Considering that great Teacher, let us ask what He was before He became the Buddha, and then passed away from earth, His teaching work being over. Before He took that last and greatest of the Initiations along the line He followed, He had manifested several times before on earth, and manifested in the same great Root Race, the Aryan Race, to which we all and so many others belong. For before that last step was taken there was another high office that He filled for thousands and tens of thousands of years. I do not want in any way to confuse you with unfamiliar names, and yet it is a little difficult to avoid them, because I want a name that stretches back to manifestation after manifestation; and our own fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, has been on earth so brief a time, living in the western world, that it has not yet created the general name which we can use with regard to these past manifestations. The eastern name is a word which translated means “the Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva; the name matters little provided that you take it for the moment that it signifies an office, and the office is that of the Supreme Teacher, not only teacher of men, but teacher, as they would say, of Gods, as you would say, of Angels and Archangels. For you must remember that the Shining Ones of the East are the same as those to whom over here you give the names of Angels and Archangels. The East calls them by a name which merely means “the shining”; and though it is often translated over here as “God,” much confusion of thought thereby is made as regards the great eastern faiths. For they, like Christianity, proclaim the unity of God, the one all-pervading life; and those whom they call the Shining Ones, the Devas, are but manifestations of that light, the Angels and Archangels of Christianity or of Islām. And He who is the Supreme Teacher has for His pupils Archangels and Angels as well as men; He is the one who is the Teacher of all, whether in the body of flesh or outside of it as spiritual intelligences; there is no other Teacher in earth or heaven above that mightiest One who fills this supreme office.

Now, such a Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, makes Himself manifest as man at the beginning of every sub-race. I have talked to you so much of Races and sub-races that the terms will not be unfamiliar; and if I remind you that we are all of one great Root Race, the Aryan, whether you take the first sub-race in India; or the second along the basin of the Mediterranean in the ancient days; or the third in ancient Persia; or the fourth giving birth to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, and then spreading westwards through Spain, France, Britain, up to the North of Scotland, and then across to Ireland, the mighty Keltic sub-race; or the fifth, the Teutonic, now peopling Germany, Britain, America, and their offshoots—if you think of those, the one Race including all the divisions, you will be able readily enough to follow the manifestations of the Supreme Teacher. Just as in the larger cycles there are manifestations of great Beings, so has every successive sub-race the appearance of this great Teacher as man, to give it the religion under which the civilisation shall develop, to give it the benediction which starts it on its evolution in the world.

Looking backwards to the sub-races that preceded the fifth, the Teutonic, to which the greater part of you who are present here belong, we can mark in each the appearance of the Supreme Teacher, taking a different name, but ever the same immortal Individuality under the veil of that name. One name that is known to all of you who are students of the past was the name He took when He led forth from Central Asia the second of the great emigrations that passed westward, which āryanised large numbers of the people dwelling in Arabia, in Northern Africa, in the whole great basin of the Mediterranean. He then bore the name of Hermes, a name familiar to every student of antiquity, especially to the students of Egyptian thought, for it was largely in relation to that that this mighty manifestation was made, and in much of the so-called Hermetic literature the name of Hermes, the Thrice Greatest, is preserved. It was a name first worn in Lemuria, but in this case was used by the Supreme Teacher manifesting for the second sub-race.

Let me pause a moment to say one word of explanation, to meet a difficulty that may readily rise in the minds of the more scholarly amongst you who have looked back to these past tales. You find the same name appearing from time to time along the same tradition. That has ever been so in the past. The name of the great teacher himself has been taken up by his successors, who renewed his teaching and carried on the tradition that he left; and so in the vast spaces of time that have elapsed since that Hermes first appeared in the second root-race of the Aryans, others took up the tradition, carried on the teaching, and the name was ever repeated. It is the eastern way. No disciple dreams of teaching there under his own name; it is under the name of his Master that he gives his wisdom to the world; and that not to conceal, but because it is held that to the teacher the credit belongs of that which the pupil may be able to expound, and so, in humility, in veneration, in gratitude to the mightiest, those who follow Him write under the name that they worship, and so hand on His wisdom, although in generations much later than Himself. It causes much of confusion, much of difficulty when the people with the western historical sense go turning over these ancient writings and applying their own canons of interpretation to people who were ancient long before those canons were invented. What is called the historical sense is a very different thing in the East from that in the West. Historical sense here means a sequence of names, dates, persons, and that is what is regarded as important; in the East it means the God unfolding in the various types of humanity that may appear; and that which they are interested in is not a special individual who has written this, that, or the other, but the teaching, the tradition, handed on from age to age, and ever marked out from the first Revealer, the name of Him who gave the knowledge to mankind. I do not want to dispute which is the better way. I only mark the difference that you may realise that in the likeness of the name there is no attempt to deceive the reader, but only to mark the line of the tradition.

In the second sub-race, then, appeared Hermes. Ages rolled on. The third sub-race was to be born; the emigration to found that sub-race rolled westwards into Persia. Once more the “Wisdom-Truth” led the emigration. To that people he was known as Zarathustra, more often called among us Zoroaster. Fourteen of those are known in the old story of Persia, but the first, the eldest of them all, He alone was that one Supreme Teacher, coming down to His disciples, building the policy of Persia, handing down to those who came after Him the tradition that went by His name; and every great high-priest of that religion worthy to bear the mantle of the great One, he also is known in history as Zoroaster; and, as I have just said, some fourteen of those are named.

The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being came forth again under another name, the name known to every student of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say, as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race. That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth. But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.

Now I have mentioned those mighty ones of the past because without that it might seem only a dream when I speak of such possibilities in modern times as well. I have traced the four latest appearances of Him who is the “Wisdom-Truth,” the last of the four manifestations before, appearing to take His last Initiation as the Buddha, He passed away and became the Son united with the Father, no longer Teacher, no longer Guide of our humanity. But there is never a break in the great succession; in that mighty succession of religious Teachers the chair of the Teacher never remains unfilled; there is ever a wise one to fill it, the wisest who is living upon earth; and when one lays down the sceptre of the Teacher, which is the symbol of His rule, another is waiting by the steps of the Chair of Wisdom to take that seat of Supreme Teacher as His predecessor passes away from earth. For never is the world left without its Teacher; never is mankind left orphaned, without the mighty One to guard and save; as one passes away, His function over, another steps in to fill the seat and carry on the teaching of mankind.

