Long kalpas of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy, preceded today’s self-consciousness alternating between wakefulness and sleep. When asleep, the ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than those emerging from his brain and the ever-deceiving physical senses. In deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. Spiritual Consciousness never sleeps because she is always in the Light of Reality and acts independently of the sleeping man. Impressions projected upon the brain may survive as “conscience.” But the Occultist, who knows that his Divine Self never sleeps, and lives in the Light of the One Reality — the same Light that illuminates every man in the world of being — says that during the state of sleep his mind (seat of the physical and personal intelligence) may get glimpses of that Light revealed by the Divine Thought, which was hidden from it during his waking hours. The spiritual perceptions of the Higher Ego are beyond space and time. Space and time are the illusory perceptions of his worldly shadow, whether wakeful or asleep. To see in Nirvana annihilation amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep — one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours — that he, too, is annihilated. Alas! the human mind, unable to transcend the limitations of its individualised consciousness, totters here on earth on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity. What, then, is the process of going to sleep? As a man exhausted by one state of the life fluid seeks another — e.g., when exhausted by hot air he refreshes himself with cool water — so sleep is the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life. Somnolence is a compelling sign that waking life has become too strong for the physical organism, and that the force of the life current must be broken by changing the waking for the sleeping state. Pernicious is the influence of the moon. Only one with remarkably strong nerves can sit or sleep under the moonlight without injury to his health. Shall we sleep with the head towards the north, south, east, or west?

The lymphatic cells issuing from nests of adipose tissue, and squeezing themselves through the epithelium cells up to the surface of the intestines, absorb therein the drops of fat and loaded with their prey, travel homeward to the lymphatic canals. This faculty of selecting their special food, of assimilating the useful, and of rejecting the useless and the harmful, is common to all the unicellular organisms. Latin Lymph comes from the Greek Nymph, an inferior Goddess. The Muses were sometimes called nymphs by the poets. Hence, all persons in a state of rapture, whether seers, poets, madmen, etc., is said to be caught by nymphs. In India, Lymph-Nymph is the Goddess of Moisture fabled to be born from the pores of an aquatic deity, whether the Ocean God, Varuna, or some minor River God. The Jews consulted demons through small golden statues, shaped as nymphs. When invoked, the nymphs showed them their tasks from hour to hour. Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders, by the alliance which they may contract with man, might be made partakers of immortality. Certain mediums boast of “spirit” husbands and wives. (Consultation and deliberation with “spirits” spells the end of wisdom.) Every Principle in the Constitution of Man has its seven aspects, and every cell and organ, its seven components. A Principle may be related to an organ of the Body. However, the visible Body is not a Principle, it is the medium of every Principle and Aspect. The Liver and the Spleen cells are the most subservient to the action of our personal mind. The Heart is the organ through which the Higher Ego acts through the Lower Self. Liver and Stomach correspond to Kama-Desire. Liver is the General; Spleen, the Aide-de-camp. The Spleen is the abode of Protean model of the gross physical body, and its subtle counterpart. It is closely linked with Kama-Prana, and inseparable from it.

A satire on the boasted wisdom, fortitude, magnanimity, and temperance of man, in the form of a dialogue between Ulysses in the island of Circe, and Gryllus, whom she had changed into a swine, and who now prefers his swinish condition to a return to the human form; Ulysses asks Circe for permission to restore his companions to the human shape. Circe will grant the request if the men themselves desire it. Gryllus, one of them, is brought forward to answer in behalf of the entire company. He refuses, and gives his reasons. He says that by making him and his companions beasts, Circe has done them a great favour. Beasts have more fortitude than men; they fight in fair, open combat, without trick or artifice; they are no cowards, they never cry for mercy. Beasts are courageous and daring, even the females; while the courage of men is artificial, and women are timid. Beasts are more temperate and chaste then man; they indulge their appetites only in a natural way, and at the proper season. Beasts do not value silver or gold. They have no adventitious desire. Their senses are more accurate. Beasts are satisfied with one kind of food, and this procured without difficulty; they have nature for their teacher, and could teach men many useful lessons. Men are incontinent: they indulge unnatural and excessive appetites; and are never satisfied.

On the true individuality or the spiritual monad, a thread around which the efflorescence of a long series of transient personalities are strung together like pearls.

