Five Years of Theosophy | Page 9

these,
at least as much as silence and solitude, that the Gods, Sages, Occultists
of all ages have retired as much as possible to the quiet of the country,
the cool cave, the depths of the forest, the expanse of the desert, or the
heights of the mountains. Is it not suggestive that the Gods have always
loved the "high places"; and that in the present day the highest section
of the Occult Brotherhood on earth inhabits the highest mountain
plateaux of the earth?*
--------- * The stern prohibition to the Jews to serve "their gods upon
the high mountains and upon the hills" is traced back to the
unwillingness of their ancient elders to allow people in most cases unfit
for adeptship to choose a life of celibacy and asceticism, or in other
words, to pursue adeptship. This prohibition had an esoteric meaning
before it became the prohibition, incomprehensible in its dead-letter
sense: for it is not India alone whose sons accorded divine honours to
the Wise Ones, but all nations regarded their adepts and initiates as
divine.-- G.M. ---------
Nor must the beginner disdain the assistance of medicine and good
medical regimen. He is still an ordinary mortal, and he requires the aid
of an ordinary mortal.
"Suppose, however, all the conditions required, or which will be
understood as required (for the details and varieties of treatment
requisite, are too numerous to be detailed here), are fulfilled, what is
the next step?" the reader will ask. Well if there have been no
backslidings or remissness in the procedure indicated, the following

physical results will follow:--
First the neophyte will take more pleasure in things spiritual and pure.
Gradually gross and material occupations will become not only
uncraved for or forbidden, but simply and literally repulsive to him. He
will take more pleasure in the simple sensations of Nature--the sort of
feeling one can remember to have experienced as a child. He will feel
more light-hearted, confident, happy. Let him take care the sensation of
renewed youth does not mislead, or he will yet risk a fall into his old
baser life and even lower depths. "Action and Re-action are equal."
Now the desire for food will begin to cease. Let it be left off
gradually--no fasting is required. Take what you feel you require. The
food craved for will be the most innocent and simple. Fruit and milk
will usually be the best. Then as till now, you have been simplifying
the quality of your food, gradually--very gradually--as you feel capable
of it diminish the quantity. You will ask: "Can a man exist without
food?" No, but before you mock, consider the character of the process
alluded to. It is a notorious fact that many of the lowest and simplest
organisms have no excretions. The common guinea-worm is a very
good instance. It has rather a complicated organism, but it has no
ejaculatory duct. All it consumes--the poorest essences of the human
body--is applied to its growth and propagation. Living as it does in
human tissue, it passes no digested food away. The human neophyte, at
a certain stage of his development, is in a somewhat analogous
condition, with this difference or differences, that he does excrete, but
it is through the pores of his skin, and by those too enter other
etherealized particles of matter to contribute towards his support.*
Otherwise, all the food and drink is sufficient only to keep in
equilibrium those "gross" parts of his physical body which still remain
to repair their cuticle-waste through the medium of the blood. Later on,
the process of cell-development in his frame will undergo a change; a
change for the better, the opposite of that in disease for the worse--he
will become all living and sensitive, and will derive nourishment from
the Ether (Akas). But that epoch for our neophyte is yet far distant.
--------- * He is in a state similar to the physical state of a fetus before

birth into the world.--G.M. ---------
Probably, long before that period has arrived, other results, no less
surprising than incredible to the uninitiated will have ensued to give
our neophyte courage and consolation in his difficult task. It would be
but a truism to repeat what has been again alleged (in ignorance of its
real rationale) by hundreds and hundreds of writers as to the happiness
and content conferred by a life of innocence and purity. But often at the
very commencement of the process some real physical result,
unexpected and unthought of by the neophyte, occurs. Some lingering
disease, hitherto deemed hopeless, may take a favourable turn; or he
may develop healing mesmeric powers himself; or some hitherto
unknown sharpening of his senses may delight him. The rationale of
these things is, as we have said, neither miraculous nor