V. The Dissociation of Human Personality During Initiation

The organs of thinking, feeling, and willing remain, then, quite free in themselves, and their connection is no longer maintained by a law innate in them, but must now be tended by the growing higher consciousness of the individual. This, then, is the change which the occult student observes coming over himself—that there is no longer a connection between a thought and a feeling, or a feeling and a volition, except when he creates the connection himself. No impulse drives him from thought to action if he does not voluntarily harbor it. He can now stand completely without feeling before an object which, before his training, would have filled him with glowing love or violent hatred; he can likewise remain actionless before a thought which heretofore would have spurred him an to action as if by itself. He can execute deeds by an effort of will where not the remotest cause would be visible to a person who had not been through the occult school. The greatest acquisition which the occult student inherits is the attainment of complete lordship over the connecting threads of the three powers of the soul; yet simultaneously these connections are placed entirely at his own responsibility.