The difference between the religious and the spiritual person is that the former believes that the inner-most shrine contains the God, and the latter knows that the God is within him. The former believes in revelation and the latter in realisation. The former believes in a special message to himself from his Master, a special mandate from Heaven; the latter knows that in God we live and move and have our being. The former believes in the astral plane as objective reality; the latter knows it to be objective imagination.
This does not mean, however, that the astral plane is non-existent, but it does mean that it is the mindfulness of the objective imagination which is the true study of the spiritual practitioner.
Reference:
- Fortune, Dione (1929): ‘Sane Occultism’. London: The Aquarian Press, p. 17-18.
