young-folks seminary where they learn a little and have a good time. Without much thought for the future, all according to their inclination and environment. But there are members of the human family who see a sterner reality in life. They feel a responsibility, they apprehend a purpose, and endeavor to see it more clearly and work in accordance with it.
• Man… feels at last that there is some mysterious purpose working through and within the veil which he is wearing. He may often attempt to catch glimpses of the presence and the mystery which he feels.
• As the fires of lust are controlled and the veil remains intact, its fabrics become cleansed and purified by the action of the mind contemplating the ideal world. The mind is then not limited by the veil. Its thought is free from the warp and the woof of the veil and it learns to contemplate things as they are rather than as given form and tendency by the veil.
• Acknowledge the wearing of the veil, but do not make the wearing of it the object of life. Assume the responsibilities of the veil, but do not become entangled in its meshes so as to lose sight of the purpose and become intoxicated with the poetry of the veil. Perform the duties of the veil, with the veil as an instrument of action, but unattached to the instrument and the result of action.
• The veil cannot be torn away, it must be worn away. By looking steadily through it it fades away and allows the union of the knower with the known.
• The veil protects and shuts out from the mind of man influences and entities which would be very harmful in his present ignorance of the powers of the veil. The veil of sex prevents the mind from seeing and coming into contact with the invisible powers and entities that swarm about him, and which, like birds of the night, are attracted by the light his mind throws into their realms.
• There are seven stages in the development of humanity through the veil of Isis. Four have been passed, we are in the fifth, and two are yet to come. The seven stages are: innocence, initiatory, selection, crucifixion, transmutation, purification and perfection. Through these seven stages, all souls must pass who have not obtained release from the cycle of reincarnations. These are the seven stages which have to do with the manifested worlds, they mark the involution of souls into matter to gain experience, overcome, instruct, and obtain freedom from matter in the completion of their evolutionary journey.
• The veil of Isis is draped over high and spiritual as well as the lowly and sensual worlds. It begins at the sign of Gemini, substance, the homogeneous primordial element, there securely fastened, and passes downward in its sweep. Isis on her high plane no mortal eye can see, as mortal eyes can never pierce the realm beyond the manifested; but when a soul has passed through all seven stages, it then, from the viewpoint of aquarius, soul, perceives Isis as she is at gemini, immaculate, pure, innocent.
• Life as spirit-matter, is in the initial stage of sex. Beings at the initiatory stage of life are dual-sexed. In the following sign, virgo, form, they enter the stage of selection, and the bodies which were dual now become separate in their sex. In this stage the human physical form is taken, and mind incarnates. Then begins the stage or degree of crucifixion, in which the ego passes through all the sorrow which saviors of every religion are said to have endured. This is the sign of equilibrium and balance in which it learns all the lessons of physical life: incarnated in a body of sex it learns all the lessons which sex can teach. Through all incarnations it learns through performance the duties of all family ties and must while still incarnate in a body of sex, pass through all other degrees. The physical bodies only of humanity are in this degree, but humanity as a race is in the next sign, scorpio, desire, and degree of transmutation. In this sign the ego must transmute the desires from purely sexual affinity, into the higher purposes of life. This is the sign and degree in which all passions and lusts must be transmuted, before it may perceive from its plane the inner forms and powers which stand within and behind the physical appearance.

*Sleep 1907

• That which connects us from day to day is the form of the body, on which are impressed the memories of the previous day. So that after sleep we find these pictures or memories awaiting us on the threshold of life, and recognizing them as our own we continue our picture building.
• Sleep is darkness. In man, sleep, or darkness, is that function of the mind which extends its influence to the other functions and faculties and prevents their conscious action.
• In sleep the conscious principle of man may be quiescent and enveloped in dark ignorance or else may be acting on a plane superior to sensuous life.
• When one dreams, the conscious principle is in the head, or has retreated to that part of the spinal cord which is in the cervical vertebrae. So long as one dreams the ordinary dream, the conscious principle is no farther than the spinal cord at the upper cervical vertebrae. As the conscious principle descends from the first of the cervical vertebrae, it ceases to dream; finally the world and the senses disappear and sleep prevails.
• As soon as the conscious principle of man has removed from the physical plane, the magnetic currents of the earth and surrounding influences begin their work of repair of the tissues and parts of the body.
• Usually, well adjusted bodies are polarized so that the head should point to the north, and the feet to the south, but experience has shown that people, equally as healthy, have slept best with the head pointing in any of the other three directions.
• Usually, it is not well for a person to go to sleep lying on the back, as such position leaves the body open to many injurious influences, yet there are people who sleep well only when lying on their backs.
• Again it said that it is not well to sleep on the left side because there is then a pressure on the heart interfering with the circulating of the blood, yet many prefer to sleep on the left side and find no disadvantage accruing therefrom.
• Anaemic persons whose vessel walls have lost their normal tone, often have pain in the back on awakening in the morning. This is frequently due to sleeping on the back. The body, therefore, should be impressed with the idea to move or adjust itself during the night to the position which will afford it the greatest ease and comfort.
• Two life currents have to do particularly with the phenomena of waking and sleeping. These are the solar and lunar currents
• He who desires to sleep well should not retire immediately after he has argued a question, or engaged in an interesting conversation, or entered into dispute, nor when the mind is agitated, annoyed, or occupied with something of absorbing interest, because then the mind will be so engaged that it will at first refuse to let go of the subject and will consequently prevent the organs and parts of the body from relaxing and finding rest.
• After retiring, if one has not already determined on the best position in bed, he should lie on the right side in the most easy and comfortable position, relaxing every muscle and letting each part of the body fall in the most natural position. The body should not be exposed to cold, nor overheated, but should be kept at a comfortable temperature. Then one should feel kindly in his heart and extend the feeling throughout the body. All parts of the body will respond and thrill with generous warmth and feeling. If the conscious principle does not then naturally sink back into sleep, several experiments may be tried to induce sleep.
• But the best way and the easiest is to have confidence in one's ability to sleep and to throw off disturbing influences; by this confidence and with kindly feeling in the heart sleep follows shortly.
• The cause of this is that inasmuch as the guardian of the body, the conscious principle, has retired and its active organs remain at rest, the coordinating conscious principle of the form of the body takes charge and protects the body against the many dangers to which it is exposed during sleep.
• Lying awake in bed is seldom beneficial and often quite harmful. The best time for sleep, however, is the eight hours from ten in the evening to six in the morning.
• Sleeplessness and insomnia are unsanitary
• A dream is only the removal of the conscious principle from functioning through the outer physical organs on the physical plane to its function through the inner organs on the psychic plane. The process and passage may be observed by the conscious principle when the mind has learned how to dissociate itself from the organs and senses of the body.
• It is possible for one to benefit from self-hypnosis if it is done intelligently. By commanding the body to perform certain operations it will be brought more thoroughly under the influence of one's own reason, and it will be easier for the reason-principle to direct one's actions in life and of the body if the body is so trained as to respond to the reasoning principle at all times. One of such operations is waking in the morning at the time which the mind ordered the body to awake before retiring, and that as soon as awake to arise and immediately bathe and dress. This can be carried farther by directing the body to perform certain duties at certain times of the day. The field for such experiments is large, and the body is made more susceptible if these orders are first given at night before sleep.
• We get many benefits from sleep, but there are also dangers.
• There is the danger of a loss of vitality during sleep. This may become a very serious obstacle to those who endeavor to lead a spiritual life, but it must be met and overcome. When the chastity of the body has been maintained for a given period, that body becomes an object of attraction to many classes of entities and influences of the invisible world of the senses. These approach the body at night and in sleep act on the conscious coordinating principles of the form body, which controls the involuntary nerves and muscles of the physical. By acting on this form principle of the body, the organic centers are aroused and stimulated, and are followed by undesirable results. The loss of vitality can positively be stopped and the influences causing it prevented from approach. He who is conscious during the sleep of the body will, of course, keep all such influences and entities away, but he who is not thus conscious may also protect himself.
• Vital losses are most often the result of one's own thoughts during waking life, or the thoughts which enter his mind and to which he gives audience. These impress the coordinating form principle and, like the somnambulistic body, it automatically follows the bent of the thought impressed on it. Let him, therefore, who would protect himself in sleep preserve a pure mind in waking life. Instead of entertaining the thoughts which arise in his mind, or which might be suggested to him by others, let him bid them away, declining an audience and refusing to countenance them. This will be one of the best aids and induce healthful and beneficial sleep. The loss of vitality is sometimes due to other causes than one's own thoughts or the thoughts of others. This can be prevented, though it takes time.
• Let one who is so afflicted charge his body to call to him for help when any danger approaches, and let him also charge his reasoning principle to command any unwelcome visitor to depart; and it must depart if the right command is given. If some alluring person appears in dream he should ask: “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” If these questions be asked forcibly, no entity can refuse to answer, and to make themselves and their purpose known.
• Having charged the mind with the above facts, and to further prevent a similar danger of sleep, one should on retiring have a kindly feeling in the heart and extend it through the whole body until the cells thrill with a pleasant warmth. Thus acting from the body, with the body as a center, let him imagine the surrounding atmosphere to be charged with a kindly thought of positive character, which radiates from him and fills every part of the room, as does the light which shines from an electric globe. This will be his own atmosphere, by which he is surrounded and in which he may sleep without further danger. The only danger then attending him will be the thoughts which are the children of his own mind. Of course, this condition is not attained at once. It is the result of continued effort: of discipline of the body, and discipline of the mind.
• If one passes through this unmanifested state after he retires, he is refreshed on awakening because it is in this deep sleep state, if it is passed through in an orderly manner, that he comes in contact with the higher attributes and faculties of the soul and receives instruction through them, which enables him to take up the work on the coming day with renewed strength and cheerfulness, and which he executes with discrimination and firmness.
• In this state the linga sharira (astral-body), which is the design or form body, is the body which is used and through which the dream is experienced.
• The real dream state, however, is symbolized by what we have called the mental man. The mental man in his mental zodiac contains the psychic and physical men in their respective zodiacs.
• Only under extraordinary conditions does one receive conscious communication from the spiritual man. This mental man is the true dream body. It is so indistinct in the ordinary man, and so undefined in his waking life, that it is difficult for him to function in it consciously and intelligently, but it is the body in which he passes the period of his heaven after death.
• He who would benefit from sleep which benefit will react on his entire life would do well to reserve from fifteen minutes to an hour for meditation before retiring. To the business man it may seem a waste of time to take an hour for meditation; to sit still for even fifteen minutes would be an extravagance. Yet the same man would think fifteen minutes or an hour at the theatre too short a time to allow him an evening's entertainment.
• One may obtain experiences in meditation as far transcending those which he enjoys at the theatre, as the sun transcends in brilliance the murky light of an oil lamp. In meditating, be it five minutes or an hour, let one review and condemn his wrong actions of the day, and forbid such or other like actions on the morrow, but let him approve those things which have been well done. Then let him direct his body and its form principle as to self preservation for the night. Let him also consider what his mind is, and what he himself as a conscious principle is. But let him also determine and resolve to be conscious throughout his dreams, and in his sleep; and in all things let him determine to be conscious continuously, through his conscious principle, and thus through his conscious principle to find Consciousness.

*Consciousness Through Knowledge 1907-1908

December 1907

• By wondering what it all means, he manifests the possibility of his entering into a realization of another world within the physical world. But the task is made difficult by his not knowing how to begin.
• As it continues to experience, the mind learns the lessons which the pains and pleasures of the world teach through its physical body, and learning these it begins to learn to identify itself as apart from the body.
• The one element of fire is not that laya center which allows the passage of the visible into the invisible
• In our physical world are focused the forces and elements of the four worlds, and it is our privilege to come into the knowledge and use of these if we will. Of itself, the physical world is a crumbling shell, a colorless shadow, if it is seen or perceived in itself, as it is seen after pain and sorrow and misery and desolation have withdrawn the glamour of the senses and compelled the mind to see the emptiness of the world. This comes when the mind has sought and exhausted their opposites. These gone, and nothing to take their place, the world loses all color and beauty and becomes a bleak, arid desert. When the mind comes to this state, where all color has gone out of life and life itself seems to be to no purpose other than to produce misery, death soon follows unless some event occurs which will throw the mind back on itself or awaken it to some feeling of sympathy, or to show it some purpose in thus suffering. When this does occur, the life is changed from that of former habits, and according to the new light which has come to it, it interprets the world and itself. Then that which was without color takes on new colors and life begins over again. Everything and all things in the world have a different meaning than formerly. There is a fullness in that which before seemed empty. The future seems to hold new prospects and ideals appear which lead unto new and higher fields of thought and purpose.

January 1908

• The first requirement therefore for one who desires to enter into the world of real knowledge must be the development of a whole and healthy body. This is a duty which he owes to the physical world.
• The food which is taken into the physical body partakes of the nature of the physical body. The physical body of man impresses the matter that is taken into it, and when this matter is thrown off again it carries the impress and nature of that body with it. If it is impressed with disease, it carries the impress of that disease off with it and contaminates the matter of the world. If it carries the impress of health, it improves the matter of the world.
• the duty to the country requires that the benefits of the best experiences of a man shall be given to his country.
• The danger of physical health is that it is liable to run riot. When the body is strong and healthy the desires are usually fierce, and it requires a strong hand to hold the body in check and prevent its being hurled into dissipation and debauchery. If the body is controlled, the benefits derived from physical health are that it furnishes the material which by a process of alchemy may be used in the preparation of that body with which one may enter safely into the psychic world.
• As the astral body of man is that form which is constituted of molecular matter and which holds the cells of the physical body together, so the astral world is that form which holds the physical particles together and which appears as the physical world.
• As the forces and elements acting through the astral world operate into the physical world, so these forces acting through the astral form body of man move him by instincts and impulses, and by the storms of anger and passion which are induced or appear from time to time.
• The astral world is a world of learning and the physical world is a world of equilibrium of duties, of the balancing of accounts.
• The life world is that atomic spirit-matter which is the distributor of all the forces of the astral world. The astral world serves as a battery in which these forces are held, and through which they are liberated into the physical world. As the astral world is the storage battery of all the forces which are liberated and used into the physical world, so the linga sharira or form body of man is the storage battery of life.
• The atomic spirit-matter of life has no form of itself, as it is the primordial element and force which enters into the composition of all things.
• The thought world is the world in which the man of thought wanders when speculating on abstruse problems or seeks to know or speculate upon the mystery of life and the causes of phenomena.
• The reason why he is unable to know is due to his endeavor to locate the subject of his search in the object of his experiment and analysis. His mind is searching for the causes in one realm while attempting to discover them in a shadow.
• The world of knowledge contains the abstract ideas of all things which have been and which are to become manifested through the lower worlds, or known to man. It is a world of calm. In its primeval state it was and is the universal mind; the parent mind of all the minds of men. The parent mind from which have come and come the minds of men, each appearing to separate from the parent mind as a crystal sphere of breath within the all inclusive sphere. .
• These breaths are the individual minds of men. These breaths, incarnated a portion of themselves in the forms of animal man and endowed and surrounded those forms with minds. The crystal-like spheres are those who still endow mankind with mind and through the human form attempt to regenerate the world.
• The world of knowledge is the world of pure reason, of abstract transcendental mathematics, of the law of harmony, the absolute law by which all manifested worlds are ruled.

February 1908

• Our senses do not perceive spiritual things, yet there is a medium of communication between the spiritual world of mind and the world of the senses . Symbols are the means of communication; and symbols can be perceived by the senses. Although symbols can be perceived through the senses, the senses cannot understand nor interpret them.
• Before what is called the creation of the world there existed what religions call God. Philosophers and sages speak of it in different terms. Some have called it the Over-soul, others the Demiurgus, and others have called it the Universal Mind . Any name will do.
• We shall use the term Universal Mind. Much of what is said of Deity or God, or Over-soul, or Demiurgus, or Universal Mind, is to be here applied.
• Let us consider the Universal Mind under the symbol of boundless space, and that space to be in the form of a crystal sphere.
• Let us then symbolize the Universal Mind as a boundless crystal, or space, in which no object nor beings nor anything existed except boundless light. This we may believe to have been the state before any effort at creation or emanation or involution of the worlds was determined by Universal Mind.
• Let our next conception be that of motion or breath within Universal Mind, and that by motion or breath within this boundless crystal sphere or space there appeared in outline many crystal spheres as miniatures of the all-inclusive parent sphere, and that which caused them to appear as distinct from the parent sphere was the motion of the breath.
• These individual crystal spheres are the individual minds, within the Universal Mind, the sons of Mind also called the Sons of God,
• In the course of events the transparent space or Universal Mind took on a different appearance. As a cloud may gradually appear in a cloudless sky, so was matter condensed and solidified within the Universal Mind and the worlds came into existence
• These individual minds or crystal spheres were not all developed alike. Some had attained to a full and complete knowledge of themselves and their relation to their parent sphere, the Universal Mind. Others were ignorant of the Universal Mind as their parent and only dimly conscious of themselves as individual beings
• Those minds who were perfect in attainment were and are the rulers, the great intelligences, sometimes called archangels or sons of wisdom, and are the agents of the great Universal Mind who see to the enactment of law and who control and regulate the affairs of the world according to the law of justice.
• Those minds or crystal spheres whose duty it was to incarnate, evolved within themselves the ideal pattern of a set of other bodies which were to be formed, by which and into which they should incarnate a portion of themselves.
• Now, the stages through which the individual mind passes in its various phases of development are as follows: As the Universal Mind contains all that was and is to become manifested, so also does the individual mind contain within itself the ideal pattern of all phases through which it will pass in its development. The individual mind is not separated from the Universal Mind, but it is directly related to the Universal Mind and all that is in it.

• 30.5 It is not our purpose to describe here the formation of the world and the development of the forms thereon. Suffice it to say that at the proper stage of development of this earth world , it became the duty of the minds as crystal spheres to carry on its and their development on it. Within and from each of the crystal spheres or breath, different bodies were developed of varying density and form until at last the physical body was produced such as we now have it.
• It has taken ages for the mind to develop a physical body such as we have today. The physical body is to be the instrument through which man becomes a God.
• The physical body therefore is not a thing to be disregarded, despised, abused, or indifferently treated. It is the laboratory and divine workshop of the Individuality, of God, the Over-soul, the Universal Mind.
• To change our thinking and our bodies will therefore require much greater thinking and living than is now done, where our mode of thought is along the line of the senses and the cells of our bodies are keyed to the tune of the senses. With the present line of thought and with the body keyed to the senses, the matter of our bodies resists all effort of the mind to change its actions. This resistance of the body represents the accumulated thoughts and actions of all previous incarnations in which we have lived sensuous and sensual lives, as well as the resistance of the forces and elements of nature within the Universal Mind. All this must man overcome; all the resistance now offered by matter in its various forms will, when overcome, be so much strength and power and knowledge gained by the individual mind. If looked at in this light, all the obstacles of life, all its troubles and afflictions now regarded as evil will be appreciated as necessary to progress, and resistance in whatever form will be regarded as a step to power..
• At the present stage all the spheres in the crystal sphere of the individual mind are concerned with the physical body, for the form and the organs of the physical body are the means by which the mind plies the task of its and their development. The spheres are all powerful on their own planes, but to control the physical body they must labor.
• The brain, a thinking machine, hitherto used by the mind to minister to the senses, or by the mind suffered to be a mere sponge or sieve through which the thoughts of others passed in and out, is changed and stimulated.
• The region where creation may begin is the head. When the head is not merely used as a thinking machine by which the pleasures and advantages of the world are gained, as the body with its desires may dictate, but when, instead, the thoughts are turned to things of a more enduring nature than the froth and baubles on the surface of the world, then the head becomes a divine sanctuary.
• The feelings and emotions of the body have their analogies in the head. As the stomach may suggest hunger so its corresponding region, the cerebellum may yearn for spiritual food. As the heart may leap for joy when it is gratified by the object of its emotion, so will the inner chambers of the brain open with rapture to the light of the spheres of the mind, when these chambers are illuminated from the spheres of the body. The yearning after spiritual knowledge and the enlightenment received prepare and fit the brain for its creative functions.
• that when the brain has been changed from its sensual uses and abuses and is trained for spiritual knowledge, then it becomes a sanctuary of the divine and within its inner spaces there is a “holy of holies.” As the pelvic region was a temple for the building and elaboration of a physical body for the lower mundane world, so now within the head there is a “holy of holies”
• This psycho-spiritual body is born through its divine center. It is quite independent of the physical body

March, 1908.

• …he must learn to distinguish himself from all that enters into the constitution of his physical body. To many this is not an easy task, but for one who is ready for the work, nature will provide the means.
• Knowledge is attained by means of a series of illusions and delusions and the becoming freed from them. In each of the worlds through which man passes he is deluded by the spirit of that world and lives in its illusions; from these he awakens only to pass through an analogous process in the world next beyond.
• Many worlds must be passed through, many illusions and delusions perceived and lived through, before that conscious something which man calls himself, I-am-I, shall find itself in its native world and learn to know itself and that world in a fuller degree than it now knows itself in this physical world.
• The power of thought distinguishes man from the lower worlds and, by thought, he must work with himself for others.
• The thinker is of the matter (if we can call this high state of being matter) of the nature of breath-individuality.
• Men are slaves and cannot at once perceive the path to the world of knowledge, but they suppose they know the things of all the worlds as soon as they begin to see the world.
• Man should not become despondent and a pessimist because he sees that all so-called knowledge is as child’s play, that those who say they know are as children playing shop and soldier, quoting fables and explaining to each other how the wind blows, the stars shine and why they happen to be, and how they, the children, came into the world and from where.
• But now, having outgrown the senses, he has reached a similar plane, but opposite to the one he left in infancy; as he had grown into the reality of the world so he now growing out of it.
• When the mind asks itself who and what it is, and the unreality of the world and the limitations of its physical senses dawn on it, then it becomes its own teacher.
• At first, all appears to be dark, as the light of the senses has failed. Man is now in darkness; he must find his own light before he will be able to wend his way out of the darkness.
• In this darkness, man has lost sight of his own light. In the unreality of the world, his light has appeared to man as unreal as any of the objects of sense, or of the procession of illusions. The senses would teach man to consider his light to be as unreal as are all other things of which they had been the interpreters.
• But among all unrealities, the light of man is that alone which has remained with him, unchanged. It is by that light that he has been able to become aware of the senses. By his light only is he able to know of the littleness of his knowledge. By his light he is able to know unrealities; by his light he is able to know that he is in darkness and to perceive himself in the darkness. This light he now perceives is the only real knowledge which he has had throughout all his experiences in life. This light is all that he can be sure of at any time. This light is himself. This knowledge, this light, himself, is that he is conscious, and it is himself to the degree in which he is conscious. This is the first light: that he is conscious of himself as a conscious light. By this conscious light, himself, will he illumine his path through all the worlds—if he will but see that he is a conscious light.
• By his own conscious light, man will learn to see the different lights of the worlds. Then the physical senses will take on a different meaning than that of their unreality.
• To enter the world of knowledge after seeing all the worlds, man as a conscious light must remain in and know his physical body, and through his physical body he will learn to know the world as never before known. Out of the darkness of ignorance man must call all matter into the light of knowledge. As a conscious light man must stand like a column of light within his body and illuminate it and through the body interpret the world. He should leave a message in the world from the world of knowledge.
• then or at some succeeding time it may be that he, as a conscious light, will in a moment, in a flash of light, connect himself with Consciousness, the permanent, changeless and absolute Consciousness,
• Having become conscious that he is a conscious light, he can never cease to exist as such

April, 1908

• As a conscious light, man then lights up and makes clear everything which he will shine through. Eternity is on all sides; here appear no limitations. Time itself is only the matter with which he works. He fears neither death nor failure, but time, as matter, he must work with.
• This is done first with the physical body. He who as a conscious light would really enter the world of knowledge must improve and perfect the different bodies in his keeping before leaving them.
• He will see that each body is of a particular quality, and that among all bodies of his lower worlds he is the only one who is conscious of himself as a conscious light.
• He must see each in itself and the light which is in it; he must distinguish the physical from the form body, the form from the life, the life from desire, and see himself amidst all these in the different worlds to which they belong. He must attune each body to breathe and live in its own worlds, and through them learn their secrets and leave with them the message of their destiny
• The physical body is dead matter, in the sense that it has ceased to live in the higher worlds; the particles of which it is composed have been retarded in their movements in the worlds of life and breath and have become dark and heavy, hence the particles of which the physical body are composed must be revived and relighted. This is the work of man when he is conscious that he is a conscious light, and it is done in a lesser degree by the ordinary man before he discovers that great truth. Man, as a conscious light, must shine through this heavy, dark, physical body, and so raise its particles stage by stage by the impress of his thought.
• It is comparatively easy for man to so raise the matter of his physical body, as well as his astral and life bodies, once he is conscious of himself as a conscious light.
• Thus man, the thinker, shining through the body, perceives the physical particles of matter clustered within and about a form. Each of the particles of that which is called the physical is a little life.
• The pain and sorrow may continue, but they do not produce the same effect on him. He listens to them and by his light he perceives the lessons which they teach. He hears in them the song of the world. Gladness and sorrow are the flats and sharps of the song. It is the song of life-matter in bondage: a fretfulness of its bondage, but gladness that it lives. From this state man as conscious light shining into imprisoned life-matter, learns of nature in the grossest and most ignorant forms and in her lowest school.
• Desire is a restless principle which attempts to draw all forms of life to itself and consume them.
• Therefore, another world, farther progressed in evolution, must be brought to the assistance of matter in order that matter may progress beyond the state of blind desire-matter in animal bodies.
• The world which assists desire-matter is the human world, the world of intelligent mind. The world of intelligence in past periods of evolution had progressed to the state of intelligence and was able to assist matter, so that when the present manifestation had involved, and had, with the assistance of a guiding intelligence, evolved to the animal state of desire-matter, it was necessary that the intelligences as minds from the world of intelligence should enter into a more intimate relationship with desire-matter. The intelligences, minds, incarnated portions of themselves into the animal-human form and endowed the human form with mind. They are the humanity in mankind. The intelligences, we are, the minds, the I-am-I in the human animal bodies. Such an intelligence is that of which we have said, that it is conscious of itself as a conscious light.
• Man, conscious of himself as a conscious light, standing in his bodies, shines through them and becomes conscious of each and the world which each represents; he impresses on the materialized spirit the flash of his self-conscious light, and, thus impressing the life-matter, he causes, by the impression of his conscious light, the matter to be stimulated and to reach out toward the light, and so the atomic life-matter in the physical body is stimulated by the one who thinks of himself as a conscious light.
• He sees that all forms of the world are shadows quickly passing; that the world itself is only a shadow-land in which beings come and go like ghosts of the night, apparently unconscious of their coming and of their going; as phantoms, the forms move to and from in shadow-land, the physical world. Then he hears the joyous laugh and the cry of pain which add to the discord of this unreality in the physical shadow-land. From shadow-land, man, as a conscious light, learns of the unreliability and emptiness of form
• Looking for the cause within the unreality, man learns through his own form body that living forms are the shadows thrown into matter by the light of the minds of men. That each human form is the shadow which is the sum total of his thoughts of the previous life; that these thoughts summed up and judged in the light of his own god, the individuality, is the shadow or form in which he as a conscious light must return to work through, rebuild and transform it. When a man as a conscious light thus sees it, the form becomes alive with the thoughts of past lives. It is revivified when he as a light so shines on it and marshals before him the actions to be performed. The senses of that shadow-form become like the strings of a musical instrument which he must and does key so that the sorrows of the world, as well as the joys, may be truly heard and dealt with as they should be. He as a conscious light shining through and enlightening his form is reflected on all forms to which his light is directed; thus he brings them into tune and causes them to take on new life.
• He thus sees the world of animate beings being driven blindly about. Through the desire acting within his form he sees the animated forms of the world feeding on themselves. He sees the destruction of all forms in the world by desire and the hopelessness of the darkness and ignorance of desire.
• As man controls the turbulent unruly monster of desire, it acts on the desire in other forms in the world, and instead of stimulating them to anger, or lust, as before, it has the opposite effect.
• But when he is conscious of himself as that steady and conscious light, he compels the thoughts to be orderly in their movements and thus brings them into conformity and harmony with the order and plan of the crystal sphere of the mind.
• Then clearly seeing as a conscious light, man perceives himself as such a light extending through the physical particles and the physical world, through the form and desires of his world, and the forms and desires of the physical world, through his world of life and thought and the life and thought of the physical and astral worlds with their life and thoughts of the beings within them. Thus as a conscious light he enters the spiritual world of knowledge of breath-individuality wherein are contained all these and the laws and causes of their orders and the plans and possibilities of their future development.

