[Page
1] In
the early days of the Theosophical Society there was an impression current
among us that psychic powers could not be developed except by one who from
birth had possessed a physical vehicle of suitable type — that some
people were psychic by nature, in consequence of efforts made in previous
lives, and that others, who were not so favored, had no resource but to
devote themselves earnestly to whatever physical plane work they could
do, in the hope that they might thereby earn the privilege of being born
with a psychic vehicle next time. The fuller knowledge of later years has
to some extent modified this idea; we see now that under certain stimuli
any ordinarily refined vehicle will unfold some portion of psychic capacity,
and we have come to be by no means so sure as we used to be, that the possession
of psychic faculties from birth is really an advantage. It is quite clear
that it is an advantage in some ways, and that it ought to be an advantage
in all; but as a matter of experience it often brings with it serious
practical difficulties.
The
boy who has it, knows a world from which his less fortunate fellows are
excluded — a world of gnomes [Page
2] and
fairies, of actual comradeship with animals and birds, with trees and flowers,
of living sympathy with all the moods of nature — a world freer, less
sordid and far more real than the dull round of every-day life. If he has
the good fortune — the very rare good
fortune — to have sensible parents, they sympathise with him in all
this, and explain to him that this fairy world of his is not a separate one,
but only the higher and more romantic part of the life of the gracious and
marvellous old earth to which we belong, and that therefore everyday life
when properly understood is not dull and grey, but instinct with vivid
wonder and joy and beauty.
There can be no
question of the advantage here; but, unfortunately, as I have just said,
the sensible parent is rare, and the budding poet, artist or mystic is quite
likely to find himself in the hands of an unsympathetic
bourgeoisie, wholly incapable of comprehending him, and thoroughly
permeated with fear and hatred of anything which is sufficiently unusual to
rise a little above the level of the deadly dullness of their smug
respectability. Then is his lot indeed unhappy; he soon learns that he must
live a double life, carefully hiding the romantic realities from the rude jeers
of the ignorant Philistine, and but too often the crass brutality of this most
reprehensible repression stifles altogether the dawning perception of the
spirit and drives him back into his shell for this incarnation. Hundreds of
valuable clairvoyants are thus lost to the world, merely through the
unconscious cruelty of well-meaning stupidity.[Page
3]
Some boys, however, and
perhaps still more often some girls, do not entirely lose their powers,
but bring through some fragments of them into adult life; and not improbably
the very fact that they have thus direct knowledge of the existence of
the unseen world, draws them to the study of Theosophy. When that happens,
is their psychism an advantage to them ?
There
is no doubt that it ought to be. Not only do they know as a fact of experience
many things which other students accept merely as a necessary hypothesis,
but they can also understand far better than others all descriptions of
higher conditions of consciousness — descriptions which,
because they are couched in physical language, must necessarily be
woefully imperfect. The clairvoyant cannot doubt the life after death,
because the dead are often present to him; he cannot question the
existence of good and evil influences, for he daily sees and feels them.
Thus there are many
ways in which clairvoyance is an incalculable benefit. On the whole, I think
that it makes happier the life of its possessor; it enables him to be more
useful to his fellows than he could otherwise be. If balanced always by common
sense and humility, it is indeed a most excellent gift; if not so balanced,
it may lead to a good deal of harm, for it may deceive both the clairvoyant
himself and those who trust in him. Not if proper care is exercised; but
many people do not exercise proper care, and so inaccuracy arises.[Page
4]
Especially
is this the case when the operator endeavors to use the powers of the higher
vehicles, because in the first place, long and careful training is needed
before these can be rightly used, and secondly the results must be brought
down through several intermediate vehicles, which offer many opportunities
for distortion. A good example of the kind of work in question is the investigation
of past history or of the previous lives of an individual — what is commonly
called examining the records. In order to obtain reliable results, this must
be done through the causal body; and to chronicle the observations
correctly on this lower plane we must have four vehicles thoroughly under
control — which is a good deal to expect.
The physical body
must be in perfect health, for if it is not it may produce the most extraordinary
illusions and distortions. A trifling indigestion, the slightest alteration
in the normal circulation of the blood through the brain, either as to quantity,
quality or speed, may so alter the functioning of that brain as to make it
an entirely unreliable transmitter of the impressions conveyed to it. A similar
effect may be produced by any change in the normal volume or velocity of
the currents of vitality which are set flowing through the human body by
the spleen. The brain mechanism is a complicated one, and unless both the
etheric part of it through which the vitality flows and the denser matter
which receives the circulation of the blood are working quite normally, there
can be no certainty of a correct report; any irregularity in either part
may readily so dull or [Page
5] disturb its receptivity as
to produce blurred or distorted images of whatever is presented to it.
