THIRD TALK 4J
darkness of ignorance lead me to the light of know-
ledge. This prayer is addressed to the Master..
You ask Him, by His teaching, to lead you from
ignorance to knowledge—to enlighten you by His
wisdom. There is also a secondary meaning at-
tached to that in India, for in these words you
are also supposed to be asking Him to lead you to
the knowledge of the higher planes, and there comes
in a rather beautiful thought which you will find
in some of those old books, that the light of the
lower plane is the darkness of the plane above»
That is a very beautiful thought, and it is wonderfully
true. What you think of here as light is dim and
murky compared even to the light of the astral
world, and that in turn is poor as compared to that
of the mental. It is very difficult to put these
distinctions into words, because, each time you rise
one plane in your consciousness, you get the impres-
sion of something quite incalculably greater than you
have ever known before ; greater light, greater power,
greater bliss ; so much so, that each time a man has
a definite advance in consciousness he thinks : " Now,
for the first time, I know what life really means,
what bliss is." But little as he can understand that
at the time, it is equally true that, when he pro-
grebes to the next plane, he will have precisely
the same feeling over again and realise that,
until now, he has never known how splendid life
could be.