o my initiation into Buddhist mysteries, and before
I left England, I had developed, under the spiritual craze which was then
prevalent in society, a remarkable faculty of clairvoyance. This gave me
the power not merely of diagnosing the physical and moral conditions of
my friends and acquaintances, and of prescribing for them when necessary,
but of seeing what was happening in other parts of the world; hence my
organism was peculiarly favourable for initiation into occult mysteries,
and naturally--or rather spiritually--prepared for that method in the
regular course of occult training by which adepts impart instruction to
their pupils.

"They awaken," as we are most accurately informed by Mr Sinnett, "the
dormant sense in the pupil, and through this they imbue his mind with
a knowledge that such and such a doctrine is the real truth. The
whole scheme of evolution infiltrates into the regular _chela's_ mind,
by reason of the fact that he is made to see the process taking place
by clairvoyant vision. There are no words used in his instruction at
all. And adepts themselves, to whom the facts and processes of nature
are as familiar as our five fingers to us, find it difficult to
explain in a treatise which they cannot illustrate for us, by
producing mental pictures in our dormant sixth sense, the complex
anatomy of the planetary system."

I have always felt--and my conviction on the subject has led to some
painful discussions between myself and some of my _mahatma_ brothers--that
the extreme facility with which I was enabled to perceive at a glance
"the complex anatomy of the planetary system," and the rapid development
of my "dormant sixth sense," was due mainly to the fact that I was
nothing more nor less than what spiritualists call a highly sensitive
medium. Meantime this premature development of my sixth sense forced me
right up through the obstacles which usually impede such an operation in
the case of a fourth-round man, into that stage of evolution which awaits
the rest of humanity--or rather, so much of humanity as may reach it in
the ordinary course of nature--in the latter part of the fifth round. I
merely mention this to give confidence to my readers, as I am about to
describe a moral cataclysm which subsequently took place in my sixth
sense, which would be of no importance in the case of an ordinary
_chela_, but which was attended with the highest significance as
occurri