When Gautama was initiated as the Buddha, another then became what I have called the “Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva. His first manifestation upon earth was at the beginning of the next sub-race. That you will very readily see, and for that reason I have been tracing down those names, sub-race after sub-race, that you might realise the relation between the new departure of mankind and the manifestation of the Supreme Teacher. So when the fifth sub-race was being born, when there was the slow growth of the Teuton in the forests of Germany, when the germs, the seeds of that new sub-race were being sown over Northern Europe, then was made manifest again the Supreme Teacher, and He came to the world once more to found a new religion, once more to bless a dawning civilisation. The religion that He founded, the civilisation that He blessed, gave to him the Greek name, the Christ. Let us pause for a moment on that western name—name, again, of an office. For it was not the name of the Buddha that He wore; it was not the name of an individual. As we look at the dominant Greek thought of the time we find that that thought embodied its highest triumph in a certain institution known as the Mysteries. There were Mysteries in ancient Egypt, in ancient Persia, in ancient India, in all the countries of that elder past; and among the Greeks also there were Mysteries—the Orphic Mysteries, to which I alluded, and many others known to the students of Grecian history under many names of Grecian Gods and Goddesses, as we call them, of the Teachers of the past. In those Mysteries there was a certain grade marked with the name Christos; these Mysteries the reflexion on our earth and in our poor worldly mirror of the great Initiations that belong to the Occult Hierarchy that guides the religious destinies of men, a shadow of those supreme Initiations thrown down upon the mirror of earth for the helping of ordinary humanity. This kind of reflexion is indicated, for instance, in the Christian Testament when it is said that Moses, the great leader of the Jews, made all things according to the pattern shown to him in the mount—a well-known ancient phrase, the Mount of Initiation—an indication to the people who followed him as lawgiver that the temple which he outlined, which for a time was seen in the tabernacle that accompanied the Jews in the wilderness, and then received its more gorgeous presentment in the Temple of King Solomon, was formed after the pattern of the heavenly things. So the heavenly and the earthly are thus related as object and image, and the object, which is the great Initiations of the Hierarchy, was imaged here in the civilisations of the past in the Mysteries, by which, by many ordeals and in many difficult ways of training and of discipline, the best men and women of the older civilisations were guided upwards from the human to the superhuman path. In those Mysteries there was this grade, the Christos, the anointed one. It was the grade of the Initiate who had triumphed over suffering, the grade of the Initiate who had carried the cross, the grade of the Initiate who was to know no more compulsory death or compulsory birth, that which marked him as having crossed the threshold of the superhuman, and being ready to enter on that higher grade of manifested life. Natural, inevitable, that in a time when Greek thought was marking the highest point of human attainment and dominating Europe, the Greek name should be taken to describe the mighty One revealed as Teacher upon earth. What nobler name could be chosen, what title more significant, what symbol more instructive, than to call the teacher who appeared and was slain by the name of the Christ?

In the early days of Christianity, as most of you probably know, a difference, which is being revived in our own day, was drawn between Jesus the Hebrew and Christ the anointed Teacher. Look back to all those schools of philosophic and learned teachers in the early days of Christianity, who, when ignorance triumphed after the fall of Rome and Constantinople, were branded with the name of heretics—those who were called the Gnostics, the knowers. A significant name. If you turn over the pages of Origen, one of the greatest teachers, remember, in the early Church, you will find many passages in his exposition of Christianity in which he says that it is necessary for the Christian Church to have in it many Gnostics, who should serve as the foundation on which it should be built, as the pillars on which it should be reared. He used the word in the sense of knowers, not alluding to the many schools classed together under that name. In a famous passage Origen points out that, while it is true that Christianity is for the unlearned, while he says it is medicine for the sinner, it is not out of the sinners and the unlearned that the great Christian Church could be builded; and he goes on to say that, while that is true, and there is medicine for the sinner, the Church must be buttressed by the Gnostic, not by the sinner, by those who know, not by those who are ignorant. That was well provided for in those early centuries of Christendom, for they also had their Mysteries, just as had the older religions around them. Turn over the pages of those early Christian bishops and doctors of the Church, the pages of S. Clement of Alexandria—canonised as saint for his learning and his holiness—turn over almost any of the pages you will of those earlier Christian teachers, who learned from the lips of those who had received their teaching again from the lips of the followers of the Christ Himself, and you will find continual references to the Mysteries of Jesus. You will find the rules laid down by which alone admission to those Mysteries could be won; you will read in the pages of S. Clement the proclamation of the hierophant to whom the candidates presented themselves, he who had in his hands the key of that kingdom of heaven, and you will find that as they stood before him he told them that only those who for a long time had been conscious of no transgression might come and learn the teaching which Jesus gave secretly to His disciples. Those were the old words of challenge ere the door of that kingdom of heaven was flung open, and only to such men and women was admission to the Mysteries possible. There they learned the inner secret teachings, those that are indicated in the Gospel story; for you remember how it was written of the Christ: “For without a parable spake He not unto them”; you remember how, when the disciples asked for explanation, His answer was: “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to others in parables.” You may remember, again, how it was said that when His disciples were with Him in the house, then He told them things which to the multitude without He refused to reveal; and you may remember the further promise that He left, when He knew that His own earthly life was drawing to a close: “I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now.” The Christian tradition of the Mysteries declared that those many things were told afterwards, when the disciples were more ready to receive, when the pupils were fitter to be taught. Origen tells us that all those teachings were kept in the Christian Mysteries, and made the secret teachings of the Church, given only to those who were worthy.

