Now the desire for food will begin to cease.  Let it be left off gradually—­no fasting is required.  Take what you feel you require.  The food craved for will be the most innocent and simple.  Fruit and milk will usually be the best.  Then as till now, you have been simplifying the quality of your food, gradually—­very gradually—­as you feel capable of it diminish the quantity.  You will ask:  “Can a man exist without food?” No, but before you mock, consider the character of the process alluded to.  It is a notorious fact that many of the lowest and simplest organisms have no excretions.  The common guinea-worm is a very good instance.  It has rather a complicated organism, but it has no ejaculatory duct.  All it consumes—­the poorest essences of the human body—­is applied to its growth and propagation.  Living as it does in human tissue, it passes no digested food away.  The human neophyte, at a certain stage of his development, is in a somewhat analogous condition, with this difference or differences, that he does excrete, but it is through the pores of his skin, and by those too enter other etherealized particles of matter to contribute towards his support.* Otherwise, all the food and drink is sufficient only to keep in equilibrium those “gross” parts of his physical body which still remain to repair their cuticle-waste through the medium of the blood.  Later on, the process of cell-development in his frame will undergo a change; a change for the better, the opposite of that in disease for the worse—­he will become all living and sensitive, and will derive nourishment from the Ether (Akas).  But that epoch for our neophyte is yet far distant.

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* He is in a state similar to the physical state of a fetus
before birth into the world.—­G.M.
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Probably, long before that period has arrived, other results, no less surprising than incredible to the uninitiated will have ensued to give our neophyte courage and consolation in his difficult task.  It would be but a truism to repeat what has been again alleged (in ignorance of its real rationale) by hundreds and hundreds of writers as to the happiness and content conferred by a life of innocence and purity.  But often at the very commencement of the process some real physical result, unexpected and unthought of by the neophyte, occurs.  Some lingering disease, hitherto deemed hopeless, may take a favourable turn; or he may develop healing mesmeric powers himself; or some hitherto unknown sharpening of his senses may delight him.  The rationale of these things is, as we have said, neither miraculous nor difficult of comprehension.  In the first place, the sudden change in the direction of the vital energy (which, whatever view we take of it and its origin, is acknowledged by all schools of philosophy as most recondite, and as the motive power) must produce results of some kind.  In the second, Theosophy shows, as we said before, that a man consists of several men pervading