The article below is a compilation of the writings of C.W. Leadbeater, one of our founding bishops from his book Talks on At the Feet of the Master.

Have no desire for psychic powers. They will come when the Master knows that it is best for you to have them. To force them too soon often brings in its train much trouble; often their possessor is misled by deceitful nature-spirits, or becomes conceited and thinks he cannot make a mistake. They will come in the course of development – they must come; and if the Master sees that it would be useful for you to have them sooner, He will tell you how to unfold them safely. Until then, you are better without them.

They say, and remember that is quite true, that the astral senses very often deceive people. In the beginning, those who are unused to them are often misled, but they forget that exactly the same thing is true on the physical plane. That is what they do not seem to realise. They say: "Anything that you get by your astral senses may be all wrong. Anything that you get by your physical senses must be quite accurate". In a whole host of ways your reason is all the time helping to correct the impressions of your senses. Why, every morning, if you are up in time, you see the sun rise. You know perfectly well it does not really rise, and yet you see it doing it. It is not rising; you know that it is resting, or moving, in space; but anyhow it is not rising. You as a parasite on the surface of the earth are being moved round in the opposite direction. Your senses are by no means to be relied on. You must check them by reason.

You can try for yourself a simple experiment that will show you the truth of this in a moment. People say, "Seeing is believing," some go further and say, " If I can touch the thing". Take three bowls of water, and put in them water of different temperatures, one so hot that you can only just bear your hand in it; make the other icy cold, and in the middle one put water of temperate degree. Put your two hands, one into the hot, and the other into the very cold. Let them remain there for a few minutes, then move them both into the central bowl. The hand that has been in the hot water will tell you that this central bowl of water is very cold: the other hand will tell you that it is very hot. That shows you that your senses are not always to be implicitly relied on. You have to check the use of your senses by your reason and you have to do that just as much with your astral or mental senses as you have to do it with your physical senses.

But it is quite true that the beginner is liable to a great many deceptions: so is the baby who is beginning to use physical senses. You have, probably many of you, seen a baby reach out to take hold of some bright object, a candle at the other end of the room, or the moon in the sky. It knows nothing at all about distance: it sees a thing and it gropes towards it. The baby's delusion does not matter, because it is in the midst of its elders. They correct it. They carry it to the light and it learns the question of distance. So by slow degrees it gets out of its delusion. The delusion of the astral baby would not matter if he were always surrounded by his elders in that sort of knowledge and was as willing to be taught by them as the baby is by the grown-up people.

But the trouble is that one who is really an astral baby generally imagines that he is a very great person indeed, that he has been chosen from all the rest of the world to receive this mighty revelation. Therefore he does not want to learn anything. That is one of the difficulties with which we are constantly faced. Those who become pupils of our Masters are put through a long course of training with regard to this use of higher sight and higher impressions generally. I suppose that to most of you that training would be very wearisome. An elder pupil will take you and pass before you a number of different objects, and say "What do you see?" You describe what you think you see, but you are generally quite wrong at first, because you have got the thing out of focus. For example, you do not know the difference between the astral body of a dead man and of a living man. You do not know the difference between the man himself and the thought-form of him made by some friend. In hosts of ways you are liable to all kinds of deceptions. Patiently the teacher (some older pupil appointed to look after you) will show you these things again and again, and show you how to recognise them, point out the minute differences. You have to work at it, and it is often a matter of years before you will be perfectly certain in all cases.

You probably do not realise the extent of the area over which this clairvoyant vision extends. To take one example only - on the astral plane alone there are 2,401 different varieties of what is called "elemental essence" and if you wish to be reliable and to do your best, you must learn all of these. You must learn to distinguish one from the other, and how and when you are to use them, if you are to make thought-forms economically. You can do it without any of this knowledge, but if so, you do it very wastefully, on the principle of emptying a bucket of water over a man to wash his little finger - about that proportion of exertion to result.

If you want to know how to do the work of the higher planes you must go through an apprenticeship, and you must learn patiently bit by bit. If you merely plunge into the thing, you are throwing buckets of water most of the time. You are wasting a vast amount of energy. That is one of the things you must avoid. We ought always to avoid wasting energy. Your energy is your capital; you are bound to make the most of it. You are responsible for any waste of it, just as you would be responsible if you let it lie idle and did nothing with it. And to do this, you must learn. It would be of no use for a pupil of the Master to say, "I know already". That is not the spirit in which we approach these things. We who are pupils are always eager and anxious to acquire further information, but always that we may serve the better, in order that we may be more useful.

That is the idea, and most assuredly there is no knowledge that comes amiss in the work which we have to do. I have often been struck with that: scientific knowledge, technical knowledge, knowledge of chemistry, of engineering - every one of them is useful to the Occultist. It enables him to illustrate points and very often to understand points which otherwise might not be clear to him. We are told that, at the end of it all, we shall attain all knowledge: we shall get rid of ignorance. I can quite see that that is a goal which will be practically a necessity. I can see that all our work is tending in that direction: that we shall need to be most wonderfully well informed in that sort of way.

