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Wisdom comes from reflection upon the results of Experience, in the search for happiness.

When the mind has sounded the depths of its resources, and the urge forward can not be appeased, when the voice of the inner self—­the soul, cannot be silenced; the disciple pauses to ask the way.  He wants to know what it is all about, and why it is that all he has so striven and struggled for fails to satisfy.  He wants to know how to avoid pain; and how to find the most direct road to that satisfaction which endures; and which is not synonymous with the so-called “pleasures” of the senses.

When this stage of development has been reached, the disciple is ready for another phase of Experience which shall extend his consciousness into those areas of knowledge, in which the Real is distinguishable from the Illusory.

Experience will then teach him that only Love is real.

That which is for the permanent good of all, as opposed to that which is transitory and only seemingly satisfying to the few, may be said to constitute the perception of the Real, and the avoidance of Illusion.

To exchange a present seeming advantage to the physical environment, for a future and permanent satisfaction of the soul is the prerogative of the wise—­the soul that has discovered itself and its mission.

In all organisms below the scale of the human, there is a constant growth in complexity of organism, with specialization of functions.

When we come to this last-mentioned stage of human development, we find that there is no more specialization in the way of development of the physical functions.  Instead, there is a determined effort at perfecting the higher functions, through the gradations of consciousness, until the spiritual consciousness of the individual entity has been awakened.

Then, indeed, has been awakened the “divine man” and the path to immortality is henceforth comparatively short, although by no means strewn with roses, judged from the limited standard of Relativity.

A man’s karma simply and mathematically, proves the direction of his former desires.  Karma does not punish or reward, as is frequently imagined.

The general impression that one is reaping “good or bad karma” according as his life is one of pleasure or of pain, is not the solution of the problem of karma, and has no relation to the law of karmic action.

If a soul has in a previous life outgrown or outworn that evolutionary phase of development, in which the mind seeks temporary pleasures, and has come to the place where he wants to distinguish the Real from the Illusory, his karma, in compliance with the law of desire, will bring him in relation to those conditions which will teach him to know the Real from the Illusory, and in those conditions he will experience pain because he will, if he remain in the activities of the world, be acting contrary to the ideas of the average.