Invoking a Guru’s blessings on your own higher nature for the purpose of sustaining you in this trance state, is as blasphemous and reprehensible an act of assisting descent, and conversion of higher into lower energies, as to invoke your Guru to help you in excessive wine drinking; for the astral world is also material. To be able to solve the mysteries of any consciousness whatever, even of the lowest physical, while in trance, is as vain a boast of the hunters for such a state, as that of physiologists or mesmerists. While you are in trance state, if you are not ethical enough in your nature, you will be tempted and forced, by your powerful lower elements, to pry into the secrets of your neighbors, and then, on returning to your normal state, to slander them. The surest way to draw down your higher nature into the miry abyss of your physical and astral world, and thus to animalize yourself, is to go into trance or to aspire for clairvoyance. “And thou, (Guru) left me looking upward through the veil, To gaze into thy goal and follow thee!” These lines are highly presumptuous. It is impossible, even for a very high Hierophant, in _any of his states whatever_, to gaze into his Guru’s goal;[14] his subjective consciousness can but _barely_ come up to the level of the normal or objective consciousness of his Guru. It is only during the initiation that the initiated sees not only his own immediate goal, but also Nirvana, which of course includes his Guru’s goal also; but after the ceremony is over he recollects only his own immediate goal for his next “class,” but nothing beyond that.[15] This is what is meant by the God Jehovah saying to Moses: “And I will take away mine hand and Thou shalt see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” And in the Rig Veda it is said:[16] “Dark is the path of Thee, who art bright; the light is before Thee.” Mr. Hellon opens his poem with a quotation from _Zanoni_: “Man’s first initiation is in trance; in dreams commence all human knowledge, in dreams he hovers over measureless space, the first faint bridge between spirit and spirit—this world and the world beyond.” As this is a passage often quoted approvingly, and recognized as containing no misconceptions, I may be permitted to pass a few remarks, first, upon its intrinsic merits, and secondly, on Lytton himself and his Zanoni. I shall not speak of the rage which prevails among mystical writers, for quoting without understanding what they quote.