Raj Yoga encourages no sham, requires no physical postures.  It has to deal with the inner man whose sphere lies in the world of thought.  To have the highest ideal placed before oneself and strive incessantly to rise up to it, is the only true concentration recognized by Esoteric Philosophy which deals with the inner world of noumena, not the outer shell of phenomena.

The first requisite for it is thorough purity of heart.  Well might the student of Occultism say with Zoroaster, that purity of thought, purity of word, and purity of deed,—­these are the essentials of one who would rise above the ordinary level and join the “gods.”  A cultivation of the feeling of unselfish philanthropy is the path which has to be traversed for that purpose.  For it is that alone which will lead to Universal Love, the realization of which constitutes the progress towards deliverance from the chains forged by Maya (illusion) around the Ego.  No student will attain this at once, but as our Venerated Mahatma says in the “Occult World":—­

The greater the progress towards deliverance, the less this will be the case, until, to crown all, human and purely individual personal feelings, blood-ties and friendship, patriotism and race predilection, will all give way to become blended into one universal feeling, the only true and holy, the only unselfish and eternal one, Love, an Immense Love for Humanity as a whole.

In short, the individual is blended with the all.

Of course, contemplation, as usually understood, is not without its minor advantages.  It develops one set of physical faculties as gymnastics does the muscles.  For the purposes of physical mesmerism it is good enough; but it can in no way help the development of the psychological faculties, as the thoughtful reader will perceive.  At the same time, even for ordinary purposes, the practice can never be too well guarded.  If, as some suppose, they have to be entirely passive and lose themselves in the object before them, they should remember that, by thus encouraging passivity, they, in fact, allow the development of mediumistic faculties in themselves.  As was repeatedly stated—­the Adept and the Medium are the two Poles:  while the former is intensely active and thus able to control the elemental forces, the latter is intensely passive and thus incurs the risk of falling a prey to the caprice and malice of mischievous embryos of human beings, and the elementaries.

It will be evident from the above that true meditation consists in the “reasoning from the known to the unknown.”  The “known” is the phenomenal world, cognizable by our five senses.  And all that we see in this manifested world are the effects, the causes of which are to be sought after in the noumenal, the unmanifested, the “unknown world:”  this is to be accomplished by meditation, i.e., continued attention to the subject.  Occultism does not depend upon one method, but employs