to reality. Were the soul to allow its
thoughts to roam aimlessly hither and thither, it would soon be corrected
by life, unless it were willing to enter into combat with it; the soul
must conform its thoughts to the facts of life. Now, when man leads his
thoughts away from the world of the physical senses, he misses the
corrective influence of this latter. If his thought is not able to be its
own mentor, it will be as unsteady as a will-o'-the-wisp. Consequently,
the student's thought must be exercised in such a way that its course and
object are self-determined. Inner firmness and a capacity to concentrate
strictly on one object: this is what such thinking must of itself
engender. And for this reason the thought exercises should not be
concerned with complicated objects or those foreign to life, but should,
on the contrary, deal with those that are simple and familiar. Any one who
succeeds in fixing his mind, over a period of several months and for a
space of at least five minutes a day, on such ordinary objects as a pin or
a lead pencil, excluding for the time being all other thoughts not
concerned with the object under contemplation, will have accomplished much
in the right direction. (A new article may be chosen each day, or the same
one adhered to for the space of several days.)

Even those who feel themselves to be "thinkers" need not despise this
method of preparing themselves for occult training, because by fixing the
attention for a time upon a really familiar object one may be sure that he
will be thinking in accordance with facts, and one who asks himself the
questions: "What are the constituent parts of a pencil?" "How are these
materials prepared?" "How are they afterwards put together?" "When were
pencils invented, etc.?" will surely be adapting his perceptions to
realities more than he who meditates on the descent of man, or asks
himself what life is.

Simple thought exercises prepare us better for an adequate concept of the
world in its Saturn, Sun, and Moon stages of development than those based
on learned and complicated ideas. For the important thing is not at all
just to think, but to think in conformity with facts by means of an inner
force. Once one has been trained to accuracy by means of an obvious,
physical sense process, the desire to think in conformity with facts will
have become habitual, even if thought does not feel itself under the
control of the physical sense-world and its laws; we th