May 1908

• Man, the mind, is the same in nature and essence as God, the Universal Mind, or Intelligence. He is this consciously or unconsciously, either in part or in perfection.
• Man is God in the proportion or degree to which he is able to know and act according to the plan in the Universal Mind.
• He is at one with the Universal Mind or God so far as he is able to consciously create, preserve and recreate.
• Without knowledge, he thinks and acts in darkness or uncertainty; as he nears perfection, he thinks and acts with the light of knowledge. The process of passing from darkness into light, from ignorant desire, into knowledge, is through thought. The mind begins to think through the primitive races. As it continues to think, it changes or improves the type of the race or its capacity to think until it creates a perfect instrument through which it thinks justly and wisely.
• The crystal sphere of the mind begins its work in this world by trying to breathe itself into rhythmic movement through the animal human form.
• The animal human form resists the motion of the crystal sphere of the mind. From this resistance is born a flash of thought.
• Through many lives, through many races, the human animal forms compel by desire the incarnating mind breathed into them from the crystal sphere of the mind; by the continued breathing and incarnating, the mind gradually overcomes the resistance of desire; then the desire is, through thought, first compelled and later trained and educated to act with, not against, the mind.
• The mind, incarnated from its crystal sphere, is ignorant of its bodies and the worlds to which it is related. .
• To the mind, ignorance is darkness, but when it discerns itself, the mind knows; it is knowledge, the light of knowledge; it is a column or sphere of conscious light which knows.
• This light, this knowledge, may be striven for and either grown into by a persistent process of reasoning, or it may shine through and illuminate space when it comes like an infinite flash of brilliance, or it may dawn and grow into the unfailing lightness as of myriad suns, while in deep meditation. But however it comes, the mind knows itself by its own conscious light.
• After it has discovered itself by its own conscious light and become aware of the world of knowledge, darkness will again come to the mind, though the knowledge remains and cannot be lost. The darkness comes when the mind leaves the world of knowledge and becomes again conscious of the bodies to which it is related, and from which it is not yet freed.
• While in ignorance and darkness, the mind is on its cross of flesh and is kept in the lower worlds of matter. With knowledge, the mind loosens the bonds of flesh and is freed from the lower worlds, even though it remains in them. After the mind is freed from the bonds of the flesh it may act from the world of knowledge and still remain in its body of flesh.
• All this is done through thought. Thought is the medium of communication between the spiritual world of knowledge and the lower worlds. Thought is the result of the action and reaction of mind and desire, and thought is also the cause of all phenomena appearing in all the worlds below the world of knowledge. Through thought the universe is created; through thought the universe is preserved; through thought the universe is destroyed or re-created.
• Not knowing itself and deluded by the senses into the belief that its existence depends on the body, the personality uses every means to protect and preserve the body, even at the expense of others, and, like a frightened shipwrecked man clinging to a sinking spar, it disappears; it is overcome by the ignorance of death. So the mind, in its passage through the lower to the more developed races, continues to think and act until an intense feeling of separateness and selfishness for its personality is developed and it continues to alternately live and die through civilizations and races. In this way the mind builds up and destroys civilizations in the course of its incarnations.
• But there comes a time when the mind reaches its maturity; then if it is to progress instead of traveling continually around the same beaten track, it must think outside of and away from the senses. It does not know how it shall think of that which is not associated with one or more of the senses.
• Like a young bird which prefers to remain in its familiar nest, fears to test its wings, so the mind prefers to think of sensuous things.
• Like the bird, it may flutter and fall, not having the confidence which comes with experience, but with repeated trials it finds its wings and, with experience, confidence comes. Then it may soar and take long flights into the hitherto unknown. The first efforts of the mind to think apart from the senses are attended by many fears, pains and uncertainties; but after the first problem has been solved there comes a satisfaction which repays all efforts. The ability to enter an unknown sphere, to take part in hitherto unknown processes, brings a joy and mental exhilaration which is followed by mental strength rather than exhaustion. So with each problem solved, the confidence which comes with successful mental voyages is assured; the mind has then no fears as to its strength and ability to travel, search and discover.
• The mind then begins a course of reasoning as to the causes of phenomena; it discovers that it must proceed from universals to particulars, from cause to effect, instead of from effect to cause; that it must have an idea of the plan of a thing if it is to know where any particular part of that thing belongs. All difficulties are overcome by continued effort.
• As it went out into the world through the senses to gather information and experience of the world, so now, when it would enter its own world, the mental world, it has to struggle to become acquainted with the ideas of that world.
• It must leave the senses behind. This it finds difficult to do. Like the young bird which leaves its nest, it must depend upon its wings for flight.
• When the mind is ready for flight in its own world, the mental world, it is prompted by a yearning inward and upward. It closes its senses temporarily by mental abstraction, aspires, and then, like a flame, it leaps upward.
• But it does not as readily become acquainted with its world as does the bird. The mental world at first appears to the mind to be dark, without color and without anything to guide it in its flight. It has, therefore, to find its poise and make its own paths through the to it pathless spaces of the mental world.
• This it does gradually and as it learns to think clearly. As it learns to think clearly, the mental world, which had appeared to be a chaos of darkness, becomes a cosmos of light.
• By its own light the mind perceives the light of the mental world and the currents of the thoughts of other minds are seen as the roads which have been made by the world’s great thinkers. These currents of thoughts are the beaten roads of the mental world along which the minds of the men in the world have moved. The mind must turn aside from the beaten tracks in the mental world. It must soar upward and upward still, and by its own light it must open the path and create a higher current of thought in order that those minds who now follow on the beaten track in the mental world may see their way to pass into higher altitudes of life and thought. .
• To the mind who is so able to rise in aspiration and clear sight there comes an inflow of strength and power and a feeling of ecstatic content and confidence that justice is the order of the universe.
• Then it is seen that as the arterial and venous blood flows through the body of man, so there are streams of life and thought which circulate through the physical world from the mental and the surrounding worlds; that the economy of nature and the health and disease of humanity is carried on by this circulation. As the venous blood returns to the heart and lungs and is purified, so what are called evil thoughts pass into the mind of man, where they should be cleansed of their impurities and sent forth as purified thoughts—a power for good.
• As the mind is prepared it may have reflected into it the light from the spiritual world of knowledge.
• Before it was capable of receiving the light of the spiritual world of knowledge, the mind had to free itself from such impediments as laziness, hatred, anger, envy, restlessness, fancy, hypocrisy, doubt, suspicion, sleep and fear. These and other impediments are the colors and lights of the life of the mind. They are like turbulent clouds which enclose and surround the mind and shut out the light from the spiritual world of knowledge. As the impediments of the mind were suppressed, the clouds vanished and the mind became more quiet and restful, and it was then possible for it to gain entrance into the world of knowledge.
• The mind gained entrance and found its way into the mental world by thought; but thought could take the mind to the entrance only of the world of knowledge.
• The mind could not enter the world of knowledge by thought, for thought is the boundary and limit of the mental world, whereas the world of knowledge passes boundless through all the lower worlds.
• The world of knowledge is entered by the knowledge of self. When one knows who and what he is he discovers the world of knowledge. It is not known before. This world of knowledge reaches into and includes all the lower worlds.
• The light of the spiritual world of knowledge is constantly present through all our worlds, but we have no eyes to perceive it, just as animals have no eyes to perceive the light of the mental world which thinkers enjoy. The light of knowledge is to men as darkness, even as the light of the ordinary mind is known to be the darkness of confusion and ignorance when seen by the light of knowledge.
• When man as a self-conscious light first discovered himself to be such he got the first glimmer of real light. When he saw himself as a conscious light there began to dawn for him the light from the spiritual world of knowledge. As he continued to see his light, he as a conscious light became stronger and more luminous, and as the conscious light of Self continued, the impediments of the mind were burned up as dross. As the impediments were burned out, he as a conscious light became stronger, more radiant and effulgent. Then the light of the spiritual world of knowledge was perceived clearly and steadily.
• The things of the physical world are opaque and dark and dense; the things of the psychic world are dark, but not opaque; the things of the mental world are light and dark; the things of all these worlds reflect and throw shadows, but there are no shadows in the world of knowledge. Each thing is there as it really is; each thing is a light in itself and there is no thing to throw a shadow.
• There is a thrill and joy of strength and power when this is known. Then even as man found his place in this physical world, so the mind as a self-conscious light knows itself to be such; it becomes a law-abiding resident in the spiritual abstract world of knowledge and takes its place and order in that world.
• There is a place and a work for it in the world of knowledge even as there is a place and a purpose for everything in this physical world. As its place is known and its work done, it gains in strength and power as exercise causes an organ to increase in strength and efficiency in the physical world.
• The work of the mind who has found its place in the world of knowledge is with the worlds of phenomena. Its work is to transform darkness into light, to bring order out of seeming confusion, to prepare the worlds of darkness that they may be illuminated by the light of reason.
• Omnipotence is felt; all things are possible. The mind is immortal, a God among Gods. Now, surely man as a self-conscious light has reached the fullness of his strength and power and has attained the fullness of perfection; further progress seems impossible.
• When this period is reached the mind decides whether it shall maintain its identity apart from those who have not attained its high estate, or else return to the worlds where other minds have not discovered themselves nor grown out of the sphere of sensuous dogmas.
• At this period a choice is made. It is the most important moment experienced by the immortal.
• Worlds may depend on the decision made, for the one who decides is an immortal.
• No power can destroy him. He possesses knowledge and power. He can create and destroy. He is an immortal.
• But even as an immortal he is not yet free from all delusion, else there would be no hesitation in choice; his decision would be spontaneous. The longer decision is deferred the less the choice is liable to be right when made.
• The doubt which prevents immediate choice is this: Throughout the ages required to evolve forms and build bodies, it was necessary for the mind to think of form, in thinking of form it had connected Self with form. The connecting of self with form had continued even after the mind had discovered itself as a self-conscious light, though it continued in a lesser degree than when man conceived himself to be his physical body. To the self-conscious light who is immortal, the idea of separateness of self remained. Knowing, therefore, the long ages which had been taken to attain to immortality, the mind may conceive that if it again mingled with poor humanity—who will not seem to profit by experience—there will be a waste of all its past effort and a loss to it of its high position. At this time, it may even seem to the immortal that if it again became intimate with human beings it would lose its immortality. So it continues until the choice is made.
• If it chooses to remain immortal in the spiritual world of knowledge it remains there. Looking down from the light of the spiritual world of knowledge, it sees the conflicting thoughts of the world of men, the cauldron of desires of the psychic astral world and the fierce turmoil of passion in the physical world. The world with its mankind appears like so many worms or wolves who crawl and growl over each other; the littleness and futility of human effort is seen and despised and the immortal is satisfied in having chosen to remain apart from exaggerated littleness and pernicious indulgences, fierce greed and struggling ambitions and uncertain sentiments of the sensations with their attendant ever-changing ideals, which all go to make up the petty delusions of the world. The little physical world loses interest for the immortal and it disappears. .
• He may wrap himself around with power and live in the world of his own creation to such a degree that all other things may become entirely absent. To such an extent may this be carried that he may remain conscious only of his being in his world throughout the eternities.
• It is different with the immortal who makes the other choice. Having reached the fullness of Self as a self-conscious light and attained his immortality, knowing himself among other immortals, he still perceives and knows the kinship between himself and all that lives; knowing that he knows, and that humanity knows not, he decides to continue with humanity that it might share his knowledge; and, though humanity should frown upon, deny or try to scourge him, he will still remain, as will a natural mother who soothes her child while it ignorantly and blindly pushes her away.
• When this choice is made and the immortal wills to remain as a worker with mankind, there comes an accession of glory and a fullness of love and power that includes every existing thing. Knowledge becomes the great wisdom, the wisdom which knows the littleness of knowledge.
• The ideas and the ideal forms and all things in the world of knowledge are in their turn known to be as impermanent shadows wafted into infinite space. The gods and the highest gods, as forms or bodies of light and power, are seen to have the impermanence of a lightning flash. All things great or small are known to have a beginning and end, and time is but a mote or fleecy cloud that appears and disappears in boundless light. The cause of the understanding of this is due to the choice made by the immortal. The impermanence of that which had appeared permanent and indestructible is due to a greater wisdom, in having chosen wisely.
• The cause of knowledge and wisdom and power is now discovered. The cause of these is Consciousness. Consciousness is that in all things from which they are enabled to act according to the capacity to comprehend and perform their functions. Now is seen that that by which one knows what is known is Consciousness. The immortal is now conscious that the cause of the light in all things is the presence in them of Consciousness.
• The duty of thought is to bring the spiritual world into the physical and raise the physical into the spiritual, to transform animal bodies into human beings and to transmute the human into an immortal.
• All worlds and planes and states and conditions, all gods and men and creatures, to the very tiniest germs, are seen linked together in a grand procession so that the most primitive element or the smallest grain of sand by an infinite series of transformations and progressions may wind its way and travel from the lowliest stages along the links in the great chain until it reaches the height where it becomes conscious of Consciousness and of the possibility of becoming at one with Consciousness. To the degree that one is conscious of Consciousness does he know by the changelessness and absoluteness of Consciousness, the impermanence and unreality of all else.
• But the great wisdom of being conscious of Consciousness does not remove the immortal from the world of man. By being conscious of Consciousness man feels the universe is kin. By the presence in him of Consciousness, and by being conscious of the presence of Consciousness, the immortal sees into the heart of each thing, and is that thing more completely as he is conscious of the presence of Consciousness.
• Each thing is seen in its own state as it actually is, but in all things is seen the possibility of their constant progression from ignorance through thought to knowledge, from knowledge through choice to wisdom, from wisdom through love to power, from power to Consciousness.
• Man the mortal must first get and be knowledge, for only through knowledge will it be possible for him to attain to Consciousness.
• Love Consciousness above forms, possessions and ideals, above all powers, religions and gods! As you worship Consciousness intelligently, confidently and with reverent love, the mind reflects Consciousness and opens fearlessly to the deathless presence of Consciousness.
• Invulnerable love and power is born within one who knows.

Psychic tendencies and development 1908

• It is now the fashion for people to be psychic: to see, smell and hear strange things, and to feel creepy and spooky.
• This cycle is causing the physical organism of man to become more susceptible to the influences from the invisible worlds which surround and permeate our physical world, although these worlds are as they were before the organism of man was so responsive to them.
• But the psychic tendency in our civilization, if turned in the right direction and controlled, will assist us in building up a civilization greater and grander and nobler than any of the past. On the other hand, psychic tendencies may hasten our destruction and bring our history to a close by insane desire for money, by the love of luxury, or by sensual gratification and worship of the dead.
• The influences which affect the psychic come from the visible and invisible worlds. Through our visible world there are constantly playing and interacting the forces and powers of the invisible worlds.
• Each world, visible or invisible, has its races and beings peculiar to itself. The entities from the invisible worlds come in contact with man through his psychic nature, and, according to his psychic tendencies, the invisible influences and entities will act on him and stimulate him to action.
• Creatures and powers at present undreamed of act on man through his emotional psychic nature. His mental visions and imaginary sounds and strange feelings are often caused by the presence of these forces and beings.
• While man is partitioned off from them by his limited physical sight, and walled in and protected from them by a strong, healthy physical body, he is safe, for his physical body is to him as a fortress.
• But should the walls of the fortress be weakened, as it may by foolish practices, then inimical creatures of the invisible worlds will break through and make a captive of him. The elemental powers of nature will drive him to all manner of excesses and he will be unable to resist any of their attacks.
• They will sap him of his vitality, make him incapable of controlling his physical body, enslave him to his desires, obsess his body, and dishonor and lower him below the level of a beast.
• The psychic nature, if properly trained, will enable man to more readily change and improve his physical body and to bring it under control.
• The psychic nature, when controlled and cultured will enable man to bring into the physical world the treasures which he may gather from the invisible worlds, to bring into physical life all the desirable ideals and ideal forms stored up in the world of thought, the mental world, and to make the physical world ready for the knowledge from the spiritual world.
• To make faculties which are new, useful, their uses must be understood and care applied, until the new faculties are known and brought under the control of the reasoning being. Reason should never be abandoned.
• Those not born psychics may develop a psychic organism and become psychics by giving up their will and becoming negative and giving way to all influences which they feel, or by a weakening and breaking down of the resisting powers of the animal body through a vegetarian diet.
• The astral molecular body of form of the present life is the sum total and result of one's thoughts in the preceding life-in the same sense that in the present life one's desires and thoughts are building for his next life the astral molecular form body, on and according to which his physical matter will be moulded.
• The mental psychic nature (leo-sagittary), is to be developed by mental practices, such as the forming of mental pictures, by giving mental forms to mental colors, and by controlling all the functions of the mind through meditation.
• The development of the spiritual psychic nature (cancer-capricorn) is brought about by the control of the functions of the mind when one is able to identify himself in the spiritual world of knowledge, in which all the other phases of the psychic nature are comprehended.

Doubt 1908

• Doubt comes from duo, two, in which is involved the idea of duality concerning any thing, and extending infinitely through all things.
• Doubt is only known to us when it is a mental operation, but the idea of doubt is present in all grades of matter, from the beginning of manifestation to the full and complete attainment of knowledge.
• Doubt is operative through all the manifested worlds; the same in principle, and varying according to the plane of its action.
• Doubt is like a cloud which steals over the mind and prevents it from perceiving clearly, and from solving any problem concerning that which is perceived.
• Like a cloud, doubt increases or decreases in size and density as one fails to act according to his understanding, or is self-reliant and acts with confidence.
• Yet doubt is a condition of the mind necessary to be experienced and overcome before clearness of mental vision can be attained.
• Connected with and related to doubt, as ancestors, teachers, companions, offspring, and servants of doubt, are perplexity, hesitancy, impatience, discontent, peevishness, irritability, turmoil, distrust, incredulity, disbelief, suspicion, misgiving, foreboding, gloominess, moroseness, irresoluteness, indecision, uncertainty, slavery, sloth, ignorance, fear, confusion, and death.
• Doubt is deep-seated in the mind, is in fact synonymous with one of the functions of the mind: that function or attribute of the mind which is known as darkness, sleep.
• …the mind begins to doubt from the time it first is conscious of its acting in a physical body
• Unfamiliarity of the mind with its body allows the element of doubt in the mind to dominate its action and to interfere with the control of the body.
• If, in the regular development of the man, after he has learned the things of the physical world necessary for him to be acquainted with--such, for instance, as exercise and discipline of the body, its maintenance and livelihood through a business or professional position, the social customs of the sphere in which he lives, and the literature of the period--and he is so familiarized with ordinary usages as to have overcome his former doubts, and if he has learned to have confidence and trust in its position, then the mind has passed the initial stages of doubt and is confronted by the doubt which arises concerning the unknown worlds.
• When things from any of the kingdoms of the psychic world impinge upon or are insinuated to the physical senses, doubt arises in the mind that there is an invisible world, within and around the physical, because that mind has become adjusted to and familiar with its physical body, and is educated by and keyed to the physical and the things of the physical world. It doubts that physical action can have its origin in an invisible source.
• They are overcome in the psychic world and astral form body only to the degree that they were met with and overcome in the physical.
• The mind identifies itself in thought with its body and physical life only, and when the theory is suggested that the mind and the thought is distinct from the physical body, though connected with it, the mind doubts and is inclined to reject such a statement.
• This doubt is found more frequently among the learned than among the uneducated, because the man of learning is learned in the things only which apply to the mind in its relation to the physical world, and he who habituates himself to thinking of things and subjects which relate strictly to the physical world is disinclined to leave the strata of his thought and grow into a higher plane.
• The mind which does contemplate itself as a mind acting in the mental world, which is distinct from the physical world, is always assailed by doubt.
• The problems with which the mind contends-such as: the difference between and relation of God and nature, man's origin, duty in life, ultimate destiny, are those which have confronted all minds attempting to act freely in the mental world.
• The doubt concerning any of these questions, or of the possible freedom of the mind from the senses, has a tendency to darken the mental vision. If the mental vision is darkened, the mind loses confidence in its own light. Without light it cannot see or solve the problems, nor see its path, and so it falls back into the sensuous fields of thought with which it had become familiar.
• But the mind which has confidence in its free action dispels the darkness of doubt. It sees its own course of action through the world of thought which it has created.
• Gaining confidence and mentally seeing its own thought and the thoughts of the world, it sees that the forms of the psychic world are determined by the thoughts of the mental world, that the confusion of desires and the turmoil of emotions are due to the confusion of thoughts and the conflicting cross-currents of thought, that the cause of the forces and beings having entity as forms in the psychic world is determined by the thoughts generated by the mind. When this is realized, all doubts concerning the causes of the emotions and sensations are cleared away, one's actions are plainly seen and their causes known.
• The doubt concerning the spiritual world and spiritual man has to do with the immortal entity who broods over and contacts physical man by means of the incarnated mind.
• The mind doubts the existence or the possible existence of there being a spiritual world of knowledge in which are the ideas of all phases of existence, from which thought takes its origin; that this persistent world of knowledge, with its immortal ideal forms, is due to the fancy of a human mind rather than that it is the statement of a spiritual fact.
• Finally, the incarnated mind doubts that it is the same in essence with the Immortal Minds and with the Universal Mind. This doubt is the most serious, destructive and darkening doubt of all because it tends to separate the mind, which is incarnate and which is subject to the vicissitudes of transitory conditions, from its eternal and immortal parent.
• Doubt is an occult sin. This occult sin of doubt is the doubt in one's spiritual being. The penalty of this doubt is spiritual blindness and inability to see spiritual truths in anything even when they are pointed out.
• The cause of the doubt of the different men is the undeveloped darkness of the mind. Until the darkness is dispelled or transformed by an interior light, man will continue to doubt and will remain in the condition in which he here finds himself.
• The man who continually doubts is a misery to himself and a pest to all around him. Continued doubt makes of man a whimpering, whining weakling who hardly dares to act, fearing the consequence of his action.
• The one who puts off deciding between two positions offered him, owing to his doubt of right choice, is usually seen to have let the best opportunity go.
• Opportunity never waits. Opportunity is ever present though constantly passing. Opportunity is a procession of opportunities.
• Doubt is overcome by confident decision followed by the action which the decision indicates.
• To slink back into indecisive doubt after one's action has proven wrong, though it was believed to be right at that time, is a setback to the mind and prevents growth. One should recognize his mistake, acknowledge it and correct it by continuing to act. His mistake should benefit him by enabling him to see through it.
• One will learn to decide and act and will solve the mystery of right action by a firm faith and belief that he is in essence one with the Universal Mind or God, through his individuality, the human higher or divine mind, and that his real conscious being comes from that source and will illuminate his thought.
• If one ponders over this thought, holds it constantly in mind, decides with it in mind and acts according to the decision, he will in no long time learn to decide wisely and to act justly, and through right judgment and just action he will come into the inheritance of knowledge which is bequeathed by his parent god, as soon as he has earned it.
• *

Karma 1908

• There is no deviation from nor exception to the absolute law of karma.
• Those who speak of chance and accident, and at the same time speak of and acknowledge such a thing as law, cut themselves off mentally from the abstract world of knowledge and limit their mental processes to the things which relate to the sensuous world of gross physical matter.
• Karma is the wonderful, beautiful and harmonious law which prevails throughout the worlds.
• In the memory of the ego of humanity, the thoughts and actions of all of the individual units of humanity are retained, and it is according to this memory that the plan for the new world system is determined. This is the karma of the new humanity.
• So one of the worst sins, for one who knows or ought to know, is to willfully deprive another of his individual right of choice, to weaken him by hiding from him the law of justice, to induce him to give up his will, to encourage or make him depend either for pardon, spiritual power, or immortality on another, instead of depending on the law of justice and the results of his own work.
• The original sin was the refusal of one of the three classes of the Sons of Universal Mind, or God, to reincarnate, to take up its cross of flesh and procreate lawfully so that other races could incarnate in their proper order. This refusal was against the law, their karma of the previous period of manifestation which they had taken part in. Their refusal to reincarnate when it came their turn, allowed less progressed entities to enter the bodies prepared for them and which those lower entities were unable to make good use of. Through ignorance, the lower entities mated with types of the animals.
• The penalty of the original sin of the Sons of Universal Mind who would not reincarnate and procreate is, that they are now dominated by that which they refused to govern. When they could govern they would not, and now that they would govern they cannot.
• Though often ignorant of the fact, each human being and all creatures and intelligences in the universe have each his appointed function to perform, and each is a part in the great machinery for the working out of the law of karma. Each has his place, whether in the capacity of a cogwheel, a pin, or a gauge. This is so whether he or it be conscious or unconscious of the fact. However insignificant a part one may seem to play, nevertheless, when he acts he starts the entire machinery of karma into operation involving all other parts.
• Accordingly as one performs well the part which he has to fill, so he becomes aware of the working of the law; then he takes a more important part. When proved to be just, having freed himself from the consequences of his own thoughts and actions, he is fitted to be entrusted with the administration of the karma of a nation, race, or world.
• There are intelligences who act as the general agents of the law of karma in its action through the worlds. These intelligences are by different religious systems called: lipika, kabiri, cosmocratores and archangels.
• We may call on these great intelligences by such names as we prefer, but they answer us only when we know how to call upon them and then they can only answer to the call which we know how to give and according to the nature of the call. They can show no favor nor dislike, even if we have knowledge and the right to call upon them. They take notice of and call upon men when men desire to act justly, unselfishly and for the good of all. …There is no sentiment or emotion in their election.
• The mental world is the world in which man really lives and from which his karma is generated.
• Life in the body has a double purpose: it is a nursery for baby egos and a school for the more advanced.
• The beauty of the lily or rose is elemental. It does not in itself express intelligence, neither does the face of an innocent girl. This is to be distinguished from beauty as the result of a strong, intelligent and virtuous mind. Such are seldom seen. Between the two extremes of the beauty of elemental innocence and of wisdom are faces and forms of innumerable grades of homeliness, strength and beauty. When the mind is used and cultivated the elemental beauty of face and figure is lost. The lines become harder and more angular. Thus we see the difference between the features of man and woman. When woman begins to use the mind the soft and graceful lines are lost. The lines of the face become more severe and this continues during the process of the training of her mind, but when the mind is at last under control and its forces are wielded skillfully, the severe lines are again changed, softened and express the beauty of peace which comes as the result of a cultured and refined mind.
• This may be done by using the money which was questionably amassed, for the benefit of others and thereby atoning in such measure as may be for the misdeeds in the acquirement of the wealth.
• The family and race in which the body is being formed is determined by the ego about to incarnate who is able to select the race and who, according to past associations and inclinations, is able to decide upon and bring about the influences and conditions which will affect the body during its formation and to provide it with such tendencies as are the result of its past actions and which fit the necessities of the present. Some egos are too dull and heavy from ignorance and indolence to bring about the conditions in which their physical body should be born and to convey the tendencies and inclinations, but they may be aware of the preparation of the physical body according to the psychic model and form by others. This work is done for them and continued until they are strong enough to do it for themselves.
• A man and his wife should be pure in their bodies and minds and should have the thoughts, ambitions and aspirations which they desire to see expressed in their child. Such thoughts or desires of the parents, together with the fitness of their bodies, attract an ego about to incarnate whose karma requires or entitles him to such accommodation. This is decided before pregnancy. But when the mother finds that she is in such condition the contract has been made between the egos of the parents and the ego who will incarnate, and such contract must be fulfilled and must not be broken by abortion.
• During this period it is possible for her to walk with God. When this is done she fulfills her mission.
• A parent or guardian whose mind is vapid, who loves the glitter of baubles, who panders to the appetites and considers sensation as that which is to be sought after, will instill similar inclinations into the growing child, whose appetites will be considered and indulged, whose whims will be gratified, and whose desires, instead of being restrained and given proper direction, will be allowed a wild luxuriant growth. This is the karma of those who in the past have not cared to restrain their desires and passions. The child who is allowed to fret and fume and bawl, and whose parents, inconsiderate of others, allow the child to have whatever it cries for and can be given it, is one of those unfortunates who live on the surface of life; they are the barbarians of society, who, however numerous they may be at present, will, as humanity grows out of its child state, be few and considered the wild and ungoverned specimens of the undeveloped human species. Theirs is a terrible karma, as they must first awaken to a knowledge of their own ignorance before they can adjust themselves so as to become orderly, inconspicuous members of civilized society. The transition to this condition brings much sorrow and suffering, while it brings out the deplorable psychic condition of ungoverned and spasmodic passion.
• the artistic temperament, if allowed to express itself then, would make the psychic nature more susceptible to the influence of drugs and alcohol and would encourage drunkenness and result in breakdowns and ruin the psychic body by opening it to every vagabond of the astral world. Not to allow the artistic development in such case would only defer this development and permit the child to better resist the demon of intoxication.
• Before man took on a physical body in the past history of humanity, he lived in the psychic or astral world in an astral body just as he now lives in the psychic world before he takes on a physical body in present times but his form was somewhat different then from what it is now. After man took on his physical body and came to think of himself as a physical being, he lost the memory of the past condition even as he loses memory in the present life of his prenatal condition.
• It will poison the practitioner and patient with the spirit of unlawful greed; unlawful because money represents and is controlled by the spirit of the earth which is selfish, whereas the power to heal comes from the spirit of life, which is to give. These are opposites and cannot be joined.
• In the individual politician who has fooled them, they have reflected a picture of themselves, magnified or reduced in parts, but nevertheless reflecting their own meanness, duplicity, and selfishness. They get but what they deserve.
• The party spirit or spirit of politics is a definite psychic entity….The spirit of patriotism is the presiding entity of a nation, of a continent.
• The psychic karma of a nation determines the government of the nation.
• Pessimism is the inevitable result of all attempts to use thought as the means for the gratification of desire. Pessimism is fully developed when the psychic body is satiated and the mind sees the futility of all effort to obtain happiness through desire.
• Pessimism is altogether driven out when one is able to feel himself in the hearts of others and others in his own heart. By endeavoring to feel the relationship of all beings, he discovers that all things are not running on to ultimate doom, but that there is a bright and glorious future for every living soul.
• Karma is thought….Man is circumscribed, held in and limited by his own thoughts. No one can be raised except by his own thought. No one can be lowered except by his own thought.
• Man is a thinker, who lives in the world of thought. He stands between the physical world of ignorance and shadows ( ) and the spiritual world of light and knowledge ( - ).
• From his present state, man may go into darkness or enter the light. To do either he must think. As he thinks, he acts and by his thoughts and actions he descends or ascends.
• Man cannot at once fall downward into ignorance and utter darkness, nor can he rise into knowledge and light. Each man is somewhere on the path which leads from the gross world of ignorance to the clear light world of knowledge. He may circle around his place on the path by re-thinking his past thoughts and generating them anew, but he must think other thoughts to change his place on the path. These other thoughts are the steps by which he lowers or raises himself.
• Each step downward is the transposing of an upper step on the path of thought. The steps downward cause mental pain and sorrow, even as pain and sorrow is caused by the effort to ascend. But however low man may go his mental light is with him. By it he may begin the climb. Each effort to think of one's light and the higher life helps to build the step which takes him higher. Each step upward on the path to the light is made of the thoughts which formed a downward step. The thoughts which held him down are refined and transformed into the thoughts which take him up.
• By his thought, man is a creator or destroyer. He is a destroyer when he changes higher into lower forms; he is a builder and creator when he changes lower into higher forms, brings light into darkness and changes darkness into light.
• Through the thought world, spiritual things come into the psychic and physical worlds and through the thought world all things return into the spiritual world.
• Man, the thinker, as the incarnated mind, acts from the sign sagittary ( ), thought, on the matter of the sign leo ( ), life, which is atomic life-matter. As he thinks, he generates karma and the karma generated is of the nature of his thoughts.
• A thought is generated by the brooding of the incarnated mind over the unformed body of his desires. As the mind broods over desire, desire is aroused into active energy which whirls from the heart upward. This energy increases with a vortex-like movement. The vortex-like movement draws into it the atomic life-matter of the zodiac in which the thinker is acting. As the mind continues to brood, the atomic life-matter is drawn into the vortex-like movement which increases in rapidity. The life-matter is moulded, polished, given outline or color, or both outline and color, by the brooding mind, and is finally born into the world of thought as a distinct and living thing.
• The birth of a thought results from the impregnation of desire by mind due to the presence of an idea.
• The death or dissolution of a thought is determined by the inability or refusal of its parent mind to perpetuate its existence, or by its being overcome and dissolved by another thought.
• Its transformation is the changing of its form from one plane to another.
• A thought bears the same relation to the mind which gave it birth, as a child to its parents. After birth, the thought like a child, requires care and nurture. Like a child, it has its period of growth and activity and may become self supporting.
• But like that of all beings, its period of existence must come to an end. Once a thought is born and has reached its full growth on the mental plane it will there exist, until what it stands for is shown to be untrue by a mind which gives birth to the thought which takes the place of the one discredited. The one discredited then ceases to exist as an active entity, though its skeleton is kept in the world of thought, much the same as relics or antiques are kept in the world's museums.
• The passions, envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, murder and the like; greed, generosity, craft, lightheartedness, ambition, love of power and admiration, frivolity, excitability, whether produced with intensity or indifference, contribute to the psychic thoughts or karma of themselves and of the world. These unformed thoughts are liberated into the psychic world by man's entertaining such feelings and giving expression to them in forceful speech or by the perpetual action of a rattle-tongue.
• The unformed psychic thoughts contribute in large part to the sorrows and sufferings of men. Man as a unit of humanity must share the general karma of humanity. This is not unjust; because, as he shares the karma of others he compels others to share the karma which he produces. He shares the kind of karma of others that he causes others to share with him.
• When one is passing through a period of mental suffering he often refuses to believe that his suffering is just and that he had any part in its making. Were the truth known, he would find that he was indeed the cause of what he now suffers and that he did provide the means by which he now suffers.
• One who has a feeling of hatred for any person or thing liberates the force of hatred.
• One who thinks and tells a lie brings into the thought world a force as violent and nefarious as that of murder. A liar pits himself against eternal truth. When one tells a lie, he is attempting to murder truth. He attempts to put a falsehood in place of a fact. If a falsehood could be put successfully in place of a fact, the universe could be thrown out of balance. By telling a lie one attacks the principle of justice and truth more directly than in any other manner. From the standpoint of mental karma, a liar is the worst of all criminals.
• It is because of the lies of the units of humanity that humanity as a whole and the units themselves must endure the suffering and the unhappiness in the world.
• The karma of a liar is a perpetual mental torment, which torment is eased while he is deceiving himself and others, but the torment is accentuated on the return of his lies to him.
• If one would know true mental karma, he must stop lying. One cannot see his own or the mental operations of another clearly while he continues to obscure his own and the minds of others. Man's happiness increases with the love of truth for its own sake; his unhappiness disappears as he refuses to lie.
• Heaven upon earth would be more fully and quickly realized than by any other means if people would speak what they know and believe to be true. A man may make quicker mental progress by telling the truth as he knows it than in any other way.
• …the mental faculties also, such as the capacity to learn and assimilate teachings from the schools and books and the inclination to persistently investigate.
• Among them are the individuals who are the heads or behind the heads of large industrial institutions, banks, railroads, insurance associations, who fraudulently deprive citizens of their rights, who acquire large possessions and vast fortunes by the application of their minds to physical and material ends. Many such are for a time considered as models by those who long to occupy similar positions and influence, but when their account comes due and is presented by the bank of karma and they cannot or will not meet it, their dishonesty is discovered. They become objects of ridicule and contempt and their physical sentence is pronounced in the court which is composed of judge and jury, or is a disease, or an evil disposition, which will soon bring, physical retribution.
• This fourth class is broadly divided into two groups. Those who seek knowledge of a purely intellectual nature, and those who seek spiritual knowledge. Those who seek knowledge of the intellect arrive at spiritual truth after long processes of intellectual search. Those who seek spiritual knowledge in itself, see into the nature of things without long processes of reasoning and then use their intellect in applying the spiritual truth according to the needs of the time.
• The social inclinations of the fourth class are not for the conventions of society, but rather for the companionship of those who have knowledge.
• The philosophy of the individual of the fourth class is to find his real work in life and how to perform his duties in relation to that work.
• The karma of a genius who uses his genius so that other minds may see that which he has seen, and so as to bring the light of genius into the world and to further his own insight into the world, is, that he will attain to a development of all his faculties and the knowledge of himself. .
• From the number of books written on philosophy, religion, arts and sciences, it might seem that if thoughts are things, and books the representatives of thoughts, the world of thought must be crowded. However, the world of thought is traveled by human thought on a small portion, and which borders on the psychic and physical worlds. There are highways and beaten roads as well as the paths where here and there some independent thinker has made a trail between the beaten roads, which, as he continued, became more distinct and extended, and as he completed his system of thought the trail became a road and could be traveled at any time by himself and other thinkers. The schools of thought we know of represent these highways and paths in the world of thought.
• When the mind begins to grow out of the physical, through the psychic into the mental world of thought, it goes out in thought with great hardship and difficulty. With the discovery that it is in the world of thought and above the passions, anger and blind desire of the psychic world, it feels elated, but on unfamiliar ground. Continuing, it finds itself in one of the schools of thought.
• At times, a thinker tries to plunge into the unknown regions on either side of the road, but the effort is too great and he is glad to retrace his steps, if possible, to the beaten track.
• Such has been the mental karma in times past. But within recent times a new, yet old, race of Egos have begun to incarnate.
• A feature of the mental karma of a person who allows his mind to be drugged into a belief which opposes his reason, is that he is unhappy and restless.
• All things are of course contained within the Universal Mind. Each individual mind is a unit within the Universal Mind, but no one unit has the right to demand of other units what they possess, nor to demand of Universal Mind (God) what it, the unit, has not already. Universal Mind or God should have as much intelligence as the little unit, man, and should know what he is entitled to. Acting from intelligence, Universal Mind will give to the little man, what belongs to him, without his demanding it.
• The demander of opulence forms the picture of what he wishes, uses the ammunition of his desire, and the object of his desire comes to him. But some one has to supply his demands.
• The law of the mental world is just in its inexorable operation on all such criminals and mental sharks, and the opulentist, too, is overtaken by the law. The law may affect him physically as well as mentally. All possessions may be swept away from him and he may be reduced to penury and utter poverty. He will be haunted by mental creatures who constantly pursue him and from whom he cannot escape.
• Those who attempt to enter consciously into the world of thought will be subjected to more rigid lessons than the ordinary man of the world. One who attempts an entrance into the world of thought is given the lesson that he should not wish for anything related to his personality or from which he will receive personal advantage, until he knows the nature of his thoughts, is able to discover his motives, and to distinguish between right and wrong action.
• (the wisher) He is like one who sees and desires a silken scarf hanging from the top of a shelf, and who reaches up, takes hold and pulls, and as he does he gets the scarf and with it are precipitated on his head many things which had been placed upon and near the scarf.
• It is not wise for one who would enter the mental world of thought to long or wish for any object which has to do with his personality. The only thing which he may long for wisely and without any ill effects to anyone is to be divinely illuminated as to how best to act. But then his longing ceases for he grows upward and expands naturally.
• The one who cures by denial of that which he treats removes the trouble by a vacuum process of thought and the one who effects cures by insisting that there is no trouble where the trouble is, removes the trouble by a pressure process of thought. The vacuum process lifts the trouble above the victim, the pressure process forces it below.
• When clear and unbiased thinkers intelligently enter the mental world of thought they will see and explain the relation of cause to effect and effect to cause in physical appearances, psychic phenomena and mental disturbances. Not till then will it be possible for people to become acquainted with the facts concerning the power and proper use of thought in the curing of diseases and other troubles.
• At present, the minds of men may be prepared for the use and knowledge of such power by each living up to his present knowledge of the laws of health, by a control of his desires, by living as clean a life as he understands, by purifying his mind of the intensely selfish thoughts which now fill it and by learning the proper use of money. If men now could become acquainted with the laws governing the different processes by which thoughts are regulated in their dynamic effect on other organisms this knowledge would bring disaster to the race.
• The duty of everyone interested in religion, in philosophy and in the sciences, is to sanction only such doctrines as he believes true, and to give no word of approval to those he believes to be false. If each is true to this duty, the welfare of the future will be assured.
• Out of the tumult and chaos of opinions will develop a philosophical, scientific religion, such as history does not record. It will not be a religion, but rather an understanding of the inner myriad forms of thought, reflected or expressed in nature's outer forms, through all of which divinity will be perceived.
• All results with their consequences are caused by the doing or the not doing of what one knows to be right. He who knows what is right yet acts not accordingly, creates karma which will cause suffering. He who knows what is right and does it, creates spiritual enjoyment, called blessedness.
• He who acts what he knows to be right, will see and know more clearly how to act and will provide the means by which all actions and results of actions become clear to him. He who acts against what he knows to be right, will become confused, and still more confused, in the measure in which he refuses to act what he knows, until he will become spiritually blind; that is to say, he will not be able to distinguish between true and false, right and wrong.
• It is a mistaken notion to say that one should not make karma in order that he might escape from it, or be free from it. One who endeavors to escape from or rise above karma by intending not to make it, defeats his purpose at the outset, because his desire to get away from karma by his not acting binds him to the action which he would escape; the refusal to act prolongs his bondage. Work produces karma, but work also liberates him from the necessity to work. Therefore, one should not be afraid of making karma, but rather should act fearlessly and according to his knowledge, then it will be not long before he has paid all debts and works his way to freedom.
• Will is free…. When he is free from all limitations, and only then, can he use the will in its full and free sense. He becomes free as he acts with the will rather than in using it.
• Two ideas are present in the individual mind of man beginning with its first emanation from the Deity, or God, or the Universal Mind. One of these is the idea of sex, the other the idea of power. They are the two opposites of duality, the one attribute inherent in homogeneous substance. In the earliest stages of the mind, these exist in idea only. They become active in degree as the mind develops gross veils and coverings for itself. Not until after the mind had developed a human animal body did the ideas of sex and power become manifest, active, and did they fully dominate the individual incarnated portion of the mind.
• It is quite in keeping with divinity and nature that these two ideas should be expressed. It would be contrary to nature and divinity to repress or suppress the expression of these two ideas. To stop the expression and development of sex and of power, were it possible, would annihilate and reduce all the manifested universe into a state of negation.
• In the earliest stage of the individual mind as it emanates from Deity, it is not conscious of itself as itself, and of all its potential faculties, powers, and possibilities. It is being, and possesses all that there is in being, but does not know itself as itself, or all that is included in it. It possesses all things, but does not know of its possessions. It moves in light and knows not darkness. In order that it might demonstrate, experience and know all things which are potential within itself, might know itself as distinct from all things and then see itself in all things, it was necessary for the mind to express itself by the putting forth and building of bodies, and learn to know and identify itself within the worlds and its bodies as distinct from them.
• Let us suppose that a being had from infancy lived apart from mankind and that with all latent human emotions it should stand before a mirror in which its own figure was reflected and with which reflection it fell in love. As it gazed upon the reflection of itself, the latent emotions would become active and without having any reason to prevent it, it is likely that that being would at once endeavor to embrace the object which had called forth the strange feelings that it now experiences.
• We may fancy the utter loneliness and dejection of that being, in finding that with the too earnest effort to embrace that which had called forth its affection and hopes and vague ideals, it had disappeared, and had left in its place only shattered bits of glass. Does this seem fancy? Yet it is not far from what is experienced by most people in life.
• Those who go to a foreign country are of four classes: some go with the object of making it their home and spending the remainder of their days there; some go as traders; some as travelers on a tour of discovery and instruction; and some are sent with a special mission from their own country.
• a. The mind who incarnates into a body of sex with the determination of living its days here is mostly one who has in previous periods of evolution not incarnated as man and is now here in the present evolution for the purpose of learning the ways of the world.
• b. The man of the second class is one who has learned that there is another world than the physical and that, instead of One, there are many gods in the psychic world…. if he does not worship any of the things which he sees in his new world, he will not be controlled by them… The spiritual karma of one who functions in the psychic world is evil if he, a human, consciously or unconsciously, ignorantly or intentionally, gives up any or all of the sex power of his body to denizens of the psychic world. This is done invariably if he runs after, plays with, or worships any of the phenomena of or experiments with, the psychic world. A man goes to and unites with the object of his worship.
• c. The man of the third kind is of that class of egos who, having learned much of the physical world, and having gathered experience in the psychic world, are travelers who are choosing and determining whether they will be spiritual spendthrifts and will ally themselves with the useless ones and the destroyers of nature, or whether they will become spiritually wealthy and powerful and ally themselves with those who work for individual immortality…. The good or evil spiritual karma of the third kind of man depends on his choice, as to whether he wants to go onward to immortality or backward to elemental conditions, and on the uses or abuses of his power of thought…. The mental world is the world in which men must choose. It is where they must decide whether they will go on with or ahead of the race of egos to which belong or with which they work. They can remain in the mental world for a time only. They must choose to go on; else they will fall back.
• d. Of the fourth kind is one who is in the world with a definite purpose and a mission. He has decided and has chosen immortality as his object and knowledge as his goal. He cannot, if he would, rebecome a man of the lower worlds. His choice is as a birth. He cannot return to the state before birth. He must live in the world of knowledge and learn to grow into the full stature of a man of knowledge…. The fourth kind of man will either vaguely perceive that he must be careful in the control of the functions of sex; or he knows that he must use every means and effort to control his passions, appetites and desires; or he will clearly perceive the value and power of thought; or he will know at once that he must cultivate the power of thought, use all the force of his emotions and stop all waste of sex in the building up of character, the acquirement of knowledge and the attainment of immortality.

