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Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism276
This awareness of the “I Am” has come to many more people than is
generally imagined, but those who have this consciousness, as a rule, say
nothing about it, for fear that their friends, relatives and neighbors would
consider them abnormal and mentally unsound. And, indeed, it is not always
wise to relate these experiences to others, for those who have not reached
the same plane cannot understand, and seeing in another a thing of which
they can have no comprehension, are apt to consider him irrational. It is a
strange thing—an amusing thing—that in a world made up of people who
claim to believe that each man is (or “has” as the term goes) an immortal soul,
one who claims to really know this to be a fact is regarded as abnormal. The
belief of the race is only skin-deep—the people are as much afraid of death,
or more so, than the man who believes that death ends all. They reject all
evidences of other planes of existence, considering those who teach of and
believe in them as being either imposters or lunatics. They live and act as if
this earth-life were all, in spite of all their claims and expressed beliefs. They
half-believe certain teachings, but have no real knowledge, and deny that
anyone else may possess that which they themselves lack.
But to the one into whose field of consciousness have come some rays of
the truth from the Spiritual Mind, these things are no longer mere beliefs—
they are realities, and although such a one may apparently conform to the
beliefs of the world around him, he becomes a different being. Others
notice a something different about him, keep he ever so quiet. They cannot
explain just what it is, but they feel something.
It must not be imagined that this budding consciousness springs fullgrown
into a man’s mind at once. It has done so in some cases, it is true, but in the
majority of instances, it is a matter of slow growth, but the man is never
just the same after the growth commences. He apparently may lose his full
consciousness of the truth, but it will come back to him again and again, and
all the time it is working gradually to make over that man’s nature, and his
changed mental attitude manifests itself in his actions. He becomes more
cheerful and happy. Things that worry his neighbors seem to have but little