valueless. So she conveyed herself secretly, by processes familiar to
her, away from her husband, and took refuge in this region of Thibet in
which we now dwell, and which, with all his knowledges, Sankaracharya was
never able to discover, for they were all subjective, and dealt not with
the material things of this world. And she associated herself here in
the pursuit of knowledge with a learned man called Svasar, 'he who is
friendly,' who considered secret knowledge merely the means to an end,
and even spiritual progress valuable only in so far as it could be used
to help others; and they studied deep mysteries as brother and sister
together--and he had been a _mahatma_ or _rishi_ of the highest
grade--and, owing to the aid he derived from his female associate, he
discovered that the subjective conditions of _nirvana_ and _devachan_
were the result of one-sided male imaginings which had their origin in
male selfishness; and this conviction grew in him in the degree in which
the Parthivi Mutar, or 'Earth Mother,' became incarnated in Nandana. Thus
was revealed to him the astounding fact that the whole system of the
occult adepts had originated in the natural brains of men who had given
themselves up to egotistical transcendental speculation--in fact, I
cannot better describe the process than in the words of Mr Sinnett
himself, where he alludes to 'the highly cultivated devotees to be met
with occasionally in India, who build up a conception of nature, the
universe and God, entirely on a metaphysical basis, and who have evolved
their systems by sheer force of transcendental thinking--who will take
some established system of philosophy as its groundwork, and amplify on
this to an extent which only an oriental metaphysician could dream of.'

"This, Mr Sinnett chooses to assume, was not the fact with the Thibet
Brothers; but, in reality, this was just what they did. The fact that
they have outstripped other similar transcendentalists is due to the
circumstance that the original founders of the system were men of more