[Page
1] THE majority of civilized
people today, in every country, profess a belief in the existence of worlds
other than the physical globes scattered through space, the suns and planets
of our own and other systems. However vague may be their ideas of the nature
of such worlds, invisible, superphysical, super-sensuous; however much
the ideas vary, according to the religion professed by the believer; they
yet cling to a belief that not
all of me shall die, that death does not put an end to individual existence,
that there is something beyond the tomb. But if we estimate the value
of the belief by the criterion suggested by Professor Bain, that the strength
of a belief may be tested by the influence it exerts over conduct, then we
find that, despite the nominal profession, the belief itself is of the flimsiest
character. The conduct of people is ruled by their belief in the visible world
[Page 2] rather
than in those invisible; their thoughts, interests, affections, all center
here; and so markedly is this the case that the behavior of anyone who is really
influenced by the thought of the superphysical worlds is deemed eccentric and
morbid. A patient's body may be worn out by extreme old age, or tortured by
a disease that must shortly end in death; doctors, nurses, relatives, will
strain every nerve to scourge the will to hold on to the useless body, will
pour into it drugs and stimulants to put off for a few days or weeks its dissolution,
as though the life beyond this world were a mirage, or a thing to be avoided
as long as possible by every means. This lack of the sense of the actuality
of the superphysical worlds is more common in modern than in ancient times,
in the West than in the East. Its wide prevalence is due to the conception
of man as a being who possesses no present relation with those worlds, and
no powers which would enable him to cognize them. Man is regarded as living
in one world, the world of waking consciousness, the world of the triumphs
of the senses and the intellect, instead of in several worlds, in all of which
his consciousness is functioning, more or less definitely; he is no longer
supposed to possess the powers which all religions have ascribed to him,
powers which transcend the limitations of the body; and the active
Agnosticism of the scientist, of the leaders of thought, is reflected in
the passive Agnosticism of the intellectual masses, whose lip-belief [Page
3] in
the superphysical is mocked by the conduct-belief of ordinary life.
It is not enough that
we should think of the super-physical worlds as worlds that we may, or even
shall, pass into after death; the realization of these worlds, if they are
to influence conduct, must be a constant fact in consciousness, and man must
live consciously in the three worlds, the
physical, the astral, the heavenly. For that only is actual to man to which
his consciousness responds; if his consciousness does not answer to a
thing, for him that thing has no existence; the boundary of his power to
respond is the boundary of his recognition of the existent. A man might
be surrounded by the play of colors, but were it not for the eye, they would
not, for him, exist; waves of melody might sweep around him, but without
the ear, there would, for him, be silence. And so the worlds invisible may
play on a man, but while he is unconscious of their presence, for him they
do not exist. So long as that irresponsiveness continues, no amount of
description can make them living, actual; to him they must remain as the
dream of the poet, the vision of the painter, the hope of the optimist,
beautiful exceedingly, perchance, but without proof, without substance,
without reality. But can the invisible worlds be made present in
consciousness, can we respond to them, and share their life ? Are there
in man powers not yet unfolded, but to be unfolded in evolution, so that he
may be likened to a flower not yet opened, powers [Page
4] that lie hidden
like the stamens, the petals, in the bud ? Are the Prophets, the Saints,
the Mystics, the Seers, the men in whom these possibilities have flowered,
and are their methods of prayer or of meditation the scientific means of culture
which hasten the unfolding of the bud ?
In seeking to answer this question we may look back into the past or
analyze the present, we may study the religions of ancient times, or we
may scrutinize our own constitution and seek to understand its constituents
and the relations of these to our environment. Along these lines, it may be,
some results may be obtained.
Looking
back over the religions of the past we find one idea dominating them all — that
the visible universe is the reflection of the invisible. Egypt sees the
world of phenomena as the image of the real world. To India the universe
is but the passing expression of a divine Idea; there is but one Reality,
and the universe is its shadow. The Hebrews in their philosophic books
assert that God made the universe of Ideas before the universe of forms;
the celestial man, Adam Kadmon, is the original, whereof the terrestrial
man is the copy, and Philo says that God, intending to make the visible
universe, first created the invisible; in the Talmud it is regarded as
axiomatic that if a man would know the invisible he should study the visible,
and the Hebrew Paul declares that the invisible things are plainly seen by
those [Page
5] that are made. Pythagoras tells
of the world of Ideas, and has
real forms existing in the intelligible world, the world of Ideas
in the Universal Mind, ere the Ideas were manifested as the physical universe.
So again Plato and his followers. Everywhere is this dominating thought,
that there is an invisible which is real, and a visible which is unreal,
a copy, a reflection. Only the Real is eternal, and only the eternal can
satisfy, since
Thou art That . The Real manifests as the unreal, the Eternal masks
itself as the transitory; how strange the paradox, how complete the subversion,
when the unreal is considered to be the only reality, and the transitory
the only existence.
