n such a mental and psychic atmosphere as is
created by the confusion and disorder of a city?
Unless protected and made safe their own
growth would be interfered with, their work
injured. And the neophyte may meet an adept
in the flesh, may live in the same house with
him, and yet be unable to recognise him, and
unable to make his own voice heard by him. For
no nearness in space, no closeness of relations,
no daily intimacy, can do away with the inexorable
laws which give the adept his seclusion.
No voice penetrates to his inner hearing till it
has become a divine voice, a voice which gives
no utterance to the cries of self. Any lesser
appeal would be as useless, as much a waste of
energy and power, as for mere children who
are learning their alphabet to be taught it by
a professor of philology. Until a man has
become, in heart and spirit, a disciple, he has no
existence for those who are teachers of disciples.
And he becomes this by one method only--the
surrender of his personal humanity.

For the voice to have lost the power to
wound, a man must have reached that point
where he sees himself only as one of the vast
multitudes that live; one of the sands washed
hither and thither by the sea of vibratory existence.
It is said that every grain of sand in the
ocean bed does, in its turn, get washed up on to
the shore and lie for a moment in the sunshine.
So with human beings, they are driven hither
and thither by a great force, and each, in his
turn, finds the sunrays on him. When a man
is able to regard his own life as part of a whole
like this he will no longer struggle in order
to obtain anything for himself. This is the surrender
of personal rights. The ordinary man
expects, not to take equal fortunes with the
rest of the world, but in some points, about
which he cares, to fare better than the others.
The disciple does not expect this. Therefore,
though he be, like Epictetus, a chained slave,
he has no word to say about it. He knows that
the wheel of life turns ceaselessly. Burne Jones
has shown it in his marvellous picture--the
wheel turns, and on it are bound the rich and
the poor, the great and the small--each has
his moment of good fortune when the wheel
brings him uppermost--the King rises and
falls, the poet is _feted_ and forgotten, the slave
is happy and afterwards discarded. Each in his
turn is crushed as the wheel turns on. The disciple
knows that this is so, and though it is his
duty to make