 
## YOUR PATH

# INTO HIGHER WORLDS

## *** THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE FOR MATURE SOULS***

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 by Bożena Podstawska

Written in 1922 by Józef Świtkowski

Original title: Droga w światy nadzmysłowe – raja yoga nowoczesna

Translated by Bożena Podstawska

Edited by William Robinson
Table of Contents

Foreword to the First Polish Edition (1922)

Foreword to the Second Polish Edition (1936)

Chapter 1 – The Goal and Measures

Chapter 2 – Rules

Chapter 3 – Mystery Schools

Chapter 4 – The Path

Chapter 5 – Results

Chapter 6 – Yama (Cleansing)

Chapter 7 – Niyama (Acquisition of Virtues)

Chapter 8 – Asana (Life Attitude)

Chapter 9 – Pranayama (The Rhythm of Life)

Chapter 10 – Pratyahara (Control of Attention)

Chapter 11 – Preparation

Chapter 12 – Dharana (Concentration)

Chapter 13 – Imagination

Chapter 14 – Dhyana (Meditation)

Chapter 15 – Inspiration

Chapter 16 – Samadhi (Yogis' Trance)

Chapter 17 – Contemplation

Chapter 18 – Samyama (Higher Consciousness)

Chapter 19 – Intuition (Conscience)

Chapter 20 – Enlightenment

Chapter 21 – A Fond Farewell

About the Author

### Foreword to the First Polish Edition (1922)

This book is for the few who do not consider higher worlds to be a mere legend – a legend which should be doubted. For the few who do not need any rational reason or experiment to prove the existence of such worlds. Furthermore, this book is for only a small percentage of them. Most people will consider the path described in this book to be too long and tedious; they often think that guidelines found elsewhere will suffice to get an access to para-sensory, higher worlds. If those worlds, so called "para-sensory worlds" – obtained by mechanical techniques – satisfy them, they have not matured enough to know or they do not desire to find other worlds.

Therefore, this is a book for mature people. In it, I speak to mature readers: I do not explain totally elementary ideas. I assume the readers are already familiar with some basic metaphysical concepts, and they have already studied some of the works quoted in my book. If a reader reads my book carefully, he will realize that – despite its small volume – it contains enough content for many years of self-development. It is not enough to read and understand its words; it is necessary to live by them, to implement them into one's character, to re-build oneself from the very foundation. This is much more difficult than doing mechanical exercises quoted in other textbooks. The exercises provided in such books may have been simply copied uncritically from other compilations, or have been deliberately written in order to cause harm.

By so saying, I do not attempt to over-estimate the value of my work. It is possible, that it may also prove to be harmful: especially for those who omit the requirement for one's high moral level. For people without morals – and their purposes – this book may be harmful indeed. However, for my target readers, this will be the path that leads to the higher words they yearn: a path which is undoubtedly difficult and tedious, but which is also certain. In this book, all the advice and instruction are things that I have myself experienced. Some readers may think, at first, that not enough instructions are given; however, when such a reader fully understands the methods, he will be able to create his own exercises. Perhaps, one day, he will put his exercises into a book that is more comprehensive than this one: one which is the first in the Polish language, and therefore, is not free from faults and shortcomings.

### Foreword to the Second Polish Edition (1936)

During the 14 years that have passed since the first edition of this book, some of its readers might have reached the level of enlightenment, while others may be still on the preparatory level. Others might have become disappointed, considering the rules set forth in this book to be too demanding for them, and put the book aside. Despite all my efforts to hide my real name, I have received many letters from my readers. They contained either expressions of joy due to finding the right way of living and achieving internal happiness, or they contained requests that I dispel some doubts and make some corrections and rectification in a later edition.

These requests were mainly of two kinds: first, to remove Sanskrit terminology, allegedly confusing, and second, to express my firm opinion about eating meat, about consuming caffeine and alcohol, and about bodily pleasures. Let the fact – that the content of the book has been left nearly unchanged – serve as my answer to these requests. I have only added two short paragraphs to explain more precisely the role of the physical body in the spiritual development.

The title of the book is Modern Raja Yoga. Therefore, the book tries to show how ancient Indian Raja Yoga now applies to contemporary Western culture. Western culture, to this day, has not created any terminology – in any of its languages – to replace Sanskrit names that describe ancient concepts. That is why these terms cannot be replaced in my book. However, I attempted to write the book in such a way that the reader – without being over-concerned with the technical terminology – should be able to start the self-development that leads to the gate of the "path".

The second question asked by my readers – the one about banning the consumption of meat and certain drugs – is a simple misunderstanding. This type of prohibition may be important in textbooks that deal with the culture of the body: with hatha yoga, or with ritualistic magic. In this book, however – a book that deals exclusively with the culture of the soul – such bans would be contradictory to its intent. Giving attention to the care of the physical body – even if done merely in the form of bans or commandments – would only prove that the physical body deserves special care. The truth is that caring about the physical body should take no more time than a reasonable person would devote to tending to his livestock or machines.

I add these two explanations to complement the foreword to the first edition, which otherwise remains unchanged.

### Chapter 1 – The Goal and Measures

You have taken this book into your hand. This suggests that some kind of motivation may lay behind that act: something more than sheer curiosity, one that makes you seek a path. A path that you could tread yourself, instead of merely reading about one that others followed and are following ahead of you. Maybe you have been wandering and searching for a long time, maybe you have felt that the broad and frequently treaded road that all people around you utilize is not sufficient for you. It may seem too simple for you, too easy, but most of all: too horizontal. The vast majority of ordinary people follow this road, slowly, comfortably, without much effort but also without many rewards. They do not have to give much, and, in exchange, they do not receive much. But you feel that you would like to sacrifice more in order to receive more. You would like to make the greatest efforts – give everything you have – to accomplish everything that is worthy of such efforts: to accomplish everything you are capable of achieving.

It is good, that this broad and overcrowded road has already become too flat for you. It is good that you want to leave it and are ready to walk on the path which is shorter and steeper but makes your ascent to the top faster. Your aspiration does you credit because it indicates that you have matured enough to enter the path. But, before you decide to enter it, examine yourself carefully and estimate your strength. Evaluate yourself strictly and soberly, ask if you really want to give all yourself, everything – unreservedly. Ask yourself if you will not get so discouraged that you will soon fall down from the path and back onto the comfortable road.

There is no doubt that you will fall from the steep slope repeatedly before you are able to keep firmly on it. The important thing is that – when you fall down – you get quickly to your feet again, despite any wounds or bruises, and that you do not feel sorry for yourself. Without delay, you use all your determination to climb onto the path again. You should make sure that your eagerness to embark on the path is not merely a temporary whim: because you have become disappointed with your everyday life due to some failure.

However, as you have taken this book into your hand and are determined to read it, this may mean that your intentions are honest and stable. Maybe there is nothing in your present life that you find purposeful and worth of effort. Maybe you look on people around you as if they were children whom you have surpassed. You feel that you need to stop playing in a childish way and take on activities of a more serious nature. If their lives always seem to you to be aimless and pointless, you may be ready for the path. If you constantly feel some emptiness – not only in the face of some recent disappointment of yours – but even in times of success and satisfaction: maybe you have truly become ready for the path. Bear in mind, however, that the path described in this book is the shortest and steepest of all: very soon you may find yourself too far away from the broad road to be able to get back down onto it.

There are other paths available as well. They may be longer but they are not as steep and arduous as this one, and – more importantly – they do not turn aside so radically from the common road followed by most of the humankind. If you chose one of them, you would still have constant connection with everything that people call "the world", and your return to the common road would be always available. Even though these roads are not so steep and demanding and the pace is not so fast, they also lead upwards. The paths of scientific studies, artistic creativity, or social work – they are all too difficult for idlers but always accessible for you. One of them might be adequate for you: having chosen it, you could put as much effort into it as you wish, and climb as high and as fast as you wish. These roads are relatively comfortable because they do not require such enormous load of work on yourself: you direct your activity mostly outwards, on objects, and it is always easier.

However, if you still feel that they will be too easy – if you truly want to work on yourself – you have many paths to choose from. There is a choice of paths between the two extremes, very distinct from each other: the path of Hatha Yoga at one end, and that of saints at the other. They are also paths, but they are not easy at all. Yet, if you choose one of them, you can still expect something for yourself. You may say: I give everything I am, all that I am worth, and I expect to receive as much as I am worth in exchange.

On the other hand, if you choose the path described in this book, you will not be able to say so. If you choose it, you can expect nothing: no benefits, no rewards, nothing but the feeling that you have done everything you are capable of, that you have not wasted anything, that you have not neglected anything.

That is why it is absolutely essential that you are aware of the aim you are going to pursue. It is not enough to tell yourself: I am not satisfied with the life that everybody around me leads. I must find something more fulfilling for myself. Consider how you define something more fulfilling. If you want more satisfaction for yourself, you will not find it on this path; in that case – you should turn towards hatha yoga. If you want to fulfill your curiosity of extra-sensory worlds, you will discover them on the path: but only after you have stopped craving to know them. If you want to obtain magical powers and extraordinary abilities, you will also get them: when it has become absolutely impossible that you might use them for personal advantage.

As you can see, the path does not offer much. But if you still wish to pursue it despite this fact, or especially because it does not offer any personal advantages, it means that you have truly grown up to it. You have grown to it, because you have already outgrown an erroneous belief that there is any other good other than the common good.

Your aim must be absolutely unselfish. You must want nothing for yourself, nothing for your own pleasure or personal benefit. Your only desire, your only aspiration must be always the common good: not only the good of all people, regardless their nationality, race, religion, culture and moral level, but also the good of the entire universe, that is the good of all creatures living in it: animals, plants, higher beings, and all the creation. Do not think that you are too small and weak to be of any use for angels or plants; when you are on the path, your forces will grow to a superhuman, inconceivable strength. This is because you will be approaching God, and thus, you will participate in God's omniscience and omnipotence.

God wants nothing for himself. Therefore, if you are going to follow God's path, you have to get rid of all your egoism, you have to forget about yourself. Are you ready to eliminate your ego permanently? Are you always ready to say: Not mine, but Thy will be done? If you can do this, and if you are truly determined to renounce every single thought of yourself, all your egoistic traits; then you are truly ready for the path. Enter it boldly: do it right now, today. If you hesitate or delay, it means that you have not grown to it yet.

Soon, you will realize how much this path gives you, how much invaluable treasure you can find on it; this is because you do not desire nor seek it. First of all, you will find infinite peace, it will be sweet and tranquil: God's peace. You will find health of the soul and even of the physical body: health so flowering and sound that it could never have been achieved by living in the most advantageous conditions elsewhere. You will find unlimited knowledge: not the knowledge that can be found in books and learned by using your memory and brain, but the direct knowledge acquired by seeing and comprehending. You will also find that which people call clairvoyance, even though they do not believe in it: you will be able to see inside the Earth and far distant lands, look into human souls and angels' spirits, and talk both to the so-called dead and the alive, no matter how far they are from you. Finally, you will find all those magical powers and incredible abilities which have given some people either the reputation of a saint or the notoriety of a wizard; you will have all of them, without exception, for your unlimited disposal.

You will find all these on the path: you will find them gradually, more and more with each step, without any effort or attempts by you. You will find yourself surrounded by wealth, power, respect, fame but – at that time – all of them will have become worthless for you. They will all seem to you to be yet other, more heavy burdens: ones that bring new and more extensive duties. But you will manage to fulfil all of those duties because you will not desire anything for yourself.

Until now, you might have been searching for this path, without the clarity of what you were seeking. You have had the premonition that somewhere, beyond all what you knew and experienced in life, there must be something more, something else, something higher: something more real. Things that other people perceive as real and valid, have lost their value of realism and truth for you. You have been looking for something beyond it because ordinary, everyday desires and aspirations of humankind have become insufficient for you.

Do you know why they are insufficient? Because within you, there exists something more than in your brothers. The Divine Spark has already awakened within you. The same spark does exist in your brothers but they know nothing about it. It is too early for them to feel it within themselves. But you have been sensing it, maybe unknowingly at first, but you feel it, without doubt. In your soul – in the core of your existence, something new, so far unknown – has started living: like an unborn baby developing in the womb of a young mother. The Devine Spark now exists in you, because you are mature enough to be conscious that it is a part of you. In other people, it is still dormant, but in you, it has already awakened. That is why you long for something unknown, something real and authentic which cannot be found in the mundane world.

Now, you can feel clearly and undoubtedly that there is something more in you than your bodies – these visible and incorporeal layers. You realize that when you pass the gate of death, you will take those layers off, one after another: first your physical body, then the etheric and astral ones and finally, your mental body. But who will take them off you? It will be you, the real you. You are already able to intuit that these bodies are not you, that for you they are rather like layers of clothing. You live inside them but they are not you. What will remain of you when they have been taken off? That which remains is you, your Divine Spark, your higher self. What is immortal, authentic and true in you – that will remain and survive beyond death and all demises.

You are becoming aware of the immortal particle within you: this is why, what may seem sufficient for your fellow brothers, has become unsatisfactory for you. You have started seeking something more because there is something more within you. You have already learned how to hear the "voice" of your conscience: it speaks silently within you. From now on, you will be able to hear it; at first, not all the time, but often. This is the voice that told you that you are not your outer layers; it gave you a constant sensation of dissatisfaction with yourself and with the world. Sometimes, you may still ignore it but you will never be able to deaden or repress it in yourself completely; now, when the higher self – the Divine Spark – is alive in you.

So now, you can see your goal more clearly. Instead of the mortal and trifling, you would like the eternal and divine to be the master within you. You do not want to be a slave of your bodies anymore, not even the more subtle ones, like the astral or mental bodies. You want to learn how to rule them, how to change them into useful tools that are always obedient to your higher self. In some way, you feel that you will not learn how to rule them anywhere in the ordinary world; therefore, you wander and seek.

Until now, your bodies have ruled over you, they were doing whatever they wanted with you and you obeyed them without any resistance. Before now, you simply did not realize that it was possible to disobey them nor how that was possible. But now, your higher self is awakening in you and claiming its rights. Before now, it was animal instincts that ruled over you, but now God in you is to lead your way. If you start a battle against yourself – that is, one against your bodies – you will not be able to reach your goal. Your goal is not division or conflict, but unification. Your lower nature should become compatible with your higher self; they should harmonize and unite. The aspirations of these two parts of yourself cannot be inconsistent anymore; they are to be attuned and harmonized. Your lower self must unite with the higher one. Such unity is called yoga in Sanskrit; if you prefer more modern term, you might call it synthesis.

Therefore, your goal is yoga. Do not hesitate to use this term only because it was coined and used by ancient Indians. Since their times, humankind has made much progress in development but still not as much as to make Yoga obsolete. You must have noticed this yourself: how very few people around you have already united with their higher self. Of course, Yoga seen as an idea or a goal, should not be mistaken for the methods leading to this goal: that is, for the systems of Yoga. From the very start, the goal has not changed: but systems and methods change as mankind develops. Today, the ancient Indian Raja Yoga would not only be fruitless, it might even mean development goes backwards. At the time of ancient Indians, a unity of higher and lower self was not possible in a wakeful state: at that time man was not advanced enough to be able to maintain his awareness while reaching into the higher planes. Achieving Yoga – the unification – back then was only possible when in the state of Samadhi; the state that we could call a trance or magnetic sleep. On the other hand, nowadays, the goal is not to experience Yoga only in short moments of an unconscious trance but in full wakefulness, with full awareness. Today, this is possible because we have made sufficient progress in development. Therefore, do not be surprised or annoyed by the term yoga or other Sanskrit words being used in this book: we do not have alternate names for them.

You should understand that today, if you want to have Yoga as your path – as your method – it must differ from ancient Indian Yoga. There are many abilities that ancient Indians had to develop by means of methodological exercises; you do not have to work on them because they are already developed in you. But you have to work on other techniques, those which were completely unknown to ancient Indians. Even their raja yogis were not matured enough for them at that time, so they could not even coin names for them. Therefore, do not confuse the method of Raja Yoga with the goal of raja yoga; likewise, it would be a mistake to confuse the initiation of Egyptians or Christians with their goal.

As you can now see, what you need is the capability: you have been seeking it but could not find it anywhere. You might have come across some books with mysterious titles, allegedly containing valuable tips for yoga exercises; but your infallible voice told you that you could not trust those tips and advice. This is yet more evidence of how your Divine Spark rules over you when you let it speak, when you let it reign. If it tells you that what you are reading now is wrong, do not hesitate: stop reading. This soundless voice within you will always give you the best advice. But it will not forbid you to read. Rather, you may expect other people to try to discourage you; but again, your conscience will tell you if you should listen to them or not.

As for the choice of measures for practicing yoga, which is for entering upon the path, it is again the voice of your conscience: your higher self that will do the choice because it knows infallibly what suits it best. You can find excellent methods in a small book which you have known since your childhood and you might have even learned by heart. This is the Catechism, the everyday Christian Catechism. It will lead you onto the path as surely as the rules of some of the arcane schools of thought. It will lead you, provided, of course, that you not only know its mandates by heart but also put them into practice in your everyday life. For some people, the Catechism seems to be incomprehensible and insufficient; this is because they only know it from reading, not from living by its principles. They only repeat its words with their mouths, instead of putting its contents into practice and live it. However, even the path of the Catechism may still seem too slow for you. If it is so, take another book into your hand, you may already know it: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Now, if you read this book carefully and with full understanding, you will not say that it is too simple. You may say that its directives are less accessible for you because they were intended for monks, while you live in the world. Remember, however, that everyone who truly wants it, can try to imitate Christ. This is why, in the next chapters, you will find many quotations from this book; you will see that it is unequalled. The words spoken on the pages of this book will merely supplement it, but they will not improve it.

From those two books you can gain some idea about the measures that should be used to give you access to the path. If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments. Without this, you will never reach access to the path, even if you explore all principles of all mystery schools. For this path, you must be well-prepared and also mature enough. You have to prepare proper dwelling for your higher self, for the Divine Spark within you. This dwelling must be properly lit and cleaned. Therefore, you have to purify your soul as well as your physical body. You have to work on all your bodies: the physical, etheric, astral and mental ones. These are what you have called yourself, until now. The guidelines for such work on yourself is exactly what you can find in the Catechism and in The Imitation of Christ.

Do not think that you can omit this work on yourself or substitute it by something else. There are some paths which provide methods of achieving certain powers without such moralizing work upon you. However, these substitute measures can give you only substitute powers – that is surrogates or imitations – and these are not what you are looking for. Nevertheless, your inner voice has told you that such paths are not for you. They are for those who cannot or do not want to take a more serious approach. But you can, and – more importantly – you desire it; you want it deeply and truly.

When a student is ready the Master appears, says the ancient proverb. This means that before you find your Master, you must get prepared. Without this preparation all your efforts to attract a Master's attention will be futile. On the other hand, you can be absolutely certain that a Master will see and approach you as soon as you are ready – but never before you are ready. So, if it seems to you that you should have already met your teacher but you have not done so far, this apparently means you are not prepared well enough. You have not deserved his attention yet. As soon as you are prepared – as properly as required – you should never doubt that you will have become worthy of attention.

As Annie Besant rightly wrote:

His entrance on his Path places him in the position of a disciple or chela, on probation, and some single Master takes him under His care, recognizing him as a man who has stepped out of the highway of evolution, and seeks the Teacher who shall guide his steps along the steep and narrow path which leads to liberation. That Teacher is awaiting him at the very entrance of the Path, and even though the neophyte knows not his Teacher, his Teacher knows him, sees his efforts, directs his steps, leads him into the conditions that best subserve his progress, watching over him with the tender solicitude of a mother, and with the wisdom born of perfect insight. The road may seem lonely and dark, and the young disciple may fancy himself deserted, but a "friend who sticketh closer than a brother" is ever at hand..." [Besant A., The Ancient Wisdom]

You have to become familiar with such darkness and loneliness from the very first moment of embarking on the path; darkness and loneliness will be your companions for much of the way. Realize that you are climbing upwards, above ground level. So far, you have been treading on the earth; you have been surrounded by people. Everything seemed to be full of motion, sound and light. Now, where you are going, there is vast space and very few people; you are entering unfrequented paths. Notice however that so far, treading on the earth was not very noisy and crowded at all; it only seemed to be that way to you. You felt loneliness and emptiness among the hustle and bustle of the world. So, this loneliness of the path should not frighten you. Besides, that solitude will not be real because the Master is always at hand, even if you cannot see him yet.

Your Master, great and invisible, watches and leads every step you make. When you enter the path, you will quickly see the effect of his care. Your life, so far, that has been quite steady and quiet, now will start changing constantly, as if it has accelerated. Changes in comfortable and difficult life conditions will become more frequent: periods of intensive activity will be followed by periods of dullness and emptiness. After periods of quiet, weeks or months of intense activity may follow, so intense that someone else would not have strength to endure them. The constant change between storms and good weather is sent upon you by your Master so that you can experience changeability and futility of everything that is material: you can detach your thoughts from worldly matters more easily. Everything, whatever you desire, you will possess, but never at the moment of that desire; only when the need for it goes away. Finally, you will discover that the importance of these things is not in them themselves, but in your desire for them. At the moment when you are most certain that people or things belong to you, that is when they will leave you. At such moments, the loneliness and emptiness will seem, to you, to be almost brutal, unbearable. You should realize that your Master will be especially close to you at such moments. And, after all, you decided to sacrifice everything, to renounce everything in order to obtain the access to the path, to follow his footsteps: he who had nowhere to lay his head.

These are the measures leading to the gate of the path. It is no surprise that you will meet only a small number of people on the other side of it. For others, it is also too hard and difficult: to renounce everything, all personal passions, every thought about themselves. That is why the path has an impression of being empty and dark. But it is dark only temporarily. It appears dark for you because you are still without light. Later on, when the Divine Spark in you expands into the powerful fire, it will illuminate the space around you. Then, your way will be well illuminated because you will have become the light yourself. There is no sun on the path – such as there is on the earth – on the path, everyone must be their own sun.
Chapter 2 – Rules

So, you have decided to embark on the path, to enter it immediately and irretrievably. You have decided to do it today and not half-heartedly, but completely. When you made the firm decision to embark on the path, a feeling of elation immediately appeared somewhere in the depth of your soul: it was as if a heavy burden had fallen off your shoulders. This is a foretaste of the liberation which awaits you at the end of the path. At the same time, you also felt a type of sacred fear, similar to that which is felt by people just before death. This is not really a fear of what might come, but rather the certainty that it will be something great, astonishingly magnificent, something that has never been experienced before now.

Let this holy reverence for the unknown and the greatness that awaits you on the path be the proof that you have already grown ready for it. If you were not mature enough, you would not approach the gate of the path with this holy reverence or apprehension but with self-confidence of a presumptuous person. Cherish and cultivate this sense of reverence in your soul; later it will develop into one of your most powerful abilities.

Your task is to prepare the proper dwelling for your higher self. That is why you have to cultivate feelings of a different kind to those you knew before now. The feelings of bitterness, sadness, depression, envy, dissatisfaction, arrogance, overconfidence, or ambition: they each would make a dwelling too unhospitable for the Divine Spark which will live within you. It is not possible to do much progress on the path if you approach it only mentally, without developing and cultivating appropriate emotions. Even now, while you are reading these words, you should try not only to fully comprehend and carefully consider them, but also to feel them most vividly. Do not be afraid that such self-control might lead to the annihilation of your ability to feel emotions. That would mean the diminution and depletion of the soul has occurred, while your purpose is to enrich and develop it. Only one who tries to enter the path before being mature enough would show such a coldness in their heart.

Now, the time has come for you to learn the rules that are required on the path.

The rules are always and everywhere the same, as they lead to the same goal. The first rule of all schools is the acquisition of knowledge. Even though the knowledge to be acquired may differ in different institutions, there are always teachers and students in every school.

The second rule is that only someone who once was a student, can become a teacher. Your Master who leads you on the path was once a student, as you are today. A false teacher would be one who gives advice to others without having previously gone through the school himself. There are no self-taught people on the path; such people have created their own personal systems: they would be worthless or even harmful for others. Therefore, do not expect that your Master will give you any personal knowledge: do not expect that he will share his personal opinions or experiences with you. No, he will simply lead you and show the way which you have to follow yourself.

A Master will not give you ready answers and will not do anything for you. He will only point out how things can be done: he will give you the principles and help you to correct your mistakes. But he will not give you strength, knowledge or even encouragement; you must want them yourself. He will not explain anything to you, he will only lead you into the conditions where you can find a solution yourself, if you truly desire and seek it. Giving someone ready answers would not be a real help; that would be merely charity. You should also learn this principle from your Master: you will not help anyone by giving him something, whether material or spiritual. You can only be truly helpful by helping others to help themselves.

Furthermore, do not expect to see your Master in his physical body: connection with him cannot be achieved by personal acquaintance but by growing spiritually to his level. The connection with guru (Master) can be only achieved by raising yourself to the spiritual plain where masters reside, not by trying to bring them down on our earthly plain. Do not expect to see any of them but always be ready to answer when they speak to you. A layman, chela (a student) is merely a person who lives in the ordinary world and honestly desires spiritual enlightenment. He has stepped over the boundary line separating him from masters and drawn their attention to himself. He works while masters observe him. Whether he sees a master or not, this has no influence on the results of his work; his good thoughts, words and deeds will bring forth fruit as surely as bad ones. [Blavatsky H.P., Lotusblüten]

In the above quote, a Sanskrit word has been used again; you should get used to this. Guru means a teacher: a Master who takes a student into his guardianship and leads him along the path. Chela is a student who has already gone through a trial period. Before this probationary period he is still a layman, apprentice, student. You are probably able to assume that a certain preparation period – or a trial period – leads to the path. Crafts guilds – a long time ago – had something similar to this. Back then, a person who wanted to be a craftsman, had first to enter an apprenticeship – a training or schooling – in a workshop. During this period he was a student, an apprentice, and had no right to do the job himself. He only had to serve his Master and learn how to use the tools and do the work. His Master watched him and when the Master considered the student to be capable, he let him into his craft workshop to be a probationary chela. Only if a student showed proper skills, could he become a journeyman, and finally, after years, a Master. These requirements in craftsmanship were modelled from the requirements of ancient mystery schools. Knowing these facts, it will be easier for you to understand the rules of such secret schools.

The old craft guilds took their rules for educating young journeymen from the rules of ancient mystery schools. Incidentally, such secret knowledge was once part of every craft. Every Master had his own trade secrets which he had achieved by years of perfecting his craft. Therefore, he was very careful about choosing his students: he needed reliable companions who would not reveal his secrets outside. This is still the same in today's mystery schools. A student must pledge, take an oath, that he will never reveal any secret. Do not think, however, that revealing secrets means revealing them to someone else. They are not that kind of secret. If you speak about them, it only means that someone unprepared – who is not mature enough to understand them properly – will understand them incorrectly. For example, tell the first person you see today that you are working on preparing a dwelling for the Divine Spark within you. He will either not understand you at all, or will misunderstand you. This is the first of your "secrets": you realize that it cannot be "revealed" to anyone. It will be the same with other secrets that you will obtain while on the path.

A student is allowed to enter the temple of higher cognition when he has proven himself to be worthy.

The task to be accomplished now is often described as having to swear an oath never to betray the secret teachings. However, the term oath and betray are inaccurate and even misleading. There is no question here of an oath in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather, it is a matter of experience. We learn how to apply the secret teachings, how to place them at the service of humanity. Only now do we begin to understand the world properly. What is important is not to conceal and withhold the higher truths but to learn to present them tactfully, appropriately, and in the right way. What we learn to "keep silent" about is something quite different. We now acquire the noble quality of silence with regard to many things that we used to talk about before – and especially with regard to how we used to talk about them. We would be poor initiates if we did not place the mysteries we have experienced at the service of the world as much as possible. The only obstacle to communication in this area is the failure of others to understand what we say. Naturally, the higher mysteries are not suited to aimless talk and chatter. But this is not to forbid a person who has reached this stage of development to speak. No one, neither a human nor any other kind of being, will ever impose such an oath upon us. We alone are responsible. We must learn to discover within ourselves what is to be done in every situation. The oath means nothing more than that we are ready to bear such a responsibility."[ Steiner R., How to Know Higher Worlds]

Now you understand what is meant by all those oaths and secrets in mystery schools. Do not expect that you will ever take such oaths or pledges before any high entity. It is the same with your commitment to join the training and become a student of secret knowledge. You are not making any commitments to anybody but to yourself. And if this commitment seems to you to be less important, and less sacred, than if it had been taken in front of the other person: this would only prove that you are not yet ready for the path. Now, you will understand better what Helena Blavatsky says about this kind of the commitment:

If a man who is mature for enlightenment, wants to be admitted as a Master's apprentice, he must bear in mind the agreement with his Master, whether made tacitly or formally, and never forget that this commitment is sacred. This means there is a trial period of seven years. If throughout this time a student is faithful to his Master, through all temptations, then he may become initiated and from then on, he can directly communicate with his Guru. And it is for the Master to decide whether a student, despite his mistakes and sins, is to receive any signs or clues. Only the Guru, who knows the motives and reasons that pushed a candidate to sin, has the right to decide whether the potential candidate should be encouraged. Hence, the first and necessary condition is that a student is to be devoted and faithful to his Master for the duration of the whole trial. The more often the magnetic connection between two of them is broken, the more difficult it becomes to rebuild it; it cannot be required of the Master to waste his force in establishing a connection with someone whose future dropping out the path can be foreseen. Yet, so many of those who expect in advance some proofs of distinction, without meeting the requirements, make complaints to the Master instead of admitting their mistakes! They break the connection ten times a year, and then, they want it to be fixed. I would like to tell those who are dissatisfied, although no one promised them anything: Did you fulfil your duties and keep all your promises? Did you, who blame Masters – those embodiments of compassion, patience, justice and love – who blame them of not favoring you enough, did you lead a sacred life and fulfill the requirements imposed on you? Which of you can tell with a pure heart and conscience that you never made any serious mistake and never doubted Master's wisdom; that you never sought tips from others in your impatience to achieve secret powers; that you never failed to fulfil your duties, whether with you thoughts or deeds. Only if you are such a person you can blame others, not yourself. Undoubtedly, many are called but only few chosen, not many have the patience to persevere to the end, most candidates do not like the simple persistence and consistency of the goal. [Blavatsky H., Lotusblüten]

You can learn a lot from these bitter words of Blavatsky-chela. She addressed them to those who had not grown to the path yet but, in their self-conceit, thought that they were entitled to commence being a chela. Remember this well: it may happen that during seven long years of the trial period you will fall down, get discouraged and give up the path. After that, you might say that, apparently, there are no masters as none have given you any sign of their existence.

Accept that you are going to spend seven years as a probationary student. If you are still not prepared sufficiently after seven years, you will have to start another seven-year probationary period or to give up the path and come back on the wide common road. The rule of every mystery school, both ancient and modern, is always the same: first, there is seven years of probation. When you complete this trial successfully, there will be another seven year period: a period of enlightenment. When the probation is completed: when a student – having gone through the trial successfully –everything that a chela needs to know has been learned. Only then can the student be initiated to become a qualified chela (journeyman) and then work together with Masters. Both of these seven year periods – one as a student, one as a chela – can be doubled or even tripled, if they are not completed satisfactorily. However, failing a trial three times permanently excludes a student from a mystery school. Any other admission to the path will be postponed until his next incarnation.

You will understand easier why each period lasts seven years (and not, for example, four or ten years) when you recall that human life is also divided into several phases, and each of those lasts for seven years. For the first seven years of life, a man builds the physical body, the second period of seven years is for building the etheric body, the third period for the astral body and the forth for the mental one. Only when a man is 29 years old, has his lower self become fully matured. However, even though completely built, these bodies change every seven years: or more accurately, they have the potential to change. After seven years have passed, not one particle in a human body is still the same. It is largely a matter of his choice, if a man builds duplicate replacement particles, or whether they are improved ones. A chela should thoroughly rebuild his bodies, replace all their particles for new, nobler ones. He needs seven years for this task; it is impossible to do it faster. If the work is not completed during seven years, the rebuilding process must be extended for another seven years.

Now, you are no longer surprised that as many as seven years are needed to simply prepare oneself for the path. Until now, you might have believed that you were already prepared, simply because you were searching for it. But it only means that you just wanted to start getting prepared. So, do not expect that you will immediately have a Master by your side and that you will see signs of his presence and care very soon. Your task for the first seven years is to show that you are worthy of his attention. On the other hand, do not doubt that you may see some signs of his care during your preparation period: you will see such signs if you deserve them. There will be exactly as many of them, and exactly of the kind, that you deserve.

Of course, they will not come in the form of secret letters, from your Master, which you find in some carefully locked room: or in the form of books that marvelously come into your possession. Seemingly, there will be nothing spectacular, nothing that you could boast about to people around you to show them as being proof of your Master's interest in you. But if you carefully observe the events of your life – if you manage to link them in the chain of reasons and effects – you will be certain that something is happening that was not there before.

You may start meeting certain people, apparently by chance. They are not masters, but tools in a Master's hands: blind and completely unaware tools. Sometimes, they may tell you something that they have heard from someone else, or bring you a book that would be completely useless for them. Even though totally unaware of the reason, they will always bring you exactly what you need and can make use of. You should understand that these small incidents are guidelines from your Master. You only have to distinguish them from the myriad of daily events to utilize them for the purpose of your preparation.

In the next chapters I will describe precisely what the preparation period looks like. For now, you only have to realize that preparations today are totally different from those of early Christians, and even more different than those used by ancient Egyptians or Indians. You were born with some abilities, abilities that people in ancient times had to develop in themselves by slow and tedious work. In the same way, your task is to develop abilities that will be present in people born a thousand years from now. You are to accelerate the course of natural development, to be at the forefront of humankind, to be a leader in its progress. Therefore, the initial thing for you is to prepare your invisible bodies in which your higher self will dwell. That is why you will not find any hygienic or gymnastic instructions, or even any breathing exercises on the next pages of this book. You might find this kind of instructions in a Hatha Yoga course book, but, for you, they are unnecessary.

If, after seven years of preparation, you successfully complete the trial period, you will be among those few who attained enlightenment after only one seven-year period. The second stage is much more serious but it will be slightly less difficult for you. Now, you are not in any danger of losing your footing with each step you take; you will have learned how to walk with balance on a steep slope. But now, you will encounter unexpected traps and snares of a different nature. Of course, they will not be set for you by your Master or another entity; it is you – and no one else – who set these traps for yourself. On the level of enlightenment, you will gradually achieve more and more knowledge and power. For your lower self, for your self-conceit and egoism, this may pose a dangerous temptation: you may start perceiving yourself as being omniscient and omnipotent. When such haughtiness deceives you, you will not follow Master's footsteps anymore; you will want to follow your own ones. Each time, this will lead you to the wasteland; returning is always sad and humiliating.

During the period of enlightenment, you will go through the second, subsequent, hall; there are going to be three of them, they correspond to three major Guṇas in Sanskrit – tamas , rajas and sattva – and also to three Rosicrucian powers: Ahriman, Lucifer and Christ. Helena Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence says about these halls:

Three Halls, O weary pilgrim, lead you to the end of toils. Three Halls, O conqueror of Mara, will bring thee through three states into the fourth and thence into the seven worlds, the worlds of Rest Eternal. If thou would'st learn their names, then hearken, and remember.

The name of the first Hall is Ignorance – Avidya. It is the Hall in which thou saw'st the light, in which thou livest and shalt die.

The name of Hall the second is the Hall of Learning. In it thy Soul will find the blossoms of life, but under every flower a serpent coiled.

The name of the third Hall is Wisdom, beyond which stretch the shoreless waters of Akshara, the indestructible Fount of Omniscience.

If thou would'st cross the first Hall safely, let not thy mind mistake the fires of lust that burn therein for the sunlight of life.

If thou would'st cross the second safely, stop not the fragrance of its stupefying blossoms to inhale. If freed thou would'st be from the karmic chains, seek not for thy Guru in those Mayavic regions. The Wise Ones tarry not in pleasure-grounds of senses. The Wise Ones heed not the sweet-tongued voices of illusion. Seek for him who is to give thee birth, in the Hall of Wisdom, the Hall which lies beyond, wherein all shadows are unknown, and where the light of truth shines with unfading glory.

If through the Hall of Wisdom, thou would'st reach the Vale of Bliss, Disciple, close fast thy senses against the great dire heresy of Separateness that weans thee from the rest." [Blavatsky H., The Voice of the Silence]

As you may know, The Voice of the Silence is a part of the collection of treatises called The Book of the Golden Precepts. They have existed in India for a very long time; some of them are of pre-Buddhist origin. Realizing that, the archaic tone of The Voice of the Silence should not be a surprise for you. You should also be aware that we have advanced much in our development since the times of ancient Indians. So, you are able to understand the context of the above excerpt, especially of the last of the quoted paragraphs: the Indians still had to close their senses against the great dire heresy – that is against the madness of ego or egoism – in order to reach the Vale of Bliss (nirvana). But nowadays, our task is different: we are not to escape into the Vale of Bliss because our duties are here, on the earth. Closing your senses to achieve peace would be a mistake: you are supposed to master your senses, not to close them. You will learn how to do this on the fifth stage of the path. Your ahamkara (ego) is no longer an obstacle for you but rather your aid: thanks to your desire for an individual life you can be useful to other people. Without it, you would be only an unproductive member of society, its burden.

The first hall is the earthy, physical plane. Avidya – ignorance, tama, Ahriman – rules over it. The fact that you are looking for the access to the path indicates that you are already growing above this plane. Fires of desire ceased to be the light of your life, you do not follow your desires and instincts blindly anymore, and you do not want to be their slave but the ruler.

In the second hall, you will find the blossoms of life: the astral plane is abundant in forms. But there, a serpent – rajas, Lucifer – coils under each flower; this is why Eliphas Levi calls the astral plain "the big serpent". There, you might seem to find a teacher very quickly but it would be a false teacher. In these regions of madness, only wizards or ignorant spiritualists look for their masters. This is merely a Hall of Learning: you should get familiar with its beautiful – but deceptive – illusions, but you should not stay there.

Only in the third hall can you reach your Master. The mental plane is the lowest of those on which Masters work. So, before you reach this hall, do not expect to see your Master or to receive any direct news from him. From the third hall, and from the levels above it, spurts the never drying spring of omniscience: akshara, intuition. The light of uncovered truth only shines there. Before now, you could have reached the Hall of Wisdom only in a state of a deepest, dreamless sleep and you could not preserve any memories of it after waking up. On the path, you will learn how to bring inspirations received from the mental plane to your awareness. You will also learn to identify imaginations of the astral world when you are awake and fully conscious; so far, you have been only able to remember fragments of some of them, from your dreams (svapna). Having gone through these high levels of the path, you will reach the forth state of awareness, turiya, which the ancient Indians could only reach in a trance (samadhi). However, for you it will be accessible at any moment, even when awake, and you will not need to lose your consciousness: your memories will last. But before that, before you have become a chela, a long journey awaits you.

