ationist argument regarding this point. The
writer says: "Desire for other forms of earthly experience can only be
extinguished by undergoing them. It is obvious that any one of us, if
now translated to the unseen world, would feel regret that he had not
tasted existence in some other situation or surroundings. He would wish
to have known what it was to possess wealth and rank, or beauty, or to
live in a different race or climate, or to see more of the world and
society. No spiritual ascent could progress while earthly longings were
dragging back the soul, and so it frees itself from them by successively
securing them and dropping them. When the round of such knowledge has
been traversed, regret for ignorance has died out." This idea of
"Living-Out and Out-Living" is urged by a number of writers and thinkers
on the subject. J. Wm. Lloyd says, in his "Dawn Thought," on this
subject: "You rise and overcome simply by the natural process of living
fully and thus outliving, as a child its milk-teeth, a serpent his
slough. Living and Outliving, that expresses it. Until you have learned
the one lesson fully you are never ready for a new one." The same
writer, in the same book, also says: "By sin, shame, joy, virtue and
sorrow, action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, the soul, like a
barbed arrow, ever goes on. It cannot go back, or return through the
valves of its coming. But this must not be understood to be fulfilled in
one and every earth-visit. It is true only of the whole circle-voyage
of the soul. In one earth-trip, one 'life,' as we say, it may be that
there would nothing be but a standing still or a turning back, nothing
but sin. But the whole course of all is on." But there is the danger of
a misunderstanding of this doctrine, and some have misinterpreted it,
and read it to advise a plunging into all kinds of sinful experience in
order to "live-out and out-live," which idea is wrong, and cannot be
entertained by any true student of the subjects, however much it may be
used by those who wish to avail themselves of an excuse for material
dissipation. Mabel Collins, in her notes to "Light on the Path," says on
this subject: "Seek it by testing all experience, and remember that,
when I say this, I do not say, 'Yield to the seduction of sense, in
order to know it.' Before you have become an occultist, you may do this,
but not afterwards. When you have chosen and entered the path, you
cannot yield to these seductions w