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the external world, must also be worked on by the soul. By study of these, by meditation upon them, the soul learns to see their interrelations, their value as translations to it of the workings of the Universal Mind in manifested Nature; in a sentence, it extracts from them by patient thought upon them all the lessons they have to teach-lessons of pleasure and pain, of pleasure breeding pain and pain breeding pleasure, teaching the presence of inviolable laws to which it must learn to conform itself. Lessons of success and failure, of achievement and disappointment, of fears proving groundless, of hopes failing realization, of strength collapsing under trial, of fancied knowledge betraying itself as ignorance, of patient endurance wresting victory from apparent defeat, of recklessness changing into defeat apparent victory. Over all these things the soul ponders, and by its own alchemy it changes all this mixture of experiences into the gold of wisdom, so that it may return to earth as a wiser soul, bringing to bear on the events which meet it in the new life this result of the experiences of the old. Here again the mental images have been transmuted, and no longer exist as mental images. They can only be recovered in their old form from the karmic records.
