132 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
have the choice whether we gain it by the hard path of
personal experience or by observation of other people's acts,
reasoning and reflecting thereon, guided by the light of
whatever experience we have alr eady had.
This is the method by which the occult student should
learn, instead of requiring the lash of adversity and pain. The
more willing we are to learn in that way, the less we shall
feel the stinging thorns of “the path of pain” and the more
quickly shall we gain “the path of peace.”
The choice is ours, but so long as we have not learned
all there is to learn in this world, we must come back to it.
We cannot stay in the higher worlds and learn ther e unt il we
have mastered the lessons of earth life. That would be as
sensible as to send a child to kindergarten one day and to
college the next. The child must return to the kindergarten
day after day and sp end years in the gra mmar school and the
high school before its study has developed its capacity
sufficiently to enable it to understand the lessons taught in
college.
Man is also in school—the school of experience. He
must return many times befor e he can hope to master all the
knowledge in the world of sense. No one earth life, however
rich in experience, could furnish the knowledge, so nature
decrees t hat he must return to Earth, after int ervals of r est, to
take up his work where he dropped it, exactly as a child
takes up its work in school each day, after the intervening
sleep of night. It is no argument against this theory to say
that man does not remember his former lives. We cannot
recall all the events of our present lives. We do not recollect
our labors in learning to write, yet we have acquired a
knowledge of the art of writing, which proves that we did
learn. All the faculties we possess are a proof that we