some helper, someone whom you love, who may have passed onwards, and so has the advantage of the astral vision. But in all those cases there comes into the waking consciousness something from the larger, and as you perfect the astral body all those come more and more within your control. As it becomes organised there is less and less need to leave it in order to exercise its powers. You will find yourself seeing, hearing, while the physical senses are active, while the consciousness is working normally, the waking consciousness in the brain; so that slowly and gradually you will unify the physical and the astral bodies and live in the two worlds continuously at one and the same time, finding those worlds intermingling and interworking; and so you will gain that much of the larger consciousness which belongs to the expression of the soul through the subtle astral body. Exactly on the same lines with the heavenly worlds, the mental world, your evolution will go on, and for this there is one condition regarding the consciousness, there is one condition regarding the instrument for the unfolding of consciousness—regular and steady meditation. There is no other way. If you find anybody telling you that by any physical means you can really unfold your consciousness, tell them that they do not realise what they are talking about. You can start a little astral consciousness on the lowest parts of the astral world by causing vibrations in matter in the physical that affect the astral, and so bring about a change in consciousness in that lowest part of the astral world, but you can go no further. I have seen in India men who, by the use of difficult physical means that none of you would care to use—for they bring about the gradual spoiling of the physical body—I have known them able to leave the physical body and live for the time being in the astral, but in that astral body they were unconscious, not conscious; they were not coming into touch with the astral world, nor using the larger consciousness at all. They had only forced themselves into that world in the astral body where it was not organised enough for the reception of impressions, nor the consciousness unfolded to understand them, and they had injured the physical brain and rendered that practically useless for physical utility; so that they had lost both worlds instead of gaining the higher that they sought. When one has seen that happen in India one realises that those methods are not methods that it is desirable to spread in the West; and it is along that line that so many of those pseudo-occult books are going which come to us from America, promising that if we follow those practices we shall be able to get the better of other people in business transactions, and hypnotise them for our own advantage and our own gain. Wherever you find that the method of working and that the object aimed at, be sure that you are dealing with a form of unfolding