Another favorite illustration of the Eastern teachers is the stream of water flowing over a rocky bed.  They point to the stream before it comes to a rocky place, and show the chela (student) that it is One.  Then they will move a little way down the stream and show him how the rocks and stones divide the stream into countless little streams, each of which might imagine itself a separate and distinct stream, until later on it again joins the main united stream, and finds that it was but a form of expression of the One.

Another illustration that is frequently used by the teachers, is that which bids the student consider himself as a minute cell, or “little-life” as the Hindus call it, in a body.  It may be a cell in the blood performing the office of a carrier or messenger, or it may be a working cell in one of the organs of the body; or it may be a thinking cell in the brain.  At any rate, the cell manifests capacity for thought, action and memory—­and a number of secondary attributes quite wonderful in the way. (See “Hatha Yoga,” Chapter XVIII.) Each cell might well consider itself as a separate individual—­in a certain sense it does.  It has a certain degree of something akin to consciousness, enabling it to perform its work correctly and properly, and is called upon at times to manifest something like judgment.  It may well be excused for thinking of itself as a “person” having a separate life.  The analogy between its illusions and that of the man when seen by a Master, is very close.  But we know that the life of the cell is merely a centre of expression of the life of the body—­that its consciousness is merely a part of the consciousness of the mind animating the body.  The cell will die and apparently perish, but the essence of it will remain in the life of the person whose body it occupied, and nothing really dies or perishes.  Would the cell feel any less real if it knew that behind its Personality as a cell, there was the Individuality of the Man—­that its Real Self was the Man, not the cell?  Of course, even this figure of speech can be carried only so far, and then must stop, for the personality of the man, when it is dissolved, leaves behind it an essence which is called Character, which becomes the property of the Ego and which accompanies it into after life according to the Law of Karma, of which we shall speak in future lessons.  But back even of these attributes of Personality, is the Ego which exists in spite of Personality, and lives on and on throughout many Personalities, and yet learning the lessons of each, until at last it rises above Personality and enters into higher sphere of Knowing and Being.