In connection with the work of the healer with patients at the gate of death, he may experience a sense of futility. Is it possible to know just what he can do? Should he continue his effort to help the newly freed soul to go forward into the light? In the face of all his knowledge (and he may have much), and in spite of his yearning desire to aid the departing one, there seems naught to do but to step aside, with a sense of utter futility, whilst the loved one passes through the gate which leads to what, my brother? We can go up to the gates, but it seems as yet that we can go no further. Even the deep seated belief in the persistence of the immortal soul proves inadequate, and only serves to comfort the serving healer personally, but suffices not to reveal to him what help he can give.

Aid at the time of the "passing into the light" depends largely upon two things:

• First, the amount of close contact between the dying person and the one who watches, and the level upon which that contact is strongest.
• Secondly, upon the capacity of the watcher to detach and dissociate himself from his own feelings and to identify himself, through an act of pure unselfish will, with the dying person.

None of this is really possible when the bond between the two is purely emotional or based upon a physical plane relation. The contact must be deeper and stronger than that. It must be a personal contact upon all planes. Where there is true soul and personality contact, there is then little problem. But this is rare to find. Nevertheless I have here given you a hint.

As regards those who have passed into the light, whom you want to help, follow them with your love, remembering that they are still the same people, minus the outer limiting shroud of body. Serve them, but seek not that they should serve your need of them. Go to them, but seek not to bring them back to you.

It is physical plane life that is the purgatory, and life experience that is the school of drastic discipline. Let us not fear death, or that which lies beyond it. The wise disciple labors in the field of service but looks forward steadily to the dawn of the "clear cold light" into which he will some day enter, and so close the chapter for a while upon the fever and the friction and the pain of earth existence. But there are other phases of life experience wherein the sense of futility and frustration meets the server in the world today.

From the angle of vision of a disciple, we might divide intelligent human beings into three groups, at the same time eliminating in our thought the dead weight of the unthinking masses who register desire but who as yet experience no sense of futility or frustration. They desire and are satisfied; or they desire and are thwarted or jealous or angry at those who appear to have that which they want and demand, and which appeals to the life of the senses. The three groups are:

1. Those personalities, integrated and intelligent, who are ambitious and pushing consciously forward, yet who meet with frustration. This frustration is due either to world conditions which are too strong for them, or to the imposition upon them of their own watchful souls [366] which throw obstructions in their way in order to lead them into the light.
2. Those mystically inclined people and those rightly oriented visionaries who have not yet built in that mental scaffolding which will enable them properly to materialize their vision, through right thought processes. They are many in number today, and their case is not an easy one.
3. Those disciples and aspirants who are attempting to work in the field of the world, yet who through karmic limitation, misapplication of the law, or some basic personality weakness, never achieve in this life their goal, and so are swept by an overwhelming sense of futility.

Beyond these three classes, acting as the opposite pole to the struggling masses, are the integrated functioning disciples of the world, who are achieving, and who are too occupied and too one-pointed to waste much time over feeling inferior or over mistakes and failures.

Therefore, by wisely placing the people who come to you for help in one or other of these three categories (allowing in your mind for the possibility of their passing into another and higher one) you will be able to help them more intelligently.

But exhibitionism and neurasthenic hallucinations have to be cured primarily through individual self-effort, through decentralization, transference of interest, and unselfishness. Neurasthenic tendencies are likely to increase instead of decrease for some time yet, such is the strain under which man labors today. The present world condition forces him to find avenues of escape, and to revert to the curative power of his own creative imagination. Release comes through acceptance of the drama of the whole and not of the part, and through steady occupation in creative work on the physical plane.