of
mental powers misused for personal ends. But they realise very well
that if they want the mental powers and the higher ranges of those
powers, they must be as rigid in the discipline of the lower bodies as
any pupil of the White Lodge could be. Take it, then, that to develop
in this way, a regimen for the bodies, as well as the strict working
and training of the mind, is absolutely necessary. But with these the
result is sure. You cannot set a time for the result, for it depends
where the worker is beginning in his present life. In all these
matters Nature's laws will not permit of what is called miraculous
growth, and if you find persons developing psychic powers very
rapidly, when perhaps they have been meditating only a few months, it
is because in a previous life they have cultivated these powers and
are taking up their lessons again in a more advanced class of
evolution, and not in the infant class, as many do in the present
life. So that there are differences. Some now beginning are not likely
to succeed in their present incarnation; but if that discourages them,
one can only say: "If you do not do it now, you will have to begin
again next life, and so on and on and on. For Nature's laws cannot be
violated, and Nature knows no favoritism and no partiality. Some time
or other you have to begin, and the sooner you begin the sooner will
you succeed."

Now the whole of this, you will remark, is the training, the
organising of _bodies_. And psychism implies that. You must train,
purify, organise, in order that the powers of the consciousness may
show forth. You will see very fully now why at the beginning I urged
you to realise that the whole of these manifestations are similar in
kind, so that when you find someone saying to you: "Oh! So-and-so is a
psychic," as though that were to condemn the person; "Such-and-such a
person is a mere clairvoyant," and so on, as though the fact of
possessing clairvoyance were a disadvantage rather than an advantage;
then the proper answer is: "Are you prepared to go the whole way with
that?" Many Indians do so (it is the point to which I said I would
return); they say that the siddhis, the powers of consciousness
manifested on the lower planes, are hindrances to the spiritual life.
And so they are in a sense. The spiritual life goes inwards: all
psychic powers go outwards. It is the same Self in either case--the
Self turning inwards on Itself, or the Self going outwards to the
wo