The astral body,
too, must be perfectly under control, and that means much more than one would
at first suppose, for that vehicle is the natural home of desires and emotions,
and in most people it is habitually in a condition of wild excitement. What
is wanted is not at all what we ordinarily call calmness; it is a far higher
degree of tranquillity, which is only to be obtained by long training. When
a man describes himself as calm, he means only that he has not at the moment
any strong feeling in his astral
body; but he has always a quantity of smaller feelings which are still
keeping up a motion in the vehicle — the swell which still remains, perhaps,
after some gale of emotion which swept over him yesterday. But if he
wishes to read records or to perform magical ceremonies he must learn to
still even that.
The old simile of
the reflection of a tree in a lake can hardly be bettered. When the surface
of the water is really still we have a perfect image of the tree; we can
see every leaf of it; we can observe correctly its species and its condition;
but the slightest puff of wind shatters that image at once, and creates ripples
which so seriously interfere with the image that not only can we no longer
count the visible leaves, but we can hardly tell even what kind of tree it
is, an oak or an elm, an ash or a hornbeam, whether its foliage is thick
or thin, whether it is or is not in flower. In fact our interpretation of
the image would, under such conditions, be largely [Page
6] guesswork. And that,
be it remembered, is the effect of a mere zephyr; a stronger wind would
make everything utterly unintelligible.
The normal condition
of our astral bodies might be represented by the effects of a brisk breeze,,
and our ordinary calmness by the ripplings of a light but persistent air;
the mirror-like surface can be attained only after long practice and much
strenuous effort. When we realize that for a reliable reading of the records
we must reach that condition of perfect placidity not in one vehicle only,
but in four, no one of which is ever normally quiet even for a moment, we
begin to see that we have a difficult task before us, even if this were all.
Not
only must the astral body be tranquil before the investigation is begun,
but it must remain unruffled all through the work — which means that,
if he wants to get more than a general impression, the seer must not allow
himself to be excited by anything which may appear in the picture. Be it
observed that the nature of the excitement makes no difference; if a
spasm of anger, of fear, is fatal to accuracy, so also is a rush of affection
or devotion. If he is to be rigorously truthful, the watcher must record what
he sees and hears as impartially as does a camera or a phonograph; he may
allow himself the luxury of emotions afterwards when recalling what he has
seen, but at the time he must be absolutely impassive, if he is to be
reliable. This makes it practically impossible for the emotional or hysterical
person to be a trustworthy observer on these higher planes; he [Page
7]
surrounds himself with a world
of forms built by his own thoughts and feelings, and then proceeds to see
and to describe those as though they were external realities.
Often such forms
are beautiful, and their contemplation is uplifting, so that, even though
they are inaccurate, they may be of great help to the seer. Indeed, his experiences
may be useful to others also, if he has the discrimination to relate them
without labeling his actors as deities, archangels or adepts. But it is usually
precisely such figures as those that his imagination evokes, and it is merely
human nature to feel that the person who comes to him must surely
be some Great One. The only way to secure oneself against self-deception
is the old and irksome way of a long, hard course of careful training: except
by some vague intuition a man cannot know a thought-form from a reality until
he has been taught their respective characteristics, and can rise sufficiently
above them to be able to apply his tests.
Calmness is necessary
in the mental body as well as the astral. A man who worries can never see
accurately, because his mental body is in a condition of chronic disease,
a perpetual inflammation of agitated fluttering. One who suffers from pride
or ambition has a similar difficulty. Some have supposed that it matters
little what they think habitually, so long as during the actual investigation
they try to hold their minds still; but that idea is fallacious. In this
vehicle, also, the storm of [Page
8] yesterday
leaves a swell behind it; an attitude of mind which is constantly or frequently
held, makes an indelible mark upon the body, and keeps up a steady pulsation
of which the owner is as unconscious as he is of the beating of his heart.
But its presence becomes obvious when clairvoyance is attempted, and makes
anything like clear vision impossible — all the more since the man,
being ignorant of its existence, makes no effort to counteract its effects.
Prejudice,
again, is an absolute bar to accuracy; and we know how few people are
entirely without prejudices. In many cases these mental attitudes are matters
of birth and long custom — the attitude, for example, of
the average Brãhmana to a pariah, or the average American to a Negro.