Now, you see the association between the three halls mentioned in The Voice of the Silence and the three stages of the path. Preparing for the path takes place on the physical plane: you should acquire as much as possible on this plane to be able to reach the Hall of Learning. There, you will gradually go through the enlightenment, completely different from that obtainable by physical senses. Your astral senses will open; gradually, you will enter the plane of glamorous illusion (mara), ruled by the king of illusion, who has in his crown a jewel so bright that the mortal get blinded by it. Perhaps you know the beautiful story about Lucifer who, while falling down from the heaven, lost the jewel from his crown, which later served as a goblet in which Holy Grail was kept. Its meaning is more than symbolic and you will understand it later.

You will also understand that Lucifer is not a devil or any other dark force, but – as his name, Light-Bringing, indicates – that humankind acquired a lot of goodness and beauty from him. This is a power that is indeed great, but it is not evil; despite the fact that it may lead people astray if they succumb to it. You will learn how to use it as a powerful measure and you will not confuse it with the goal; you will not become its ruler, not a slave.
Chapter 3 – Mystery Schools

Now you know what kind of "mysteries" await you on the path and why you cannot reveal them to anyone. You also know that the goal of the path has remained unchanged for thousands of years and it will remain the same to the end of this Manvantara. However, the measures that lead to this goal change, depending upon the level of development that humankind achieves. For this reason, the systems of mystery schools were different in different periods of times.

The schools were called mystery schools, and now you easily understand why it was so. They were not mysterious in their essence; they did not hide their existence as they did not need to hide. If an intruder had entered one of them, he would have found nothing improper there, nothing against religion, the state or humanity. He would have only found things incomprehensible and inaccessible for him on his level of development, and thus, mysterious for him. And if the schools were located in inaccessible regions – inaccessible to a casual visitor – this was for a different reason than an attempt to keep a secret. The goal of the schools was – like today – to shape students' astral and mental bodies; that is why favorable conditions in the environment were necessary. Even today, any school, whether primary or university, should not be located in a noisy, crowded and overly busy district because that might disturb the learning process. For schools where students' astral and mental senses are supposed to be developed, even more peaceful and quiet environments are required; in such a school, even the presence of an average man could pose a serious disturbance. This was the only reason that mystery schools were built in isolated, inaccessible places.

But even this need for inaccessibility has changed with the course of human advancement. Do not think that today, if you want to enter a mystery school, you need to travel to Tibet or Greenland. Nowadays, we are able to control outer conditions much better than it was possible for people ages ago. Not only were ancient Indian schools located in the depths of the temples where intruders had no access; to make an access to them even more difficult, the temples themselves were built on islands, amongst wide lakes, in impenetrable forests, or even under ground. Egyptians hid them inside their pyramids and other deserted buildings: the purpose of such buildings is obscure for the majority of people today. You have probably heard that first Christians gathered in catacombs and underground caves: for reasons other than saying their prayers. And in Middle Ages, the monasteries were proper hiding-place for mystery schools. But modern schools do not need to hide and they may exist anywhere, or nowhere. Later, you will understand why this is so.

If you know the book Bhagavad Gita, you also know that it enumerates five paths of Yoga. They are: Sankhya Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Karma-Sanyasa Yoga and Atmasanyam Yoga. If you want to complete all seven rays of Logos, you might add Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga to this list but it will be only a "mask". Hatha Yoga should be replaced by Bhakti Yoga, which describes the path that many of the Christian saints followed most precisely. Hatha Yoga should not be included in the seven original Indian paths; it was created much later, when – under the influence of Tantriks – the Indian philosophy started to assume more and more materialistic approach. You can see that, if we exclude hatha yoga, all other above mentioned paths led to the unification of the lower and higher self, that is to Yoga. However, none of them were comprehensive enough to give the perfect development of all higher human powers as achieved in Raja Yoga. All of them did lead a practitioner above the line of earthly development but not to those reached in Raja Yoga. Today, humanity needs perfect leaders who will be the prototypes of its further development. In our times, even Raja Yoga would be insufficient if it had remained in its original, unchanged form. That is why modern schools have taken only the general skeleton from this system and filled it with the material which is much more suitable for the present level of development.

So far, probably without realizing it, you have been following the path of Karma Yoga. You will be still following it, but from now on, with full awareness. This path – Karma Yoga – does not require attending any mystery schools; it is accessible for everybody, no matter what his life conditions are, without any special knowledge or preparation. The only thing you need to follow it is your good will. If you want to know to what extent you are following this path, you should read and analyze Vivekananda's work, Karma Yoga. Likewise, another great book, Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ is a combination of Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga. On the other hand, Jnana Yoga generally requires the philosophical-scientific approach, and it was always the path most frequently chosen by educated priests. You might read about other paths and about ancient Raya Yoga in specific works, but – at the moment – you do not need all this knowledge. However, it might be useful for you to know some general rules concerning the initiation of a student in various periods of time.

You have already learned that a period of enlightenment – which comes after a period of preparation – resulted in the initiation; only after such initiation could a student be admitted as a chela. During enlightenment a student acquired the ability of making observations with his para-sensory organs and the initiation itself was a test of these newly acquired abilities; it was similar to an exam. The priest who initiated a candidate, put him into a state of deep sleep or trance, a state close to death. A student had to remain in this state of inertia for three days and four nights; it was the so-called "mystical death": some people like to talk about it a lot, even though they know nothing about it. During this time of three and a half days kundalini fire went through its three and a half coils on seven levels, and reached the hole at the top of the skull (brahma-randhara). In other words, a student's astral body left his physical body and he stood face to face with the powers of the astral world. If he was well prepared he was able to confront them without fear or losing the balance of his mind. It was the first time for him when he stood alone, in darkness, without help and care from his guru or from other people. If he completed this trial successfully, he was woken up back to the consciousness, by means of a magnetic touch. Then, he was taught how re-enter this state of trance and wake up from it without the assistance of other person.

After initiation, a chela was given the name of parivrajaka – a homeless wanderer – in Sanskrit, or sotapatti – one who entered the stream – in the Pali language. From that moment, he was a wanderer: he did not have a homeland on this earth and travelled through invisible worlds. Some bonds and ties still attached him to the earth but he was able get rid of them eventually. First, he would throw off the yoke of a threefold kind, namely: the illusion of the personal self, skeptical doubt and superstition. Later you will find out what these yokes mean; for now, bear in mind that throwing them off sometimes required a few subsequent incarnations, they were so tightly connected with human nature. They are even more difficult to throw off nowadays, in our time of materialism and high level of development of the lower self.

Only having thrown off the three yokes, could an aspirant progress to the next level of chelahood and attain the second initiation. After the second initiation, he was called kutichaka – one who is building the hut – in Sanskrit, or sakridagami – one who will be reborn only one more time – in Pali. Having gone through the astral plane, he made his residence – built a house – for himself on the mental plane. There, he was given a new key of knowledge. He had already received one after the first initiation: it was the knowledge of the astral world. The second key meant the knowledge of the mental world. Either in the same incarnation or in the next one, a chela proceeded to the third initiation, which made him a swan – one who was astride Hamsa – for Indians, or anagami – no longer incarnating – for Buddhists. On this stage, he was throwing off the subsequent fourth and fifth yokes: the bonds of desiring anything for himself and bonds of liking and disliking. Then, he was ready for the fourth and last initiation after which he became a Paramahamsa – beyond I – for Indians, or Arhat – one who is worthy – for Buddhists. He gradually threw off the last bonds: the desire to live in any form, and finally, even without a form. Getting rid of ahamkara was equal to cutting off the last connection binding him to the individual life. After that, the drop came back to the ocean: an initiate disappeared from the world and dived into the state of nirvana. This was the final stage of ancient Indian Raja Yoga.

You might have had a distorted concept of what nirvana is; that is common among materialistic minds of the West. For western minds, who consider their lower bodies to be the basis of their existence, it is obvious that being without them equals to non-existence. But for you, who undoubtedly feel your higher self and are going to unite with it, such existence without a form (arupa) does not mean annihilation, but rather contrary to it: omnipresence. For you, nirvana is not the end of existence, but its extension and enrichment.

More about the levels of the path: for Indians, the last stage of Yoga was throwing off the yokes that were binding the Divine Spark to lower bodies, so that it could abandon them and return to its primal, ancient source. In those ancient times it was a natural thing because the Spark had been living in the corporeal layers for a relatively short period of time. The Divine Spark had still felt alien in them and the longing attracted it back to its homeland, the arupa planes. However, since those times, we have undergone a significant evolutionary process. Christ did not descend to the earth to take our souls from here but to show us the possibility of developing them while still on earth. Our task is not to run away from the earth but to use every possible mean for its advancement. The Indians were like small children who were sent to school, and wanted to run back home. We are the students of higher grades, we understand that running away from school is pointless, so we stay there willingly to learn as much as we can.

Indians' souls still had remembered vividly their blissful time on the plains of arupa, without the corporeal layers that tied them and seemed to be a heavy, unbearable burden. That is why their mystery schools used methods that could quickly connect them again with these plains; methods that would unite them with the homeland of the higher self. In later periods, human souls gradually resigned themselves to their fate: they got more and more interested in their outer layers and their earthly surroundings. For example, the only ability that the Chaldeans preserved from their ancient knowledge was the ability to feel the influence of celestial bodies on their organisms: this was the root of their astrology. Today, astrology is considered by people of the West to be a superstition, even though until Kepler's times it was inseparable from astronomy. Thus, the Chaldean mystery schools were much more materialistic compared to the Indian ones. They encompassed, apart from students' work on themselves, what we today call a science. A Chaldean initiate was not only a yogi, or a saint, but also a scientist with broad rational knowledge. On the other hand, an ancient Indian initiate was only able to pass knowledge to others when he was in the state of turiya; his knowledge was drawn directly from the arupa worlds, it did not come from rational and logical reasoning but rather from a direct revelation.

The Egyptians went even further in their materialism: was manifested in embalming corpses and surrounding them with the objects of everyday use. In their mystery schools, only a very distinct tradition of the prior connection of a human being with the arupa world was preserved; thus, their initiates had some mood of inevitable acceptance. Isis had been already separated from Osiris and they were not able to restore their relation. This also meant that the level of their students' initiation was lowered. The mystery schools were not able to make a student's young and weak individuality independent. They only taught him how to read others' thoughts in turiya, they could not develop in him the ability to create his own thoughts. This is a little similar to today's concept of telepathy. You will understand this relation better when you realize that our epoch is the recurrence of the Egyptian one but, of course, as its opposite pole.

The times that directly preceded Christ's descent onto the earth were the times of spirit's deeper fall into materialism. At the same time, it was the awakening of the individual soul. Therefore, in Greece and Phoenicia there were no more mystery schools in their proper meaning. Instead of them, there were mysteries and schools of philosophy. The schooling was completely rational and the purpose of mysteries was to show and teach – by means of theatrical performances – facts that could not have been expressed in lectures by using words that were too specific. Christianity restored the original high level of education in mystery schools and enriched them with all spiritual achievements that Christ gave to humankind. Since the times of Christ, a new connection between lower and higher worlds has been established; this was done in a new, completely unique way. Thanks to Christ's sacrifice, people do not have to escape from the earth anymore, they do not have to dive into yogis' sleep in order to contact higher worlds. Now, we can establish this connection here, on the earth. This is what is meant by the communion of saints, a term in the Catechism which you might have not understood before now.

You understand why nowadays we do not have such mystery schools that existed in ancient times, and why they can be anywhere and nowhere. Separate schools are simply not needed. Christ showed us the way that everyone – without exception – can follow, regardless of how difficult and unfavorable, for self-work, their living conditions are. There is no such a life situation that would prevent a man from rising to the heavenly worlds, where he can find Christ. Everybody, who truly desires it, can do it. Now, you can see how extremely important that little book, The Imitation of Christ, can be. It is not surprising that even contemporary Indians study it. Sometimes, you may hear a claim about the alleged superiority of Buddhism over Christianity; you should not be misled by this claim. Consider that Buddha's activity occurred six centuries before Christ descended onto the earth. Humanity had progressed six hundred years in its development and needed something more than Buddha offered. It was Christ who gave that "something more" to humanity. He said concisely: I am the way, the truth, and the life; with these few words, he showed us the way into higher worlds: through Him.

Now, you are not confused at all that I speak about higher worlds, and then about higher self; you have realized that higher worlds, in which the higher self dwells, belong to the arupa plains. There are no forms on those plains, no limits, no distinctiveness. There, your Devine Spark and Christ are one. By establishing a connection between your lower and higher self, you simultaneously establish a connection with Christ. This is modern yoga; it is not so different from the ancient one if you understand that nirvana is Christ. Remember this and you will never get confused by contrary claims by so-called yogis or occultists.

As you can see, modern Yoga does not need any kind of mystery school. Your mystery school is right here, just where you are sitting at the moment. Two people create it: you and your Master. He is still unknown to you, but he is already present.

Even though mystery schools are not necessary nowadays, you can still find some of them, scattered around many places in Europe, Asia and America. Some of them do practice yoga, but others take advantage of their students' ignorance, or even vanity. The more genuine schools go either in the direction of Indian wisdom or of Egyptian wisdom; some schools have made a strange mixture of Hatha Yoga and Kabbalah. There are also schools that call themselves hermetic or Rosicrucian, even though they do not have anything in common with these movements, apart from the name.

But you do not need any of these. A real mystery school is not a place or a building but the work. The purpose is not to surround yourself with mystery but to do the work. You can start this work at any moment and wherever you are. Even in public schools some individuals are allowed to come to school only to take the final exam. This is the same in your case: you will need a mystery school when you are ready to take an exam. You will be informed just in time – not earlier – where to go to take it. Do not ask about it before because no one will tell you the truth. When the time comes, you will receive some hints about your school, and you will not share this information with anyone else either. You will not even mention that you know something about it. Before this moment comes, let it be a myth for you.

So, the school will become reality for you when you start approaching the initiation. When the right moment comes, you will meet people who will tell you about it. This will not be anything special or secretive but it will be very true. And when it comes, you will be already so high on the path that you easily know what they tell you is true. So now, do not bother with it but start working on yourself with all the patience and persistence you are capable of. Later, you will see how much patience and persistence is required on the path, much more than you have shown so far. One of your everyday tasks will be developing these abilities – patience and persistence – to the greatest extent.

At the moment, you only need to have no prejudice that one school may lead to a different goal than another. As the seven different paths of ancient Indian Yoga were simply like the seven colors of one sun ray – split by the prism of the earthy plane – in the same way, different modern schools are all the streams flowing into one big river. Hence, for example, the Rosicrucian school – if it is genuine – is not different from a Christian, Scottish, or Hermetic one. When on the proper level of the path, you will infallibly distinguish whether a school is real or not, from its certain features which will become understandable for you.

Remember as well, from the very beginning of the path, that The Voice of the Silence accurately warns you not to seek for thy Guru in those Mayavic regions. Bear in mind that a real Initiate does not self-appoint himself as an initiate; only an adept of Hatha Yoga might do so. A real Initiate does not use any title and, at first sight, does not differ from an average person. You can spend years on intimate terms with him and not even know that he is an initiate. First, you must be equal to him to find out who he is, or rather, to distinguish it. Among initiates, making acquaintances, introducing each other or exchanging any secret signs or words is pointless. Each of them sees immediately who the other person is; they already know each other from higher planes, so there cannot be any mistake or doubt.

This ability to see other initiates – this conscious connection with them by way of subtle bodies – was not possible for people before Christ's descent. This is why nowadays mystery schools in their original form are not necessary any longer. A student's constant presence close to his Master is not required either. Since Christ's times, a self-initiation has become possible. Paracelsus is believed to be the first self-initiate. His initiation can be considered to be by his own effort because he did not have a Master in the physical body; however, it is obvious that he needed him in the astral or mental body. Similarly, Christian saints or the Rosicrucians usually did not attend any mystery schools before their initiation.

In the next chapter, you will read about the preparatory levels and levels of enlightenment. You will see that schools are not necessary to do exercises required at these levels. If you have come across the terms such as: concentratio, meditatio, or contemplatio in the Christian esotericism, this can be treated as proof that secret exercises were not unknown to medieval monasteries. Similarly, you can find some terms in the Rosicrucian teachings which later made their way into the secular science, where – under the influence of materialism – their original meaning was distorted. Consider, for example, the meaning of such words as imagination, inspiration or intuition. We say that someone imagines something when he thinks about something that does not exist, when he has illusions or hallucinations. Some people seek inspiration in alcohol or drugs. Or they speak about intuition when they intuitively feel an aversion to certain food, or when they intuitively rattle their prayers while they are actually thinking about something completely different.

Do not think that nowadays there are no Rosicrucian, Christian, Buddhist or other mystery schools. They still exist but there is no requirement for you to be there personally. You may attend such a school if it does not prevent you from fulfilling your duties or life tasks. However, do not expect that you will see an advertisement for a mystery school or that someone will recommend one to you. If you have a need for such a school, your Master will show it to you, even if you do not sense his presence yet. There is no doubt that schools which advertise themselves publically, and take fees for teaching, are false.
Chapter 4 – The Path

Now, you have learned to distinguish the difference between ancient Indian Yoga and modern Yoga and you will have no problem understanding that Yoga levels correspond to our present level of development – even though their names may sound archaic. It is proper to preserve the Sanskrit terminology because there are no words, in English or in any other European language, which would equally precisely and concisely express the notions that have their names in Sanskrit.

You may also come across these names in various European compilations and works, often used unquestioningly. This can be confusing because Hatha Yoga uses the same terms as Raja Yoga, even though they have different meaning. These terms are as follows: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. You probably realize that these eight levels should not be confused with the eight levels of the Noble Eightfold Path described in every Buddhist Catechism. Later you will discover that the whole Eightfold Path actually is only one of the levels of Yoga.

When you reach the first level of your path you will notice how much it differs nowadays from the equivalent level of ancient Indian Yoga. Yama – level one – literally means restraint and therefore involves passive cleaning. At this stage, your task is not to build new features into your bodies but to restrain yourself from repeating the same faults. In ancient Indian teachings, yama consisted of five parts (five yamas): non-violence, non-lying, non-stealing, moderation and non-acceptance of gifts. You can conclude from this, how much we have developed since Raja Yoga times. For us, each of these directives, possibly excluding the fifth one, is so obvious that even listing them is not necessary. But later you will see that even in our times these directives do have their justification, if they are truly understood according to the level of our development.

The second level of the path is called niyama. At this level, the discrepancy between Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga is brought into focus. The former encompasses mostly physical practices in its six principles: bhakti, neti, laukiki, dhauti, trataka and kapalbhati – their actual meanings are irrelevant for you. Raja Yoga also consists of six principles, called Shat-Sampatti. They are completely different in their content. Shankara closed these six-fold virtues in the following terms:

Shama – control of thoughts,

Dama – control of deeds,

Uparati – to accept life as it is,

Titiksha – patience and forbearance of external unfavorable situations,

Shraddha – faith in guru and yourself,

Samadhana – inner balance and uniformity of purpose.

This shows that niyama is an active work because it is not limited to restraining yourself from sinning but the intent is to build-in completely new features into your etheric, astral and mental bodies.

The third level of Hatha Yoga – asana – means body posture. According to its materialistic trait, it is the first and an extremely important level. It consists of huge number of rules for assuming certain body postures during breathing or other physical exercises. Some of the asanas are very arduous (mudras) or simply perverse (vajroli). In Raja Yoga the term asana means an easy body posture that is possible to maintain, without getting tired, during long exercises in pratyahara and dharana. For Indians the lotus position (padmasana) was the most appropriate; for the Europeans who are not used to sitting with their legs crossed, it might be too tiring.

Pranayama literally means breath control. It is the fourth level and one of the most important in Hatha Yoga because it aimed, by means of various breathing exercises, to kindle the kundalini fire and to make it affect the chakras in the etheric body. On the other hand, Raja Yoga achieved the development of these chakras by quite a different way, namely by exercises of the etheric and astral bodies. The kundalini fire awakened spontaneously when the chakras were activated and functioned properly. Modern Yoga follows the same approach; it replaces those breathing exercises – dangerous for European organisms – with rhythm. So be aware of this and do not let your impatience or suggestions from false masters tempt you into trying any of those breathing exercises.

At a certain point of this book you will find some tips for exercises which are safe and healthy. Remember that all exercises taken from Hatha Yoga must be always carried out to the end if you do not want them to be dangerous for your lungs or your brain. In any case, if you should fail to resist the temptation of practicing Hatha Yoga, this would be proof of your immaturity to be on the path.

You should be aware, that while you are on the path, you will often encounter such temptations. They will be appearing more and more forcefully, especially from the hatha yogis from astral plain. The best food for such temptations is always your impatience and your conceit. Very often, it will seem to you that you are far enough on the path to see some results of your chakras' activity. You will think that not seeing them means that the way chosen by you is perhaps too slow or even does not lead to the goal at all. And this is exactly what will tempt you to try different ways.

The fifth level, pratyahara, is the last of the required steps in Hatha Yoga. It consists of mental exercises and these are not something that hatha yogi likes. In Raja Yoga, on the other hand, this level was always absolutely crucial, as it still is today.

To put it simply, pratyahara is the exercising of attention; its aim is mastering attention so that it is not distracted by external stimuli but it is fully dependent on the man's will, on his free choice, and is directed according to his intention. For example: you are reading this book and putting all your attention to the sentence you are reading at the moment. Suddenly, you hear the noise coming from the neighborhood or just the rain lashing against the window. You immediately get distracted from the reading and your attention turns to that sound. Your attention does not depend on your will but on external stimuli which reach your awareness through your senses. Your task in pratyahara will be to master your attention entirely and to use it as an obedient tool.

You should learn how to attach your attention where you want it to be and not let it follow the impressions from outside. When you are reading, your attention will not dare to get distracted from the book or to escape to any sensory impressions, like hearing or touch. If you focus your attention on one of the senses, for example eyesight, all the other senses must be silent; they must not distract you, divide your attention, nor let it drift in multiple directions.

When you perform such exercises with each of your senses in turn, you will learn how to control them, rather like a telephone exchange that controls all the stations connected to it. At any moment, it is possible to switch off the call with one of the stations and establish the connection with another one. It would be a poorly managed telephone exchange if during the conversation with one station, the other one switched on spontaneously and disrupt the previously started conversation. With some proficiency, you will also learn how to switch off all the stations completely; how to detach your attention from the world so that you do not receive any external impressions when you do not want to receive them.

What I called earlier the preparation, consists of these five levels. Based on this concise information, you can see how much work from yourself – and how serious it is – that you are required to do to prepare for the path of enlightenment. All exercises that these five levels consist of are merely preparatory exercises before you can start your own secret practices. They all aim at controlling your bodies, both physical and invisible ones, with your will, to make them skillful and reliable tools when the time for proper exercises comes.

You would achieve false and weird results if you tried to carry out exercises of higher nature with inadequate tools, disobedient to your will and acting on their own. The exercises of higher, more advanced nature will give you enlightenment that would be premature on the lower levels. This would be abnormal, similar to forcing young children to do a job only suitable for an adult.

Do not think that during seven long years devoted to working on the five lower levels of yoga, you will always be in the dark. Do not think that you will never see any light which would ensure that you are on the right path and that your exercises lead to the intended results. Sometimes, especially when you are about to lose your faith and hope, you will experience something that will encourage you anew. I will tell you more about these experiences later. I have only mentioned them now so that you know that your path will be difficult and arduous due to its steepness. That steepness in itself will make the views you see more and more delightful at each level.

The subsequent, higher levels of Raja Yoga go in a completely different direction that the corresponding levels of hatha yoga, even though their names remain the same. So, from now on, I shall not mention Hatha Yoga any more. You can see yourself, that the terms such as: dharana, dhyana and samadhi are only empty words for hatha yogis. In Raja Yoga, on the other hand, they preserve their full meaning; in modern Yoga their meaning is even richer.

The sixth level and the first that requires higher practices is dharana. This, in European terms, corresponds to concentration. Focusing attention on one object for a long period of time was practiced at the pratyahara level because its aim was to train attention so that it does not stray from one impression to another. It stays on the object chosen by you and does not get distracted by external stimuli. However, the exercise of pratyahara is rather passive because its aim is limited to not letting the attention go out of your control. In plain language, its purpose is to make you less scatter-brained. In dharana, on the other hand, more activity is demanded from you; you are supposed to have full control of your attention to keep it on the chosen external object as long as you wish. The chosen object can be a certain point in your body, or in space, or even a memorized picture. This is a crucial preparatory step for the next level of your path.

The seventh level, dhyana, corresponds to the European terms meditation or contemplation. However, it is not meditation in its commonly understood meaning, that is: the mere wandering of your thoughts, here and there, to consider various assumptions and possibilities in one's life. It is not the rational thinking process. The object of contemplation in dhyana is not a material, corporeal thing but abstraction. All thinking about physical objects – even about their seemingly non-physical features, like for example the design of a new invention or an idea for a poem or a picture – still belongs to dharana. Dhyana centers around abstraction, around notions unconnected to the physical world; therefore, its object is something that exists at the heights of the arupa plains. If you are thinking about a dog you saw, about its appearance, color, breed, features – you are practicing dharana. However, if you choose for the object of you meditation not the specific dog, that you know with your senses, but a dog in general, dog as a species, you will practice dhyana. In that case, you meditate about the features of a dog, its characteristics, its role in nature, its relation to a man; about things that do not exist on the physical plain, even though their results manifest themselves on this plane. Thinking about a good deed done by your friend will be still dharana, but meditation about goodness as a notion, as a virtue – this is dhyana.

When you, by means of various exercises, get skillful at both dharana and dhyana, you will notice the essential difference in the traits that accompany both these states. Practicing dharana for a long period of time will make your mind fatigued. It is like solving a mathematical problem, one that is perhaps not very difficult but requires numerous calculations; or like the fatigue that comes from the careful reading of long specifications for a machine or device.

On the other hand, after dhyana practice, no matter how long it has lasted, you will not feel any fatigue at all: you will experience improved mental capacity and freshness. Do you know why this is so? Because in dhyana you will have done, for the first time, exercises that do not occupy the physical brain. You will not think with your brain, so it does not get tired but relaxes for the time of the meditation. You will remain fresh, of course, on the condition that you have acquired proficiency in pratyahara and dharana beforehand; in other words your attention is able to stay where you want it to be. Previously, when external stimuli constantly distracted you, you had to make an effort to direct your attention back to the thing you intended and those efforts made you tired.

You will frequently hear from other practitioners, and maybe it will also happen to you, that meditation makes you sleepy, or that you actually fall asleep. The reason is either – as previously mentioned – mind fatigue due to lack of skill in pratyahara, or you can be sleepy simply because your brain is inactive during meditation and therefore falls asleep. So, if you have practiced pratyahara and dharana diligently and despite this fact, you are sleepy or even fall asleep during practicing dhyana, there is no reason to worry.

In dhyana you do not think with your physical brain but with your mental body; so even if you fall asleep, you are still practicing your meditation and it will be as fruitful as if it was done in wakefulness. The fact that you do not remember anything from your practice does not downgrade its worth; the time will come when you remember all your experiences from sleep and you will also remember the content of your meditation. I am not mentioning other reasons for sleepiness during meditation because they only affect people who have not grown up to meditation yet. You can imagine that a person who is not able to think in abstract terms will simply fall asleep from boredom, not tiredness; for he has to focus on an object which is unavailable to him. Such a person is only able to use his physical brain that cannot manage the task.

Samadhi is the last level. You can find some information about it in books. In Raja Yoga it is also called a yogi's sleep. You already know that ancient Indians were able to reach the arupa plane only in a trance; for them, it was the only way to experience turiya. In the times of ancient Indians, reaching dhyana was reserved exclusively for most excellent students because in others the ability to think in abstract terms was not yet developed. What you will find in old Indian books, and what may fill you with admiration for their extremely sublime ideas, does not come from the minds of people of that time but from direct revelations obtained in the state of samadhi. What a yogi was telling in his inspired sleep, was diligently noted by his companions; and even if they did not understand it, they were certain that it was infallibly true. After waking up from the sleep, even the yogi himself did not understand what he had told in samadhi because he was not able to comprehend it with his mind. However, for you, this is another opportunity to see and judge how long is the way that we have travelled in our development since those times.

In dhyana, the result of your meditation is a deepened knowledge about the object you choose. In meditation you reach the arupa plane where there are no forms, no individuality. There, your thoughts are thoughts of other entities from this plane, and their thoughts become yours. You bring the ideas of others from this plane; in other words, you bring yourself an inspiration. That is why mediation deepens your knowledge about an object. In addition to what you already know about that object, you also acquire what others know about it. Study this fact carefully and you will come to understand the idea of what inspiration really is. The fact that a person receives it from outside, not from within himself, does not diminish the worth of an inspiration. You cannot be certain that inspirations do not come from your higher self – and therefore from yourself – because your higher self belongs to the arupa plane where identity or separateness do not exist.

This is how things appear in dhyana and if you understand it well, you will also understand the next level above it – samadhi. I speak about samadhi in terms of modern yoga; earlier it was a state of being in a trance. While in dhyana your thoughts about an object become one with the thoughts of others, in samadhi you become one with the object itself. You simply become it. Try to comprehend these words best you can: you become one with the object. You immerse in it, plunge into it and blend into oneness. Through samadhi, you acquire the most comprehensive knowledge which can be obtained about any object because you become one with it. In dhyana you received such knowledge through yours and other people's thoughts. Here, having immersed yourself in samadhi, you will experience the object directly, not through thoughts. You will feel that you are that object, you live its life, you receive its impressions, you go through its experiences.

This immersion, or in terms of European mystery schools – contemplation – leads directly to intuition. Notice, however, that the term intuition is very often used incorrectly because only few understand what it really means. It is often confused with instinct; but you probably now know that the former is the super-conscious state while the latter is subconscious. Intuition is the opposite pole of instinct, not the same. Animals have instinct and it is inborn in them; only people have intuition, on the condition that they rise to this level by their own efforts. There are people in which intuition seems to be inborn but you know how to explain this fact. These people have developed it in their previous lives and now, in their current incarnation, they already have it.

Contemplation leads to intuition. The former is the activity, while the latter is its result. In ancient Indian Raja Yoga the three levels: dharana, dhyana and samadhi together were called samyama. So, contemplation in its real meaning is samyama, while samadhi is only the state which allowed a yogi to practice contemplation. It is obvious that in order to succeed in contemplation one needs both dharana and dhyana because without concentration and meditation it is impossible to attain contemplation and to achieve the results that the intuition brings.

Do not think that dharana, dhyana and samadhi are solely mental practices.

In the same way as we can focus our thoughts and immerse in them, it is possible to focus and immerse in emotions. You will practice such meditation and concentration exercises not only with your mental body but with etheric and astral ones as well. They are equally important and necessary, too much mental exercise would lead to asymmetrical development. You would develop only few of your extrasensory organs while others would remain dormant; your organism would be incomplete and crippled. Depending on the method of meditation, you achieve different results and develop different extrasensory organs.

So you can see that mediation is not just a theoretical exercise. Its results are immediately visible in higher bodies as they cause chakras – that is lotus flowers in these bodies – to gleam and move. Your guru will notice them and evaluate if they are working properly; when you achieve a certain level you will see them too. Before you see them, you will have proofs of their activity because you will be able to get knowledge about your previous lives and even about our earth's incarnations.

In dharana, dhyana and samadhi you work in your invisible bodies; it should be obvious that the results of this work will also manifest in those bodies. Now, you understand how misleading the path of Hatha Yoga is; it tries to trigger the development of extrasensory, non-physical organs by means of mechanical, physical exercises. To a certain extent, such results can be achieved by mechanical exercises; this is as if a person devoid of the sense of hearing and without sheet music tried to learn how to automatically play a few melodies on a musical instrument. It would be possible; yet, you see clearly that it is not the right way.
Chapter 5 – Results

Having read briefly about the general rules for practices that apply on the path, you now realize that it is impossible to develop non-physical organs by means of physical exercises. Moreover, the general picture of the systems used by mystery schools is now beginning to shape in your mind. It is similar to the technique that would be used by a man who wanted to rebuild his house. First of all, he would clean it thoroughly of all the things that are not necessary and which would interfere with the process of the rebuilding. After the cleaning, but not earlier, he could start to renovate the concrete: that is, to use better material to replace the old one. Without prior proper cleaning, he would have no access to those places that required such work – he would not have full control over the objects requiring his efforts. He would not be even able to see which parts required repair.

Your task is similar. First of all, the dwelling you are preparing for your higher self must be cleaned of all unneeded and harmful things. This dwelling consists of your mental, astral, etheric and physical bodies. Therefore, you must clean each of them of all redundant things. You have to clean your mental body of the thick and opaque cloud of the thought-forms surrounding it. (Thought-forms are entities created by thinking, whether by a human or someone else. They are living creatures, existing for shorter or longer period of time.) You have to clean your astral body of its unnecessary desires and urges, and so, make it peaceful. You have to eradicate unwanted habits and addictions – even the oldest ones – from your etheric body. As for your physical body, you do not need to cleanse it because it does not have any good or bad qualities. It is merely a machine that will work as long as the etheric body stays in it and pushes it to work. When you clean your etheric body, your physical body will get pure as well.

Your work should be a top-down process which means that you start from your mental body. When you clean your mental body and remove the thought-forms that surrounded it, the result will be similar to that achieved by cleaning windows in the house. So far, there has been an impenetrable cloud obstructing your view of the outside. Having cleaned your mental body, you will be able to look outside and receive thoughts from others. You have learned that using others' thoughts is called inspiration. Its more materialistic approach is erroneously called telepathy because, if we wanted to be precise, telepathy would be more like feeling from a distance.

Along with the mental cleaning you must gain control of your mental body. Translated into Sanskrit, it is pratyahara and dharana. When you learn how to rule over your mental body, your faults such as distractedness and absent-mindedness, will vanish. Your thoughts will be clear, distinct, precise and strong. You will personally experience how much truth there is in the statement: People do, think and say so many unnecessary things that they do not have time for what is essential. You will stop creating unnecessary thoughts that lead nowhere and you will learn how to bring your thought to a conclusion every time, without abandoning the unfinished process. Thanks to this, your ideas will become extremely distinct, thorough, and logical. Instead of constantly creating a thick cloud of weak, frail, powerless thought-forms, you will start creating fewer but more powerful and vigorous ones. In practice, this will mean improving your mental capability, clear-headedness, logical reasoning and certainty of facts.

First of all, the work on your astral body will bring you great peacefulness, despite increased delicacy of feelings. Today you may be not capable of some emotions but, on the other hand, some other feelings easily upset the balance of your soul and overwhelm you completely, against your will. It happens that one moment you get easily discouraged or upset, for the most trivial reason, and in the next moment, you switch to uncontrolled joy, even if you understand that the reason was too trivial to cause such a strong reaction. This constant change of mood, the domination of different feelings over your soul, will finally yield to peacefulness of the soul, to certain tranquility. Practicing pratyahara, you will learn how to control your emotions, how to choose proper ones and not to let unwanted feelings into your soul. Moreover, you will learn the economy of feelings. You will not squander them needlessly; you will be reserved towards trivial issues but more generous about the objects that deserve deeper feelings. Your sensitivity to emotional stimuli will rise but it will depend on your will whether you yield to them or remain indifferent. You will be master of all your emotions while, until so far, you have been their slave.

The most striking change will be seen in your etheric body. Your character, your habits, and even your voice and behavior, will be completely reshaped: you will become a new person. Flaws of your character, even minor ones, will vanish one after another; your addictions will disappear completely and your health will flourish to an extent unknown before. People who have known you for many years will attribute these changes to some extremely advantageous external conditions. But the truth is that they will be triggered by one factor: your strong willpower and willingness to do good. At a certain level on the path, you will notice that some mesmeric abilities will awaken in your etheric body, without your slightest effort. You will be able to use them to heal people, animals and plants around you. However, do not treat this as your profession. This is a gift, so do not treat it like a source of income.

You already know that the physical body is merely a machine kept in motion by the etheric body. The reshaping of your physical body will go parallel with reshaping the etheric body. I have already mentioned that your health will flourish; simultaneously you will attain physical strength and extreme endurance to withstand hardship, hunger or lack of sleep. Your taste will change; you will lose your interest in spicy, pungent food, alcoholic drinks and drugs. Some people try to start rebuilding themselves from their physical bodies instead of starting from the top. They switch to vegetarianism, they restrain from tobacco or coffee and think that by doing so they can develop supernatural powers. However, they confuse cause and effect. A liking for vegetarian food comes as a result of exercises of higher nature and therefore, vegetarianism is not the reason for any extrasensory development.

You will comprehend now, and later you will personally experience, why this book does not contain any rules regarding the nutrition of the physical body. There are no principles or imperatives of this kind on the path. Physical organisms of humans (teeth and intestines) have adapted both to plant food and meat. Moreover, centuries-long adaptation to such substances as coffee, tobacco, and tea have made people resistant to the toxic effects of the alkaloids that they contain. So, if you are able to go without meat, coffee and tea effortlessly and without any harm to your health, you may cross them off your list of food. If you do this, your astral body – which has been too short-tempered before now and got out of control easily – will quieten. However, if a lack of these kinds of food, which you have got used to over many years, causes you malfunction in your physical, etheric or astral body (such as anxiousness or nervousness), and they do not subside after further abstinence, it is better to continue to consume them. Fighting against these small inclinations for some foods or drinks, needlessly wastes your energy which you need for achieving more serious goals.

However, there is big difference between slightly stimulating substances mentioned above and drugs in their medical meaning, like alcohol in various forms, morphine, cocaine, etc. The former ones are usually needed in the same amount over time, while the need for the latter ones increases with time: this proves how dangerous they are. They take control of you, weaken your willpower and make you unable to be a student of mystery knowledge.

I do not think that you are an addict, because such people do not enter the path. I simply want you to realize how extremely harmful drugs and alcohol can be. You may already know this because sometimes, very rarely, you might have been in the situation when some dose of alcohol or drug is necessary, simply as medication. Drugs will never be necessary for you but only for your bodies, as if they were your animals. You might have heard that race horses are given some wine before the race, and elephants, some rum, after doing hard work. In a similar way, in some cases, you might also need to trigger the energy of your bodies by the use of small doses of alcohol, caffeine, etc.

