Those Gates admit us to the sanctuary of man’s own nature, to the place whence his life-power comes, and where he is priest of the shrine of life.  It needs but a strong hand to push them open, we are told.  “The courage to enter them is the courage to search the recesses of one’s own nature without fear and without shame.  In the fine part, the essence, the flavor of the man, is found the key which unlocks those great Gates.”

The necessity of killing out the sense of separateness is profoundly emphasized as one of the most important factors in this process.  We must divest ourselves of the illusions of the material life.  “When we desire to speak with those who have tried the Golden Gates and pushed them open, then it is very necessary—­in fact it is essential—­to discriminate, and not bring into our life the confusions of our sleep.  If we do, we are reckoned as madmen, and fall back into the darkness where there is no friend but chaos.  This chaos has followed every effort of man that is written in history; after civilization has flowered, the flower falls and dies, and winter and darkness destroy it.”  In this last sentence is indicated the purpose of civilization.  It is the blossoming of a race, with the purpose of producing a certain spiritual fruit; this fruit having ripened, then the degeneration of the great residuum begins, to be worked over and over again in the grand fermenting processes of reincarnation.  Our great civilization is now flowering and in this fact we may read the reason for the extraordinary efforts to sow the seed of the Mystic Teachings wherever the mind of man may be ready to receive it.

In the “Mystery of Threshold,” we are told that “only a man who has the potentialities in him both of the voluptuary and the stoic has any chance of entering the Golden Gates.  He must be capable of testing and valuing to its most delicate fraction every joy existence has to give; and he must be capable of denying himself all pleasure, and that without suffering from the denial.”

The fact that the way is different for each individual is finely set forth in “The Initial Effort,” in the words that man “may burst the shell that holds him in darkness, tear the veil that hides him from the eternal, at any moment where it is easiest for him to do so; and most often this point will be where he least expects to find it.”  By this we may see the uselessness of laying down arbitrary laws in the matter.

The meaning of those important words, “All steps are necessary to make up the ladder,” finds a wealth of illustration here.  These sentences are particularly pregnant:  “Spirit is not a gas created by matter, and we cannot create our future by forcibly using one material agent and leaving out the rest.  Spirit is the great life on which matter rests, as does the rocky world on the free and fluid ether; whenever we can break our limitations we find ourselves on that marvellous shore where Wordsworth once saw the gleam of the gold.”  Virtue, being of the material life, man has not the power to carry it with him, “yet the aroma of his good deeds is a far sweeter sacrifice than the odor of crime and cruelty.”