The acquisition of spiritual consciousness, Illumination, endows the mortal mind also, with a degree of power sufficient to penetrate the veil of illusion--the _maya_; the disciple then sees for the first time, all things in their true light. The separation between the personal self, and the spiritual being that we are, is so fine as to be like a cob-web veil, and yet how few penetrate it. The suddenness with which this awakening (for it is like awakening from a dream of the senses), comes, startles and surprises us, and then we become astonished at the transparency of the bonds that bound us to the limitations of the mortal, when we might have soared to realms of light. "By perfectly concentrated meditation on the correlation of the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, will come the power to traverse the ether." The Zens say that the way of the gods is through the air and afterwards in the ether. This means that we must evolve from the physical to the psychic, and thence to the etheric or spiritual body. This is the way of the many. It is only the few who attain to perfect spiritual consciousness while manifesting in the physical, but these do not have to undergo "the second death" which is the dropping off of the psychic body, and assuming the spiritual body. They attain to immortality _in the flesh_, (i.e., in the present personality). "Thereupon will come the manifestation of the atomic and other powers, which are the endowment of the body, together with its unassailable force." The body here referred to, it must be borne in mind, is the etheric or spiritual body, which possesses the power to disintegrate matter; the power to annihilate time and space; so that he may look backward into remote antiquity and forward into boundless futurity; or as the commentator says, "he can touch the moon with the tip of his finger"; the power of levitation and limitless extension; the power of command; the power of creative will. These are the endowments of the spiritual body with which the disciple is seeking to establish his identity--that he may overcome the second death and become immortal _in consciousness_, here and now. Of this spiritual, or etheric body it is said, "Fire burns it not; water wets it not; the sword cleaves it not; dry winds parch it not. It is unassailable." _Meditate upon this sutra._ "For him who discerns between the mind and the spiritual man (the Self) there comes perfect fruition of the longing after the real being."