[From WIND OF THE SPIRIT, pages 165-67]

The holy mysteries are never publicized — never, never, never!
You have to earn them and fit yourselves for them. It is obvious
that if you are not fit to receive them, they never come to you.
It would be a crime to attempt to do otherwise. It is the
easiest thing in the world for a man or a woman to incur loss of
the soul by following any other method of occult training than
that of the Masters, taught as they themselves in their turn are
by the Dhyani-Chohans, the bright and blessed gods. I mean it.

If you want truth, you must come to the Temple for it. You must
come in the proper spirit. You must work upon yourself so that
you will train yourself to be fit to learn, to be receptive.
Otherwise, you just cannot receive it. You will not take it in.
You cannot take it in until you make an opening in which to put
it — to use very plain, simple language. If your mind is set
against it, like a closed door, it does not open to receive. You
must train yourselves first. If you do train yourselves and live
the life, absolutely no barrier can prevent your going
indefinitely forwards.

It is exactly like a growing child. He cannot take in the
world’s wisdom even, even the wisdom of this world, until his
mind has developed to the point where it can receive it and
retain it until it is trained to do it. Simple! It is exactly
the same thing with occultism, with esotericism, with the
mysteries. They are indeed in the Theosophical Movement, both
the Greater and the Less. They can be had by anyone, but such a
one must prepare himself, train himself, must be in deadly
earnest. Then he can receive them.

The chief or fundamental rule of this training or discipline is
the becoming receptive to the inner and higher part of one’s own
constitution, whose whisperings of truth and intimations of
cosmic verities find no lodgment in minds willfully or ignorantly
closed against their entrance. There is the whole, or at least
the fundamental, rule of occult teaching and learning concisely,
and the reason for all the safeguards thrown around it.

I have myself known hapless students of Theosophy who have
literally gone crazy, temporarily at least. They have gone crazy
from an unwise and unguided study of some of the more recondite
teachings. It is pathetic. The pathos lies in their yearning to
learn and to become greater than their lower selves are. The
pathos likewise lies in the fact that they tried to scale the
peaks before they had disciplined themselves to traverse the
foothills of morals, of learning and self-control. The Masters,
HPB, and the Theosophical Leaders have had to watch out for and
contend with this peril. It is a very difficult situation.

I have known men and women barely escaping the loss of health in
excessive brain-mind study without the healing, saving power of
selfless devotion: a most beautiful thing in a way; one’s heart
warms to them in admiration for their courage, for their
insistence on getting truth; but it has been unwisely done. That
is why we insist upon the all-round, balanced growth, a wise,
shapely growing into knowledge and wisdom, instead of the
distortions and ungainly malformations, mentally and even
psychically, that come from unwise study of occult things.

It is for this reason that in our own Theosophical Society the
inner, the secret, the occult, and the esoteric are so very
carefully guarded and watched over and NEVER publicized. Our
Masters have no desire to have their students incur risks of
soul-loss, or mind-loss, or even of physical deterioration, or
any other human tragedy. Otherwise, having stated these things,
just remember how beautiful and simple the rules of occultism
are.

Nothing in our deeper and more occult studies will ever interfere
with your family duties, never; for those duties are duties; and
it is one of the first obligations of a Theosophist to fulfill
every duty. He is no occultist if he neglects one, no matter
what his temptations are. No matter if he tries to grasp the
sun, if he neglects a duty he is a coward by that much. Being a
coward and a weakling, he is no occultist.

One should never injure another. If you do it you are beginning
to descend, and you may walk into black magic. There is a way
and a chance to rescue yourself and to return to the strait and
beautiful path. For it is a truly glorious path, and it brings a
sense of the realization that man is akin to the gods and that
the gods are present amongst us. Yes, I mean it. The gods even
now walk the earth. Few are the sons of men who have trained
themselves to realize it.

Now, the gods will associate with us, self-consciously to us,
when we shall have learned first to know that they are there;
then to make their approach to us mutually desirable. Let it
suffice, however, for the main thought to carry home that the
gods walk amongst us even now, as they did in far past ages, in
the childhood of man, when he was still innocent and not so
sophisticated that he thought he contained all the knowledge of
the universe in his puny, little brain.

Let us then, make ourselves presentable, and let us make our
lives so attractive and interesting to the divinities, that they
in their turn may be glad and happy to associate with us,
self-consciously. I will go this far and then stop. There is a
place, a geographical place on this earth, where not only is it
common for the highest men that the race has produced to
associate with the gods companionably, freely, friendly; but
where the same relations of teachers and taught exist between
gods and men, that exist today in our schools of learning. I
wonder if you grasp what that means.

At the heart — like this omphalos, or navel, or center, in the
Temple, this little pillar in the center of this auditorium — in
the holiest place there, what we call the sanctum sanctorum,
there is an invisible presence, the highest spiritual presence of
this earth. Make of it what you can.