strained to accomplish; and withal it is a process involving a double
risk to the continued earthly life of the person who undertakes it.
One of these risks is the doubt whether, when once _nirvana_ is
attained, the ego will be willing to return. That the return will be
a terrible effort and sacrifice is certain, and will only be prompted
by the most devoted attachment, on the part of the spiritual
traveller, to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction. The second
great risk is that of allowing the sense of duty to predominate over
the temptation to stay--a temptation, be it remembered, that is not
weakened by the motive that any conceivable penalty can attach to it.
Even then it is always doubtful whether the traveller will be able to
return."

All this is exactly as Mr Sinnett has described it. I shall never forget
the struggle that I had with my ego when, ignoring "the idea of duty in
its purest abstraction," it refused to abandon the bliss of _nirvana_ for
the troubles of this mundane life; or the anxiety both of my _manas_, or
human soul, and my _buddhi_, or spiritual soul, lest, after by our
combined efforts we had overcome our ego, we should not be able to do our
duty by our _rupa_, or natural body, and get back into it.

Of course, my migrations to the _mahatma_ region of Thibet were
accompanied by no such difficulty as this--as, to go with your _linga
sharira_, or astral body, to another country, is a very different and
much more simple process than it is to go with your _manas_, or human
soul, into _nirvana_. Still it was a decided relief to find myself
comfortably installed with my material body, or _rupa_, in the house of a
Thibetan brother on that sacred soil which has for so many centuries
remained unpolluted by a profane foot.

Here I passed a tranquil and contemplative existence for some years,
broken only by such incidents as my passage into _nirvana_, and disturbed
only by a certain subjective sensation of aching or void, by which I was
occasionally attacked, and which I was finally compelled to attribute,
much to my mortification, to the absence of women. In the whole of this
sacred region, the name of which I am compelled to withhold, there was
not a single female. Everybody in it was given up to contemplation and
ascetic absorption; and it is well known that profound contemplation, for
any length of time, and the presence of the fair sex, are incompatib