Cull from each day’s experience all that helps to develop the spiritual man—­all that will stand the test of immortality—­kind words and deeds; principle maintained; a wrong forgiven; a service cheerfully extended; a tolerance and generosity for the mistakes of others as well as for your own.  These seem small things to the personal self—­the ambitious, the gloating, the sense-desiring self of the personality; we scarcely take them into account, but to the Self that is seeking immortality, these are the grains of wheat from the load of chaff; the diamond in the carbon; the wings upon which the spirit soars to realms of bliss.

Meditate upon this sutra.

“By perfectly concentrated meditation upon the heart, the interior being, comes the knowledge of consciousness.”

The heart is the guide of the inner nature, as the head is of the outer.  Love, the Most High God, is not born in the head, but in the heart.  The heart travails in pain through sorrow and loss and compassion and pity and loneliness and aspiration and sensitiveness; and lo! there is born from this pain, the spiritual Self, which embraces the lesser consciousness, enfolding all your consciousness in the softness and bliss of pure, Seraphic Love—­the heritage of your immortality.

Meditate long and wisely upon this sutra.

“Through perfectly concentrated meditation on the light in the head, come the visions of the Masters who have attained; or through the divining power of intuition he knows all things.”

There is a point in the head, anatomically named “the pineal gland”; this is frequently alluded to as the seat of the soul, but the soul is not confined within the body, therefore, it is in the nature of a key between the sense-conscious self and the spiritually conscious Self; it is like a central receiving station, and may be “called up,” and aroused to consciousness by meditation.  Realizing and focusing the light of the spiritual nature upon this part of the head, opens up those unexplored areas of consciousness in which the masters dwell, and the student knows by intuition, which is a higher aspect of reason, many things which were heretofore incomprehensible to the merely sense-conscious man.

The spiritual Self is not a being unlike and wholly foreign to our concept of the perfect mortal-man; all the powers of discernment which we find in mortal consciousness are accentuated, intensified, refined; all grossness, all imperfections and embarrassments removed; pleasure sensitized to ecstasy; love glorified to worship.  “Shapeliness, beauty, force, the temper of the diamond; these are the endowments of that body.”

The spiritual body is shapely, strong, beautiful, imperishable, as the diamond, with all its brilliancy.  No vapory, uncertain, or unreal being, but the Real, with the husk of sense-consciousness dropped off, and only the kernels of truth buried in the chaff of Experience, retained from the experiences of the personal self.