those who have the power to recognise; the
power given by the conquering of self. Otherwise
how could they exist, even for an hour,
in 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