1The arcana of the human soul cannot be unveiled by any psychology.
2Be it C. P. or T. P., both — on the ground they tread, and having regard to the end they pursue — are mere waymarks set along the route of understanding: able to orient our incessant search, but powerless to define, connote and demonstrate the inner essence of the I.
3Absurd as it may appear at first sight, knowledge of the I is obtained not by the function of thinking (the characteristic modality of the psychological method) but in the function of not thinking.
4Said otherwise: the I is knowable not by intellectual discernment but by meditation, which escapes the psychological teachings.
5In meditation, the images contained in the astral light of the Martinists are, so to speak, captured by the subconscious mind and filed — metaphorically speaking — in a very special pigeon-hole of what we call memory.
6Now, the combination of these images — each of which represents a fact lived by the soul across its different incarnations — produces, or better, excites a chain of associations in which consciousness goes little by little recognising itself in the past, understanding itself in the present, and presaging itself in the future.
7A great master of occultism has said that in man everything is mortal — but adds that it lies in man''s power to attain immortality.
8Meditation presupposes this possibility and seeks to attain it by a special technique whose supreme consequence is ecstasy.
9The division between the higher manas and the lower manas — in other words, the abstract mind and the concrete mind — represents the axis around which the mortal and the immortal turn.
10In the normal or waking state, the mortal maintains a velocity directly proportional and opposed to the immortal.
11Meditation can conjugate these velocities, fusing the one with the other.
12Mental alchemy — the Azoth of the hermetists, the potable and perfect gold — is attained by this transmutation of the conscious into the superconscious (the unconscious of C. P.), that is, of the mortal into the immortal.
13The common agent of this transformation is once more that vital or astral light, upon which the conscious and the unconscious act — to project and dynamise the mental contents, and to receive and coagulate the mnemonic effects.
14Light conserves and produces forms, maintains the rhythm of the universe, magnetises beings, serves as nexus between worlds and beings — and is therefore the bond of union between minds.
15Our limited horizons stop here.
16The reader who aspires to greater knowledge will find it in the works of Ramacharaka, Besant, Osly, Mulford, Fortuni, Richet — and, reading with attention, also in those of Eliphas Levi, Papus, Sédir, Barlet, Castellot, Agrippa, etc., etc. · 19
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.