As regards the deceitful nature-spirits, these are a very real feature. There are very many different kinds of these. Mostly they are rather small creatures, and they think it is very amusing if they can make a great big man do what they say, and order him about. They can do that very often merely by pretending to be Julius Cesar, Napoleon, or anybody that happens to occur to them, and it is great fun to see big people, who belong to a higher stage of evolution than their own, doing what they suggest. It is perhaps a little hard on the poor people; the only thing is that they should have brought their reason and common sense to bear upon things. If you hear an astral voice sometimes, do not immediately jump to the conclusion that it is the voice of a Master. Do not think that it is necessarily a great Archangel - they are very few and their contact with humanity is not very frequent - whereas dead people are always speaking, always offering advice in one way or another, and nature-spirits play their little tricks frequently. The voice is more likely to be that of a dead man than that of any Great Teacher, Master or Archangel. So, as I say, if you happen to hear an astral voice, take it quite calmly. It is a very interesting phenomenon, not because of anything you might get out of it, but because anything a little out of the ordinary way is in itself interesting, and there is generally something to be learned from it. So note well everything that it says, but use your reason with regard to it. Do not, of course, take the opposite course and start by denying that there is a revelation.

That again is a dangerous thing to do; one should never hastily deny. I have had many years of this sort of work, and I have assuredly learnt that – not to be in haste to deny anything. One may think of a thing as very improbable; it is not safe to say that it is impossible. So much happens, and there are so many and such varied possibilities, that it is never safe to deny outright. Use always your reason and common sense; listen respectfully to the revelation whatever it may be, but do not let it affect your conduct in any way. Your conduct should be the result of your own decision - of your own reasoned thought, and not of something that somebody else, you do not know who, tells you. By all means receive the advice; it is most likely kindly meant, but do not follow it unless it seems reasonable; for reason and common sense are the highest things you have. They are given you to check all these other impressions. Do not forget to use them, merely because the impression comes to you from the astral plane instead of the physical plane. For that is all the more reason why you should use them.

To have no desire for psychic powers, in one sense might indeed be said to be the wisest of advice. Have no desire for them, but wait until the Master sees it fit that you should have them. "And in any case", the Master goes on to say, "the time and strength that it takes to gain them might be spent in work for others". There we have again emphasised what is so emphatically the keynote of this book, that everything should be subordinated to service, that every vestige of selfishness should be removed. Service and unselfishness - that is the point upon which so much insistence is placed in this book. Here He says that to try to develop psychic powers means spending time and strength on yourself, which you might be devoting to the service of others. That is quite true.

Yet many people would like to have them. Of course that is quite legitimate. I mean, no one can blame a person for saying: "I hear of these wonderful psychic powers which make their possessor so much more useful. I want to be useful, I would like to have them too". There is nothing wrong in that, only you had better follow the advice which is given here to wait until they come, or until the Master Himself tells you how to open them. "Is He likely to do that!" you will say; yes, my own experience tells me that He is. I had none of these powers. I was not thinking about them in any sort of way, not because I had all these exalted feelings especially, but because I had not thought about the matter, because we were then under a certain mistake with regard to them. We thought in those early days that they could not be developed unless one were born with the psychic vehicles, with a certain amount of psychic faculty to begin with. I had not that, but hoped that in the next life I might perhaps receive a body which would enable me to do these things too. But one day the Master Himself, gave me a hint in that direction. He said: "I should advise you to try a certain sort of meditation", which He recommended, "I think you will get good results from it". I tried it and got the results.

The same thing will be said to every one who works for the Master, when the right time comes. And remember that the reverse is also true, i.e., you will be told when the right time comes. If you have not been told, it is because the right time has not yet come. You may take that as quite certain. In what form He would signify His wish is another matter, but He would signify it in some way or another. What then is the best way to make oneself fit for such an effort! Why, unquestionably there is only one way - to use for service all the powers you have up to the fullest possible extent. Any person who is using all the powers he has for the service of others and without thought of self is very likely to receive new powers. It is the old parable of the talents over again. You may remember that those who made good use of their talents were able to go on and were given charge of far greater work. It was said to each of them: "Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord". So very few people seem to realise what that means - the joy of the Lord, the joy of the Masters, the joy of the Logos, what is it? It is not any vague pleasure or bliss. The joy of the Logos is in His work; He has thrown Himself absolutely into His work. He has chosen to throw Himself down into this mighty work of evolution - that is the joy of our Lord, the joy of carrying out this splendid plan of pouring out His love through the universe. So, if you are to enter into the joy of the Lord, then it means that you are to take part in that work and in the bliss which it brings. So if you want to enter into that joy, the way to do it is clearly indicated in that Christian parable, - namely, to use every talent you already have, and see that you are using it quite to the utmost. If you are not yet using all the powers you have, They will wait to give you others until They see you are making full use of what you already have.