In those days when many knew, when many understood, a distinction was drawn between Jesus and Christ. I alluded to it, you remember, in the first of this course of lectures; and I did so deliberately, intending to return to it when, having dealt with the many intermediate questions, I should arrive at the lecture on the Coming Christ. For there was a difference between the human body of the mighty disciple Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and the divine Power that came down upon that body at the point of time marked as the Baptism, when it is written, the Spirit of God came down upon Him and abode with Him; there you have marked the Coming of the Christ, the consecration of the Supreme Teacher. That distinction you find recognised in the Epistles, though no attention is drawn to it further in the Gospels after that startling and suggestive statement; but if you take the Pauline epistles you find yourself in quite a different atmosphere from that of the history as told in the Gospels; you find there the name of Christ in a new meaning, a mystical meaning of profoundest import; you find S. Paul declaring that he does not ask to know Him after the flesh, it is the inner Christ he seeks; you find him saying of that mystic Christ that He has to be born in the believer—a statement that could never have been made of the physical body of Jesus. You find him declaring that that mystic birth of the Christ in human souls is to be followed by a growth of the mystic Christ within the believer, until at last he has reached the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ. That is the mystic Christian life, the Christ born in the soul, unfolding His divine powers as the Christian grows in wisdom and in love, showing Himself more and more manifest as the human life unfolds to the divine, until the perfect Christ is manifest and the Son of God is seen again on earth. But that old mystical idea slipped out of the Church teachings, and only remained in the Testament, marked but not understood. And so He who was the inspiring Spirit, the Supreme Teacher, the all-pervading life of His Church, became the outside Saviour, who by a physical sacrifice was said to have made atonement between God and man; and you had a vicarious atonement, a legal substitution, instead of that identity of nature which made the Christ and the believer one. That is the change which came over Christian teaching in those long ages of darkness that followed the vanishing of the Mysteries that had kept the flame of knowledge alive, until there were no longer pupils willing to be taught, and by the absence of the pupils the teachings of the Masters were withdrawn.

So we realise that with the revival in our own days of the mystic teaching and the realisation that there is a life in Christianity which is rightly marked out by that holiest of names, we begin to see in that spreading new life in Christian churches, in the revival of that idea of the possibility of the divine growth in humanity, we see one of the signs of the coming of the Christ, preparatory to His next manifestation upon earth. For it would scarcely have been worth while merely to amuse you for an hour with the story of the past if it did not bear on the present and the future, on the repetition of the old-world tale, of the remanifestation of that mighty Son of God. For that reason, to make, as it were, the gulf less wide between the ordinary thought and the thought of the Occultist, I spoke about the earlier manifestations, marking each successive sub-race of man; and if you have followed along the line of what I have been putting to you Sunday after Sunday of the stage at which the world is standing now, of the transition age in which we are, of the closing age that is passing, of the opening age that is coming, of all the signs which show the ending of the one, of all the signs which show the beginning of the other, then without shock or jar should come to you the present idea that we may well be looking again for a manifestation of the Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, who was last manifest as the Christ in Palestine. Let us see what that would mean.

Unless all that I have been telling you during the past five weeks is a mere dream; unless the very facts that I have pointed you to are utterly without significance, you ought almost to have thought yourselves into the point to which I fain would lead you now—that we are on the threshold of a new manifestation, and that the mighty Teacher again will appear as man among men. Now, to say that to any people may only make them think: “But why for us?” So might the Jew have questioned when last He came on earth. That a thing so great, so transcendent, and so rare, should come to earth at any particular time, to be measured by only a few years of mortal time—that that should be now seems too strange, too beautiful, to be true. And yet He came before; why not again? If at the birth of the fifth sub-race, why not at the birth of the sixth? Some must be on earth when any such manifestation takes place; some generation of men and women must be born around the coming of a Christ; and there is no valid reason that any one of you can give why this age should not be such a time, and the people of this age the recipients of the new flood of spiritual life. Strange, because it happens seldom, but sure, because it happened at similar crises in the story of the world; and the strangeness of it does not mark it as untrue when you see the signs of the coming all around you, if your eyes should be open to recognise what they mean. For an expectation is spreading everywhere of the coming of some mighty Teacher, and here and there on earth the expectation has taken voice, nay, has even had a human messenger and herald to proclaim it. In Persia such a messenger came in the one who was called the Bāb, who declared the coming of a mighty one, followed by another said to be yet greater than himself, and yet a third, the Abbas Effendi of the present time, certainly a great spiritual teacher, but one who still declares that the mightiest is yet to come, who is to bind together the eastern and the western worlds.

Not only along that line has this expectation shown itself, but among the people of Islām in a strange combative form, natural to their fighting races, showing itself, therefore, as leader in battle to be ruler in the future; and through Africa you see it in this expectation of the Mahdi, which has given so much trouble during our own time.

I only mention these to show you that the thought is spreading and the expectation growing; for ever the world grows expectant before the mighty One returns to reveal Himself on earth. Such a coming of the Christ the occult world is looking for—for the same great Being who appeared in Palestine, for He is still the Supreme Teacher, the same individual. Who may say what name He will bear? But what is of import to all of us is: Shall we recognise Him when He comes, or shall we be as blind of vision, as hard of heart, as were the Jews among whom His last manifestation occurred? It is so easy for us looking back through the glamour of the centuries in which the great Christian Master has been the head of Christendom, and seen as perfect man with the irradiation also of the Christ upon Him—for the Church has made no distinction between the two all these later years—it is so easy for us to look back through all those centuries and say we should have known Him had we been there. But that has happened so often. Was it not His reproach to the people of His day: “Your fathers slew the prophets, and ye build their sepulchres”? There are always plenty of people ready to rear the sepulchre of honour to the name of the prophet of the past; how few in any age of the world have recognised the prophet of their own day! That is not only true of the Supreme Teacher, but of others a little beyond the knowledge and the power of their own day; ever they have been met with hatred, ever the world has cast them out, has tortured or has slain them. Why should we in our own day, then, be any wiser? Why should the fifth sub-race, the most combative of all the nations, the most critical, the most sceptical, the most unwilling to recognise the higher, the most self-assertive—why should we have eyes open to see a greatness that has never been recognised in the past? That is the problem that may well exercise our minds, in order that we may try to develop in ourselves the power to recognise should He come in our own day. For one great rule runs all through nature: that you can only recognise that to which you can respond. It is true of the outer nature and our physical eyes. We can only see each other because in the retina of the eye there is the ether that answers to the external waves of light. Similarly in moral characteristics, and, above all, in the spiritual nature, we can only recognise in proportion as we reproduce. If in ourselves there is some opening up of the spiritual nature, if in ourselves there are some of the qualities which shine out so gloriously in Him, if in us there is some touch of that nature which in Him has risen to divinity, ah! then it is possible that we may throb responsive to Him when He comes, hidden, as He ever has been, beneath the veil of flesh. But that that may be so we must go outside the thought of our time to that of the time that is coming; not the combativeness of the fifth, but the compassion of the sixth sub-race must find its home in our hearts. And if one may judge from the past, when He comes He may again be despised and rejected of men, for the spiritual ideal is not an ideal to which the heart of our own age quickly responds. You can see it in the characteristics of the Christ: “when He was reviled He reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not.” But amongst you that would show great poverty of spirit. Not to revile back when you are reviled, in the mind of the modern day, is to mark the reviling as true. That is the spirit of the time. If you are slandered, libelled, abused, go into court and drag the slanderer there; if not, you are guilty. That is the common opinion of the time. One who has learned the lesson of the Christ, who before His accusers answered nothing, that man is condemned by the popular mind of the day. He would answer if he could, because they would answer if they could; but the measure of the Christ is not the measure of those who bear His name in the combative civilisation of the time. And so when He comes again, reviled and slandered as He must be if He be far beyond our knowledge and our understanding, the common verdict will go against Him as it went against Him before. We may not murder; that is too merciful in these modern days. We prefer rather that the victim shall live to be tortured than to give him the mercy of a swift, a ready death.