Mirrors 1909

• The two-surfaced mirror suggests the astral world, which can be viewed from two sides only: that which is past and that which is present. The three-surfaced mirror represents the mental world which may be looked at and comprehended from three sides: past, present and future. The all-surfaced mirror stands for the spiritual world which is approached and known from any and every side and in which past, present and future merge into eternal being.
• The one surface is a plane; two surfaces are an angle; three surfaces form a prism; the all-surface, a crystal sphere.
• The physical world stops the process of involution and turns that which is involving back on the line of evolution
• What one sees in the world is the reflection of what he does in the world. The world reflects what he thinks and does. If he grins and shakes his fist at it, it will do the same to him. If he laughs, the reflection laughs too. If he wonders at it, he will see wonder depicted on every line. If he feels sorrow, anger, greed, craft, innocence, cunning, inanity, guile, selfishness, generosity, love, he will see and have these enacted in, and turned back at him, by the world. Every change of the emotions, the horror, joy, fear, pleasantry, kindliness, envy, vanity, is reflected.
• All that comes to us in the world is but the reflection of what we have done to or in the world.
• Something that happens to or is reflected at us by the action of some other person, may seem to be the reverse of what we are reflecting or doing in the world to-day, and, while we consider it from the viewpoint of the present, we shall not see the connection. To see the connection we may need another mirror, one that reflects the past. Then we shall see that that which is thrown before us to-day, is the reflection of that which is behind us. Happenings that cannot be traced to their causes or sources, are the reflections thrown into the present, of actions long since past, actions which were performed by the actor, the mind, if not in this body in this life, then in another body in a previous life.
• He would not only be able to see the reflections of his body in his mind, but he may be able to connect and see the relation of all things which occur to him, with his present life, and he will know then that no thing does occur but that which is related in some way to his present life, as a reflection from the actions of past lives, or those of other days in this life.
• The figures and forms which move about in the world, are said to exist in themselves and to be different from their reflections in a looking-glass. But this is so only in length of time and not in reality. The forms which move over the surface of the earth are reflections only, as in a looking-glass. The image which they reflect is the astral body. That is not seen; only the reflection is seen. These reflected forms in the world keep moving about as long as the image which they reflect is with them. When the image leaves, the form, too, disappears, as in a looking-glass. The difference is in time only, but not in principle.
• Human beings are so many types or phases of the nature of man which is mirrored forth in the multitude of the reflections of the sides or different aspects of humanity. Humanity is a man, male-female, who is not seen, who does not see itself except by its two-sided reflections, called man and woman.
• The spiritual world may be spoken of as one, grand, complete, universal mirror. As a mirror it may be compared to one, infinite atmosphere. The material of which it is composed is primal breath-matter, which is light. .
• In the spiritual world, considered as a mirror, is contained the idea and plan of all that is to be manifested in any of the three mirror-worlds. The mirrors of the spiritual world are mind-mirrors. These mind-mirrors may be symbolized by crystal spheres. A crystal sphere pictures all things on every side of it without having a backing or lining of matter different from the crystal, through which the light shines.
• All that has being in the atmosphere of the spiritual world-mirror is self-existent, having being or coming into being by itself or from itself within the atmosphere of the spiritual mirror.
• A mind-mirror of the spiritual world reflects from, on, in, by, or through itself. When it reflects from itself it shines forth and this shining enters into the mental world by being transmitted, emanated or refracted by a thought-mirror. This thought-mirror may be turned and reflected into the desire-world by the mind or thought of a man and later the thought will appear as an act or a form in the physical mind.
• When a mind-mirror reflects on itself it sees the universal mind. When it reflects in itself it sees itself in all things and all things in itself. When it reflects by itself it sees itself alone and no other thing than itself. When it reflects through itself it sees that which is imminent in it, but which yet transcends every existing thing in all of the worlds of manifestation and in the spiritual world itself; it knows itself as the permanent, changeless and one reality, persistent through all time, space and being, and as that which all of these with their qualities, attributes, characteristics or distinctions depend on for their respective states and being.
• That by the presence of which the spiritual world is a mirror, self-shining and reflective, that which allows all things to be known in the spiritual world-mirror and each individual mind-mirror to know itself and to reflect from, on, in, by, or through itself, is Consciousness. The presence of Consciousness in the infinite universal mind makes all things perceptible, reflective and known by the individual minds.
• By Consciousness the mind-mirror as an intelligent being may, by reflecting on Consciousness, through itself, become at one with Absolute Consciousness.
• The incarnated mind is the mirror by which are emanated, transmitted, or refracted, the thoughts which come from man's spiritual world;
• by the incarnated mind he throws on his desire-mirrors the images which cause his desires to be active, to be calmed, or to be changed.
• By this mirror-thought man looks into, chooses and decides which images he will reflect on his desire-mirrors and which he will cause them to reflect through the physical body or mirror, so that they will become actions.
• Thus he brings about the circumstances and conditions which surround him.
• Above and around the incarnated thought-mirror is the real man himself who is a spiritual individual mind-mirror reflecting the universe.
• Wherever man goes, there he projects or reflects from himself, the images which flit through his mind. So hamlets, villages or great governments are built up, all of the architectural structures, sculpture, paintings, music, all designs, clothing, tapestry, houses, temples and huts, the daily papers, the magazines, or books, legends, myths and religions, all are the putting into evidence in this world, by means of the mirrors of man, those things which exist as pictures or ideals in his mind.

Adepts, Masters and Mahatmas 1909-1910

July 1909

• Each world has its own beings who are conscious of their being in the particular world to which they belong and in which they live.
• but each class or kind in its world was not or is not conscious of those in either of the other worlds.
• All of these worlds and principles are within and around physical man, as they are within and around the physical world.
• The purpose of evolution is…that man within his physical body should be conscious of all the manifested worlds and be able to act intelligently in any or all of the worlds while still in his physical body.
• To do this steadily and continuously, man must make for himself a body for each of the worlds;
• The terms adept, master and mahatma represent the stages or degrees of each of the other three worlds.
• He comes again into the physical and will so continue to come life after life until he shall establish for himself a body or bodies other than physical, in which he may live consciously in or out of the physical.
• That is to say, as any intelligent man may tell the race and rank and degree of culture of any other physical man, so any adept may know the nature and degree of any other adept which he may meet in the form-desire world. But whereas one living in the physical world may deceive another man in the physical world, as to his race and position, no one in the form-desire world can deceive an adept as to his nature and degree.
• The adept has moulded the blind force of desire into form, which is no longer blind, but has senses corresponding to those of the form body, which act through the physical body. An adept, therefore, is one who has attained to the use and function of his desires in a form body apart from or independent of the physical body.
• The adept as such is a body of desire acting in a form apart from the physical.
• A master is one who has related and balanced the sex nature of the physical body, who has overcome his desires and the matter of the form world, and who controls and directs the matter of the life world on the plane of leo-sagittary ( - ) from his position and by the power of thought, sagittary ( ). has mastered the physical appetites, the force of desire, who has control of the currents of life…
• He is a master of life and has evolved a body of thought and may live in this thought body clear and free from his desire body and physical body, though he may live in or act through either or both.
• Ideals are in the mental thought world what desires are in the form world and objects in the physical world.
• thought is a distinctive body of a master.
• A mahatma is the perfection and completion of evolution.
• A mahatma is an individualized mind free from the necessity of further contact with any of the worlds lower than the spiritual breath world.
• so are ideas the eternal laws according to which and by which mahatmas act in the spiritual breath world.
• A mahatma differs from the adept and the master in that the adept must still reincarnate because he is still making karma, and a master must reincarnate because, although he is no longer making karma he is working out that which he has already made, but the mahatma, having ceased to make karma and having worked out all karma, is entirely freed from any necessity to reincarnate.

August 1909

• a mahatma as an agent of the universal law does not himself go to the people of the world to communicate universal laws and principles of right action, but sends an emissary to advise or remind the people of the laws under which they live.
• the records of the becoming of a mahatma are not physical, and physical men, while they are only physical, cannot examine such records.
• A mahatma will not solve the modern problems because these are the very lessons by which humanity is learning and the learning of which will make responsible men.
• At this important juncture in the history of the race the mahatmas have offered to mankind such rules and principles of life as will solve their vexed problems.
• The real God of the universe cannot be ousted from its place, nor would a mahatma wish to put out of place the one God, were that possible. The mahatmas of whom we speak will not appear to men, because such appearance would excite human beings and cause them to worship them without knowing really what they worshipped.
• One who would worship a mahatma or a god proclaims positively by his action that he has no comprehension of the one God through all.
• Adepts, masters and mahatmas are the logical sequence and results of repeated reincarnations.
• Apollonius of Tyana was an adept.
• Pythagoras of Samos was a master.
• Gautama of Kapilavastu was a mahatma.
• An adept, master or mahatma gives to a people a philosophy or a religion which that people is most ready to receive.
• Adepts may move and live among men and even in the noise and bustle of a city because the duties of an adept often bring him into the maelstrom of human life. A master would not live in the noise and bustle of a large city though he may be near one, because his work is not in the whirlpool of desires and forms, but with the purer life and with the ideals and thoughts of men. A mahatma need not and could not live in the market place or the highways of the world because his work is with realities and is removed from the quarrels and confusion of desires and changing ideals and is concerned with the permanent and the true.
• Adepts, masters and mahatmas may and do have physical bodies
• Unless we are familiar with the work and thought and knowledge of adepts, masters and mahatmas we can not distinguish them as such from other men.
• The universe is a great machine. It is composed of certain parts, each of which performs a function in the general economy of action. In order that this huge machine be kept running and in repair it must have competent machinists and engineers, able and skillful chemists, intelligent scribes and exact mathematicians.
• how much more necessary must be the existence of adepts, masters and mahatmas, as beings of intelligence who fill offices and positions in the economy of nature and act with and according to the laws by which the universe is maintained and operated.

September 1909

• MAHATMAS do live apart from ordinary men, not because they dislike or have grown apart from them, but because it is necessary that their habitations are far from the atmosphere of the market place. The dwelling place of a master is also removed from the rush of life and desires in a large city, because his work is not in a maelstrom of desires of physical existence, but with orderly systems of thought. The adept, too, seeks a habitation away from the cauldron of physical life, because his studies must be conducted quietly, but when necessary he enters into and may live an entire life busily engaged with affairs of the world. The adept is particularly concerned with forms and desires and the customs of men and with the changes of these; therefore he must at times be in the world.
• Before selecting a physical habitation and center from which their work is to be dOne, they must consider many factors, among them, magnetic centers of the earth, freedom from or prevailing of elemental conditions, the clearness, density or lightness of the atmosphere, the position of the earth in relation to sun and moon, the influence of the moonlight and sunlight.
• There are geographical centers on the earth's surface which have served as the stages on which the drama-comedy-tragedy of life has been enacted again and again.
• Adepts, masters and mahatmas select their habitations, with respect to the progress of man, along this path of civilization.
• Caves are chosen, among other reasons, because in their recesses bodies undergoing certain initiations are protected from atmospheric influences and the influences of the moon and sunlight; because of the sympathetic magnetic action of the earth in stimulating and developing the inner senses and the inner body; because of certain races who live in the interior of the earth and who may be met with in the recesses of the earth only; and because of means there available for rapid and safe transportation through the earth which cannot be had over the earth's surface. Such caves as are chosen are not mere holes in the ground. They are the gateways of avenues leading into grand courts, spacious halls, beautiful temples and vast spaces within the earth, awaiting those ready to enter them.
• Forests are chosen by some adepts and masters on account of the activity of vegetable life and animal forms, and because their work may be with the life and types of animals and plants, and because the vegetable and animal forms are dealt with in the instruction of their disciples.
• Mountains are the resorts of adepts, masters and mahatmas, not only because of their geographical positions, the seclusion which they afford, and because the air is lighter, purer and better suited to their bodies, but because from mountains certain forces can be best and most easily controlled and directed.
• Deserts are sometimes preferred because they are free from demoniacal and inimical elementary presences and influences, and because the dangers attending travel over desert country will keep inquisitive and meddlesome people away, and because the sand or underlying strata afford magnetic and electric conditions necessary to their work, and generally because of climatic advantages. Great deserts are usually free from these elementary presences because great deserts have been ocean beds. Though these ocean beds may have been the scenes of human life before they became such, the atmosphere has been cleared and purified by the submerging of the land. When the waters of the ocean roll over a country they destroy not only the astral bodies of beings who have lived there, but they also disintegrate the elementaries; that is, inimical desire-bodies of human beings who have lived there.
• Positions of importance on the earth, such as those where cities stood or stand, where rivers rolled or now flow, where volcanoes lie dormant or are active, and such places as are selected by adepts, masters and mahatmas as abodes are centers where invisible worlds and cosmic forces contact, enter or pass through or out of the earth. These points are physical centers which offer conditions under which cosmic influences may be more easily contacted.
• They do not live in disorder and confusion. No master or mahatma would live with a people who persist in wrongdoing and who constantly act against law. No master or mahatma would live in the midst of discord or among impure physical bodies.
• In the same way one would hardly be able to distinguish an adept by his physical appearance or manner from others.
• The adept may make himself visible as an astral body and allow his body to be touched.
• No one should believe in their existence until life itself will present to him such facts and conditions as will allow him to say with reason that he feels and sees a necessity for the existence of such intelligences.
• Not by guessing, nor by wishing, nor by favor, but by an earnest and unselfish desire to know, an aspiration to the divine, by acting according to the knowledge of one's own better nature and the divine within him, and by a conscientious and unremitting endeavor to control one's lower by the better desires, and a careful, patient and continued effort to understand and control one's own thoughts, together with a feeling of the unity of life in all things, and with a sincere desire without hope of reward to gain knowledge, for the love of mankind: by these means one may come in contact with and prove and know, without harm to himself or others, of adepts, masters and mahatmas
• One is able to find an adept, or the adept will find him, when he has developed within himself somewhat of the nature of an adept, which is controlled desire.
• He is able to meet and prove a master as he is able to think and to live intelligently in the world of thought and when he himself has developed a body capable of living or thinking clearly in the thought or mental world.
• He will know a mahatma only when he has attained to a knowledge of his
• own individuality, knows himself to be I-am-I as distinguished from all other things.
• No one will ever be able to know an adept, master or mahatma, or to know the differences and relationships between them until he has at least apprehended these differences and relationships within his own make up. It is possible for a man to know these differences and to distinguish between the natures and beings within and outside himself even though he may not as yet have fully developed bodies equal to such beings.
• The thought body which each human being has is the body he uses when he dreams intelligently, in the dream world, while the physical body is asleep, and when his dreams are not caused by disturbance of the physical body. If one can act in his dream body consciously and when he is awake, he will be able to perceive and know and prove a master.
• One will be able to meet or prove a master to be such when he is able to dream consciously and intelligently in his waking moments and while still conscious in his physical body.
• One can be able, in his physical body, to know a mahatma as such, and distinct from other orders of intelligences, by his own knowledge body, which is in or through or above the physical. The knowledge body is that which intelligently persists in deep sleep, after the physical body with its desires and the formative body and the life thought body have been left behind. Then he, alone, as a knowledge body, exists in the spiritual world. All bodies and faculties are processes or degrees of becoming and attainment. The mahatma body is the attainment.
• The knowledge body is that by which things are known. It is not the process of reasoning, which leads to knowledge, it is knowledge itself. That body of knowledge which is perfect and not obliged to go through reasoning processes and reincarnations is or corresponds to a mahatma body.
• There is a cyclic law according to which adepts, masters and mahatmas appear successively to take part in the affairs of the world and as regularly as the coming of the seasons in their order.
• Among the visible signs that an adept, master and mahatma has appeared, is here or will in the future appear, are the many people who claim to be adepts, masters or mahatmas. None of the claims, alleged messages, advices, proclamations, prove the passing, presence or coming of adepts, masters or mahatmas, but they do give evidence that the human heart yearns toward something and for the attainment of that something in man himself, which adepts, masters and mahatmas are. As the season of the year is announced by the passing of the sun into a particular sign of the zodiac, so the coming of an adept, master or mahatma is announced when the heart of humanity passes or reaches into the realms where adepts, masters and mahatmas dwell.
• When an adept, master or mahatma becomes such, then, in compliance with the law or of his own free will and for love of mankind, he comes into the world and makes a gift to the world of something which will show the path of travel which he has gone over, indicate dangers to be avoided, obstacles to be overcome, and work to be done. This is done that those following may be aided by their having gone on before. These gifts to the world are like sign-posts at cross roads, each indicating the road it is left to the traveller to choose.
• Adepts, masters and mahatmas carry on their work with the world in groups, each in turn being assisted in the general work by the others.

October 1909

• The elements or constituents of all things which appear physically are held suspended in the atmosphere of the earth.
• One who claims adeptship, whether by this or any like term, is either self-deceived or an impostor; or else, if he be an adept and makes the claim, he is either at once taken from his post or loses his caste and power and is no longer under the guidance of those masters who act according to just laws and for the good of the people. Initiation into any order higher than that of ordinary mankind prohibits such announcement by the one initiated. His claims become louder as his powers become weaker.
• When an individual or a race is ready to receive instruction from a master or masters, the thoughts of the individual or race appear in the mental world, and according to the nature of the thoughts of such minds they receive instruction from a master. The minds receiving such instruction are at first not aware of the existence of masters, nor are they aware of receiving any instruction from any other order of beings or from any world except the world of the senses to which they are accustomed. A master holds out an ideal or ideals to an individual or a race and assists them in their mental operations in approaching or attaining their ideals, much the same as a teacher in a school sets examples and gives lessons to the scholars and then aids the scholars in learning their lessons and in proving their examples. Masters encourage the efforts of an individual or the race in approaching their ideals, as good teachers encourage their scholars with the lessons.
• The mind works its way through the mental world by its power to think.
• The schools of the mental world are conducted according to a just system of learning which is older than the world.
• A master is always ready to teach whenever men are ready to learn. In this way, in the mental world, mankind receives indirect teaching from the masters. Direct teaching from a master, as between teacher and pupil, is given when man has proven himself worthy to receive direct instruction.
• A mahatma's duty to man is to bring him to an actual knowledge of what he, man, is as a spiritual being.
• Man represents an idea, a mahatma brings man to knowledge of the idea.
• Ideals are shown to men by masters who point the way to the ultimate idea from which ideals come.
• (likes and dislikes) All adepts have their likes, but not all have dislikes. Those who have dislikes are adepts who seek power for themselves and who endeavor to subject others to their will. Adepts with good intent toward humanity have no dislikes for men.
• Masters are above dislikes, though they have their preferences. Their preferences are, like those of the adept, for those of their kind and for that for which they are working.
• A mahatma has no likes or dislikes.
• (food) The human body is that on which desire feeds and fattens. Desire is the material which is transformed into thought. Thought is food for the mind. Mind is the matter which makes the immortal individuality or perfect mind.
• A master raises the lower into higher desires and transmutes the desires, which are as food for thought. These thoughts are in turn the food or material of which the master or mental body is fashioned. A master, as such, does not eat and drink in order to persist, though he grows in power from or by thought.
• The physical body of a mahatma does not depend for its continuance on solid foods. The food most necessary is the breathing of pure air. That is not the air breathed in by the physical man; it is the breath of life, which is the life of all bodies and which the physical body of the mahatma learns to breathe in and assimilate.
• (clothing) the skin of an animal may protect the physical body from injurious magnetic influences from the earth. Silk will protect the body from electrical disturbances. Wool will attract some of the sun's rays in cold climates and conserve the heat of the body. Linen will reflect the heat of the sun and keep the body cool.
• The greater the intelligence, the more simple and plain his dress,
• (recreation) Adepts, masters and mahatmas have no amusements though they have their recreation and pleasure. Recreation is given to their physical bodies, such as walking, climbing, or such gentle exercise as will keep the limbs and muscles of the physical body in condition. Their pleasure is in their work. The pleasure of an adept lies in seeing success attend his efforts to wield and mould the elements and the results attending what he does. A master's pleasure is found in seeing the improvement in the minds of men, in assisting them and in showing them how to control and direct their thoughts. The pleasure - if it can be called pleasure --of a mahatma is in his knowledge and power and seeing that law prevails.
• (sleep) No physical body of whatever kind or grade can exist without sleep.
• Sleep is the withdrawal of the mind from the body and the turning on of the magnetic influence.
• They can withdraw from the physical body at will, can prevent injurious influences from affecting it, and allow the magnetic influence to remove all wastes and repair all damages.
• The adept as such, apart from his physical body, does not require sleep in the sense in which the physical body does; nor is he unconscious during sleep, though there are periods when he rests and renews himself, which are analogous to sleep.
• Aside from his physical body, a master does not sleep in the sense of becoming unconscious. A master is conscious throughout an incarnation. But there is a period at the commencement of his incarnation when he passes into a state similar to that of dream, until he awakes as the master in his physical body.
• A mahatma is immortally conscious; that is to say, he maintains a continuous conscious existence through all changes and conditions throughout the entire period of evolution in which he acts, until he should some time decide to pass, or should at the end of the evolution pass, into that state known as nirvana.

November 1909

• ADEPTS and masters are organized into lodges, schools, degrees, hierarchies and brotherhoods. A lodge is a dwelling place in which an adept, master or mahatma lives, or it is a place of meeting; the term school refers to the line or kind of work in which he is engaged; a degree shows his capacity, ability and efficiency in the work of his school; a hierarchy is the race to which he belongs; a brotherhood is the relationship which exists between those in lodges, schools and hierarchies.
• The purpose of organization among adepts is to perfect their bodies, to direct desire and to control the forces of the unseen psychic world.
• As masters have not entirely worked out their karma, they are shown in their schools what that karma is and how best to work it out, how to perfect their thought or mental bodies, and what are the scope and mysteries of the mental world.
• Mahatmas are not organized as are adepts and masters. Their physical bodies have little place in their organization, if such it can be called. They do not meet in groups or schools or hold conclaves for the purpose of instruction.
• The first race of humanity were bodies of nascent minds, individual spiritual breaths. The second were electrical bodies of life force. The third were astral bodies. The fourth race were and are physical bodies, men, in and through whom the three previous races act as the form, the life, and the breath of the physical men. All physical human beings now living and distinct in sex, of whatever country, clime or so-called-race, are fourth race beings or bodies and are types of the fourth hierarchy.
• This fifth race acting through the fourth race, which is the physical body, cannot be seen by fourth race men any more than fourth race, physical men can see the third or second or first races which are in and work through them. The fifth race acts through the physical race as desire and although it cannot be seen by physical humanity, none the less it directs and compels physical humanity to its dictates.
• The fifth race of humanity is the hierarchy here called adepts
• The sixth race of humanity are the beings here called masters. The sixth race of humanity are mental bodies of thought which act on and direct, or should direct, fifth race desire, as fifth race desire impels fourth race physical men to action.
• The seventh hierarchy is the hierarchy herein called mahatmas. It is they, the most advanced, who are guides, rulers and law givers of all the races of humanity.
• The sixth race acts through physical fourth race man as his thinker.
• The seventh race acts through fourth race physical man as his I-am-I principle, or that in him which is direct and instant knowledge.
• The desire principle and thinking principle and knowing principle now present in the fourth race physical man are the fifth, sixth and seventh races of humanity herein called adepts, masters and mahatmas.
• The brotherhood of humanity is made up of those in every race who think and act for humanity as a whole rather than for any group or degree or school or hierarchy.
• Adepts and masters, as such, do not live in cities or communities. But there are communities where adepts and masters live in their physical bodies. Conveniences are had which are necessary for eating and drinking and taking care of their physical bodies. There is at least one community which is made up of the physical bodies of adepts, masters and mahatmas and a certain primitive, physical race of beings who are representatives of the early fourth race stock of humanity. This early fourth race began its existence in the middle of the third race. …and they are not known to the world.
• The physical bodies of adepts, masters and mahatmas may be burned by fire, drowned, or crushed by rocks. Their physical bodies will contract diseases affecting other mortal human bodies if subjected to the conditions for such diseases. These bodies feel heat and cold and have the same senses as other human bodies; they pass through the changes of youth and age and as physical bodies they die when the span of physical life has ended.
• But because the physical bodies of adepts, masters and mahatmas are subject to the same dangers, diseases and changes to which mortal man is heir, it does not follow that they allow their physical bodies to incur any of the effects resulting from the dangers, diseases and changes from which the human mortal man suffers, except the change known as physical death.
• A master might, in his physical body, move among lions, tigers and venomous reptiles without harm to his body.
• (Master) Because of his overcoming desire as a blind force and as the root of appetites and of attraction to sensual forms, by the power of his thought, thought may assume for him an importance beyond its real value, and by thought a master may build a mental wall about himself which will shut out the light from the spiritual world. If he attaches overmuch value to thought he becomes cold and removed from the physical world and thinks alone with himself in his own mental world. .
• (Mahatma)He knows his power, and the idea of power is so strong in him that there may develop from it egoism or egotism. Egoism carried to the extreme results in his seeing himself as God through all the worlds. Egotism ultimately results in being conscious of I as the only I or being. The power of egotism may be so great as to cut off all the worlds and then he is conscious of nothing else but himself.
• Throughout the manifested worlds there are two things which are with humanity through all its transformations and attainments. They follow and inevitably conquer each unit of humanity unless such unit conquers and uses them. These two things are by man called time and space. Time is the change of the ultimate particles of matter in their relationship to each other, as matter flows through the worlds in its coming and going. Matter is dual. Matter is spirit-matter. Matter is materialized spirit. Spirit is spiritualized matter. Space is the sameness in the one. In this sameness are continued the manifested worlds and in it the operations of time are performed. Failure to conquer time results in death in that world in which the individual unit of humanity is acting. Difference in time in the different worlds is difference in the changes of the matter of each of these worlds. Time is overcome in any of the worlds when one strikes a balance between the opposites in the spirit-matter in that world. When one strikes the balance between the particles of time or matter, the change of matter, time, stops for him. When change ceases, time is conquered. But if time is not conquered when the balance should be struck then the change called death takes place, and man departs from the world in which he has been acting and retreats to another world. As time is not conquered in the world of retreat, death again conquers. So the individual unit passes from the physical body through the psychic and often to its heaven world, but always back again to the physical world, constantly confronted by time and overtaken by death, which forces it from world to world if he has failed to strike the balance in time.
• The ability to balance the opposites in matter depends upon seeing sameness as it is through the changes of matter and to relate the matter to sameness, not to see sameness as matter. Failure to recognize sameness through the operations of time results in ignorance. Failing or unwilling to see the sameness of space through physical matter, a man cannot balance the physical sex matter, cannot arrest the changes in the desire matter, cannot equilibrate nor stay the thought matter, and the mortal cannot become an immortal.
• There are two types of adepts, masters and mahatmas: those who act for themselves, separately and selfishly, and those who act for humanity as a whole.
• Knowledge without wisdom acts selfishly and with the idea of being separate. The result is the nirvana of annihilation at the end of the manifestation of the worlds. When sameness is seen and the idea mastered and acted on, then time as change of matter is balanced in all the worlds, death is conquered, space is conquered, selfishness and separateness disappear and the one thus knowing, sees that he, as an individual immortal unit of humanity, is in no way separate from any of the other units in any of the manifested worlds.
• A mahatma may decide to keep a body, the form body of the physical, in which he can communicate with and be seen by humanity. Then he overcomes in his physical body time and death in the physical world by immortalizing the form of the physical body, not physical matter as such. He puts the body through a course of training and provides it with particular foods which he gradually diminishes in quantity. The body increases in strength and gradually throws off its physical particles, but maintains its form. This continues until all the physical particles have been thrown off and the body of form stands, the conquerer of death, in the physical world, where it may be seen by men, though it lives in the form-desire world and is known as an adept, an adept of a higher order. This body is the one which has been spoken of in theosophical teachings as nirmanakaya.
• That class of mahatmas in whom egotism is developed leave the psychic and the mental bodies, which they have developed, continue in their spiritual body of knowledge and shut themselves out from all things of the world; they enjoy the bliss which comes from the attainment and knowledge of self and the power that attends it. They have during their incarnations sought immortality and bliss for themselves alone, and having attained immortality they have no care for the world or their fellows in it.
• Although they have overcome matter, time, they have conquered it only for one period of its manifestations. Not having mastered sameness, space, in which time moves, they are still under the dominion of space.
• Those mahatmas who do not shut out the world remain in touch with the world of men by keeping their mental thought body, in which case they contact the minds only of men and are not seen or known by men through their senses.
• The purpose of a mahatma who remains in contact with the world is to govern a race of men or mankind as a whole, to control the minds of men, to direct their action, prescribe laws and to have the worship and adoration of mankind.
• When one becomes a mahatma of this type, in whom egoism is fully developed, he naturally perceives his own godship. He is a god and wills that his power and knowledge shall rule the worlds and men. On becoming such a mahatma he may establish a new religion in the world. The greater number of the world's religions are the result of and have been brought into being and established by a mahatma of this kind.
• Religions are necessary to certain groups of races, who are as sheep needing a fold and a shepherd. The mahatma or god gives a certain protection to his followers and often guides and sheds a beneficent and protective influence over his people. A religion represents one of the schools in which mankind is taught while the mind is in its youthful stages of development.
• There are other forces and beings, however, which are neither friendly nor indifferent to man but who are inimical and evily disposed to human-kind. Among such beings are some adepts. They, too, appear to man. When they give him some revelation and empower him to start a religion or society or form a group of men in which pernicious teachings are imparted, diabolical practices observed, and lewd and licentious ceremonies are held which require the shedding of blood and gruesome, ghoulish and disgusting indulgences.
• Man should not fear to believe in one or many gods and their creeds, but he should be careful in entrusting himself to a religion, teaching or god, who requires unreasoning faith with absolute devotion. There comes a time in the life of each when religions no longer teach him, but merely show the record of what he has passed through and has outgrown

