human body can perform the
greatest wonders by knowing the Universal Spirit (or God) and
acquainting itself with the properties and qualities (occult) of all the
things in the universe. A human being (a Dikshit or initiate) can thus
acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great distances." Finally,
Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly great
naturalist, says, with brave candour: "It is spirit that alone feels,
and perceives, and thinks, that acquires knowledge, and reasons and
aspires..... There not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted
that the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of
sense, or can, perhaps, wholly or partially quit the body for a time and
return to it again; the spirit communicates with spirit easier than
with matter." We can now see how, after thousands of years have
intervened between the age of the Gymnosophists* and our own highly
civilized era, notwithstanding, or, perhaps, just because of such an
enlightenment which pours its radiant light upon the psychological as
well as upon the physical realms of Nature, over twenty millions of
people today believe, under different form, in those same spiritual
powers that were believed in by the Yogis and the Pythagoreans, nearly
3,000 years ago.

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* The reality of the Yog-power was affirmed by many Greek and Roman
writers, who call the Yogis Indian Gymnosophists--by Strabo, Lucan,
Plutarch, Cicero (Tusculum), Pliny (vii. 2), &c.
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Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving
all the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power
of acting independently of his body, through the Atman, "self," or
"soul;" and the old Greeks went in search of Atmu, the Hidden one, or
the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian
mysteries; so the spiritualists of today believe in the capacity of the
spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly
and tangibly with those they loved on earth. And all these, Aryan
Yogis, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists, affirm that
possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied
spirit--the real self--are not separated from either the Universal Soul
or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their
qualities, as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no
limitation. And that when this difference is once rem