When you are high enough on the path, you will be able to evaluate which stimulating substances are justified in some cases. You should remember that these substances will be effective and have the desired impact on the body only if the body has not been inured to them by regular usage. You can never give in to the temptation to provide your body with such substances on a regular basis, even if other people do so. You are required to control your bodies and only when you decide it is right, are you to administer the proper dose to them.

Based on what have been said so far, you can visualize a rough picture of the results that the exercises may bring. But it is not everything. It is possible to achieve the described results even without entering the path and without doing exercises in modern yoga, simply by means of persistent and constant work on yourself, on reshaping the character and mind. But, if such desirable results can be achieved by work which can be carried out in an ordinary way, you certainly have the right to expect more when you work more. When you do the work above the ordinary standards, the results of this work rise above normal standard too, and your abilities rise above the abilities of an average human, to the para-normal level.

Inspiration is one such para-normal ability: as well as is telepathy, even though more and more people are born with this innate ability. Healing abilities cannot be inborn and can only be developed by a person with more than average mental control. You will attain them spontaneously. Your inspirational ability to understand thoughts of people around you will be joined by the ability to feel their emotions and moods. However, do not think that this knowledge of others' thoughts may be the cause of any indiscretion. No one will be harmed by your knowledge because your moral level will be already so high that it will not allow for any, even most trivial, desire to abuse this ability.

You will not disclose to anyone, even in jest, what you have learned from other people's feelings or thoughts. You will also learn not to draw any conclusions for yourself from what you know. If you did not learn it, people's faults, their ugly thoughts and low feelings that you can now see, would make you feel an aversion towards them and you could not respect them anymore. This must never happen. You should like, love and have compassion for all people, no matter how good or bad, how wise or stupid they are. Their faults should not repel you from them nor make you disrespect them; on the contrary, they should evoke compassion and willingness to help them. Soon, you will realize that evil does not exist and there are no evil people; there are only errant ones who are misled because they do not know. Sinning comes from ignorance (avidya, tamas), not from evil. Ahriman and Lucifer are not devils nor wicked demons. They are forces – neither good nor bad as such – which can be harmful only when people, in their ignorance, yield to them instead of using them for making developmental progress.

For the ambitious, the most tempting abilities are various forms of clairvoyance. You will attain this abilities and, what is important, they will come without your effort. Clairvoyance will awaken in you when you do exercises aimed at something completely different; you will receive it as a by-product, as a simple consequence of awakening your para-sensory organs. The first images may appear as soon as you practice pratyahara; you may even notice some flashes if it beforehand. They may be in the form of colorful patches or shapes that do not belong to any physical object. Gradually, these images will become more and more distinct and then, you will be able to perceive astral beings. In a similar way, your understanding of other people's thoughts will develop into seeing the form-thoughts in their colors and shapes. Next, you will proceed to perceiving the higher beings who have the mental bodies as their lowest layer. At the moment, it is too early to speak about the benefits you will gain from intuition. You will be able to fully comprehend and evaluate them when you experience them.

When your etheric body and its organs develop, the first results will be a gradual improvement of your memory, of your experiences during sleep, and the ability to use the etheric body independently of your physical body. You will be able to withdraw your etheric body from the physical one, to move objects with it and materialize it so that it is visible to other people. You will never wish to use these newly obtained abilities to impress others just to evoke their respect. On the other hand, when it is necessary, you will use them without hesitation, for example when you or another person is in danger and the rescue by normal human means is impossible or will be too late. Additionally, your ability to use the etheric body will enable you to know the beautiful world of etheric beings, which do not have a physical body, such as gnomes, leprechauns, nymphs and dwarfs.

There are other abilities that result from mastering the etheric body: walking through walls or into the inside of the earth, floating in the air, the ability to communicate with friends and even with Masters who are far from you, the ability to commune with so called the dead who have left the physical plane. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why the Tantriks invented hatha yoga; they wanted to attain these abilities, at least to the extent that it was possible without having to renounce their materialistic outlook on the world.

The temptation to use these abilities for selfish purposes is very strong. It increases while new skills increase. You need to be aware of this temptation and be ready to face the dangers that come with it. The Hall of Learning is an especially dangerous place because there, under each flower a serpent is coiled, and this metaphor should be treated literally. After all, it is the kingdom of Lucifer: he wields a powerful weapon, rajas. He has tempted us once already, in Paradise: and since that time it has not been easy for us to free ourselves from his power. But, if you clean your bodies thoroughly, so that nothing Luciferian remains in your personality, you will free yourself from his power. Your bodies cannot be ruled by two rulers at the same time; if you want Christ to live in you, Lucifer must withdraw. Obviously, Ahriman must have withdrawn beforehand but, if this path attracted you, it means that he is already retreating.

However, you will have to fight a long-lasting battle, one that is extremely difficult because it is taking place inside your soul. You will experience so many difficult situations and hardships in your life that you will think they are inexhaustible. One of the ordeals that you should expect is that everything, until now hidden under the cover of culture and social norms, will be exposed. As Helena Blavatsky said:

Even if there is only one hidden fault in a chela's character, it will come to light during these battles – no matter how hard he tries to conceal it. A misdeed puts a mask of temptation and passions that has not been fully mastered yet, and will bring him down, into mental humiliation. This battle is fought solely between a student's will and his animal nature; karma forbids angels and masters to interfere before the result is determined. All bad tendencies – most secretly concealed – will surly manifest, as well as good ones. Eventually, it will become apparent what the student truly is. [Blavatsky H., Lotusblüten]

This is true indeed; no one will help you in your battle before the result is known. No one will intervene and side with you; you must fight alone and, to make matters worse, in the dark. This is the time when all lower forces ally to prevent your victory. Spiritual darkness surrounds you, you see no solution or escape, you do not know if there is someone who cares for you, and you do not feel the support of the ground below your feet. On the other hand, you feel that all forces push you from behind, into the dark abyss in front of you, and you know that you will perish there. All disasters and misfortunes come at the same time and surround you on all sides: yours and your relatives' diseases, financial difficulties, threats of losing your possessions or position, decrease of your significance, calumnies that injure your reputation, and, on top of that, nervous breakdown, low spirit, lack of faith in your powers and in everything else.

If you do not fall in the face of all these hostile forces attacking you; if you withstand and show fortitude; if you do not doubt in yourself and your Master; if you do not despair – then, all these threats hovering over you will start dissipating like clouds in the rays of sun. Imbalanced situation will be settled, diseases and distress will subside and you will be able to breathe and relax again. Then, you will know that your Master was with you through all these hardships, that he watched your struggle with compassion but he could not interfere. He purposefully left you alone so that you could fight without anybody's support and rely on yourself; so that you do not lose your independence, faith and persistence even for a moment.

You will experience many periods of spiritual darkness and they will be more and more dangerous and desperate. Each time, dark forces will surround you so tight that you will see no way of getting out of the predicament. But if you endure, this tight knot will untie naturally by itself and you will notice that if you did not see the solution, it was due to this spiritual darkness.

You must realize that both during these desperate battles and after them you will remain alone. Your relation to people around you will always be like that of a teacher towards pupils. The teacher lives among them, loves them, takes care of them but the pupils do not equal him. This solitude will accompany you from the first levels of the path to its end. You will feel it very intensely before you understand that you should look on all people like companions during a train journey. Some of them get on, others get off at intermediate stations so you do not get attached to anyone; you wish good will to everyone, you help them whenever you can, you forgive all their faults and bad manners, but when they get off the train, you bid them farewell without sorrow.

### Chapter 6 – Yama (Cleansing)

You already know that yama, the first level of the path, consists of five directives which Indian students had to observe before they could enter the path. You may realize that they were obliged to follow these directives very accurately: but for us, contemporary people, these rules are of simple morality. However, when you analyze each of these principles carefully, and think deeply what they contain, you will see that they are not as simple as they first seemed to be.

The first rule, ahimsa – do not kill, does not merely mean that you must not kill a human or animal. Killing is not only by rapid and quick violence, it is also the means of doing slow, gradual harm to injure somebody in such a way. Moreover, it is possible to kill not only the physical body but also astral or mental ones. If you evoke harmful feelings or disturbing thoughts in a person, if you make them doubt in the goodness and truth; then you kill their astral or mental body. When you make someone work beyond his capabilities, give them inadequate food or underpay them, this can also kill. When you are passive while someone does harm to another person, though you are able to prevent it, you are equally guilty for causing that harm. And finally, you kill when you restrict someone's personal freedom, when you abuse your power, and force somebody to do what you think is good for them, even if it is against their will.

Of course, you should not come to any extreme conclusions and say for example: I will not try to rescue this drowning man because he may think that it is good for him to kill himself. If he really thinks that suicide is a good solution for him, he will try, despite your rescue, to drown again when you are not around. Remember as well that sometimes karma will thwart your help, but you know that for the mystery student the intention is more important than the results. When you try to defend someone who is wrongly treated, and despite all your efforts you do not manage, it means that this person's karma prevented you from defending him or her. In that case your conscience should be clear because you did everything you could.

The second principle says do not lie: it also includes much more than it is usually thought. You lie not only with your mouth but with your deeds and thoughts also. When you pretend that you are working to deceive your manager, you lie, even if he does not watch you. Or when you are excessively polite towards someone because you expect to benefit from such politeness. When you speak about someone and conceal this person's good traits but, on the other hand, highlight his faults, it is on par with slandering him or telling lies. In such a case, you also kill him.

The same happens when you do not rectify false rumors about someone that you know that they are not true. When you simply think falsely about someone, you are lying; this is because you already know that thoughts are beings that live and act. Your false rumors go out into the world, and they attach to people to trigger similarly untrue thoughts in them. A lie does not only apply to thinking falsely about people but to thinking falsely about things as well; when you do not judge them according to your knowledge, but to the opposite. You lie when your approach to life is pessimistic, when you always expect bad things to happen without rational basis for this. And finally, you lie when you excuse your idleness with lack of strength while you are aware that, with some good will, you would be able to summon up the required energy.

The third principle is do not steal. From the proverb: lying is theft, the third principle is closely related to the second. You steal not only when you take something from someone without his knowledge, but also when you hide from him something that might have let him gain something if he knew about it. Silence can be just as much a theft as a lie. When you waste your time doing something less important than fulfilling your duties, you have stolen that time. In a similar way, you would steal time from another person, if you needlessly bothered them. On the other hand, when you do somebody else's duties for them, you prevent them from doing that work to fulfil this part of their karma. When you ascribe somebody else's achievements to yourself, you have stolen from him, even if it does not do that person any harm. On the other hand, if you are excessively altruistic, and ascribe your achievements to someone else, you are stealing from yourself and putting that person in danger of being considered a liar. Remember, never do someone else's work for them.

All exaggeration is a sin. You steal, when you are a manufacturer and exploit your workers. You steal when you are a banker and exploit money that does not belong to you. You steal as a merchant, if you charge as much as possible and not as much as is appropriate for your trade. You steal as an official, when you take money for duties that you were already paid for by your employer. You steal as a teacher, when, instead of teaching, you distract your students or when you force them to do chores for you. You steal as a politician, or as a member of parliament, when instead of caring for your electors, you use them to your advantage. And finally, you steal when you demand that other people perform a service for you, that you could do yourself without neglecting your duties.

The fourth principle has changed its meaning significantly since ancient Indian times. It was easier for Indians to practice abstinence than for us. Nowadays, we have many ways to gratify our senses – unimaginable in ancient times – for we have refined them to the highest degree. Tobacco, coffee, tea, various kinds of alcohol, elaborate meals, technical devices that make life easier; all of these work against the fourth principle. Modern technology allies with industry and commerce to create multiple but artificial needs in people's minds, because these needs are basis for the existence of industry and commerce. You must be free from all non-essential needs because they bind you to the tamas life; they take so much of your time and attention that what remains is not enough for useful activities.

Your life should be simple, without unnecessary demands: both in the furnishings of your dwelling and in your food, clothing, and entertainment. However, this does not mean asceticism. Mortifying yourself would be against the first principle and would pose an obstacle to your further progress. Care for your bodies as much as the owner of horses cares for them; give them everything they need to be healthy and strong, but prevent them from overindulgence. You will find more tips on this topic in the chapter about asana. For now, remember that the principle of abstinence refers not only to yourself but also to all human fellows who are dependent upon you to some degree. Thus, it is a sin if you always try to please members of your family and pamper them. If your approach to upbringing your children is child-centered – a mistake often seen nowadays – this is equally wrong. On the other hand, too much strictness would be a sin against the first rule.

The fifth principle may seem pointless to you because there cannot be any harm from receiving presents. The definition of a gift, as such, is something that you have not earned and therefore weighs your karma down because it binds you to the giver with the duty of reciprocating. The fact that something is undeserved is the basis of the fifth principle. This sin does not mean simply taking presents, but desiring them or wishing for them are equally sinful. You should be always steadfast that you will receive what you are worth, but you should not demand anything above it. Greed and envy are born from such demand and, when such desires are not fulfilled, disappointment with life, aggrievedness and an unwillingness to live may result. You need to free yourself from feelings of this kind and remove them from your astral body.

Never expect anything more than what you have justly deserved. You will never receive more; yet you may even receive less if your karma has brought you such diminishment. Should you think that your living conditions could be better than they are, first make sure that you are able to manage improved ones. Better conditions usually mean harder duties. If you are sure that you have grown to a higher position, first of all do your present duties most scrupulously; perhaps your present situation is only a bridge to a higher position which you will receive when you prove that you are the right person. And, most importantly, never doubt that you will get it. If you want to achieve something but only think about obstacles to your goal, your thoughts will postpone it. You will always have everything that you need but nothing above what is necessary: do not expect unnecessary comfort and pleasure. When you are on the higher levels, you will cease to desire anything for yourself; start learning it now, get rid of your desires one after another, remove them from your astral and mental bodies.

At first sight, the five yamas seemed quite naive to you but now you have a different point of view. You see that they contain both Moses' Decalogue and Christian Commandments. They are passive restrictions and not active imperatives. You will proceed to the active ones on the level of niyama; now you have enough work on yourself before you manage to consistently implement the five passive yamas into your bodies. You see how much is contained in yama, these five seemingly modest commandments. Think about all faults and weaknesses found in human character and you will find out that all of them are contained in the five yamas. To understand it better, take the Catechism and you will easily notice that its seven deadly sins correspond to five bans of yama. Pride is against the fifth and third yama, greed against the second and fourth, lust against the first and fourth, envy against the first and fifth, gluttony against the first and fourth, wrath against the first, and sloth against the third and fourth. If you go further into a search for human faults, you will see that they all are included in yama. For example, meanness you will put under the third yama, harshness under the first, deception under the first and third, and so on.

If you were not mature enough for the path, you would have quickly become annoyed with thinking about such unpleasant things like faults and sins, especially that sin, for many modern people, has become merely an empty word without any content. But you are getting rid you your pride and your overly high, false image of yourself and you realize that you are not sinless. You also understand that you must eradicate in yourself not only sins as such but even any tendency to sin. Your bodies must be so pure that there is no threat for them to fall into old sinful habits, even if you are not controlling them constantly.

Now think what will happen when your bodies are already purified; when you remove the whole heap of unneeded and hampering waste. A lot of space in them will be made free, allowing for the opposite tendencies to grow. Until now, you could not achieve this because all the space was tightly packed with sinful habits. When you remove a tendency to harm or to kill, you will stop wishing misfortune to anyone; in its place you will develop love and sympathy for all living creatures. When you remove the tendency to lie, you will not hurt anyone, even in a joke; moreover, in place of pride, you will start developing modesty, humbleness and reverence for all beings. Only after you eradicate the tendency to steal, will you understand your higher duties, your purpose on this earth. You will learn what it truly means to help your fellow humans in their development. Abstinence will bring you unexpected peace and self-control. You will not have to fight against any of your bodies anymore because they will be so pure that their instincts will never be against any of the yamas. And finally, the fifth principle will give you great independence from your circumstances and will keep you from many disappointments and regrets. It will also teach you to act not for results but for the sake of the task itself: even though the results are quite different from what you have intended or even if it seem that there is no result at all. Buddha-Dharma enumerates five moral powers that rise from following yamas, namely: trust in yourself, persistence, presence of mind, focus, and self-control. These powers have their equivalents in five higher sensory organs: faith, ability to act, deep thinking, attention, and brightness. You will see later that at our present level of development there are not five but seven higher organs.

Now, you know what sins you should avoid and how you should purify your bodies at the level of yama. This purification is a never-ending process and it is very important to always do it in the right way. Previously, you have not been able to see any faults in yourself. Now, that you have made the higher self's dwelling clean, any slight faults that are still there will offend you much more. Life itself will provide you with right means and measures for the work of further purification.

Try to treat everything that happens to you as an occasion to learn something, not as inexplicable coincidence. For example, until now, you may have got impatient or frustrated from the unnecessary waste of time spent waiting for someone or something. However, if you had controlled your impatience instead of getting thoughtlessly angry, you would have learned many interesting and useful things while waiting. You could have observed how unpleasant waiting can be and conclude from this fact that you should never make anybody wait for you, should it depend upon you. If you have to wait in a crowd of noisy and impatient people, you can practice two very useful exercises: the first of them in pratyahara, trying not to feel or hear anything in this noise and trying not to surrender to the waves of annoyance that surround you; the second in dharana, focusing on something not related to the present surrounding. Every string of impatience paralyzes, even destroys, the higher faculties latent within us. [Steiner R, How to Know Higher Worlds]

When you are on higher levels, you will see that this statement is very true. You also need to get rid of impatience about achieving results from your exercises. When it seems to you that you are waiting too long for the results of your efforts, continue to do your best and do not let yourself get irritated. Impatience only delays the results, does not bring them faster.

Moreover, never let yourself get angry for any reason. If someone offends you and you get angry and then offend him back, you have only made things worse. But if you tell yourself that his offense does not diminish your worth, you will be able to act more tactfully. The person who offended you might have done so simply because he was irritated or he was being stupid – you will be able to identify your distress more aptly. You do not have to literally pursue the words of the Gospel: Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also: but you should be capable of doing this. You should bear the offense so calmly that even one more would make no impact on you whatsoever. Only when you are capable of such self-control, can you react properly to such offenses and not hurt those people who hurt you. This does not mean that we simply swallow insults; rather, we should be as calm and confident in responding to insults directed at us as we would be if we acted on behalf of someone else who had been insulted. [Steiner R, How to Know Higher Worlds]

You may think it is easy to preach theoretically about restraining yourself from getting angry, but it will be difficult to actually do it. When one is angry it is human nature not to think about restraining oneself from anger. However, the belief that such is human nature is a false belief, and being convinced that you cannot change your nature is even more erroneous. You are a student of higher wisdom and you are supposed to rebuild your bodies from their basic form: you are therefore to change your nature completely. This is possible; do not tell yourself that it is not. When you feel that anger is overcoming you, think at that moment: I am a chela. You can then even make a promise to yourself: I will get angry, I will get mad – but not now – in five minutes. Now, I decide to remain completely calm. Such a promise given to your astral body will help you control it. After five minutes have elapsed, it will have calmed down a little; waves of anger will stop shaking it, and you will have regained control over it.

In addition to anger and irritation, we must also struggle against other traits, such as fearfulness, superstition, prejudice, vanity, ambition, curiosity, the urge to gossip, and the tendency to discriminate on the basis of such outer characteristics as social status, gender, race, and so on. [Steiner R, How to Know Higher Worlds] Look into your soul with honesty and you will see that you are bashful and conceited at the same time, even though it looks impossible for both of them to be there. If you are conceited and you think highly of yourself, then you cannot be bashful but only excessively self-confident. You can only be uncertain about something you are not sure of.

Cowardice is the trait of morally low people and, as you have grown to the path, you should eradicate any hint of it from yourself. Do not fear anything or anybody because nothing has the ability to harm the real you, that is your higher self. You are alone on your journey to enter higher worlds, without anybody's help and protection. How will you endure this if every new thing – or even the mere possibility of something new – frightens you? Later, when you are able to see in the astral way, you will fully understand the paradox that nothing is more fearful than fear itself. You will notice how fear causes your astral body to contract and tremble; how tightly the girdles of green fear embrace that body and how they restrict its movements.

Maybe you think that superstitions and prejudices are burdens that you have thrown away long ago. But are you absolutely sure that, for example, your conceptions of the sun as a ball of fire, stones as lifeless objects or electricity as a blind force are not only superstitions? You will come to see that such beliefs, for example that you cannot float in the air against gravity or that sorcerers do not exist, are also superstitions. Another common superstition is a belief that you cannot think without a brain or exist without form.

If you judge new and unknown things on the basis of superstition and prejudice, all your life experience may be nothing else. Such life experiences will pose an obstacle to exploring para-sensory worlds. They will obscure or give a false image to your discoveries. You will not truly absorb new things, if you commence your exploration with a false conception about them. New things must be approached without any prejudices, without any prejudgments. If you assume beforehand that soaring into the air is against the law of gravity, you will make it impossible for you.

A child learns how to walk not because it sees other people walking but because no one told it that walking is impossible. Superstitions and prejudices are very powerful suggestions and autosuggestions, and you have to free yourself from them. You have to eradicate even the slightest tendency to succumb to suggestions. Overcoming public opinion is a good means of practicing of how to eradicate such suggestions. Public opinion is the most powerful weapon that enables Lucifer to rule over people. Look inside your soul and see if you are free from the yoke of public opinion and whether you are indifferent to what others think about you. Moreover, examine yourself and see if you have already got rid of the prejudice that religion is superstition. Religion is one of the greatest moral powers, and it can be a superstition only for superstitious people. When they allegedly liberate themselves from it, they devoid themselves of one of the spiritual powers and they hurt themselves by doing so. A vermiform appendix is also a superstition for people, as they say that they can live without it; yet, among mystery students, there are no people with intestines damaged in this way.

Curiosity is a fault that uses a lot of your spiritual force and unnecessary litters your etheric body. You must have already noticed that curiosity of gossip and news is worthless. Excessive curiosity in reading is equally pointless. A typical example is reading a daily newspaper, from which you do not remember anything after one week. Uncontrolled desire for knowledge is equally worthless if it only burdens your memory mechanically. Remembering lists of dates, numbers or names will never be useful to you; they will be like undigested food that only overloads your stomach. If you want knowledge to have a significant value, you have to truly assimilate what you have learned. It is not enough to stuff some facts into your brain and memory, you must also "digest" them by the work of your mind. Only then, will it be your long lasting achievement. Absent-mindedness and flightiness of thought are caused by curiosity of all novelties; such curiosity does not explore new knowledge in depth, but merely jumps from one topic to another, which causes superficiality and shallow judgement.

You know from your own experience how often curiosity initiates various sins. When you have heard about something new, you want to possess this thing; even though you did not feel such urge before. Greed and desire arise. When you hear about something new and tell others about it, without first checking if it is true, you can easily tell a lie or even a defamation. This is why it is important to be able to be silent. Until you say something, it is under your control; but you lose that power the moment it leaves your mouth. You have the right to speak, but only about things that you take from the depths of your soul and are ripe to be told. Whether something should be said or not, will have been fully considered and well-thought-out by you.

It is better to say nothing than to have to try to rectify or withdraw it afterwards. If you decide to speak, do so precisely and concisely. Do not multiply words unnecessarily, but, on the other hand, do not spare any needed ones; later you will not regret that you have said too little. Especially when you give an order to do something or when you give some advice, be as brief but also as precise in your wordage as possible. Sometimes one missed out word can thwart everything you have commanded.

When you report an incident, do not start from its end and then return to its beginning. Having started from the beginning, do not start from "the day the world was created" but from the point which is essential in order to understand the whole story. But most of all, do not exaggerate and do not add not-existing details. One redundant word can turn your story into a lie, and if it is about a person, into a defamation. When you give someone advice, do not give him ready solutions, give him only some clues so that he is able to come to the conclusion himself. When he puts his own thoughts into this process, he will remember the lesson much better than if you gave it to him in the form of a ready solution.

When you are receiving information from someone, not only should your mouth remain silent but your thoughts as well. You do not put full attention to what is being said if you are listening in a predestined mind-set; the message is less precise for you. Quieten your thoughts and emotions completely when you are listening to someone because, otherwise, they will obscure your understanding. When you listen, for a moment, become this person: feel his emotions and think his thoughts. Then, you will be able to understand him as precisely as he understands himself, or maybe even more accurately. At the level of pratyahara you will learn how to quieten all your senses and thoughts, now it is only important that you understand how very needed this is.

Also on the higher levels, it will be possible for you to live in full abstinence. Your bodies will be purified to such an extent that no lower desires appear in them. Then, you will be able to stand, without any harm, what now would be self-indulgence or gratification your desires and whims. Then, the most tasty drink, most elaborate meal, most excellent and comfortable dwelling, most intoxicating delight; all these will cease to pose the temptation to repeat it over and over again. When opportunities occur, you will seize them willingly and you will feel all their impressions, but you will not feel attached to them; you will not feel the need to repeat them, and when they pass, you will not miss them. Before you achieve this level, practice the moderation and continence and endure all shortages without being discontented. Only when you cease to feel displeasure because of some shortfalls, will you be able to have everything.

You have learned about the fifth principle which not only forbids the taking of gifts but also the expectation of any pre-planned results. Watch yourself for even the slightest trace of disappointment when the result of your efforts is not exactly as you expected. In any case, your work will be worthless until you cease to desire even the contentment of completing it. Should you feel satisfaction after doing a good deed, you have diminished its worth because vanity has awakened in you.

Good deeds are obligations and do not deserve anything in exchange. Being glad of doing one is as naive as being glad of fulfilling a responsibility to which you have committed yourself. And if you feel satisfied when you see that others do not fulfill their duties, you not only awaken vanity in yourself, but you sin against the second and third yama; you cannot say if they would have fulfilled them or not, if they had been in your situation.

You may think that this is all too demanding: but ponder, this path leads above the normal human level and it rightly demands from its students superhuman efforts. I will give you an example by which you can evaluate how high the demands are. The third yama forbids you to lie but it does not require to correct other people's lies at all costs. At a higher level, you will practice the ability to remain completely silent while listening to illogical or utterly erroneous reasoning; you will not even think that you know it better. And it would be definitely a sin to feel any contentment because you do know better.

### Chapter 7 – Niyama (Acquisition of Virtues)

The purpose of yama was to clean your bodies of everything that is unwanted. By doing this, you have made room for a place to build required virtues. You have learned that niyama includes Shat-Sampatti – six virtues that were strictly defined in Shankara's times. Similar to the five yamas, the notion of these six virtues has broadened since the ancient Indian epoch.

The first of the six-fold virtues is called shama which means thought control. The point is to be aware of your every thought and of what it is doing. In other words, subconscious thoughts are not allowed. So far, while you tried to attach your attention to one thing, it often happened that your thoughts went in a completely opposite direction. Later you could not have said where they wandered. If you watch yourself carefully, you may notice that, when you are reading, writing or counting, often you are thinking about something else at the same time. Even when you are able to focus your thoughts on one thing, another subconscious thought is often going in a different direction.

Seemingly unexplainable moods of dejection and bitterness arise from such subconscious thoughts: since you do not control them, they come to illogical pessimistic conclusions. You do not even notice that various temptations are born in this way as well. Negativities are sent down to the physical body when such uncontrolled thought resonates in your astral body. First, a mere thought comes to mind, then strong imagination followed by pleasure, evil delight, and consent. [Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ] You will not realize that a subconscious thought has arisen in you but will only notice it when the temptation shakes your whole astral body.

The second, and equally important, task is to control your thoughts' longevity. Ordinary people, especially those who consider themselves practical, tend to seek comfort. They use their old thoughts taken from the depths of their memories instead of creating new thoughts. Often they are even not their own thoughts but ones implanted into them long ago: at the school desk or from the world at large. Such ready-made thoughts, only slightly refreshed in the brain, seldom can be adapted to new situations; hence this "practical thinking" is often very antiquated, if not completely erroneous. You must be free from it. In the extra-sensory worlds you will encounter completely new phenomena which your old way of thinking, based on old knowledge, is not capable of handling. Thus, when you observe a new event or phenomenon, be careful to formulate an idea about it using a fresh thought, a thought taken right from the thing itself. Do not relapse into an old habit of using ready thoughts taken from previous experience.

In addition to distinguishing new thoughts from old ones, the third task is to distinguish your own thoughts from someone else's. Up until now, you may have not noticed how many thoughts you take from outside, without controlling their value. In the cloud of though-forms surrounding your mental body few are of any value. Regardless of their value, you know that all outside thoughts are inspirations. Like attracts like; so you are surrounded by thoughts at a level similar to yours. When you purify your mental body, this cloud of thought-forms will decrease because high nature thoughts are relatively rare. Low thought-forms will be repelled by high vibrations of your purified mental body. Your inspirations will have become more valuable and have real usefulness. They will come not from ordinary people but from Masters or other high entities of spiritual hierarchy.

Finally, the fourth task is to control the logic of thinking. To come to the conscious conclusion by thinking subconsciously is to be avoided. You should carefully observe the whole thinking process, to ensure that all its links connect in a logical way and ensure that there are no breaks or sudden disconnects between them. And, most importantly, you should be especially careful that no stray thoughts from outside interfere in the process. Only if you do this, you can be sure that you correctly built the whole chain and therefore, the final conclusion is correct. You will achieve truly sound thinking by this process and such thinking will have a healing effect on your lower bodies.

The second of the six-fold virtues is dama, the control of deeds. It does not mean that you have to do only noble deeds of a higher nature, but instead that you control the less important ones, which are easy to overlook. For example, notice how many unnecessary movements you do involuntarily. When you walk, you wave your arms or shake your head; when you sit, you fiddle with your fingers or any object that you have in your hands. You do this thoughtlessly and without any need. You waste a lot of your etheric body's energy which could be used for a more fruitful purpose. Observe yourself and you will notice that you do not even know how to walk. When you walk, you hit your heels on the pavement so hard, as if you wanted to break it; or you shuffle on it as if you intended to polish it with your shoes. Furthermore, without any need, you carry gloves or a heavy stick in your hand, a stick which does not support you but hits the ground. You never go out without these objects; yet, you are bothered if you have to carry half-kilo package: so you order it to be delivered from a shop to your house. When you leave home, you lock the door without thought and then, already underway, you return because you are not sure if you have locked it or not. You pay so much attention to reading or talking when you eat that later you do not know what you have eaten, how much, and indeed, whether you have eaten at all. When you have sealed a letter that you have written, you remind yourself that the purpose of writing the letter has been missed by writing about everything else.

Such incidents, and thousands of similar ones, should never happen to a chela. Every action, whether trivial or important, must have a logical motivation; otherwise it is unnecessary. Each should logically result from the previous one. If you go for a walk to enjoy fresh air, it would be illogical to head for the crowded districts of the city. Similarly, you will not gain anything from listening to the concert and simultaneously thinking about your business or talking to your neighbor. When you go for a short journey, there is no point taking food with you. When you have an issue that should be done immediately and another with no fixed deadline, do not start from the second, because this means you may have no time to complete the first one. When you put things away in drawers or wardrobes, remember where you put them. If you have done this thoughtlessly, you would have trouble finding them later. In addition, if you had to move other things to make room, you would have to search them as well. Arranging things anew in an illogical manner means that often used ones are put at the bottom and less used ones at the top. All of this seems obvious, but you must admit that you do not always follow the rules of simple logic. Control of deeds also includes using a certain logical order, so that one activity results from the other and does not contradict it or spoils it. When you practice it carefully for some time, you will see how many things you did without any need that could have been easily avoided with some preplanning and consideration. Then, you will be able to evaluate how much time and energy you wasted.

Uparati, the third virtue, means – first of all – persistence in following the path of your life, and secondly – realizing the actual conditions on that path. You can put it in one single phrase: sense of responsibility. If you consciously undertook to do something, it is now your duty to fulfil that obligation diligently. Before you take on new responsibilities, first evaluate if you are able to manage them, and then, consider if they are necessary. If you take new duties carelessly, you might neglect older ones that could be more important. Changes are often pleasant, of course, and it would be nice to change your duties from time to time, instead doing always the same things. But remember that you are not fulfilling your duties for your own pleasure but to be useful for the society. By doing nothing, you would become a parasite, a drone who takes others' resources of this world. If you think that if you were able to choose different duties for yourself, you would then choose ones better suited to your abilities and more useful to your fellow people, then you are simply blaspheming against these high entities ruling over you and the whole word, by thinking that you know better than they do.

If you really were capable of fulfilling other obligations, you would surely have them. First, if you want to prove that you can manage other duties, fulfill your current duties with love and accuracy. Only then will you grow to more serious ones. However, do not treat your duties as a constraint and restriction; do not make a martyr of yourself. After all, no one has forced you, you committed to do them yourself, and you were aware that they would have to be fulfilled. In theory, you could actually abandon them at any moment, even today, right now. But, when you committed to do them, you agreed to their completion; should you abandon them, you would have to bear the consequences. You do have a choice and freedom, no one pushes you in one direction or another.

But when you look honestly inside your soul, you see what you really desire. You would like it to be possible to abandon the difficult duties, but if someone else, not you, bore the consequences of your deed. It is certainly inappropriate; and your conscience forbids you to do it. So, your conscience wants one thing and you desire something different. You are not compatible with your conscience and this results in some unwillingness towards your duty. Yet, it is not you who is incompatible but your lower self, your bodies. They do not like responsibilities, they would much prefer look for fun and pleasure. They are still not pure enough to like duties and responsibilities: there is still egoism and conceit in them – things you will remove by practicing yama.

However, the purpose of uparati is different: it is not to remove anything but to build something new. You should build in a stable and strong conviction that you are not forced to do anything. You are totally independent. You have unrestrained choices, always and everywhere you are. At all times, you can act completely opposite to what you did before now; if you do not do it, it is simply because you do not want to do it. And you do not want to do it, because you are able to think logically enough to know that it is impossible to choose only an action without its consequences. Therefore, you prefer some consequences, but not the other ones.

If from the consequences of your duties you encounter sorrow and suffering that are not connected directly to them, notice that you did choose these activities, and not any other ones: the possibility of having to endure these hardships was always there. Perhaps not yesterday nor a year ago, but it was you who undoubtedly chose them. When you know enough about karma and reincarnation, you will realize that you chose the conditions you are living in now prior to your current incarnation. It does matter if you chose them yourself or The Lipikas did so; the choice was made on arupa planes, where you and the Lipikas are one. (The Lipikas are celestial beings who are the recorders of karmic actions, hence often called the "Lords of Karma.") When you look on your life tasks from this point of view, you will manage them in accordance with your own development and with the advancement of the whole of humanity as well. Having understood your goal, you will be persistent in your attempt to achieve it, without being easily discouraged and without straying from the chosen path for pursuing some secondary aims or to avoid having to overcome the obstacles. It is good for us that we sometimes have sorrows and adversities, for they often make a man lay to heart that he is only a stranger and sojourner, and may not put his trust in any worldly thing. [Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ]

Titiksha is based on the above mentioned approach to your tasks and on patience in enduring all failures and sufferings resulting from that approach. Moreover, it requires tolerance towards all people and other creatures. Much has been said about compassion for fellow people, but most often this is understood as leniency and weakness rather than tolerance. There are different sort of people around you: good and bad, stupid and wise. You can hardly bear some of them while you like others, even though you realize that there are actually no bad or stupid people; there are only mistaken ones because they do not know. Yet, if you had been told that tomorrow they are all going to a foreign land and it is not sure if they would ever return, you would have more tolerance of their mistakes and weaknesses. You would not demand them to be as you want them to be; your attitude toward them would not be based on your likes and dislikes to such a large extent.

Most of all, you would not feel so personally offended by each of their words or acts. You would say to yourself: Tomorrow they will go away and maybe we will never see each other again, and it would be much easier for you to forgive them these mere trifles that up until now seemed to have been so unforgivable. You would find more warmth and compassion for them and you would try harder not to be so harsh on them. There are some favors that you are neglecting to do for them, because you think that you can do it later; now, in this new situation you will do those favors immediately for them, so that they have good memories of you. Furthermore, if you knew that they would die tomorrow, you would try much harder to be nice to them. In such a case, you would find a grain of sympathy and reconciliation even for your most hated enemy. But the truth is that you cannot actually know if one of them will not die tomorrow. If this was to happen, you would be left with everlasting remorse in your soul because you had not reconciled with him, you had not forgiven him his offenses and you had not made amends for any harm that you had done to him.

And this is exactly what titiksha requires from you: to act towards people around you as if you are seeing them for the last time in your life, as if it was already determined that they will die tomorrow. Think it deeply over in your soul and make this your principle when interacting with people in your life.

On the other hand, your attitude towards things should be the complete opposite. Treat all the things that you possess as if you were destined to die tomorrow. You will then see that they cease to be so extremely important and valuable to you: they are not worth so much to defend them jealously from others using them. Assume a similar attitude towards events, disappointments and hardships. You will endure them much easier when you assume that everything is going to end tomorrow. You will no longer be so eager to complain about them to other people, for you do not want to be overly impatient and miserable in the last moments of your life.

Shraddha, self-trust, is the fifth of the six-fold virtues. Self-trust has nothing to do with the excessive self-confidence of conceited or arrogant people. Shraddha is to be worn inside yourself, not outside. Outside, no one even notices it because it is about events, not people. I have already told you that you will encounter completely new, unknown events on your path, and you will face them alone, without protection or care from anybody. If you lose trust in yourself even in the face of every-day events, which are well known to you, how do you expect to withstand unknown ones?

You will realize that obstacles or adversities – which devoid you of self-trust and discourage from further attempts – are very flimsy. Thus, even tens and hundreds of failures should never discourage you from the chosen goal. You may convince yourself that you should stop further efforts because it is impossible to achieve the goal on the chosen path not only for you but for everybody. Remember the words of St. Augustine: Potuerunt hi et hae; cur non tu Augustine? In other words, if others were able to achieve the goal by following this path, you should also. After all, how are you going to follow your Master's footsteps if you have fallen before you have started? And how can you expect your Master to give you a helping hand if you do not trust his hand, particularly if you do not even believe that it exists?

It is obvious that there are powers that want to keep you on the earth, under their control. They will try by every means to obscure your faith in your Master and your trust in your own ability. I have previously mentioned that there will be periods of darkness. When you experience them, it will seem to you that all this secret knowledge with its teaching about Masters and higher powers of man is sheer madness or nonsense: common sense itself will be derided. You will feel the path you are following does not lead to the light but into a bottomless abyss of darkness. Should you lose faith in your Master at that moment, he will cease to exist for you. If you lose faith in your ability, you will actually lose that ability, and you will become pray to distress and delusions. That is why shama, thought control, is so important, and is the first of the virtues. A spiritual darkness will be fed by your own old thoughts that you had from the time before you entered the path. They make you unable to believe in something new, because it is contrary for them to believe in something new.

