He was in the cement business, and his clothes, even on Sunday, were always covered with a fine white dust, for he was unmarried and lived alone in a single room. He made a bare living at his work, but was thoroughly conscientious and devoted to the interests of his employer, and all he asked was steady work and fair remuneration for the rest of his life. He was a real mystic by temperament, though he belonged to no particular tradition. The world for him was but a show of false appearances that the senses gathered; the realities behind were spiritual. He believed that his soul had existed for ever and would never cease to exist, and that his ego would continue to expand and develop according to the life he led, and shaped by his thoughts and acts (but especially by his thoughts) to all eternity. This world for him was a schoolroom, a place of difficult discipline and learning, and the lessons he was learning were determined logically and justly by his previous living and previous mistakes. Talents or disabilities, equally, were the results of former action.... But to the ordinary man he appeared simply as a rather dull everyday worker, without any worldly ambition, absolutely honest and trustworthy, and always occupying a subordinate position in practical affairs. In the “old country” he had belonged to some sort of society that kept alive traditions of teaching methods of spiritual development, and he told me much concerning their theories that immense latent powers lay in the depths of one’s being and could be educed by suitable living, and the period in the “schoolroom of this world,” as he called it, could be shortened and the progress of one’s real development hastened. It all lay, with him, in learning how to concentrate the faculties on this inner life, without neglecting the duties of the position one held to family or employer, and thus reducing the life of the body and the senses to the minimum that was consistent with health and ordinary duty. In this way he believed new forces would awaken to life, and new parts of one’s being be stimulated into activity, and in due course one would become conscious of a new spiritual region with the spiritual senses adapted to it. It amounted, of course, to an expansion of consciousness. All this, naturally, interested me very much indeed, and I spent hours talking with this cement maker, and many more hours reading the books he lent me and thinking about them. My friend helped in this extension. Carl du Prel’s “Philosophy of Mysticism” was a book to injure no one.