r, but several others of the fraternity, including one of the
highest. I regret the extremely personal nature of my visit to those
thrice blessed regions prevents my saying more about it. Suffice it
that the place I was permitted to visit is in the Himalayas, not in any
fanciful Summer Land, and that I saw him in my own sthula sarira
(physical body) and found my Master identical with the form I had seen
in the earlier days of my Chelaship. Thus, I saw my beloved Guru not
only as a living man, but actually as a young one in comparison with
some other Sadhus of the blessed company, only far kinder, and not above
a merry remark and conversation at times. Thus on the second day of my
arrival, after the meal hour, I was permitted to hold an intercourse for
over an hour with my Master. Asked by him smilingly what it was that
made me look at him so perplexed, I asked in my turn:--"How is it,
Master, that some of the members of our Society have taken into their
heads a notion that you were 'an elderly man,' and that they have even
seen you clairvoyantly looking an old man past sixty?" To which he
pleasantly smiled and said that this latest misconception was due to the
reports of a certain Brahmachari, a pupil of a Vedantic Swami in the
Punjab,* who had met last year in Tibet the chief of a sect, an elderly
Lama, who was his (my Master's) traveling companion at that time. The
said Brahmachari, having spoken of the encounter in India, had led
several persons to mistake the Lama for himself. As to his being
perceived clairvoyantly as an "elderly man," that could never be, he
added, as real clairvoyance could lead no one into such mistaken
notions; and then he kindly reprimanded me for giving any importance to
the age of a Guru, adding that appearances were often false, &c., and
explaining other points.

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* See infra. Rajani Kanta Brahmachai's "Interview with a Mahatma."
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These are all stern facts, and no third course is open to the reader.
What I assert is either true or false. In the former case, no
Spiritualistic hypothesis can hold good, and it will have to be admitted
that the Himalayan Brothers are living men, and neither disembodied
spirits nor creations of the over-heated imagination of fanatics. Of
course I am fully aware that many will discredit my account; but I
write only for the benefit of those few who know me well enough to see
in me neither a hallucinated medium, nor attribute to me a