Neither of those could report accurately a scene in which appeared any
members of the classes they instinctively despise. I may give an example
which came under my notice some time ago. I knew a good clairvoyant
with strong Christian proclivities. So long as we were dealing with
indifferent subjects, her vision was clear; but the moment that anything
arose which touched, however remotely, upon her religious beliefs, she
was instantly up in arms, and became absolutely unreliable. Being a highly
intelligent person in many directions, she would have checked this
prejudice if she had been conscious of it; but she was not, and so its evil
influence was unrestrained. If, for example, a scene arose before us in
which a Christian and a man of some other religion came in any way into
conflict or even appeared side by side, her [Page
9] description of it was a
mere travesty of the reality, for she could see only the good points in the
Christian and only the evil in the other man. If any fact appeared which
did not fit in with the alleged history contained in the Christian Scriptures,
that fact was ignored or distorted to suit her preconceptions; and all this
with entire unconsciousness, and with the best possible intentions. That is
only a small sample of the unreliability of spontaneous, untrained clairvoyance.
No
wonder that it takes many years of patient and careful training before
the pupil of the Master can be accepted as really reliable. He must discover
all these unrecognized prejudices, and must eliminate them; he must evict
from the recesses of his own consciousness other tenants even more firmly
attached to the soil — pride, self-consciousness, self-centeredness.
The last is a condition
from which many people suffer. I do not mean that they are selfish in the
ordinary gross meaning of the world; they are often far from that, and they
may be kind-hearted, self-sacrificing, and anxious to help. Nor do I mean
that they are offensively proud or conceited; but just that they like to
be under the limelight, to be always well on view in the center of the stage.
Suppose such a person to be psychic from birth; in every case where there
is a personal experience to be related, that psychic will necessarily and
inevitably magnify his or her personal part in the affair, and that without
the slightest intention of doing so.[Page
10]
We know that it sometimes
happens that a beginner in astral work identifies himself, in his recollection
of some event, with the person whom he has helped. If he had during the
night been assisting a man who was killed in a railway accident, he might
wake in the morning remembering a dream in which he had been killed in
a railway accident, and so on. in something the same way, when the self-centered
psvchic comes across in his investigations some one with a fine aura, he
immediately remembers himself with such an aura; if he sees some one conversing
with a Great One, he promptly imagines himself to have had such a conversation,
and (without the slightest intention of deceit) invents all sorts of flattering
remarks as having been addressed to him by that august Being. All this
makes him indistinctly dangerous, unless he has quite a phenomenal
power of self-effacement and self-control.
Members of the Society
who have flattering experiences of this sort have been encouraged to send
an account of them to the President or to some other trained seer, in order
that the facts (if any) may be disentangled from the embroidery, in the hope
that such correction may enable them by slow degrees to learn how to winnow
the chaff from the wheat. They come with stories of the marvelous initiations
through which they have passed, of the great angels and archangels with whom
they have familiarly conversed, and the tales are often so wild and so presumptuous
that it requires a great fund of patience to deal adequately with them. No
doubt [Page
11] it requires
a good deal of patience on their part also, for again and again we have to
tell them that they have been watching some one else, and have
appropriated his deeds to themselves, or that they have magnified a
friendly word into an extravagant laudation.
We may easily see
that, if the self were just a little more prominent, they would not come
and ask for explanations, but would hug to their bosoms the certainty that
they really had become high Adepts, or had been affably received by the Chieftain
of some distant solar system. So we come by easy gradations to those who
have angel-guides, who hear divine voices directing them, and are the constant
recipients of the most astounding communications. It is no doubt true that
in some cases such people have been charlatans, and that in others they have
been insane; but I think it should be understood that the majority of them
are neither mendacious or megalomaniac, but that they do really receive these
bombastic proclamations from entities of the astral world — usually
from quite undistinguished members of the countless hosts of the dead.
It
sometimes happens that a preacher, especially if of some obscure sect,
becomes a spirit-guide. In the astral world after death, he discovers some
of the inner meanings of his religion which he had never seen before, and
he feels, that if others could see these matters as he now sees them, their
whole lives would be changed — as indeed they quite probably would. So
if he can manage to influence some [Page
12] psychic
lady in his flock, he tells her that he has chosen her to be the instrument
for the regeneration of the world, and in order to impress her more profoundly,
he often thinks it well to represent his revelation as coming from some high
source -— indeed he
usually supposes that it does so come. Generally the teaching and advice
which he gives is good as far as it goes, though rather of the copybook
heading style of morality.
But to that dead
preacher come presently people who will have none of his sage, moral maxims,
but want to know how their love affairs will progress, what horse will win
a certain race, and whether certain stocks will go up or down. About all
such matters our preacher is sublimely ignorant, but he does not like to
confess it, reasoning that as these men believe him to be omniscient because
he happens to be dead, they will lose faith in his religious teaching if
he declines to answer even the most unsuitable questions. So he gravely advises
them on these incongruous subjects, and thereby brings much discredit upon
communications from the other world in general, and upon his own reputation
in particular.