Therefore, do not be too fast with judging, and especially with denying, new ideas. When you read or hear about something which is not in accordance with your previous experiences or ideas, do not be too hasty in saying that it is not true or that it cannot exist. Restrain yourself from making any judgements so that you do not have to correct them later. On the other hand, always be ready to change your opinion without regret, immediately, when you realize that your previous one was incorrect. In other words, get rid of the stubbornness of your thoughts; obstinacy comes from ignorance. Such obstinacy is characteristic of people who claim that their rules do not let them change their opinion. Especially with new things, do not insist on your old principles but be ready to make new ideas more appropriate for these new things.

The last of the six-fold virtues is samadhana, inner balance which, of course, does not mean apathy. It is stoicism that means indifference towards unpleasant and pleasant impressions, and it is this that leads to a certain numbing of sensitivity. On the other hand, samadhana is a virtue and therefore, cannot be characterized by a lack of virtue, such as a lack of sensitivity. On the contrary, the levels of the path will develop newer and newer aspects of your sensitivity. However, feeling these impressions does mean succumbing to them. The important thing is to feel all the impressions, from the strongest to the most subtle ones, but never getting overpowered by them, not letting them control you. At all times, you should have control over how they influence you and never let them upset your inner equilibrium.

Up until now, when you experienced a great joy, you were completely and beyond measure overwhelmed by it: you were simply beside yourself with that joy. On the other hand, when you had experienced a failure or sorrow, you had been immediately overcome with despair. From now on, you should distance yourself from such outbursts; you should start to control yourself. Sudden jumps to joy or to despair, fluctuation from optimism to pessimism has a bad effect on your inner balance. This it is not about being indifferent. You are allowed to feel joy and sadness. It is necessary to feel these emotions most vividly because later, spiritual organs will grow and develop from them. But it is important that you do not let them overcome you completely, that you do not drown in them, and that you are able to view things in realistic terms.

Whenever you succumb to such sudden fluctuations, you use a lot of spiritual energy unnecessarily for the rapid vibrations of your astral body; even though this energy is needed for more important goals. It is as if you wanted to write something: you need only a small amount of energy to write, you would not take a big swing with your pen and hit the paper with such force that the paper breaks. In a similar manner save your spiritual energy in the same way that you do not waste the physical one; saving your spiritual energy is what makes you grow above average people. You will need this energy at moments of danger or spiritual darkness, at moments of misfortune and disappointment, in order that you do not lose faith in your power.

So now, you have an idea of what Shat-Sampatti is. But it does not encompass the whole scope of your tasks on the level of niyama. The six virtues – the whole Shat-Sampatti, is only one of the virtues which you will have to build into your bodies. These virtues, also known in mystery schools as four qualifications or four means of practice are as follows:

Viveka – distinguishing the difference between permanent and temporary things;

Vairagya – non-attachment, the power of not being concerned about the result of your efforts;

Shat-Sampatti – which you already know as the six virtues;

Mumukshutva – a longing for enlightenment and liberation.

It was not necessary to mention these four tasks while explaining the levels of the path, because you will soon notice how these qualifications and yama and niyama all overlap.

Viveka requires the great amount of careful cultivation. A good preparation for viveka is to assume towards people an attitude that they are going to die tomorrow, while assuming an attitude towards things – as if YOU were going to die tomorrow. It will be easier for you to notice what is temporary in people and things by assuming this attitude; and also what has a permanent significance. As a result, you will understand that words and deeds of your fellow humans are only temporary; they last for a short moment and are without real importance. What is important in them are tendencies, abilities, paths they travel, or rather the general directions of such lines.

An uneducated person who shows altruism, righteousness and nobility of his character, even though using unacceptable words and doing coarse deeds, will be valuable for you: his morality and love for people is the path that he is following, while the lack of education or coarseness of behavior are only temporary details, without permanent significance. On the other hand, somebody's social position, influence, property, refinement and even knowledge that he has acquired from books will not influence you unduly. You will not be deceived by flattering words or beautifully sounding platitudes if you sense that within them are falsity, egoism or self-interest; you will not be able to distinguish any life line in such a person, or worse, you will see the path leading visibly downwards. Even when it comes to social activity, scientific work or artistic creativity, you will only appreciate them when their performance is not based on egoistic motives. What should always be decisive for you are the motives, and not means people use to achieve their goals.

You will use similar reasoning in judging things, phenomena of nature and events. When you look at a flower, you will see what is permanent in it, such as blooming, desire to develop; and you will distinguish that from its temporary traits such as specific form, color, number of petals etc. When looking at a forest, you will see its permanent features, such as protection from the wind, dwelling for birds and animals, a source of fresh air and you will distinguish these features from such temporary ones like the age of the forest, kinds of trees, fuel or building value etc. When thinking about war, you will not concentrate on heaps of dead bodies, destruction of property, movement of political borders, but you will be aware of changes in the form of governments after war, heroism of one of the armies in face of selfish cowardice of the other, development of deadly weapon, new rules for peace agreements. Even such a down-to-earth thing as a lamp will reveal to you its value for science, work, communication, and security, while its insignificant details like price, or even the artistic material it is made of, or its possible health benefits, will not attract your attention.

Vairagya is based on the result of your exercises in karma yoga. In the previous chapter, you read that it should be completely indifferent to you whether your actions bring the expected results or not. Now, it is time for you to move forward with this notion. It should become indifferent to you whether you are able to perform the planned action or not, let alone what the results of this action may be. When you enter the path, it will happen more and more often that while you are performing an action, even a most simple and ordinary one, something unexpected disturbs you so that you have to postpone what you have intended to do. It will often happen that when you say to yourself: Now, I am going to do this and that, just before you start, the necessity to do something else will appear. You will not be able to do what you planned but something completely different; unexpected and surprising.

Such interruptions are lessons sent to you by your Master, so that you have a chance to practice vairagya, and at the same time, for you to see what progress you have made in freeing yourself from impatience. At first it will be difficult for you to fight feelings of impatience. For example, when you are leaving home to deal with an urgent issue, at the door you meet a guest who you have to invite inside. Even such a minor trifle will teach you vairagya. If it should happen that you say to yourself: Now, I will read, as you open the book, you have to deal with a most urgent issue which you have not predicted. After you have gone to bed at night to enjoy undisturbed rest, it may happen that you are forced to get up, more than once, before you can finally go back to bed to ponder there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. Such events will continue to seem to be really annoying for you but only as long as it takes you to learn to accept disturbances in your plans with complete calmness, without even a hint of impatience. You will have regained an ability to act freely and undisturbed, even though sometimes such trials will occur again in order that you can see if the habit of impatience has crept back into your soul.

The third qualification is Shat-Sampatti, already known to you, and mumukshutva is the fourth. This word was often wrongly translated as the desire for liberation or the longing for nirvana, although it would be much easier to translate it as aspiration for salvation. For ancient students of mystery schools, mumukshutva was indeed the longing for nirvana, because, as you know, ancient Indians left nirvana not so long before and they felt uncomfortable in the earthly bonds. However, for us, people living nowadays, salvation does not mean the selfish escape from the earth but becoming one with Christ. This unity is our ideal, so that we are able to say with honesty: Not my will, but thine, be done! Thus, if we want to understand mumukshutva as the desire for liberation, the liberation will refer to our lower self. You should free yourself from the yoke of your lower bodies, free yourself from their power; you should desire liberation. And you have been longing for it; that is why you have been looking for the path. Maintain this desire in yourself and cherish it carefully because it gives you determination to climb the steep and difficult levels of the path.

When you get there, to the top, to Christ, you will become liberated. Your bodies will not rule over you anymore, but they will become obedient and dexterous tools which you will use to cooperate in the development of humanity, in its salvation. You will not desire to escape from the earth, but you will want to work here; you will become Christ's chela. Obviously, this does not mean that you will be attached to earthly things. You will have reached the level where nothing and no one binds you. You will be free. Everything you possess you will give for the service of humanity, for its good. You will desire nothing for yourself and that is why you will have the most powerful measures at your disposal, measures that can be those of the most mighty ruler, in order that you can use them for the world's sake.

At the yama level, your task had been to get rid of unwanted traits and now at the niyama level you will construct new features. You will gradually acquire new virtues as empty space appears. You should not wait with implementing these new virtues until your bodies are completely purified. The levels of the path do not follow each other subsequently but rather run parallel to each other, only at the beginning do they seem subsequent. You will see it more clearly when you reach the higher stages of the path.

### Chapter 8 – Asana (Life Attitude)

As a baby learns how to sit, how to stand, and finally how to walk, it adjusts its invisible bodies to these positions. You will have to keep a similar sequence in following your exercises so that they are performed correctly. The body position during exercises had a great importance for ancient Indians. The position had to be worked out in every detail because they had only recently put on these bodies. In the materialistic hatha yoga, the most detailed rules were described; it created 66 various body positions for pranayama: 32 asanas, 24 mudras and 10 kumbhakas. Raja Yoga did not give so much attention to the physical body and therefore, it advised to maintain a position that is comfortable enough to keep it for a prolonged period of time. The only requirement was to keep the head, neck and spine in a straight upright line to allow for undisturbed flow of etheric currents. You should keep in mind maintaining this straight line of your body posture during pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. At first, do these exercises in a horizontal position, lying in the most comfortable posture, later you can try a vertical position by sitting or standing upright.

However, the concept of asana is not limited to the physical body. In Sanskrit, the word asana means posture: not only a bodily one but also psychological and spiritual attitude. Understanding the body posture is not limited to the position of the body, but includes also the state of its health, its mood, fitness level and environmental conditions. The most carefully maintained position will not help you, if your stomach is overloaded with food that is hard to digest, or when you have some health problem, even a slight one like a cold; or when you are exhausted by excessive work. Similarly, the best body posture will not be useful at all if you are irritated, upset, depressed or worried. Adopting a careful position will also be worthless if you cannot be certain whether someone or something will disturb you in a moment. So, for your exercises to be effective, apart from the favorable physical conditions, you will also need proper mood and environment.

You already know that in Hatha Yoga the term yama does not refer to the internal or spiritual purity but to cleaning your physical body by such obvious and simple means like an everyday shower, nose and throat cleaning, brushing teeth and caring for proper and regular bowel movements. You do all these without any knowledge of yoga, it is simply your habit acquired in childhood. So for now, I will simply remind you that such bodily hygiene is something that you cannot neglect or under-estimate. Maybe you have already stopped doing some of these activities, considering them to be unnecessary, but you should resume them; and soon, you will notice how useful they all are. Two of them are very often ignored. During your morning shower, take some salty water into your hand and suck it into your both nostrils – as deep as possible – to clean the nasal cavity. It will protect you from sneezing and will make your voice sonorous and clear. Another thing is that, each evening, you can place a glass of clean water next to your bed and drink it in the morning; slowly, one sip a minute. This will make your bowel movements so regular that medicaments will be redundant. It is also advisable to wash your body in the evening, not to prevent the bed linens from getting dirty, but to free your body from the etheric particles of other people and things that attached to it during the day.

You realize that real you means your higher self, and not your etheric, astral, and mental bodies, let alone the physical one. By now you have already a proper attitude towards your bodies, the attitude of a chela. Your physical body is merely a mechanism, an engine fueled and ignited by your etheric body. The astral body is a living creature, with its own organism and own emotions, but it is still not the real you. The mental body is not real you either; it is just your thinking machine, a machine that compares, reasons, and makes judgements. These extra-sensual bodies are your animals, that you harness – when you wish – to your physical body to be able to move and act on the earthly plane.

Thus, assume an attitude towards your bodies similar to that of the owner of animals. Never say for example: It hurts me or I am tired, sad, upset because it is not you who feels pain, who is sad or tired. These are your bodies – your animals – which are affected by all these inconveniences. Take as much care of them as if you were a wise owner; give them all they need: proper food and rest, keep them clean and strong but never loosen your hold on them; never let them take control. You would make mock of a rider who, despite having reins in his hands, goes where his horse leads him and not where he wishes to go. Your bodies must be trained so well that they never take you in a direction that is not intended by you. If they feel that you are their master, they will not stray from your path. When you think or speak about them, always use expressions like: it is hungry or it is happy. You, real you, never feel hunger or joy, you are always an impartial witness of their hunger or joy. When you maintain such attitude towards your bodies, it will be much easier for you to bear their complaints and problems; it is much easier to bear someone else's pain than your own. And you, your higher self, cannot suffer from a toothache nor be happy because you got promoted and your salary will be higher.

The conditions in which you live do not always depend on you. To a certain extent you can choose a quiet place for your exercises; a place that is free from noise, clutter and disorder and that is not exposed to constant changes in lighting. A small room, furnished only with a simple sofa, or a mat, would be best for this purpose. It would be best if you can dim it. But beware of complete darkness in – at the beginning of your practice – dark spirits like dark places. And, most of all, make sure that you are the only person who has instant access to the room. The aim is to create the cleanest and most quiet atmosphere possible. Even you should not enter the room, in which you practice, if you are overexcited, upset or sick. Consider this place to be your sanctuary.

However, if your living conditions do not allow you to have a separate room for your exercises, this does not mean that practicing Raja Yoga is beyond your reach. Although having a separate room is favorable, it is not absolutely necessary. If you truly want to do your exercises, you can do them even in the poorest conditions. Do not use each inconvenience as an excuse for not practicing. Five minutes a day will be enough time for practice, and you should be able to find this time even if you have numerous duties. Every day, either before going to bed, or every morning after waking up you will find a moment for your practice. Moreover, even during your daily duties, moments occur when you have to wait for something or when you can rest for a moment; you can use such time for practicing. If you are in the habit of taking a stroll, you should choose places that are far from noise and traffic – for example the park or field. There you can find silence and peace, not only for you to relax but so that you can concentrate on exercises as well. The physical body and brain are not involved in exercises of a higher nature so, for them, they will be periods of complete relaxation.

By practicing yama and niyama you have been preparing the spiritual foundation. As a chela, a student of the secret knowledge, you should maintain quite different attitude towards everything that life brings than an ordinary person. The spiritual foundation would be damaged if you implemented what you had learned only while you performed your exercises. Following the same mental tracks that you had followed previously, while doing your everyday duties with average people, ignores the spiritual foundations. The way you create ideas, even about the most ordinary things, is to be completely different than the way you used to create them. Every concept you create about a thing should tell you something specific about it, something meaningful, something that will allow you to come to logical conclusions. Earlier, you were creating concepts that did not say anything significant, they were only empty words. Now, you should avoid acquiring such empty terms that do not contain anything meaningful to you because you have not examined their essence; do not use them in your thoughts or speech. You will notice how often people misuse terms like hysterics, modernism, radiography, popularity, disorder, etc. without even asking themselves what is the real content of these words and whether there is any. You should also avoid looking at things thoughtlessly, only for satisfying your curiosity or the need of observing. There is no point in looking at things just to see them; you should always look to know them, to enrich your knowledge.

When you make resolutions, adopt a proper attitude as well. Even with minor things, do not take any actions before you carefully consider the need and the purpose of performing them. Abandon any ideas that are not driven by reasonable motives. Do not let yourself be tempted to do something under the influence of momentary impulses or emotions. However, do not think that I am advising you to hesitate and procrastinate before starting to do something. Motivation is not inversely proportional to the swiftness of making decisions. From now on, you will often find yourself in a situation where success depends on the ability to make a fast decision and where delay will mean missing a chance that will not repeat itself.

You should also maintain a new attitude when speaking. Ensure that each of your words are full of meaning; for you realize the moment it is said you have lost control over it. And this is why social small talk – when you jump from one topic to the other hundreds of times – is worthless for you. In small talk, subjects are hardly touched, and not explored in great depth and there is no time for contemplating them. On the other hand, do not avoid occasions when small talk takes place as they are great opportunities for you to see how people normally think; sometimes you can be useful because during the conversation you may throw a seed of deeper thought that can enter into their souls and send out shoots at a later date. When you do throw out such a seed, avoid speaking in a sermonizing tone and do not act as if you know everything and are only listening to them out of idle curiosity.

Always take into account the conditions of your environment so that you can adopt the proper attitude for your actions. Avoid acting against your surroundings by trying to adjust what you do. For example, when in the company of people busy with an intellectual work, it would be a mistake for you to give an oration or play the piano. Similarly, just because you want to sleep or meditate at unusual time, it would be improper to expect everyone to be quiet for you. It would be incorrect to preach about the harmful effects of drinking while in an alcohol bar. Your will be helped by innate sense of diplomacy in these matters and do not need hundreds of examples. The approach can be summarized as: always act properly to suit a place and time.

You should take the same attitude towards your whole life. Look on life as if it was a school which you attend to learn as much as possible, not as a chain of sufferings or personal victories. Treat your physical body as if it is a mechanism which you own; take care of it as much as you would of a machine. Give it everything it needs to be strong and healthy but, at the same time, use its powers for your work without sparing or pitying it. It will be much easier for you to overcome laziness and any tendency to indulge your body's whims. It will be much easier for you to bear discomforts and physical sufferings.

You will be able to estimate your abilities and strengths better and this is connected to your spiritual attitude towards your aspirations. You will not aspire to do something that is beyond your capabilities, but, on the other hand, you will not neglect anything you are capable of doing. When you are fulfilling your duties, do not carry them out thoughtlessly – in the manner a work horse that does not understand what it is pulling and why it is pulling it – but try to understand them and see the global consequences. Over time, you will see that each of your activities – even the most trivial – are useful for the humanity. Having come to realize this, you will do your best to avoid redundant activities and those which are not in furtherance of mankind's development.

You will also learn to concentrate fully while doing your work; even for minor or short tasks. You will break your habit of thinking about something else while doing your work or working without thought. Even when you walk down a street, you should do it with full attention, and not get submerged into daydreaming or chatting; put full attention to your surroundings. By doing so, you will observe things that you would otherwise have missed; sometimes you can even avoid or prevent an accident.

A proper attitude towards your inner life should also be maintained; do not forget about its existence. Do not live only on the impressions and events happening around you, but sometimes look deeper into your soul. Put aside everything external, detach your attention from your bodies and their experiences and become aware of your higher self. Try to feel that you are one with it and that it rules over your body as the only reality, the only thing that is really true. Then, recall all your deeds, feelings and thoughts that have happened since the last time you did such an internal review. You know of this examination of conscience from the Catechism; it is not something insignificant or redundant. Seeing all your deeds, words and thoughts through the eyes of your soul, you will look at them with absolute courage and honesty. Like an impartial judge, you will see how much there is still to be done in the task of purifying yourself.

Observe these deeds, feelings and thoughts not like your own but like someone else's in order to avoid blurring the impartiality of your judgement through egoism. It is easier to judge someone else without being too tolerant. It is crucial to be absolutely honest and truthful with yourself. When you look for excuses for some of your failings, their importance will not be seen properly: you will lose the possibility of ridding such faults from your soul. At a higher level, you will learn the exercise called reverse review which will enable you to have impartial judgement of your deeds. For now, just make a commitment to yourself that you will examine your conscience every evening before going to sleep: be persistent in keeping this promise, and thus, practice fulfilling your resolutions.

In Indian writings, you will find eight properties – that are the characteristic for spiritual attitude of asana – under the name of the Noble Eightfold Path. It encompasses the following eight levels:

Proper understanding

Proper thought

Proper speech

Proper action

Proper livelihood

Proper effort

Proper mindfulness

Proper concentration

Do not confuse the eight levels of Noble Eightfold Path with eight levels of Yoga, because the former is merely one of yoga's levels. The importance of this path, for the development of one of the invisible senses, will become clear to you later. For now, I would like to direct your attention to the extreme importance of your attitude towards your surroundings.

As a chela, a student of secret knowledge, your attitude towards people around you has changed, even if they do not notice it. And they should not notice it. So far in your life, you have surely experienced how strongly someone else's thoughts, feelings and moods have influenced you. When surrounded by sad or stressed people you absorbed their moods. In the same way, people around you were impacted by your moods and feelings. You are at the beginning of your preparatory period so you have not mastered controlling your thoughts and feelings yet: when you are among other people do not let those feeling have any effect. When you are overpowered by a sad thought, anger or depression, do not infect others with it: withdraw to solitude and return to them when your soul is completely peaceful and your face is serene.

Take note that along with the progress of your spiritual development, the strength of your thoughts and feelings will also develop. Such powerful thoughts and moods will have a great impact on people around you. Even the objects that surround you absorb your thoughts, feelings and moods. Thoughts and moods attach to walls and furniture and create very long-lasting hard layer. That is why sensitive people, when they enter somebody's flat or house, immediately feel spiritual value of the occupant even if he or she is absent at the moment.

You have to try especially hard not to have an adverse influence on children by your thoughts and feelings. Their nature, still very sensitive and not resistant enough, is an extremely fertile ground for any seed, whether good or bad, which sprouts very quickly. Sometimes you will hear a conversation in which parents complain that their children have acquired – and no one knows from where – a tendency to quarrel, lie, spread gossip; even though it is alleged that they do not hear anything like that at home. Without doubt it is possible that they do not hear it, because parents are careful not to show these flaws when in the presence of their children. But they do not restrain themselves while the children are not at home. Quarrels by parents, outbreaks of anger, social gossip or even ambiguous words attach to the walls and furniture, and form a dense dirty cloud. When children return home, all of this penetrates into their souls like invisible viruses. Children become bad, arrogant, untruthful, and deceitful even though their parents try to behave properly in their presence.

Even you are affected by your previous thoughts and feelings. If you should surrender to pessimistic thoughts, bitterness, self-doubt, despair and aversion to the world and people, while you are in your room, should you later – after you had a stroll and composed yourself – return to that room, it may seem to be unpleasant and repulsive to you. Those were your own thoughts and feelings that have made your room so dirty, that to you, it now seems unpleasant and hostile. Should you stay inside it for some time, you will give in to pessimism and despair again because of your own pessimistic thoughts that you had earlier thrown on walls. This is why I warned you to never enter your sanctuary in pessimistic or despairing mood.

Your new position in the society requires something more from you. Not only your thoughts and feelings are important but also the way you behave and act towards your fellow people. Everybody – whether she or he is a mother or father, brother or sister, teacher, caretaker, merchant, official – is a member of a binding circle of people, who are closer or more distant from each other. You should always abide by the rule that you never demand from others more than you demand from yourself. On the contrary, you should demand from them less than from yourself. And you must not get angry because they are not what you would like them to be. You are only allowed to make remarks and point out their faults when it is correct for you to do so; that is when you are their teacher, their caretaker, their supervisor or a guardian of public order.

Not making unnecessary remarks is not limited just to your speech. It also means that you should behave in the company of others in a way that your presence is never a burden for them. Do not get tempted to force them to do what you want. Do not try to stop their activities simply because you are now bored by them. Your presence should be always in harmony with other people, except when they obviously err. But in most cases simply do your best not to be a burden. And you will not be a burden, if by constant effort, you demand as little as possible for yourself from others. Unless it is absolutely necessary, do not demand that others make way for you, or that they get quiet for you, or that they serve you with something. On the other hand, do the contrary: make way for others whenever you can, try not to make unnecessary noise, always be ready to help and to serve, but only when somebody asks for something. Never force your presence, help and advice on anybody. Never impose your excessive care; not even on your own or someone else's children. Soon, your exaggerated care would become a burden for them and your constant questions whether they need anything or how they are, would make them tire of you. In other words, always respect their individuality.

The higher you progress on the path levels, the more your feelings subtleness and your inner tact will develop; even without special exercises or tips you will feel how to harmonize with people around you.

### Chapter 9 – Pranayama (The Rhythm of Life)

In her Esoteric Papers Helena Blavatsky writes:

Literally translated, pranayama means the suppression and retention of the breath. However, all of the Masters are unanimously opposed to it. The science of pranayama has a twofold significance and two applications. Hatha yogis take it very literally, as relating to the regulation of the vital, lung breath in the physical body. Their motives are usually selfish: to acquire psychic or spiritual powers, blissful spiritual experiences or feeling of ecstasy for themselves. On the other hand, raja yogis apply the science of pranayama to the mental or will breath; only after they have purified their lower bodies and got rid of all selfish desires. Only then can pranayama lead to the highest clairvoyant powers, to the opening of the third eye, and to the acquisition of true occult powers. They use pranayama exclusively for the development of the mind and will.

You will now understand why you will not find in this book any instructions for breathing exercises to accelerate the development of your invisible bodies' chakras. Such instructions will be available for you later, when you have achieved the ability to establish the psychical rhythm in your bodies, that is the will breath by means of dharana, dhyana and samadhi. For now, I will only give you some general guidelines for breath exercises that are by no means mysterious and do not influence your chakras. You would find the same guidelines in various original works of Indian systems of breathing, but there, they are often so mixed with harmful or erroneous instructions that it is extremely difficult to choose the right ones.

The Indians rightly say that we, in Europe, do not know how to breathe. We use our lungs only partially and that is why we have to breathe unnecessarily quickly in order to give them enough oxygen. Women usually use only the upper part of their lungs while men – the middle or lower part of theirs.

Try, standing upright or lying down, to breathe in as much air as you can. Inhale until your shoulder blades and your upper ribs rise. You will notice how much more air you are able to inhale than you normally do. A few slow and deep inhales and exhales every day will suffice as a lung exercise. Do not breathe in this manner too often as it may lead to pulmonary emphysema. After physical effort, exhaustion or weariness, a few deep breaths will help you regain vital forces and freshness; but they must be done quietly and with full concentration. When you are cold, such breathing will return warmth to your body. The result of this exercise is purely physical and you should not expect any other effect.

I will describe another exercise that you can try only if you have scrupulously practiced yama; it has some impact on one of the chakras of the etheric body. This exercise would be premature or even harmful if carried out before your body is purified of all bad habits and prejudices. It could be harmful for other people, because you might implement your bad habits into them. You should do this exercise only when you are in a completely peaceful mood and in perfect health.

Lay on your back in a comfortable position with your head, neck and spine in a straight line. Your head must lay horizontally, not be bent forward: avoid high pillows. Cross your arms on your chest, right on the top of the left. Your feet should touch each other. In this position, inhale as much air as you are able to. When your lungs are completely full, sense that your stomach is also filled with air: do not exhale, but try to push the air from your stomach into your lungs using your stomach muscles. You will see that the effect of this is that your ribs and shoulder blades expand. When you release your diaphragm and stomach muscles, it will be as if the air from lungs returns to your stomach. Then you can exhale. When you first start this practice, one inhale and exhale is enough. Eventually, it will be possible for you to repeat this exercise without exhaling any air. However, do not try to do it more than five times because it may be harmful. Also, do not do this exercise more often than once a day. Only when you are on the higher level of the path, will you notice that apart from its impact on the etheric chakra, this exercise will bring you enhanced intestine work-out and the feeling of health and energy. You must get used to breathing through your nose, never through your mouth, not only on the occasion of similar exercises but also throughout the day.

The above exercises have nothing to do with restricting the breath; on the contrary, they teach you how to fully involve your lungs in breathing. Later, when on the levels of dharana and dhyana, you will observe that, without being aware of it, the rate of breathing drops when you are concentrating on meditation. It is the same as if you watched something so intently that you stop breathing. That is why this slower breathing rate must be compensated by the exercises in deep breathing that I have just described to you.

Breathing exercises, selected uncritically from the Indian scripts by some European authors, have a doubtful value. On the other hand, making your breathing rhythmical is a completely different thing. From the principles of mechanics we know that sometimes rhythm can substitute for effort. Water dripping constantly onto the same surface of a stone, will eventually create a hollow. A troop of soldiers, marching rhythmically across a bridge can make it swing with enough strength, that it breaks: this is why the troops in an army mix their steps when they go over a bridge. Rhythm – that is repeating the same thing at equal intervals – is a great power; one that is underestimated in our materialistic times. Even in things that are essential to our health, like eating or sleeping, we abandon rhythm: we eat at different times, when we have time or when we think we are hungry. We also sleep irregularly and that is the reason that our generation has become inferior. We do not even think about rhythm in speech or music. The rhythm of modern poems is as feckless as the rhythm of our musical compositions and, on top of that, we consider it to be an advantage.

You, however, should utilize the most precise rhythm in everything you do: breathing, walking, speaking, eating, sleeping and even in your feelings and thoughts. Observe in nature, how everything in it has its own rhythm, how everything happens in an orderly manner. Day comes after night, spring after winter, waning of plants after their flowering. There is a determined time for everything and nothing happens hap-hazardly, too promptly or with too much delay. Rhythm should become your habit in everything you do; get used to it so completely that it becomes the habit of your etheric body. When you walk, let your steps be stable and rhythmical but not too heavy or long. While walking, remember that your breathing should be rhythmical and matched with your pace. For example, one inhale during three steps and one exhale during another three steps. Choose the timing of your meals in equal intervals – of course not too short an interval – and always at the same time of day. Remember that your stomach needs about 2–4 hours to digest food, so never eat more frequently than every three hours: it is better to do it less frequently. Sleep should also come at regular intervals and for the same duration. Eight hours of sleep is sufficient: sleeping more than 10 hours is excessive while less than 6 hours might be harmful for your health and for your powers. After waking up never eat in bed because the stomach sleeps longer than other organs of the body. Before having your breakfast, move around a little, for at least as long as washing and getting dressed takes you. If it is possible, put all your daily duties and chores on a regular schedule. Always start the day at the same time and move to other activities at the set times. Alternate mental activities with physical ones, easy ones with more difficult, etc. Try to adjust the type of daily activity to the rhythm of nature, to the time of the day, and even to the season of the year. Early morning hours are good for concrete, material work, not only physical activity but mental too, such as making calculations, logical thinking, etc. Evenings are better for creativity, artistic activities, studying arts: everything that requires creativity and imagination. Similarly, summer months are more suitable for working outside, study and observation of nature, while winter for synthetic and creative work. On the higher levels, you will grow to feeling these differences with your etheric body. Of course, you should do all these only if it is possible for you. If you do not have the power to change and adjust your living conditions, then, in whatever conditions you are living in now, try to find enough possibilities to practice pranayama and all the other exercises that are required on the path.

As at a further stage of pranayama – which you will achieve slowly and gradually – you will adjust the rhythm of your breathing to the rhythm of your heart rate. You will achieve a state in which the same number of heart beats occur for each inhale and exhale. You achieve it not by doing any special exercises, but involuntarily, by controlling and quietening your bodies to such extent that they become in perfect inner harmony with each other. The sign that you are close to reaching such harmony is something that you might have regarded as completely impossible before now. That is, you will become aware that your pulse, the beating of your heart, depends on your will; you have become able to accelerate it or slow it down. If you have studied anatomy, you have learned that there are two kinds of muscles in the physical body, striated and smooth muscles. The former serves conscious movement while the latter movements independent on human thought: for example movements of the stomach and intestine. The heart is the only organ built from striated muscles which has movements independent of our conscious thoughts. In future, all people will be able to control their heart muscles and you, as a chela, are ahead of the development of humanity and thus, you will develop the ability to control the heart movements sooner. This does not mean that it is impossible to gain such control in other ways; for example by practicing hatha yoga, or even to have an innate capability.

By mechanical exercises one may also achieve other higher abilities but this is not the proper way. You will achieve the ability of controlling your heart movements, and, as a by-product, the control of blood-flow, without a purposeful attempt to obtain these. You will achieve them on the higher level of the path, along with other abilities such as prophesying, moving in your etheric body, etc. At this time, I have only indicated that making your breathing rhythmical will connect you closer to this ability. When you are at the level of development that allows you to achieve this ability, your morality will be so high that it will not cross your mind to draw attention to it to other people. It will be solely for you, as a sign that you are making progress on the path.

There is a pause between inhale and exhale and a pause between exhale and inhale. When you are at the right level, you will understand the value of these pauses. It will also happen at that level – when you bodies are purified – it will be impossible for you to get overcome by lower feelings. It will have become simply impossible that anger squeezes your throat, that your heart stops beating from fear or you blush from embarrassment. You know from your own experience, how much emotional outbreaks influence your breathing and heart rate, and how much they overcome your physical body.

You should now see clearly the difference between pranayama of modern Yoga and the mechanical exercises of pranayama in Hatha Yoga. The results of the two will differ as well. The purpose of pranayama in Hatha Yoga is the awakening of kundalini fire and leading it through etheric chakras to the Brahman opening; which is achieved without any purposeful effort. It is as if you tried to stimulate a plant to grow faster by means of various artificial and rapidly working substances. Even though it is possible to make it grow, the process is pathological and immature. You will achieve a higher level involuntarily as your chakras mature and fully bloom naturally, like plants under the natural influence of sun and air. You will develop the ability of opening the chakras in this natural way, and this ability will remain in your higher self for all your next incarnations. Thus, it will be your permanent acquisition, which will not perish after you die, but will be transferred into your new bodies which you will receive in your subsequent incarnations.

### Chapter 10 – Pratyahara (Control of Attention)

In Indian philosophy, you can find a notion that has been unknown to European philosophical systems. This is sutratma, which translated literally from Sanskrit means silver cord. You will understand better what sutratma is in dharana; for now it is enough to imagine it as a cord linking the receiver of your phone with other stations by making the right connections. By plugging it alternatively in one socket and then another, you change stations and you can receive messages from them. Your sutratma plays a very similar role. It is plugged into your ears so that you can hear, to the tongue in order to taste, to the skin to feel warmth or touch. When you are doing so, you are putting your attention to one particular sense, and you receive impressions from it. But most of the time, you are connected to all of your senses simultaneously: you receive various impressions together and you don't know which one is of the highest importance. When all telephone stations ring at the same time to demand connection, you usually choose the one which nags at you the most.

In pratyahara, your task is to introduce some order in this ringing, to fix the switchboard so that various stations do not all call at the same time: you can choose the one you should connect with. In other words, the goal is to receive only the impressions you need, and ignore the rest of them. Your life is a great source of occasions to carry out this exercise. You have been doing some of these exercises involuntarily before now. For example, during a walk along a street, when you were involved in an interesting conversation with just one person, you put all your attention to that person's words and ignored completely what other passers-by were saying. You did not even notice what they looked like, you did not know who you were passing, and maybe you did not even notice when someone said hello to you – even though your eyes were open. Some other time, when you were standing in front of a display window, perhaps a bookstore, you were so absorbed in looking at the book covers you did not even hear the noise of street traffic behind you, or a neighbor passing by and saying hello. You may have sat at the dinner table and were so absorbed in an interesting conversation that later, you could not remember how the meal tasted – you do not even know if you have eaten and whether you have eaten or not. At a concert, you listened to a singer with such attention that you did not see the people sitting next to you, nor the singer himself: you were so enraptured with the music that you did not feel a tooth-ache, even though earlier it had been unbearable.

All these incidents were accidental and involuntary exercises that happened because you put your attention to the sensation that was strongest at that moment. Now, your task is to change the exercise into a conscious one: you will not choose the telephone station that rings the loudest or from which you expect the most interesting news but one which is quite indifferent to you at any given moment. For practice you will direct your attention according to your choice. For example, when you are reading a very interesting book, stop in the middle of the most absorbing paragraph to scrutinize the font in which it is printed, or to count the number of lines on one page. When you observe a very interesting event with your eyes, suddenly think about the air temperature or about the parts of your shoes which are most (not least) comfortable. While listening to a concert, try to become aware of the scent of your neighbor's perfume so vividly, that for a moment you no longer hear the music. You will find a lot of such possibilities in every moment of your life and in all conditions. The above exercises should be enough for you to create an idea in which direction they should go and what they look like.

The purpose of the exercise is to control senses to such an extent that you receive input only from the sense to which you wish to pay attention to; the one you connect to by sutratma. You must learn how to make a connection with the sense of your choice, cut that connection whenever you want, and make a connection with a sense that does not seem to be particularly important at that moment. In this way you will gradually introduce order to your "switchboard".

Be sure to avoid concentrating too much on one aspect when doing these exercises. You would miss the goal if you always put attention to the same sense; you may have missed very interesting input from other ones. You should learn how to control your telephone switchboard for more than being able to connect with one selected sense. You should also learn how to control all of them: not only being able to switch to one of the stations but also to two or more of them at the same time. When you leave home for example, you could decide: Now, all my senses will be open; I will not only see, hear and feel everything what is happening on the street, I will also remember it in detail. And you already know that you remember things to which you have put your attention consciously. In this way, practice focusing on two or three senses simultaneously; for instance, notice impressions received by a sense of hearing and touching, excluding all other senses and later, notice only those received by smell and sight.

Having achieved some experience in linking sutratma consciously with your senses and disconnecting it accordingly to your will, you can progress to further exercises in pratyahara. Namely, from all the impressions received by one sense, choose only a certain group of sensations. Now, we have to abandon the analogy to telephone switchboard as it has become too inappropriate.

When you drink coffee – if you drink it – ignore its taste completely and focus exclusively on the taste of sugar in it. When you listen to someone playing the piano, do not listen to the melody at all but instead, try to focus on harmony of the music, or, to the contrary, focus only on the melody without hearing any chords. At an orchestra concert, choose one of the instrument, for example the flute or violin, and try not to hear any other instruments, even if they play much louder than the chosen one. When you admire a painting, try to see separate lines but not shades and colors, then try to see only colorful patches but not the lines, and finally only the light and shade but not the colors and outlines. When you are in a crowd of talking people, choose one or two of them, and listen to their conversation, try not to hear anybody else. The goal of the exercise is to be able to notice more delicate impressions despite the flow of stronger and more pressing ones. And not only barely notice them but also to follow and observe them. You need to develop the ability of spotting and picking subtle impressions from the flood of coarse ones that hit your senses with much force. By so doing, you will not only sharpen your physical senses but also open the way for receiving very delicate impressions that cannot be felt by physical senses.

Either at this level, or at the next one, you will notice this sharpening of your senses. The bat's squeak consists of such high notes that most people cannot hear them at all. Perhaps you also have not heard them before now; but you will start to hear them. The beam of white light broken up by a glass prism splits into components of different colors, from red through yellow, green, and blue to violet. The human eye cannot see colors beyond red and violet. But you will be able to notice colors at each end which other people do not see. You will see, for example, infrared and ultraviolet rays. The former will be of black-violet color while the latter of bluish-gray color.

You will start noticing other visual phenomena that are invisible for other people. For example, you will notice that the poles of a steel magnet or iron electromagnet emit colorful rays. On the north pole you will notice blue light and on the south one, orange. The human body, especially the hands and head will appear to you to be surrounded by radiant glows. Beams of rays burst from fingers, eyes and mouths. You will also see that plants glow and clouds of colorful mists float over flowers. Practicing dharana will further develop your senses, not only the physical ones but astral and etheric ones as well: you will start noticing more and more wonderful phenomena. Furthermore, your physical senses will become more precise; for example you will be able to recognize iron by touching it and you will distinguish it from other metals, even if it is covered by a piece of fabric. You will be able to distinguish sounds that other people do not hear at all. Your smell will sharpen to such an extent that you will be able to distinguish the rock from metal or wood, water with salt from water with sugar, and so on.

