“Thereon comes surcease from sorrow and the burden of toil.”

The one who has attained cosmic consciousness, acting always from the Self, and not from personal desires, is set free from karma; he has fulfilled the cycle; he makes no more bondage for himself; he is free and is already immortal.

“When that condition of consciousness is reached, which is far-reaching, and not confined to the body, which is outside the body and not conditioned by it, then the veil which conceals the light is worn away.”

The acquisition of spiritual consciousness, Illumination, endows the mortal mind also, with a degree of power sufficient to penetrate the veil of illusion—­the maya; the disciple then sees for the first time, all things in their true light.  The separation between the personal self, and the spiritual being that we are, is so fine as to be like a cob-web veil, and yet how few penetrate it.  The suddenness with which this awakening (for it is like awakening from a dream of the senses), comes, startles and surprises us, and then we become astonished at the transparency of the bonds that bound us to the limitations of the mortal, when we might have soared to realms of light.

“By perfectly concentrated meditation on the correlation of the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, will come the power to traverse the ether.”

The Zens say that the way of the gods is through the air and afterwards in the ether.  This means that we must evolve from the physical to the psychic, and thence to the etheric or spiritual body.  This is the way of the many.  It is only the few who attain to perfect spiritual consciousness while manifesting in the physical, but these do not have to undergo “the second death” which is the dropping off of the psychic body, and assuming the spiritual body.  They attain to immortality in the flesh, (i.e., in the present personality).

“Thereupon will come the manifestation of the atomic and other powers, which are the endowment of the body, together with its unassailable force.”

The body here referred to, it must be borne in mind, is the etheric or spiritual body, which possesses the power to disintegrate matter; the power to annihilate time and space; so that he may look backward into remote antiquity and forward into boundless futurity; or as the commentator says, “he can touch the moon with the tip of his finger”; the power of levitation and limitless extension; the power of command; the power of creative will.

These are the endowments of the spiritual body with which the disciple is seeking to establish his identity—­that he may overcome the second death and become immortal in consciousness, here and now.

Of this spiritual, or etheric body it is said, “Fire burns it not; water wets it not; the sword cleaves it not; dry winds parch it not.  It is unassailable.”

Meditate upon this sutra.