There Is No [...] Higher Than The

Public Opinion, This Invisible, Intangible, Omnipresent, Despotic Tyrant; This Thousand-headed Hydra - The More Dangerous For Being Composed Of Individual Mediocrities...

Reflect Upon The Defects Of Your Character: Thoroughly Realize Their Evils And The Transient Pleasures They Give You, And Firmly Will That You Shall Try Your Best Not To Yield To Them The Next Time.

That Cruelest Of Tyrants - Public Opinion.

Whatever Plane Our Consciousness May Be Acting In, Both We And The Things Belonging To That Plane Are, For The Time Being, Our Only Realities. As We Rise In The Scale Of Development We Perceive That During The Stages Through Which We Have Passed We Mistook Shadows For Realities, And The Upward Progress Of The Ego Is A Series Of Progressive Awakenings, Each Advance Bringing With It The Idea That Now, At Last, We Have Reached "reality"; But Only When We Shall Have Reached The Absolute Consciousness, And Blended Our Own With It, Shall We Be Free From The Delusions Produced By Maya [illusion].

Science Regards Man As An Aggregation Of Atoms Temporarily United By A Mysterious Force Called The Life-principle. To The Materialist The Only Difference Between A Living And A Dead Body Is, That In The One Case That Force Is Active, In The Other Latent. When It Is Extinct Or Entirely Latent, The Molecules Obey A Superior Attraction, Which Draws Them Asunder And Scatters Them Through Space. This Dispersion Must Be Death, If It Is Possible To Conceive Such A Thing As Death Where The Very Molecules Of The Dead Body Manifest An Intense Vital Energy.