minated
men who surrounded them were men who had power to produce phenomena of
various kinds, to heal the sick, to make the lame to walk, and so on,
and that phenomena always accompanied the great religious Teacher in
the past. These things did not give Him His religious authority: they
were simply the outcome of His knowledge of natural laws; for a man
who is thoroughly spiritual has matter subject to him on every plane
in Nature. But it by no means follows that the man who can manipulate
matter on the lower planes is therefore able to speak with authority
on the higher. The fact that the spiritual man is always a great
psychic, always has power to utilise higher forces for controlling
physical matter, that fact, while true, does not prove the truth of
the opposite idea, that the man who has power over matter is
necessarily highly unfolded as regards the spirit. It is true, of
course, that the founders of religion were men surrounded with clouds
of phenomena, and the reason for that is the one I have just stated:
that to the truly spiritual man matter is an obedient servant; to use
a quotation from an Indian book: "The truly spiritual man all the
siddhis stand ready to serve."

Now it was necessary for the founding of religions and for the
teaching of many of the doctrines of religions which had to do with
worlds invisible to the physical eye, that the man who first
promulgated these doctrines should be a man who had a first-hand
acquaintance with the conditions they described. For you must remember
that in every religion there are two sides to its teaching: the side
of the spiritual truths known only to the unfolded divine
consciousness; the side of the existence of other worlds than this,
and of the conditions existing in those worlds--important to men, as
they have to pass into those worlds after death, important to men
also, as much of the symbolism, the rites and ceremonies, are
connected with what we may roughly call occult science. As the
Buddha said when speaking of worlds beyond the physical: "If you
want to know your way to a village and particulars about the village,
you ask a man who lives there and who has gone along the roads leading
to it: and so you do right to come to me when you want to know about
the Devas and about the invisible worlds, for I know those worlds
and I know the way thereto." So that looking back to these great
spiritual Teachers and Revealers of the unseen, we find they are
always me