Those, roughly, then, are the conditions: meditation for the consciousness, purity for the evolution of the instrument. If you are willing to accept those conditions, then the path of the higher evolution opens before you, and according to your courage, your perseverance, and your ability will be the rapidity with which you can tread that path. The object before you should be the helping of others, the gaining of these powers in order that you may be more useful, not in order that you may be greater than your fellow-men. Of the purity of your motive there is only one test: are you using the powers you have now for the helping of your race? If you are not, then no profession that you will use the higher powers for good will be effective in bringing you help in their unfolding. I have met many a man, many a woman, who is anxious to be an invisible helper—that is, a worker on the astral plane—but I do not always find that those people are visible helpers as far as their present powers go. And I do not understand why people should want to go about in astral slums when they keep carefully away from the physical slums which are already within their reach. So far as you can go by your own power you have the right to go, but if you ask for help from those more highly developed—from the great Teachers of the race—then you have to bring in your hands the proof—and that proof is life, and not words—that as you are using well the talent you have you deserve to be helped in the gaining of others. There is the underlying meaning of those strange words ascribed to the Christ, that he who has much, to him shall be given. Those who have used well that which they have, those alone have claim to be helped in gaining more; for by their life they have shown that they do the best with what they possess, and that is the guarantee that with more they will utilise that also for the race. And so in the old rules of discipleship it was said that when the disciple came to the Teacher he must bring with him in his hands the fuel for the fire; it was the fire of sacrifice, and the fuel was everything that the pupil possessed in mind, body, and estate; and he brought that in his hands as offering to the Teacher, and then alone was he accepted by the one who knew. And so in these days also that higher evolution, quickened by the power of the great Ones, can only be opened up to those who bring in their hands the fuel for the fire of sacrifice; you must be willing to give up everything you have, and own nothing, material or immaterial; you must hold everything you have and everything you are at the service of the great One from whom you ask the gift of knowledge. When that is brought the gift is never refused; when that door is thus knocked at it never remains closed. True it is that the gateway is narrow; true it is, now as of old, “Strait is the gate, narrow is the way, and few there be that find it.” But the fewness does not depend on the grudging of the Teacher—it depends