The ideal development would be that no exercises should be done by means of the physical body but that everything which has to take place within it should result only as a consequence of exercises for intuition. As, however, the physical body offers such powerful impediments, the training may permit of some alleviations. These consist in exercises which affect the physical body; yet everything in this domain that has not been directly imparted by the teacher, or those having knowledge and experience of these things, is fraught with danger. Such exercises, for instance, include a certain regulated process of breathing to be carried out for a very short space of time. These regulations of the breathing correspond in quite a definite way to particular laws of the psycho-spiritual world. Breathing is a physical process, and when this act is so carried out as to be the expression of a psycho-spiritual law, physical existence receives the direct stamp, as it were, of spirituality, and the physical matter is transformed. For this reason occult science is able to call the change due to such direct spiritual influence, a transmutation of the physical body, and this process represents what is called “working with the philosopher’s stone” by him who has a knowledge of these matters. He who knows these things, frees himself indeed from those concepts which have been limited by superstition, humbug and charlatanry. The significance of the phenomena does not become less to him who knows, just because, as a spiritual investigator, all superstition is foreign to him. When he has acquired a concept of a significant fact, he may be allowed to call it by its _correct name_ although that name has been fixed upon it as a result of misunderstanding, error and nonsense. Every true intuition is in fact a “working with the philosopher’s stone,” because each genuine intuition calls directly upon those powers which act from out the supersensible world, into the world of the senses. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