and of evolution that can only injure; it cannot really serve. The worst of it is that those forms tend to atrophy the parts of the brain that you want to bring things through after a higher consciousness is active and the higher body is organised. By this means you injure the brain, and with the brain the connecting link between this world and the next, so that you injure yourself along that line as well as along the other, and make yourself incapable, until you have a new body, of that higher unfolding at which you aim. There you have the danger of people picking up fragments of an ancient science of the East, without realising all the protection with which in the East that science is surrounded; and if even there one finds occasionally such cases as I have mentioned, of the ruined physical frame and the undeveloped astral body, then how much more dangerous it is when given to people of different physical heredity, without the conditions which in the East are ever imposed! Meditation, then, is the one safe way of unfolding the consciousness, and thus organising the vehicle; and the other condition is purity of thought, purity of desire, purity of physical life. That is the matter side of the training. Your thoughts must be pure, otherwise your mental body will be unfit for higher development; your desires must be pure, or your astral body will not be fit for that unfolding at which you aim; your physical body must be pure, otherwise when the developed mental and astral pour down their power on the physical, the physical will be unable to answer, and you will have hysteria instead of the wider consciousness you seek.