The exercises described above will be very helpful to achieve all these. But you will go further and practice something that is even more important than you have exercised so far. That is, you will learn how to switch off all your senses completely. The following exercise can be treated as a bridge to try to achieve it: try to focus on some abstract, mental idea, for example on a memory of a past event. It does not matter if the event took place an hour ago or many years ago. Picture it in your mind so vividly and with so much detail that you do not see, hear and feel anything else that is happening around you.

When you plan to do this exercise, do not isolate yourself in a room where you can find silence, half-light and a relaxing atmosphere but, to the contrary, choose surroundings full of light, that are noisy and busy. Again, try to read something with your full attention in similar adverse conditions. When doing this, do not choose a topic which is especially interesting to you because it will be easy to focus on it even without much effort; choose a topic that is difficult, does not interest you at all and require full attention just to understand it. This exercise can be mixed with the prior one; for example you can stop reading to see if the sky is clouded or what is the hair color of a person in front of you. But be careful to do this only when you want to and not, for example, when a person suddenly appears in front of you so that his movement catches your attention without you choosing so. You must beware of all subconscious impressions.

The number and kind of such exercises can be expanded and depends on your creativity and resourcefulness. Do not treat them as merely theoretical exercises, with no intended results. This is a strictly practical and real preparation: at the higher levels you will see how necessary and significant it has been. If you are to think without using your physical brain, it must be fully quietened first: it is never to interfere with your pure thinking process by its heavy and slow vibrations. During your higher practice, it must be completely quiet and is not to break the silence in any circumstances, for as long as you decide. And you – you are not your body or brain – but your higher self.
Chapter 11 – Preparation

The preparatory path is composed of the five levels you have now read about. It will take seven years. During this period, a lot of work on yourself awaits you: you will call yourself fortunate if you are able to complete enough preparation to enter the proper path of chela. If you carry out some of the tasks less perfectly than others, you will be still allowed to enter it: but as a probationary chela. Preparation does not have to be absolutely perfect before you can achieve enlightenment. It is acceptable that in some aspects you are still on the preparatory level while you are reaching for enlightenment in others. It is similar to education. If you are only average at some subjects at school – while you excel at others – you are promoted to the next grade. Then, of course, you have to catch up on your shortcomings; otherwise you will not manage the more difficult material.

The preparatory period is a single grade and yama, niyama, asana, pranayama and pratyahara are the subjects to be learned in it. That is why they do not come consecutively, one after another but they are parallel to each other. The reason I wrote about pranayama later than about yama, is that without initial, at least very rough cleaning of your bodies, it's impossible to carry out exercises of the further levels. It will be the same in higher grade. There, dharana, dhyana and samadhi are also parallel to one another; together they compose samyana; however, without some skills in dharana, you will not be able to practice dhyana in a fruitful way.

In fact, it is possible to know nothing about these three higher levels and postpone any interest in them until after the seven years' probation; after maturing to enlightenment. But for you, at these higher levels, you will be able to see the fruits of what you sowed during your preparatory period. Every mystery school, when it assigns a task to a student, explains what results will be achieved. Therefore, you should also know that results you can expect during the seven year path.

The general task in the preparatory period is, as you now know, to clean and master your mental, astral, and etheric bodies, and by so doing, also your physical body. Only when you have achieved complete control, can they be transformed by the light of knowledge gained by enlightenment. Your transformation into new person is the aim of yoga. Your higher self will be seen through your bodies by its glow. The preparatory levels are only to make this possible. They are to clean your bodies, give you full control over them, and improve their functioning so that they become your reliable, always obedient, tools that function faultlessly. Adjusting these tools to the tasks that enlightenment will demand of them, will take place at higher levels; the only aim for now is to clean and fix them.

As you are now aware, the aim of Hatha Yoga is to master the physical body and the invisible bodies through the physical one. By means of tough exercises, often very painful, hatha yogi aspires to achieve such control over his physical body that he can inflict pain to it, control the functions of its internal organs, put it into a state of catalepsy, and withdraw his etheric or astral body from it. In addition, a hatha yogi cleanses his physical body by restraining himself – from eating meat, drinking alcohol, having sex – in order to influence his etheric and astral body by the physical one. Undoubtedly, it is possible to partly achieve these aims: the sign of partial success is a gaining of some mediumship abilities. (Famous spiritual mediums of present time [year 1920] are incarnations of the former hatha yogis; that is why moral levels of the mediums vary to a large extent). A hatha yogi, by a simple act of his will, can invoke such phenomena as levitation, telekinesis, moving objects without the use of physical body, that is do "miracles" in the eyes of ordinary people; he is also able to achieve some kind of clairvoyance at a lower degree (in lower astral planes) and enter into a contact with some spiritualists' "ghosts".

Of course this is not the right outcome because it skips purifying the mental body and establishing connection with one's higher self. It is not possible to develop the spirit through the body but on the contrary, only moral development can influence bodies which are the spirit's tools. That is why I have not given you any tips for mastering your physical body. I have not advised you to restrain from meat, stimulants or from fulfilling your physical urges. You should be like the wise owner of a horse who will not let it starve or fight off its urges but he will control those urges for his own purpose. If you think that at the beginning of your preparatory period it will be easier for you to control some of your desires by physical abstinence, you can attempt to do so but do not expect too much by way of results.

It is logical that the purification starts at the top and descends gradually. That is why you started it from your mental body. You tried to remove that cloud of petty and insignificant thought-forms – whether your own or somebody else's – that was surrounding your mental body with an impenetrable cloud. Now, the space around your mental body is clear and free; it does not obscure your view anymore, and thanks to that, you will be able to receive inspirations and perceive others' thoughts when you are on a higher level. It will not only be the thoughts of other people; for that ability would not differ much from telepathy. Most important, you can obtain inspiration from these thoughts which belong to creatures higher than ordinary people.

Thus, you will be able to reach upwards with your mental body but the influence of this purified body will work down, on your lower bodies. You will abandon unnecessary thoughts and start thinking about only that which is necessary. Thanks to this, there will be much less unwanted emotions in your astral body, much less desire and temptation. Purifying your mental body of the burden of redundant and insignificant thoughts will transform it into an extremely accurate and efficient tool. Your thoughts will become clear, logical and precise to an extent that is impossible to be achieved by a person who has not gone through your preparatory period.

Your astral body will change as well. So far, it looked like a multicolored cloud, without any distinct outline, constantly changing its form and colors, whirling and gleaming, at one moment dark and in another, light. Astral currents and whirls could enter it easily to change its shape and color; to cause sudden outbreaks and turmoil and to evoke constantly changing emotions. After having gone through the preparatory period, this body will gain a distinct shape and clear outline. Sudden outbreaks and uncontrolled, irregular quivers will vanish from it, but the energy will still flow and whirl in it; the difference is that now they will be your own currents, not imposed upon you from outside. Moreover, some colors that are less beautiful will either vanish completely – for example blood-red, grayish green, unclear black or opaque violet – or at least they will be less intense. On the other hand, some new, extremely clear and luminous colors will appear.

The results of the preparation will be also visible in your etheric body. Instead of a shapeless mass, that roughly fills the outlines of your physical body – a vague and dull mass, gleaming only in certain points as happens with pieces of coal that are hardly glowing, and with many growths and bumps on it – now, in its place a clearly shaped figure will appear, consisting of three clearly separated parts, in which a few colorful stars shine and multicolor currents flow among them.

These gleaming stars are the lotuses of your etheric body, the chakras. They have developed during the preparatory period and now they shine and whirl in a proper way. These stars or wheels vary in the number of their petals or spokes. Manipura chakra, which has ten petals, shines in the middle of your body; from a bud that had five alive petals and five dormant ones, you have awoken the five dormant ones by practicing yama. You then brought this chakra to full development by practicing the breathing exercise in which you were moving the air from your stomach to lungs and back. If you had tried to start with that breathing exercise – without awakening it first by practicing five principles of yama – it would have been made to move in the opposite direction. This would have meant that the currents of energy in your etheric body would have circled in an incorrect way; you would have obtained mesmeric abilities but they would influence others in a manner like alcohol. Instead of healing them, it would only have suppressed illness symptoms and temporary relieved suffering. But you will have a pure and healthy ability to heal because your etheric body is pure and healthy. You will be allowed to use this life force to heal people around you, to bring them relief in suffering. But your main task does not go in that direction. Your task is not to become a healer because more serious work awaits you: to heal and strengthen souls, not bodies.

Apart from the ten-petal chakra, you will also awaken other chakras: but not all of them, because for activating some of them, the practice of dharana and dhyana exercises is required. Your twelve-petal chakra, located near the heart will be developed by the presence of the six-fold virtues that you acquired by practicing niyama. In this chakra, its six petals were previously moving slowly while the other six were inactive. Now, they all shine and whirl correctly. The sixteen-petal chakra shines in your head, in the spot where nasal cavity meets the throat; you developed it by means of the Noble Eightfold Path. However, your eight-petal chakra still remains in the bud state. You have awaken four of its petals when you worked on four qualifications and you have set them in a motion compatible with the other four petals. This chakra will fully develop when you enter chelahood.

Even these chakras that you have awoken so far will give you the variety of new perceptions because they now work properly, as paranormal senses. The twelve-petal chakra, apart from enhancing your vitality and mesmeric abilities, will also let you feel people's temperament in such a way that you may come to call some of them cold and others warm, even though this is merely a description. Thanks to the sixteen-petal chakra, you will add to this observations the impressions of light; people who you feel are warm will appear light to you, the cold ones – dark, and these who are neutral – gray. Moreover, these observations will also have some form; you will distinguish the shape of one person's thoughts from the thought of some other person and even the forms in which principles of natural phenomena are expressed. Initially, these observations will not be very precise: but they will enhance your trust in the path that you are following, and they will give you proof that your effort is not in vain because you can see some results.

Do not expect your path to be nothing but pleasure. The newly awoken sensitivity of the paranormal organs will not only give you interesting and joyful experiences, but also a variety of unpleasant ones. You will be like a small, helpless child – one that is under the impact of positive and negative influences – unable to cope with an overwhelming variety and unable to defend itself from their effects. Your invisible senses, recently awoken, will be initially inept at shielding you from receiving all input.

One such unpleasant symptom – which may be difficult to cope with at first – is a feeling of breathlessness and discomfort when in a crowd of people. The astral body reaches approximately half of a meter beyond the outline of the physical body which means that in a crowd of people their astral bodies will merge with yours and cause that feeling of airlessness, this may even lead to nausea. The spiritual coldness of some people, which you will feel with your twelve-petal chakra, will be very unpleasant for you and some time will pass before you are able, for example, to shake hands with such a person without feeling disgust. The emotions and moods of others will easily trigger your astral body to vibrate in the same manner. A depressed person will make you feel depressed, someone else's rage will make your body shake with anger. Perceiving other people's thoughts will awaken similar thoughts in yourself. But if those thoughts annoy you, you could easily start disrespecting people because of their egoistic and inferior attitude.

Your preparatory path leads among painful and joyous experiences, and among many others too. You should be aware of periods of spiritual darkness which will come to you with more and more force; do not forget about a constant feeling of loneliness and emptiness which will accompany you on the way. Remember, as well, that the higher you climb on the path's levels, the fiercer the lower forces will become: they used to consider you to be their victim, and will now put temptation and traps in your way to make you fall off the path.

On the other hand, the ignorance of other people to your progress will be very helpful to them; people do not like it when someone like you stands out of the crowd. As long as you were an average person, you had some faults that allowed others to forgive you; you were similar to them and did not grow above their level. But when you started to be different from other people, you are able to attract their attention. Such attention is not friendly, but rather envious. When they are able see that you are higher than they are, they will not understand and will try to find error, fault, and weakness in you. They do this in order to convince themselves that they are not worse than you and you being so high is not proof of their inferiority.

When looking for fault, the sense of observation and eyesight, in such people, sharpen extremely. They will discover and sense every slightest fault in you, every flaw of your character; no matter how hard you try to hide it, they will bring it into daylight. They will not only spot it but also make it monstrously big and enjoy that they have found "spots on the Sun". It does not mean that they are malicious, they are simply ignorant. They are only blind tools in the hands of low forces that feel you are escaping from their control; they do what they can in order to keep you in their clutches. So remember, it will be in vain for you to try to keep and hide even one fault, one flaw on your soul, to find an excuse for it or try to hide it from your conscience. You can be certain that other people will notice it, bring it out in the open, and greatly magnify it. They will even remind you about sins of your youth, which you thought were long forgotten. So, embrace yourself with power and persistence so that you will be able to boldly stand their attacks that will be constantly surrounding you.

It might not be pleasant but you must get used to it. Indeed, it will be very useful to you, because even if you want to accept one small flaw on your character, others will find it and put it before your eyes. It will be very salutary for you: it will be a remedy against self-conceit and your leniency towards yourself. In this way, you will realize how difficult it is to clean yourself thoroughly from vanity, from thinking well of yourself. Sometimes you will say to yourself: What do they all want from me? I am already so much better than they are and it is still not enough for them. When you say this, you will be no longer better than them: you will have become inferior to them; they at least realize that they are not perfect – and you deny your own imperfection.

But this is not enough. Feel love and gratitude for others instead of feeling – seemingly justified – aversion to them for the distress they unjustly caused you. Be grateful for the lesson they have given you, by showing you faults which you did not see or did not want to see. They have not done you any harm but have helped you to purify yourself. Thus, never allow yourself for any feeling of disrespect or contempt for them; this would be one of the worst falls on the path and it would be extremely difficult for you to recover from it. Accept other people as they are, not as you would like them to be. On the other hand, shape your character as you would like it to be, in your future.

As you climb up the levels of the path, you will gradually receive higher abilities, and you become as a super-human to a greater and greater extent. However, do not expect to receive these higher abilities for your own use. More is demanded from the more talented ones, not less; this rule is valid even in schools, not only on the path. Thus, all your higher abilities that you will subsequently obtain, will be given to you so that you can serve others in a more effective manner. And how are you going to help those others if you turn away from them with contempt and hidden resentment? What would you call a mother who holds her children in contempt because they know less than she does, or who holds those children in contempt for hurting her with their ignorance? Do not say that other people are not your children because they are. You are to become their spiritual caretaker, you are to teach and lead them, but, first of all, you are to be an example to them. You are to tell everybody, not only with your words, but by who you are: I have been able to climb upwards to purify my bodies; you are able to do the same, if you really want to.

How would it be possible for you to be their caretaker, like an older brother, if you do not love them? Maybe you already know a sentence that can be applied to all fields of secret knowledge: Only what you love can be revealed to you; you will never truly know anything to which you feel repugnance; such aversion builds a wall between you and it. You can find the way to peoples' hearts only through your own heart, never through contempt. If you want to lead them, you need them to trust you. No one accepts help from an enemy. So it is not merely enough to forgive them when they reveal your hidden faults to you. You should admit that they are right and be grateful to them. You must make them feel that they have not hurt you at all; that they have not caused you any harm; on the contrary – they have helped you and you do not feel any resentment toward them.

In this way you will fulfill the words of the Gospel by your deeds: If someone throws a stone at you, give him bread. You now understand that this rule is not merely theoretical but has a great practical significance. People serve merely as blind tools for lower forces and your action will neutralize their effort. Having your hidden faults exposed will not hurt you at all, it will not hurt your pride, it will not enhance your self-conceit; but endow you with gratitude and appreciation. This lower forces' weapon, which is terrifying for ordinary people, will have become blunt. You must endure such a moral "flogging" because you are following Christ's footsteps. Further stations of his Passion await you at the higher levels of the path.

Having passed the preparatory levels, you can still turn back from the path. You can leave it to go back on the broad and comfortable road that most humanity follows slowly and relatively effortlessly.

You have not been admitted as a chela yet, you haven't obliged yourself yet; therefore, you are still allowed to leave the school. Having returned to the world, thanks to the preparatory period that you have experienced, you will have become a very valuable and useful member of society. The abilities that you developed, will enable you to get proper social position. You will even have the right to use the fruit of these abilities to your own benefit, because in the world, on its broad and level way, the rules of the New Order do not yet apply, only the rules of the Old Order. Only one condition is binding on you: you are not to use your abilities to harm anybody. If you should do so, you will lose them irrevocably.

But if you are truly matured to the path, you will not stop halfway. Its future hardships will not discourage you, and the principle: Nothing for yourself, everything for others will not discourage you either. In your soul, this truth will shine brighter and brighter: what you only do for others, you truly do for yourself. This conviction will make stronger your resolution to follow path to its very top, because the higher up it you are, the more you are able to do for others. You will want to be a "helper of Helpers" and at the top, to join the circle of Elevated Beings: those who truly hold the earth's fate in their hands. With doubled energy, and with inexhaustible persistence, you will embark on practicing the three higher levels.

### Chapter 12 – Dharana (Concentration)

The first of the higher stages and the sixth of all levels of the path is dharana or concentration. As you already know, the goal of practicing dharana is to achieve proficiency in focusing your attention on one object without being distracted by external stimuli, for a set period of time. It is not necessarily a physical object that is to be the subject of your attention; it can also be a sensory impression or a recalled memory. By having practiced pratyahara you will have learned how to control your attention; how to attach it to whatever you want to and how to detach it, by an act of will. You have trained your attention to such an extent that it will not detach itself from the object chosen by you, unless you make the decision: it will not follow another object even if that object makes a strong impression on you. Having made your attention to be an obedient and efficient tool, you will now be able to use it for achieving further goals.

Translating the word dharana as concentration is not precise. You obtained the skill of pratyahara in order to attach your attention to a chosen subject. Now, you can use this ability not only for attaching your attention to a certain object for a set period of time, but also for finding out as much information about it as is possible by the means of such focusing.

Thus, dharana is a way of gaining knowledge about things. It is making yourself enlightened about the objects' features. You will easier understand this process of gaining knowledge if you do two simple experiments. Take a needle into one hand and prick it slightly against the other hand, only hard enough to see a small drop of blood. You will feel this prick as a pain, not very strong, and that is the end of your first experiment. From this, you will have found out that a needle prick is painful. You will have found out only as much as a child who pricks itself with a needle for the first time in its life.

Now proceed to the second experiment. This time, focus solely on the pricked point of your skin and keep your attention there for a moment. You will notice, first of all, that such a slight prick is in itself not very painful at all. The sensation felt at the very moment of pricking will not be unpleasant; you are able to connect it to previous experiences when the prick was allegedly painful. Keep your focus on that spot and you will notice that the pain comes after a while and that it is most acute when the blood starts flowing. This sensation can be distinguished as two separate impressions: one is the stinging sensation and the other feels like swelling, as if something small stuck inside was becoming bigger and bigger. If you focused your attention on this area longer, you would learn even more from this experiment; but what has now been shown is enough for you to realize what kind of results you may come to by practicing dharana. There is nothing para-sensory in it, nothing miraculous. By simple act of concentrating, you obtain much more exhaustive and precise knowledge than if you tried to obtain it without focusing on the observed object.

Exercises in dharana are not only limited to the sense of touch or to your own body. Imagine, for example, that you hear a bird's chirrup. When you focus on this, you will notice that the bird must be somewhere nearby; using your hearing, you will evaluate from which direction the sounds are coming, they will make an impression of being loud or quiet, pleasant or unpleasant to your ear. Generally, it will be the same what you have been noticing many times so far. But now, try to focus and keep your attention on this chirrup for a little longer. You will notice that the bird is making several sounds at different pitch; there are breaks between subsequent sounds – the bird is saying something in its own language, there is something more in it than chirruping for your pleasure or discomfort. Listening to it, you will feel empathy towards the bird to a certain extend. Feelings similar to those that have made the bird sing, will arise in your soul: you may feel something like fear, maybe pain, or on the contrary, joy and happiness. You will understand what the bird is saying by its chirruping, you will start understanding its language; this would be impossible without dharana.

Here is another example. Look briefly at a chair standing next to you. When you look carefully, you may notice that it is made of wood, polished, well preserved despite long usage, the wood is hard, and the chair is made in a sound manner. At first, you may think it is impossible to notice anything more about the chair, even if you were to look at it for an hour. However, try to keep your attention on this object despite your conviction. You will start to notice something new. The back of such a chair is more worn than its other parts and its front legs are cracked, as if cut up. This was done by someone who sat on it quite often. Thus, this chair has not been used for quiet intellectual work; it is either from a dining room or from a child's room. Moreover, on the edge of this chair you might see some marks, as if someone had tried to cut it with a sharp object: the chair probably comes from a child's room, more likely a boy's room. And now, you know much more about this object than previously; and if you have kept your attention attached to it even longer, you would notice more details.

Do not think that dharana is useless for you: that it would be more suitable for detectives. It is true that Sherlock Holmes practiced dharana: that is why he was able to track details that were left unnoticed by others. However, for you, dharana practiced on inanimate objects will serve not as the means to an end but be an exercise in focusing your attention.

Another example. On the table in front of you, suppose there is a lilac in a vase. When you look at the flower carefully, you may notice it has a nice violet color; apparently it has been cut recently and it has not started fading yet. Some of the flowers are still in buds while others are in full bloom. You can see that not all the flowers have identical colors, that some are lighter than others. You can also see that most of them have four petals and only rarely you will find one with five or more petals.

And now, use dharana, and try to keep your attention focused. You will distinguish older flowers from freshly bloomed ones because the older ones are lighter in color, they are simply "going gray". Moreover, their color is more matt while the fresher ones are glossy. Still looking carefully, you will see that it is not really a "gloss" that makes the fresh flowers look so vivid, it is rather as if they look as if they are wet. But once again, it is not really wetness; you can check this by touching them. By thinking intensively on how to describe what you see, you decrease intensity of your eyesight. What you thought was caused by eye tiredness will suddenly become clear: the flowers are covered by a light glowing mist. It cannot be a hallucination because you still see the older flowers vividly; it is only the outlines of the fresh ones that are obscured by some fluffiness. This is how, by practicing dharana, you have come to your first observations of the etheric aura of flowers.

On the basis of these examples you are able to understand the course that practicing dharana should take. You will also understand, that exercises can be performed everywhere and at any time; you do not need any special objects or a specified hour of the day to do them; you can find occasions to practice exercising in your everyday surrounding. Every thing you see, every sound you hear, every emotion you feel, all of them give you an opportunity to practice.

However, do not think that in dharana you will use only one sense. By practicing pratyahara, you have learned how to switch between senses according to your will. Now you will use this ability in dharana. The more senses you focus on a subject, simultaneously or one by one, you will obtain more comprehensive knowledge about it. When you study a flower, do not do it only with your eyesight, but also touch it, smell it, and even taste it. Having collected as many impressions as you can from the object, notice how they make an impression on your soul; you will have discovered some new knowledge. You will not only learn what impression an object makes on your physical senses but also how it influences your internal senses, your chakras, by feeling its impact on your soul. At first, such feelings will be feeble and hardly noticeable but if you practice more, it will intensify.

And this is a higher level of dharana. You will find a lot of possibilities to practice this type of exercise in your environment at any time, without being distracted from your daily activities. Dr. R. Steiner recommends to start practicing some of them at an early level of preparation; here are his guidelines:

If the attention be frequently fixed on the phenomena of growing, blooming and flourishing, a feeling remotely allied to the sensation of a sunrise will ensue, while the phenomena of fading and decaying will produce an experience comparable, in the same way, to the slow rising of the moon on the horizon. Both these feelings are forces which, when duly cultivated and developed to ever increasing intensity, lead to the most significant spiritual results. A new world is opened to the student if he systematically and deliberately surrenders himself to such feelings. [Steiner R., Knowledge of the Higher Words]

Do not be discouraged, if you do not have such feelings at first attempts and beware of pretending or convincing yourself that you have felt them when you have not. They will eventually appear for certain from patience and persistence in you repeating your exercises. However, if you do not really feel it and talk yourself into thinking that you had, this may be a barrier to your future progress.

When you have mastered these exercises, you can then add to them the practice of using dharana on non-sensual objects: for example on the organs in your etheric body. But for these new exercises, you must choose the right moment and surroundings; you need silence and darkness; or at least half-light. Make your body comfortable, as if you were preparing for breathing exercises: put yourself into a quiet mood and switch off all your physical senses. Next, put your attention to one part of your body, whichever you wish, but be fully aware where it is: for example the big toe of your left foot. Put so much attention to this point that you are not able to feel, see or hear anything else. At first, you will not feel anything special except some warmth. This will be caused by prana flowing into your toe more vividly, in accordance with your attention. However, after some time, you will feel something new: you will observe that all your sense of touch, all sensitivity from your body, is gathered in this single point, in your toe. Now, should you touch the edge of a bed or a chair with that foot, even if protected by a shoe, the touch will feel extremely intense, almost painful.

If you are able to keep your focused attention even longer, you will notice extraordinary phenomena; at first you may not believe they are real. Your sense of touch has moved not only to that one toe but has spread around it in the air. It is as if the toe has become surrounded by a layer of sensitivity outside of it. You can feel, very vividly, not only the shoe, but the material of which the bed or its cover are made, even though your toe does not have any direct contact with them. These early phenomena will not be achieved when doing the exercise for the first time: you have to repeat it persistently. However, do not spend too much time doing this exercise at first because if prolonged too long at this intensity, you might experience unexpected results; and not be able to cope with them.

This exercise will prepare you for the next one; one which will lead to actual para-sensory impressions. However, do not proceed to the next exercise until you have achieved good results in this preparatory exercise. You should randomly choose different points of your body for the preparatory exercise and beware of making it last too long. 3-5 minutes is enough for practice, and then stop, even if you have not achieved any results. Remember as well that these exercises are not obligatory, you can decide if you want to try them or not. Without them, you will reach higher levels as well, in a similar way as you get to the subsequent levels without practicing breathing exercises, which I mentioned in the chapter about pranayama. They are as if additional subjects at school; without them you also get promoted to another grade, and they only serve those who have special interests and predilection for them.

The next exercise that I am now going to describe is also not compulsory. As in the previous exercise, withdraw your attention from all your senses; direct it to one of the chakras in your etheric body, for example to the one located near the heart. With all the concentration you have, try to feel this one point of your body, even though you are not able to locate it with precision. The first few attempts will be fruitless: but eventually you will be able to feel and locate this chakra clearly. When you feel it, it will be a completely new sensation, unlike any you have experienced so far. Perhaps comparable to the feeling of a young woman: one who is going to have a baby for the first time and feels in her body the first movements of her future child. But in your case the movement is not physical. Yet, it will be in one specific area of your body. The depth of the location of this point will be most difficult to judge. On some occasions, you will have the feeling that it is moving right under your skin; on others, that it is located much deeper, virtually next to the heart (that is if you have selected your twelve-petal chakra).

Moreover, you will notice that it is not a small point but something that takes a relatively large space; even though you are not able to define its size precisely. You will make much progress by noticing what kind of movement is happening in this organ. Take care, do not try to convince yourself that you are feeling a rotating movement, because different people have very different feelings. You should only notice that this is a movement completely different from the movements of the physical heart. You can try practicing dharana on your other chakras in a similar way. When you do these exercises persistently, you may come to see the colors and lights of the chakras, and then, you will also be able to see how they move.

Do not forget that you need extraordinary patience and persistence for this type of exercise. It is very likely that you will seem not to notice any results; it is also possible that you obtain results different from those expected. It is a big mistake to have preconceived ideas about the results because you might be inclined to adjust your exercises to fit in with your wrong presumptions. You already know that on the path, you have to avoid any presumption that is not based on fact. To even a greater extent, you should avoid making any guesses about future results. Your task is to do exercises with all patience and persistence you are capable of, just for the sake of the exercises, not for any results. Undoubtedly, the effects will come to you but not when you think they should. It could take at least seven years; maybe even fourteen, if you lack persistence during the first seven.

However, do not be discouraged or frightened by how long it takes to do these exercises. Do not say: If I am supposed to wait for the results for so long, my lifespan may be not enough to achieve them. First, take into consideration that you do not work for results, but only for the sake of the work itself. Second, remember that you have not only this current life but many that will follow after it. It does not mean that no effects whatsoever will be obtained in this incarnation; it depends largely upon you, on your patience and persistence. Your age is of no importance either, even if your youthful years are far behind you. It often happens, that only in the evening of man's life, does a change of a worldview happen within him. A worldview that was formerly largely materialistic becomes quite the opposite as a man turns to the path. Such people become the most devoted chelas, as they do not have obstacles in the form of bodily desires, ambitions or attachment to life, and so on. It is easier for them to pass through the preparatory levels and reach higher levels. That their life is now behind them, it may have acted as a great preparatory school.

This is what Leadbeater tells about himself:

It may be of use if I mention my own experience in this matter. In the earlier part of my residence in India twenty-five years ago I made no effort to rouse the fire – not indeed knowing very much about it, and having the opinion that, in order to do anything with it, it was necessary to be born with a specially physic body, which I did not possess. But one day one of the Masters made a suggestion to me with regard to a certain kind of meditation which would evoke this force. Naturally I at once put the suggestion into practice and in course of time was successful... I have never heard that there is any sort of age limit with regard to the development. [Leadbeater C.W, The Inner Life]

There are three things that are important here: there is no age limit, only appropriate meditation is required, and the etheric body is of correct quality. You can easily understand the first two of these. As for the third, you need to be aware that if you did not have the proper etheric body, you would have felt that the path is not right for you. In such a case, you might have thought that Hatha Yoga was better for you; and you would have gone in that direction.

Now, I will tell you about an exercise mentioned by W. Judge: this exercise is so effective and beneficial that you should treat it as a compulsory everyday exercise. During your probationary period, you have probably gotten used to making a short examination of your conscience; to analyze and judge your deeds and thoughts that happened throughout the day. You are also aware that this examination does not mean that you have to remember every event and activity but that you should judge whether you have the right attitude towards them. You are to look on your deeds, words and thoughts and judge them as if someone else performed them. This will enable you to judge them much more objectively.

You should do this daily examination of conscience along with the following exercise: instead of doing it in a consecutive order, from morning to noon and on to evening, reverse the order. Start from what you did or thought a short while ago, and go backwards to earlier and earlier events. Thus, instead of thinking about one particular event and then trying to remember what happened next, go in the opposite direction to remember what occurred earlier, and then, even earlier. In this way, go through your entire day, but from evening through noon to morning.

The goal of this exercise is not to remember each event, thought or word without exception but to keep your attention on that chain of thoughts, which consists of links of mental images, ordered accordingly to your will. You should remember the events of your day, but not in the order which they happened – one after another – but in the opposite order. In this exercise, you will lack the helpful measure which you would have in ordinary order, that is remembering events based on the results that the previous one brought. In this exercise, one deed does not logically results from the previous one, but the contrary: first you see the result and then the reason. Thus, you will have to focus more intensely to be able to keep your attention on this reversed chain of events.

There is a threefold benefit that comes from this practice. First of all, you will learn to judge events as they are, without considering the reasons that caused them; this will make your judgement more objective. Let us consider a simple case: supposed you planned to meet someone to discuss some issue but this person did not keep the appointment. You got angry, you sent for this person, waited for another hour or so, and then, when he arrived, you said bitter words to him. When you analyze this day in the evening, the first things you see are those bitter words and you will see clearly that they were not ones to be said by a chela. If you had started your analysis from the morning, remembering the unpleasant waiting would have reignited your anger, which would have justified your bitter words. Now you can see what it means to look on your deeds in an objective way.

The second benefit is that you learn how to think pictorially. If you did the examination of your conscience in the usual manner, you would think with words rather than with images. You would tell yourself: He did not come, I waited, I sent for him, I told him some bitter words of truth; each of these thoughts result logically from the previous one, in a manner of cause and effect. But when you think in a reverse order, you see only those bitter words without any cause; to remember the words clearly, you have to rebuild the scene in your memory. You are facing this person and talking to him sharply. You do not need words but an image of this scene if you want to recall it. And this is exactly the goal of your exercise: making images of memory. When you run through your day from evening to morning, you should see yourself in the recollections of your mind as clearly as if you were looking at yourself in the mirror or at the cinema. You should see yourself as if you watched a film at the cinema, played in the reverse order, from the end to the beginning. Do not skip even the most trivial details, like the fact that, when you were coming back home, you had to climb the stairs. You should first see yourself at the door of your flat, then going through the door backwards, going backwards down the stairs (when in reality you were climbing up). Do the same when you recall your way to the city. And always try to see yourself as you appear to another person, not as you appear to yourself.

The third benefit is reversing the order itself, that is, as if you had reversed time itself. Getting used to running your thoughts backwards through events, starting from the most recent ones, you prepare yourself for astral thinking which will be absolutely necessary for you later. When you start entering the astral plane with full awareness, it will be very easy to get confused and give reasons for results; should you still think in the way you do on the physical plane. Dreams are good examples of this "reversal of the time".

Imagine that you are having a dream in which a killer enters your room and wants to murder you. You desperately try to defend yourself, but cannot and he fires the gun at your body from close range. You hear the shot, you feel pain in your heart, you feel that life is leaving you... and you wake up. It would seem that this drama has been built logically; the end result comes from prior reasons – however, in reality it was all completely different. You woke up because, while sleeping, you had rolled over onto your left side causing some pressure near to your heart. This pressure caused involuntary movements in your body so that you accidentally pushed a chair. The noise made by the falling chair caused the dream about a gun shot and the killer. So, the pressure on the heart was first, then the noise, and the image of the killer came later. When you woke up, you reversed that order of the events for one that is completely different from the actual one.

Now you understand the significance of analyzing things in reverse order and the usefulness of it when evaluating your deeds with your conscience. You know that trying to remember each trivial event, word or thought is not the most important thing here. The vital thing is that you actually do this exercise in reverse order, from the end to the beginning and that you actually see yourself doing the deeds. Do not tell yourself about them in words. It does not matter if you go all the way back to morning, it is enough if you reach noon or even afternoon. The main goal of this exercise is to put your thoughts into a new direction and give them a new quality. You should become skillful in ordering events according to your will and not simply remember them in the same order they happened. The "normal" order does not depend upon you, it is imposed on you by external circumstances, and you are able to free yourself from it. Moreover, you need your mental images to be as vivid as possible. In the next chapter, you will see why this is so. For the moment you appreciate the value of the reverse order for the way it improves the quality of your examination of conscience. You will see your deeds, words and thoughts in a new light and will judge them impartiality.

### Chapter 13 – Imagination

The practice of dharana clears the way to reaching imagination, that is to seeing things in pictures. You are aware that imagination has nothing in common with such pathological conditions as hallucinations, delusions or illusions. The Latin word for an image is imago, and it does not mean an illusion. If the real object does not exist, its image will not appear in a mirror. What you have learned about the external world – by means of your senses – is also all image, not the reality itself.

Let us take a table as an example. What you think is a table, is actually an image of a certain object, created from the sum of your sensory impressions, such as touch, sight, smell etc. You have looked at the table, you have touched and lifted it and all these impressions created an image of the table in your mind. This image would not have appeared if you had not collected enough sensory data.

When someone reports an event to you, you can imagine it, you can evoke pictures of consecutive phases of this incident in your mind. How you perceive the table is your imagination about this object, created on the basis of your own sensory impressions; how you perceive the described event, is your imagination of external impressions. You have not seen the incident, and yet, triggered by someone else's words, the images of it have been created in your mind. They appeared because the event you were told about has made a certain impression on you.

Thus, imaginations can be created from external or internal impressions. While listening to the story, the sense of hearing creates an external impression in the mind. This does not mean that you created the image solely on the basis of that external stimuli. When you listen, certain internal impressions are evoked in your soul, and they can be so strong that you see the described event as clearly as if you witnessed it yourself. Recall how strong images are created in your soul when you read the work of a good novelist.

Let us go back to your image of the table. It is a physical, external object; you can examine it with your senses. While examining it, you put your attention to it. It depends on the degree of your attention, how strong imagination you will be able to create about this object later. But this examination does not evoke any feelings in your soul, you are completely indifferent towards the table. However, other objects can awaken some feelings in your soul, and in this case, imaginations about such objects will be much stronger. There are also some objects (and beings) that you cannot examine with your senses as they are not physical. However, they do exist and make impressions on the non-physical senses. These impressions can be the source of imaginations as well, and dharana opens your way to them.

It is obvious that the description of the imaginations created from para-sensory impressions can be difficult because there are no words to describe them. If you want others to understand you, you have to use words taken from the sensory physical world, and they can only roughly convey what you want to express. So the descriptions will be understandable to some extent only. For example, a non-physical object can cause an impression that is similar to the impression that the color blue makes on the physical sense of sight. In such a case you would say: I see blue, even though you do not actually see it with your eyes; it is merely the impression you would have had if you had seen the blue color. Do the following exercise, but have in mind all the time, that the words for your impressions are only approximate, as more precise words do not exist:

Choose an animal and watch it very carefully, so that you are able to create a vivid imagination of it later. Your imagination will be based on the sensory impressions. Then, choose a plant, and again, study it and create its vivid imagination. And finally, take a stone, preferably a transparent crystal. Three separate imaginations will be created in your soul. Put one next to the other and try to distinguish what individual features each of them has, what makes them different to the others.

Each of them – a stone, plant, and animal – has a certain form. But a stone does not move and does not grow in any apparent way, it does not have any organs or limbs; it only exists. A plant exists as well, and does not move either, but it grows, blossoms and matures; it changes its form and it has some organs for growth and giving fruit. And finally an animal: it also grows and matures, but moreover, it moves triggered by its desires and instincts, and it can receive sensory impressions. The form of a stone was created by forces free from any desires; a plant has its form thanks to the forces of growth, while the form of an animal is due to its desires. Now, try to focus on these three different forces, concentrate on them so much that a separate feeling for each of them appears in your soul. After a few trials, you will come to a completely new imagination, to an internal one.

The feeling that awakens in your soul under the influence of a stone will bring an imagination that could be called blue-violet, when compared to the impressions received by physical eyesight. The imagination triggered by a plant might bring an impression that you have when you see the color green, while imagination caused by an animal may give you the impression of orange-red. You are aware that these impressions are not visual; you will not see a blue-violet stone nor an orange animal. You will only have an impression which is vaguely similar to the one you have when you see those colors. With further practice, you will notice that each kind of stone makes an impression of a different hue of blue-violet, that each kind of animal has its own shade of orange, and that plants have different shades of green, sometimes turning into a light pink.

