And then the details of daily life, the command not to touch even the hand of one’s nearest and dearest.  How contrary to Western notions of affection and good feeling!  How cold and hard it seems.  Egotistical too, people would say, to abstain from giving pleasure to others for the sake of one’s own development.  Well, let those who think so defer till another lifetime the attempt to enter the path in real earnest.  But let them not glory in their own fancied unselfishness.  For, in reality, it is only the seeming appearances which they allow to deceive them, the conventional notions, based on emotionalism and gush, or so-called courtesy, things of the unreal life, not the dictates of Truth.

But even putting aside these difficulties, which may be considered “external,” though their importance is none the less great, how are students in the West to “attune themselves” to harmony as here required of them?  So strong has personality grown in Europe and America, that there is no school of artists even whose members do not hate and are not jealous of each other.  “Professional” hatred and envy have become proverbial; men seek each to benefit himself at all costs, and even the so-called courtesies of life are but a hollow mask covering these demons of hatred and jealousy.

In the East the spirit of “non-separateness” is inculcated as steadily from childhood up, as in the West the spirit of rivalry.  Personal ambition, personal feelings and desires, are not encouraged to grow so rampant there.  When the soil is naturally good, it is cultivated in the right way, and the child grows into a man in whom the habit of subordination of one’s lower to one’s higher Self is strong and powerful.  In the West men think that their own likes and dislikes of other men and things are guiding principles for them to act upon, even when they do not make of them the law of their lives and seek to impose them upon others.

Let those who complain that they have learned little in the Theosophical Society lay to heart the words written in an article in the Path for last February:—­“The key in each degree is the aspirant himself.”  It is not “the fear of God” which is “the beginning of Wisdom,” but the knowledge of SELF which is WISDOM ITSELF.

How grand and true appears, thus, to the student of Occultism who has commenced to realize some of the foregoing truths, the answer given by the Delphic Oracle to all who came seeking after Occult Wisdom—­words repeated and enforced again and again by the wise Socrates:—­MAN KNOW THYSELF.

Chelaship has nothing whatever to do with means of subsistence or anything of the kind, for a man can isolate his mind entirely from his body and its surroundings.  Chelaship is a state of mind, rather than a life according to hard and fast rules, on the physical plane.  This applies especially to the earlier, probationary period, while the rules given in Lucifer for April last pertain properly to a later stage, that of actual occult training and the development of occult powers and insight.  These rules indicate, however, the mode of life which ought to be followed by all aspirants so far as practicable, since it is the most helpful to them in their aspirations.