And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you with the thought to-night that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal, more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just. And it may well be that we have reached such a time of evolution that the popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry. That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak, learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross.

Lecture VII
The Larger Consciousness and its Value

Friends: During the whole of the lectures, of which the discourse of to-night is the last, I have taken for granted the existence of a larger consciousness in man than that which we know at the present time as our physical or waking consciousness. Over and over again I have had occasion to allude to it, once or twice I dwelt for a few moments upon it, but I could not interrupt the course of what I had been putting to you by any detailed description of the larger consciousness, or of the instruments of that consciousness, the body or bodies of man. It seemed to me that the work I had been trying to do would remain somewhat imperfect unless I tried to place before you, ere quitting the subjects I had been dealing with, something with regard to this larger consciousness in man; a consciousness which exists in every one of us; which functions intermittently in all of us; which is in course of unfolding in humanity at the present time. And side by side with the unfolding of the consciousness there goes a continual evolution of the bodies in which that consciousness expresses itself, and it is that subject that I want to deal with to-night, trying to put before you clearly and definitely the theory which is studied by Theosophists with regard to this matter, a theory which some of us have proved to be true by our own investigations, and—which is a far more important thing—confirmed by the great Scriptures of the world’s religions, the testimony which has been given to man by seers, by prophets of the highest, the most inspired, order. Sometimes we are inclined to lay more stress on contemporary evidence than on the evidence that comes from the great Scriptures of the world. It seems to me as though that were a little along the line of hiding the sun by holding a plate quite close to the eyes. For it is quite clear, when you come to think of it, that testimony which may be given nowadays by half-developed students cannot in the nature of things be nearly as valuable as that of the great prophets and seers of humanity, embodied, however mystically and allegorically, in the great Bibles of humanity. In fact, the testimony of the modern-day investigator should be checked and governed by those mightier and wider revelations, and it is always a point of satisfaction, a point of confirmation to the modern and partially developed seer when he finds that his own investigations throw light on some of the statements of these Scriptures, and that the Bibles of the race become more illuminating in some of their obscurer passages by the light that he may have been able to gain by his own investigations. I am not, then, pretending for one moment that anything I put to you now is comparable in value with what you might find out for yourselves, if spiritually illuminated, in these great Bibles of religions. But I do think that the investigations of to-day help us to understand those great revelations, though much that is there said is necessarily obscure to us because of the immense difference in knowledge between the speaker and the student; therefore, though we may call our knowledge to-day a farthing light, it may be of value in the deciphering of these great manuscripts of the past, so that even a little knowledge of our own may enable us to go more deeply into those great wells of truth which have come down to us from antiquity, which have been given to us by the Saviours of the world.

In order to make what I have to say clear to you, I shall have to ask you to pardon me if I go in the beginning a little into definition and detail. If you want to study your own body, comparatively simple as that is, you must be willing to learn the difference between a bone and a nerve, between an artery and a vein, and so on through the whole of the more or less familiar terms which the physiologist uses in explaining the anatomy and the physiology of the body. No person can have clear and definite ideas if he is not willing to study the mere nomenclature of that which he wishes to understand; and while it is quite possible to avoid using words of other languages, it is not possible to avoid some demand on the consecutive thought-power of the student if he desires to be anything more than a mere superficial hearer, without any definite understanding of the subjects which he supposes himself to be studying. There is a very good and simple description of man’s constitution in one of the Pauline epistles, where a triple division is given, and a perfectly accurate division, although subdivisions again are possible and practicable; but for my purposes now that division into three, and then certain subdivisions of each, will be sufficient to give you a very clear and definite idea of consciousness in man; and then by your own experience you can decide how much of the larger consciousness comes into your waking consciousness, or how much of you is still without vehicle of expression, still without the power of manifesting in worlds related to our own.

That division, as all of you will at once know, is Spirit, Soul, Body. It is curious how indefinite the mass of Christian people are with regard to the meaning of the first two terms, Spirit and Soul. I am not quarreling with the fact that different definitions may sometimes be given; I am quarrelling with the fact that most Christians have no definition at all; that they use the words interchangeably; that they constantly talk of man as a duality, always using the word body; sometimes using the word Spirit, and sometimes soul, for all that which they exclude from the body. Thus you hear people talking about spirits manifesting in various ways; sometimes you hear about the human soul and its immortality, and so on. But a clear, distinct definition of what is Spirit, what is soul—that for the most part is wanting among even the students of theology. Let us see if it be not possible to define them in a way which may at least be clear. You may, of course, differ with the division for the reason that you may think some other dividing line is better; I am concerned chiefly, for the moment, with giving you a clear definition, and then you may correct or amend it according to your own thought or your own knowledge. The definition will, of course, govern me in all that I say to-night. First of all, then: What is Spirit? Spirit is a germ of Divinity unfolding itself gradually in human evolution, appropriating certain kinds of matter which it gradually organises into an instrument for self-expression—we may shorten that by saying a germ of Divinity encased in matter. That germ of Divinity, as you might naturally expect, shows out in itself the triple division of its Divine parent. Just as you find God, manifesting in a universe, ever manifesting three supreme attributes, sometimes personified into what is called a Trinity, so you would naturally expect to find in the germ that which you find in the parent—that the triple nature of Divinity should show itself out in the triple nature of the Spirit which is man. And that is so. You find Spirit showing itself forth in full Divinity, taking for a moment the Christian names as most familiar, in the form of Power in the Father, in the form of Wisdom in the Son, in the form of creative Activity in the Holy Spirit. If you will take those names for the time as being most familiar to your own thought, and therefore introducing nothing of difficulty to you—if you will remember those accepted ideas for the time, and translate them into terms of consciousness, limited, because these are not all fully unfolded in man, you will be able readily to distinguish in man’s spiritual nature, and even more distinctly for the moment in the lower reflexion of that with which I will deal presently—you will be able to distinguish the threefold division, and so to obtain, as it were, a clear picture of your own spiritual nature. That which in Divinity we call Power, the Will by which the worlds exist, shows itself out in our own spiritual nature as Will. The Wisdom which upholds the worlds shows itself out in the human Spirit also as the pure and compassionate Reason, which is the Wisdom, the Christ, in man. The third, creative Activity, shows itself in intellect, the highest, the noblest form of creative Activity—the intellect, the pure intellect in man is the third reflexion in man of the creative Activity of God. And if you link what may be less familiar with the familiar, it will be very easy for you to keep the thread of that which I desire to put before you. Think first of all, then, that the Spirit, the germ of Divinity in man, has to show out in the gradual unfolding of its hidden powers these three supreme attributes with which you are familiar in the thought of Divinity itself.