December 1909

• (disqualifications) Ungoverned anger, passion, appetites and desires, will disqualify an aspirant; so will a virulent or wasting disease, such as cancer or consumption, or a disease preventing the natural action of internal organs, such as gall stones, goitre and paralysis; so will amputation of a limb, or loss of the use of an organ of sense, such as the eye, because the organs are necessary to the disciple as they are the centers of forces through which the disciple is instructed.
• One who is addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors disqualifies himself by such use, because alcohol is an enemy to the mind. The spirit of alcohol is not of our evolution. It is of a different evolution.
• Mediums and those who frequent seance rooms are not fit subjects for discipleship, because they have around them the shadows or ghosts of the dead.
• Hence somnambulists and those suffering from dementia, that is, any abnormal action or unsoundness of mind, are unfitted.
• No one who is subject to hypnotic influence is fit for discipleship,
• The confirmed christian scientist is unfit and useless as a disciple,
• (adepts) In the school of the senses the disciples are instructed in the development of their psychic faculties, such as clairvoyance and clairaudience, in the development of the psychic or desire body and how to live apart from the physical and act in the desire world;
• (masters) whereas in the school of the mind, the disciple is instructed in the use and development of his mind and of the faculties of the mind, such as thought transference and imagination, the faculty of image building, and in the development of a thought body able to live and act freely in the world of thought.
• Those desiring to be disciples, whose efforts are to think clearly and understand definitely what they think, who take delight in following an idea through processes of thought as it is reflected in the world of thought, who see the expression of thoughts in their physical forms, who trace the forms of things back through processes of thought to the idea from which they originate, those who endeavor to understand the causes which actuate human emotions and control human destinies, are those who have made or are making their application for admission to discipleship in the school of the masters.
• Their acceptance as disciples is known to them as soon as they have developed mental faculties which fit them for and make them ready to receive instruction in the school of the masters.
• Those who choose the school of the masters may, on becoming a master, become a mahatma and then only, safely become an adept. Those who choose and enter the school of the senses, and who become adepts, seldom if ever become masters or mahatmas.
• One should study well his motive in wishing to be a disciple. If his motive is not prompted by the love of service to his fellow men, as much as for his own advancement, it will be better for him to postpone his attempt until such time as he can feel himself in the hearts of others and feel mankind in his own heart.
• The self appointed disciple is the only witness of his appointment. No other witness is needed. If a self appointed disciple is of the stuff of which true disciples are made, he will feel that socalled documentary evidence will be of little or no importance in deciding a matter in which lives of effort are concerned.
• The self appointed disciple who will eventually become an entered disciple, knows that he has set himself a task which may take many lives of unremitting effort, and although he may often feel discouraged at his seemingly slow progress in self preparation, yet his determination is fixed and he steers his course accordingly.
• The self preparation of the self appointed disciple in the school of the senses is parallel or similar to that in the school of the mind, for a considerable time; that is, both endeavor to control their appetites, direct their thoughts to the studies at hand, eliminate customs and habits which distract them from their self appointed work, and both fix their minds on their ideals.
• (food) It is not impossible to live an ordinary life and preserve health without the use of meat for some singularly constituted bodies. But in the present physical body of man, he is constituted an herbivorous and a carnivorous animal.
• There does come a time, when the disciple is nearing adeptship or mastership, when he discontinues the use of meat and may not use solid or liquid food of any kind; but he does not give up the use of meat while he is actively engaged in large cities and with other men. He may discard the use of meat before he is ready, but he pays the penalty by a weakly and sickly body, or by a fidgety, ill-tempered, irritable or unbalanced mind.
• The self appointed disciple should not attempt to kill or weaken desire, the beast in his keeping; he should care for and have as strong an animal as he can, that he may complete his journey. His business is to control the animal and compel it to carry him where he wills.
• Western races are meat eating races.
• He must not run away from things which seem obstacles on his path; he must walk through and overcome them fearlessly. No weakling can succeed.
• It requires a strong desire and a fixed determination to undertake and make the journey. One who supposes that he must wait until conditions are ready for him, one who thinks that things will be done for him by unseen powers, had better not begin.
• He who believes that his position in life, his circumstances, family, relationships, age and encumbrances, are obstacles too great to overcome, is correct. His belief proves that he does not understand the work before him and that he is, therefore, not ready to begin.
• The school of the adepts When he has a strong desire, a firm conviction in the reality of his quest, and has the determination to go on, he is ready to begin. He does begin from that point. He is a self appointed disciple.
• Obstacles beset the self appointed disciple at every turn. He must not run away from them, nor ignore them. He must stand his ground and deal with them according to his ability. No obstacle or combination of obstacles can overcome him - if he does not give up the fight.
• When he has met the difficulty and has dealt with it squarely and learned what it had for him, it will disappear. It may hold him for a long time or it may disappear like magic. The length of its stay or the quickness of its removal depends on his treatment of it.
• From the time it begins to dawn on the self appointed disciple that all his troubles, difficulties and woes, as well as his pleasures and pastimes, have a definite place in his education and character, he begins to live confidently and without fear. He is now preparing himself to be a duly entered disciple.
• As a man about to begin a long journey takes with him only what is necessary on the journey and leaves other things behind, so a self appointed disciple attaches himself to that only which is necessary to his work and leaves other things alone.
• This does not mean that he ceases to care for the things valuable to him alone; he must value a thing for what it is worth to others as well as for what it is worth to him.
• What is more important to him than conditions, environment and position, is the manner in which he meets, thinks and acts with these.
• As a day is made up of hours, the hours of minutes, the minutes of seconds, so his life is made up of greater and lesser events, and these of trivial affairs. If the aspirant manages the unseen little affairs of life thoroughly, and intelligently controls unimportant events, these will show him how to act and decide the important events. The great events of life are like public performances. Each actor learns or fails to learn his part.
• All this he does unseen by the public eye, but what he does in public is what he has learned to do in private.
• Like the secret workings of nature, the aspirant must work unceasingly and in darkness before he will see the results of his work.
• Years or lives may be spent in which he may see little progress, yet he must not cease working.
• Like a seed planted in the ground, he must work in darkness before he can see the clear light. .
• The aspirant need not rush out into the world to do any important work in order to prepare himself; he need not race over the world in order to learn; he himself is the subject of his study; he himself is the thing to be overcome; he himself is the material which he works with; he himself is the result of his efforts; and he will see in time what he has done, by what he is.
• The aspirant should check outbursts of anger and passion.
• The body should be made to feel that it is the friend, instead of the enemy, of the aspirant. When this is done and the physical body feels that it is being cared for and protected, things may be done with it which were impossible before.
• Harmless outdoor pleasures and exercises such as swimming, boating, walking, moderate climbing, are good for the body.
• Close observation of the earth, its structure and the lives it contains, of the water and of the things in it, of the trees and what they support, of clouds, landscapes and natural phenomena, as well as study of the habits of insects, birds and fishes, will afford pleasure to the mind of the aspirant.
• The aspirant must not allow money or the possession of it to be an attraction to him. If he feels that he is wealthy and has power and is of importance because he has much money and power, or if he feels poor and of no account because he has little or none, his belief will prevent further progress.
• The aspirant's wealth or poverty is in his power of thought and in faculties other than those of the physical world, not in money. The aspirant, if he is poor, will have enough for his needs; he will have no more, no matter what his possessions may be, if he is a true aspirant.
• A self appointed disciple should not affiliate with any set of people to whose method of belief or form of faith he must subscribe, if these are different from his own or if they limit in any way the free action and use of his mind.
• This sensing of the new world is by no means an entrance into and living in the astral world. This sensing of a new world is often mistaken for entrance into it.
• He should not believe what apparitions or unseen voices may tell him, but he should question all he sees and hears if it seems worth while, and if not, he should command what he sees to disappear, or bid the unseen voice be still.
• His senses will seem to melt into each other and he will find himself not so much in a place as in a condition, in which he will be aware that he is an accepted disciple.
• When he has learned so to live and act independently of his physical body he will be an adept.
• (rules) Among the rules applying to the physical body are: observance of the laws of one's country, of relation to family, of chastity, of care and treatment of body, non-interference by others with his body. Among the rules applying to the body of the new psychic faculties are those concerning obedience, mediumship, disputes or arguments, treatment of desires,. treatment of other disciples, use of senses and powers.
• The rules require that a disciple shall not violate the laws of the country in which he lives.
• In relation to family, the disciple shall fulfil his duties to parents, wife and children. If a separation from wife or children should take place it shall be upon the request and act of wife or children; separation must not be provoked by the disciple.
• As to chastity, if the disciple is unmarried, at the time of becoming disciple he shall remain unmarried providing that by so doing he will maintain his chastity, but if he cannot remain chaste in desire and act then he should marry. As regards the married state.
• The rule concerning chastity requires that the disciple shall not incite his wife's desire and that he shall earnestly endeavor to control his own. The rule concerning chastity forbids the use of the sex function under any pretext whatever, except for natural relationship between man and woman.
• As to care and treatment of body, it is required that that food shall be eaten which is best for the health and strength of the body, and that the body shall be kept clean, nourished and cared for, and be given the exercise, rest and sleep found necessary to the maintenance of bodily health.
• All alcoholic stimulants and drugs producing an unconscious state are to be avoided.
• The rule relating to non-interference by others with his body, means that the disciple should under no circumstances or pretence allow anyone to mesmerise or hypnotise him.
• The rule relating to disputes and arguments requires that the disciple shall not dispute or argue with his fellow disciples nor with other men. Disputes and arguments breed ill-feeling, quarrels and anger and must be suppressed. All matters relating to their studies, when not understood between themselves, should be referred by the disciples to their teacher. If not then agreed on, the matter shall be left alone until their growing faculties will have mastered it. …As regards others, the disciple may state his views if he wishes, but must cease argument if he feels antagonism rising within himself.
• The rule regarding the treatment of other disciples requires that the disciples shall regard them nearer than his blood relatives; that he shall willingly sacrifice himself or any of his possessions or powers to assist a brother disciple, if by such sacrifice he does not take from or interfere with his family or act against the laws of the country in which he lives, and if such sacrifice is not forbidden by his teacher.
• Should a disciple feel anger or jealousy he must search out its source and transmute it. He interferes with his own and the progress of his class by allowing any ill-feeling toward his fellow disciples to exist.
• The disciple is forbidden to make any attempt to project himself out of his physical body, or leave his physical body, or aid another disciple to do so.
• A disciple lives inside of his life in the world. As he lives a more interior life, he may wish to leave the world of men and live with those of the school to which he belongs. Such desire is however forbidden and must be subdued by the disciple, as desire to leave the world will result in his leaving it, but there remains the necessity to return again until he can work in the world without the desire to leave it. The disciple's work in the world may cover a series of lives, but there comes a time when it is either necessary for him to leave it for a short or long time or altogether.

January 1910 (adepts)

• The disciple is shown the servants and workers of and in these different elements, with the forces acting through them, though he is not as disciple brought into the presence of the rulers of the elements.
• He meets the bodies belonging to these races and sees their relation to his own physical body, that of earth which is composed of beings belonging to these races.
• Besides these four elements, he is shown the fifth, in which he will be born as an adept at the completion of his development.
• The disciple is instructed concerning these races, their powers and action, but he is not carried into the realms or spheres of these races until he is more than a disciple.
• Some beings of these races are summoned before his developing senses that he may become familiar with them before birth among them and before he is trusted
• and allowed to act independently in and among them.
• The disciple is instructed concerning the earth and its inner side; he may even be taken in his physical body to some interior parts of the earth, where he will meet some of the races spoken of.
• It may be required of him in his duties in the world that he be a prominent or an obscure physician. As such, he may impart the information to self appointed disciples who are fit to receive it, or he may give to the world such information as it can use to advantage.
• He is shown harmless and inimical creatures who live in the atmosphere of man. It may be required of him to prevent such beings from attacking mankind, when mankind allows of protection. It may also be his duty to distintegrate some of these beings when they pass beyond their boundaries and interfere with man.
• He is taught the means of communicating with and summoning the presence of beings of these worlds; that is to say, he is instructed, in their names, the forms of their names, the pronunciation and intonation of these names, and the symbols and seals which stand for and compel them.
• The turn of life of man is the beginning of the decline of his physical power. With some men this happens at thirty-five and with others not until their fiftieth year.
• In a community such as before described as that of the early race of physical man who are preserved in their natural purity, the disciple sees physical humanity as they were before the class of sensual minds had incarnated among them. This stock was preserved in order that mankind might be carried in its physical line unbroken from the time of the inception of the physical until the time of its passing from fourth race physical humanity into fifth race and sixth race and seventh race humanity, or through physical, psychic, mental and spiritual stages; humans, adepts, masters and mahatmas.
• This is the event of his lives of effort. His birth is equal to a physical death. It is a separation of body from body. It may be preceded by a conflux and tumult of the forces and fluids of the physical body and attended by apprehension or by calm and mellowness like as of the evening, at the glowing of the setting sun. Whether his travail be like unto the rumbling thunder amid the deepening darkness of gathering clouds or the quiet glory of the dying sun, the seeming death of the physical is followed by birth. As after a storm or luminous sunset the darkness is brightened by the stars and the light flood of the rising moon, so emerges out of the effort of overcoming, so grows out of death, the new born being. The adept emerges from or through his physical body into that world which he seemed to know so well but which he finds he knew but little.
• (master) the requirements of the aspirant for discipleship in the school of the masters differ from those of the other school in that the self appointed disciple shall not attempt the development or use of the psychic senses.
• His senses bear evidence, but the test of these is made by reason.
• There is no age limit for the aspirant to discipleship in the school of the masters. One may appoint himself a disciple when very old. He may not become an accepted and entered disciple in that life, but his step will bring him nearer to the point of discipleship in a succeeding life.
• The self appointed disciple is usually one concerning himself with obscure things, asking himself or others questions not generally thought about. He may be interested in subjects of mystery to the senses or in mental problems and processes.
• Psychic faculties may have been possessed by him from birth or they make their appearance during the course of his studies. In either case, the self appointed disciple who wants to enter the school of the masters must suppress and stop the use of these faculties.
• Suppression without injury is had by turning his interest from the senses themselves to the subjects which these senses present.
• The self appointed disciple who is in natural possession of psychic faculties can make rapid progress in mental development if he will close the doors to the psychic world.
• When he so shuts the doors he should try to gain entrance to the mental world by using and developing the mental faculties. When he dams the psychic floods they rise as energy and he receives an accretion of mental power.
• This path may take a long time to travel as compared with the results gained in the school of the senses, but in the end it is the shortest way to immortality.

February 1910 (masters)

• IN turning the mind from the senses to the subjects which the senses represent, one may clearly distinguish the difference between the school of the adepts, and the school of the masters.
• The school of the adepts controls or attempts to control the mind and senses by means of the senses.
• The school of the masters controls the mind and the senses by faculties of the mind.
• To attempt to control the mind by means of the senses is like harnessing and attempting to drive a horse with its head to the wagon.
• The time spent in becoming an adept is the time used in learning to drive the horse backward. After a disciple has become an adept and learned to drive the mind by means of the senses, it is almost impossible for him to take the better way of directing the senses by means of the mind.
• The subjects of what is received through the senses as objects, are perceived as subjects by turning the thought from the senses to that which they reflect. In doing this the aspirant is selecting for his discipleship the school of the mind;
• When he experiences through the senses, then his thought, instead of dwelling on the experience, reverts to what the experience teaches.
• Then he may think concerning the causes of existence. Thinking of the causes of existence makes the disciple, who is self appointed to the school of the masters, adjust and relate the senses to the mind, lets him distinguish the differences between the mind and the senses and lets him see the modes of action of each.
• …instead of attempting to draw the mind into and unite the mind with the senses, as by dwelling on a dream, looking at an astral figure or landscape and trying to continue to see and experience them, he asks and finds out what the dream means and what caused it and to what subjects the figure or landscape refer and what they are.
• By so doing he sharpens his thinking faculty, checks the opening of psychic faculties, lessens the power of the senses in their influence on the mind, separates in thought the mind from the senses, and learns that if the mind will not work for the senses the senses must work for the mind.
• In this way he becomes more confident and his thought acts more freely and more independently of the senses.
• He may continue to dream, but the subjects of which he dreams are considered instead of the dream; he may cease to dream, but the subjects of dreams will then take the place of the dreams and be present in his thought as dreams were to his astral vision.
• His thought is referred to the subjects of his senses instead of to the objects which the senses seek.
• He seeks the meaning of the object and its cause; and these may be found in the mental world, as thoughts; and beyond the thoughts, as ideas.
• He may in some respects value the sense and object more than before, but the highest value will be given to the subjects and things which he will perceive by his thought.
• He hears music or noises or words and tries to appreciate them for their meaning rather than for the manner in which they affect his hearing.
• If he can perceive truly in the mental world what a word is and means, he will no longer cling to words and names as he had, though he will now value them more.
• His meditations do not then begin with nor center upon the senses nor the objects of sense for themselves. He tries to begin his meditation with thoughts in themselves (abstract thoughts), not with the senses.
• As his thoughts become clearer in his own mind he is better able to follow the processes of thought in other minds.
• (Arguing)There may be a tendency to argue but should he feel pleasure in getting the best of an argument or in considering another with whom he argues as an opponent, he will make no progress toward discipleship.
• As he argues to win, he blinds himself to what is true.
• He who seeks only that which is true and right has no fear, because he cannot lose. He seeks the right and loses nothing if he finds another right.
• As the aspirant is able to direct his thoughts forcefully, the power of thought becomes apparent to him. This is a dangerous stage on the road to discipleship. As he thinks clearly he sees that people, circumstances, conditions and environments, may be changed by the nature of his thought.
• The aspirant who by his thought causes others to act according to his thought, who cures bodily ills, causes bodily harm, or by his thought directs the thought and actions of others, thereby ends his progress on the road to discipleship,
• The aspirant who obtains money by thought… will not become a disciple
• If he does not stop longing for …changes in his circumstances and does not discontinue setting his thought to obtain them, he will never become a disciple.
• When the self appointed disciple finds that there is an increase in his power of thought and that he may do things by thought, that is a sign that he should not do them. The use of his thought to obtain physical or psychic advantages, debars him from entrance to the school of the masters.
• When the self-appointed disciple finds that he may command others and control conditions by means of thought and does not, then he is on the true path to discipleship.
• Endurance, courage, perseverance, determination, perception and enthusiasm are necessary to the aspirant if he wants to become a disciple, but more important than these is the will to be right.
• There should be no hurry to be a master; though one should let pass no opportunity for advancement, he should try to live in eternity rather than in the time world.
• He should search out his motives in thought. He should have his motives right at any cost.
• At some unexpected moment during his meditations there is a quickening of his thoughts; the circulations of his body cease; his senses are stilled; they offer no resistance or attraction to the mind which acts through them.
• There is a quickening and gathering of all his thoughts; all thoughts blend into one thought. Thought ceases, but he is conscious.
• A moment seems to expand to an eternity. He stands within. He has entered consciously into the school of the masters, the mind, and is a truly accepted disciple.
• He is conscious of one thought and in that all thoughts seem to end. From this one thought he looks through all other thoughts.
• A flood of light streams through all things and shows them as they are.
• This may last for hours or days or it may pass within the minute, but during the period the new disciple has found his place of discipleship in the school of the masters.
• The circulations of the body start again, the faculties and senses are alive, but there is no disagreement between them.
• Light streams through them as through all other things. Radiance prevails.
• Hatred and disagreement have no place, all is a symphony.
• His experiences in the world continue, but he begins a new life. This life he lives inside his outer life.
• Whatever he was to himself before, he now knows himself to be as a child; but he has no fear. He lives with the confidence of a child in its readiness to learn
• He is alone in the world. No friends or relations will understand him; the world cannot understand him. He may be considered as wise or simple, as rich or poor, as natural or strange, by those he meets. Each one sees him to be what that one himself seeks to be, or as the opposite.
• The disciple in the school of the masters is given no rules to live by. He has but one rule, one set of instructions; this is that by which he found entrance to discipleship. This rule is the one thought into which all other thoughts entered; it is that thought through which his other thoughts are clearly seen. This one thought is that by which he learns the way. He may not at all times act from this thought. It may be seldom that he can act from this thought; but he cannot forget it. When he can see it, no difficulty is too great to overcome, no trouble is too hard to bear, no misery can cause despair, no sorrow is too heavy to carry, no joy will overwhelm, no position too high or low to fill, no responsibility too onerous to assume. He knows the way. By this thought he stills all other thoughts. By this thought the light comes, the light which floods the world and shows all things as they are.
• He may be unnoticed by men, but he is not unnoticed by the masters.
• The disciple may continue to the end of the life in which he becomes disciple without consciously meeting with other disciples; but before he passes from the present life he will know his master.
• The disciple feels an intimate reverence for his teacher, but does not stand in worshipful awe of him.
• As the disciple progresses, he may by thinking on any object trace it back to its source.
• He continues to think of himself in the mental world; thus he controls desire by his thoughts.
• When he is able to live without longing for and without regrets at leaving the world, when he appreciates that time is in eternity, and that eternity is through time, and that he may live in eternity while in time, and if his turn of life has not been passed, he is aware that the period of outer action is ended and the period of inner action begins.
• A body which seemed aged may be restored to the freshness and vigor of manhood.

March 1910

• The head of the physical is the heart of the new body and it lives throughout the physical body.
• …he clearly understands that what the ordinary man experiences or passes through only after death, he must in future pass through while fully conscious in his physical body.
• He must now learn to live consciously in and operate from the heaven world of man in order to become a master.
• …he experiences the astral world with all of its forces, through certain temptations, attractions, pleasures, fears, hatreds, sorrows, which all disciples in the school of the masters must experience and overcome before they can be accepted and know of their acceptance as disciples in the school of the masters.
• While still a disciple, the heaven world of man is not clear and distinct to him; this can only be realized fully by a master.
• The heaven world of man is the mental world into which the disciple is learning to enter consciously and in which a master lives consciously at all times.
• He now learns that at the time of becoming a disciple and during the moment or period of that calm ecstasy, there entered into the inner chambers of his brain a seed or germ of light which was really the cause of the quickening of his thoughts and the stilling of his body, and that at that time he had conceived of a new life and that from that conception is to be developed and born intelligently into the mental world the body which will make of him a master, the master body.
• His thoughts are his rules. He must learn these himself. He judges these thoughts and their effects by calling into use the one thought which judges other thoughts impartially.
• The disciple of the masters must be not only aware of the difference and distinctions between his mental faculties, but he must act with these as clearly and intelligently in the mental world as the ordinary man now acts through his sense organs in the physical world.
• For each sense every man has a corresponding mental faculty, but only a disciple will know how to distinguish between the faculty and the sense and how to use his mental faculties independently of the senses.
• The disciple sees that it is impossible for a thinker to perceive the order of universal phenomena with their causes, because, although the speculator is often able to rise to the mental world through one of his mental faculties and there to apprehend one of the truths of existence, he is unable to maintain the unclouded use of the faculty until he is fully conscious of what he apprehends, though his apprehensions are so strong that he will always be of the opinion which is formed from such apprehensions. Further, that when this faculty is again active in his senses he tries to square what he has apprehended in the mental world by his mental faculties as they now act through their respective senses. The result is that what he may have truly apprehended in the mental world is contradicted or confused by the coloring, atmosphere, intervention and evidences of his senses.
• It is made plain to the disciple that his particular faculty through which he will become from a disciple in the school of the masters, a master, is the motive faculty. By the motive faculty he will declare himself. Of all things motives are the most important.
• as a disciple retired from the world and living alone or in a community in which there are other disciples, he begins to do that which he had apprehended or about which he had been informed while in the world. The reality of himself is more evident to him.
• He is aware of the reality of his faculties, but he has not yet realized the full and free use of these and the identity of himself.
• That which entered into him on becoming a disciple, that is, the seed and the process of its development, is becoming evident to him.
• While in his physical body, the disciple learns gradually of the potential power of the I-am faculty within. This is learned by calling into use the light faculty. The power of the I-am faculty is learned through the power of the light faculty. But it is learned only as the disciple develops and is able to use his focus faculty.
• The light faculty makes known a limitless sphere of light. What this light is, is not at once known. By the use of the light faculty all things are resolved into light. By the use of the light faculty all things are made known to or through the other faculties.
• The focus faculty gathers, adjusts, relates and centralizes things. By means of the focus faculty duality becomes unity.
• The dark faculty is a sleeping power. When aroused, the dark faculty is restless and energetic and opposed to order. The dark faculty is a sleep producing power. The dark faculty is aroused by the use of other faculties which it negatives and resists. The dark faculty blindly interferes with and obscures all other faculties and things.
• The use of the motive faculty is the cause of every result in any world, however remote.
• I am faculty is the faculty of being conscious of self.
• The disciple is conscious of the light faculty, of the I-am faculty, of the time faculty, of the motive faculty, of the image faculty, of the dark faculty, but as disciple he must begin his work by and through the focus faculty.

April 1910

• The disciple finds that that thought into which all other thoughts had blended and by which he had found himself as disciple, and had known himself to be an accepted disciple in the school of the masters, was in fact the opening up of and ability to use his focus faculty consciously; that he had, after his long and continued efforts, been able to bring together his wandering thoughts which had been attracted by and were operating through his senses, was due to the use of his focus faculty; that by the focus faculty he had collected and centered those thoughts and so quieted the activities of the mind as to allow the light faculty to inform him where he was and of his entrance into the mental world.
• it seems to him as though he is coming into great knowledge and that he will enter all realms in the different worlds by the use of his focus faculty. It seems to him that he is able to know everything and answer any question by using his focus faculty, and all the faculties seem to be at his disposal and ready for his use, when operated from his focus faculty,
• The body and all the elements of the body are changed during one inbreathing and outbreathing.
• Between these swings of the physical and magnetic breath there is a moment of balance; at this moment of balance all objects or things become known to the disciple by the use of his focus faculty.
• the disciple does not forget the one thought into which all his thoughts had been centered and by which he seemed to know all things and by which he knew himself as an accepted disciple.
• He knows that it was by the focus faculty that he knew himself to be in another world than the world of the senses,
• This focus faculty is the power of the mind to bring in line and relate any thing to its origin and source.
• When a thing is directly in line with its origin and source it is known as it is.
• From his body of sex, he trains the range of his focus faculty to find the mental world.
• This puts him out of range of the senses in the physical body though he is still possessed of his senses.
• As he continues to so use his focus faculty, one after another the senses are stilled.
• The disciple cannot touch or feel, he cannot smell, he has no sense of taste, all sounds have ceased, vision is gone, he cannot see and darkness surrounds him; yet he is conscious.
• This moment, when the disciple is conscious without seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling and without touching or feeling anything, is of vital importance.
• What will follow this moment of being conscious without the senses? Some keen minds in the world have tried to find this state of being conscious without the senses. Some have shrunk back with horror when they had almost found it. Others have gone mad. Only one who has been long trained in and who has been tempered by the senses can remain steadily conscious during that crucial moment.
• What follows the experience of the disciple has already been decided by his motives in attempting it. The disciple comes out of the experience a changed man. The experience may only have been for a second by the time of his senses, but it may have seemed an eternity to that which was conscious in the experience. During that moment the disciple has learned the secret of death, but he has not mastered death. That which was steadily conscious for a moment independently of the senses is to the disciple like coming to life in the mental world.
• The world of the mind is dreadful to a thing of the senses. The world of the senses is as hell to the purified mind.
• When the disciple is able he will again repeat the experiment which he has learned. Whether the experiment is dreaded or is eagerly sought by him, it will lead the disciple into a period of negation and darkness. The physical body of the disciple has become a thing distinct from himself though he is still in it. By the use of his focus faculty in attempting to enter the mental or heaven world he called into action the dark faculty of the mind.
• The experience of being conscious without the senses gives the disciple great strength and power, but it also ushers him into a period of unutterable gloom. This gloom is caused by the awakening into action of the dark faculty as it had never before acted.
• Through all periods and existences of the mind the dark faculty of the mind had been sluggish and slow, like a gorged boa or a serpent in the cold.
• It had fed in the senses the activities which have paid it constant tribute, and that tribute had kept it in a torpid state.
• But the disciple trying to overcome the senses and to enter the mental world has in great degree withheld tribute from this thing of ignorance, the dark faculty of the mind.
• But he finds that his desires were not really conquered and the dark faculty of the mind was not really overcome. When the disciple was able to be conscious without the use and independently of his senses, he called at that time and by that experience the dark faculty of his mind into activity as never before.
• This, the dark faculty of his mind, is the adversary of the disciple. The dark faculty has now the strength of the world serpent.
• It acts directly and in a way most likely to overcome and prevent the disciple from crossing through its realm of death into the mental world of immortal life.
• But that old evil, the dark faculty, seldom attacks the disciple in the way he expects to be met, if he does expect. It has innumerable wiles and subtle ways of attacking and opposing the disciple. There are only two means which it can employ, and it invariably uses the second only if the first has failed.
• He is aware of the inside of things. Rocks and trees are so many living things not seen, but apprehended as such. All the elements speak to him, and it seems to him that he may command them. The world seems a living, throbbing, being. The earth seems to move with the movement of his body. The trees seem to bend to his nod. The seas seem to moan and the tides to rise and fall with the beating of his heart and the waters to circulate with the circulation of his blood. The winds seem to come and go in rythmic movement with his breath and all seems to be kept in movement by his energy.
• He seems the king and ruler of nature which had been waiting for him through the ages until he should, as now, at last have come to rule in her kingdoms.
• In the midst of the delights of sense, there comes to the disciple one thought. It is the thought by which he sees through things and knows them as they are. By it, the disciple in the school of the masters knows that the new world in which he stands is not the world of the masters, the mental world, beautiful though it is.
• figures and forms and all elements cry out to him. First to enjoy with them and, as he refuses, then to remain with them and be their ruler, their savior, and lead them onward to a higher world. They plead; they tell him they have waited long for him; that he should not leave them; that he alone can save them.
• He knows that this world is not his world; that the forms which he sees are impermanent and decay; that the tones and voices which appeal to him are the crystallized echoes of the world's desires, which can never be satisfied. The disciple pronounces his thought to the world which has claimed him. He shows it that he knows it and will not give his word to the inner world of the senses.
• The disciple in the school of the masters dismisses the call of ambition and position. He dismisses the call to be a great teacher or a saint, though he listens well to the cry for help. The thought of his discipleship is again with him. He focusses on the calls and judges them by his one thought. Almost had he gone out to the world to help.

