In other words, it must have become so ingrained in his character as to govern absolutely all his acts and impulses to action, i.e., automatic, habitual, and natural.
In the School of Natural Science this comprises and constitutes the “Ethical Section of the General Formulary.”
In the School of Pythagoras we are informed that students sometimes remained for years in the “outer court,” and sometimes they failed entirely and hopelessly, and went back to the outer world. Whereupon a white stone was erected to their memory as though they were dead. They were indeed, for the time being, dead to the School.
This fully answers the ethical question as to the effect of this real knowledge on the individual and on mankind.
The real Master sees to it that all that precaution can provide, or human wisdom can suggest, is done to insure beneficent use of the knowledge gained.
It is here that “degrees” in initiation become a necessity. Every step, or passage of the candidate from a lower to a higher degree, is marked and determined finally and solely by his “proficiency in the preceding degree.”
The question of Morals, or the ethical effect, therefore, is pre-determined, and as far as possible, solved first.
But even with all this wise precaution, the unprepared and the unqualified have sometimes entered the outer courts; and when compelled at last to reveal their character, have turned to rend their teachers, and have done their utmost to destroy the School and demoralize mankind.
If these moral renegades could only realize the meaning to themselves of thus entering the “Left-hand Path” of devolution and of starting voluntarily “down the deep descent,” as portrayed in Dante’s “Inferno,” or in Ahrinzeman, they would, indeed, hesitate long before “turning to the left,” for inevitable destruction lies that way.
Here lies the scientific explanation of the “Fall of Lucifer,” portrayed in some form in the pantheons and mythologies of every philosophy and religion known to man.