The
advantage of the pupil who, not having been psychic in the beginning, is
afterwards instructed in these matters, lies, I think, in this: that before
the attempt is made to develop any such powers, he is trained in
selflessness, his prejudices are eradicated, and his astral and mental
bodies are brought under control; and so, when the powers come, he has
to deal only with the difficulties inherent in their unfolding and their use,
and not with a host of others imposed by his own weaknesses. He has learnt
to bring his vehicles into order, to know exactly what he can do with them,
and to make allowance for any defects which still exist in them; he
understands and allows for the action of that part of the personality which
is not normally in manifestation — that which has been called by the
Psychical Research Society the subliminal self.
When
the powers are opened he does not proceed immediately to riot in their
unrestrained use; laboriously and patiently he goes through a series of
lessons in the method of their employ — a series which may last for years
before he is pronounced entirely reliable. An older pupil takes him in hand,
shows him various astral objects, and asks him: "What do you see? " He
corrects him when in error, and teaches him how to distinguish those things
which all [Page
14] beginners
confuse; he explains to him the difference between the two thousand four
hundred varieties of the elemental essence, and what combinations of them can
best be used for various sorts of work; he shows him how to deal with all
sorts of emergencies, how to project thought-currents, how to make artificial
elementals — all the manifold
minutiae of astral work. At the end of all this preparation the aspirant
comes out a really capable workman — an apprentice who can understand
the Master's instructions, and has some idea of how to set to work to
execute the task confided to him.
The person who is
born psychic escapes the trouble of developing the powers; but this great
gain brings with it its own peculiar temptations. The man knows and sees,
from the first, things which others about him do not know and see; and so
he often begins to feel himself superior to others, and he has a confidence
in the accuracy of his power of sight which may or may not be justified.
Naturally he has feelings and emotions which are brought over from past lives,
and these grow along with his psychic faculties; so that he has certain preconceptions
and prejudices which are to him like colored glasses through which he has
always looked, so that he has never known any other aspect of nature than
that which they show him. The bias which these give him seems to him absolutely
part of himself, and it is exceedingly hard for him to overcome it and see
things at another angle. Ordinarily he is quite unaware that he is all askew,
and acts on [Page
15] the hypothesis that he is
seeing straight, and that those who do not agree with him are hopelessly
inaccurate.
From all this it
emerges that those who possess the psychic faculties by nature should exercise
them with the greatest care and circumspection. If they wish that their gift
shall be helpful and not harmful, they must above all things become utterly
selfless: they must uproot their prejudices and preconceptions, so as to
be open to the truth as it really is; they must flood themselves with the
peace that passeth understanding, the peace that abideth only in the hearts
of those who live in the Eternal. For these be the prerequisites to accuracy
of vision; and even when that is acquired, they have still to learn to understand
that which they see. No man is compelled to publish abroad what he sees;
no man need try to look up people's past lives or to read the history of
aeons long gone by; but if he wishes to do so, he must take the precautions
which the experience of the ages has recommended to us, or run the terrible
risk of misleading, instead of feeding, the sheep which follow him. Even
the uninstructed clairvoyant may do much good if he is humble and careful.
If he takes for a Master some one who is not a Master (a thing which is constantly
happening), the love and devotion awakened in him are good for him; and if
in his enthusiasm he can awaken the same feelings in others, they are good
for others also. A high and noble emotion is always good for him who feels
it. even though the object of it may not be so great as [Page
16] he is supposed to be. But
the evil comes when the erring seer begins to deliver messages from his
pseudo-Master, commands which may not be wise, yet may be blindly
obeyed because of their alleged source.
How then is the
non-clairvoyant student, who as yet sees nothing for himself, to distinguish
between the true and the false ? The safest criterion of truth is the utter
absence of self. When the visions of any seer tend always to subtle glorification
of that seer, they lie open to the
gravest suspicion. When the messages
which come through a person are always such as to magnify the occult position,
importance or title of that person, distrust becomes inevitable, for we
know that in all true Occultism the pupil lives but to forget himself in
remembering the good of others, and the power which he covets is that which
shall make him appear as nothing in the eyes of men.
Psychic powers are
widely desired, and many men ask how they can unfold them. Yet is their possession
no unmitigated blessing, for at the stage which the world has reached today
there is more of evil than of good to be seen by the man who looks with unclouded
vision over the great mass of his fellow-creatures. So much of sordid struggle,
so much of callous carelessness, so much of man's inhumanity to man which
indeed makes countless thousands mourn, and might well make angels weep;
so much of the wicked, calculated cruelty of the brutal schoolmaster to his
shrinking pupil, of the [Page
17] ferocious driver to his far
less brutish ox; so much senseless stupidity, so much of selfishness and sin.
Well might the great poet Schiller cry: