Letter XI.

To ——.

There is a sentence in your letter not explained by J. Niemand, which, however, needs explaining, for it is the outgrowth of an erroneous idea in you. You say: "Can I help these ignorant elementals with mental instruction? I tried it, but not successfully."

In all those cases where it is caused by the elementals you cannot. Elementals are not ignorant. They know just as little and just as much as you do. Most generally more. Do you not know that they are reflectors? They merely mirror to you either your own mind, or that mental strata caused by the age, the race, and the nation you may be in. Their action is invariably automatic and unconscious. They care not for what is called by you "mental instruction." They hear you not.

Do you know how they hear, or what language they understand? Not human speech; nor ordinary human thought clothed in mental speech. That is a dead letter to them altogether.

They can only be communicated with through correlations of colours and sounds. But while you address yourself to them, those thoughts assume life from elementals rushing in and attaching themselves to those thoughts.

Do not, then, try to speak to them too much, because did you make them know they might demand of you some boon or privilege, or become attached to you, since in order to make them understand they must know you, and a photographic plate forgets not.

Fear them not, nor recoil in horror nor repulsion. The time of trial must be fulfilled. Job had to wait his period until all his troubles and diseases passed away. Before that time he could do naught.

But we are not to idly sit and repine; we are to bear these trials, meanwhile drawing new and good elementals42 so as to have—in western phrase—a capital on which to draw when the time of trial has fully passed away.

On all other points Niemand has well explained. Read both together.

Lastly; know this law, written on the walls of the temple of learning.

"Having received, freely give; having once devoted your life in thought, to the great stream of energy in which elementals and souls alike are carried—and which causes the pulse beat of our hearts—you can never claim it back again. Seek, then, that mental devotion which strains to give. For in the law it is written that we must give away all or we lose it: as you need mental help, so do others who are wandering in darkness seeking for light."