Then, passing from that highest part of our nature to what S. Paul calls the soul, what is the Soul in relation to the Spirit? It is the temporary reflexion in grosser matter of the eternal Spirit; the image of that which is the eternal object; the reflexion in the mirror of a world of that eternal life which passes from world to world, unfolding, but is never subject to the transitoriness which marks the ever-changing worlds. The soul in man is the Spirit working in grosser matter; and hence in our own natures, so familiar to us—for now we come into a region that psychological science deals with and tries to define and understand—we have, when we look at our own consciousness, the soul, the reflexion of the Spirit in grosser matter. We have the mind reflecting the pure intellect with all its activities—imagination, judgement, reason—all these powers of the mind. Then we find a part of our nature that we call the emotional; there we have the reflexion of that pure and compassionate Wisdom that I spoke of which shows itself in the lower worlds by Love, the highest and loftiest of the emotions, the root whence all virtues spring. For the same principle of unity which expresses itself as Wisdom in the spiritual world expresses itself as Love, which draws the separated lives together in the world where matter has overcome Spirit, where Spirit is blinded by matter. The unity that the Spirit knows the soul seeks by Love, which is the attribute that draws toward unity, and that which in the spiritual world is known, in the lower world is sought by this exquisite attribute of the soul. And that which in the higher world we call Will becomes Desire in the lower. For the difference between Will and Desire is that Will is self-determined, whereas Desire is determined by the attractiveness of objects outside the consciousness. You are moved by Desire when some pleasure attracts you, some pain repels you, when your activity goes along the road that is determined by an outer attraction, an outer repulsion; you are moved by Will, the spiritual attribute, when the whole of your inner nature, drawn up to a single point, self-determined, sends that nature along the road that within yourself you have chosen, whether it leads to pleasure or pain, whether it leads to gain or loss in the lower world. Will is determined from the spiritual Self; Desire is guided and stimulated by objects in the lower world. Hence that which is Will in the Spirit is Desire in the soul. And so you find the soul represented by these three well-known attributes: Mind, with all its powers; Emotion, the root emotion being love; Desire, the reflexion of the determining power in this lower world.

When you come down into everyday life you find the whole of these make up your waking consciousness, showing itself out in the denser matter of the brain; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the mind; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the emotions; in your waking consciousness you know the working of desire; so that the waking consciousness, the limited, the conditioned, the smaller consciousness, is that which is within the limitations of your brain or physical body, but is none other than the larger consciousness which shows itself in the subtler worlds as soul, in the spiritual world as Spirit. If you realise clearly that outlining, with its subdivisions, you will find that consciousness is a unit, and the differences are differences of the material in which it is working rather than in itself. The triple division is the only one, whether you look at it in the brain, in the subtle body, in the matter of the world where the Spirit rules. Everywhere consciousness is one, expressing itself in three modes, by three qualities, but everywhere a unit, yourself, the reality within you.

What is Body? For there is a third factor in S. Paul’s definition of man. Naturally the body also has in it the same triple differentiation as the consciousness. And so we find a spiritual body, the clothing of the Spirit in the highest worlds of consciousness. We find also what S. Paul, again, calls a natural body. There is a natural body, he says, and there is a spiritual body. But that natural body divides itself into two—the subtle body in which the soul is working; the dense body in which the waking consciousness is working, the reflexion of the highest. Those two naturally go together, and might well be classed roughly as the single natural body, for it is transitory, impermanent, belongs to the three worlds of change—the physical world, the intermediate, and the heavenly; has a certain life through which it passes in the three worlds, and then gives back its elements to the worlds to which they respectively belong. Whereas the spiritual body is a relatively permanent thing, lasts through the whole of the long life of the individual, passes through birth after birth, death after death, knows neither birth nor death in its own nature, passes through them, but is not affected by them—the spiritual individuality, the real man, is eternal in his own nature, and has a permanent clothing of the matter of the spiritual world, unfolding his powers, organising his matter, but remaining ever the same in essence, the consciousness ever living in those worlds, the matter the same, only becoming more and more definitely organised. In that spiritual body remains the memory of all the experiences through which you have passed; in that spiritual body resides your true individuality, that knows neither birth nor death; in that spiritual body which is ever yours all the experiences of the past are gathered up, and part of those experiences is put forth, birth after birth, in order that the soul may clothe itself in new bodies for new experiences and new developments. So that the part of you that lasts is the Spirit in the spiritual body; the part of you that changes, the soul in the temporary body, whether you take the subtler or the denser parts.

Supposing you accept that definition of man in his triple division, it will be easy enough then to follow out step by step what the higher consciousness is as apart from the lower, the larger as apart from the smaller. You will start with the great conception of a living Spirit coming down into denser and denser matter, with the object of acquiring that matter and subduing it to his own purposes, appropriating it, wrapping himself up in it, and temporarily blinded by the veil, but a veil that he is going to turn into an instrument, so that by it he may know all the worlds, and come into contact with every portion of the universe. For that he appropriates the matter of every world; for that he wraps himself round in these material garments; and working upon these, he turns them to his own purposes, shapes them by his own will, moulds them in order that he may use them for that which he desires to effect—contact with matter, the condition of his becoming master of the worlds; and by making matter his servant and his instrument, all the worlds become open before him, and he can function in any one of them. That the pure spiritual being cannot do. He can only function in worlds of the Spirit, those lofty eternal regions where Divinity itself resides and manifests without the blinding effect of the denser matter that we wear. But just as Divinity emanates these coarser forms of matter in order that the spiritual germs may be sown therein, and therein gain the experience by which their powers will be unfolded from within; just as Deity is manifest in matter, so must the germs of Deity grow therein, until matter is subject to them as it is to the Father of light, whence they come.