Reincarnation is the serial and periodical rebirth of every individual monad, from pralaya to pralaya. Reincarnation is indissolubly linked with Karma, the Divine Law of Truth and Justice. Astral monad is the shell of the deceased personality, disintegrating together with the corpse. In Hinduism it is known as bhut; in Greek philosophy, as eidolon; in Theosophy, as elementary. That shell is the deceptive image of lingering desires (Kama-loka), the Limbus of the Catholics, the Hades of the Greeks. The evocation of the dead (necromancy) as well as the preservation of corpses is a violation of the laws of nature; it is an outrage on the modesty of death, which hides the works of destruction, as we should hide those of reproduction. Death is exhaled by death. The cemeteries poison the atmosphere of towns and the miasma of corpses blight the children even in the bosoms of their mothers. As spirit and matter run along parallel lines and are readily convertible to each other, so the spiritual evolution goes hand in hand with the physical. The immortal Ego is the root of every new incarnation, the string on which are threaded one after the other the ephemeral “personalities” of man. When the post-mortem period of lethargic stupor is over, and the last ante-mortem desire dissipated, the Spiritual Soul enters in full consciousness the blessed region of Devachan, where all earthly mists have been dispersed, and where the scenes of the past life come clearly before the spiritual sight. Thence one can neither be reborn before its appointed period, nor reappear on earth visibly or invisibly in the interim. Unless the spiritual fruition the Higher Ego merges into, and its aroma absorbed by the reincarnating Ego (Atma-Buddhi), the latter becomes non-existent — for it can only receive spiritual colouring from each lower ego during incarnation. All transient, non-reincarnating principles are left behind soulless and lifeless, firstly as a material residue, and later on as a reflection on the mirror of Astral light. Reincarnation is a cyclic necessity for the Eternal Pilgrim — the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute Unknowable. Nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the first attempt, she tries again. No one can progress beyond this world without becoming perfected physically, morally, and spiritually. And as Nature never proceeds backwards in her evolutionary progress, so man cannot regress physically to lower forms of life — but he can retrogress morally, yielding to the seductive influences which converge towards him. Selfishness is the single most important cause of all sin and suffering on earth. Its effects can only be counterbalanced on earth, hence the endless cycles of tears watering the parched soil of pain and sorrow until harmony is restored. Like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and rebirth, the moral cause of which is clinging desperately to life on earth — while the instrumental cause is Karma, the law of merit and demerit. The entire bundle of egotism disappears after death, as the costume of the part he played disappears from the actor’s body after he leaves the theatre and goes to bed. Nothing remains of that bundle to go to the next incarnation, except the seed for future Karma. The soul of the wicked will go on wandering about in the earth’s sphere assuming at times the forms of human phantoms, and even those of animals. The ancient profane never seemed sure any more than the modern whether an apparition was that of a relative, or the genius of the locality. Man is a Unity only at his origin and at his end. In-between, spirits and souls, gods and dæmons emanate from the Soul of the Universe. But the rabble is the same in every age: superstitious, self-opinionated, materializing the most spiritual, noble, and idealistic conceptions, and dragging them down to its own low level. The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb. The underworld receives the image; the spirits seeks the stars. Abortion is much worse than foeticide, it is a crime against Nature. Abortion will also shorten the mother’s life on earth only to prolong it with dreary percentage in Kama-loka.

Wheat is not a product of the Earth for it has never been found in the wild state. It was the first-born Lords of Wisdom, Regents over the seasons and cosmic cycles, who revealed to nascent mankind the arts of agriculture. Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth, were brought by divine men and women from other worlds, for the benefit of those they ruled. The humble wheat is pivotal to man’s Inner Principles and the Laws that govern the World of Being. Isis, the Virgin-Mother of Horus, was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. And her priests placed the sacred wheat on the breast of their ven-erable defunct. The Wheat Fields of Egypt are the Elysian Fields of Greece and the Homeric Tartarus. Extra-terrestrial wheat is the link between the occult philosophy of the old Egyp-tians, and that now taught by the cis-Himalayan Adepts. Aaru is the subjective state of post-mortem existence, where the defunct’s soul receives wheat and corn, growing therein seven cubits high. What is meant by the three cubits of the ear and the four cubits of the stalk of the wheat that grows in the Fields of Aaru? The ear of three cubits is the immortal upper triad of man and aroma of Manas (Higher Ego), represented by the triangle. The four cubits is the mortal lower tetrad (stalk or straw), represented by the square. In Egyptian philosophy the Eyes of the Lord are interchangeable: the Sun is the eye of Osiris by day; and the Moon, the eye of Osiris by night. The Wheat Fields of Aaru are an allusion to Devachan. The wheat sown and reaped by the defunct during his life is his Karma.