“When the present perfected European civilization was yet in an inchoate state, occult philosophy, already hoary with age, speculated upon the attributes of man by analogy with those of his Creator. Individuals later, whose names will remain forever immortal, inscribed on the portal of the spiritual history of man, have afforded in their persons examples of how far could be developed the god-like powers of the microcosmos.
Describing the Doctrines and Principle Teachers of the Alexandrian School, Professor A. Wilder says:
“Plotinus taught that there was in the soul a returning impulse, love, which attracted it inward toward its origin and centre, the eternal good.
While the person who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful within itself will seek by laborious effort to realize beauty without, the wise man recognizes it within himself, develops the idea by withdrawal into himself, concentrating his attention, and so floating upward toward the divine fountain, the stream of which flows within him.
The infinite is not known through the reason…but by a faculty superior to reason, by entering upon a state in which the individual, so to speak, ceases to be his finite self, in which state divine essence is communicated to him. This is ECSTASY.”
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see “the present and the future in a clear mirror”, on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: “This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 