May 1910

• The disciple in the school of the masters now enters his death period.
• He treads the earth, but it has the unsubstantiality of a shadow.
• Life is a pain, though the disciple is dead to pain as to pleasure. Everything is unreal; all is a mockery. Love is a spasm. Those who seem to enjoy life are seen to be only in a delirium. The saint is self deluded, the sinner is mad. The wise are as the foolish, there is neither bad nor good. The heart of the disciple loses feeling. Time is seen to be a delusion, yet it seems to be the most real. There is no up nor down in the universe. The solid earth seems to be a dark bubble floating in darker and empty space. Though the disciple in the school of the masters walks about and physically sees things as before, the mental darkness thickens about him. Waking or sleeping, the darkness is with him. The darkness becomes a thing of horror and continually encroaches. Silence is upon him and his words seem to have no sound. The silence seems to crystallize into a formless thing which cannot be seen, and its presence is the presence of death. Go where he will, do what he will, the disciple cannot escape this dark thing. It is in everything and around everything. It is within him and around him. Annihilation were bliss as compared to the nearness of this dark thing. But for the presence of this dark thing the disciple is alone. He feels as though he is the living dead in a dead world. .
• The disciple is in the coils of the ancient serpent of the world against which human strength is as weakness.
• It dawns upon him that if he cannot overcome the darkness, yet the darkness has not quite overcome him, for he is conscious.
• This thought of being conscious in the dark is the first glimmering of life for the disciple since he entered his death period.
• When the disciple is willing to remain perpetually in utter darkness if need be, and when he feels conscious in eternity, even though in darkness and will not yield, that thought by which things are known comes to him.
• He now knows that the utter gloom in which he is surrounded is his own dark faculty, a very part of his own being which is his own adversary. This thought gives him new strength, but he cannot fight, for the dark faculty is of himself though it eludes him. The disciple now trains his focus faculty to find his dark faculty. As the disciple continues to exercise his focus faculty and bring the dark faculty into range there seems to be a sundering of mind and body.
• When seemingly within range and about to be discovered, the thing of darkness, like a devil fish, emits an impenetrable blackness which surrounds it and darkens everything. While the darkness prevails the thing again eludes the focus faculty of the disciple. As the disciple brings the focus to bear steadily into the blackness, it begins to take on form, and out of the dark gloom there come most loathsome forms.
• But he is fearless until he discovers that they are his own creations. Then fear comes. He sickens in despair.
• Each time he ceases using his focus faculty he finds relief, but not forgetfulness.
• At some time, it may be in one of the darkest moments or one of relief, the one thought of the disciple comes again; and again he knows things as they are. They are the children of his past thoughts and deeds conceived in ignorance and born in darkness. He knows that they are the ghosts of his dead past, which his dark faculty has summoned and which he must transform or be borne down by. He is fearless and wills to transform them, by the one thought which he knows. He begins this, his work. Then he becomes aware of and awakens and uses his image faculty.
• As soon as the disciple comes into possession of his image faculty he discovers that the dark faculty is unable to produce forms. He learns that the dark faculty had been able to throw up before him the past in forms by means of the image faculty, but as he has now taken possession of it and learns its use, the dark faculty though it still remains elusive, cannot create form. Gradually the disciple gains confidence in himself and learns to look fearlessly on his past. He marshals the events of that past in order before him. Through his image faculty he gives them the forms in which they were, and by the one thought which he knows he judges them for what they are.
• By his image faculty the disciple is able to give form to the darkness and to image the dark faculty, but he is still unable to know the dark faculty in itself
• The disciple may try to image to himself who he is and what is his form. But by his one thought which he knows he will know that he is as yet unborn and that though he knows of his "I" he is unable to image himself. The disciple finds that from the very first of his attempts to center the focus faculty on the dark faculty, even though it were possible, he could not have discovered the dark faculty because his attention had been diverted from it by the creatures which it made present to him. As he learns this he knows that he has stilled the dark faculty. He knows himself to be unborn, like a foetus.
• He finds or has shown to him that that with which he has struggled is the uncontrolled and blind desire of his human kind and that by subduing desires he aids and stimulates mankind to so act with theirs.
• As yet the disciple has not overcome sleep; he has not overcome death. He knows that he cannot die, though he is in a womb of death. He no longer struggles. He awaits the maturing of time which will bring him to birth.
• There seems to be a new influx of intelligent life. He takes mental life within his physical body, as when a foetus takes life in the womb. The disciple feels as though he might rise out of his physical body and soar where he pleases and at will.
• As his time of birth approaches, the one thought which he knows is ever present with him. His focus faculty is fixed in this one thought. All things seem to blend into this thought and this one thought which he knows is through all things. He becomes more conscious of this one thought; lives in it, and while his physical body will perform its functions naturally his whole concern is in his one thought which he knows. A calm joy and peace are within him. Harmony is about him and he quickens according to his thought.
• Power comes and his speech is born within him. As he speaks, he ascends out of the dark faculty as out of a womb. He, a master, has risen. His speech, his voice, is his birth. It is his ascension. Never again will he pass through death. He is immortal. His speech is a word. The Word is his name. His name, his word is as the keynote of a song which is sounded throughout the time world, surrounding and permeating the physical world. His name is the theme of the song of life which is taken up and sung by every particle of time. As the harmony of time is understood, the disciple perceives himself to be a mental body. His mental body is a body of faculties, not of senses. His focus faculty he uses readily. By it he finds that he, his mental body, is the one thought by which he became a disciple in the school of the masters, the same thought which guided him through all difficulties and by which he knows things as they are; it is his motive faculty.
• His immortality seems not to have just commenced, but to extend indefinitely into the past.
• Though there are beings who live consciously and throughout time in the heaven world, yet mortal men resting in this heaven world do not know these beings, and during their stay they are unaware of the presence of masters, unless the thought of masters had been part of their ideals in physical life.
• The time faculty of the master is brought into use, by his motive faculty, as he thinks. As he thinks, the atoms of time group themselves and are related to each other as his thought, and that is determined and caused by his motive.
• The master thinks of his motive and his motive faculty makes known to him the motive which prompted his becoming a master. While he seems to have always been a master, he knows that his becoming one is the fullness of his time.
• The worlds take on form as form-time, which is form-matter, and forms appear upon them.
• He sees a continuous line of forms, graduated in perspective, stretching over the bounds of the physical world and ending in himself. These forms or bubbles lead into himself. By his focus faculty he lines them up and sees that they are the forms or the shadows of himself. He focusses them, and all end now and blend into and disappear in the physical body, his present physical body, from which he has but just risen, ascended as a master.
• He is immortal; his immortality is the whole of time.
• His physical body is in the same position and, according to physical time, not many moments seem to have lapsed.
• The master is aware of and sees other masters about him. They speak to him as one of them.
• The sun shines, birds sing, the waters pour forth their melody of joy, and manifested nature greets the master as her creator and preserver.

June, 1910

• …he perceives the thing which was the cause of all past hardships and heart stifling gloom, and above which he has risen, but from which he is not quite separated. That thing is the old elusive, formless darkness of desire, from which and out of which came myriad forms and formless dread. That formless thing is at last formed.
• This is the thing which guards the Path and allows no one to pass who does not conquer it. The sphinx calmly gazes on, while man dwells in the coolness of groves, while he throngs the market place, or makes his abode in pleasing pastures. However, to the explorer of life, to him to whom the world is a desert and who boldly tries to pass over its wastes into the beyond, to him the sphinx propounds her riddle, nature's riddle, which is the problem of time. Man answers it when he becomes immortal-an immortal man. He who cannot give answer, he who does not master desire, to him the sphinx is a monster, and it devours him. He who solves the problem, masters death, conquers time, subdues nature and he goes over her subdued body along his path.
• He has outgrown physical life, though he remains still in it; he has conquered death, though he may still have to take on bodies which will die.
• To live and act in the astral world also, he must call into action his sphinx body, his desire body, which now sleeps. He calls; he speaks the word of power. It arises from its rest and stands beside his physical body.
• It is the adept body, an adept.
• The adept body sees his physical body and may enter it. The master is through them both, but is not the form of either.
• The physical body is aware of the adept within, though it cannot see him. The adept is aware of the master who has called him into action and whom he obeys, but whom he cannot see.
• He knows his master as an ordinary man knows but cannot see his conscience.
• The physical body acts as a physical man in the physical, but it is ordered and directed by the adept who is now its ruler. The adept acts in the astral world, the inner world of the senses; but though having free action, he acts in accord with the master's will, because he feels the master's presence, is aware of his knowledge and power, and knows it is best to be guided by the mind of the master rather than by influence of his senses. The master acts in his own world, the mental world, which includes the astral and physical worlds.
• To man acting in the physical world, it seems strange, if not impossible, that he should have three bodies or be developed into three bodies, which may act separately from and independent of each other. To man in his present state it is impossible; yet, as man, he has these three as principles or potential bodies which are now blended and undeveloped, and without either of which he would not be man.

July 1910

• A master does not often come among mankind because it is not well for men. It is not well for men, because the presence of a master about and through his physical body prematurely quickens men. The presence of a master is like one's own conscience. A master's physical presence quickens the conscience in man and causes him to be aware of his shortcomings, vices and untruthfulness, and, although it also wakens all of the good qualities and encourages the virtues in him, yet man's knowledge of his virtues, side by side with his being conscious of his evil tendencies and untruthfulness, brings almost overwhelming remorse and regrets, which sap his strength and make his path seem hopelessly dark with insurmountable obstacles. This is more than his egotism can stand and he withers under the influence which were he more mature would quicken and assist him.
• His presence gives life to the inner nature and tendencies and makes them apparent,
• A master knows a man by his motive. When a man's motive is right he assists him in his thoughts toward the attainment of his ideal, and though men may say that they are promoted by right motives and have unselfish ideals, they cannot know because they do not know their motives and, therefore, cannot judge their ideals.
• When a man has worked earnestly and assiduously and with devotion to his ideal, and his motive shows that he is entitled to it, the master thinks and his thought reaches the mind of the assiduous devotee who then sees the way of attainment of his ideal. This seeing comes after effort, and there is a mental joy and happiness which follows it. Then the man who had strained and struggled sets himself about his work confidently and with assurance and because he sees the way in which it is to be done. In this way a master may and does help man.
• With an accepted disciple in the school of the masters, a master acts through the one thought by which he becomes consciously an accepted disciple. The master speaks to men through their ideals. He speaks to the disciple through thought. He speaks to other masters by motive and by his presence.
• The man of hurry cannot be blamed if he thinks such description flat. But ideals toward the masters will not always be flat, even to the busy man. Some day the claws of his desires will scratch and awaken him, or his mental growth may reach upward beyond his desires and his busy play in life, and then on his mental horizon there will come a thought he had not before had, and he will awaken to the ideal of the mind. This ideal will not leave him. He will continue to dream of his ideal and the dream will become gradually a waking dream and, at some day, most likely in a future life, the waking dream will become reality to him; then what was reality will be a dream, a dream of the childhood of his lives from which he has passed, as the days of children pass when they become men.
• Masters are engaged with the ideals and the thoughts of men, as parents are with the play of their little ones. Like the prudent mother or kind father who look on at the play of their little ones and listen patiently to their dreams, so the masters look on at the little ones in the nursery, and in the school of life.
• As men approach their ideals and are ready for higher ideals, the masters direct their minds to the eternal verities, here called ideas, in the spiritual world. Their thought of an idea is the ideal held in the mental world by the master, and the minds of the leaders of men in the world of men, who are ready, catch glimpses of the ideal and by their thoughts bring it into their world of men. As the leaders of men speak the thought, the new ideal, into the world of men, those who listen to them are impressed by the thought; they take it up and look up to it as their ideal.
• According to the ideals of humanity as a whole or the race in part or a few leaders, the masters think, and time arranges itself and flows according to their thought. The power of the masters is their thought. Their thought is their speech. They think, they speak, and the time flows on, bringing into fullness the aspirations of man. The word of the masters keeps the world in balance. The word of the masters keeps it in its form. The masters' word causes the revolution of the world. But though the masters' word sounds through and supports the world, few ears can hear its tone, few eyes can see its form, few minds can comprehend its meaning. Yet all minds are trying to understand the meaning of the age, which the masters' word has spoken into being. Many eyes look forward to see what it will bring, and ears are strained to catch the note, which the new age sounds.
• Birth of a Mahatma The master knows the way, and knows how to enter the spiritual world.
• Standing in his physical body and through his adept body, the master speaks the word of birth. By his word of birth he is born. By his word of birth the master's name passes into or becomes one with his name as mahatma. The word of his birth as mahatma is called into being by the use of his light faculty and his I-am faculty. As he gives his name by these faculties, he enters the spiritual world. There he has always been, but could not perceive it, could not realize it, until the use of the light and the I-am faculties realized it.
• In becoming a mahatma all faculties are blended into one being. All faculties become the I-am. I-am is the mahatma. I-am no longer thinks, for thinking ends with knowledge. The mahatma, I-am, knows. He is knowledge. As mahatma, no one faculty acts alone. All are together as one, and all are the end of all thinking. They are knowledge.
• To the mahatma, the physical, buzzing world has disappeared. The inner desire world of sensation is stilled. All thought in the mental world has stopped. The three manifested worlds of time have disappeared into and blended with the spiritual world. The worlds have gone, but they are comprehended in the spiritual world by the mahatma. In the worlds of time, which were made up of indivisible particles which are the ultimate divisions of time, each world was distinct in itself, but at the fulling of time, when time runs into its sources from the mental world, all the individual units run together like drops of water, and are blended, and all make up the eternity, the spiritual world which is one.
• He who has entered and knows eternity is the eternity. He knows that he was and is ever and always I-am. All things are present in this knowledge. As I-am knows itself, limitless light abounds, and though there are no eyes to see it, the light knows itself. I-am knows itself as light, and light is I-am. If the mahatma wills to be throughout eternity only as he knows himself, I-am, as being, he shuts out from his light the manifested worlds, and remains I-am, his light, the light throughout the eternity. In the ancient eastern philosophies, this state is spoken of as entrance into nirvana.
• The becoming of mahatma and such entrance into nirvana is not determined at the time or after he becomes a mahatma; it is decided by a master through his motive faculty, and that decision or the causes of such decision have been determined by and made up of all the motives which have prompted man in his efforts in overcoming and toward attainment. This choice is that of those ascetics who do not love the world, and leave it that they may attain their own deserved bliss. The choice results from the beginnings of man as he sees and thinks of himself as distinct and separate from others and does not relate himself to others.
• The master who thinks of the welfare of mankind for the sake of mankind, and not that he shall advance, does not on becoming mahatma remain in the quiet bliss of nirvana. The mahatma who remains in his bliss knows I-am, as I only. He who knows beyond and within the I, knows I-am, as I; but he also knows I-am, as Thou. He does not remain in the knowledge of his own light. He speaks the knowledge of his light, which is the light, into the three manifested worlds. When one on becoming mahatma speaks his light, all the worlds respond and receive new power, and the unselfish love is felt through all beings. One who has grown into the one light, one who knows the spiritual identity of all beings, will always speak into the world the light which he has become. The light thus given lives in the world and cannot die, and though it may not be seen by men, still it will shine, and the hearts of men to whom it is spoken will find it at the ripening of their time.
• The mahatma who has chosen to remain as an eternal light through the manifested worlds retains his physical, adept and master bodies. One cannot become a mahatma without his physical body, but not every mahatma keeps his physical body. The physical body is necessary for the development and birth of all bodies. The physical body is that in which spiritual and mental and psychic and physical matter is transmuted, balanced and evolved. The physical body is the pivot of the worlds.
• A mahatma knows before he thinks, and thought is used only as the working out and applying of knowledge.
• Each faculty has not only its own function and power, but may be empowered by the other faculties, though all the others are dominated by the faculty to whose power they contribute.
• The light faculty of the mind acting on the dark faculty, causes the mind to become conscious of its own ignorance. When the dark faculty is used under the light faculty, falsehoods and all untruthfulness are brought to light and the mind may find all imperfections, absurdities and disproportion, concerning whatever subject or thing it is directed to. But if the dark faculty is used without the light faculty, it produces confusion, ignorance and mental blindness.
• By the light acting with the I-am faculty man impresses his identity on all surrounding things and charges his I-am faculty on and into the atmosphere and personalities with which he comes in contact
• The light faculty should act and be always present in the action of the other faculties. When the light faculty is absent or has ceased to function, man is spiritually blind.
• The I-am faculty acting under the influence of the time faculty spins and weaves out of matter webs and conditions and environments for the mind through the manifested worlds in, under and according to which it acts. …According to the inactivity of the time faculty, the I-am faculty is unable to recall its relation to any period or event and is unable to see itself as existing in the past or the future. The time faculty must be present in all mental activities and operations of men.
• The image faculty is the matrix in which matter is held and given outline and form.
• Without the image faculty, the focus faculty is unable to show forms to the mind.
• By action of the image faculty on the dark faculty, the dark faculty causes to appear to the mind and take form, its fears, doubts, appetites and passions. By use of the image faculty the dark faculty causes the mind to see forms in the dream state. Without the image faculty, the dark faculty is unable to give shape to any fear or to see any forms in dreams.
• By the image faculty the motive faculty makes the mind aware of the types and species of forms which result and how they result from different thoughts. Without the image faculty the motive faculty is unable to make known to the mind the forms which thoughts take, or to give form to ideals.
• By aid of the image faculty and through the I-am faculty, the mind is able to conceive its form in its own state as distinct from the form of the physical body.
• The focus faculty balances and relates the other faculties to each other. It gives a mental grasp of any subject and is that faculty by which the mind rises and descends from world to world. By the focus faculty the other faculties are drawn together and blended from world to world until they enter into the spiritual world where they all become one. When all the faculties are blended into One, the mind is knowledge and power, radiant and immortal.
• When the light faculty is directed or induced by the focus faculty the mind is illuminated on any subject in the world to which it is directed. As the light faculty is aided by the focus faculty, the mind is able to surround itself with a body of light other than that of the world in which it is acting. By aid of the focus faculty the light faculty brings light to a center and makes a body of light. In the absence of the focus faculty, the light faculty diffuses light without relation to subjects or objects.
• Acted on by the focus faculty the image faculty may reproduce any form that has existed anywhere. By the focus faculty acting on the image faculty the mind is able to magnify infinitely the minutest forms, and reduce those of greatest magnitude to the infinitely small. In the absence of the focus faculty, the image faculty cannot show to the mind any distinct objects or forms, nor can it give mental perspective to figures.
• Under the influence of the focus faculty, the dark faculty may suspend the activities of the mind on the physical plane of action, and produce sleep, or it may produce a hypnotic sleep of other minds, or it may keep one's self awake and awaken others from a hypnotic sleep. Under the influence of the focus faculty the dark faculty can make known to the mind, darkness and the nature of sleep, what death is, and the processes of death. Under the direction of the focus faculty, the dark faculty can be made to report each of one's desires and what one's ruling desire is, what the appetites are, what passions, anger and the vices are, and how they affect the other faculties of the mind, and it can show the manner of the action between the faculties and the senses. In the absence of the focus faculty the dark faculty suspends the action of the other faculties of the mind, and produces sleep. When the focus faculty ceases to act with the dark faculty, the dark faculty produces death.
• By directing the focus faculty on the motive faculty, one is able to know the governing principle of his own life or in the lives of others. With the focus faculty the motive faculty will make known the motive which caused any thought, action or result and judge the consequences resulting therefrom. By aid of the focus faculty, the motive faculty will show what thought is, what prompts it, and where it dwells. Without the focus faculty motives cannot be known, thought cannot be discovered and the mind cannot know the causes of its action.
• The I-am faculty by the correct use of the focus faculty makes known to the mind who and what it is. It is able to know and preserve its identity in any of the worlds, irrespective of the conditions under which it might act. But according to the inability of the I-am to use the focus faculty the mind will not know itself in any of the worlds. In the absence of the focus faculty, the faculties cannot act in combination, and insanity follows. The focus faculty preserves a unity in the action of the faculties. If the focus faculty is not used in connection with each and all of the faculties no one singly or in combination can give true reports concerning any subject or thing.
• The influence of the dark faculty extends through all the worlds and affects all other faculties of the mind. The dark faculty is the cause of all doubt and fear in the mind. If not dominated, checked or controlled by one or all of the other faculties, the dark faculty will produce riot and confusion in the mind. The dark faculty is negatively strong and resists control or domination. It is under control only in so far as it is made to perform its functions in the service of the other faculties. The dark faculty is a necessary and valuable servant when mastered, but a strong, ignorant and unreasoning tyrant when it is not controlled.
• when the dark faculty does not act at all, time disappears into eternity and all is a day of negative bliss, because there would be no shade or contrast to the light which would then prevail and the mind would make no calculations.
• The image faculty acted on by the dark faculty is unable to give form to anything or it will reproduce all the forms of darkness of which the mind had ever been aware, and the dark faculty will cause the image faculty to produce new images, new forms of ungainly or hideous and malignant aspects, representing the phases of desires and passions and sensuous vices. In the absence of the dark faculty, the image faculty would show forms of beauty, and picture to the mind those things which are pleasing to the mind.
• In proportion to the influence of the dark faculty, the focus faculty is unable to present to the mind any subject or thing, cannot draw into view or relate to each other thoughts and the subjects of thought, nor co-ordinate or relate the action of the faculties to each other. In the absence and quiescence of and control over the dark faculty, the focus faculty can group and co-ordinate objects, thoughts and the subjects of thought, and present them clearly and concisely to the mind. In the absence of the dark faculty the focus faculty is unable to temper and strengthen the mind. But while quiescent and controlled, the focus faculty enables the mind to be continuously conscious.
• When dominated by the dark faculty, the motive faculty is unable to acquaint the mind with its motives or the causes of its action, and in proportion as the influence of the dark faculty prevails, the motive faculty is prevented from enabling the mind to understand the relation between cause and effect, the manner and method of thought and the mind is unable to distinguish between its faculties and the senses, and the causes of the actions of either. In the absence of or its control over the dark faculty, the motive faculty can make known to the mind its own nature and enables the mind to choose and decide without doubt the best course of action.
• In proportion to the influence and prevalence of the dark faculty, the I-am faculty is unable to give the mind identity, and the mind ceases to be conscious in any or all of the worlds of its action. When the dark faculty prevails against the I-am faculty it causes the mind to become unconscious of and produces death in that world; in the absence of the dark faculty the I-am faculty becomes all-conscious in the world of its action; light prevails, but the mind has nothing to overcome, and having no resistance, by the overcoming of which it could gain strength, it can not become fully self-conscious and immortal. By the mastery of the dark faculty, the I-am faculty gains immortality and learns to know itself. In the absence of the dark faculty the faculties do not learn perfection in function, and their operations would become slower and finally cease; the mind would be simply conscious without individuality and without being conscious of consciousness.
• By means of the motive faculty, the mind causes all action and the results of action; and starts action of the other faculties. The motive faculty is the cause of their acting and determines their power. By the motive faculty, the mind decides upon its ideals and what its attainment shall be.
• By the motive faculty the mind decides on what subject or object the light faculty will illuminate it.
• Without the aid of the motive faculty the image faculty of the mind cannot give form to matter.
• In the absence of the motive faculty, the worlds cannot start into operation, matter has no impetus to action, the mind has no purpose in effort, its faculties remain inert and the machinery of karma cannot be set in action.
• According to the action of the motive on the dark faculty, the dark faculty is aroused into action; it resists, beclouds and confuses the mind; it is the cause of inordinate appetites, and produces passion and all phases of desire; it suggests and stimulates all longings, wishes and ambitions. On the other hand, it is the means of controlling the appetites and passions, and is the cause of noble aspirations, according to the motive which governs the dark faculty. With the motive faculty acting through the dark faculty, the mind is cut off from the physical world and death is produced; and, according to the motive, the mind is detained by the dark faculty of desire, after death. According to the motive, the mind is born from its physical body through the dark faculty into the mental world. In the absence of the dark faculty the mind would have no means of overcoming resistance and it could not achieve any attainments nor self-conscious immortality.
• By the motive faculty acting on the I-am faculty, the mind decides of what it will become conscious, and by being conscious what it will become, determines what the quality of its reflective powers will be and what it will reflect.
• The motive faculty acting on the I-am faculty decides what the mind will do and sense and think and know when acting in the physical and the other worlds. The motive faculty determines why and for what purpose the mind seeks immortality, the method by which immortality will be attained, and what the mind will be and do after immortality. According as the motive faculty guides the I-am faculty, the mind will or will not misunderstand or mistake itself for its bodies, will or will not know right from wrong action, will or will not be able to judge circumstances and conditions at their true value, and to know itself as it is at any time in any of the worlds, and also what it may become in this and in future periods of manifestation. If the motive faculty is absent, there is no self action of the mind. The motive faculty must be present in all mental functions and action. Only by learning its motives can the mind know its true self.
• The I-am faculty gives individuality to and individualizes light. By the I-am faculty acting with the light faculty, the mind becomes a sphere of splendor and power and glory. By the I-am acting with the light faculty, the mind may remain in the spiritual world, or may appear as a superior being to any of the beings of the worlds in which it may enter. In the absence of the I-am faculty, light remains universal and not individualized, self knowledge is impossible and mind can have not identity.
• By the action of the I-am faculty through the image faculty the mind dominates, holds and gives distinctness to form. It impresses the idea of I-am-ness on forms
• In the absence of the I-am faculty, the image faculty can give no distinctness nor individuality to form; matter would remain simple and uniformed and there would be no forms.
• Through the focus faculty the I-am faculty gives power. The I-am faculty acting through the focus faculty speaks itself out of, through and into each of the worlds.
• By the I-am faculty acting on the dark faculty, the mind resists, exercises, trains and educates desire and overcomes ignorance, regulates its appetites, silences and transmutes its vices into virtues, dominates darkness, conquers and overcomes death, perfects its individuality and becomes immortal. In the absence of or without control by the I-am faculty, the dark faculty would control or suppress and crush out or cause to become inactive the other faculties of the mind, and the mind would suffer mental and spiritual death.
• By the action of the I-am on the motive faculty, the mind becomes impressed with the idea of egotism, which is the dominant motive of its action. As I-am dominates the motives, the mind will have an uneven development and imperfect and inharmonious attainment. As motive decides the action of the I-am faculty, the mind will become evenly developed, harmonious in its action and have perfect attainment. Without the I-am faculty acting with the motive faculty, the mind would have no comparison for action and no idea of attainment.
• The I-am faculty should act with all other faculties of the mind. It conveys the idea of permanence to the other faculties and is the end of attainment as mind. Without the I-am faculty, there would be no continuity, permanence nor individuality of the mind.

August 1910

• every man uses the faculties of his mind in some degree.
• so also are there centers and parts of the human body through which and from which the faculties of the mind act and are operated while the mind is in the body.
• the way to train the faculties is by exercising them.
• The faculties are trained by mental processes and not by the senses or their organs. The senses should not be keyed up as by gazing fixedly with the eyes closed, or by straining the ear to hear. The senses should be relaxed, not keyed up.
• One should begin to train the faculties by a certain attitude of mind. To train the light faculty, the attitude should be of attention, confidence, sincerity and good will.
• The light of the light faculty is intelligence, which comes and illuminates the mind according to one's progress. To develop this faculty of the mind, one may direct his mind to the subject of light and try to perceive and understand what is light in each of the worlds, spiritual, mental, psychic and physical. As one becomes proficient in the exercise, he will find that intelligence is a light and will illuminate the mind when the light faculty is able to perceive it.
• The attitude of mind to exercise the time faculty is of patience, endurance, exactitude and harmony. All the faculties should be directed in thought to the subject of time and the time faculty. As one develops in the practice of these four virtues, the mind will become enlivened, stimulated, and a change will come in the understanding of things, and change itself will have new meanings.
• To seek co-ordination, proportion, dimension and beauty, should be the attitude of mind when one wants to exercise the image faculty. The energies of the mind should be directed to the idea of the image faculty, but no pictures or forms should be created by the mind while the image faculty is being called mentally into operation. If pictures or colors or figures are outlined and seen, the clairvoyant sense of sight is being developed and not the image faculty. To assist in the calling of the image faculty into independent use, words, names and numbers should be conceived and their beauty and proportion, dimension and coordination should be seen, as the names, numbers and words are formed or imaged.
• Seeking balance, justice, duality and unity is the mental attitude or condition in which one should be for the exercise of the focus faculty, and with this attitude he should bend all his faculties to know that which he values above all things. The subject which is taken must, however, not be anything connected with the senses or possible to be reached by sensuous perception. As he advances in his practice his mind will become clearer, the mental fog will be removed and he will be illuminated on the subject of his search.
• Strength, service, love and sacrifice should constitute the attitude in which one should attempt the exercise and training of the dark faculty. He should try to be informed concerning the secret of death. As he preserves the right attitude of mind and continues the exercise, he will understand it.
• Freedom, action, honesty and fearlessness, should be the qualities making up the mental attitude necessary for the exercise and training of the motive faculty. All of the energies of the mind should be centered on knowing the action of right thought. With this purpose in mind the exercise should be continued and the success will be announced when one's true nature is revealed to him. All of these qualities are necessary to face one's true nature. But the man exercising this faculty should determine and have the earnest desire and firm resolve to right wrongs at any cost. If this intention is certain and persistent in his mind, he will not fear.
• Permanence, knowledge, self and power, form the attitude in which the mind can, with all faculties bent on the subject of self, try to call into independent, conscious being, the I-am faculty. In proportion to the success achieved, the mind will receive an accession of power, and man a confidence in his persistence through death, and he may at his will stand forth as a column of light.
• Outside his own heart, there is no place at which an aspirant to discipleship in the school of the masters may apply for admission, and no person is able to receive or accept such aspirant, nor is anyone able to introduce him to a master. The school of the masters is the school of the world. There are no favorites. Each disciple must depend on his merits and is accepted by no preference nor because of credentials. The only speech which the masters can hear and respond to are the thoughts and aspirations of the heart. One's thoughts may be hidden to one's own view, but they speak their true nature in no uncertain notes, where thoughts are words.
• The age is ripe for those who will to appoint themselves disciples in the school of the masters. The appointment can be made in no other way than by one's resolution. Most people are willing to be masters, as they are willing to be great men and leaders of civilization, but few are willing to fit themselves and comply with the requirements. Those who make rash promises, who expect much in a short time, who look for results and advantages within some fixed time, who think that they may practice on other people and who promise the world to give it an uplift, will do others little good and be themselves the least benefited. One cannot appoint himself as disciple to another whom he opines to be a master, nor to a society or group of people, and have the appointment result in permanent good to any concerned. Masters do not hold their lodges with men. There are lodges, societies and groups of people who do accept pupils and do give secret instructions and who do have occult practices, but these are not the masters spoken of in the preceding pages.
• When one appoints himself a disciple in the school of the masters, he shows that he does not understand what this means if he sets a time for his acceptance. His self appointment should be made only after due consideration and in a calm moment, and when he has an understanding that he is in eternity and that he makes the appointment for eternity, and not subject to time. When one so appoints himself, he will live on confidently, and although the years may roll by without his seeing any other evidence than his moral improvement and increase of mental strength, still he knows he is on the way. If he does not, he is not made of the right stuff. One who is of the right stuff cannot fail. Nothing will daunt him. He knows; and what he knows no one can take away.
• There are no great things for one to do who would be a disciple, but there are many little things to do which are of the greatest importance. The little things are so simple that they are not seen by those who look about to do great things. But no great thing can be done by the disciple except by nurture of the small.
• Cleanliness and food are simple subjects and these he must understand. Of course he will keep his body clean and wear clean garments, but it is more important that his heart be clean. Cleanliness of heart is the cleanliness here meant. Cleanliness of heart has been advised for ages. In every sphere of life it has been advised. If a student of occult lore makes light of it, let him know that a clean heart is not a metaphor; it is a physical possibility and may be made a physical fact. A self appointed disciple becomes an accepted disciple in the school of the masters, when he learns how and begins to cleanse his heart. Many lives may be needed to learn how to begin to clean the heart. But when one knows how and begins to clean his heart, he is no longer uncertain about it. Once he has learned the work as an accepted disciple, he knows the way and he proceeds with the cleansing. The cleansing process covers the entire period of discipleship.
• When the disciple has his heart clean, his work as disciple is done. He passes through death while living and is born a master. His heart is needed for his birth. He is born out of his heart. After he is born out of it, he still lives in it, but is master of it. While he lives in his heart he lives with the laws of time, though he has overcome time. A strong heart is needed. Only a clean heart is strong. No drugs, sedatives, or tonics will avail. Only one specific, one simple, is needed. No apothecary, nor any cult or organization, with or without quick cures or sure ones, can supply it. This simple is: Simple Honesty.
• One must be his own physician and he must find it. It may have been long unnoticed, but it can be found in the heart. It may take a long search to find it, but when it is found and used, the results will repay the effort.
• But honesty in the gross, the kind which the legal and even moral codes of the world demand, is not the simple which the disciple needs. Much of the gross is needed to get a little of the essence, in the simple. When honesty is applied to the heart, it changes the heart. The treatment will be sure to hurt, but will do it good. Only one who tries, knows the difficulties and obstacles encountered and the strength needed to find and use honesty. Those who are already honest, and are always offended at having their honesty questioned, need not try.
• When a little of the specific of honesty is by an aspirant applied to his heart, he begins to stop lying. When he begins to stop lying, he begins to speak truly. When he begins to speak truly he begins to see things as they are. When he begins to see things as they are, he begins to see how things should be. When he begins to see how things should be, he tries to make them so. This he does with himself.

