When desire, thought and work are changed into will, reason and sacrifice, then the man is turning homewards, then he lives by renunciation.

When a man has really renounced, a strange change takes place.  On the Path of Forthgoing, you must fight for everything you want to get; on the Path of Return, nature pours her treasures at your feet.  When a man has ceased to desire them, then all treasures pour down upon him, for he has become a channel through which all good gifts flow to those around him.  Seek the good, give up grasping, and then everything will be yours.  Cease to ask that your own little water tank may be filled, and you will become a pipe, joined to the living source of all waters, the source which never runs dry, the waters which spring up unfailingly.  Renunciation means the power of unceasing work for the good of all, work which cannot fail, because wrought by the Supreme Worker through His servant.

If you are engaged in any true work of charity, and your means are limited and the wealth does not flow into your hands, what does it mean?  It means that you have not yet learnt the true renunciation.  You are clinging to the visible, to the fruit of action, and so the wealth does not pour through your hands.

Purification of Bodies

The unfolding of powers belongs to the side of consciousness; purification of bodies belongs to the side of matter.  You must purify each of your three working bodies—­mental, astral and physical.  Without that purification you had better leave yoga alone.  First of all, how shall you purify the thought body?  By right thinking.  Then you must use imagination, your great creative tool, once more.  Imagine things, and, imagining them, you will form your thought-body into the organisation that you desire.  Imagine something strongly, as the painter imagines when he is going to paint.  Visualise an object if you have the power of visualisation at all:  if you have not, try to make it.  It is an artistic faculty, of course, hut most people have it more or less.  See how far you can reproduce perfectly a face you see daily.  By such practice you will be strengthening your imagination, and by strengthening your imagination you will be making the great tool with which you have to practice in Yoga.

There is another use of the imagination which is very valuable.  If you will imagine in your thought-body the presence of the qualities that you desire to have, and the absence of those which you desire not to have, you are half-way to having and not having them.  Also, many of the troubles of your life might be weakened if you would imagine them on right lines before you have to go through them.  Why do you wait helplessly until you meet them in the physical world.  If you thought of your coming trouble in the morning, and thought of yourself as acting perfectly in the midst of it (you should never scruple to imagine yourself