If your patience and persistence in doing this exercise brings you the above described results, you will have experienced your first para-sensory imaginations. You will gain an impression of how the physical external objects affect your internal organs. When you get skillful at feeling such para-sensory impressions, caused by physical objects, soon you will also come to feel objects that do not exist for the physical senses. There are multiple objects and beings on the etheric and astral planes that do not cause any impressions on our physical senses. You can only see them with higher senses, that is, with the organs of the etheric and astral bodies.

You already know from the experiences you gained during the preparatory level, that the presence of some people gives you the impression of coldness, while when you are around others, you feel warmth; that you can call some of them dark and some light. From now on, these impressions of coldness or warmth and brightness or darkness, will be accompanied by impressions that might be compared to colors. They will be impressions of colors but they will not have their source in any of the physical visual objects. When you look with your physical eyesight, you see both the color and the object to which this color belongs, you see that its surface is of a certain color. But the color does not have to be always associated with an object. The color itself can cause an impression, very vivid one, and you only have to practice making yourself aware of it.

Look into the depth of the blue sky and try to make yourself aware not of the blue color of that layer of air, but of the blueness itself. Feel the color, not the air. When you have gained some experience, you will come to realize that blue not only brings a soothing effect, but it literally attracts you towards itself, and in so attracting, it disperses. In blueness, you lose the feeling of being limited within spatial dimensions; you plunge into this blueness, further and further from yourself, you feel neither its boundaries nor your boundaries. Now, do a similar experiment with another color, for example red. Look for some time at a red piece of cloth or red-painted wall; try not to see the cloth or wall but the color itself, the redness. After a few attempts, you will feel that it presses against you, that it limits and pushes you, that it is constrictive, even egoistic. In pratyahara, you have learned how to choose the impressions that you wish to experience, and how to ignore others, by the act of your will power. So now, you should be able to see not the cloth or wall, but the color itself.

There are some beings in the higher worlds who will make you have impressions similar to colors. Such colors are not the beings themselves but their expressions. Thus, if you suddenly have an impression of a certain color hovering freely in the space before you, without any visible object, this means you are seeing an astral being who is expressing itself by this color. This imagination has not been created by a sensory impression or images from your memory. At first, you will think that these colorful visions are merely hallucinations or the symptoms of tired eyes; however, you will quickly realize that they are not triggered by any physical cause and that they are not illusions either.

When you get more adept and have experienced many such colorful imaginations, you will also learn how to notice them as soon as they appear. You will notice that they appear suddenly and do not last long, a few seconds at the most. You will notice as well that these phenomena do not have any spatial dimensions, you will not be able to say what size they are or how deep they are; sometimes you may have an impression that you are inside a colorful cloud. With some practice, you will be able to evaluate the difference in the quality of the colors, and their hues. Sometimes the colors will be indistinct and other times extremely clear; like colorful beams of light, sometimes they will sparkle and glimmer. These observations will be accompanied by a feeling that indistinct colors are imaginations of astral beings of a low kind, while those of a lighter color, the more transparent ones, are beings of a higher kind. You will very rarely see gleaming beams of light, as they are imaginations of the most magnificent beings.

When you start seeing these imaginations, be happy and delight in them, but do not try to explain them to yourself. Just try to remember them as precisely as you can, without any speculations or conclusions what these colorful imaginations can be or mean. Avoid even thinking about them by use of any words and absolutely do not tell anyone else about them. People who are higher than you on the path, will notice and know better what you see, so there is no need to describe it to them. And those who are lower than you will not understand what you are telling them, it is too early for them to have this knowledge. The more often you have such imaginations, the clearer it will be for you to understand that human language is very ineffective to describe them. In addition to imaginations expressed by colors, you will also have some that are felt as warmth, taste, smell, and others that the human language has no words for, not even roughly similar. However, there will be none that can be compared to the impressions caused by sounds. Although the astral plane is very rich in colors, lights and aromas, it is completely silent and quiet.

Gradually, this variety of colors will be accompanied by form. Imaginations, apart from having a certain color, will start to show some outline, or certain shape, even though it will not be very stable. Such fluidity is a characteristic of the astral plane, where forms and figures constantly change. There is nothing concrete, nothing at rest. Each being, each object constantly changes its shape: it is therefore difficult to distinguish between beings and objects; it is difficult to divide them into living and dead. There, everything "lives", everything moves and changes its form. This is indeed the Hall of Learning for you. And indeed, under each flower, a serpent coils, because a seemingly nice and charming creature can immediately change into a dangerous and ugly one. Low desire can take seemingly innocent form and only the hue of a color and its opaqueness will warn you.

You will obtain better understanding of the astral world – so different from our physical world – when you reach subsequent higher levels. For now, simply study this new world, learn about it but restrain yourself from making any conclusions. And, most important, do not lose the stable ground of the physical world under your feet. Here, on earth, you have imaginations that come from objects or beings; on the other hand, in dharana, the imaginations are not seemingly related to any object. Therefore, even more, you need to keep your common sense and logical thinking: do not give in to the temptation of uncontrolled fantasy, which is not based on real facts.

This is why you need to control your thoughts and feelings to such a great extent, and this is the skill that you were supposed to have acquired during the preparatory period. An adeptness in pratyahara is equally necessary, so that no unwanted sensations or impressions disturb your concentration. Your thoughts and feelings, previously mastered, you will now direct on completely new, unknown tracks; you will use them to develop new skills. You will need a lot of strength for this, for you have to focus everything in a single direction, without losing concentration from unwanted thoughts or undesired impressions. You have partly understood it already, and you will understand it better when you make progress in your exercises. If you want to successfully enter the higher levels, it is important how well all preparatory levels are completed.

Here is another exercise, suggested by Dr. Steiner for being very effective in practicing dharana:

We place before us a small seed from a plant. [...] First, we must establish what we are really seeing with our eyes. We describe to ourselves the form, color, and the other properties of the seed. Then we ponder the thought: The seed, if planted in the ground, will grow into a complex plant. We visualize the plant, we make it present to and in us. We build it up in imagination. Then we think: What I now visualize in my imagination, forces of earth and light will later in reality draw forth from this small seed. But if this were an artificial seed, an artificial copy so perfect that my eyes could not distinguish it from a real seed, then no forces of earth and light would ever be able to draw forth such a plant from it.

If we can clearly form this thought and bring it to life within us, then we will be able to form the next thought easily and with the right feeling: Within the seed already lies concealed what – as the force of the whole plant – later grows out of it. The artificial copy of a seed has no such force. Yet, to my eyes, both seeds look the same. Therefore the real seed contains something invisible that is absent in the copy. Thoughts and feelings should now focus on this invisible reality. We must imagine that this invisible force or reality will in the course of time change into the visible plant, whose colour and form we will be able to see before us. We should hold the thought: The invisible will become visible. If I were unable to think, then what later becomes visible could not announce itself to me now.

It is important to emphasize that whatever we think we must also feel with intensity. (...) Time should be allowed for both the thought, and the feeling united with it, to penetrate the soul. If it is done in the right way, then after a time, we become conscious of a new force within us. This creates a new perception. The seed seems to be enclosed in a small cloud of light. In a sensory-spiritual way, we sense it as a kind of flame. At its center, we experience the sensation similar to the impression made by the color purple, at its edges a sensation similar to the color of blue. What we could not see before now becomes apparent to us, created by the force of the thoughts and feelings that we have awakened within us. [Steiner R., Knowledge of the Higher Words]

When you achieve the result described in this exercise, do another exercise, which is closely related to the previous one:

We place before us a mature plant. First, we immerse ourselves in the thought: A time will come when this plant will wither and decay. Everything I see now will then no longer exist. But the plant will have produced seeds, and these will become new plants. Thus once again I become aware that something I cannot see lies hidden in what I can see. We saturate ourselves in the thought: The plant form with all its colors will soon no longer be there. But the knowledge that the plant produces seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothingness. I cannot see what preserves the plant from disappearance anymore than I could see the future plant in the seed. Therefore it follows that there is something in the plant, too, that I cannot see with my eyes. But if I let this thought live within me, and the appropriate feeling unites with it, then after a time new force will grow in my soul and become a new perception. A kind of spiritual flame form will then grow out of the plant. Of course, this flame will be correspondingly larger than the one described in the case of the seed. It will be felt as green-blue at its center and as yellow-red at its periphery. [Steiner R., Knowledge of the Higher Words]

It is obvious that you need to see a real seed or plant to be able to do such exercises, imagining them only will not suffice. That would be fantasying, detached from reality. The point of the secret knowledge is not to create any random imaginations in your soul, but that external reality actually creates them in your soul. You do not only imagine these colorful flames that surround seeds and plants, they really exist.

Each student sees them in the same shape and color for any given plant, if he truly is able to see them. If each of them described differently what they saw, even though referring to the same plant, then you might rightly consider that hallucinations or self-suggestion have taken place. However, it is not so. At the higher levels, a time will come for you to learn "the secret writing". You will then notice that colorful flames are in part the letters of this writing, and thus, they must have a stable form to be understood by all capable of reading them.

Once you are successful with the exercise described above, you will be ready to progress to the next ones; the object of which will be an animal or a man. Use all your skill acquired in pratyahara to observe an animal or a person when they strongly desire something. Put attention to the desire itself, not to the person nor to the object of his desire. If this desire reaches its peak, and it cannot be fulfilled, try to remain as calm as possible and immerse yourself completely in the impression that this desire is making in your soul. You need to be calm, in order that you do not get infected by their desire and avoid having a similar one; you should only be a witness of it, a careful but indifferent witness.

From this exercise, you will notice a completely new feeling in your soul, like the only wave on a surface of a calm lake. Dr. Steiner compares this feeling to a small cloud which you can see on the horizon of a blue and sunny sky. When you repeat this exercise often enough, you will come to a new imagination. An impression of something bright and colorful will appear in your soul, rather like a flame, yellow-red inside and purple at its edges. It will be the astral embodiment of the desire you have studied. You had some flashes of such imaginations at the preparatory level. When you looked at a person, whose complexion was usually quite pale, you had an impression, seemingly unjustified, as if the color of his or her face had changed from orange to purple: this is when that person strongly desired something.

You can supplement this exercise by observing a person whose desire has just been fulfilled. The imagination that you will reach by doing this exercise will give you the impression of a yellow flame with greenish edges. In both exercises, you will notice that the form and color of the flame does not depend on the person or the animal; you will notice exactly the same flame and the same color in every case. On the other hand, the size of the flame, even though it is difficult to define, and the intensity of its colors, depend upon the intensity of the desire. The brightness and the strength of the colors of the flame depend on the quality of the desire. Purely sensual or physical desires have solid, non-transparent colors, while less materialistic desires have purer and brighter colors.

It should be obvious that such observations of people cannot be a reason for criticizing or disrespecting them. An even more important thing is that you shall never reveal to anyone what desires you noticed in them or in their friends. These are to be purely scientific experiments for you, from which you are not to draw any unfavorable conclusions about the people observed. Do not mention to them what you have noticed; it will be best if in your everyday life you simply forget all about it. The person you observed is not important, only the things that you have noticed. Also remember that what is referred to as the flame, is only the impression, similar to one made by a flame on the physical eyesight; therefore, there is no feeling similar to warmth or heat. You already know that the feeling of warmth or coldness in the soul means something completely different; it is not desire, rather it gives you some idea about the moral level of the person compared to your moral level.

You should also avoid indifference and dryness towards the objects of your observations by being too scientific. Watching plants carefully to develop your imagination should not diminish your love for nature nor make you incapable of feeling delight for animals, plants and minerals. On the contrary, you should cherish and develop diligently your love for nature; only then it will reveal its secrets to you.

Only what you have loved, will reveal its secrets to you – this axiom of the secret knowledge you will test by your own experience on each level of the path. And you should love everything; not only people and other living creatures, but natural phenomena, works of art, beautiful thoughts and lofty ideas as well. You will realize soon, at the next level that it is possible to love thoughts, and without such love you will not achieve anything. What you do not love, from what you close yourself off, that which you reject – it will also reject and avoid you. It does not matter if it is a rock, rain, a fly or a man.

### Chapter 14 – Dhyana (Meditation)

On the level of dharana, you became familiar with exercising your concentration; this led to seeing thoughts in a pictorial, imaginative way. You made yourself capable of receiving impressions from the astral plane and being aware of them. Now, you are about to start doing exercises that will open the mental plane for you, in a similar way. To be able to enter the astral plane, you needed to focus your attention and feeling as vividly as possible on the subject; the astral plane, as you know, is the world of emotions, desires and urges. Now, in order to get access to the mental world, you have to develop your mental powers in a similar way to the way that you developed the powers of your astral body. However, do not think that just because you are an intelligent and cultural person, you already have your mental body well-developed. At the preparatory levels, you learned how ineptly you have controlled your mental body up until now. On those levels you undertook exercises that were aimed at making your mental body to become a tool that is obedient to your will and works flawlessly.

In dhyana, it will be discovered if this tool does actually work flawlessly. If there are any flaws or defects in it, all dhyana exercises will prove to be fruitless for you. You will not achieve any results from them, or you will achieve results that are different from those you intended. From now on, it will not be enough to think logically and reasonably in your usual manner. You are not only to think, but also to observe carefully the thinking process and its functions. But first of all, you have to be able to create lively thoughts, full of meaning and force; only with such thoughts will you be able to awaken and develop new abilities in your mental body. Up until now, your thoughts have been largely dependent upon your emotions; they have also been giving your will impulses to take actions. Thoughts, emotions and will have been bound together causally. But from now on, they are to be detached from each other to be independent; each of these forces will be separate from the others. In dhyana, emotions and will provide a fertile ground from which your mental body will develop the ability of inspirational seeing.

You might have already heard about "split personality"; now you will understand it properly. The three powers of your being – thoughts, emotions and will – when indivisible and properly bound together, constitute the unity of man. A person whose thoughts, emotions and will are united in this way, is considered to be normal. You might have said about yourself: I feel, I think, I want. By so doing, you expressed that it was always the same you; that you were the subject. You would be considered to be abnormal if you desired things that were unpleasant for you, or if you acted in a way that is against logical thinking. However, in your initiation, you will come to a state in which these three powers lose their mutual connection. You will not have a feeling that you think, but that "somethings thinks in me". You will have similar feeling when it comes to emotions: "something feels in me", and to your will: "something in me wants". Your "I" will split into three separate ones; one "I" will think, the second one will feel and the third will express its will.

To reach this point, you have to practice exercises in dharana, dhyana and samadhi that will develop independence of the three powers of your being. First of all, however, you need to thoroughly harmonize these three powers. You should never feel aversion when you think that sympathy is justified; your will should never insist on a deed which is against your thought or feeling. Without such harmony, one of these three powers might take advantage over the other two; then you would become a truly abnormal person – you might not have met one of those in your life. There are people, in whom their overly strong will kills all thought and feeling; there are others, whose heart coldness and lack of will go in hand with rampaging intellect; and finally, there are degenerates whose only impulses are from feelings and desires. Before your three powers can act independently, you are to harmonize them to the greatest extent, in order to avoid such dangers.

Now you understand why the harmony of the powers of feeling, will and thought is necessary before you reach initiation. You will also need this for other purposes. Harmonious development of these three powers helps to develop the second half of the six-petal chakra, and you realize that for initiation you have to have all chakras properly developed and working normally. You also know that, like in other chakras, half of the petals have been already active for a long time, even though you were not aware of this. Now, it is time to awake and develop the three remaining petals. As it comes to other chakras as well as to the six-petal one, you should see that their development does not depend upon physical measures but on installing proper features into your invisible bodies.

One such feature is the sense of truth. Of course, this is not a physical organ, but an internal trait. Your sensitivity to all that is true must developed to the highest degree; one that you have not even imagined before now. Your sense of truth must be so acute that all that is false or erroneous feels clearly unpleasant to you, almost causes you physical pain. As the opposite pole for this sense of truth, you should also grow within yourself a strong tolerance for errors in the speech and deeds of other people. Never let yourself feel any aversion toward a person who lies intentionally or only repeats erroneous statement unwittingly. Happy is he to whom truth manifests itself, not in signs and words that fade, but as it actually is – says Thomas A. Kempis. And elsewhere: We frequently judge that things are as we wish them to be, for through personal feeling true perspective is easily lost.

By developing the sense of truth, along with tolerance for other people's errors, you simultaneously work on strengthening the certainty of your judgement and quick decision making. This new ability has an impact on the development of your will by the firm resolution over doubt as how to act.

The third topic of your exercises aims at the development of the ability to think; for this purpose, you will need very serious studies. Apart from reading, aimed at the development of your mental abilities, you will also need to make deep study of secret knowledge and its various implications. Apart from sacred scriptures of many ancient nations, the works of modern occultists will also be useful, such as Blavatsky, Sinnet, Olcott, Hartmann, Besant, Leadbeater, Collins, Steiner, or even Papus, Aksakov, De Rochas and others. Your sense of truth will help you to glean the truth from under the surface: often incredulous or inconspicuous. You will be warned when an author is fantasying, whether intentionally or not.

All exercises in dhyana are undertaken in order to prepare you for real meditation. You will find many topics for meditation in the books mentioned above; apart from those, there are also some meditation topics that bring specific results. Before you progress to these topics, you need to acquire some technical skills in the methods to do these meditations: this can be achieved by practicing topics taken from the books you study. In the next chapter, you will be given more precise instructions: then, I will give you some topics for meditation that lead to specific results. For now, I would like you to concentrate to achieve a stable attitude towards events and the phenomena of life.

This sense of truth – which you have to nourish now – already started to awaken on the preparatory level. You certainly remember that on the stage of niyama, you worked on the four qualifications: the first of which was to distinguish between temporary and permanent things, between truth and guessing. At that time, you understood it with your intellect, external mind; now you will develop an internal sense of truth within yourself. When you nourish the development of this sense of truth, you will be able to perform fruitful meditation on the judgement of temporary things compared to permanent things, and vice versa. You will learn not to overestimate temporary things, but at the same time, you will learn their relevance to permanent ones. Famous Goethe's words: All things are transitory, should give you a theme for very fruitful meditation.

In dhyana, you will continue the work that you started in niyama. The sense of truth and ability to distinguish the temporary from eternal are first two elements of the four qualifications. The third, as you already know, are the six-fold virtues, the cultivation of which was your task in niyama. You are also aware that four qualifications awaken the four dormant petals of the eight-petal chakra; on the level of dhyana three of them were already awoken and active. The fourth petal still needs awakening, it will bring the desire for freedom or – if you prefer – the desire for salvation. This desire will awaken in you gradually – influenced by meditation on various topics – and will reach full development at the stage of samadhi.

Before you reach that level, there is still a lot of work in dhyana waiting for you. Developing the sense of truth will bring you a better and better ability to distinguish temporary things from permanent ones: only the permanent is true. Temporary things are merely illusions, mirages, apparitions. Slowly, you will notice that only potential abilities or possibilities can be seen as permanent, and not something that already exists.

At the moment when an extremely good deed has been done, you will stop perceiving it as being permanent. After the deed has been completed, it becomes temporal, temporary and meaningless. However, your ability to perform good deeds is permanent. Whatever you learn, what you acquire with your mind, even the most complex concepts, none of them are permanent. When you have completed dewachan, you will then lose all those things as well as your mental body. However, your ability to comprehend such complex concepts, the ability to learn and acquire ideas, is permanent. All material things are even more temporal and fleeting.

Even feelings and their external results are not eternal. But your ability to have these feelings is permanent; when you develop it, you will have it throughout all your incarnations. When you think deeper about it, you will understand that it does not apply to all emotions without exception. The ability – which you develop by your own work and effort – to feel emotions, is permanent. The emotions of a lower kind were received as a heritage of your bodies; your work involves replacing them with feelings of a higher nature. Whatever you have to cleanse from yourself, cannot be eternal; that would contradict the law of progress.

The ability to distinguish the temporary from the permanent will be now available to you. Suffering, as such, is temporary and insignificant but it has some value as a means for building some patience and persistence into your bodies. Additionally, your social position can only be valuable as a means; if the scope of your power is larger, you have more possibility to do good and support development. However, fame and honor are not eternal at all and can be downright harmful. They can easily lead to haughtiness, to erroneous belief in your own value and, moreover, they can pose an obstacle to fulfilling other duties, maybe less eminent but more fruitful.

In a similar way, all possessions are worthless; they only bring with themselves more burden and they distract your attention from the right path. Health of the physical body as such has no value either; you only need it to be able to use your body as a well-working, efficient tool. Think about all the worldly things that people crave for and make so much effort to obtain; you will notice that none of them are valuable. At best, they have indirect value, when they serve as a means to reach other goals. However, much more often they are just a burden and push you down, to the lower levels and make it very difficult to rise back up.

Pondering on worldly possessions and their value will give you valuable preparation for your proper meditations. During this pondering, you will notice how shallow and erroneous your judgements were of their value up until now; moreover, you will notice something much more important. You will acquire a new way of looking at the things among which you live. And you will create these new ideas yourself, you will be their creator.

You will obtain these new ideas by meditations. You will not take anything from outside except the object of the meditation itself. You will not take anything from other people. All this new knowledge comes from within yourself. You build these new concepts from your own materials; you are their sole creator. No one helps you, you create everything by your own effort and powers. And it is meditation that gives you those powers. You immerse yourself into it without any external impressions; you work only with your internal forces. You do not even need any external impulses for doing this; nothing external makes you to ponder about these things, you have started doing it yourself, by an act of will coming from within you.

By using your internal forces, you make stronger and more frequent connection with your higher self. Everything you learn from your meditation, all new concepts, new judgements, new attitudes – you receive it all from your higher self. You cannot take it from your intellect, your physical brain, but from your higher self. And you know that it belongs to arupa plains, to the worlds that are not limited by forms. What your higher self knows there, is common knowledge to all beings who dwell there; there are no individual boundaries. It may be the knowledge of eminent people living on earth, or it can be the knowledge of purely spiritual beings. There are no authors, no owners. The knowledge you gain from there, by your higher self, is nobody's and everybody's – it is common, it is inspirational. By means that they are not aware of, poets, musicians, painters and sculptors receive their inspiration from here; whereas you receive yours consciously (that is, you are aware of it) by doing meditation exercises.

I will give you an example of how to perform such meditation based on the following sentence: Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. [Collins M., Light on the Path] First, try to understand the meaning of each word separately in this sentence, and then, follow this – or a similar – pattern of thought:

The eyes are the tool of eyesight. In the physical world, I see objects with them. It does not matter – when seeing things – if my eyes are clean or if they have tears in them. Even though tears manifest themselves physically, they have a reason in the astral body. I can cry from anger, despair, or from joy or compassion. And such an emotion affects what I observe using my physical eyes. In joy, everything seems more beautiful and pleasant than in despair. Thus, feelings have an impact on physical eyesight.

Therefore, if I want to see clearly, without any personal prejudice, I must first quieten my emotions: I must become incapable of tears. My initial belief that the physical eye always sees in the same way – regardless of tears – was wrong. If the sense of truth was already developed in me, I would feel immediately that my belief was erroneous. And, if emotions have an impact on physical eyesight, they must have even bigger impact on the astral one. In imagination, the hue of the image is closely related to my personal emotions. I have to become incapable of tears, not only metaphorically but literally, so that I can see clearly, without any personal prejudices, both physical and astral phenomena. It is not enough to control my astral body just so that I do not cry when I experience stronger emotions. I must control it so thoroughly that no feeling – not even the slightest – appears in it, unless I have decided, with my will, that it can do so. Egoistic feelings are the most common source of tears: I have already tried to cleanse my body of them in niyama. Now, I have to take such full control of my astral body, that it feels only what I allow and only when I allow it. This is simply pratyahara of emotions. Only when I succeed in it, will my astral seeing be clear and untainted by personal prejudice.

I have shown you only one possible train of thought but you can easily understand that the same idea – before the eyes can see... – can lead to many other patterns of thinking. Whichever of them you follow, you will be able to perform a successful meditation. Notice how much new knowledge you have gained, just by meditating on these few simple words. Even if you did not know anything about niyama or pratyahara, you would see from this meditation that it is necessary to cleanse yourself of egoism and to control your feelings. You have also understood that a full control of emotions – not just a partial one – is necessary.

Now that you already know some exercises that use your imagination, use these exercises to learn how to control your emotions. Imagine, as vividly as you are able to, that one of your acquaintances – not of high moral standards – accuses you of very bad, even criminal, deeds. You try to deny it but he uses new falsehoods, then he offends you, and finally, assaults you physically. Try to imagine such an incident very clearly, with every detail: but forbid yourself to feel any emotion. Do not let even a hint of a feeling of unfairness, anger or indignation appear during this imagination. If you manage to do this, you will have your astral body fully under control.

### Chapter 15 – Inspiration

In dharana, you have developed the ability to see pictorial images. For the first time, you have experienced colorful images that do not come from any visible object. Then, the number of such images multiplied; you have collected enough, so that you could divide these colorful images into obscure ones, or bright and gleaming ones: you have realized that they are the signs of beings at various levels. If you had enough patience and restrained yourself from guessing what those creatures are, then you did not create any prejudgment about their nature. Over time, in dhyana, you will have the possibility to make a correct judgement. You know that dhyana, through its meditations, leads to inspiration; and that inspiration is the first level on which it is possible to become familiar with "secret writing". The images of your inspiration are as if they were the particular letters in this writing system. Each was not influenced by any other and they did not depend on each other. Like the letters of a written word, you have to join a number of such images together, one by one, so that they make something meaningful, something that informs.

By inspiration you obtain the understanding of this meaning. In your imagination, you looked at this secret writing as if it was a message written in a foreign language. A message that was incomprehensible to you, even though you knew each individual letter. If you had practiced dhyana diligently, the meditation on before they eyes can see... taught you something extremely significant. It made you aware that what you saw in your imagination was not things as they really are, but as they were amended by your own feelings and moods. You did not look at their phenomena directly, but as though through colored lenses. If another student looked at the same things, he would see them completely differently than you, because he would look at them through his own "glasses". What you see when you first enter the astral plane – what you perceive as objects or beings of this world – you see only a small fraction of what they really are. Most often you will see them as you have cast them into this world by your emotions, moods and desires. Most of all, what you first see there is yourself; when you first enter the astral plane, at the beginning you see yourself before anything else.

You know that the concept of distance is completely different in the astral world than that in the physical one. In the astral world, "distant" are things that are foreign for you, that you have nothing in common with. On the other hand, things that are "close" are those that are familiar to you, or you have an interest in them or they are similar to you in a way. That is why, at the beginning, you saw only yourself: because you are the closest thing to yourself in the physical world. In the physical world, you also look on yourself and see yourself as a close entity. But everything you see as "myself', you perceive as being inside you. When you say: I feel, I desire, you see this desire or feeling as something that is inside of you. You cannot see it outside, it does not come to you, but it comes out of you. However, in the astral world, you can observe your own feelings and moods: you see them as being outside of you, you can see them as objects, as if they exist outside of yourself. You will have to become accustomed to the fact that you are seeing your inner self as if you were looking at an external object: as if someone else was looking at it.

You are starting to be familiar with the secret writing. You already know the letters and you try to create syllables and words with them. In your imagination, you look at colors hovering around yourself and you read: me, my interior. You have also started figuring out how to read this writing, how to deduce the meaning of the word from the letters. You do not read them literally, straightforwardly: "redness, blueness", but symbolically, metaphorically.

At first, you may feel a little disappointed that this "writing system" is read symbolically. You might have thought that in the higher worlds, everything should be concrete and have a sharp outline, as in the physical world. Black letters on white paper are understandable to everyone who has learned them. However, symbolism of the astral and mental planes is no less accurate than physical letters. In the astral world, emotions are colors; in the mental world, each thought is a shape, a figure. The color is not the symbol of a feeling; a figure is not the symbol of a thought, but is the thought itself. You have created these symbols yourself, because you think in an earthly way and cannot come to terms with the fact that an emotion is a color and a thought is a figure. Later, when you feel more at home at these worlds, when you figure everything out, this symbolism will seem so extremely clear and accurate that – compared to it – even the most clear physical signs will have become uncertain and ambiguous to you.

Gradually, when your ability to read these "letters" develops, that is when you come to see the pictorial images more frequently, you will start noticing differences in these astral phenomena. The difference in their color and shape is not the only one you will discover. You will also notice that some of them change under your influence and some are independent of you. Sometimes, you will see an exceptionally beautiful color or a very symmetrical and harmonious figure. But at the moment you start to feel delight towards it, the color and shape will immediately change.

However, most of these phenomena will remain unchanged despite your emotions and thoughts, or they will simply vanish right away. With time, you will learn that all the phenomena you cannot change come from within yourself: they are you. On the other hand, those few which change under your influence – they are the manifestations of beings separate from you. Discovering this is the next step you take to learn how to read the secret writing.

Before you can achieve it, you have to – as I have already mentioned – grow into the symbolism of the astral world. You have to learn how to use its symbols as adeptly and confidently as you use normal digits and letters. You have to be able to see this symbolism everywhere, including all worldly phenomena. Only then will you understand the true meaning of the statement that "all temporary things are merely the basis for comparisons". To grow into this symbolism more effectively, you will need to have some additional meditation exercises. You can invent them yourself, based on the following pattern, suggested by Dr. Steiner in his Outline of Occult Science:

Visualize a plant – as vividly as you are able to – with its roots in the earth. Then imagine how its leaves develop one by one, and finally, how the plant blossoms. Now, visualize a man. Try to feel intensely how much more perfect his characteristics and faculties are when compared with those of a plant. A man is able to move around in order to follow his feelings or his will, while a plant is chained to the earth. However, in a plant the lack of this trait is something that makes it – in a certain way – more perfect than a man. He acts under the influence of his desires which causes him to go astray; a plant only abides by the pure laws of growth when it opens its flowers – without any desire – to innocent rays from the sun. On the other hand, a man can be considered superior to a plant because he has both the innocent powers of a plant and also his desires, passions and instincts.

Now, visualize green sap flowing in a plant as an expression of pure, passionless laws of growth. Next to it, visualize red blood flowing in human veins as an expression of his instincts, desires, and passions. Then, think deeply on how a human being is capable of making progress: by purifying and cleansing his instincts and passions using the powers of his higher soul. As a result of this, something undesirable in those instincts and desires is destroyed; and then, at a higher level they are transformed. The red blood may be conceived as the expression of such purified and cleansed instincts and passions. The analogy can be seen in a rose: its green sap has been transformed into the redness of a flower, but a flower – even though red – still follows the pure and passionless laws of growth, in the same manner as a green leaf. The redness of a rose can be now perceived as a symbol of the blood that has been purified by casting aside everything that was undesirable in it. Such transformed blood is equally pure as the powers working in a red rose.

[...] Not only must these thoughts be expressed in the mind, they have to evoke the feeling of joy at the innocence and lack of passion within a plant. An understanding is reached from this: the gained perfection has to be paid for by obtaining instincts and desires.

Your body is more perfect than that of a plant, you have an ability to move, you have your senses; but you also have your instincts and desires. Delight at the innocence of a plant, and – at the same time – the realization that you have to "pay" for your perfectness by having your desires, brings you a mood of solemnity. However, you have a chance to free yourself of those low instincts: by using your own will, you are able to purify and refine yourself almost to the degree of a plant. This hope of freedom brings you the mood of joyfulness. You realize that your blood's redness can become as pure as that of the rose flower; such ennobled blood will enable you to have internal experiences which are as pure – and as free of low desires – as the life of a rose.

The object you choose for such meditation is not the most important factor; you can choose whatever objects you want. The crucial thing is that you feel very vividly what you think about: your thoughts must be accompanied by emotions. The vibrations of these feelings, repeated frequently, will awaken and develop a new ability in you. Because of this new skill, the symbols will become as clear and real for you as ordinary letters and digits have been so far. The greenness of a plant's sap – a symbol of passionless existence; and the redness of human blood – a symbol of desires and passions: they will both give you a similar message – they will clearly tell you that the color itself, redness or greenness, has a very specific meaning. The exact meaning does not come from the external object itself but from its color. As you already know, in the astral world colors are things and things are colors.

Gradually, you will become more and more accustomed to the symbols, and more adept in reading the secret writing. Even this little sample that you have learned by now will allow you to read a lot. When the blood-red color appears in your imagination – you will read it as desire; if you feel aversion to this unpleasant color but the color does not change its shade under the influence of your feeling – you will read it as your own desire. You will think: this is what my desire looks like. You will also realize that it must be quite strong to have such an impression on your astral senses which are not yet skillful in observing these manifestations.

This may be a quite unexpected discovery for you. You might have assumed that you had already completely removed such low desires from your soul. But there it is, in front of you: this bloody redness, unchangeable under your influence – as clear as captions telling you that you have not eradicated this low desire at all, that you have only hidden it at the very bottom of your soul. Here, in the astral world, it has become visible, like anything else that you might have hidden inside; now, you have suddenly seen it right in front of you and it almost frightened you. One flash of redness – a symbol so simple, yet straightforward – told you more than the entire sentence. It told you explicitly: You have misjudged yourself. You thought that you had cleansed yourself of all low bodily desires, but – as you can see yourself – it is apparent that these desires are still in your soul.

Contemplate on what you have just learned and you will realize that symbols speak extremely unambiguously – if you have learned how to read them. On the other hand, beware of "seeing" symbols where there are none. Do not think that every colorful image or impression is an astral manifestation. For example: when you squint your eyes, you will see red patches in front of you – this is not an imagination but the physical symptom caused by the compression of the sight organ. When you look for a lengthy period of time at the fresh greenness of Spring, and afterwards you look at a gray or white object, you will see reddish patches on it. This is not an imagination either, but a simple physiological symptom. Therefore, carefully avoid the delusion which makes you confuse physical phenomena with astral ones. True imaginations appear suddenly, unexpectedly, and they vanish equally quickly as they appeared. You will not be able to conjure them up, make them disappear nor reappear whenever you want. Eventually, only after long years of practice, will you be able to find means of having imaginative impressions when you want, and to be able to look into the astral world with full awareness.

Meanwhile, practice meditation whenever you can. You can choose any topic you want; remember that the more sophisticated the subject of your meditation, the higher you will be taken; higher abilities will be awoken in your soul. You already know, that purely intellectual meditation, without emotions, will be relatively ineffective. If you practiced only this kind of meditation, you would develop powers only for the mental body. But you know that your development should be harmonious, that your emotions and will should be developed as well. That is why it is important to choose the topics for meditations which will evoke the highest possible feeling in you, and which will also awaken the power of your will. The same meditation can be directed towards feelings initially, and at some other time, towards will. For example, the meditation about a plant and a human being will serve you equally well for awakening both your emotions and your will. The red color of a rose – as a symbol of purified human blood – may awaken in you the will to purify your blood, so that it is completely free from opaque colors of low instincts and desires.

At the same time, practicing these exercises has the aim of loosening the connection between the three powers of your being: thinking, feeling and will. When that connection is loosened, each of these three constituents will be able to function alone, independent of the other two. And meditations on non-sensual subjects will give these powers a new route; instead of being directed towards external objects, they will now be directed inwards, into the depth of your being. You will soon realize how spirituality powerful it is to have such independent powers, which are not wasted on sensual objects. With mental power free to be directed inwards, you will become to be aware of your higher self. In a similar way, when the power of your feelings is not forced outwards – so that your feelings can be expressed in words or in some other way – then the power is kept within yourself; it may now be transformed into a para-sensory power. Finally, the same applies to your will. When it is freed from the connection to your thoughts and feelings – so that it does not merely function under their influence – you will be able to keep it inside as a higher power, functioning without the physical organs.

### Chapter 16 – Samadhi (Yogis' Trance)

Clairvoyance is a state of the most perfect vigilance, because then the inner spiritual man is disentangled and set free from the body. I would rather, therefore, denominate sleep-walking (somnambulism) the coming forward of the inner-man, of the spiritual growth of man. At this moment the spirit is quite free and able to separate itself from the soul and body, and go where it will, like a flash of lightning. The sleep-walker is then incapable of any ungodly act; though his soul be impure, he can neither lie nor deceive. [Kerner J., The Seeress of Prevorst]

This is how Ms. Hauffe, a 19th century – and thus relatively modern – somnambulist, describes somnambulism; and you can assume that this description is almost exactly the same as that ancient Indians described as the state of samadhi. You can literally apply this statement to them: "at such moments, a somnambulist immerses himself in his being or he goes out of himself". Speaking more colloquially, they were losing consciousness, to a lesser or greater degree.

For Indians, samadhi was a state of "holy sleep", a state of complete exclusion of physical senses and even of physical life. During samadhi sleep, a yogi's body was in the state of near deadness which modern science calls catalepsy. For them, on their level of development, it was impossible to remain conscious and to achieve the state known in today's psychology as active somnambulism. In such a state, a person is able to keep almost complete control over his physical body: he can walk, move around, talk, read, work, despite the fact that he is in the state of deep somnambulism. For a person today, the only apparent difference between this state and a full waking is a certain "narrowness of consciousness".

But for you, this narrowness of consciousness is a state you have become accustomed to by doing numerous exercises. Each case of the attention focused on one object can be perceived as the narrowness of consciousness, because you do not see, hear or feel anything else but the object of your attention. Therefore, for you, samadhi will not be like a magnetic sleep, catalepsy or any other special state into which you – or another person – would have to put yourself. You do not need to fall into any kind of sleep or trance; you simply disconnect your senses so that they do not disturb you during meditation or contemplation. Likewise, your exercises in dharana and dhyana also require a narrowness of consciousness; even though you do not lose your consciousness for even a short moment. In the same way, you will not lose your consciousness in samadhi.

Now, you can clearly see how significantly Hatha Yoga differs from modern raja yoga. Today's hatha yogi develops an ability which has been rediscovered a quarter of a century ago and is called statuvolence. This "dependent-upon-the-will state" is nothing more than putting the body under anesthesia; or even into a state of rigidity. Such an anesthesia of the senses is for a hatha yogi a substitute of that which can be achieved by pratyahara. When this numbness reaches the brain, a hatha yogi falls into trance; this is his samadhi. In this state, he can withdraw his astral body from the physical one, and, by so doing, achieves a certain degree of astral clairvoyance; but he cannot reach beyond this level. You realize that this kind of clairvoyance is inept: the mental horizon of a hatha yogi is obscured by a cloud of thought-forms and his own emotions, this tints his ability to see.

Some modern "clairvoyants" – who have the ability to use their astral organs either inborn or developed by some practices of hypnotic rather than magnetic nature – come to a similar level of an ability to see in the astral world. You will understand that such visions have little merit when obtained by people who have not diligently done all the work required during the five preparatory levels; you also understand that a so called "training " of clairvoyant mediums given by alleged spiritualists – in reality – results in a distortion of the development in these people.

