of the human masses, and their considerable dependence yet on laws and
forms and rituals. Still, if it should prove that that age of dependence
IS really approaching its end, that would surely be a matter for
congratulation. It would mean that mankind was moving into a knowledge
of the REALITY which has underlain these outer shows--that it was coming
into the Third stage of its Consciousness. Having found this there would
be no need for it to dwell any longer in the land of superstitions and
formulae. It would have come to the place of which these latter are only
the outlying indications.

It may, therefore, happen--and this quite independently of the growth of
a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism
to it--that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and
spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the
pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and
afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of--or
perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State. Books
like the Upanishads of the Vedic seers, and the Bhagavat Gita, though
garbled and obscured by priestly interferences and mystifications, do
undoubtedly represent and give expression to the highest utterance of
religious experience to be found anywhere in the world. They are indeed
the manuals of human entrance into the cosmic state. But as I say,
and as has happened in the case of other sacred books, a vast deal of
rubbish has accreted round their essential teachings, and has to be
cleared away. To go into a serious explication of the meaning of these
books would be far too large an affair, and would be foreign to the
purpose of the present volume; but I have in the Appendix below inserted
two papers, (on "Rest" and "The Nature of the Self") containing the
substance of lectures given on the above books. These papers or lectures
are couched in the very simplest language, free from Sanskrit terms and
the usual 'jargon of the Schools,' and may, I hope, even on that account
be of use in familiarizing readers who are not specially STUDENTS with
the ideas and mental attitudes of the cosmic state. Non-differentiation
(Advaita (1)) is the root attitude of the mind inculcated.

(1) The word means "not-two-ness." Here we see a great subtlety
of definition. It is not to be "one" with others that is urged, but to
be "not two."

We have seen that there has been an age