September 1910

• WITH the subject of cleanliness, one learns about the subject of food. One who would enter the school of the masters must learn what are his needs of food, and what the kind and quantity which should be taken.
• Honesty will tell him what he needs to eat. The kind of food needed for one self appointed in the school of the masters is of words and thoughts.
• Words and thoughts are too simple for most people, but they will do for the disciple. They are what he needs. Words and thoughts are the food which one can make use of in the beginning and words and thoughts will be used ages hence, when he is more than human.
• At present, words are of little value and are only empty sounds, and thoughts can find no lodgment, and pass undigested through the mind. As one studies words and learns their meaning, they are to him as food. As he is able to see new things and old things in the words, he takes new mental life. He begins to think, and delights in thought as his food. He has new uses for his mental digestive tract.
• At present, the minds of men are unable to digest words and assimilate thoughts. But to do this is incumbent on one who would be a disciple. Words and thoughts are his diet. If one cannot create them himself he must use such as he has. The mind takes, circulates, digests and assimilates its food by reading, listening, speaking, and thinking. Most people would object to take drugs and poisonous and indigestible stuff as food with their soups, salads and meats, lest that might cause injury and require the doctor; but they will read with avidity the latest yellow novel and family paper, with its rapes, murders, crookedness, corruption and abject worship of wealth and fashion's latest excrescence. They will listen to slander and slander others, enjoying gossip over the tea or card table, at the opera or after church, and they will spend odd moments in planning social conquests, or think out new business ventures just inside the limits of law; this through the greater portion of the day, and at night their dreams are of what they have heard and thought and done
• As a man's body is made up of the food he eats, so a man's mind is made up of the words and the thoughts which he thinks. One who would be a disciple of the masters needs simple food of plain words and wholesome thoughts.
• Words are the creators of the world, and thoughts are the moving spirits in them. All physical things are seen to be words, and thoughts are alive in them. When one has learned somewhat of the subjects of cleanliness and food, when he is able to distinguish somewhat of the difference between his personality and the being who inhabits it, his body will have a new meaning for him.
• As man sees thought in things, thought becomes ever more present and real. Those who cannot see the thought in things must serve their apprenticeship until they can,
• Again he creates, and again disappears; and as often as he comes he will be crushed, until he learns to know thought and to live in the thought instead of its expression.
• To know thought and the nature of thought, one must take a subject of thought and think about it and love it and be true to it, and work for it in the legitimate way which the subject itself will make known to him.
• To give birth to a thought, one must take a subject of thought and must ponder over it and be true to it, until his heart and his brain give warmth to it and arouse it. This may take many days or many years. When his subject responds to his brooding mind, his brain is quickened and he conceives the subject. This conception is as illumination.
• The means by which one may make himself mature and fit for thought is, first, to procure and apply the cleansing simple to the heart, and at the same time to study words. Words mean little to ordinary man. They mean much to those who know the power of thought.
• A word is an embodied thought. It is a thought expressed. If one will take a word and fondle it and look into it, the word which he takes will speak to him. It will show him its form and how it was made, and that word which before was to him an empty sound will impart to him its meaning as his reward for calling it to life and giving it companionship.
• One word after the other he may learn. Lexicons will give him a passing acquaintance with words. Writers who can make them will put him on more familiar footing. But he himself must choose then as his guests and companions. They will become known to him as he finds delight in their company. By such means a man will become fit and ready to conceive and bear a thought.
• There are many subjects of thought which should come into the world, but men are not yet able to give them birth.
• Much of the confusion will cease as people think less about many things and try to think more about fewer things.
• An adept body is developed in the abdominal region and passes through the abdominal wall. A master body is carried in the heart and ascends through the breath. The mahatma body is carried in the head and is born through the roof of the skull. The physical body is born into the physical world. The adept body is born into the astral world. The master body is born into the mental world. The mahatma body is born into the spiritual world.
• Those to whom this seems shocking cannot be blamed. It is strange.
• As he cleans his heart with honesty, and will not lie, his heart becomes a womb, and in purity of thought he conceives in his heart a thought; he conceives the master thought; that is the immaculate conception. At an immaculate conception the heart becomes a womb and has the functions of a womb.
• For some time yet bodies will come into the world as they now do. Virtuous minds seek worthy bodies in which to incarnate. But all human bodies fashioned are for minds awaiting their readiness to enter. Different and worthy physical bodies must be ready and await the superior minds of the new race to come.
• When the heart is sufficiently cleansed it receives a germ fashioned of the quintessence of its life. Then there descends a ray through the breath which fecundates the germ in the heart. The breath which thus comes is the breath of the father, the master, one's own higher mind, not incarnate. It is a breath which is clothed in the breath of the lungs and comes into the heart and descends and quickens the germ. The master body ascends and is born through the breath.
• The body of the mahatma is conceived in the head when the male and the female germs of the same body are there met by a ray from above. When this great conception takes place, the head becomes the womb where it is conceived.
• One who has pledged himself in thought to the immortal life, one who knows that his heart or head is the holy of holies, can no longer live the life of the sensuous world. If he tries to do both, his heart and head will be as places of fornication or adultery. The avenues leading to the brain are channels along which illicit thoughts enter for intercourse with the mind. These thoughts must be kept out. The way to prevent them is to clean the heart, choose worthy subjects of thought and to speak truthfully.
• Adepts, masters and mahatmas may be taken as subjects of thought and they will be of benefit to the thinker and his race.
• The world has been informed about adepts, masters and mahatmas. They will not press their presence upon men, but will wait until men can live and grow into it. And men will live and grow into it.
• Two worlds seek entrance or recognition into the mind of man. Mankind is now deciding which of the worlds it will prefer: the astral world of the senses or the mental world of the mind. Man is unfit to enter either, but he will learn to enter one. He cannot enter both.
• Only a slight partition, a veil, divides man's thought from the mental world, and though it is ever present and his native realm, it seems strange, foreign, unknown, to the exile. Man will remain an exile until he has earned and has paid his ransom.

* Atmospheres 1910

• Physical man in his atmosphere is like a fetus enveloped in its amnion and chorion in process of development within its larger atmosphere, the womb. About three quarters of the nourishment by which his body is maintained is taken through his breath. His breath is not merely a quantity of gas which flows into his lungs.
• The physical atmosphere of man is composed of infinitesimal and invisible physical particles which are taken into and thrown off from the physical body by means of the breath and through the pores of the skin.
• A physical atmosphere is susceptible to odors and incense and produces an odor, which is of the nature and quality of the physical body.
• If one could see the physical atmosphere of a man, it would appear as innumerable particles in a room made visible by a ray of sunlight. These would be seen to be circling or whirling about the body, all being kept in movement by his breath.
• It is by the contact or merging of physical atmospheres that contagious diseases are spread and physical infection imparted. But one's physical body may be made almost immune from physical contagion by keeping it clean within and without, by refusing to harbor fear, and by confidence in one's health and the power of resistance.
• The psychic atmosphere of man permeates and surrounds his physical atmosphere. The psychic atmosphere is stronger and more powerful in its influence and effects than the physical.
• With the astral form body as the center, the psychic atmosphere surrounds it and the physical for a distance proportionate to its strength.
• Were it to be seen it would appear as transparent vapor or water.
• The physical atmosphere would appear within it as particles or sediment in water.
• The psychic atmosphere of a man may be likened to a spherical ocean, with its hot and cold currents, its waves and undulatory movements, its whirlpools and eddies, its drift and undertow, and the rise and fall of its tides.
• The psychic atmosphere of man is ever beating against the physical body with its astral form body, as the ocean beats the shore.
• Like the ocean, the psychic atmosphere is restless and never satisfied. The psychic atmosphere preys upon itself and affects others.
• it causes a yearning for some object and produces a sensation as of a strong undertow.
• Circulating through the astral form body and surrounding the physical, the psychic atmosphere has as one of its features that subtle influence spoken of as personal magnetism.
• One who sees that his psychic atmosphere is influencing another against what he knows to be best, or if he feels that he is unduly influenced, may check the action or change the influence by not sanctioning the emotion or desire felt, and by changing his thought to a subject of a different nature and by holding his thought steadily to that subject.
• All feeling and sensation of whatever kind is produced by means of one's own psychic atmosphere and the psychic atmosphere of others.
• The psychic atmosphere of some persons has the effect of stimulating, exciting, and interesting those with whom they come into contact. This may be of a pleasurable nature.
• Others have the opposite effect of enervating or deadening those whom they meet, or causing them to lose interest in affairs.
• In the present state of the development of humanity man has no definite and well defined mental body during his physical life. But there is a definite mental atmosphere …..is like a sphere of electricity or electrical energy, as distinguished from the magnetic quality of the psychic atmosphere.
• It is related to the psychic atmosphere as electricity is to a magnetic field.
• The mind moving in its mental atmosphere does not sense, and is not subject to sensation of any kind. Only when it acts through and in connection with the psychic atmosphere and the physical body is it susceptible to and experiences sensation.
• The mind acting in its mental atmosphere and when engaged in abstract thinking is devoid of sensation.
• Only when the thought is immersed in the psychic atmosphere and connected with the senses does the mind experience sensation.
• Without the mental atmosphere the human being might still live, but he would be an animal only, a maniac, or an idiot. It is because of the mental atmosphere that the physical man appears to be and is more than an animal.
• The psychic atmosphere alone has no conscience nor moral apprehensions.
• It is actuated and dominated by desire, and is not disturbed by any notions of morality or right and wrong.
• When the mental atmosphere contacts and acts in connection with the psychic atmosphere, the moral sense is awakened; the idea of right and wrong is considered, and, when the action considered is contrary to the awakened moral sense, then conscience whispers "No".
• If the thoughts in the mental atmosphere respond to this No, the mental atmosphere subdues, calms and controls the tempestuous psychic atmosphere, and the contemplated immoral act is not allowed.
• The action of the mental on the psychic atmosphere is moral, and when the psychic is dominated by the mental, the result is morality.
• Independently of the physical body and its atmosphere and the psychic atmosphere of a man or of others, his mental atmosphere awakens, stimulates and encourages others to think and suggest to them subject of thought, or else has the effect of putting a damper upon, oppressing, clouding and snuffing out their mental activities. This is not always done with intention.
• One so affecting others may be quite unaware of the effects; these effects are produced with or without his intention according to the power of his thoughts and the susceptibility of others' mental atmosphere to them.
• Those of equally or nearly equal positive mental atmospheres are likely to antagonize and oppose each other if their ideals differ.
• Unlike the psychic and physical men in their psychic and physical atmospheres, the spiritual man in his spiritual atmosphere has permanence. It is due to this definiteness and permanence of the spiritual atmosphere of spiritual man that the mental atmosphere is emanated, the psychic atmosphere put forth and the physical being called into existence, each within and through the other, and that the physical and psychic and mental atmospheres are patterned after though differing somewhat from the spiritual atmosphere.
• That the mind may contemplate it as a subject of thought, the spiritual atmosphere of man may be compared to a colorless sphere of shadowless light and the spiritual man to that which is conscious of and in the light.
• The spiritual atmosphere is not usually sensed by man because the psychic atmosphere is so turbulent and restless that men cannot understand the spiritual power nor interpret its presence.
• When the mind contemplates the spiritual atmosphere, the spiritual atmosphere is apprehended as peace and silent power and invulnerability. The spiritual atmosphere gives to the mind a faith, more deep-seated and lasting than any impressions which may be produced by evidence of the senses or by logic. Owing to the presence of the spiritual atmosphere, the incarnate mind has faith in and assurance of its immortality.
• The incarnated portion of the mind does not long contemplate the spiritual man when the spiritual atmosphere makes its presence known, because the spiritual atmosphere is so unattached to and different from the psychic atmosphere that it produces an awe, a calm, a power and a presence, too strange to be contemplated by the human mind without dread or trepidation. So that when the spiritual atmosphere makes itself known by its presence, the mind is too fearful to be still and to know it.
• If the mind of one is well trained and has his psychic nature well under control, it will be able to influence the mind and control the psychic atmosphere of the other. But if neither mind dominates its own psychic atmosphere, the strongest of the two psychic atmospheres will influence and dominate the psychic and mental atmospheres of the other.
• By action of the mind with desire and form, a tongue of invisible light is sent out from between the eyebrows and forehead. So acting, one mind salutes, challenges or greets, the mind of the other through his mental atmosphere; his mind acts in a similar manner and establishes a station at his forehead; the two stations thus established flash out and receive messages through each mental atmosphere. Words may be used to connect or to bring the stations into rapport, but according to its power each mental atmosphere has its effect on the other independently of words.
• If one's mental atmosphere has been connected with that of another, physical nearness is not necessary for him to affect that other's mental atmosphere. By his thought, one connects his mental atmosphere with the mental atmosphere of another. Through the mental atmosphere thought may be induced in or suggested to another.
• When one's spiritual atmosphere is pronounced it acts on another independently of his reasoning power and his psychic nature, and produces a calm and restfulness, and during that time his spiritual atmosphere is related to and influences and may dominate his mental and psychic atmospheres.
• If, however, the subject of spiritual man should be talked of and the one whose spiritual atmosphere is strong should arouse and stimulate the atmospheres of the other by the subject of religion or of the individual spiritual man, then the one so aroused would have similar aspirations as the one by whom he was influenced.
• This mechanical interpretation of the spiritual power imparted will shut out from his mind the light of his spiritual atmosphere.
• By the presence of one or many men a room and a house has given to it an atmosphere which is characteristic of the thoughts and desires of those who live or have lived in or frequented it. This atmosphere pervades the room or house as long after the departure of its occupants as the strength of their thoughts and desires determine; it may be sensed or perceived by one who enters that room or house.
• A village, a town, a large city, has its peculiar atmosphere.
• The physical atmosphere is affected by physical action, the psychic atmosphere by desire, the mental atmosphere by thought, and the spiritual atmosphere by the faith in what one knows.
• Like a thread passing through each of the atmospheres and connecting with physical man, there is that which relates each to the other and by means of which the mind in its physical body may become aware of each and of all its atmospheres and adjust itself in its proper relationship to each atmosphere. This is no uncertain thing; it is a verity. The mind in the physical body is at one end of the thread; the underlying individual "1 am" is at the other end. To the incarnate mind there seems to be no other end than that at which it is; or else, if it thinks there is a spiritual end, it does not consider how that end is to be reached. The end which is in the physical can reach the spiritual end. The way to reach it and unite the ends is by means of thought. Thought is not the way, but thought makes or prepares the way. The way is the thread. Thought travels along this thread and discovers it and inspirits it. The thread itself is that which is conscious through all atmospheres. Thinking about it is the beginning; being conscious is the opening of the way. By continuing to think about it and by extending the conscious principle, the incarnate mind becomes conscious of itself and conscious of its higher self at the other end of the conscious principle, and in course of continued effort the ends will become one.

*Hell 1910

• There is something in man which is called conscience. Conscience tells man when not to do wrong. If man disobeys conscience, he does wrong. When he does wrong he suffers.
• The devil is allowed all the freedom he wishes in his efforts to tempt man, and if he succeeds in his efforts he gets the man as his reward.
• The fact behind the belief in the devil is the presence in man of desire and its influence and power over his mind. Desire in man is his tempter. If man yields to the prompting of unlawful desire—unlawful as determined by his conscience and his moral standard—he is chained by that desire as securely as the devil is said to hold his subjects in bondage.
• To each man and woman will at sometime be proven the existence of that something which is expressed by the word hell. Life in the physical world will prove it to everyone.
• Man can touch the borders of hell or explore the mysteries of its depths. He will remain ignorant of or learn from his experiences according to the weakness or the strength and capacity of his mind and according to his willingness to stand the tests and admit the facts according to his findings.
• When hell in one's body becomes active it produces the pains with which most people are familiar.
• Hell is not at once discovered, and if it is, it is perceived dimly and as an individual whole. No sharp outlines are seen.
• The devil of one's own personal hell is one's overmastering and ruling desire. The devils' angels, or the little devils, are the lesser appetites, passions, vices and lusts which obey and serve their chief desire, the devil.
• While he is given or allowed dominion the devil is not perceived and hell remains an unknown though active realm. While man obeys, parleys or makes bargains with or yields to his desires and lusts, the devil and hell are not known.
• So life after life man comes into the physical world and he scouts hell's borders, and enjoys some little pleasures and pays for them the price or penalty of hell. Though he may get well into the domain he cannot see and does not know it to be hell. So hell remains unseen and unknown to men. The sufferings of hell follow the unnatural, unlawful and extravagant indulgences of the appetites and desires, such as inordinate gluttony, the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, and the variations and abuses of the sex function. At each gateway of hell there is an inducement to enter. The inducement is the sensation of pleasure.
• the mind will not be satisfied to leave any part or state of the universe unexplored. So in its ignorance the mind at some time goes against the law, and when it does hell is entered. The mind seeks pleasure and gets it. As the mind continues to enjoy, which it must do through organs of sense, they become dulled; they lose their receptivity and require a greater stimulus; so the mind is urged by them to make the pleasures more and more intense. In search of more pleasure, and endeavoring to increase the pleasure, it goes against the laws and at last receives the just penalty of suffering and pain. It has only entered hell. The mind can get out of hell after it pays the penalty of the suffering resulting from the unlawful act which caused it. But the ignorant mind is unwilling to do this and tries to escape the penalty. In order to escape suffering, the mind seeks as an antidote more pleasure and is held in the fastnesses of hell. So the mind from life to life accumulates, link by link, a chain of debts. These are forged by thoughts and deeds. This is the chain with which he is bound and with which he is held by his ruling desire, the devil. All thinking men have traveled somewhat into the domain of hell and some have gone well into its mysteries. But few have learned how or are able to take observations, hence they know not how far they are in, nor do they know what course to take in order to get out.
• Whether or not he knows it, every thinking man living in the physical world is in hell.
• To discover hell and know the devil one must proceed to do it intelligently, and must be prepared to take the consequences. The consequences are in the beginning suffering, which steadily increases. But in the end there is freedom. One need not tell anybody that he is going to find hell and master the devil. He can and must do both while living in the world.
• To find hell and meet the devil one has only to resist and conquer and control his ruling desire.
• when he does challenge the devil, meets only one of his captains or underlings. But even challenging one of these is enough to give the challenger a great battle.
• By fighting and overcoming some particular appetite, or by refusing to be dominated by and work for the attainment of some ambition which is wrong, a man conquers one of his devil's angels. Still he does not meet the devil. The great desire, his master-devil, remains far in the background, but is manifested to him in its two aspects: sex and power, they give him hell—after the pleasure. These two, sex and power, have their origin in the mysteries of creation. By conquering and controlling them intelligently, one solves the problem of existence and finds his part in it.
• A determined attempt to overcome the master desire is a challenge to and a summons of the devil. The purpose of sex is unity. In order to know unity one must not be overcome by desire of sex. The secret and purpose of power is the attainment to intelligence which helps all. To be intelligent in this manner one must overcome and become immune to the desire for power.
• Continued growth and development of the mind inevitably causes it to engage in the great struggle with the devil, the struggle with sex, and after that, final subjection of the devil by the overcoming of the desire for power.
• Many mystics have entered hell, but few have overcome and subjected the devil. Few are willing or able to continue the fight after the first set-to and so, after they have been bruised and scarred by the devil's double goad of desire for sex and desire for power, they have given in, abandoned the fight, been beaten, and they remained subject to their desires.
• After having given in, many have thought they have conquered because of the rest after the fight and because of certain successes which follow as the reward for submission after the fight.
• There are no outward signs of success when one has fought and overcome his devil and passed through hell. He knows it, and all of the details connected with it.
• The healthy person does not begin to understand what the hell of physical pain is until he has had some such experience as a jumping toothache. If he has an eye gouged out, his jaws crushed, breathing made difficult; if he falls into a vat of boiling acid or loses his scalp, or if he has an eating cancer in the throat, all instances of sufferings caused by so called accidents and of which the newspapers are full, any such experience will put one in hell.
• The picture hells do exist only for the one who had painted them.
• Minds of personalities who hold to the notion that they are made up of and dependent upon the senses have the fieriest hell.
• Hell lasts only for the period required by the mind to free itself from the desires which prevent it, the mind, from seeking its own realm. The period may be but of a moment or it may be of long duration.
• According to the intensity of sensation an eternity or period of immense duration may seem to be drawn into a moment, or a moment may be extended to an eternity. To a comprehensive mind of quick action, an eternity of hell may be an experience of a moment. A dull and stupid mind may require a long period of hell. Time is a greater mystery than hell.
• Each mind is alone responsible for his long or short hell after death as well as in life. During the period after death and before it can go beyond hell, the mind must meet and overcome the devil. In proportion to the strength of the mind and the definiteness of thought, the devil will take form and be perceived by the mind. But the devil cannot take form if the mind is not able to give him form. The devil does not appear the same in form to all minds. Each mind has its own devil. Each devil is fairly matched in quality and power to the respective mind. The devil is the desire which has dominated all the desires of the life just ended, and his form is a composite form made up of all the worldly and fleshly thoughts of that life. As soon as the devil is perceived by the mind, there is a battle.
• The mind accuses the devil and the devil accuses the mind. The mind commands the devil to go, and the devil refuses.
• The devil is the master-desire of a life, trimmed into form.
• But whatever the churches may say, the fact is that after the devil, the desire in form, has shown and accused the mind of all the wrongs he has done during life, and after the mind has suffered the torments caused by the burning desires, then the devil can no longer hold the mind, the mind parts company and there is an end to that hell.
• Hell and the devil should not be thought of with fear and trembling. Hell and the devil should be thought of by everyone who can think and who has an interest in his origin and future.
• The more one knows about the devil and hell the less he is afraid of them. Ignore them if we please, but they will continue until we know them and do away with them.
• The mind will be subject to hell until it develops and adjusts its faculties, replaces ignorance by knowledge and attains mastery over itself.
• The purpose of the world and desire, the devil, is to exercise and educate the mind by furnishing it experiences through sensation, that it may distinguish between the action of its own faculties and the results of sensation, and that by the overcoming of the resistance offered by desire the faculties of the mind be developed, and so the mind finally arrives at an understanding and mastery of itself and from a mastery of itself, to a knowledge of itself, and freedom. Without experience, no sensation; without sensation, no suffering; without suffering, no resistance and without resistance no self-mastery; without mastery, no knowledge; without knowledge, no freedom.
• Hell is the battlefield of the mind and desire.
• The mind's suffering lasts through the period which it takes to separate itself from that which is different in kind from it. In freeing itself from desire and hell after death it does not find freedom forever.
• The reason why the mind must contact and work with desire, which is different from and not it, is that there is a quality in one of the faculties of the mind which is of the nature of desire. This quality is the dark faculty of the mind.
• Each mind will in some one physical life engage in its fight for freedom. It may not come out victorious in that life, but the knowledge gained through its experience of the fight will add to its strength and make it more fit for the final struggle. With continued effort there will be inevitably a final fight and it will win in that fight.
• Desire or the devil never urges the final struggle. When the mind is ready it begins. As soon as the mind resists being driven by desire and refuses to yield to any of the desires which it inherently knows it should not yield to, then it enters hell. Hell is a state of suffering of the mind in its effort to overcome its own ignorance, to gain self mastery and knowledge. As the mind stands its ground and yields not, the devil becomes more active and uses his goad and the fires of hell burn more scorchingly. But unless the fight is entirely given up the fires are lit afresh by the remorse, regret and agony of the mind for its having yielded and its seeming failure. As it renews the fight or continues to stand its ground, all the senses are taxed to the limit of the strain; but they will not break. All the wiles and instincts and insinuations resulting from the ages of desire will appear in the path of the mind in its “descent” into hell. The fires of hell will increase in intensity as the mind continues to resist them or to rise from them. As the mind refuses to gratify or give way to each of the ambitions which beckon it on, and as it refuses to yield to the gnawing or yearning of sex, the burning grows fiercer and fiercer and then the fires seem to burn out. But the suffering is not lessened, for in its place there comes an emptiness and a feeling of being burnt out and an absence of light, which is as terrifying as the hottest fire. The whole world becomes a hell. Laughter is like an empty cackle or a groan. People may appear to be like maniacs or deluded fools who chase their shadows or engage in useless games, and one's own life seems to have dried up. Yet even in the moment of most intense agony the mind will know that it can stand all tests, trials and tribulations of whatever kind if it will, and that it cannot fail, if it will not yield, and that it will overcome if it will hold out.
• No other person or body than one's own is to be blamed by the one who has challenged the devil and has entered hell. Such a notion is a trick of the devil, who thus tries to throw the mind off the track and to prevent the one fighting from seeing the real devil. When one blames another for what he suffers, that one is surely not fighting the true fight. It shows that he is trying to run away or shield himself from the fire. He is suffering from pride and egotism, or else his vision is too clouded and he cannot go on with the fight, so he runs away.
• As long as the mind can suffer hell it is not fit to be immortal.
• Hell must be passed through and its fires must burn until all is burnt out that can be burned.
• Hell beckons no man and is shunned by most men. Those who are ready for it will enter it and overcome it.

Heaven 1910

• The mind is a foreigner from a happy realm, the mental world, where sorrow, strife and sickness are unknown.
• Arriving on the shores of the sensuous physical world, the visitor is beset, beguiled, bewildered by the allurements, delusions and deceits of forms and colors and sensations.
• Forgetting his own happy state and seeking happiness through the senses in the objects of sensation, he strives and struggles and then sorrows to find on approaching the objects, that happiness is not there.
• After a sojourn of barter and bargain, of conflicts, successes and disappointments, after smarting from pain and relieved by superficial joys, the visitor departs from the physical world and returns to his happy native state, taking with him experience.
• The mind comes again and lives in and passes from the physical world to its own, the mental world.
• The mind becomes a time-worn traveler who has often visited, yet never has sounded the depths nor solved the problems of mundane life.
• He comes from his eternal home to spend a day in the world, then passes again to rest, only to come again.
• This goes on until he shall discover in himself, his deliverer, who will tame the wild beasts which beset him, who will dissipate the delusions which bewilder him, who will guide him through sensuous delights across the howling wilderness of the world and into the realm where he is self-knowing, unattracted by the senses and unaffected by ambitions or temptations and unattached to the results of action.
• Until he finds his deliverer and knows his realm of safety man can look forward to heaven, but he will not know it nor enter heaven while he has to come unknowingly to the physical world.
• After death not all men enter heaven.
• To enter heaven, one must think of and do that which makes heaven.
• Heaven is made by thinking of ones own and others' spiritual and moral welfare and is earned by earnest work to such end.
• The happiness of heaven is through thought.
• The sense or senses which are concerned with the flesh have no part or place in heaven. Then what kind of senses are these heavenly senses? They are senses made by the mind temporarily and for the occasion, and do not last.
• The heaven which man inhabits after death is in man's own mental atmosphere.
• He must first pass through, grow out of, his psychic atmosphere, that is, go through hell, before he can enter his heaven.
• His heaven consists in the development, living out and realization of these ideal thoughts; but all the time, be it remembered, he is in his own atmosphere. Out of this atmosphere is furnished the germ from which his next physical body is built.
• The mind may shut itself up in its own heaven within the great heaven world and be out of touch with other minds of like quality or power, similarly as a man shuts himself off from the world when he absents himself from all human society.
• Each mind may participate in the heaven of another mind or with all other minds to the degree that their ideals are the same and to the degree that their thoughts are in tune, similarly as men on earth of kindred ideals are drawn together and enjoy mental association through thought.
• THE mind must learn to know heaven on earth and to transform the earth into heaven.
• It must do that work for itself while on earth in a physical body. The heaven after death and before birth is the native state of purity of the mind.
• But it is the purity of innocence. The purity of innocence is not real purity. The purity which the mind must have, before its education through the worlds is complete, is the purity through and with knowledge.
• The body offers the resistance which develops strength in the mind that overcomes that resistance; it furnishes the temptations by which the mind is tried and tempered; it affords the difficulties and duties and problems by the overcoming and the doing and the solving of which the mind is trained to know things as they are, and it attracts from all spheres the things and conditions necessary for these purposes.
• The earth is in heaven and heaven is around and upon the earth, and mankind must and will be made aware of it. But they cannot know of it or know this to be true until they open their eyes to the light of heaven.
• The misuse of sex functions is not the only evil in the world, but it is the root of the evil in the world and to overcome other evils and such as grow out of them man must begin at the root.
• Today heaven is clouded over and surrounded, by darkness.
• Now is the time to enter heaven. The unbreakable will to do what one knows to be right, is the way to pierce the darkness. By the will to do and the doing of what one knows to be right, whether the world howls or all is silent, man calls upon and invokes his guide, his deliverer, his conqueror, his savior and in the midst of darkness, heaven opens, light comes.
• The man who will do right, whether his friends frown, his foes ridicule and taunt, or whether he is observed or remains unnoticed, will reach heaven and it will open for him.
• But before he can cross the threshold and live in the light he must be willing to stand at the threshold and let the light shine through him. As he stands at the threshold the light which shines into him is his happiness. It is heaven's message through which his warrior and savior speaks from within the light.
• As he continues to stand in the light and knows happiness a great sadness comes with the light. The sadness and sorrow which he feels are not such as he had before experienced. They are caused by his own darkness and the darkness of the world which acts through him. The darkness outside is deep but his own darkness seems darker still as the light shines on him.
• Were man able to endure the light his darkness would soon be consumed, for darkness becomes light when held steadily in the light. Man may stand at the gate but he cannot enter heaven until his darkness is changed into light and he is of the nature of light.
• At first man is not able to stand at the threshold of light and let the light burn up his darkness, so he falls back. But the light of heaven has shone into him and has set fire to the darkness within him and it will continue to be with him until he shall time and again stand at the gates and let the light shine in until it shines through him.
• He would share his happiness with others but others will not understand nor appreciate it until they have reached or are trying to reach heaven by way of the path of doing of right without looking to the result of action. This happiness is realized by working with others and for others and for and with one's self in others and others in one's self.
• The work will lead through the dark and light places of earth. The work will enable one to walk among the wild beasts without being devoured; to work for and with another's ambitions without desiring them or their results; to listen and to sympathize with another's sorrows; to help him to see the way out of his troubles; to stimulate his aspirations and to do all without making him feel obligated and without any desire other than for his good.
• This work will teach one to eat from the shallow bowl of poverty and be filled, and to drink from the bitter cup of disappointment and be contented with its dregs. It will enable one to feed those who hunger for knowledge, to help those to clothe themselves who discover their nakedness, to light those who wish to find their way through the darkness; it will allow one to feel repaid by another's ingratitude, teach him the magic art of turning a curse into a blessing and will even make him immune to the poison of flattery and show his egotism as the littleness of ignorance; through all his work the happiness of heaven will be with him and he will feel that sympathy and compassion which cannot be appreciated through the senses. This happiness is not of the senses.
• A philosopher of materialism does not know the strength of that sympathy which is known to one who has entered heaven while on earth and who speaks from out his heaven
• The heaven born love for others is not emotionalism, sentimentality, nor the pity which a superior bestows on an inferior. It is the knowing that others are in one's self, which is knowledge of the divinity of all things.
• Heaven to be known and entered by such means will not be desired by those who desire to be the great men of the world. Those who think that they are great men do not know of and cannot enter heaven while they are on earth. The great men, and all, men, must become great enough and have knowledge enough to know that they are as babes and must become children before they can stand at the gate of heaven.
• The human race wishes for immortality and heaven on earth but the race cannot inherit these until it gives up taking nourishment through the senses and learns to take nourishment through the mind.
• The human race today can hardly distinguish itself as a race of minds from the race of animal bodies in which they are incarnate.
• This so hard and seemingly cruel earth is destined to become and is now the foundation on which heaven shall be built, and the gods of heaven will incarnate among the children of men when the bodies prepared shall be fit to receive them. But the physical race must be healed from its vices and made healthy in body before the new race can come.
• The best and most effective and the only way of bringing this new order of life into the life of present humanity is for man to begin and do this silently with himself, and so to take up the burden of one more cripple from the world. He who does this will be the greatest world conqueror, the noblest benefactor and the most charitable humanitarian of his time.
• At present, man's thoughts are unclean, and his body unholy and not fit for the gods of heaven to incarnate in. The gods of heaven are the immortal minds of men. For every man on earth, there is a God, his father in Heaven. The mind of man which incarnates is the son of God who descends into the physical child of the earth for the purpose of redeeming, and enlightening, and raising it to the estate of heaven and enabling it, too, to become a child of heaven and a son of God.
• Thought is the creator, preserver, destroyer or regenerator of all the manifested worlds, and thought does or causes to be done all the things which are done or brought about. But to have heaven on earth man must think the thoughts and do the deeds which will make and reveal and bring and cause him to enter into heaven while on earth.
• But when he is able to do in the physical body what takes place after death, he will know heaven and he shall not die; that is to say, he as a mind may cause to be created another physical body and enter it without sleeping the deep sleep of forgetfulness.
• By the living of his physical life according to the heaven-like thoughts, his physical body will be purged of its impurities and made whole and clean and immune to disease, and thought will be the ladder or path by which he may ascend and communicate with his higher mind, his god, and the god may even descend into him and make known to him the heaven which is within, and the heaven without will then become visible in the world.
• The thought which will bring heaven to earth is free from all that has to do with personality.
• Only thoughts which are free from the element of one's own personality unless they be thoughts of subduing and mastering that personality-and thoughts concerned with the bettering of the condition of man and the improvement of the minds of men and the awakening of these minds to divinity, are thoughts which make heaven. And the only way is by beginning it silently with one's self.

Friendship 1911

• LIKE honor, generosity, justice, sincerity, truthfulness and other virtues in frequent and indiscriminate use by the unmindful, friendship is spoken of and assurances of friendship are proffered and acknowledged everywhere; but, like the other virtues, and, although it is felt in some degree by all men, it is a bond and state most rare.
• True friendship is in the unselfish motive which causes the thinking and the acting for another's good, without self interest
• Friendships begin through gratitude. Gratitude is not the mere thankfulness which a beneficiary feels toward his benefactor. It is not the thanks given to cold charity for alms, nor is it the feeling miscalled gratitude felt or shown by an inferior for what his superior has bestowed upon him. Gratitude is one of the noblest of the virtues and is a god-like attribute. Gratitude is an awakening of the mind to some good thing said or done, and the unselfish and free out-going of the heart toward the one who did it. Gratitude levels all castes or positions
• Should things arise which interrupt or appear to break the friendship, such as going to a distant place, or such as disagreements arising, or should communication cease, still, the friendship, though seemingly broken, is not at an end. Though neither should see the other before death, the friendship, having begun, is not yet at an end. When those minds reincarnate in the next or some future life, they will meet again and their friendship will be renewed.
• Friendship is essentially a relationship of mind
• eventually, it causes the best in one to act for all men.
• THERE are comparatively few true friendships in the world, because few men are true enough to themselves to have true friendships. Friendship cannot thrive in an atmosphere of deceit. Friendship requires the nature to express itself truly, and unless there is honesty of expression friendship will not live. Man is his own best friend when he is truest in his friendships.
• Acquaintances may be chosen, but friendships arrange themselves. Friends will be drawn together as naturally as magnet attracts iron.
• Friendship requires the strength to stand alone if need be.
• Within the universal mind there is the divine plan, that each mind shall learn its own divinity, and the divinity of other minds, and finally shall know the unity of all.