Your clairvoyance will be of a different nature. You do not need any kind of a trance, sleep or other unnatural state: the truth is that they might even be downright harmful for you. You will be able to switch from the physical seeing to the astral one as easily as you move your eyes from a book to a view outside the window. You simply direct your attention to a different thing, in the first case – to your physical sense; in the second case – to the astral one. This shifting of your attention from the physical senses to the astral or mental ones: this is samadhi in modern yoga. On the outside, it is perceived as the above mentioned "narrowness of consciousness", nothing more. There is no body inertia, no disconnection of the physical senses, not the slightest pathological symptom.

During your samadhi you keep full control of your physical and mental powers. You do not lose your consciousness even for a second, because now – to the three states of consciousness known to people – you have added the fourth one: turiya. There are three commonly known states. The first is the normal waking state, which is from when you wake up in the morning until you fall asleep in the evening. Deep sleep usually ends a few hours after midnight. The third is light sleep of early morning, from which you remember some memories as your "dreams". The fourth state – turiya – the one in which you are during meditation and contemplation, is the state of "higher consciousness".

This is the physiological side of your samadhi state. I have elaborated on it deliberately, so that you are not afraid of this state, called "yogi's sleep" by the ancient Indians. You know that, for you, it will not be an abnormal state. Now, we can move on to its psychological aspect, that is to turiya: the fourth state of consciousness, which is rightly called "higher consciousness". It would be even more appropriate to call it "omni-consciousness". For ancient Indians, turiya was the state of higher consciousness because when they were in it, they lost their everyday consciousness: they simply fell asleep. For you, however, it will be rather like omni-consciousness because when you are in the state of turiya, you do not lose your normal consciousness. You are simultaneously awake, asleep, and in higher consciousness.

The ecstasy of Christian mystics in the Middle Ages, although it had the same characteristics as turiya: it was still a state in which they lost their normal consciousness. When they were enraptured in ecstasy, they did not see or hear anything that was happening around them – not because they did not want to see or hear it, but because they could not. As I have mentioned before, they consciously developed only one of their chakras, so they were able to fall in ecstasy through it. However, they were not able to keep a connection with their physical senses. On the other hand, you are developing all your chakras harmoniously, both in your astral and etheric body; therefore, during turiya, you will be able to keep connection with your physical body.

Even in cases when you leave your physical body, it will not be in a state of lethargy or catalepsy. Hatha yogi has to put his physical body into lethargy or deep sleep during samadhi, because he withdraws his astral – and partly his etheric body as well – from his physical body. Only the remaining part of the etheric body supports life in his physical body; thus, its life becomes very suppressed, almost plant-like. On the other hand, when you leave your body, you take only your mental body with you, and you leave your astral and etheric bodies with your physical one. Those are the bodies most frequently used in an average person and are relatively well developed. So, when you withdraw from your mental body, people around you will not notice any change. You will be able to move around, see, hear, speak and feel like you have always done before; no one will notice anything different in you. The attention of your higher self will be detached from external things, but your astral and etheric bodies will stay in your physical body; and the three of them constitute the lower self. For people around you, you will be still the same as they are, because they perceive their lower selves, their three bodies as "I".

Thus, you know that samadhi will not cause an abnormal state; one that could raise your anxiety about your health, and one that in other people could raise anxiety about your mental health. Of course, you will practice samadhi when you are alone and in quiet surroundings; you will not seek other people's company when doing this exercise. On higher levels, you will also learn to control your etheric body to such an extent that you will be able to consciously direct its currents flowing through physical body. In addition to that, you will be able to exert parts of the etheric body outside the physical body. You will do it with full consciousness because you will exert only those parts which you do not need in your physical body at a given moment. You will be completely aware of which parts are not needed and when they are not needed.

Therefore, it will not be similar to the symptoms of being a medium. An example can be taken from the life of Blavatsky who – when she wanted to convince a sceptic that it is possible to exert the etheric body and remain conscious – stood far from him. Then, with her etheric body, she knocked his teeth strongly, from inside his mouth. Of course, she never convinced the sceptic, who – first, frightened by such evidence – on the second day denied everything saying that perhaps he had hallucinations. For you, however, it is clear why he denied the fact that he was not able to comprehend. This should serve as a warning too, so that, when you have achieved this capability, you do not try to convince anyone else that you have it; you will not convince anyone, you will only risk being ridiculed. When people cannot understand something, they deny it completely rather than try to change their deeply rooted convictions.

Before you are able to control the currents of your etheric body consciously, the organs of your etheric and astral bodies have to be developed. This is because impulses of your will usually go from top to bottom, that is from your mental body, through the astral one, to the etheric one. Therefore, all your chakras must be activated: they should rotate and glow. One of your tasks at the stage of dhyana was to work on the development of your eight-petal chakra, but it has not yet been brought to full bloom. However, the currents in your etheric body depend largely on this chakra. The development of the first petal of this chakra gives you an ability to distinguish appearances from true things, or, in other words, the temporary from the eternal. When this way of distinguishing things becomes so natural for you that it is habitual – it has become a characteristic of your personality – then the center for these etheric currents will have been created in your head: under your control. Exercises in meditation, like those you have practiced so far, will enable you to move this center slightly down inside and deeper within your head: to where the sixteen-petal chakra is located.

Proper distinction of the temporary from the eternal not only strengthens the center of etheric currents in the sixteen-petal chakra, it also has a strong transforming impact on your entire etheric body. So far, this body was as if it was open to the outside: etheric currents from your surrounding could penetrate it easily without you being aware of it happening. But now, you are able to control the currents of your etheric body; they branch out on its surface and become tighter and tighter to form a delicate net. When etheric currents from outside now contact your etheric body, they cannot penetrate it without your noticing. They encounter this delicate net that you have formed, and they cause it to vibrate – in a similar way that light triggers the retina of the eye – and then, through the second petal of the chakra, they reach your awareness. You now have an ability to feel these external currents, that is to receive etheric impressions from your surroundings. The development of the third petal in the eight-petal chakra was possible thanks to the six-fold virtues which you started practicing on the niyama level. The twelve-petal chakra – located near the heart – was also awakened from its dormant state by these virtues. Your aim now is to bring this center of currents further downward, to a place you made for it in the throat chakra. But you will only be able to do this after both the twelve-petal chakra and the eight-petal chakra have been fully awakened and matured, so that they are fully active.

Then, it is time to develop the fourth petal in the eight-petal chakra. For this, you should cherish in yourself the "desire to be free" so intensely that it becomes – like the prior three – a permanent feature of your character. Only when you cease to look on external things and beings from your narrow perspective, will you free yourself from everything that binds you to your personal ego. Your narrow "I" must vanish in the presence of beings and phenomena of higher worlds, so that you can get access to these worlds. Without a desire to be free, you would still look on these beings and phenomena through your personally colored "glasses"; you would bring your rigid personal boundaries to these worlds. These higher beings would be repelled by these boundaries and be unable to penetrate into your inner self. You would also not be able to merge your being with theirs: the impenetrable surface of your personality – if you are still not able to abandon it – would act as a resistance.

Obviously, this freedom – from looking at everything from your personal perspective – does not mean restricting (even to the slightest degree) your personal sense of "I". You should not only keep an awareness of yourself, but diligently strengthen it as well. You know that in the higher worlds, the boundaries – which might help you to separate your "I" from "not I" – are not as rigid as in the physical world. Having a strong sense of self and being able to feel another being's self are two different things; you must learn how to reconcile them. Meditation practiced with your astral or etheric body does not cause you to fall into unconsciousness thanks to your sense of "I". In your everyday life, you have become accustomed to thinking with your brain. During the first attempts to meditate you may have noticed how easy it was to lose the sense of self. When you had to go beyond the physical brain in your thinking process, you had to put aside your sense of self, in the manner of a tool no longer needed. You might have even fallen asleep at that time: being in similar circumstances that happen during real sleep. When your brain becomes inactive, you lose your daily consciousness. Even now – when you are able to think without your brain – you may be still incapable of retaining your consciousness when you stop thinking at all: whether with your brain or without it.

If you carefully observed your reactions during meditation exercises, you might have noticed that you experienced a quite unpleasant feeling: people often experience this at the initial stage. This is a feeling of a certain emptiness, almost nothingness, and with it, a feeling of disappointment arrives. You have just entered the higher world, which is usually imagined as something extraordinary lofty, magnificent, and full of light, life and motion. But when you entered it, a complete darkness and nothingness enveloped you. You saw nothing, you did not receive any impressions, you felt nothing, not even yourself. You felt dissatisfied with your experience: you almost fear this icy-cold emptiness. You are afraid of entering it, because the only thing that you have managed to preserve in your consciousness, when immersing into this emptiness, is the sense of I. And you must preserve the sense of I, because, in this new world – initially – you will not come across anything more than that sense of self, the sense of your existence.

However, this will be so only at the beginning. You are like a person who was blind from his birth and then an operation made it possible for him to see. Naturally, he is afraid of the sensation of light; he closes his eyes and prefers to grope blindly rather than to trust this newly gained sense which he has not learned to use yet. But gradually, he becomes more skillful at seeing. In a similar way, you will also gradually grow into the higher worlds and become skillful in exploring them: you will feel more confident and at ease in these worlds.

Therefore, you have to preserve the sense of I, not lose it – even for a moment – when you meditate using your emotions or will, rather than your thoughts. The better you develop the two-petal chakra, the better you will be able to preserve this sense of I. You already know that this chakra is located at the forehead, between eyebrows, and that it is also called 96-petal chakra. It would be a mistake to develop it prematurely, because you would not be able to use it; and it could be even harmful. You know that you will experience the split of your personality into three powers, separate and independent of each other. These powers are your thoughts, emotions, and will; the organs they use are the eye, throat and heart chakras. So, if you had developed your two-petal chakra prematurely, your power to think might have overpowered the other two so much, that they would not be able to develop. That is why you have worked equally diligently on all three powers, that is, on your three bodies: mental, etheric and astral. Meditations which you have already practiced and which you will learn from the further part of this book, will bring your two-petal chakra to its full maturity.
Chapter 17 – Contemplation

The exercises you were doing on the levels of dharana and dhyana, made you capable of performing the proper meditation. While doing them diligently, you noticed that knowing the right way of meditating is not enough. Apart from knowing the "technical" aspect of meditation, some additional abilities – that cannot be developed in everyday life – are required. Without these powers, your meditation will be nothing more than a mere pondering, and will not take you beyond thinking processes of the brain. You are now aware of the ways and means that led to the development of these abilities in you.

First of all, you achieved it by making some "savings" in your emotions, moods and thoughts. You learned to stop thinking about unnecessary things: such as jumping from bursts of joy to despair, to being impatient, grumpy or pessimistic. The energy released – that you would have otherwise wasted on these emotions and thoughts – is now available for you to use freely. You have also learned to quieten your thoughts, emotions and will, regardless of any external stimuli. By so doing, you are now able to direct these powers of thought, emotion and will inwards: instead of spending them externally in order to react to the stimuli from the outside. Most importantly though, these three powers have been harmonized with each other.

By cleansing your mental body and making it orderly – freeing it of all redundant thought-forms – and forcing it to produce lively and clear thought-forms, you have gained control over this body and its energies. Moreover, thanks to meditating on the themes unavailable to the physical brain, you have become independent of thinking solely with that brain. Therefore now, you will be able to retain these powers within your mental body; and not waste them by triggering the brain to its normal heavy and slow vibrations.

This abundance of mental powers, kept inside, will help you now to awaken and develop the two-petal chakra. Before you are able to consciously feel the movement of this chakra, you may notice an external symptom of its development. Namely, you will see a certain change in your ability to remember things; at first this might even make you feel anxious. Details that were previously easy for you to remember – such as names, numbers, poems, musical compositions – now escape from your memory.

On the other hand, your ability to create and remember new concepts will increase – concepts which you had created by your own mental effort, not ready-made ones that you have read (or heard from somebody else) and mechanically learned by heart. At first, the weakening of your mechanical memory will worry you – if you are still capable of worrying – but soon you will notice that you have not lost anything as a result of this change in the quality of your memory. It is quite the opposite, you have gained a lot: you have ceased to use concepts from somebody else – concepts obtained mechanically – and instead, you now use your own genuine concepts.

Your astral body achieved a high degree of peacefulness by your control over it. You no longer give in to undesired emotions passively, you no longer trigger unnecessary feelings in yourself: you do not react emotionally to external stimuli at all, if you have no wish to do so. Because of this, you retain a substantial amount of emotional energy that would have previously been spent outside of you with no control. This ability to "preserve the word in your soul" – as occultists call it – leads to the development of the sixteen-petal chakra and gives it what sun, rain and soil gives to a plant.

You will comprehend better the power of astral body energy when you realize that this is the power that gives human beings the ability to speak. In ancient times, the sounds that people were capable of uttering with their speech organs only expressed their internal emotions: that is, the state of their astral bodies. This was the speech of a man's soul, an expression of what he felt. In the beginning, these sounds consisted only of vowels. Only much later did man progress to uttering consonants; this was possible when he started to be aware of his environment – when he started using the senses of his physical body. Then, he tried to imitate external phenomena by using consonants. Finally, when he associated the phenomena of the world outside him with the internal impressions evoked, he was able to combine vowels with consonants to create more complex sounds.

In this way syllables were created. Then came simple words – one-syllable words at first – and eventually more complex ones. Nowadays, the ability to speak is overused by people. Speech is not used to express the impressions that external stimuli and events evoke or to express the state of a person's soul. Speech is often made to hide and cover such impressions from other people. By making such speech, one have wasted his internal powers that could have helped him to awaken the throat chakra. This chakra cannot be developed because of the overuse of the ability to speak. But you are already able to "preserve the word in your soul"; and this will help you to develop your sixteen-petal chakra.

Exercises at the levels you have gone through, cleansed and transformed your etheric body at the same time. You have learned to stop involuntary and redundant body movements: you have gained control over etheric currents. Your will – which has been freed from what seemed to be compulsory connected to emotions and thoughts – is becoming more and more independent of your bodies. It will serve as a perfect tool for your higher self. That is why you may sometimes notice that it is not you who desires something, but that "something" inside you wants it. You will notice this especially at moments when you are in your normal everyday mood, when you are thinking in the earthly manner, and when – falling into the old habit – you perceive your bodies as "I": your lower bodies definitely do not want the same things that your higher self wants.

Moreover, you will see that your will has become extremely strong; to a degree that you could not even imagine earlier. Now, a simple decision by your will is enough for you to undertake – without procrastinating – even a most difficult activity, one that does not bring you any sort of pleasure or benefit. Your will has become so strong because it is not wasted on reacting to stimuli from the outside; you do not exert it to respond to external impressions, nor to make efforts to move thick heavy physical matter. This is why your will can now be used on more subtle etheric matter.

Now, you will understand better the meaning of the split of personality that I have mentioned previously. Observe the differences between how you are now and how you were seven years ago. Back then, you acted like all other people who were around you. Your thoughts, emotions, and will were linked with each other by a certain pattern that had been implanted in you by your parents during your childhood and then, by your adjustment to the environment. When you saw an attractive thing, it triggered in you a desire; you immediately thought about the means that could help you to acquire it. In other words: the thing that you had seen – by making an impression on you – had made your astral body vibrate. The mental body, strongly linked to it, thought about the means of satisfying this desire. And finally, the etheric body – linked to the other two – imposed its will on the physical body, forcing it to take action to try to obtain the desired thing.

Seven years later, this has all changed. A thing – even the one most desired by other people – makes an impression on you, but nothing more than that. It may even make a stronger impression on you than on other people because your physical senses have become more subtle. However, such an impression does not trigger any thoughts, emotions or will in you – provided that you do not want them. Through your senses, it reaches your consciousness, but it does not trigger a reaction; you simply observe it, as if it was a message that will be dealt with later. You are able to decide yourself whether you should respond to this impression and how you should do it: by using your thought, emotion, or will. You are completely free in this respect, nothing from the outside forces you to think, feel or act in a particular way.

You freely choose whether you will react and by what means you will do it. You can take action with your thought only: to use impression – made on you by the thing – as a theme for your meditation. You can act with your feelings: you awaken the vibrations you wish to awake in your astral body; either the vibrations of delight towards this thing or vibrations of desire – if you think they are useful. Finally, you can act with your will: you can use your etheric body to impose your will on your physical body and make it bring this thing to you, or give it to someone else, according to your wish.

Now, independence of your thoughts, emotions and will from external stimuli has become your defining characteristic. However – because you receive impressions and are aware of them – this independence should not be seen as insensitivity. You are even more aware of them than other people, because you receive them independent of your thoughts and feelings. You have a full consciousness of these impressions, you do not cut yourself off from them by any kind of a trance, as it was – in their samadhi – a common practice for ancient Indians: you are in omni-consciousness. For you, this is turiya, the "fourth state of consciousness". For Indians, it was available only in a trance but for you, it is always available; it is your normal state. Only when you reach this state, will you be able to practice contemplation properly, that is to immerse your consciousness into a chosen subject and to contemplate about it; because such contemplation is basically thinking deeply about an object. Of course, it does not have to be a physical object; it can be any feeling, concept or abstract idea.

Now, you can easily understand the link between the split of personality and the creating of a center of etheric currents in your head. As long as restrictions on your thinking, feeling and wanting had not been removed, you could not attempt to direct your etheric body independently; its movements were tied to the other bodies. The etheric body could only work together with the astral and mental bodies, and therefore it had not one, but three centers from which its currents were radiating. Only when you managed to free your thinking from its bond with feeling and will, did you free the center in your head.

By loosening the connection between feeling and will, you were able to free the second center which is located near the larynx. When you strengthen it so much that its currents flow throughout your entire etheric body, then you can start preparing the third center – the one located in the heart area. Strengthening each of these centers makes the corresponding chakras develop and mature: the two-petal, sixteen-petal, and twelve-petal chakras. However, the heart chakra should not be activated before the entire etheric body has been protected by a net of subtle currents on its surface. You will learn later how to do it; now you can prepare yourself for this process by choosing your etheric body as a theme for your contemplation.

For such contemplation, you need some preparation in meditation on the theme of your etheric body activity. From Steiner's valuable guidelines, I can recommend the topic taken from the Rosicrucian symbols. You probably remember – from the chapter on inspiration – the meditation on the difference between a man and a plant. Repeat this meditation with possibly the most inspirational of emotions, and then, create a symbol in your mind. This symbol consists of a simple black cross on a blue background with a star, made of seven roses, at its intersection. The black cross is a symbol of everything that is low in man's desires and instincts. Only by crucifixion, can these desires be transformed into the innocent red characteristics of a rose. Try to feel in your soul – as vividly and as long as you can – this ennoblement of your blood redness, its purification to the level of the flower of a rose. Then, put aside the imagination of the symbol: detach your attention from the garland of roses on the cross intersection, and instead, put your attention to the activity of your consciousness itself, to the consciousness you used to create this symbol.

The rose, the blueness, the cross: those are all external objects. However, the act that combined them into one symbol is purely an internal activity. You created the symbol by an act of your will. Now, contemplate on this activity of your will, think intensely about this creative act, which resulted in such a meaningful symbol. If you manage to engage in this activity deeply enough, you will experience something unknown to you before: you yourself will become the cross, the rose and the blueness. You will feel that you have a form of the cross, on which you put your desires and urges, and the innocent redness of the roses is the pure vibration of your seven chakras.

Perform this preparatory contemplation until you achieve the described effect, and only then progress to the next one. The excerpt from the Gospel of St. John contains one of the most powerful topics; if you are able to perform this contemplation properly, you will observe how significant its results are. These are the simple words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.

These sentences will serve you as the topic for a new contemplation: In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehend it not. Do not get discouraged if you cannot achieve any results when you do this contemplation for the first time. You may be still unable to understand the depth of these words; they only seem to be simple. Now, you will have a good occasion to test your persistence and consistence in the face of a failure. Nevertheless, you should not move on to a second topic before you have achieved the desired result in the first one.

I will not give you any more ready-made ideas on which you could base your contemplation. From the previous guidelines, it should be now clear to you how to create similar lines of thoughts. From now on, create them yourself; rely on nothing and no one, only on yourself. If you stray to the wrong path of thoughts, your sense of truth will warn you that you need to return. And it is certain that you will need to go back many times before you find the right path. But these initial failures will give you valuable lessons and will make you more experienced. This is your aim: to follow your own path, not someone else's; not to act blindly and passively, but always with full consciousness and by the act of your own will. The only thing your Master will tell you is what the requirements are, and what results you should achieve; he will never give you any mechanical means of obtaining these results. You cannot follow this way before you yourself become the way – says the guru to a new student. But to the chela, he says somethings else: You are the path. Now, you can compare this with Christ's words: I am the way, the truth, and the life.

As you have realized, you have to find the right way by yourself, by your own effort, and within you. If you received it from someone else – from me, for example – you would follow my path, not yours. I have given you some topics for meditation and contemplation; this does not mean however, that they are my own topics. They belong to all humankind. You might have thought that the topic from the Gospel of St. John has existed for just nineteen centuries; you will realize that it is much older, beyond comparison. Each topic I have suggested to you belongs to all humankind and can be applied at each stage of development of humanity. Depending on the level of development at various periods of time, these topics bring different results; however, they always awaken the most noble abilities that can be achieved in any given epoch.

The Rosicrucian topic, even though it has existed only for six centuries, still belongs to all humankind: for the most significant thing about any topic is the results it brings; its exact mental content is of secondary importance. It is not the details of the topic that are most important, not the material of which it is built. What matters is the power that created it and the potential it has to lead to a certain result. The exact content of a topic serves only as a means for awakening certain powers in the soul that lead you to those results; the results are often quite different from the theme itself. Remember this when you choose your topics, from those so far presented, or ones that will be presented in the remaining part of this book. Now, I will give you three more topics, taken from the Hall of Learning. They are as follows:

Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness.

Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters, it must have lost the power to wound.

Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters, its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart. [Collins M., Light on the Path]

When you commit yourself to practicing these exercises, you will gradually come to understand what contemplation is and what connection it has to the state of samadhi. On the level of dharana – you practiced concentration, on the level of dhyana – meditation, and only now, on the level of samadhi – is it contemplation. Complete immersion, contemplation, is only possible when you have achieved the level of samadhi. You have to become a master not only of your attention – this you have already achieved in dharana. You have to become a master not only of your meditation – which you achieved in dhyana – but you also have to able to immerse yourself completely into the theme of your reflection. You have to live in the theme and to become one with it. Some call it – very rightly – "a total abandonment in something". Your contemplation will be perfect only when you completely abandon yourself in the theme of your meditation, when you forget about yourself for the time of meditation.

Now, think what "forgetting about myself" means. What do you usually call "myself"? What you are, is the sum of everything you have lived through, of your mental, emotional and physical experiences, of all that you have collected in your memory. You may say that if you suddenly lose your memory, you are not yourself any more. You would not know who you are, what your name is and where you come from: what people you know, what knowledge you have. In short, you would know nothing about yourself; you would no longer be yourself. And, in contemplation, in the act of abandoning of yourself, you have to lose your memory, you have to stop being yourself. This does not mean you will lose your memory permanently. You only have to put it aside, as if redundant ballast: so that it does not disturb your contemplation. Afterwards, when you have finished the exercise, you will recover your memory and you will go back to what you call "myself", you will "come back to yourself". This is an archaic expression – very accurate – although nowadays people do not understand what it originally meant. You "come back to yourself" when you regain your memory, you come back to what is stored in your memory. Therefore, if you are now "coming back to yourself", it means that previously you "left yourself". The Germans have the expression ausser sich sein; in English it is only slightly similar: "abandon oneself in anger, joy" etc.

So, in contemplation you "go out of yourself", and then, you "come back to yourself". This should be understood almost literally. Your higher self leaves its lower levels – the physical, etheric and astral bodies – and takes only the mental body with itself. The ancient Indians did the same in their yogi sleep. But, while they did it in a trance, you can do it in your waking state. Memory, as you know, belongs to the etheric body; in contemplation you leave your memory in this body, you do not take it with you. In this way you "abandon yourself" in the object of your contemplation, you lose your memory. Your higher self does not need it. This is your lower self – which other people see as yourself – which needs it. Let it keep it, let it remain in your etheric body. This is what enables you to remain conscious during Samadhi; not to fall asleep but to be fully aware.

### Chapter 18 – Samyama (Higher Consciousness)

In Raja Yoga, the three highest levels – dharana, dhyana and samadhi – together are called samyama. You know that these levels are not consecutive but that they are parallel to each other. Thus, samyama is not the fourth level, after the previous three, but their sum: their consummation. At the level of samyama, you will need the abilities developed in dharana, dhyana and samadhi. Those abilities are: being able to concentrate, being able to meditate and being able to contemplate. When you use all three at the same time, you are practicing samyama. During exercises that you have performed so far, you probably noticed that only concentration can be performed for its own sake; meditation and contemplation cannot. When you meditate, you also have to be concentrated: without a proper focus of attention, it is impossible to think about one thing for a lengthy period of time. For contemplation, you need both concentration and meditation. You can only immerse into the subject and think about it if you are able to keep your attention on it for a sufficient time and also unite with it in your thoughts. That is why samyama requires all three at the same time: dharana, dhyana and samadhi; and that is why it contains them all.

If you have truly achieved the level of samyama – that is, if you have reached it not merely by reading about it and trying to understand it intellectually – then you have achieved something significant. Namely, you have confirmed, by your own experience, the existence of the spirit. You have experienced that it is possible to think, not solely with the brain, but with the spirit as well; that you can be aware of yourself not only when within the physical body, but outside it as well – and even outside the etheric and astral body. You have experienced that – beyond what you have so far called "I" – there is another "I": one that is equally real as the first one, yet much more valuable.

The second "I" – that is your higher self – may seem to you to be a little alien at first: as if it was a separate being who has come from an unknown location and now tries to interfere in your life. But this being seems strange to you only when you think of it in the earthly manner: when – falling into the old habit – you identify your bodies as being "I". It is these bodies who perceive this new being as strange, not you; and they wish to rebel against it, to thwart it. But you will not let them do so: you know that this being – being you – is real and immortal.

However, to achieve such awareness you had to practice meditations and contemplations long enough and deep enough. Each of the topics I have suggested to you will suffice for at least two months of practice: you have enough work to last for several years. I told you that it would be improper to commence subsequent exercises before a prior one has brought the required effect on your bodies. Remember that meditation works from top to bottom: from your mental body, down to the astral and etheric ones. For each of them at least one week is required, provided that you regularly practice every day. If you want the effects to go from the mental body to the etheric one, in the best case it will require three weeks. However, you need to take into account that, very often, your meditation practice will be inaccurate, superficial or it will be skipped completely.

Every day an exercise is missed, a day free from practice, there is a doubly adverse effect on the results. The goal of meditation is to create a certain spiritual rhythm; every day it is to accustom you to make a conscious connection with your higher self, at the same time every day. Therefore, each missed day hinders making the connection the next time and also delays the development of your chakras. Now, you clearly understand the significance of what you learned in the first chapters of this book: even five minutes a day for practicing Yoga may be sufficient – if you practice every single day for years.

You will also understand how much truth there is in the idea – which you have most likely come across, and might have thought of as merely a theoretical statement: not a practical notion. It is: When you make one step toward knowledge, at the same time, you will make three steps toward moral ennoblement. Without these three steps toward ethical cleansing, your step toward knowledge would be pointless; you understand that this knowledge – this higher understanding – can be achieved only when you raise yourself to the heights of this knowledge. And you will be only able to raise yourself high enough if you are not weighted down by the redundant ballast of heavy matter: if your bodies are so clean that nothing remains in them that might drag them downward.

The ladder by which the candidate ascends is formed of rungs of suffering and pain; these can be silenced only by the voice of virtue. [...] Its foot rests in the deep mire of thy sins and failings; and ere thou canst attempt to cross this wide abyss of matter thou hast to lave thy feet in Waters of Renunciation. Beware lest thou should'st set a foot still soiled upon the ladder's lowest rung. Woe onto him who dares pollute one rung with miry feet. The foul and viscous mud will dry, become tenacious, then glue his feet unto the spot, and like a bird caught in the wily fowler's lime, he will be stayed from further progress.

These are poetic words, taken from Blavatsky's The Voice of the Silence, but they contain deep truth.

Without previous moral cleansing, samyama would be completely pointless. You would even notice a purely physical – that is external – symptom, which would prove it. Namely, if you tried to raise yourself to the level of samyama without thorough cleansing and ennoblement of your bodies, you would not be able to keep your consciousness. Therefore, each time you tried to practice samyama, you would involuntary fall into a trance. You would simply have to leave your bodies, take them off; they would be too heavy and dirty for these high planes where samyama leads you. That is why a hatha yogi, even though he does not necessarily go in the direction of witchcraft, is not able to enter the higher worlds without falling in a trance. He has to leave his bodies on the earthly plane because they would pose insuperable obstacle, even though the worlds he is able to access are not the highest of all. As you already know, hatha yogis are only able to reach the astral plane, or, at most, the lower regions of the mental plane. These are worlds in which you are able to be in a state of full awareness, because you have been practicing imagination and inspiration.

So, if it happens to you that – against your will and despite your efforts – you fall into unconsciousness during the practice of samyama, do not blame this on samyama, but on yourself. Apparently, you did not practice yama and niyama carefully enough: you performed your daily examination of conscience without accuracy and objectivity. If such heavy elements are still in your body, you cannot raise them with yourself. Should you notice that, in samyama, being aware is becoming more and more difficult – because you lose consciousness – stop practicing these exercises for a period of time. Examine your soul carefully. Perhaps, when you entered the stages of dharana and dhyana, at that time you stopped observing your inner self and something undesirable has developed in it. Most often this is pride: concealed so masterfully that you have not immediately noticed it. Often, hand in hand with it, selfishness grows – because it is impossible to be proud without also being selfish.

Now, consider what samyama is and what it requires. You know that it consists of dharana, dhyana and samadhi. But that is just an enumeration of its components, not what the essence of it is. However, you should not try to create any definitions, even very accurate and comprehensive ones. Definitions, no matter how perfect, can never encompass everything. Therefore, instead of making definitions, determine the characteristics and features of an object. In secret knowledge, definitions are worthless. In secret knowledge, everything has at least seven meanings: you might give seven definitions for the same thing and they would all be equally good: but each has inbuilt bias. Consider, for example, what samyama means for you, and what it means for a hatha yogi. Consider, as well, what it would mean for a genuine sorcerer. You should also take into account the fact that the essence of concepts changes with the passage of time, it develops and perfects, while the name remains the same. For example, what samyama is for you today, could not have been possible in ancient India. Even the most enlightened of their raja yogis were not able to perform it with full awareness: this level was yet to mature.

Practicing samyama requires you to practice dharana, dhyana and samadhi at the same time. All three are necessary and this is a characteristic feature of samyama. Samadhi, as you know, is a state different from a waking state; in the state of samyama you use dharana and dhyana. Without samadhi, they would be simply concentration and meditation. Contemplation is possible only in the samadhi state.

The state in which you are when practicing samadhi is called turiya; thus, samyama might be defined as "contemplative turiya". However, even though it might seem to be the most accurate definition, you will soon notice that such a definition is one-sided. You can practice samyama, even on objects of everyday use, which only require simple observation. A definition is always one-sided and incomplete. The very act of making a definition makes a defined thing finite, rigid, frozen, limited and dead. Samyama is an ability, a capability, a possibility: thus, it is always alive. It is in constant flux and not something solid and fossilized. It is not a fact in itself, but an ability to create numerous facts, without limitations.

Reading this book carefully, you might have noticed that in its different chapters, things previously discussed are described differently in later chapters. This is because in various places of this book, different perspectives illuminate different characteristics. Try to imagine a triangular lantern, made of three glass panels, each of a different color, and a candle inside it. I might show you the candle through the red glass on one occasion, through the yellow one some other time, and at other times through the blue one. But you always see the same candle. Each time, you see it through a glass of a different color and from a different angle, even though you always see it well and accurately. Now consider the way that this applies to definitions and characteristics.

If you choose the Holy Trinity – that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one – as a topic for samyama, you will soon notice the difference between the scholastic definition of it and the characteristics that you feel of their unity. You will feel some sympathy to the position that the Father cannot be older than the Son because he becomes the Father the moment he has the Son.

As an optional topic, I commend one of the aphorisms about Yoga from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: By practicing samyama on the heart, knowledge of the mind is attained.

These aphorisms were written many centuries ago: compare them to the words said by the Seeress of Prevorst: In the state of total clairvoyance I think by using the spirit, in the area of the heart... This sleep-waking state occurs only when a person abandons himself or goes out of himself. Ms Hauffe believed that a human being is divided into three parts: spirit, soul and body. It was compatible with the three-part division in the Rosicrucian system, even though she had never heard about it. So, once more there is a trinity: combine it in samyama with three chakras in your body, that is with two-, sixteen-, and twelve-petal chakras, and then, in the same samyama exercise, add to them three powers of yourself: thoughts, emotions and will.

If you manage to perform samyama on this topic correctly, you will arrive at one of the concepts of the human spirit itself.

I shall explain: it is one of the concepts – you know that various concepts may vary significantly while all of them may be equally valid. I will not give you a step-by-step instruction for this samyama exercise: the important thing is that you come to your own understanding of what the human spirit is, not to understand mine. You know the general line of thought for each exercise in samyama. You start from dharana, that is from focusing your attention on the object of samyama, you create the most vivid imagination of this object, and then you meditate about it. Finally, you cast away the object itself and immerse yourself in the impressions that imaginations and meditations have made on your inside. You immerse into this impression completely to reach the level of higher consciousness. The important concept is to implement the knowledge gained there into your etheric body; that is, to bring it into your usual consciousness.

It is extremely difficult to bring these higher experiences to the everyday waking state. Initially, be ready to feel that the only result of samadhi is an impression that you entered emptiness, complete nothingness. You return from that state to your normal consciousness with a welcome feeling of relief and certainty. You might have a similar impression if you were in a foreign – completely dark – place, and after some time you saw a glimmer of light. The plane of higher consciousness – which you enter in samyama – is so completely different from all states of consciousness that you are familiar with, that the first impression of it is invariably one of emptiness and darkness. There, you will encounter nothing you already know; nothing already defined. There will be literally nothing that you could put against yourself and say: This is me, and that is something else, that is different than me. You would like to say Tat Twam Asi but there is no object you could say it about. There is only nothingness; even you are nothingness. It would be desirable if you were able to preserve the sense of yourself, the sense of your existence; there, even your thinking is not present to assist you.

No wonder that after initial experiences of this kind, you may have periods of spiritual darkness: I have mentioned this previously. Especially in times of other hardships – that could be called 'thunders of bad fate' – periods of spiritual darkness occur. An illness may happen, or financial difficulties occur, or there may be an unexpected worsening of conditions in which you have lived so far. Because of such events, you will fall in a state of spiritual darkness. It will seem to you that everyone and everything has abandoned you. Because you are "so high on the path", you may think that you should have special privileges, and yet, misfortune has fallen on you. You may doubt the value of your aspirations – or even doubt the existence of higher worlds; even though you have entered them so many times before. You will think that no other person in the world has more misery. You feel lonely, without anybody's support. Finally, you will understand that you must not look for support from outside; that you can only find it within yourself. You have to be a support, not only for yourself, but for others as well. Only then will spiritual darkness evaporate, lit by your own light.

However, only at the beginning will these periods of spiritual darkness be dangerous. The more episodes you survive, the more accustomed to them will you become: and more bravely will you to be able to face them, even if they should become more dangerous. Only when you achieve such courage and fortitude, will you count only on yourself, no matter what happens and no matter where you are. You will not look for anyone else's help. Only then will you see clearly and surely that you are not alone in this world. You will see others, who – as laboriously as you – try to go out of such darkness back to the light. You will see them higher or lower than you are, but you will feel a bond with them: you will feel that you all head to the same goal... to the light.

### Chapter 19 – Intuition (Conscience)

In the title of this chapter, I have called intuition "conscience" to satisfy my habitual tendency to define everything in accurate terms. But, as you already know, a definition can never be truly accurate. It is the same in this case, for the term intuition encompasses much more than the term conscience. It only has some common characteristics with conscience.

If you have already learned how to observe your internal experiences, you should now be able to feel the nature of conscience. It does not rationalize, it does not prove anything, it does not "think" logically. It simply gives a verdict: this should have been done in a different way! It presents itself as a dogmatic statement, but – unlike dogma – it does not require blind faith from you; on the contrary, it lets you rationalize and analyze why it advises you to act in a certain way. It does not reason, it states; but you can think about it and analyze it as much as you wish.

Thus, conscience does not think, and nor does intuition. It stands higher than thinking, as much as the causal body stands higher than the mental body. You know that the causal body belongs to the arupa planes where no separate forms exist. That is why there is no thinking: there is no one who could think. There, all beings are one and your being is one with all others. Now, it is easier for you to understand the term intuition: it comes from Latin and means immersion. At the moment of intuition you stop being a separate self, you immerse your spirit into an ocean in which you are only one drop of water. You become one with all other drops in the ocean, and, by so doing, you participate in the omniscience and omnipotence of the ocean. You alone, as a drop, do not have this omniscience. That is why when you are disconnected from the ocean – after a short moment of intuition – you must figure out, slowly and by means of reasoning, the motives that your intuition had to make you act in a certain way.

The following comparison – even though inexact – may serve as an example: a simple man asks you in which direction he should go to get from Warsaw to London. You say he should go to the west. You see him immediately spur his horse to rush in a westerly direction. You catch up with him and say: No, stop! For this simple man, this was intuition: you were his intuition. You did not even have time to think why he could not go, but you immediately knew that it was an impossible thing to do: you did not have time to think about logical reasons. Only later, after the man had stopped and asked why he could not go, you slowly started explaining that the journey would be extremely long, and it is impossible to cross the sea on a horse. If he understood your reasoning and did not depart, this would indicate that he listened to your intuition. On the other hand, if he had not listened to you and had set off, then – after a long journey – he would have got to the seaside and only then realize, from his own experience, that the intuition was right.

Intuition is always like that. It comes suddenly: not as a sensation or a thought but rather like a feeling which might be called unwitting instinct. Later, you will realize that this sense is omniscient rather than unwitting; for now, however, let us call it an instinct. It appears unexpectedly and makes you act in a way that – to your rational mind – may seem to be lacking in motives, or even illogical. If you resist this "instinct" – if you act contrary to what it tells you to do – you will come to realize (often after many years) that you made a mistake by not listening to it. On the other hand, if you acted on it immediately, without thinking, and only later considered the motives of your action, in a rational way, then you may understand that you had made the correct decision. More often, there will be after-effects from your deed that will convince you that the decision was right and expedient.

