and even spiritual progress valuable only in so far as it could be used to help others; and they studied deep mysteries as brother and sister together--and he had been a _mahatma_ or _rishi_ of the highest grade--and, owing to the aid he derived from his female associate, he discovered that the subjective conditions of _nirvana_ and _devachan_ were the result of one-sided male imaginings which had their origin in male selfishness; and this conviction grew in him in the degree in which the Parthivi Mutar, or 'Earth Mother,' became incarnated in Nandana. Thus was revealed to him the astounding fact that the whole system of the occult adepts had originated in the natural brains of men who had given themselves up to egotistical transcendental speculation--in fact, I cannot better describe the process than in the words of Mr Sinnett himself, where he alludes to 'the highly cultivated devotees to be met with occasionally in India, who build up a conception of nature, the universe and God, entirely on a metaphysical basis, and who have evolved their systems by sheer force of transcendental thinking--who will take some established system of philosophy as its groundwork, and amplify on this to an extent which only an oriental metaphysician could dream of.' "This, Mr Sinnett chooses to assume, was not the fact with the Thibet Brothers; but, in reality, this was just what they did. The fact that they have outstripped other similar transcendentalists is due to the circumstance that the original founders of the system were men of more powerful will and higher attainments than any who have succeeded them. And on their death they formed a compact spiritual society in the other world, impregnating the wills and imaginations of their disciples still on earth with their fantastic theories, which they still retain there, of a planetary chain, and the spiral advance of the seven rounds, and the septenary law, and all the rest of it. In order for human beings to come into these occult knowledges, it is necessary, as Mr Sinnett admits, for the adepts to go into trance-conditions--in other words, to lose all control of their normal, or as they would probably call them, their objective faculties. While in this condition, they are the sport of any invisible intelligences that choose to play upon them; but fearing lest they may be accused of this, they erroneously assert that no such intelligences of a high order have cognisance of what happens in this world. The fact that _mahatmas_ have powers which appear supernatural proves nothing, as Mr Sinnett also admits that innumerable _fakirs_ and _yojis_ possess these as well, whose authority on occultism he deems of no account, when he says that 'careless inquirers are very apt to confound such persons with the great adepts of whom they vaguely hear.' There can be no better evidence of the falsity of the whole conception than you are yourself. For to prove to you that you were the sport of a