Shadows 1911

• A shadow is not merely the absence of the light in the outline of the object which intercepts it. A shadow is a thing in itself.
• The shadow is a projection of the shade of the interior as well as of the outline of the body. The interior of the body cannot be seen because the eye is not sensible to the rays flight which comingles with the interior of the body and projects its shade.
• if the sight were trained, the seer could perceive the interior of the body in all its parts by means of its shade, because the light that passes through the body is impressed with and bears a subtle copy of the parts of the body through which it passes.
• Gloom follows and is a companion of a shadow, because a shadow obscures and shuts out the light from that on which it falls and gloom rests on that on which the light is obscured.
• A very sensitive person may feel something of the influence of the invisible shade and the apparently visible shadow even though he may not know the causes which produces it or the law by which it was produced. The light which causes the shadow carries with it some of the finer essences of the body and directs the magnetism of that body to the object on which the shadow falls.
• At an eclipse of the sun, the earth is in the moon's shadow.
• If he can perceive the astral or design body of his physical structure, he will see the interior condition of his physical body, which physical body is the visible and outward expression of the invisible and interior condition. When he looks at his shadow he, sees the interior condition of his body as plainly as he would see the expression on his face by looking into a mirror. Whereas in the mirror he sees by reflection and sees the parts reversed from right to left, his shadow is seen by projection or emanation and there is a sameness of the position.
• When one's shadow is projected by the light and is seen, it will show the condition of the health of the body. If the shadow increases in strength it will show a corresponding health and strength of body.
• But as the physical body must at some time die, for one to live an unending life means that the shadow must become independent of its physical body. So that for one's shadow not to grow less really means that his astral body, the form of his physical body, will become so perfect, and independent of its physical body, that he will live in it throughout ages. This cannot be unless the shadow, instead of being as it now is, merely a projection of the form of the body, increases in strength and power and becomes, as it can be, greater and better than the physical body.
• The physical world and all things in it are known at their true values according to the degree of knowledge one has of shadows. One will learn what physical objects are by a knowledge of shadows. By learning of and by proper dealing with shadows, man can climb from world to world in his search for knowledge. There are shadows thrown or projected from three of the four manifested worlds, and there are many varieties of shadows in each world.
• the shadow … is not caused by the physical body which appears to cause it, but by the invisible form man within the physical.
• There are many varieties and degrees of physical bodies, but all are only shadows.
• all physical appearances are shadows
• To stop the pain and remain unbroken, man should not chase shadows nor flee from them; he must remain in and learn of them, until he finds that which is permanent in his world of changing shadows.
• man's physical body is the shadow of his invisible form, and that like as a shadow shifts or disappears when the object which causes it is removed, so a physical body dies and disintegrates when its invisible form body is severed from it.
• Like as a man's physical make-up is the visible shadow of his invisible form, so is this seemingly solid physical world, and so are all physical things on and in it, the visible shadows made out of the plastic and invisible matter precipitated from the invisible form world.
• Shadows in the astral world are projections of copies of the forms of things in that world. The forms of the astral world are projections or shadows-not copies---of thoughts in the mental world. Thoughts in the mental world are emanations from the minds in that world. The thoughts or emanations in the mental world are projections by the light of the spiritual world, of the types of the spiritual world through the minds acting in the mental world. The physical objects in the physical world are the shadows of the forms in the astral world. The forms of the astral world are the shadows of thoughts in the mental world. The thoughts and ideals of the mental world are the shadows of the types or ideas in the spiritual world.
• Light in each of the lower worlds has its origin in the spiritual world.
• Light is the intelligence of the spiritual world.
• He identifies himself with his shadows, not knowing that he does it. So he lives in this physical world of shadows and sleeps carelessly on or moves restlessly and frets on through the night of his troubled sleep; he dreams of shadows and dreams his shadows into existence, and believes that shadows are realities. Man's fears and troubles must continue while he believes shadows to be realities. He quiets fear and ceases to trouble when he awakes to reality and knows shadows to be shadows.
• Man, the real man, is a conscious intelligent and spiritual sphere of light. In the earliest times, which was the beginning of things, and for a reason best known in the spiritual world of light, man as a spiritual light looked out from his sphere of light. As he did, he perceived his light to be projected in the mental world. And he thought, and entered the mental world. As a thinker by his mental light, man looked into the astral or psychic world and projected his thought, and his thought took form. And he as a thinker thought of himself as being that form and desired so to be. And he was in that form and sensed himself as a man of form. Sensing his form, man looked through the astral or psychic world and desired to see his form, and his desire was projected as the shadow of his form. And as he looked at that shadow he longed for it and thought to enter and unite with it. He did enter into and dwell with it and took up his abode in it. So, ever since that early time, he has projected his forms and their shadows and lived in them. But shadows cannot last. So as often as he casts himself into form and projects and enters his physical shadow, so often must he leave the physical shadow and his form and return to his heaven, the mental world. He cannot enter his sphere in the spiritual world of light until he learns of shadows, and knows himself as the spiritual light while still living in the physical shadow world. When he knows this, his physical body will be to him a shadow only. He will be unattached to and unhampered by his form of sense. He can still his thoughts. Knowing himself as a spiritual light, he may enter his sphere of light. Such a man, if it be his work to return to the physical world, may shine through his shadows in all the worlds without again being obscured by them.
• Man sees shadows only when he looks away from the light. He who looks at the light sees no shadows. When looking steadily at a shadow for the light in the shadow, the shadow disappears as the light is seen. An acquaintance with shadows means familiarity with the worlds. A study of shadows is a beginning of wisdom.
• According to its wants or needs desire demands food, and the thought of man provides it. The food is seen when it is provided, but generally the mental processes by which it is provided are not seen nor understood, and seldom thought of.
• Each shadow projected forms part of a larger shadow, and many of these are part of the precipitation of a still larger shadow, and all form one great shadow. As many minds as are at work so many shadows are projected and all make up the great shadow.
• When one such thought is projected into the invisible world of form, many minds perceive it and work with it and strive to give it a shadow, until one of them succeeds by the light of his mind in projecting its shadow into the physical world of shadows.
• So will be projected into this physical world by thought the shadow of forms of ideals now but dimly perceived.
• Man thinks that he does, but he does not really delight in the shadows of the physical world.
• Life after life man projects his physical shadow house and lives in it and enjoys the thought of it. He builds his house of shadows in this shadow world until he cannot hold his house of shadows together, and he passes through the shadow of life and through shadows of his hopes and fears, of longings and dislikes, until he reaches the end and passes through the shadows of his ideals in the heaven world which he has built: He lives through the shadow of heaven until his desires call him back into the physical shadow world. Here again he comes to project and then chase the shadow of money, to live in the shadow of poverty, to be tortured by the shadow of pain, enthralled by the shadow of pleasure, lured on by the shadow of hope, held back by the shadow of doubt, and so he passes through the morning and evening of his life, lives through the shadows of youth and old age until he learns the uselessness of striving for shadows and sees that this physical world and all things in it are shadows.
• All astral shadows act directly on and affect the senses. All mental shadows act on and influence the mind. Passion, anger, lust, malice, fear, greed, slothfulness, laziness and sensuality which move the senses to action, and particularly such which stimulate the senses without any visible cause, are the shadows of astral forces and forms which affect the astral form body, and this moves and acts through its physical shadow. Vanity, pride, gloom, despondency, selfishness, are shadows thrown on the incarnated mind from the thoughts in the mental world.
• He will learn that every shadow may be dispelled by turning to reason and by looking at the light. He will know that when he invokes and looks at the light, the light will dispel the shadow and cause it to disappear. So when come the shadows which cause moods of despondency, gloom and pessimism to obscure the mind, he may by consulting his reason and turning to the light in aspiration see through the shadows.

Flying 1911

• In moments of reverie, of deep thought, of ecstasy, man, the mind, knows that he can fly. …Then he looks at his heavy body and stays on earth.
• But some day one man bolder and more qualified than the rest will fly, without other physical means than his body. Then other men will see and believe; and, seeing and believing, their senses will be adjusted to their thought and they, too, will fly. Then men can no longer doubt, and unaided bodily human flight will be an accepted fact, as commonplace as phenomena of the wonderful forces called gravitation and light. It is well to doubt, but not to doubt too much.
• Man has the Power to overcome gravitation and raise his physical body and take aerial flights in it, as surely as in his thought he can fly to distant parts of earth.
• It is hard for a man to discover and make use of his power over gravity and of flight, because he has not seen anyone rise and move freely through the air without mechanical contrivance.
• The law called gravitation rules every particle of physical matter, reaches into and through the psychic emotional world and exerts a powerful influence on the mind itself. It is natural that gravitation should have its mysterious pull on physical bodies and cause them to feel heavy by drawing them towards its physical center of gravity—the earth center. The center of gravity in the earth pulls on the center of gravity in every physical body around it and compels every physical body to lie as flat on earth as the pull can make it.
• The same power by which a man makes his body lift itself to its feet will enable him to raise that body into the air.
• Why will a cat or a mule walk along the brink of precipice...They have no dread of falling, because they do not and cannot picture themselves falling. Because they do not imagine or form a picture of a fall, there is not the slightest likelihood that they will.
• When a man looks over the edge of a precipice, the thought of falling is suggested to his mind; and, if he does not lie flat, the thought is likely to overcome his poise and cause him to fall. If his footing is secure, he will not fall, unless he thinks of falling. If his thought of falling is strong enough, he will surely fall, because his body must follow its center of gravity when and to where that center is projected by thought.
• Man can learn how to use a force which will overcome the force of gravity and give lightness to his body and cause it to rise into the air.
• To raise his physical body into the air a man must conform and attune its molecular structure to and charge it with the force of lightness.
• He can charge his molecular body with lightness by breathing and by certain uninterrupted thought.
• Under certain conditions the raising of his body from the earth may be accomplished by singing or chanting certain simple sounds. The reason that certain singing or chanting may so affect the physical body is that sound has an immediate effect on the molecular structure of every physical body. When the thought of lightness is intent on the raising of the body and the necessary sounds are produced, they affect the molecular structure from within and without, and, given the proper rhythm and timbre, it will respond to the thought of lightness, which will cause the body to rise in the air.
• To charge the molecular body with lightness, to overcome gravity by breathing and rise in the air,

1. one should breathe deeply and freely.

2. As the breath is taken into the body, the endeavor should be to feel it as it seems to pass through the body. 3. This feeling may be of a slight surging downward through the body and upward through the body with each inhalation and exhalation

4. When one breathes easily and deeply and tries to feel the breath through the body, the breath is the carrier of the thought.

5. As the air is drawn into the air chambers of the lungs, this thought which pervades it is impressed on the blood as the blood enters the pulmonary alveoli for oxygenation; and, as the oxygenated blood goes downward or to the extremities of the body, the thought goes with it and produces the feeling of the surging or tingling or breathing, to the extremities and back again, upward to the heart and the lungs.

6. As the breathing continues and the thought of the breathing through the body and of lightness is continued uninterruptedly, the physical body feels as though all parts of it were alive and the blood, which is alive and which may seem to be the breath, is felt as it circulates through the entire body.

7. As the blood circulates, it acts on and charges every cell in the body with the quality of lightness with which it is impressed.

8. When the cells have been charged with the quality of lightness, an immediate connection is made between them and the inter-cellular or molecular form structure of the physical body to an inner breath, which inner breath is the true carrier of the thought of lightness.

9. As soon as the connection is made between the inner breath and the molecular form body of the physical, an entire change is produced throughout the body.

10. The change is experienced as a sort of ecstasy.

11. As the dominating thought directing the inner breath is of lightness, the force of lightness overcomes the force of gravity.

12. The physical body then loses weight. If it remains on the ground where it stands, or reclines, it will be as light as thistle-down.

13. The thought of rising is an order to the physical body to ascend, when the thought of ascending is uppermost.

14. As the breath is inhaled, it is turned at the diaphragm into an upward current to the lungs. The inner breath so acting through the outer physical breath enables the body to rise.

15. As the breath aspires there may come the sound as of a rushing wind or as the stillness of space.

16. The force of lightness has then overcome gravity for the time, and man ascends into the air in his physical body in an ecstasy which he had not before experienced.

17. When man so learns to ascend, there will be no danger of his falling suddenly back to the earth. His descent will be as gradual as he desires.

18. As he learns so to ascend, he will lose the fear of falling.

19. When gravity is overcome, there is no sense of weight. When there is no sense of weight, there is no fear of falling.

20. When the force of lightness is exercised, man may rise and remain suspended in the air at any height which is possible for physical breathing.

21. But he cannot yet fly.

22. A control of the force of lightness is necessary to the man who would fly in his physical body without any physical attachments or contrivances.

23. But lightness alone will not enable him to fly. To fly he must induce another force, the motive force of flight.

• The motive force of flight moves a body along a horizontal plane.
• The force of lightness moves a body upward in a vertical direction, while
• gravity draws it downward in a vertical direction.
• When the force of lightness is controlled, the motive force of flight is induced by thought.
• When one has overcome the gravity or weight of his physical body by control of the force of lightness and has risen in the air, he will, naturally, induce the motive force of flight, because he will think of some place to which he would go.
• As soon as he thinks of direction to some place, the thought connects the motive force of flight with the molecular form body of the physical, and the physical body is moved forward by the motive force of flight
• Flight by such means as here indicated may seem impossible at present. It is impossible for some at present, but it is possible for others.
• It is especially impossible for those who feel sure that it is impossible.
• It is not likely that those who believe it possible will learn how to fly in the manner here described, for, though the psychic organism necessary to work with may be theirs, they may lack mental qualities, such as patience, perseverance, control of thought, and may not be willing to acquire these qualities. Still, there are a few who have the psychic organism and the mental characteristics necessary, and for these it is possible.
• It is possible that in an early age man had the power to fly ….and that he lost the power as he progressed and took greater interest in his physical and more material development.

1. Preparatory to inducing the motive power of flight, one should train his body and his thought to the achievement of flight.

2. Morning and evening are the times best suited to accustom the body to such undertaking, and exercising the thought with the object of flight.

3. In the calm of the morning and the evening let the one who has deep and quiet faith in himself and who believes it possible for him to fly stand on a slight rising on a broad plain or on a hill commanding a broad and uninterrupted view of land undulating into the distance.

4. Let him look over the broad distances as intimately as he looks on the place on which he stands, and let him think of the lightness and freedom of the air as he breathes deeply and regularly.

5. As his eye follows the undulations into the distance, let him have a longing to reach out and soar, as he knows the birds can, over the scene below him.

6. As he breathes, let him feel that the air he draws in has a lightness, as though it would lift him upward.

7. When he feels the lightness of the air, he should hold his legs together and raise his arms to a horizontal position with palms downward as he inhales the light air.

8. After continued practice of these movements, he may have a feeling of a calm joy.

• These exercises and this feeling attunes the molecular form body within and throughout the physical matter of his body to the motive force of flight.
• As the exercises continue without lack of confidence in his inherent power to fly, he will through his molecular form body sense the proximity of the motive force of flight, and he feels as though like a bird he, too, ought to fly.
• As he brings his molecular form body into touch with the motive force of flight, he will in one of his exercises, simultaneously with his inbreathing, reach outward with his arms and legs with a motion as of swimming, and he will by thought intuitively connect or induce the motive force of flight to act on the molecular form body of his physical, and he will be impelled forward.
• By a slight pushing of his feet from the ground he will be carried forward a
• short distance through the air, or he may drop after only a few feet.
• This will depend on the fitness of contact between his molecular form body and the motive force of flight, and upon his power of thought to continue the relationship which he had established between them. The contact once established, however, will give him assurance that he can fly.
• But although he has demonstrated to his physical senses that there is the motive force spoken of, he will not be able to fly without some contrivance to answer the purpose of the wings and tail such as a bird uses.
• To induce the motive force of flight without a wing-like attachment to his body would be dangerous or disastrous to the physical body, because when induced the motive force would impel the body forward, but man would not be able to guide his flight and he would be forced along the ground without ability to give direction except as he might from time to time reach out with his hands or push the ground with his feet.
• Man, if he ever had it, has long lost the power to induce the motive force of flight. But for man it is possible to attain all things.
• (Aviators) it is possible that during one of his flights one among them may induce the motive force of flight. The one who does so may learn and at once increase the speed of his airplane as the force impels him on.
• Whichever mode of flight is attained, it will bring about great changes in the bodies, habits and customs of the people. Their bodies will become lighter and finer, and people will find their chief pleasure and enjoyment in flying. The pleasure now found in swimming, dancing, speeding or swift movement of body is only a slight foretaste of the exquisite pleasure which will be found in flying.
• Who can say when this will be done? It may not be until centuries hence, or it may be tomorrow. It is within the reach of man. Let him who will, fly.

Hope and Fear 1911

• "I, Hope, was begotten and named by Thought, your father, and nurtured by Desire, Queen of the Underworld, and ruler of the middle regions of the universe. But though I was thus called into being by our immortal parent, I am pre-existent, parentless, and eternal as the great father of all.
• I whispered to the Creator when the universe was conceived, and he breathed me into his being. At the incubation of the universal egg, I thrilled the germ and awakened its potential energies to life. At the gestation and fashioning of the worlds, I sang the measures of the lives and attended the limning of their coursings into forms. In modulated tones of nature I hymned the names of their Lord at the birth of beings, but they did not hear me. I have walked with the children of earth and in paeans of joy I have voiced the wonders and glories of Thought, their creator, but they did not know him. I have shown a bright path to Heaven and trilled the cadence of the way, but their eyes cannot perceive my light, their ears are not attuned to my voice, and unless the immortal fires descend on them to light the fuel I will give, their hearts will be empty altars, I shall be unknown and unperceived by them, and they will pass into that formlessness out of which they have been called, without achieving that for which they were destined by Thought.
• Desire awoke in the gods. Each saw in Hope naught but the object of his awakened desire.
• "Do not shun Fear; she is but a shadow. If you will learn of her she cannot harm you. When you have passed through and banished Fear, you will have redeemed yourselves, found me, and we shall return to Heaven. Follow me, and let Reason guide you. "
• Driven by fear and wandering through dark worlds, the immortals came down to earth in early times and took up their abode with and disappeared among the mortal men. And Hope came with them. Long since, they have forgotten who they are and cannot, except through Hope, remember whence they came.
• Driven on by Fear, immortals walk the earth in forgetfulness, but Hope is with them. Some day, in the light which is found by purity of life, they will dispel Fear, find Hope, and will know themselves and Heaven.

Wishing 1911-1912

• Wishing is generally recognized to be idle indulgence, and many suppose that wishes are not followed by the things wished for and have little effect on their lives. But these are erroneous conceptions.
• Wishing does influence our lives and it is important that we should know how wishing influences and brings about certain effects in our lives.
• Some people are more influenced by their wishes than others.
• The difference in the results of the wishing of one person from the wishing of another depends upon the impotence or the subtle power of his thought, on the volume and quality of his desire, and on the background of his past motives and thoughts and deeds which make up his history.
• …one who is old in experience and who has benefited from his experiences does very little wishing. Novices in the school of life, find much pleasure wishing.
• Those who have had some experience with the worldly and bodily wishes and find them to be evanescent and unreliable even when obtained, wish to be temperate, to be self-restrained, to be virtuous and wise. When one's wishing turns to such subjects, he stops wishing and tries to acquire these by doing what he thinks will develop virtue and bring wisdom.
• The wisher with a method usually proceeds according to the new-thoughting scheme, which is, to state his wish and to call upon and demand of his law of opulence its fulfillment. His plea is that there is in the universe an abundance of everything for all, and that it is his right to callout from the abundance that portion for which he wishes and to which he now lays claim.
• In fact, the manner of its coming often causes much sorrow, and he wishes that he had not wished, rather than suffer the calamity which is entailed by the getting of this wish.
• To get and enjoy any thing in the physical world a man must do what is necessary to that end in the physical world.
• What he does to get it, must be according to the laws of the physical world. If he wishes for any physical thing, but does nothing more than wishing to get it, thus acting against the law, he may get that which he wishes for, but it will inevitably be followed by disappointments, sorrow, trouble and misfortune. He cannot break the law by going against it, nor evade it by going around it.
• Wishing is an expression of the desire to get something for nothing.
• The attempt to get something for nothing, is unlawful, unjust, and is evidence of impotence and unworthiness.
• Wishing is a phase of this delusion, and when wishing is followed by practical results it is likely to be more dangerous than speculating in stocks and other ways of betting and gambling.
• To get a wish without doing more than wishing, is a bait which leads the wisher to believe that he may have his wishes gratified without work.
• The same law applies to the desires and the emotional nature. He who wishes others to give him their affection and to gratify his desires, but gives little affection in return and has little consideration for their benefit, will lose their affection, and be shunned.
• The ardent wisher always pays a price for every wish he gets.
• The thing or condition for which one wishes is seldom if ever what he expected it would be, or if he gets just what he wanted it will bring unexpected difficulties or sorrow, or the getting of the wish will change conditions that the wisher does not wish changed, or it will lead or require him to do what he does not wish to do. In every case the getting of a wish brings with it or causes some disappointment or undesirable thing or condition, which was not bargained for at the time of wishing.
• Wishing has become a habit with man.
• To get suddenly that for which we have ardently wished is like having an unripe fruit which is plucked. It appears attractive to the eye, but is bitter to the taste and may cause pain and distress.
• Can we live without wishing? It is possible.
• Those who try to live without wishing are of two kinds.
• The ascetics who withdraw themselves to mountains, forests, deserts, and who remain in solitude where they are removed from the world and so escape its temptations.
• The other class prefer to live in the world and engage in the active duties which their position in life imposes, but try to remain unattached to the things by which they are surrounded and unaffected by temptations of the world. But there are comparatively few such men.
• Owing to our ignorance and our desires and wishing, we drift or rush from one thing or condition into another, always dissatisfied with what we have and always wishing for something else and hardly if ever understanding what we have and are.
• When the energy of the mind or thinking principle is turned upon itself and is intent upon discovering its own nature and power, it is not led away and deceived by desire in the whirl of the senses.
• One who persists in turning the energy of the thinking principle upon itself will learn to know the ideal perfection which he must attain.
• He will know that he can get anything by wishing for it, but he then will not wish.
• He knows that he can live without wishing.
• And he does, because he knows he is at every time in the best condition and environment and has the opportunities which will best afford the means to go on towards the attainment of perfection.
• He knows that all past thought and action have provided the present conditions and brought him into them, that these are necessary that he might grow out of them by learning that which they hold for him, and he knows that wishing to be anything other than what he is, or in any other place or conditions than where he is, would remove the present opportunity for progress, and postpone the time of his growth.
• It is well for each one to work onward towards his chosen ideal and it is best for him to work out from the present toward that ideal without wishing.
• Each one of us is at this time in the very best condition it is for him to be in.
• But he should go onward-onward by doing his work.