So, in looking at this consciousness unfolding and these bodies becoming organised, we can trace throughout the purpose of that long unfolding—to make the Spirit master of matter, to enable him to act in every world; and when we catch a glimpse of that great purpose, we realise how perfect is the plan, how complete our triumph will be. First we notice, when we are looking at the lower forms of consciousness in ourselves, that we can understand a certain relation between matter and Spirit which we are told exists all the way up to the highest spiritual world. And so far as investigation has been carried by the students of to-day, they find that relation in each successive world that they enter and finally subdue. It is a relation, then, that runs right through between consciousness and form, between Spirit and matter; it is this: that every change in consciousness has a corresponding vibration in matter, and that every vibration in matter has a corresponding change in consciousness. We are told that that relation is imposed by the Logos Himself in His first shaping of the matter side of His universe; that all the vibrations of which He makes the atoms capable answer one by one to changes in His own consciousness, and that throughout the whole of His universe, in all the mighty realm of spirit-matter that He rules, this correspondence is universally, unchangeably found—for every change in consciousness a corresponding change in vibration, for every change in vibration a corresponding change in consciousness.

Let us see how that would work if anyone whose eyes are a little opened looks at the aura of a person—the lowest part of that aura, if you will, in etheric or astral matter: let us say, astral. You will notice a large number of colours continually flashing through it and changing; and if you examine those colours, every one, as you know from your ordinary study, representing a certain definite vibration in matter—every colour is nothing more than a certain vibration in matter, a vibration with a definite wave-length—if you watch those changing colours in the aura you will find that they are either generated by a state of consciousness or give rise to it. Suppose, for instance, you find a person in a mood of devotion, engaged perhaps in prayer—you can see them by the score in any Christian church. Watch the astral aura of that person, and you will find that the whole of it is vibrating in a way that gives you the colour of blue, blue everywhere predominating, the whole of the aura suffused with that colour. But you will also find, if there is in that congregation a quiet person who was not feeling devotional when he came into that congregation, that gradually his astral body will be affected by the vibrations in the astral bodies near him, and that those vibrations imposed upon him from without will produce a devotional mood within him. You can start it, then, at either end: either the mood producing the appearance, the vibration, or the vibration producing the mood. Take it in another form: have you never felt when you yourself were perfectly good-tempered and some very irritable person came up to you, have you never felt that you yourself were becoming irritable?—not that you had anything to be irritable about, but merely because the other man was, and it needs considerable control, control over the astral body, to prevent the irritation of the person who comes near you from affecting your own previously placid mood. If you have not observed this, keep watch over yourself during the coming week, and you will find how continually you reproduce the emotions of the people with whom you come into contact. What is the mechanism of it? Very simple. That person’s astral body is vibrating in consonance with the emotion he is feeling. Those vibrations of his astral body set up vibrations in your astral body, a perfectly mechanical thing. But because it is your astral body, the matter you have appropriated, those vibrations in it produce in you the corresponding mood of irritation. Hence the common ethical precept given by every great teacher, to return good for evil. That is by a deliberate effort of the consciousness to throw yourself into the mood which is opposite to the evil mood of the person with whom you come into contact. If you do that, then your own mood will overbear in your astral body the vibrations imposed upon it from without, and your astral body will begin to vibrate in correspondence with your own good emotion instead of with the evil emotion imposed from outside. The further result of that, if you be strong enough, will be to correct the bad vibration in the astral body of the man who is near you, and so, by correcting that vibration into harmony with your own, to produce in him your own good emotion, instead of having your emotion controlled by his. That is the ordinary science of the emotions that every aspirant for the higher life is set to practise in his daily life. He is first told the theory, so that he may understand what he is doing, and then he is set to the practise, so that by the practise he may realise the truth of the law that his teacher has explained. Sometimes the ethical teacher only says: “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.” With the unspiritual hearer the question will very readily arise, “Why should I give love when hatred is given to me?” Only knowledge will enable you to understand the wisdom that underlies this precept of all the great teachers of the past. Speaking in an age when authority was valid, and when people were willing to accept the precept from one whom they recognised as greater than themselves, they only proclaimed the law, and the docile hearer tried to obey. In our own more critical and combative age it is necessary to justify wisdom to a more critical and carping generation, and so the full explanation is given which shows you the scientific truth which underlies the ethical precept.

That runs through the whole of the working of our bodies, the whole of the changes in our consciousness. You can work it out step by step, or you can read the working out which has been made by a thoughtful student,[3] and so you will have a veritable science of the emotions, and you will go out into the world a source of peace, a source of blessing, a source of all good emotions, helping the weaker by your own knowledge and your own strength, and so enabling them to climb more quickly by giving this helping hand out of the knowledge that you have learned.

By that fact, then, we have power over matter, we can throw it into the vibrations we desire. We can do more than that: we can shape it into organs of expression for the consciousness that is unfolded within us. Understanding these laws, we begin to realise that by these bodies we may come into touch with the various worlds around us. Let us see, again, the method. When first the spiritual germ descends into matter, gathering round itself the matter that it needs, that matter is like a mere cloud. It is still so in the highest regions for most; it is becoming organised into definite instruments of consciousness in the three lower worlds in all the more advanced members of our present race, to a very large extent in all of you. If you pause for a moment on the physical body, you will see exactly what is meant by the phrase: the organising of the body. You have here now in your physical body a valuable instrument, first for acquiring knowledge of the outer world, and then for acting on that world, carrying out the knowledge you have gained. You have, as you know, in your body two sets of nerves, called sensory and motor: by the sensory you gather knowledge from without; by the motor you act upon the outer world, utilising the knowledge you have gathered to bring about the results that you desire; and your physical body is well organised for its work. By the evolution of the senses, by the gradual growth of the whole nervous system, by the development of your brains, you have largely become master of this densest world, the physical world, to which your body is related. All that is needed further is a comparatively small evolution—the development of the other two senses, the conquest of the realm of ether, that which science is now investigating. So far, then, you have one instrument, the instrument of your waking consciousness. Through that, spirit and soul alike are working, the powers of the soul showing out as far as the density of the matter will permit. Coming into denser matter is very much the same as if you brought a light through thicker and thicker glass. The light would remain the light, but that which would show out through the glass would be less and less according to the opacity of that glass. So with the light of the spirit shining through the soul and the body. Your next work is the organisation of the next finer body of matter, that which I called the subtle. In that your emotions are working, in that your thoughts are working, and to a very large extent your mental and emotional bodies—we call the emotional the astral—are organised at the present time. But here more variety comes in. Some of you will have your astral body so well developed that it is fit for separate working in the intermediate world. Some of you will have it well developed so far as consciousness is concerned, but not so far as the reception of impressions from the outer intermediate world. That is, your consciousness will be working there in that finer matter that has not yet sufficiently organised the astral body to receive impressions from without.

