Owing to certain conditions connected with my linga sharira, or “astral body”—­which it would be difficult for me to explain to those who are not to some extent initiated—­I passed through the various degrees of chela- ship with remarkable rapidity.  When I say that in less than fifteen years of spiritual absorption and profound contemplation of esoteric mysteries I became a mahatma, or adept, some idea may be formed by chelas who are now treading that path of severe ordeal, of the rapidity of my progress:  indeed, such extraordinary faculty did I manifest, that at one time the Guru, my master, was inclined to think that I was one of those exceptional cases which recur from time to time, where a child-body is selected as the human tenement of a reincarnated adept; and that though belonging by rights to the fourth round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain.  “The adept,” says an occult aphorism, “becomes; he is not made.”  That was exactly my case.  I attribute it principally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others.  As Mr Sinnett very properly remarks—­

“Very much further than people generally imagine, will mere confidence carry the occult neophyte.  How many European readers who would be quite incredulous if told of some results which occult chelas in the most incipient stages of their training have to accomplish by sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in church, nevertheless, the familiar Biblical assurances of the power which resides in faith, and let the words pass by like the wind, leaving no impression!”

It is true that I had some reason for this confidence—­which arose from the fact that prior to my initiation into Buddhist mysteries, and before I left England, I had developed, under the spiritual craze which was then prevalent in society, a remarkable faculty of clairvoyance.  This gave me the power not merely of diagnosing the physical and moral conditions of my friends and acquaintances, and of prescribing for them when necessary, but of seeing what was happening in other parts of the world; hence my organism was peculiarly favourable for initiation into occult mysteries, and naturally—­or rather spiritually—­prepared for that method in the regular course of occult training by which adepts impart instruction to their pupils.

“They awaken,” as we are most accurately informed by Mr Sinnett, “the dormant sense in the pupil, and through this they imbue his mind with a knowledge that such and such a doctrine is the real truth.  The whole scheme of evolution infiltrates into the regular chela’s mind, by reason of the fact that he is made to see the process taking place by clairvoyant vision.  There are no words used in his instruction at all.  And adepts themselves, to whom the facts and processes of nature are as familiar as our five fingers to us, find it difficult to explain in a treatise