Living and Living Forever 1912

• …the pulse of life beats in the structure of that rock.
• Life is an invisible and immeasurable ocean, within or out of the depths of which are born all things.
• Enveloped by his atmosphere as in a chorion, man gestates on the earth, but he has not made contact with the life from the ocean of life.
• He has not taken life. He is not living.
• He sleeps in an unfashioned, unfinished embryol state, unaware of the ocean of life, but he often dreams he has waked, or dreams dreams of his living.
• Seldom is there one among men who grows out of his embryol state and who is living in contact with the ocean of life.
• As a rule men sleep through their period of embryonic existence (which they call on earth life), disturbed by occasional nightmares of fear, pain and distress, or exhilarated by dreams of happiness and joy.
• Unless man is in contact with the flood tide of life, he is not truly living.
• In his present condition it is impossible for man to have his body contact the ocean of life through his main stream of life.
• His body is animal and in it are represented all forms and organisms, but by the action of his mind he has cut off direct contact of life from his body and encased it in a world of his own, his own atmospheres.
• The divine spark of intelligence dwells in his form, but is covered over and hid from his gaze by the clouds of his thoughts, and he is prevented from finding it by the desires of the animal to which he is yoked.
• Man as a mind will not let his animal live naturally and according to its nature, and his animal prevents him from seeking his divine inheritance and from living with intelligence in the flood tide of the ocean of life.
• As people of the world, are we living? We are not.
• Men do not live naturally as animals, nor do they live as divine beings with intelligence.
• If man were truly living, he would have no aches, no pains, no disease; he would have health and wholeness of body; he could, if he would, by living, outgrow and pass over death, and come into his inheritance of immortal life.
• Living is a process and a state into which man must enter intentionally and intelligently
• Man must begin the process of living by choice, by choosing to begin it.
• The first step toward living, is for one to see that he is dying.
• The next step toward living is to renounce the way of dying and to desire the way of living.
• He must understand that yielding to the bodily appetites and tendencies, causes pain and disease and decay, that pain and disease and decay can be checked by a control of the appetites and bodily desires, that it is better to control the desires than to give way to them.
• Can man remove disease, stop decay, conquer death, and gain immortal life, while living in his physical body in this physical world? He can--if he will work with the law of life.
• Immortal life must be earned. It cannot be conferred, nor does anyone naturally and easily drift into it.
• (alchemists) All were not idle dreamers. It is not likely that all failed in their course. Out of the hosts who have taken up this quest of the ages, a few, perhaps, did reach the goal. If they did find and did make use of the Elixir of Life, they did not herald their secret to the world.
• It may have been, it was necessary in other ages to speak of the way to immortal life guardedly, through myth, symbol and allegory. But now we are in a new age. It is now time to speak plainly of and to show clearly the way of living, by which immortal life may be attained by a mortal man while he is in a physical body.
• If the way does not seem plain no one should attempt to follow it. His own judgment is asked of each one desiring immortal life; no other authority is given nor required.
• No mortal is now fit and ready to take immortal life. If it were possible for a mortal to put on immortality at once, he would draw into himself unending misery; but it is not possible. Man must prepare himself for immortal life before he can live forever.
• He will die.
• But when he lives again he will anew take up his burden from where he left it, and go on toward his goal for ill or good. It may be either.
• Living forever and remaining in this world means that the one so living must become immune from the pains and pleasures which rack the frame and waste the energy of a mortal.
• It means that he lives through the centuries as a mortal lives through his days, but without the break of nights or deaths.
• He will see father, mother, husband, wife, children, relatives grow up and age and die like flowers that live for a day. Lives of mortals to him will appear as flashes, and pass into the night of time.
• He must watch the rise and fall of nations or civilizations as they are built up and crumble into time. The conformation of the earth and the climates will change and he will remain, a witness of it all.
• If he is shocked by and withdraws from such considerations, he had better not elect himself to live forever.
• One who delights in his lusts, or who looks at life through a dollar, should not seek a life immortal.
• A mortal lives through a dream state of indifference marked off by shocks of sensation; and his whole life from beginning to end is a life of forgetfulness. The living of an immortal is an ever present memory.
• His motive should be to fit himself to help others to grow out of their ignorance and selfishness, and through virtue to grow into full manhood of usefulness and power and selflessness; and this without any selfish interest or attaching to himself any glory for being able so to help. When this is his motive, he is fit to begin the process of living forever.
• Man as an intelligent ultimate unit will continue to appear and disappear and reappear in the different worlds under the conditions required by the worlds, and must endure the torments of sensation and change, and will be unaware of himself as he really is as an intelligent ultimate unit, until he arrests change and stops the conflict of the opposites in the manifesting side of the ultimate unit which he is.
• Man may arrest change and stop the conflict of these opposites by contemplating and becoming aware of and relating himself to the sameness or oneness of the unmanifested side of himself as an intelligent ultimate unit.
• Mind is a stage in the development of the ultimate unit.
• The opposites of the manifesting side of the ultimate unit may be balanced and united.
• When the opposites of the manifesting side of an ultimate unit are balanced and united as One, the opposites cease to be opposites and the two become one, which is as neither of the opposites.
• That by which the opposites of the manifesting side of the ultimate unit become united as one, is the oneness or sameness, which is the unmanifesting side of that ultimate unit.
• That which the opposites of the manifesting side of the ultimate unit have become is substance.
• The opposites of the manifesting side of the ultimate unit which have united and again become one, have rebecome substance and are the sameness of the unmanifesting side.
• Living forever is not living for the enjoyment of delights.
• Living forever is not for exploitation of one's fellows.
• Living forever requires greater courage than has the bravest soldier, more zeal than has the most ardent patriot, a grasp of affairs more comprehensive than has the ablest statesman, a deeper love than has the most devoted mother.
• One who lives forever cannot give up his trust. His work is with and for the races of humanity. Not until the youngest brother of his great family is able to take his place will his work be finished, and perhaps not then.
• The process toward living forever, very likely is a long and arduous course and requires greatness of character and coolness of judgment to travel. With the right motive there will be no fear in launching out on the journey.
• One who undertakes it will not be daunted by any obstacle, nor can fear take hold of him. The only means by which fear can affect and overcome him is when it is hatched and nursed by his own wrong motive. Fear can find no brooding place with right motive.
• It is time for men to be conscious that they are borne on by the torrent of life, and in a little while are engulfed by death. It is time to choose not to be so engulfed, but to use the torrent to be borne on safely, and to live forever.
• The process of living forever is approached by thinking of living forever, and begins with the conception of the thought of living forever.
• By thinking of living forever is meant that the mind reaches out after and searches out all available matter on the subject, and broods over the thought of living forever.
• As the mind is so roused it becomes prepared and prepares the body to begin the process.
• The conception of the thought of living forever takes place at that instant when the mind for the first time awakens to the realization of what living forever is.
• This awakening differs from the labors of the mind in its gropings and efforts to understand.
• It comes after and as the result of these gropings and efforts, and is like the flashing into the mind of, and the satisfaction at, the solution of a problem in mathematics with which the mind has worked a long time.
• This conception of what living forever is may not come until long after one had dedicated himself to live forever. But it will come, as his acts conform to what he learns and knows about the process.
• When he awakens to what living forever is, he will not be in doubt about what he should do; he will know the process and see his way.
• Until then he must be guided in his course set by reasoning on the subject and doing what seems to be best.
• For the physical body to live through centuries it must be healthy and strong and immune to disease. Its constitution must be changed.
• the body must be made free from impurity.
• The body cannot be made pure and virtuous, except by having purity in thought, virtue in thought.
• Purity of body is not produced by the mere desire for purity of body.
• Purity and virtue in thought is developed by thinking without attachment to the thought, or attachment in thought to the results which follow thought, but simply because it is right to so think. When the mind so thinks, purity and virtue are spontaneous.
• The cells when hungry draw, pull, influence the mind towards the things which are of their nature.
• A man cannot leave a thought or bid a thought to leave as lovers who are to part linger over their farewell or as women say their continued good-byes. One who keeps company with or entertains it cannot be rid of a thought.
• A thought cannot go if one holds on to it or looks at it.
• To be rid of a thought a man must not parley with or sanction its presence.
• He must discountenance its presence and rebuke it, and then turn his mind and attend to the thought with which he would be concerned.
• The undesirable thought cannot live in an unwelcome atmosphere.
• As man continues to think the thoughts which are right, he rebuilds his body in the nature of his thoughts and his body is then immune to influences which are wrong and disturb his mind by thoughts which are wrong.
• The body as it is built under and by right thought, becomes strong and resists with power what it is wrong for it to do.
• As man controls and directs his thought to accord with immortal life and the process of living forever, the body will make known and demand the food necessary to its change in development.
• A distinction should be made between what the body wants and what the body needs. The body's wants are what were its old desires, which were then sanctioned and gratified by the mind and which were impressed on the cells and reproduced by them in other cells. The body's needs are what the new and healthy cells require for their capacity to store the life force.
• The body should not be allowed to fast unless food becomes repulsive
• The longer the life of the cells, the less food is required to maintain them.
• As the body needs less food, all diseases which may have been afflictions of or latent in the body will entirely disappear and the body will increase in strength.
• During this period the body has been sloughing off its gross physical parts, and growing into new bodies, as a serpent sloughs off its skins.
• On this period reach the events of all former similar life periods, and so there reappear in the period of adolescence of the new body the tendencies which were of those past stages of adolescence. This adolescent stage of the new life of the body is a dangerous period in development. If its impulses are heeded all progress stops and man falls back into a lower stage of worldly life than that from which he has emerged.
• If this point is passed no solid food will be needed.
• It will not be necessary then to take nourishment through the mouth, though nourishment may be taken by way of the mouth. Nourishment may be absorbed through the skin as waste matter is there now excreted.
• At a stage in the development of the body it will no longer need any grosser food than water. If the body is carried to the limit of its development, it will depend on the air for its nourishment and the water needed will be absorbed from the air.
• In the process of living forever, this molecular model body must be made to supplant and take the place of the physical cell body by transfiguration.
• It must be strengthened and exteriorized and adapted to physical conditions, so that it may be used in the physical world similarly as the physical cell body is used. How can this be done? This must be done and can be done only by the creative principle. The essential in living forever is the use of the creative principle.
• the model form becomes stronger, more pronounced and is gradually distinguished from the physical body as a distinct form, though united with the physical body.
• Gradually the cellular physical body becomes weaker in comparison with the molecular model body, as that becomes stronger and more evident to the senses.
• The change is due to the transmutation of the generative seed into the model form body.
• As the form body becomes stronger and firmer within and through the physical body of cells, it becomes as apparent and evident as the physical body.
• By physical sight are perceived the gross parts of objects on their exterior sides; objects seem to be broken off or separated from each other.
• In astral and psychic development, the model body becomes fluidic and is likely to issue forth from the physical, as in the case of mediums.
• That is the end of the attempt to live forever.
• When the molecular model body is not allowed to flow out from its physical counterpart no psychic senses will be developed, no psychic world entered. The molecular model body must be knit together with the cellular physical body.
• There must be a fine balance between them.
• During the development of the physical cell body and the molecular model body, the appetites become finer. What was before attractive is now repellent. Things which were before the cause of much concern are now regarded with indifference or dislike.
• As the molecular body becomes stronger and firmer new sensations are experienced. It seems as though with a slight effort the bands could be severed which bind to earth, and as though the veil which separates the physical form from other worlds could be removed. This must not be allowed. All that should be experienced by the molecular body must be experienced within the physical cell body. If other worlds are to be perceived, they must be perceived through the physical body.
• It must not be supposed because all the world seems to crave is given up, that the body is like a mummy, that life has lost all interest and that the world is now a blank. The body is dead to the world insofar as gross attractions are concerned. In place of these there grow up other interests. The world is experienced on its fairer side by means of the finer senses developed. The gross pleasures are gone, but in their place come other pleasures.
• The molecular model body is bisexual, both sexes are in one body. Each seeks expression through the other side of itself. In the dual-sex molecular body, desire requires the creative principle present in the body to act.
• The time required to accomplish all this depends upon the strength of character of the one engaging in the work, and upon the motive which prompts the undertaking. It may be done within the generation in which it is begun, or centuries may elapse before the work is finished.
• The heart must not be set on anything in the world or of the world. Business, society and official life must be given up. These can be given up only when they are no longer duties.
• Wife and family and friends must be given up. But this must not be if the giving up would cause them sorrow.
• Wife, husband, family and friends, are in need of one no more than one needs them, though the needs are different in kind.
• The wife or husband, family and friends to whom one thinks he is devoted, are not the real objects which call out his devotion. Seldom is he devoted to those individuals, but rather to the sentiments, emotions, or particular desires within himself and which are awakened, stimulated and developed within, by wife, husband, family or friends. He responds to them, to the extent that the response satisfies that in him which they represent to him.
• His devotions and affections are to the desire for wife, husband, family and friends within himself and not to any wife, husband, family and friends outside. They are only reflections or means by which he seeks to satisfy desires within, which they reflect and stimulate. If the organs or functions of body, or particular emotions or sentiments concerning husband, wife, family, friends, within him should die, become impaired or wear out, then it is not likely that he would care for those outside individuals-certainly he would not care in the same way in which he had cared for them before. His sentiments will change toward them. He may feel responsibility or a pity for them as toward a needy stranger, or treat them with indifference. So long as wife, family, or friends, need one's care, protection, or advice, it must be given. When one is ready to leave wife, family or friends, they do not need him; they will not miss him; he can go.
• The emotions must not be given free reign. They must be restrained.
• Such sentiments or emotions as the wish to help the poor or to reform the world must not be allowed to flow out into the world. He himself is the poor one. He himself is the world. He is the one in the world who most needs and deserves help. He is the world which must be reformed. It is less difficult to reform the world than to reform one's self. He can confer more benefits upon the world when he has redeemed and reformed himself than if he should spend numberless lives among the poor. This is his work and he proceeds to learn and do it.
• He cannot give up the things it is necessary to give up, nor do the things which he must do, unless the doing or the giving up is preceded by meditation. There is no use in trying to live forever without meditation. Coincident with the whole process, and essential to his development, is a system of meditation. Without meditation progress is impossible. In meditation is decided what must be given up. There is where the real giving up takes place. Later, when the proper time comes, the things given up in meditation are by outside circumstances naturally made to fall away. The actions performed, the things done, which are necessary to the living forever, are first reviewed and done in meditation. The cause of the attainment of living forever is in meditation.
• Meditation is the conscious state in which man learns to know and knows himself as well as any thing in any of the worlds, that he may have imperishable being and freedom.
• No experiments or experience with a thing from its physical side only, can ever result in knowledge of that thing.
• No thing can be known if it is approached from its physical side. In meditation, the meditator learns of an object and knows the object in its subjective or abstract state and without any contact of the object. After he knows in meditation what the object is, he may examine the physical object and subject it to analysis.
• The meditator cannot at once distinguish his mental faculties from his senses, nor the manner in which the faculties are related with and operate through his senses, nor can he analyze at once an object in its ultimate parts and synthesize the parts, nor can he know these in meditation at once as a whole. This ability and knowledge is acquired by his devotion to it.
• How soon he will be able to learn all there is to be known about an object or subject in meditation will depend on the development and control he has of his mind when he begins, on the control he has over his desires, on his devotion to the work, and on the purity of his motive in his will to live forever.
• Some minds are better adapted to meditate on abstract subjects than on concrete things, but this is not usually the case.
• There is a fourth order or kind of meditation which has to do with the mind in its ultimate state as mind in the spiritual world of knowledge. It will not be necessary to outline this fourth meditation, as it will be discovered and known by the meditator as he progresses in meditation of the third or mental world.
• There are four degrees in meditation, in each of the worlds. The four degrees of meditation in the physical world are: 1) taking and holding in the mind the object or thing to be meditated upon; 2) subjecting that object or thing to an examination by each and all of the senses from their subjective side; 3) contemplating or brooding over that thing as a subject, without the use of the senses and by means of the mind only; 4) knowing the thing as it is, and knowing it in each of the worlds where it may enter.
• The four degrees of meditation in the psychic world are: 1) selecting and fixing in the mind any such thing as an element, an emotion, a form; 2) seeing how it is related to and affects each of the senses and how the senses regard and affect it; 3) pondering over the senses, their purpose and relation to the mind; 4) knowing the possibilities and limits of the senses, the action and interaction between nature and senses.
• The four degrees of meditation in the mental world are: 1) to conceive a thought and to keep it in reverence in the mind; 2) to perceive the manner in which the senses and nature affect and are related to thought or the action of the mind; 3) to contemplate thought and mind in its relation to and as separate from the senses and nature, how and why mind and thought affect nature and the senses, and to contemplate the purpose of the mind's action toward itself and toward all other beings and things; 4) to know what thinking is, what thought is, what the mind is.
• In the organization called man, there is the germ of all of which it is possible for him to know or to become in any of the worlds manifested or unmanifested or in the cosmos as a whole.
• In this system of meditation it is not necessary that man should center his thought on any place or point in space outside his own organization in order to know any thing in any of the worlds.
• Each of his bodies or principles is as a magic mirror into which he looks when he wills to know that which has happened or may happen, and to know what is or what may be in the world of which that body or principle is the mirror.
• The mind as a whole is one. It manifests in the four worlds in seven aspects as faculties in descending and ascending order of development.
• The light faculty is the source of enlightenment on all subjects or things.
• From the I -am faculty comes identity and the knowledge of selfhood.
• From the time faculty comes growth and change.
• In the motive faculty is judgment and choice, of direction or of right or wrong.
• In the image faculty is the power of proportion, to give color and line.
• The dark faculty gives resistance and brings darkness; it develops strength and produces doubt.
• The focus faculty separates, searches, balances and adjusts.
• Not all of the faculties of the mind are incarnate.
• Only one of the faculties is in the physical body of man.
• That faculty which is in and through the body is the focus faculty. It is man's mind, his thinking principle.
• To meditate intelligently man must find and realize this mind or faculty, the thinking principle, himself, in the body.
• He is the conscious light within the body. When man does perceive and realize himself in the body, he will know he is the conscious light within.
• One faculty of the mind does not usually act without affecting or calling upon the other faculties.
• Whenever man engages in what he calls thinking, it is his focus faculty, thinking principle, mind in the body, which he is trying to bring to bear on the subject or thing of which he thinks.
• But of all the things on which he has been enlightened man is not yet enlightened on his question, “What am I?” or “Who am I” the light faculty will act on the focus faculty, the I-am faculty will give identity to the light, and the focus faculty or thinking principle will know I am I, which is then the Self-conscious Light. When this is realized by man, he will be able to think and will need little instruction in how to meditate. He will find the way.
• What is called thinking is not meditating. What is called thinking is the fitful, jerky, uncertain effort of the mind to turn and focus its light on the thing it wills to see.
• This is like the efforts of a near-sighted man with St. Vitus's dance trying to follow a blind trail through the woods on a dark night, with the aid of a revolving flashlight.
• Thinking is the steady holding of the mind's light on a subject.
• Meditating is the holding of a subject in the mind's light until the purpose for which this is done is accomplished.
• The mind in the body, is like a monkey in a cage. It jumps nimbly about, but though it appears to be interested in everything and to examine things minutely, it has little purpose in its jumpings, and it does not understand anything on which it lights.
• Man, the conscious light in the body, should contemplate that light as different from that in which it is. This will help him to study himself and to be more orderly and consecutive in his thinking. As the mind becomes steadier, more orderly and less liable to fly about, it will be better able to examine itself and to turn toward its source.
• At present the incarnate mind is unable to steady itself in anyone of its centers in the body.
• So the mind flits about and is distributed through the body, answering to the calls and often identifying itself with the sensations or the emotions of the body.
• The thinking outwardly is the passage of the mind's light out of the body.
• To find itself, the mind must not dissipate its light; it must conserve its light. To conserve its light it must not allow the light to run through the senses.
• To prevent his light from running through the senses, man should not attempt to shut off or cut off the senses, as has been advised in some systems of teaching;
• …he should prevent his light from going out through the senses by centering it within.
• The light is centered within by thinking of himself within.
• When the thinking is concerned with a subject which must be considered interiorly, such as, "what is the conscious light within?" the senses do not have to be closed. They are closed, because the thinking principle is directed to an interior subject.
• When the mind holds a subject within and examines it in its own light, it increases in strength and power. With each such effort the mind becomes stronger and its light clearer.
• Each of the worlds will be discovered and explored in meditation as the mind increases in strength.
• But it must be understood that each of the worlds must be discovered and explored within the mind, within the organization of man.
• When man discovers himself as a conscious light in the body, he can meditate on the physical body in his light and learn the world as a whole and in its minute parts.
• That is to say, there should be a thread of light from the head to the end of the spine; and that thread of light should be the path along which messengers as angels of light should ascend and descend to receive and execute the laws issued from the center of light in the head, the god in the body.
• But seldom is that path ever opened in a human body. It is almost invariably closed; and the messengers of the body do not travel in that path, as angels of light; they travel outside the path, and communicate and receive messages along the nerve currents - as lurid flashes of sensation, or nervous shocks.
• the demands of sense are usually honored and obeyed, and the force of the desires or emotions rise up into the cerebellum and thence into the cerebrum, along the convolutions of which the force is fashioned, given impetus by the mind's light, and is sent out from the forehead as by a tongue of flame.
• This is called a thought and is a tribute from the mind to the physical world of sense.
• But it is not a thought which is a self-living thought, such as thoughts which move and rule the world.
• The thoughts so created are of four natures, corresponding to the four worlds, the physical, psychic, mental and spiritual and are related to and act on the corresponding parts of man's body: the part of sex, the navel and solar plexus, the breasts, and the head. In their regular cycles they surround man and produce his periods of sensuality, of exhilaration and depression, of sentiments or emotions, of ambitions or aspirations.
• When one attempts to meditate, these influences of his own creation, as well as other's influences, crowd around him and interrupt or interfere with his efforts at meditation.
• As man or the conscious light becomes steadier and is being centered in the body, its radiance through and around the body attracts stray creatures of the dark and inimical things, as well as those to which it has given being.
• These creatures of the dark, like pests and wild birds of the night, try to rush into the light, or like beasts of prey attracted by the light, prowl about to see what damage they can do.
• It is proper that the one who tries to meditate should know of these things with which he has to contend.
• But he should not be alarmed by or have fear of them.
• He must know of them, that he may treat them as they should be treated.
• Let him be thoroughly convinced that no extraneous influences can harm him if he will have no fear of them.
• By having fear of them he gives them power to disturb him.
• In the beginning of his efforts to meditate, the meditator can learn how to and keep out these influences.
• As he grows stronger in light and has learned how to meditate, he must in this system of meditation redeem and transform all things of his creation and for which he is responsible. As he progresses he will do this as naturally as a true father will train and educate his children.
• To bring the breath to a mutual point between its coming and going, where there is a true balance, the mind or thinking principle should not be turned or focussed on breathing.
• It should be turned on itself toward the conscious light and on the question of its identity.
• When the thinking principle or focus faculty is trained on the question of the identity of its light, the focus faculty brings into balance the I-am faculty with the light faculty through the representatives of them in itself. When this is done, breathing stops. But in doing it the mind has not been concerned with breathing.
• The mind will learn how to meditate by first learning how to think. When the mind learns how to think it can engage in meditation.

1. Thinking is not a training of muscle and nerve and an increased blood supply in the brain. This straining is an alternate cramping or swelling of the brain, which prevents the mind from holding its light steadily on a subject.

2. Thinking is the turning and steady holding of the mind’s light on a subject and the steady mental gazing in the light until that which is desired is clearly seen and known.

3. The mind’s light may be likened to a searchlight in the dark. Only that is seen on which the light is turned. As the mind finds the particular subject of which it is in search, the light is focussed and held on that subject or thing until all about that subject or thing is revealed or known.

4. So that thinking is not a hard a laborious or violent struggle with the brain, in an effort to force the brain to reveal what one wishes to know.

5. Thinking is rather an easy resting of the mind's eye on that on which its light is turned, and the certain confidence in its power to see

• After learning how to train the mind's light on a subject with the resultant knowledge, the mind may begin its meditation
• In meditation the mind's light is not turned on a subject.
• In this way the physical body and through it the physical world are summoned as subjects in the mind's light, and there held until known.
• It is necessary for one to understand how to prevent the inimical or disturbing influences before mentioned from interfering with his thinking
• Breathing has a somewhat similar effect on the mind, in allowing influences to enter. But it is as ill-advised for one to try to keep influences out of the mind by the suspension of his breath, as it would be to stop his breath to prevent mosquitos from entering his skin.
• One should keep extraneous influences from his mind by the strength and steadiness of the mind's light. Like the dilation and contraction of a searchlight, the light of one who is trying to think, expands and contracts, in its effort to bring into focus and to focus its entire light on the subject it would know.

1. Influences rush in to the light during its expansions and contractions. The light continues to expand and contract because the mental gaze unsteadies the focus as it turns toward the influence.

2. Knowing this, the thinker should gaze steadily on the subject on which his light is turned, without heeding the disturbance in the light caused by their efforts to rush in.

3. Influences are kept out of the light by refusing to take the mental gaze from the subject on which the light is turned, and by the mental attitude of confidence that no outside influence shall intrude. By refusing to heed or look at anything other than the subject in question, influences are prevented from entering. Like the skin when breathing stops, the mind's light becomes impenetrable. No influence can come in nothing can go out; its full force is focussed on the subject, and the subject reveals itself and is known.

4. Most persons who try are usually prevented from thinking by the disturbing influences and mental pests which disturb and vitiate their mind's light.

5. By turning the mental gaze to the intruder it is kept out of focus from its subject, and the pest pollutes the light. The thinker often tries to oust the intruder, but does not know how; and, even if it is chased, like the mosquito from its prey, it is not before it has left corruption in its place.

6. Not always must influences be kept out. There will come the time in one of the degrees of meditation when the evil influences of one's creation are admitted or summoned into the light, where they will be tried, judged and transformed by the light. This should not be done until the aspirant knows how to think; not until he can focus his mind's light on a subject where he wills.

Many years will have been taken up by the aspirant for living forever, in learning how to think.

…and substitution of the physical particles of the physical cells by the form body of the physical, as described in previous articles; and, finally, a life body is raised to perfection, with which the mind unites and lives forever.

Christmas Light 1912

• Thinking man looks on, and in it sees symboled life's tragedy-and the forecast of his own. He sees the uselessness of effort in the endless round of life and death, and sadness falls over him.
• Fain would he lay down the weight of years and pass into the forgetfulness of dreamless sleep unwaking. But he cannot. The dire woe-cry of humankind breaks the gloom of sadness; and he hears.
• Up rise the frailties of man: Lost faiths, broken friendships, ingratitude, hypocrisy, deceit, are seen.
• In his heart there is no room for these.
• He feels the sorrows of a world in throe and throbs with the aching heart of man. In himself man hears the cry of man for power to see, to hear, to speak.
• The sun's path symbols the life of man: as sure to rise-and whether the sky be bright, orovercast-sure to sink into the dark. This has been the course throughout countless aeons and may go on for aeons unknown. Man's whole life is but a puff of air, a flash in time. It is a streak of light, enfleshed, costumed, that falls and for a few moments plays upon the stage; then trembles, vanishes, and is seen no more. He comes-he knows not whence. He passes-where? Is man born to weep, to laugh, to suffer and enjoy, to love, only that he should die? Shall man's fate always be death? Nature's laws are the same for all. There is method in the growing grass blade. But the grass blade is a grass blade. Man is man. The grass blade flourishes and withers; it questions not the sunlight nor the frost. Man questions while he suffers, loves, and dies. If he shall not be answered, why should he question? Men have questioned through the ages. Still, there is no more answer than there is echo to the grass blade's rustle.
• Nature gives birth to man, then compels him to commit offences which she repays with hardship and death.
• If he shall not be answered, why should he question? Men have questioned through the ages. Still, there is no more answer than there is echo to the grass blade's rustle.
• Must kind nature ever be made to tempt and to destroy? Teachers speak of good and bad, of right and wrong.
• But what is good? what bad? what right? what wrong? –who knows? There must be wisdom in this universe of law.
• Will questioning man ever remain unanswered?
• If the end of all is death, why this joy and agony of life?
• If death does not end all for man, how or when shall he know his immortality?
• O, wretched earth! O weary earth! playhouse of the games, and blood-stained theatre of countless crimes! poor, unhappy man, player of the games, maker of the parts you act! Another year has passed, another comes.
• Who dies? Who lives? Who laughs? Who cries? Who wins? Who loses, in the act just ended? What were the parts?
• Cruel tyrant, and poor oppressed, saint, sinner, dolt, and sage, are parts you play.
• The costumes you wear, change with the shifting scenes in each succeeding act of life's continuous show, but you remain the actor-few actors play well, and fewer know their parts.
• Ever must you, poor actor, hidden from yourself and others, in the costumes of your part, come on the stage and play, until you have paid and received pay for each deed in the parts you play, until you have served your time and earned freedom from the play.
• Poor man! too eager or unwilling actor! unhappy because you do not know, because you will not learn your part-and within it remain separate.
• Man tells the world he seeks the truth, but he holds on to and will not turn from falsehood. Man calls aloud for light, but slinks away when light comes to lead him out of darkness. Man shuts his eyes, and cries out that he cannot see.
• When man will look and let things come to light, the light will show the good and the bad. What is for him, what he should do, that is good, is right, is best. All else, for him, is bad, is wrong, not-best. It should be let be.
• He who wills to see will see, and he will understand. His light will show him: "No," "Let be," "That is not-best." When man heeds the "no" and would know the "yes," his light will show him: "Yes," "Do this," "This is best." The light itself may not be seen, but it will show things as they are. The way is clear, when man wills to see it-and follow.
• Man will learn to see, if he will look into the light; he will learn to hear, if he will listen for the true; he will have the power to articulate speech, when he sees and hears. When man sees and hears and speaks with the harmlessness of power, his light will not fail and will let him know immortality.

Intoxications 1913

• The spirit which acts through narcotics dwells at the threshold of the senses. It will not allow the conscious principle in man to pass beyond its realm, or to know its secrets and mystery, until he has proved himself immune to the seductions of the senses and has learned to control them.
• The spirit of alcohol is a high officer of the law. It stands at the boundary lines of the worlds. It is a servant of those who obey and are masters of the law, and will allow them to pass and even bear them on when they know and are able to control it. But it is a tyrant, merciless and cruel, to those who abuse it and disobey the law which it must serve.
• By the white fluid is represented the lymphatic system and its fluid; the red is related to the circulatory system and the blood. The generative system and fluid act in connection with these. By physiological or alchemical processes is developed the wine, the amrita, the nectar, the soma juice, of which the scriptures speak. The meaning of the scriptures is not that these fluids should produce drunkenness, but that by interior processes they should renew youth until immortality is attained.
• The astral form body is the center toward which all intoxicating psychic influences move.
• The astral form body is a magnet by which the cells making up the physical body are held in place.
• The astral form body may act as a sponge and as a storage battery. As a sponge absorbs, the astral form body may be allowed to absorb influences and things which dwarf and eat it away. But it may, on the other hand, be made to grow in strength and usefulness in the ocean of life in which it is borne up and supported.
• As a storage battery, the astral form body may be allowed to be controlled by creatures which draw off and absorb its force and burn out its coils; or, it may be made a battery of increasing capacity, and its coils may be kept charged with full power to go on any journey and do all necessary work.
• But for the astral form body to be made a storage battery of power, the senses must be guarded and controlled. To guard and control the senses and fit them to be good ministers of the mind, a man must refuse to take psychic intoxicants, must refuse to give way to psychic intoxication. Outbursts of passion must be checked or prevented, else the coils for the storage of life will be burnt out, or his power drawn off.
• Things of the senses and psychic influences need not be excluded from the senses and interests. One cannot exclude them and remain living in the world.
• Things of the senses and psychic influences are necessary as fuel, but not as intoxicants.
• No influence that cannot be controlled should be allowed to come into the body, and only such psychic influences should be permitted entrance as are useful or can be made use of in one's purpose in life.
• Nature's forces are indispensable servants to their masters. But they are relentless drivers of their slaves, and persistent chasteners of men who refuse to become their masters.
• FROM the time the mind becomes conscious of the world in its physical body, until it is free from the necessity of a physical body, it is subject to some form of mental intoxication. To overcome mental intoxication one must become master of the mind's actions. By overcoming mental intoxication one gains knowledge. When all intoxications are overcome, one is unclouded and uses knowledge freely.
• There are four things inherent in the mind and which the mind seeks and with which it becomes intoxicated. These are love, wealth, fame, power. Love is of the focus faculty, in the physical world; wealth is of the image and dark faculties, in the psychic world; fame is of the time and motive faculties in the mental world; power is of the Light and I-am faculties in the spiritual world.
• The focus faculty, the faculty of the mind incarnate, seeks each of the four in turn, under its many forms in the physical world, then turns from each to seek them in the other worlds.
• The things which stand above or within love, wealth, fame, power, are relationship, worthiness, immortality, knowledge. These are realized only after one has dispelled the glamours of love, wealth, fame, power.
• Rarely, if ever, is there a time when man can see clearly and judge without prepossession, twist or sentiment, any question affecting him. His judgment on certain questions will be different at successive periods, though the things and questions remain the same.
• He is bewildered when a child, has expectations and confidence as a youth, in manhood he has his responsibilities, and in old age doubts, indifference, uncertainties and hopes.
• The mind cannot know happiness nor do its true work with intelligence until it becomes no more intoxicated. The cessation of its intoxications can be brought about by the mind only when it refuses to be attracted by or attach itself to things outside itself. It does this by turning its thought and attention to and learning to use and control its actions within.
• Then there is yet the glamour of the mind within, after the mind has lost interest in the world and the things of the world and is taken up with its own processes and workings only.
• Unless he knows himself a conscious being, not form, within and distinct from the body of sex in which he is, he cannot have love without the tincture of sex. He must learn and know the essence of love before he can love truly and without injury to himself and the one he loves.
• That which prompts and is within love is not approached until man seeks to realize the divine.
• That which stands within love is relationship. Love is to teach man his relation to all things.
• While under love intoxication man cannot think of nor know his true relationship to the bodies and things he loves.
• So love holds him to sex and to sense until he is willing and ready to think and to know. When man thinks of until he knows his relation to that which he loves, love ceases to be an intoxicant of the mind, it serves its purpose.
• It reveals and relates the parts of the mind to the whole. It shows the indissoluble relationship of each mind to all and all minds to each other.
• When one loves a person, it is usually not the character or mind or soul that is loved; it is the person. Looking at the form without subjects one to its glamour.
• As one wants mirrors not for the sake of mirrors but because he may be gratified when he looks into them, so he wants near him those whom he thinks he loves, because of the sentiment or sensation in him which they arouse or reflect. When one looks steadily in his light within, he finds there that which is or was reflected in the form without. When he finds this he is cured of his love intoxication for the form without. Its glamour is dispelled.
• He now loves that within, without need of its reflection from without.
• Forms within which cause sensations of love, should be held steadily in the light within until they are seen through. As each is seen through it will disappear, and will show the organ and the nerve center to which it is related, and the thought that called its matter into form.
• The forms disappear when the thoughts to which they are related are perceived.
• When the thought of love is perceived without the inner forms of love, then that which is love should be summoned in the conscious light within.
• Then the focus faculty of the mind will focus the subject in the light within, and it will be known that that which is love is one's own identity and very self. One's own self is love.
• When this love is known, the thoughts of love should again be summoned within the light; then the will should be to find the identity of self in each of the thoughts; and then it is known that the self in each is the same as in one's own self; that in love is the relation of sameness within each of the selves.
• One who thus knows the secret of the relation of love has unlimited capacity to love. Love intoxications have no power. His love is in the self in all beings.
• One who knows the relation and whose love is in the self in all beings, masters wealth and fame and power intoxications without great difficulty. The method of overcoming love intoxication should also be applied in conquering other forms of mental and spiritual intoxication.
• Wealth gives place to worthiness, which is the standard of valuation of himself and of things. Worthiness is that for which he works.
• …intoxication ceases when he finds and follows that in him which is immortal.
• He thinks and works for immortality, the state of being continuously conscious in whatever form or condition he may be.

Imagination 1913

• Imagination will continue to sway destinies. It will carry some up into the heights and others into the depths. It may make or unmake men.
• Imagination does things. Things are done in imagination. What is done in imagination is as real to the one who does it as are the products of imagination when harnessed to physical uses.
• That is real to man of which he is aware.
• Man becomes aware of things by having them thrust upon him or by turning his attention to them.
• He does not understand that of which he is aware, until after he has given his attention to and tries to think about and understand it.
• When he thinks of and tries to understand it, imagination will unfold new forms to him; he will see new meanings in old forms; he will learn how to make forms; and he will understand and look forward to the final art of imagination, in the unmaking and making of form.
• Time and place have much to do with the dreamer who wishes things would happen and waits for opportunities and moods, but the imaginor creates opportunities, drives moods from him, makes things happen. With him, imagination works at any time and in any place.
• The imaginor or imaginator is one who brings through his image faculty, matter into form, guided by his thought, according to his knowledge and determined by his power of will.
• (dreamers are passive, imaginors are positive) Stray thoughts and sensuous sounds and forms attract the dreamer. His mind follows them and plays with them in their rambles or is gripped and held by them, and his image faculty is driven and compelled to give them expression as they direct.
• The imaginator quiets his image faculty and closes his senses by thinking steadily until he has found his thought. As seed is cast into the womb of the earth, so the thought is given to the image faculty. Other thoughts are excluded.
• Resting finally on the latent knowledge in the mind and by the power of will, the imaginor stimulates the image faculty with his thought until the work of imagination begins.
• According to the latent knowledge of the imaginor and by the power of will, the thought takes life in the image faculty. The senses are then called into use and each serves in the work of imagination. The thought having taken form in imagination, is the central figure in a group or groups of forms, which take their color from it and which it influences until the work of imagination is done.
• his senses actively engage in the costuming of the characters to which his image faculty gives form.
• The powers of imagination are: the power to desire, the power to think, the power to will, the power to sense, the power to act.
• Desiring is the process of the turbulent, strong, attracting and unintelligent portion of the mind, demanding expression and satisfaction through the senses.
• Thinking is the focussing of the light of the mind on a subject of thought.
• Willing is the compelling, by thought, of that which one has chosen to do.
• Sensing is the conveying of the impressions received through the organs of sense to the faculties of the mind.
• Acting is the doing of that which one desires or wills.
• The art and endowment of imagination and the powers used in imagination are the inheritance in this present life of part of what the man had acquired by effort in his past lives.
• Those who have little power of or desire for imagination have made little effort to acquire it.
• Imagination can be developed. Those who have little, may develop much.
• Imagination is attained to by discipline and exercise of the mind in the work of imagination.
• To discipline the mind for imagination, select an abstract subject and engage in thinking about it at regular intervals until it is seen and comprehended by the mind.
• Inborn tendencies and motive in life will decide from which sources imagination draws.
• Man must think, he must think his way into the realm of thought, the mental world, before he can provide fit forms for thoughts which he would bring into the psychic and the physical worlds.
• If he cannot enter the thought realm, the thoughts which stimulate him will not be of his kind-not of the mental world, and he will be unable to hold and know them and to judge and deal with them.
• Man, the incarnate mind, is an exile from his home in the mental world, the world of thought. His ideal thoughts and good works pay his ransom, and death is the way by which he returns home for a respite-only for a respite. Seldom during his life on earth can he find his way back, nor even for a moment look at his home. But it is possible for him to find the way while still in this world. The way is by thinking. Inconstant straggler thoughts intercept and distract him, and lead him away when he tries to think, as the diversions and pleasures and temptations of the world lead him away from his responsibilities and duties of life. He must work his way through the horde of straggler thoughts that stand between him and his goal.
• When he enters the thought realm, he will find his thought and the thoughts to which he is to give forms and which he will bring into the world through imagination.
• He enters the thought realm by trying to think, by disciplining his conscious light to focus on the abstract thought to which he aspires, until he finds and knows it.
• Faith and will and controlled desire are necessary to begin and continue thinking, until the subject of thought is found and known.
• Faith is not a guess or wish or belief in a possibility. Faith is the settled conviction in the reality of the subject of thought, and that it will be known. No number of futile attempts to find it; no failure, however wide of the mark, will change the faith, because such faith comes from knowledge, the knowledge which one has acquired in other lives and which remains for man to lay claim to and to secure.
• When one has such faith and chooses to act, his choice induces the power of will; he turns his mind to the thought in which he has faith, and his thinking begins.
• Inability to know his subject of thought is not failure. Each effort is an aid in the end.
• It enables him to compare and to judge the things which come into mental vision, and he gains practice how to dispose of them.
• More than this, each effort helps to control the desire necessary to imagination.
• Controlled desire gives strength to the forms produced by imagination. By control of the blind turbulence which interferes with thinking, the light of the mind is clarified and strength is given to imagination.
• Memory is of service in the work of imagination after, but not before, one has found the thought which is to be the work of imagination to bring into form and produce.
• The negative action is a reflection of objects of the senses and thoughts, and the assumption of their color and form. The negative function of imagination is exhibited with "imaginative" people, who are awed and lose equilibrium by picturing things which might occur (whereas a sure-footed beast is unimaginative).
• By the positive action, that of the "imaginator," the image faculty produces figure and color and gives them to matter, and articulates sounds, all as determined by the influence of the other six faculties of the mind.
• The instruments of sense build the body of crude matter as imagination projects its form to live in and through and ensoul that body.
• By the power of imagination the philosopher gives system to his thought, and builds into words the invisible forms of his imagination.
• Those who have imaginative power are more intense and susceptible to the impressions of life than those who have little imaginative power. To the imaginator, friends, acquaintances, people, are active characters, who continue to live their parts in his imagination when he is alone.
• The unimaginative man lives by rule according to habit, in set forms and grooves, and based on experience.
• He does not wish to change them, but wants to continue these.
• Perhaps he thinks they should be improved, but any improvement should be along the lines of what has been.
• He dreads the unknown. The unknown has no attraction for him.
• Unimaginative people are usually law abiding. They do not wish to have the laws changed.
• The imaginator lives by change, according to impressions, in moods and emotions, based on his hopes and ideals.
• He does not dread the unknown; or, if he does, it has for him the attraction of adventure.
• Imaginative people chafe when law is restraint to innovation. They would adopt new measures and try new forms.
• When imagination works for the production of forms of a sensuous nature, the spirit of the earth does not interfere, but it encourages its action because this earth spirit thus receives greater opportunities for experiencing sensation through new forms.
• As the mind imagines, it learns. It learns gradually, but it learns. Imagination teaches the mind through forms. It appreciates law, order, proportion.
• With this constant development of the mind through higher forms, comes a time when it would use imagination to different ends than to make forms for the senses.
• Then the mind attempts to create abstract forms, which are not of the senses, and the spirit of the earth at once opposes and rebels.

1. Desire spreads confusion in the mind, beclouds and bedazzles the mind. 2. The earth spirit causes the senses, desires and bodily powers to be arrayed in battle against the bedazzled mind, as it still attempts to make forms for abstract thoughts and for spiritual beings. 3. Seldom an imaginator is able to battle successfully against this army of the earth spirit in himself. 4. If he abandons his ideals the earth spirit rewards him with world honors for the wonders his imagination brings into the world.

• If the imaginator does not give up the fight, he fails or appears to the world to fail. In reality he does not fail.
• He will fight again, and with greater power and success.
• He will bring imagination out of the realm in which it works for the senses, into the realm where it works for the supernal spirit.
• Once in ages an imaginator succeeds in this. It is no common success, no ordinary event. He reveals new spiritual laws to the world.
• He makes, by imagination, forms in which the beings of the spiritual world can come and do come into form and manifest themselves.
• Steps in imagining, taken from the excerpts above
• The imaginor:

1. quiets the senses and the image faculty 2. finds his thought 3. the thought is given to the image faculty 4. other thoughts are excluded 5. Resting finally on the latent knowledge in the mind and 6. by the power of will, 7. the imaginor stimulates the image faculty with his thought until 8. the work of imagination begins. 9. the thought takes life in the image faculty. 10. calls the senses into use (costuming the characters) 11. thought takes form 12. other forms surrounding the created form take their color from it 13. inborn tendencies and motive in life determine what thought is chosen 14. must be able to think his way into the mental realm, his home 15. there he must find his thought and those to which he is to give form. 16. faith, will and controlled desire are necessary (faith that the thought is real and will be known) 17. efforts to focus and enter the mental realm will teach how to judge and dispose of the “blind turbulence” which interferes with his efforts. 18. efforts result in controlled desire which gives strength to the created forms