e with
them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the
manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the
condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in
crime.

You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with
his misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if you
would transmute the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to
immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to
sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without
sympathy walks to his own funeral."

Don't imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to
find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden
Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you
must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the
lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personality
that conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard this
personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is,
or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as
we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes
unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don't cut it
off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should the
men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a
later century?

You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in
order to learn the secrets of alchemical transmutation. There is
nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot
learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of
the world.

There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater
than love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is no
God holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will
readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that
appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure;
think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the
lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the
expression of your sex with the pure and lofty and holy power God gave
to it, or refrain from the thought of sex until you can learn to do
so.

Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the
Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with
th