We have learnt to become indifferent to the pairs of opposites; we have gained love, harmony and patience, and now stand at the middle point of the Paramita Path. We have worked so far with the instruments of action, and emotion, and life, but just as the guiding force has been love immortal, so the agent used throughout has been the mind. It is the mind that has been taught to express love in charity, to speak and act in harmony, to get rid of the impatience of our desires and to learn to wait, patiently, actively.

Now we take a further step: mind has now to come into its own and has to learn how to use, instead of being used by, the lower instruments. Freed from these instruments and their pull, the mind can use them for its own purpose. It is free from the senses and sense-organs, the turbulent emotions and uncontrolled speech and instinctive actions; but it is still full of illusions, and at this stage the truth behind all things thought of by the mind has to be sought. What lies beyond the Gate just passed? Before we can see clearly we need a mind wiped clean of preconceived ideas and prejudices as well as of memories. These have been created by ourselves. Recognizing this, we can begin to create new mental pictures.

These new pictures must be "harmless," based on Dana and Shila. But do we really know what is harmless? Hence we are told that the way to create harmless thoughts is to study "the voidness of the seeming full, the fulness of the seeming void." The voidness of all that we see and know of, we have already experienced, in part; but we have not yet seen the fulness of that which seems so empty when we have freed ourselves from the life that we had lived before. To reach this stage, we have to search for the Self, the Reality behind the shadows that we look upon as real.

We are approaching in mind that higher state when we begin to sense the "steady light" shining "upon the pure white walls of Soul." That is our immediate goal. Towards that light we struggle on, realizing that "the lightest breeze of passion or desire" disturbs that light. The great pull of the army of the thought sensations that we have subdued, or remembrances of lower pleasures, or the slightest regret for what has been left behind, even though we know it is of the nature of illusion, will disturb that steady light.

Can a fleeting memory stop our progress? It can. Why is this so? If we do not here and now seek the cause of this, and struggle only with the effects, we shall fail, because effects keep changing. "Change is thy great foe," the struggling neophyte is warned. He has to learn that "the ETERNAL knows no change."

Once again we are back to fundamentals. Love immortal must have become a part of ourselves, and now we have to saturate ourselves with "pure Alaya." As for the mind, it must become "as one with Nature's Soul-Thought." If we have truly learnt how to "live and breathe in all" as all that we perceive breathes in IT, then we have become, to some extent at least, one with ALL, and as such invincible. The Warrior cannot fail. Such an inspiring thought alone can help us in times of trial. Whatever can be destroyed is not real and immortal. All forms, whether of thought, of feelings or of actions, must die; their ensouling essence alone is immortal.

Our mind, or thought creations, must, therefore, be centred on "the pure bright essence of Alaya." Each one of us is its "crystal ray." The bright essence is not without us, not something afar off, towards which we struggle. It is within this form of clay material that we call man. It is there, and must become our life-guide, and if we pay attention to its behests it becomes for us our own true Self, the Watcher within. When we behave and think in terms of our body of illusion, this true Self becomes the victim of the lower self. To prevent this from happening we must realize that it is the body that errs and has to be controlled and mastered. On the One Pure Light we have to fix our Soul-gaze. Our mind and Soul have to be mastered if this pure Light, free from affection, is to aid us in crossing the middle portal.

We are told that we have now "crossed the moat that circles round the gate of human passions"; we have conquered illusion—"Mara and his furious host." We have cleaned our heart of impure desires, but our task is still not over.