While the aspirant is thus working to improve the three essential qualifications of desire, will and intelligence—­to intensify his desire to possess powers for the helping of others, to strengthen the will to get such powers, and to steadily improve the intellect—­he should also be giving most earnest attention to meditation, for it is through this practice that the most remarkable results may be produced in the transformation of his bodies, visible and invisible, through which the ego manifests itself in the physical world.  In the degree that these are organized and made sensitive and responsive they cease to be limitations of consciousness.  Such sensitiveness and responsiveness may be brought about by meditation, together with proper attention to the purification of the physical and astral bodies; for purity and sensitiveness go together.

Meditation is a subject so very important to the aspirant that specific instructions should guide him.  The average person, used to the turbulent life of occidental civilization, will find it a sufficiently difficult matter to control the mind, and to finally acquire the power to direct it as he desires, even with all the conditions in his favor.  The serene hours of morning are the most favorable of the twenty-four for meditation.  Regularity has a magic of its own and the hour should be the same each morning.  To be alone in surroundings as quiet as possible is another essential.  The most desirable time for meditation is soon after awakening in the morning.  Before turning the mind to any of the business affairs of the day let the aspirant sit calmly down and mediate upon any wholesome thought, like patience, courage or compassion, keeping the mind steadily upon the subject for five minutes.

Two very important things are being accomplished by such meditation.  First, we are getting control of the mind and learning to direct it where and how we choose; and, second, we are attracting and building into the bodies we possess certain grades of imponderable matter that will make thinking and acting along these lines easier and easier for us until they are established habits and we actually become in daily life patient, courageous and compassionate.  Whatever qualities or virtues we desire to possess may be gained through the art of meditation and the effort to live up to the ideal dwelt upon daily by the mind.

While it is absolutely true that any human being can make of himself that which he desires to be—­can literally raise himself to any ideal he is capable of conceiving—­it must not be supposed that it can be done in a short time and by intermittent effort.  We sometimes hear it said that all we need do is to realize that all power is within us, when, presto! we are the thing we would be!  It is quite true that we must realize their existence before we can call the latent powers into expression; but the work of arousing the latent into the active is a process of growth, of actual evolutionary change.