“When the spiritual man is perfectly disentangled from the psychic body, he attains to mastery over all things and to a knowledge of all.”

The spiritual Self, the cosmic conscious Self, must not be confounded with the psychic body, which is formed from the emotions—­passions; fears; hatreds; ambitions; resentments; envy; regrets.  Know thyself as a being superior to all baser emotions, and the mastery over them is complete.  They are not destroyed, but converted into love—­the everlasting Source of Life.

“There should be complete overcoming of allurement or pride in the invitations of the different regions of life, lest attachment to things evil arise once more.”

It is said that the disciples, seeking the paths of Yoga, reach three degrees or stages of development; first, those who are just entering the path; second, those who are in the realm of allurements, subject to temptations; third, those who have won the victory over the senses and the external life—­maya; fourth, those who are firmly entrenched behind the bulwark of certainty; the spiritual being realized:  cosmic consciousness attained and retained.

“By absence of all self indulgence at this point, also, the seeds of bondage of sorrow are destroyed, and pure spiritual being is attained.”

Self-abnegation and self-sacrifice have ever been the way of spiritual development; but we are prone to misunderstand and mistake the true interpretation of this admonition; men shut themselves in monasteries and women become nuns and recluses as a penance, in order to purchase, as it were, absolution (at-one-ness with The Absolute, which knows not sin); this is not the point intended here.  Spiritual consciousness can not be bought; the desires of the personal self may be sublimated into divine force and power, through recognizing the desires of the self as baubles which attract and fill the eye, until we fail to see the glories of that which awaits us.

“Thereafter, the whole personal being bends toward illumination, full of the spirit of Eternal Life.”

Here again, we have assurance that the spiritually-conscious man, the “luminous body” is not a being apart from the self that we know our inner nature to be, but rather it is the inner Self even as we in our ignorance and our lack of initiation, know it, raised to a higher realm of consciousness; our desires refined, spiritualized, made pure, and our faculties strengthened and immortalized.  We do not withdraw from experience but we draw from Experience the lesson—­the hidden wisdom of the initiate.

Meditate upon these sutras.

“He who, after he has attained, is wholly free from self, is set in a cloud of holiness which is called Illumination.  This is the true spiritual consciousness.”

This aphorism is self-explanatory.  He who attains illumination, and afterward lives and acts from the inner consciousness—­the spiritual man, is free from the desires of the sense-conscious life, with its consequent disappointments; he sees everything from the spiritual, rather than the mental point of view, and understands the phrase “and behold, all was good.”