Therefore, intuition has nothing in common with instinct; except perhaps that both of them do not come from rational thinking. Intuition always comes first, before the mental process that tries to understand the motivation. This is also how intuition significantly differs from a conscience. Intuition always appears suddenly, in a flash, before you can think or make a conscious decision. It always comes unexpectedly – at least in everyday life – and tells you what to do, even though you often have not yet planned to do anything.

Intuition can only appear when your mental body and brain are silent, when you do not think at all. But because you hardly ever stop thinking, it can only occur in short moments between one thought and another. That is why it is always like a flash. And that is why it shows up most vividly when you have become thoughtless for a moment: for example when surprised by a sudden or dangerous incident. In such a moment, your intuition causes you to make an instant decision, to take action; when you have done so, it gets quiet – it has already saved you. Later, when you analyze the incident, you do not know why "it just occurred to you" that you should have acted in a certain way.

On the contrary, conscience appears either before a deed has been performed, when you hesitate how to act, or after the deed has been done, when you try to justify your actions by rational thinking. Then, your conscience may disapprove what you have done, it can make you feel ashamed of it. Sometimes it will nag you for years afterwards. Those naggings are called "pangs of conscience", and, most likely, you know them well. It is not a coincidence that this sounds like some ailment. When you develop the ability of clairvoyance, you will see that these "pangs" look like abscesses on a person's aura, that they make it look ugly. But without doubt, they are even less pleasant to their owner. By realizing that such pangs of conscience are like abscesses or ulcers on a person's astral and mental body, it is easy to understand that they can exist even after the death of a physical body.

However, deeds are not the only result of intuition. An act is the consequence of the will, but the impact of intuition is not only limited to the will. Equally often – or maybe even more often – it is the source of knowledge. When it occurs as an outcome of the will, you may assume that it comes from the Magnificent Beings who in Esoteric Christianity are called the Thrones. When it occurs as knowledge, its source is in other, equally magnificent Beings, called Kyriotetes. Both belong to the highest Spiritual Hierarchies.

When intuition shows up as knowledge, it teaches you instantly and comprehensively, as if "in one word". When you come to have frequent and clear intuitions, you will be able to observe them as you have so far observed your mental processes. Then, you will notice that this "one word" – in which intuition details comprehensive knowledge about a given concept – is actually more like a number than a word. Such a number – of course different for different concepts – contains both the value of the given concept, all its characteristic features, its relation to other things, and its potential energy: everything that can be known or learned about this one thing.

The ambiguous feeling that intuition is expressed by a number rather than by words will, at first, seem illogical to you: you have been accustomed to perceiving numbers as mathematical – that is abstract – signs, not related to any real thing. However, you must understand that this feeling itself – that intuition is expressed by numbers – is also intuitive. Therefore, you cannot check its validity by logical thinking. When you are capable of clairvoyance, numbers will speak to you equally clearly and unambiguously as words in your normal life. The Seeress of Prevorst can serve as a good example of this: she marked names and features of things with "internal numbers". When you obtain this ability, you will also understand her second, more secret sequence of internal numbers: for example, by using it, she put a number next to her name, which indicated the date of her death. One sequence of these internal numbers came from the Thrones, and the other – the deepest one – from the Kyriotetes. Do not confuse these sacred numbers with the numbers of Kabbalah which are only their distorted reflections on the astral plane.

These are some – not all, of course – of the characteristic features of intuition. In previous chapters I presented this to you from other perspectives. At that time, you were not mature enough to understand the ones I have just described. Only now, when you are capable of thinking without your brain, can you raise yourself even higher, and be able to obtain knowledge without thinking of any kind. And only such knowledge can be seen as being intuitive. Now you will know why a student on the path, even one who can hardly read and write, is sometimes more knowledgeable than the most learned "scholar". A chela surpasses him infinitely; he surpasses him as much as intuition surpasses logical knowledge: knowledge obtained by the thinking processes.

These high plains of intuition can be also reached by some born clairvoyants, or those who are in a deep trance evoked by magnetism – but not hypnosis – provided they are morally cleansed enough. Clairvoyants of a lower level often like to show off with Kabbalistic numbers. They are Kabbalistic indeed: that is, they merely come from the astral plane, because such people are incapable of reaching higher. You should not expect that you will immediately be able to express your intuitions in numbers. If you can judge yourself honestly, without hidden pride, you will admit that you are still far from the moral level that would enable you to reach the level of beings as magnificent as the Thrones and Kyriotetes. Besides, your exercises in the development of intuition do not go in the same direction as those of mediums or clairvoyants. Your aim is to obtain intuition and be fully aware of it; this is much more difficult than falling into a trance and reaching arupa planes. In the distant future, more people will have the ability to have intuition in a state of full awareness; you have to precede them by thousands of years. It is much more difficult to obtain intuition than it is to put yourself in a trance and disconnect from all external or internal stimuli which might distract you from immersing yourself into arupa worlds.

Patanjali rightly said that there are five kinds of obstacle the student meets on his way. They are: wrong knowledge, right knowledge, idle speculation, sleep, and memory: Yoga overpowers these obstacles. Yoga is unity: the unity of your lower self with the higher one, the unity of everyday awareness with the higher awareness. And higher awareness is intuition. This means that the aim of Yoga is to unify your everyday awareness with intuition. The obstacles enumerated by Patanjali often prevent this: both right and wrong knowledge – in fact, all knowledge – speculation, sleep, and memory. You have created concepts about things you have learned and this becomes the content of your logical knowledge, one obtained by the means of thinking processes. Without speculation, you would not be able to create new concepts about things that have made impressions on you; impressions from which you created your knowledge. When you are sleeping, you do not receive any sensual impressions – because your astral body withdraws from the physical one – but you receive astral impressions, and you remember their fragments after you wake up. And finally, your memory enables you to recreate these impressions, concepts and knowledge; as you know, your memory is located in the etheric body. When you realize all this, you can see that all your mortal layers – that is your physical, etheric and astral bodies, which together compose your lower self – pose obstacles to intuition. Therefore, your lower self is the obstacle to intuition. However, despite this, you should not fight with it nor try to get rid of it; you must preserve it because your task is to reach intuition with full everyday awareness.

Now you understand that without Yoga, without the unity of your lower self with the higher one, fulfilling this task is impossible. Only when they unite – when there are no two separate beings within yourself but you have become one – only then your bodies will cease to be an obstacle to intuition. You will be able to choose whether you want to receive impressions or not, whether you want to think or not, whether you want to remember something or to switch your memory off. You will also understand why intuition only appears in short moments, when you are not thinking. You – as a "Divine Spark" – are oneness; you cannot divide or split yourself. When you think, you are on the mental plain, therefore you cannot simultaneously immerse into arupa planes, into worlds of intuition. You need to withdraw from your mental body for a moment to be able to enter the world of intuition. So, by saying that your lower self – which means your mental body as well – should not be your obstacle, I did not mean that you are supposed to take your mental body into the worlds of intuition. It would not be possible as the mental body is too thick, too heavy. The only thing you need from your mental body is that it does not disturb you, that it stops thinking for a moment. That is why you have been doing the exercises aiming at controlling your thinking. In pratyahara you learned how to detach your attention from internal stimuli, and from your memory and thoughts. Now you can see clearly how necessary those exercises have been, even though they seemingly had no relation to spiritual development. The relation will be seen later.

You have already learned what the main features of intuition are and what requirements have to be met to obtain it. However, even if you meet all the requirements – even if you detach your attention from external stimuli and stop feeling and thinking – the intuitions you obtain are as if they are random. This is similar to opening a scientific book randomly and reading whatever you can see on that page. Of course, you might learn something in this way. But you want something more: you want to decide what you learn; you want to be able to choose the object of your intuition. But to have this ability, it is not enough to detach yourself from external impressions and wait thoughtlessly for the intuition to come.

You have to connect with an object of the intuition, unite with it – you need to become this object yourself. You can only become one with an object when you immerse thoroughly in it; when you plunge into it with your whole being. Intuition literally means immersion. With your physical body, you are not able to immerse in the physical body of another object because they are separated from each other. They both have rigid surfaces and cannot penetrate into each other. Even if you take water as an object of your experiment which uses only your intuition, you will not immerse in it appropriately; your body will only push water out of the way, not merge with it. In the space taken by your body, there is no water; you are not one with it, you are separated by the surface of your body. You are not water, you are in water, while to obtain intuition, you have to become water. Similarly, you are not able to achieve this goal with your etheric, astral or mental body.

You can only become one with an object when you are in the place where all things are one: on the arupa planes. There, all objects, all beings, and all ideas are one. Do not think that it is more difficult to unite with an idea than with an object. One of the works of the Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki may serve as an example. He had never been a father; however, he created a poem about the suffering of a parent in his Father of the Plague-Stricken. By means of poetic intuition, he immersed himself into the idea of a "father" and united with it so completely, that he was able to feel all the degrees of suffering of a father who lost his children one after the other.

If you assumed that this work was not written under influence of intuition but rather psychometry, you would be partially right. Słowacki had his inspiration to write The Father of the Plague-Stricken after he had heard the story, in the place when it had really happened. Both what he had learned and his presence at the site of the events, had a strong psychological impact on the sensitive poet's soul and gave him visions of the events. These visions were inspiration to write the poem; but it was still not intuition. Słowacki was not a chela of the secret knowledge, he did not develop the ability to have conscious intuitions; however, his vision and inspiration raised him to the level where he could obtain the feeling of a father's suffering and pain. And this is what a vision is: an inspiration. Thus, the three levels, which you already know well, can be seen clearly here: first comes imagination, then inspiration, and finally intuition. Słowacki, through the astral plane raised himself to the mental plane, and from there, he reached arupa planes. Your way is exactly the same. The only difference is that you follow this path consciously, while Słowacki did so involuntarily. He was a poet, while you are a chela. But because he was able to reach as far as to intuition, he is recognized as being especially inspired, like two other Polish writers, Mickiewicz and Krasiński.

From this small example you can see, that secret knowledge can be useful even in literature; it helps to understand how the greatest works are created. It can also help to understand the phenomena of a new field called "parapsychism". Psychometry also belongs to this field. A description of psychometry is: Some very sensitive people, when they approach and touch an object, not only are able to feel its existence, shape, color and describe it in detail, but they are also able to tell where it came from, who owns it, and even events that happened in its vicinity. For a scientist working in the field of parapsychism, this is all that he can know about psychometry. Therefore, he examines accounts, collects statistical data, calculates what percentage of people and to what degree they are psychometrically sensitive, examines the validity of their statements, measures their heart rate and body temperature, etc.: this is all he can do. On the other hand, you will look on psychometry from a different perspective. You will be less interested in its phenomena, because you do not doubt their existence; you will focus on their essence which you want to comprehend and know. This will not be particularly difficult for you, as you already know, to a certain degree, astral and mental planes. You also know that on each of these planes, there are reflections – distorted to a lesser or greater extent – of the cosmic "cinematograph" called Akasha Chronicles. Therefore, for you, psychometry simply means watching the astral and mental reflections of these Akashic pictures. On each plane, these pictures become refracted, and thus, the lower the plane on which you watch them, the more obscure and less accurate they become.

The connection between psychometry and intuition seemingly looks quite weak; however, as you have seen on the example of Słowacki, this connection does actually exist. Remember as well, that one of the fields of secret knowledge – history of the cosmos – is a result of reading the Akashic records by chelas. Unskilled clairvoyants also read it; but they do not understand the meaning of the phenomena they see and they are not able to explain them correctly. You also – even though you have practiced for years – are not yet skilled enough to comprehend the Akashic visions. Therefore, for the time being, do not try to explain them. On the other hand, use psychometry as an indirect way of obtaining intuition about objects chosen for your exercises. Even though this kind of exercises is not compulsory, here is an example of how to do it.

Take a chosen object into your hand or put it on your abdomen. Close your eyes and try to penetrate inside the object with your being. Restrain yourself from any thoughts, do not try to guess or feel anything, just wait passively and quietly. After a while, impressions or images will appear. You will feel attraction or aversion toward the object; you may see an image of a person who was its owner, or an image of the surroundings from which it comes. Try hard not to make any guesses or judgements, even for a second. You are only supposed to be a witness – indifferent, objective and thoughtless – who will remember everything that he sees very well. When you learn how to remember these images, stop putting attention to them and focus exclusively on the internal impressions made on you by the object. This is more difficult than psychometry but you can achieve it. Then you will see it: not the Akashic reflections from the surrounding of the object, but the astral or mental from of the object itself. Now, you are very close to intuition, to obtaining the deepest and most comprehensive knowledge about the object, and – most importantly – to the truest knowledge, taken directly from the source, not refracted by astral or mental planes.

### Chapter 20 – Enlightenment

The last three stages – dharana, dhyana, and samadhi – together are "the path of trial". On the previous five levels you were preparing yourself to be worthy of "enlightenment". You reached that enlightenment by imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions. Imaginations enlightened you in the astral world, inspirations – in the mental world, and intuitions introduced you to the arupa planes. The knowledge you obtained on these various planes is called "enlightenment" and it makes you to be more knowledgeable than ordinary people.

You understand that during the years of a "trial", your enlightenment has to be limited. Being still on trial, there is no guarantee that you will not use the knowledge gained during enlightenment in a wrong, or even harmful, way. Such a warranty will become possible after you have been "initiated". As mentioned in one of the early chapters, the path of Yoga is similar to the initial years undertaken by an apprentice: one who is practicing his trade, and then, later on, becomes a chela. An apprentice, when promoted to become a chela, did not immediately receive all secrets of his craft. Only gradually, as he proved himself to be trust-worthy, his Master revealed details and secrets of his craft. The same applies to you: although you are a chela, you are not totally "accepted" yet. You are working and your Masters are watching you: your work, your behavior, and – most importantly – your soul, thoughts and feelings.

Never forget, even for a moment, that during the years of "enlightenment", that is during your trial, you are being constantly watched, even though you cannot see your guards. Masters observe you more accurately and meticulously than you would be able to observe yourself; they can see everything in you more clearly than you can. They see your progress, but also every instance of negligence – which happens more often than you think.

Imagine a man who has a piece of land, and wishes to cultivate a garden on it. He has been clearing it off and weeding it for seven years; he has planted fruit trees and vegetables. During this time he has had many gardening experiences; he has obtained some "enlightenment" in the field of gardening. Relying on this additional knowledge, he may continue to grow and plant his land: he expects better and better results. However, while growing new plants, he may neglect removing new weeds from his garden, and they could grow bigger, unnoticed. Consider: will his newly-acquired knowledge result in a better harvest, or will the excessive weeds make his work be in vain?

You are similar to that man. On the first five levels, you tried – honestly and diligently, without doubt – to remove all bad habits and vices from yourself, and to plant into your soul the virtues required on the path. But when you progressed from the preparatory level to the trial path, you said to yourself: I have weeded bad habits and faults from my character, and I have planted the required traits. So, now I can continue planting, growing and collecting the fruit, because weeds will no longer hinder my work. However, you have failed to remember that the nature of weeds – both those in the soil and in your soul – is to stubbornly grow anew, if not constantly removed. You cannot rest, even for a moment. Every pause from work is a step back on the path. If you do not move forward, you go backwards. If you do not make progress, you stay in the same place, while others go forward and leave you behind.

Look carefully inside your soul, with strictness and truthfulness toward yourself. Are you really not able to find the slightest fault in yourself? Have you removed all your vices so diligently, that no new weed can now grow? Is there nothing, absolutely nothing, that might hinder the growth of those little and fragile plants that you have planned with so much care and hard work? If your answer is negative, you are cheating yourself. You are hiding the truth from yourself.

For example, let us consider a small thing: a good and truly selfless deed about which Krishnamurti writes so beautifully. Are you truly able to raise yourself so high, that when you do someone a favor – even a really big one – you would never boast about it: to him or to some other person? Can you be an "unknown benefactor", truly unknown to anybody? Even if you can sometimes do it, are you sure that a feeling of satisfaction will not brush your soul? Will you never think: Now, I have done something truly remarkable, no one else could have done so!

But this is quite a petty and ordinary thing. Of course, ordinary people may not be able to do it, but on the path, this is something obvious. So, you can see how difficult it is to completely weed out your pride and self-love. They both go hand in hand, even though they sometimes adopt a very innocent appearance. Has it never crossed your mind that – because you are already so high on the path – you deserve some special care from the Magnificent Beings who rule fate? You may feel subconsciously that – because you have achieved so much – you have the right to demand special privileges. However, remember that the higher you are on the path, the more serious duties you will have; therefore, you have less right to expect anything for yourself. Ultimately, only the good you do for others – without thinking about yourself – is really good for you as well.

Your imaginations – which you have started experiencing and which you will now experience more often – will show you very clearly the quality and true value of your soul. They will show you who you really are: when practicing them, you picture yourself as if looking at another person, impartially observed and judged. From now on, you will experience this "seeing yourself", as your astral doppelgänger, more and more frequently. After you have gone through "initiation", it will always be like that. Steiner calls it "the meeting with the guardian of the threshold". And indeed, your doppelgänger is like a guard: it forbids you to pass the threshold of the initiation if your soul has not been properly purified of all vices.

It is not possible to hasten your initiation by any improper means. You have to simply mature to it; you will not be able to enter it before you are truly ready. In the olden days, initiation was done as if it was from outside: by the help of others who had already been initiated. Therefore, improper, premature, or downright undeserved initiations might have taken place. But now, from the time of Christ, initiation is possible only by means of thorough self-knowledge; it is not the responsibility of others anymore. You must simply mature, like a plant which can only give fruit if it has fully developed. First, it has to grow leaves and flowers, and only then, can it produce fruit. In a similar manner, you need to make your spirit bloom: your higher self must flourish here, on the physical plane, and not remain as a mere possibility. This means that your higher self must strongly grow into the rupa planes, into your bodies; it must control them and be their only master. A fragile and tiny seed of your higher self – which you have planted in the soil of your soul – needs the soil to be pure and free from weeds, so that its growth and bloom is not hindered.

To enable your higher self to blossom, you need enlightenment. It has the same effect as the sun rays have on a plant. By preparation, you cultivated the soil, you removed weeds and planted the seed. Now, your fragile seed needs sun rays to grow. It also needs your constant care so that new weeds do not strangle it. If weeds grow along with it, its flowers will be frail and your plant will not be able to give good sweet fruit: only a sour or poisonous one. Thus, you must always watch carefully to ensure that new weeds have not started to grow. And you, you alone, are responsible for what happens. Your Master may show you the way, he may warn you about errors, or support you when you stumble, but he will not act on your behalf nor take responsibility for your actions.

In order to be able to cross the threshold of initiation with full responsibility, you need the knowledge of enlightenment gained from practice of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions. Your first para-sensory experiences: colors and glows of the astral world, have led you to the Hall of Learning. They gave you precisely as much knowledge as you needed for enlightenment in the astral plane. Now you understand that these imaginations – even though you did not intend to obtain them – were not accidental, but purposeful. They might have seemed to you to be accidental and independent of your will and desire; this was because they could only appear when your chakras – your higher senses – have developed sufficiently. At that time, you could not see their development because you were still unable to see the chakras. You were rather like a child who cannot see its own eyes, but slowly starts to realize their existence when he starts to observe the external world. In a similar way, you realized that your chakras must be fully developed and active because you could sense astral impressions by using them. By inspirations, you have learned how to read them, what they mean and who they come from. By intuitions, you can directly communicate with the beings from whom these impressions come. What is more, you can communicate with the beings who do not need the astral or mental plane for their activity. You are able to distinguish astral beings from mental ones, and mental beings from karmic ones.

As the result of maintaining a connection with creatures so magnificent, your relation to your karma changes as well. As an ordinary person, you had to submit to karma blindly and without question. The Lipikas measured the correct dose of karma for you: just enough, so that you could work on it without excessive effort, but also without being overly lazy. In each of your previous lives your karma tied you so strongly that – whether you wanted to or not – you had to accept it. Even the way in which you accepted it was strictly specified and forced upon you. Therefore, your life always pushed you implacably in the direction chosen for you before you were born; your own faults and desires always brought you the living conditions most appropriate for responding to your karma. From your point of view, those conditions often seemed undesirable, as if they were hardships: that fell upon you from a blind, unjust fate. In reality, these were the Lipikas who only pulled the strings weaved from your desires and failings. When it was necessary, they hit you with them like hammers, and finally they made the divine spark appear and awaken in you.

If you analyze your life carefully, you will see that this has now changed. You are changing slowly – from a passive victim of your karma, from a beast of burden pressured by an outside force – into a driver of such a beast. Now, not only do you put a burden on your back yourself, not only do you take and carry it, but you also choose the direction for yourself. You have moved from a passive to an active role. What the Lipikas did for you before, you now do it yourself. You have taken your fate into your hand, and you do so knowingly. From being a slave, you have changed into a ruler. This is possible because you have significantly cleansed yourself of faults and of selfish desires; they cannot act like a net anymore to drag you down into the karmic conditions. The bonds that tied you have ceased to exist, so you cannot be dragged forcefully along anymore. No longer being driven, you have to lead yourself. Now, you are allowed to choose how to react to your karma; you can even choose to make it more burdensome in this life so that it is repaid faster. This is why you need enlightenment.

Enlightenment gives you even more. It enables you to have an insight into the general activity of those magnificent beings called Lipikas, who rule over the karma of the world. You can see their activities and understand the motives by which they assign karma to individuals, families, cities, countries and the entire Earth. You have become an assistant to them: you work with them and you take up a part of the non-personal karma, that is a part of the karma of your city and nation. Because you now communicate with beings as high as the spirits of a nation, race or tribe, you feel a sense of responsibility for that kind of karma. You become a part of them: you participate both in their karma, and in their power.

It is indeed more than a human power to have your fate – the destiny of your life and the course of events – in your hands. And now you do have this power. Moreover, you participate in a power that is a hundredfold larger: you can influence karma of the world, you can rule over it knowingly and reasonably. Think how significant this is: you create history! The history of the world will go in the direction pointed by you. You – a small, inconspicuous, and unknown human being – you create the history of the world. And you have been permitted to adopt this role because you have gotten rid of your egoism: there is no danger that you will abuse this power for a selfish purpose, inconsistent with universal development.

Imagine someone who has the same knowledge as you have, but who does not have the required moral level – what dreadful harm such a person could inflict. Remember that, in addition to the power over karma, you also have many other very special abilities. For example, you have the ability of astral and mental seeing: you can know feelings and thoughts of others. Someone who would like to use this ability to achieve selfish goals would cause much abuse: he might use it ruthlessly for his own purposes. But you have never done this, and you will not: because you are on the path.

Consider further, how very much your knowledge surpasses the knowledge of philosophers, scientists, psychologists, physiologists, sociologists, and historians. But you do not use this knowledge for any secondary purpose: you do not even boast about it. No one else knows that you have it. It is not to impress others: you have it so that you able to help those who really need help. You help them anonymously, and then, you vanish. They do not even notice to whom they should be grateful. You know that you should not expect any reward for you actions – you help people without any expectations, not gratefulness nor anything else. It does not matter to you whether your help was really useful: whether you really did help or if you have done harm. You simply did what you felt was right – what you thought was best in given circumstances – and then, you left. You did not even have a feeling of satisfaction for yourself.

There was never a single feeling of pride that you "are helping the world". You are not so naively self-conceited to think that the world may depend upon your help: that it might stumble in its progress if it did not get your help. If you had failed to help, a hundred of others would have appeared in your place, and they would have helped: such negligence by you would have only burdened your karma. By helping the world, you help yourself; therefore, there is no other reward in doing it. There is no right to expect gratefulness or appreciation. If you want an act of help – given to others – to be helpful for yourself also, it must be free from any expectations of results. While helping others, only if you do not think about yourself at all, can you truly help yourself as well. You gain, when you do not think at all about any gain, but when you forget about it completely. And even any quiet expectation of gratefulness, or any feeling of self-satisfaction, will count as "gain".

At the end of the path of enlightenment, the threshold of initiation awaits you; if you want to cross it, you must be ready to leave behind everything that binds you to the earthly plane and its issues. Any expectation of results from your actions, any expectation of people's gratefulness to you would bind you to them. As a chela, you must be literally "dead to the world ": only when you stop being attached to it, will you be able to work for it fruitfully. You cannot man a machine and be part of it at the same time; you must stand beside it, not be in it. That is why you have to stand at the gate of death – to go through death – if you want to be able to be initiated.

You must go through death, but at the same time, you must still continue to live on this earth; and bear within yourself the secret of what is on the other side of death. Such secrets cannot be entrusted to everybody. Sometimes, it happens that ordinary people return to life – having experienced death in torpor or due to illness – but they did not go through it consciously, and they do not remember what they saw there. You, on the other hand, will go through death consciously: you should remember all the details of this event, but not reveal them to anyone. To attain this secret, you must be unquestionably worthy of the honor. That is why the path of enlightenment is still only "the path of trial" for you, and you can still fail.

### Chapter 21 – A Fond Farewell

By writing chapter 20, I accomplished the task which I set for myself when planning this book: I have lead you through the preparatory levels of enlightenment. Now, this topic has been exhausted. Having reached the level of intuition, you do not need any further help: from me, from other books, nor from anyone else. Everything further you need to know, will be found through intuition – and your knowledge will be more comprehensive and accurate than that found in the best books.

This does not mean, of course, that you do not have to study from books at all. You are going to react with other people; therefore, you should know what they do, what they are interested in, what their opinions are, where they are heading. Moreover, you will gradually need to get familiar with the most significant of the occult works – not only with those about secret knowledge but also about astrology, alchemy, chiromancy, Kabbalah, Spiritism, mediumism, and even black magic and the cult of Baphomet. This is because you need to be familiar with everything discovered so far by other people.

However, to know something and to perform something are two different things. I probably do not have to warn you that you must not practice black magic or Spiritism. This you know already very well; but in case there is any doubt, your intuition will warn you in a timely manner. Alchemy – the pursuit for ways to make gold – will not tempt you either. You know that alchemy should be understood in its true, deeper meaning. Besides, you do not need to manufacture gold: you will always have sufficient for all your needs. Similarly, you should not try to examine your horoscope by using astrology. You are aware that now – as a chela – you can choose your own fate: a horoscope will be unreliable for you. And finally, Kabbalah will not lure you: you have already gone through the world of Kabbalah in the Hall of Learning, and you do not want nor need to return there.

But you should familiarize yourself thoroughly with these things: sometimes you may encounter an irrational person – one who has got mislead and tangled in those temptations and almost lost his soul there – and you will have to save him. Mediums of different kinds – clairvoyants, practitioners of Spiritism or psychokinesis – may also need your help; having got trapped in the pitfalls set for them by unfriendly astral beings. And sometimes, you may encounter truly determined and powerful sorcerers whom you will have to face to prevent their plans, or to counteract the evil they have already managed to do. In such an encounter, you will have all good forces to assist you, unless you wish to use them in an improper manner.

However, most of the time, you will be around ordinary people: your younger brothers. After all, you have become a chela – you have chosen the path, and you have climbed to its higher levels – in order that you can act among people. You will act among them as their caregiver and leader on their way to progress. But you will never put yourself on a "pedestal" from where you might look down on others, to preach, or to show them the way. You will live among them as an equal among equals. You may even need to go to a lower level: a chela does not work on the surface but from the very bottom. No one will see you, and thus, no one will admire, applause or honor you. You will go down to the level of little ones and you will act there: unknown, unappreciated, misunderstood, sometimes even ridiculed. But you do not fear this; you have learned to work without expectation of any reward or appreciation: just for the sake of the work itself.

I want to give you something to help you to sustain living in this way – this dismal and ungrateful way – yet, one full of indescribable sweetness. Not pieces of advice, tips or orders: I want to give you a small ray of light to support the holy flame of the omnipresent love in your heart, so that it lights every moment of your work. You are to go among people: this does not mean abandoning everything you have learned so far to become a nomadic preacher. You have to do something much more difficult: you are to stay where you are, not to change your life in the slightest way, but, despite this, to have an impact on people and work for them. This will not be a physical, material work, but rather a spiritual one. You will have to grow into other people's souls, not into their everyday activities; and you will have to do it in such a way that they do not notice it at all. You will become advantageous for them, even though they – not realizing this fully – may often avoid, offend, or even hate you. You will act in such a way that they do not realize that they are "throwing stones" at someone who they cannot live without.

Always remember all the abilities you have developed, how much good you are able to do with them, and thus, how much you should assist your brothers. For example, think about the quality of your invisible bodies. By means of exercises required on the path, you have cleansed your mental body, controlled its functions, and changed it into a reliable and perfected tool. Your thoughts are now not only clear and bright, but also extremely powerful. Their vibrations reach far around you and have a strong impact on everybody in your surroundings.

Therefore, you do not need to give people any lectures nor verbal advice: your clear, logical and powerful thoughts will often suffice. They radiate from you and have impact on all mental bodies that are near you. It does not matter whether these people recognize this telepathic influence or not. The results of this influence may appear after some time, maybe quite a long time, but they will undoubtedly appear. In this way, your impact on other people is most significant. Whenever you hear people making some erroneous or ridiculous claim, do not try to correct or criticize them immediately. Say nothing, even though they may think you agree with their statements; correct their errors only in your mind. Your powerful form-thoughts will work slowly but gradually; after some time, you may hear the same person stating a completely opposite opinion, one that is compatible with yours. Your lively, truthful thoughts will simply become an inspiration for other people.

As a rule, restrain yourself from correcting people, from giving them verbal advice or remarks. People are willing to accept advice only when it conforms with their intentions; otherwise they will ignore the advice they asked for. Very rarely, you may meet a person who honestly asks for your advice and truly wants to follow it; but even in this case, do not give him any instructions, any ready-made solution for how he should act. On the other hand, try to show him the advantages and disadvantages of various solutions – show him the results that may be achieved by each of these solutions – and leave the decision to him. However, do not be surprised and do not treat him with disdain if it turns out that he has chosen, in your opinion, the least reasonable solution. Often, his karma will have pushed him to choose this particular way. Never let him feel that you are disappointed with his decision; accept it stoically, without being over eager to offer further counsel.

Your feelings and moods will also have a big impact on the people around you. On the preparatory levels, you have gotten rid of such negative feelings as anger, impatience, pride, greed, envy; you have also learned how to avoid being pessimistic, sad, or bitter. As you are now able to quieten your emotions and feelings, you should focus on producing positive feelings and moods, so that they emanate into your surroundings. Every morning, before you leave home to do your daily activities, leave a positive, bright, and happy mood in your household. Every day, when you enter your workplace, bring in friendship, an optimistic mood, and understanding to your colleagues. If you feel that one of your colleagues is upset or discouraged, give him your special care; try to uplift him: not directly, not by saying comforting words – as they may often seem empty – but by leading his thoughts to a more optimistic state. Most importantly, send him some thoughts and feelings of encouragement and power. In the evening, before you go to bed, never forget to send the world your blessing, love and peace. Of course, there is no need to remind you that before that, you should have given your honest forgiveness to all people who – often without realizing it – have offended or hurt you during the day.

If you always remember that there are no evil people – only those who act without knowledge nor awareness – it will be easier for you to avoid adverse feelings, disgust or disdain towards them. Never let yourself feel this way; on the contrary, always feel sympathy and even respect for everyone: the same divine spark dwells in them as it does in you. Always see good in them, never their faults nor their bad traits. You will come to realize that there is no man in the entire world – even the worst of felons – who has not got at least one virtue. It often happens that virtues are hidden behind a rough – even repulsive – appearance; some people often hide them, discouraged by other people's coldness or ungratefulness. Your task is to discover and reveal such virtues in every person, regardless of their appearance, social position, and opinions – often wrong opinions.

When you deal with other people, you should always have understanding and empathy towards them, as broad as possible, unlimited; not only a compassion for their faults, ignorance, and errors, but also – and this is more difficult – an understanding of their attitude towards you. An approach that you know from previous chapters can be useful in this respect: always treat people as if they were going to die tomorrow. You will bear their behavior towards you – even if they have harmed you on purpose – with more ease and without impatience. If you maintain this point of view, you will also see the significance of their deeds and errors in a more objective way. It will be easier for you to distinguish permanent things from trivial and meaningless ones; it will be easier to treat these trifles less seriously than you treat them when you are with someone on a daily basis. This unlimited tolerance for others should become your second nature; to others, it should seem to be the most natural of your traits, not some peculiarity. It would not be real tolerance if you put it on only occasionally – like armor – and the rest of the time looked down on others as if they were naughty children. Your tolerance must not be impenetrable – so that it separates you from others – it should attract you to people and help you to connect with them.

However, this connection with other people – achieved by your understanding – should not bind you to them and restrain your independence in your own life. You already understand the true meaning of another guideline: do not attach to anyone nor anything. You are a "traveler" who meets strangers and new surroundings wherever you go. You wish good to everyone, you help and serve them, but you do not feel attached to them. At any moment, you are ready to leave them and move elsewhere without regret or sadness. And you know from previous chapters, how to reconcile this lack of attachment to people with your love for them. True love gives everything but does not demand anything back in exchange. When you do not expect anything, do not count on anything, but always wish good to everyone, you may remain unattached. Of course, there are some karmic bonds – stronger than bonds of blood – which will tie you to some people for some time. But in such cases, you do not bind yourself, it is your karma: it binds you to other people, and then, when karma is done, the bond gets loosened. You will experience it in the future, as you have done so many times already. Now you can better understand it.

You need to be especially tactful and careful while dealing with people who claim that they know their way around secret knowledge. If they find out that you are also doing studies in this field, they will treat you as if you are one of them: they will expect that you discuss and share your "secrets" with them. These may be people of various kinds: in addition to real fanatics and dreamers, you may also meet some irrational spiritists, hypnotizers, "experts" in the field of clairvoyance or mediumism, fortune tellers or occultists. There are also more serious scientists, such as theosophists and anthroposophists. Always be wary about them, listen to them patiently – they usually like to talk a lot – but say little and do not correct their statements.

If they ask you a direct question, choose one of their correct beliefs and confirm it, but do not discuss their errors. They would probably not understand you, and, even if they did, they would not agree with you, because they prefer their beliefs. From your own readings, you may know some quasi-philosophical fields, known today as theosophy and anthroposophy, so you know that they should not be depreciated. For most of their followers, this is the highest level they are capable of raising themselves to. Therefore, do not ruin their cult of authority and dogma. People on various levels of development believe in various authorities and accept various statements: they have not matured yet to surpass those external authorities. In any case, they are now on preparatory levels, and this should be appreciated.

Be equally temperate towards so called scientific researchers, such as psychologists and metaphysicians. Because you have knowledge about higher bodies, sometimes you can show them a different direction in which they might go in their research to obtain good results. Never try to overcome their materialistic way of thinking – they would immediately stop trusting in what you suggest. Obviously, you will never let them examine your abilities; it is best if they never know at all that you have para-normal abilities. Even if they did experiments with you, and even if you managed to prove that your abilities exist, they could never admit that your abilities are exceptional: for them, they are abnormal, and therefore pathological.

Your tact and intuitive sense of boundaries – if you respect them – will prevent you from awkward situations or getting into problems that are difficult to correct. It is never easy to be tactful and to keep your peace of mind when you are misunderstood or disrespected – or even downright hated or bullied – by others. However, if you strictly follow the commandment of detachment, you will bear these signs of other people's ignorance much easier; you will be able to stay calm and not to get discouraged from completing equally diligent work with these people.

On the preparatory levels, you have had a chance to get hardened for bearing this kind of personal failure; now you are able to remain composed both in failure and in success. When you see that the clouds of trouble and misfortune collect over your head, you do not react fearfully, but face them with courage. You immerse into these karmic tangles with resolute bravery, without hesitation and procrastination; as you now trust in good forces and in your own powers. When you cross the threshold of initiation, you will realize that this pluckiness, fearfulness, trust and toughness of spirit are necessary to successfully go through the "acid test" that awaits you when you meet the guardian of the threshold.

For your journey, which leads to this meeting, I want to give you a few last words. They are not guidelines as you do not need them anymore; you should always be able to cope by yourself. I only want to highlight a few things that you should always remember. The further you are on the steps of the path, the more independent you will become, and you will have to count on yourself to a greater and greater degree. By counting on yourself, I mean your higher self, the Divine Spark, which – from a tiny spark – has now grown into a powerful flame. The more you unite with this light, the brighter it will light your way, and the fuller and more perfect your enlightenment will be. Walking along this path briskly and confidently, you will not even notice that you have already matured to the initiation. The moment when the bright figure of the Great Guardian of the threshold appears, this will surprise you; he will take your hand – literally or metaphorically, it does not matter – and he will lead you to the temple of wisdom. Beyond this threshold, trials, or tests, leading to the initiation await you. Later, you will hear the Master's voice: You are the path.

When saying farewell to a person who sets off for a long journey, you would like to say a lot, you would like to give a lot of advice, warnings, and guidelines; but instead, you say nothing, words seem too trivial and inefficient. Only at the last moment, you manage to utter a few words in which you enclose all your good wishes for this person. I, likewise – instead of trivial words – want to give you only these good wishes for your way:

May God lead you!
About the Author

Józef Świtkowski (born May 15, 1876 in Tarnopol, died April 01, 1942 in Lviv) – Polish parapsychologist (psychic researcher), musician, photographer, researcher and theorist in the field of Photography, activist and publicist in the field of Photography.

He studied Philosophy, Law, Chemistry, Mathematics and History of Art at Lviv University, which at that time was a Polish city but is now Ukrainian. From 1921 he was a researcher and reader in Photography at Lviv University. He successfully conducted independent research in the field of Optics and on various photographic techniques. However, very few of his original photographic works have survived: 15 are in the National Museum in Wrocław, and 13 are privately owned.

He served a term as the chairman of Julian Ochorowicz's Parapsychological Association in Lviv. He was the author of numerous works in the field of Parapsychology, including:

Droga w światy nadzmysłowe – Raja yoga nowoczesna (1922) – The Path Into Higher Worlds – Modern Raja Yoga

Magnetyzm zwierzęcy i jego właściwości lecznicze (1936) – Magnetic Forces and Their Healing Properties

Okultyzm i magia w świetle parapsychologii (1939) – Occultism and Magic in the Light of Parapsychology

He also conducted research in the phenomena known as "physical mediumism" (psychokinesis, telepathy). He cooperated with Polish and German magazines on parapsychology. He translated into Polish and published Klejnot mądrosci wschodu (The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom) – a book ascribed to Shankaracharya, an 8th-century Indian philosopher and theologian. It is not clear if he translated it directly from Sanskrit or from the German translation. He also translated C.W. Leadbeater's Man Visible and Invisible.

Józef Świtkowski did not always sign his books with his real name. He used pen-names, such as: J.A.S (Raja Yoga is signed with this pen-name), A.S., Świt, Kazimierz Słonimski, Stefan August Sokołowski and August Siołkowski-Chicago.

