therwise why
place them so far off?

Unfortunately, Nature has done this and
not personal choice or arrangement. There are
certain spots on the earth where the advance
of "civilization" is unfelt, and the nineteenth
century fever is kept at bay. In these favored
places there is always time, always opportunity,
for the realities of life; they are not crowded
out by the doings of an inchoate, money-loving,
pleasure seeking society. While there are
adepts upon the earth, the earth must preserve
to them places of seclusion. This is a fact in
nature which is only an external expression of
a profound fact in super-nature.

The demand of the neophyte remains unheard
until the voice in which it is uttered has
lost the power to wound. This is because the
divine-astral life[A] is a place in which order
reigns, just as it does in natural life. There
is, of course, always the center and the circumference
as there is in nature. Close to the
central heart of life, on any plane, there is
knowledge, there order reigns completely; and
chaos makes dim and confused the outer margin
of the circle. In fact, life in every form
bears a more or less strong resemblance to a
philosophic school. There are always the devotees
to knowledge who forget their own lives
in their pursuit of it; there are always the
flippant crowd who come and go--of such,
Epictetus said that it was [as] easy to teach
them philosophy as to eat custard with a fork.
The same state exists in the super-astral life;
and the adept has an even deeper and more
profound seclusion there in which to dwell.
This place of retreat is so safe, so sheltered,
that no sound which has discord in it can reach
his ears. Why should this be, will be asked at
once, if he is a being of such great powers as
those say who believe in his existence? The
answer seems very apparent. He serves humanity
and identifies himself with the whole world;
he is ready to make vicarious sacrifice for it at
any moment--_by living not by dying for it_.
Why should he not die for it? Because he is
part of the great whole, and one of the most
valuable parts of it. Because he lives under
laws of order which he does not desire to
break. His life is not his own, but that of the
forces which work behind him. He is the
flower of humanity, the bloom which contains
the divine seed. He is, in his own person, a
treasure of the universal nature, which is
guarded and made safe in order that the fruition
shall