Gradually, as evolution goes on the organisation of the astral body will go on in everybody, but it is possible, as I suggested to you a few Sundays ago, very largely to quicken that evolution, and gradually to make the astral body what it ought to be, as perfect an instrument for contact with the astral world as the physical body is for contact with the physical world. That is, of course, what a very considerable number of people have done, and they are able to act either in or out of the physical body. We will take both cases in a moment. Take the finer part first of the subtle body—the mental body. In most of you that also is fairly organised, but, again, it is organised for working within yourself, but not receiving from the outer mental world all that hereafter it will be able to receive and utilise, and only a few of you, comparatively, would be able to leave the denser and the astral body behind, and live in the heavenly world, in full consciousness, working there as thoroughly as you can work in the physical world.

What signs are there by which you can judge how far the organisation of the astral and the mental bodies is going on, so that if you work to quicken their organisation you will be able partly to judge how far your work is effective? Let us take the working in the body, the physical body, first. As these other higher forms of consciousness begin to become co-ordinated with the physical, and to hand on to it the impressions that they receive, the mental body is becoming highly organised; when the person possessing it is strong in science, physical science, above all in the grasping of principles, in the power of observation, in the ability to draw conclusions from the observations that have been made, organisation is improving. Among the scientific men of our own time that mental body will be very highly developed, chiefly for use in the waking consciousness, very imperfectly as yet for direct reception on the higher planes. The higher development of the astral body will show itself in forms of art and of high emotion, and just in proportion as those are transmissible to the waking consciousness may you realise that the astral body is becoming more definitely organised. When the body of the intellect, the lasting body, part of the spiritual body, is becoming organised, then it is that you find fine metaphysical ability, great philosophical profundity of thought, the highest conceptions of idealistic art, the highest achievements in idealistic literature. Those are the faculties that belong to the beginning of the spiritual body in man, transcending the transitory, beginning to shape the permanent instrument of the Spirit. Where you have great talent, where the mental body is highly organised, where you have the highest genius, there the spiritual body is beginning its organisation. For that highest genius is the flashing down from the organised spiritual body into the lower nature of knowledge which in those regions alone can be gained; and when art and literature become illuminated by the Spirit, then you have the mighty geniuses of history that outlast the passing generations and shine out in the world of thought.

What signs may we find other than those of the organisation of these bodies through which the larger consciousness will work? Genius is the highest of all, save that which I spoke of as the manifestation of the Christ, the Wisdom Spirit in man. But if we leave those loftiest manifestations of the larger consciousness alone, what signs may we find amongst ourselves of the growing organisation of those higher bodies and the unfolding of the larger consciousness? There are very many signs to-day of the organising of the astral body, and it is in the lack of discriminating these from genius that we find a great absence in power in the new psychology. You find the organisation of the astral body showing itself forth in the power to receive impressions directly from the astral plane, and the power to translate them into the waking consciousness. In the body those first signs are seen in telepathy where it is well developed, where people are able to communicate with one another without the ordinary physical means of communication, and that is not so very infrequent a thing among the more thoughtful of our own time. That is a power you can develop, if you like, by definite and regular practice; only remember that all development of power means regular practice and patient and reiterated experiment. One finds, for the most part, that after a few weeks or months of practice people are apt to drop the whole thing if they have not in that time gained startling results. That is not the way that powers grow. The law is sure, that if you choose to concentrate your mind so as to make a clear image, that will be reproduced in astral matter. Then by an effort of the self-determined will you can send that astral thought-form to whomsoever you choose; and if you practise that day after day, week after week, nay, even month after month and year after year, you will find that you will ultimately develop the power of sending thought clearly and definitely, so that you will be able to communicate with the absent as surely, as certainly as any physical-plane communication can be sure and certain. Practice along these lines can do you nothing but good. It increases the power of the will, it increases the concentration of thought; but remember that without concentrated thought and fairly strong will you are bound to have a very long practice before you will have results tangible in the outer world. The person who cannot keep his mind steady for a couple of minutes at a time, the person who cannot concentrate definitely on one thought, such a person certainly cannot transfer that which he is unable to create; and for a very considerable time people will have to practise by creating the thought-image before they will have anything to be definitely sent to another. But that is one of the means of organising the astral and the mental body as an instrument of the larger consciousness. Some people, of course, have it by nature, as you say, but what does that mean? Only that they have practised it in previous life. No one gets anything for nothing from nature. On the other hand, nature is a good paymaster, and pays the exact wages that we have earned, never withholding anything. If you can do it easily, it is because you have done it before; if you find it difficult, it is because you are beginning that definite kind of work. But no one obtains it without labour, no one can develop it without long and continued practice. But there is one form in which the astral body shows its organisation when you are out of the dense body and not in it, in the form of dream. Whenever you go to sleep you leave your dense body behind. Some dreams belong only to the brain; it is because people do not distinguish dream from dream that so much foolish ridicule is sometimes cast on the dream-state altogether. It is perfectly true that there are dreams which grow out of conditions of the physical body, where a little change in the circulation, a momentary block in some vessel of the brain, will cause a dream, incoherent, senseless, without meaning or illumination. That is the physical dream; it may be caused by any disturbance of the body—indigestion, a hundred other things. The dream that shows that the astral body is becoming organised is a dream in which some definite knowledge is conveyed, in which some definite warning is given, in which something is added to you that you had not before, or in which you come into contact with someone who has passed out of the physical conditions through the gateway of death, and whom you may meet in the astral world when you yourself have temporarily dropped the dense body. Those dreams are coherent, rational, sometimes illuminative. Remember how many dreams have now been put on record in which a man has gained in the dream-state knowledge that he had not in the waking state. How often that knowledge gained in the dream-state has enabled him in the waking state to cover over some gap that he was before unable to bridge. You will find in Myers’ book on Human Personality some of these dreams given, although not very definitely explained, and if you find in your experience that those are becoming more frequent, then you may be sure that your astral body is becoming a vehicle of consciousness, an instrument by which consciousness can work in the other world. It is true that in some dreams, especially of warning, the thought may be thrown into your mind from without when you have not found it out for yourself, but have been informed of it by another. Such a warning may come through, given you by some friend, some helper, someone whom you love, who may have passed onwards, and so has the advantage of the astral vision. But in all those cases there comes into the waking consciousness something from the larger, and as you perfect the astral body all those come more and more within your control. As it becomes organised there is less and less need to leave it in order to exercise its powers. You will find yourself seeing, hearing, while the physical senses are active, while the consciousness is working normally, the waking consciousness in the brain; so that slowly and gradually you will unify the physical and the astral bodies and live in the two worlds continuously at one and the same time, finding those worlds intermingling and interworking; and so you will gain that much of the larger consciousness which belongs to the expression of the soul through the subtle astral body.

