you see yourself as a body, you are body and nothing else, and that is the perception of the vast majority of mankind. They may talk of soul and mind, and all these things, but what they perceive is the physical form, the touch, taste, vision, and so on. Again, with certain men, in certain states of consciousness, they perceive themselves as thought. You know, of course, the story told of Sir Humphrey Davy, who was making experiments before his class with laughing-gas, and suddenly one of the tubes broke, and the gas escaping, he breathed it in. For some moments he remained like a statue. Afterwards he told his class that when he was in that state, he actually perceived that the whole world is made up of ideas. The gas, for a time, made him forget the consciousness of the body, and that very thing which he was seeing as the body, he began to perceive as ideas. When the consciousness rises still higher, when this little puny consciousness is gone forever, that which is the Reality behind shines, and we see it as the One Existence-Knowledge-Bliss, the one _Âtman_, the Universal. “One that is only knowledge itself, One that is bliss itself, beyond all compare, beyond all limit, ever free, never bound, infinite as the sky, unchangeable as the sky. Such an One will manifest Himself in your heart in meditation.” How does the Advaitist theory explain all these various phases of heavens and hells and all these various ideas we find in all religions? When a man dies it is said that he goes to heaven or hell, goes here or there, or that when a man dies he is born again in another body, either in heaven or in another world, or somewhere. These are all hallucinations. Nobody is ever born or dies, really speaking. There is neither heaven nor hell, nor this world; all three never really existed. Tell a child a lot of ghost stories, and let him go out into the street in the evening. There is a little stump of a tree. What does the child see? A ghost, with hands stretched out, ready to grab him. Suppose a man comes from the corner of the street, wanting to meet his sweetheart; he sees that stump of the tree as the girl. A police-man coming from the street corner sees the stump as a thief. The thief sees it as a police-man. It is the same stump of a tree that was seen in various ways. The stump is the reality, and the visions of the stump are the projections of the various minds. There is one Being, this Self; It neither comes nor goes. When a man is ignorant, he wants to go to heaven or some place, and all his life he has been thinking and thinking of this, and when this earth dream vanishes he sees this world as a heaven, with _devas_ and angels flying about, and all such things. If a man all his life desires to meet his forefathers he gets them all, from Adam downwards, because he creates them. If a man is still more ignorant and has always been frightened by fanatics with ideas of hell, when he dies he will see this very world as hell, with all sorts of