THEO. You may regard it as you like. Believing that, outside the ONE Reality, nothing is better than a passing illusion—the whole Universe included—we do not view it as insanity, but as a very natural sequence or development of the terrestrial life. What is life? A bundle of the most varied experiences, of daily changing ideas, emotions, and opinions. In our youth we are often enthusiastically devoted to an ideal, to some hero or heroine whom we try to follow and revive; a few years later, when the freshness of our youthful feelings has faded out and sobered down, we are the first to laugh at our fancies. And yet there was a day when we had so thoroughly identified our own personality with that of the ideal in our mind—especially if it was that of a living being—that the former was entirely merged and lost in the latter. Can it be said of a man of fifty that he is the same being that he was at twenty? The _inner_ man is the same; the outward living personality is completely transformed and changed. Would you also call these changes in the human mental states insanity? ENQ. How would _you_ name them, and especially how would you explain the permanence of one and the evanescence of the other? THEO. We have our own doctrine ready, and to us it offers no difficulty. The clue lies in the double consciousness of our mind, and also, in the dual nature of the mental “principle.” There is a spiritual consciousness, the Manasic mind illumined by the light of Buddhi, that which subjectively perceives abstractions; and the sentient consciousness (the lower _Manasic_ light), inseparable from our physical brain and senses. This latter consciousness is held in subjection by the brain and physical senses, and, being in its turn equally dependent on them, must of course fade out and finally die with the disappearance of the brain and physical senses. It is only the former kind of consciousness, whose root lies in eternity, which survives and lives for ever, and may, therefore, be regarded as immortal. Everything else belongs to passing illusions. ENQ. What do you really understand by illusion in this case? THEO. It is very well described in the just-mentioned essay on “The Higher Self.” Says its author: