Those rules may be summed up under two heads: clear and strenuous thinking, discipline for the bodies that you are trying to evolve; and also, I should add, for the body below them in evolution.

Those are the two great laws for the safe evolution of these so-called psychic powers, what I call the powers of the consciousness on the astral and mental planes.

There must be a discipline for the bodies, for you have to choose the material which will serve you best in the work you are doing out of the innumerable combinations of matter with which Nature presents you.

You must choose the combinations that will serve your purpose, which you can utilise in the building of the organs of sense on plane after plane.

Just as really as the man who is a drunkard will injure his nervous system by his excesses, and by supplying coarse and over-active compounds will injure the physical body, so making it a less useful instrument for the man--as any excess, not only drunkenness, but gluttony, profligacy, and so on--as these injure the physical body as an instrument of consciousness, and to have full and perfect consciousness here we must train, discipline, build up our body with knowledge and with self-control, so also is that true on the higher planes.