Exactly on the same lines with the heavenly worlds, the mental world, your evolution will go on, and for this there is one condition regarding the consciousness, there is one condition regarding the instrument for the unfolding of consciousness—regular and steady meditation. There is no other way. If you find anybody telling you that by any physical means you can really unfold your consciousness, tell them that they do not realise what they are talking about. You can start a little astral consciousness on the lowest parts of the astral world by causing vibrations in matter in the physical that affect the astral, and so bring about a change in consciousness in that lowest part of the astral world, but you can go no further. I have seen in India men who, by the use of difficult physical means that none of you would care to use—for they bring about the gradual spoiling of the physical body—I have known them able to leave the physical body and live for the time being in the astral, but in that astral body they were unconscious, not conscious; they were not coming into touch with the astral world, nor using the larger consciousness at all. They had only forced themselves into that world in the astral body where it was not organised enough for the reception of impressions, nor the consciousness unfolded to understand them, and they had injured the physical brain and rendered that practically useless for physical utility; so that they had lost both worlds instead of gaining the higher that they sought. When one has seen that happen in India one realises that those methods are not methods that it is desirable to spread in the West; and it is along that line that so many of those pseudo-occult books are going which come to us from America, promising that if we follow those practices we shall be able to get the better of other people in business transactions, and hypnotise them for our own advantage and our own gain. Wherever you find that the method of working and that the object aimed at, be sure that you are dealing with a form of unfolding and of evolution that can only injure; it cannot really serve. The worst of it is that those forms tend to atrophy the parts of the brain that you want to bring things through after a higher consciousness is active and the higher body is organised. By this means you injure the brain, and with the brain the connecting link between this world and the next, so that you injure yourself along that line as well as along the other, and make yourself incapable, until you have a new body, of that higher unfolding at which you aim. There you have the danger of people picking up fragments of an ancient science of the East, without realising all the protection with which in the East that science is surrounded; and if even there one finds occasionally such cases as I have mentioned, of the ruined physical frame and the undeveloped astral body, then how much more dangerous it is when given to people of different physical heredity, without the conditions which in the East are ever imposed! Meditation, then, is the one safe way of unfolding the consciousness, and thus organising the vehicle; and the other condition is purity of thought, purity of desire, purity of physical life. That is the matter side of the training. Your thoughts must be pure, otherwise your mental body will be unfit for higher development; your desires must be pure, or your astral body will not be fit for that unfolding at which you aim; your physical body must be pure, otherwise when the developed mental and astral pour down their power on the physical, the physical will be unable to answer, and you will have hysteria instead of the wider consciousness you seek.

Those, roughly, then, are the conditions: meditation for the consciousness, purity for the evolution of the instrument. If you are willing to accept those conditions, then the path of the higher evolution opens before you, and according to your courage, your perseverance, and your ability will be the rapidity with which you can tread that path. The object before you should be the helping of others, the gaining of these powers in order that you may be more useful, not in order that you may be greater than your fellow-men. Of the purity of your motive there is only one test: are you using the powers you have now for the helping of your race? If you are not, then no profession that you will use the higher powers for good will be effective in bringing you help in their unfolding. I have met many a man, many a woman, who is anxious to be an invisible helper—that is, a worker on the astral plane—but I do not always find that those people are visible helpers as far as their present powers go. And I do not understand why people should want to go about in astral slums when they keep carefully away from the physical slums which are already within their reach. So far as you can go by your own power you have the right to go, but if you ask for help from those more highly developed—from the great Teachers of the race—then you have to bring in your hands the proof—and that proof is life, and not words—that as you are using well the talent you have you deserve to be helped in the gaining of others. There is the underlying meaning of those strange words ascribed to the Christ, that he who has much, to him shall be given. Those who have used well that which they have, those alone have claim to be helped in gaining more; for by their life they have shown that they do the best with what they possess, and that is the guarantee that with more they will utilise that also for the race. And so in the old rules of discipleship it was said that when the disciple came to the Teacher he must bring with him in his hands the fuel for the fire; it was the fire of sacrifice, and the fuel was everything that the pupil possessed in mind, body, and estate; and he brought that in his hands as offering to the Teacher, and then alone was he accepted by the one who knew. And so in these days also that higher evolution, quickened by the power of the great Ones, can only be opened up to those who bring in their hands the fuel for the fire of sacrifice; you must be willing to give up everything you have, and own nothing, material or immaterial; you must hold everything you have and everything you are at the service of the great One from whom you ask the gift of knowledge. When that is brought the gift is never refused; when that door is thus knocked at it never remains closed. True it is that the gateway is narrow; true it is, now as of old, “Strait is the gate, narrow is the way, and few there be that find it.” But the fewness does not depend on the grudging of the Teacher—it depends on the want of self-surrender by the disciple. Bring all you have and all you are, lay it at the feet of the Master of the Wisdom; He will open the gateway, He will guide you along the path. But dream not that words are heard in that high atmosphere where the Master lives and breathes: only high thoughts can reach Him, only noble acts can speak the thoughts you have conceived; for voice there is the life that is lived, and only the life that speaks of sacrifice can claim the teaching at His hands.