Then passing on to the Intellect, you will be able to hold out for examination each mental process and principle.  You don’t believe it, you may say.  Then read and study some good work on Psychology, and you will learn to dissect and analyze every intellectual process—­and to classify it and place it in the proper pigeon-hole.  Study Psychology by means of some good text-book, and you will find that one by one every intellectual process is classified, and talked about and labeled, just as you would a collection of flowers.  If that does not satisfy you, turn the leaves of some work on Logic, and you will admit that you may hold these intellectual processes at arm’s length and examine them, and talk about them to others.  So that these wonderful tools of Man—­the Intellectual powers may be placed in the “not I” collection, for the “I” is capable of standing aside and viewing them—­it is able to detach them from itself.  The most remarkable thing about this is that in admitting this fact, you realize that the “I” is using these very intellectual faculties to pass upon themselves.  Who is the Master that compels these faculties to do this to themselves?  The Master of the Mind—­The “I.”

And reaching the higher regions of the mind—­even the Spiritual Mind, you will be compelled to admit that the things that have come into consciousness from that region may be considered and studied, just as may be any other mental thing, and so even these high things must be placed in the “not I” collection.  You may object that this does not prove that all the things in the Spiritual Mind may be so treated—­that there may be “I” things there that can not be so treated.  We will not discuss this question, for you know nothing about the Spiritual Mind except as it has revealed itself to you, and the higher regions of that mind are like the mind of a God, when compared to what you call mind.  But the evidence of the Illumined—­those in whom the Spiritual Mind has wonderfully unfolded tell us that even in the highest forms of development, the Initiates, yea, even the Masters, realize that above even their highest mental states there is always that eternal “I” brooding over them, as the Sun over the lake; and that the highest conception of the “I” known even to advanced souls, is but a faint reflection of the “I” filtering through the Spiritual Mind, although that Spiritual Mind is as clear as the clearest crystal when compared with our comparatively opaque mental states.  And the highest mental state is but a tool or instrument of the “I,” and is not the “I” itself.

And yet the “I” is to be found in the faintest forms of consciousness, and animates even the unconscious life.  The “I” is always the same, but its apparent growth is the result of the mental unfoldment of the individual.  As we described it in one of the lessons of the “Advanced Course” it is like an electric lamp that is encased in many wrappings of cloth.  As cloth