During the immense
period of time covered by these and by other religions, man was regarded
as an immortal consciousness veiled in matter, the consciousness becoming
more and more limited as the veils of matter grew thicker and thicker; his
deepest relations were with the world of Ideas, and each world grew more
unreal, more illusory, as the matter which composed it grew more and more
dense and gross. The phenomenal worlds were, as their name denotes, worlds
of appearances, not of realities, and man must pierce through these appearances
to reach the core of Reality. This Spirit endued the garment of mind, and
over the mind the garb of the senses, in order to come into relation with
the intellectual and sensuous worlds, and man, the [Page
6] resulting composite, must
rise above the senses, must transcend the mind, in order to be self-consciously
Spirit. As in himself as Spirit he knows the spiritual, so in his mind-garment
he knows the intellectual, in his sense-garment the sensuous.
The
sense-garment is threefold, and each layer relates him to a material world — the
heavenly, the astral, the physical. All these are truly visible, each cognizable
through sense-organs composed of its own state of matter, but only the grossest
is visible to the normal man, because in him only the grossest layer of the
sense-garment is in thorough working order. As the finer layers of the sense-garment
are gradually evolved into similar working order, the finer phenomenal worlds
will become sensuous to him, tangible to his senses. Thus was it taught in
elder days; thus is it now taught in Theosophy. The pseudo-invisible — that
which is capable of being seen although invisible to the eyes of the flesh — will
become visible as evolution proceeds, bringing into functioning activity the
finer layers of our sense-garment, and then the three worlds will become the
visible universe.
Such functioning activity may even be brought about, at the present stage
of evolution, by special methods, and man may live consciously in the
three worlds at once. For such men the actuality of the lower
invisible worlds is established on that so-called indubitable evidence, the
evidence of the senses, and it is of this sensuous evolution that many, perhaps [Page
7] most, people think when they
speak of obtaining proof of the persistence of individual consciousness on
the other side of death. Such evidence, however, must remain for a considerable
time to come out of the reach of the majority of people, although the minority
able to obtain it is ever-increasing and is certain to increase more rapidly
in the coming years. The available evidence for the existence of the finer
layers of the sense-garment, and for man's relations through it with superphysical
worlds, is abundant and is continuously receiving additions. Clairvoyance,
clairaudience, premonitions, warning and prophetic dreams, apparition of
doubles, thought-forms and astral bodies, etc., etc., are beginning to
play a part in ordinary life and to find unjeering reportal in the daily
press. Signs of evolving sense-organs are thus around us, and the unimportance
of death will be more and more recognized as these multiply. It is no longer
possible for a person, instructed in the well-ascertained facts of mesmeric
and hypnotic trances, to regard mental faculties as the products of nervous
cells. It is known that the working of those cells may be paralyzed while
perception, memory, reason, imagination, manifest themselves more
potently, with wider range and fuller powers. Those who have patiently
and steadily observed the phenomena occurring at spiritualistic séances know
that when every doubtful happening is thrown aside, there remains a
residuum of undoubted facts which prove the presence of forces [Page
8]
unknown to science, and of
intelligence that is not from the sitters or the medium. Automatic writing
has been carried to a point where the agent concerned cannot be the brain-consciousness
of the writer. Thought-transference — telepathy — has passed
beyond the range of controversy and has established itself as a fact
by reiterated and exact proofs. The worlds unseen are becoming the seen,
and their forces are asserting themselves in the physical world by the
production of effects not generated by physical causes. The boundaries
of the known are being pushed back until they begin to overlap those
of the astral world. The evidence increases so rapidly that the materialist
of forty years ago threatens to become as extinct as the dodo, and the
whole attitude of the intellectual classes to life is changing. And yet,
amidst all this, it may be well for us to realize that these extensions
of knowledge, valuable as they are, can only, at the best, give us proofs
of a prolongation of life, not of our immortality, for the three worlds
are all phenomenal, all changing, and therefore all transitory. They
add to our physical life, an astral life and a heavenly life; they give
us three visible worlds instead of one; they enlarge our horizons,
and add to our material inheritance; they do not, and they cannot, give
us the certitude of immortality.
To say this is not
to undervalue the further improvement of our sense-garment, but to put the
senses in their right place as regards our knowledge [Page
9] of the superphysical worlds,
even as we have learned to put them in their right place in our knowledge
of the physical. If we analyse carefully the knowledge which we gain through
observation every day and at once utilise for our conduct, we find that very
little of it is directly obtained through the senses; at our present stage
of physical evolution the experiment to prove this is not quite easy, but
it is not impossible. If we would make the experiment we must proceed as
follows; we shut out all that the mind has deduced from previous observations,
and narrow ourselves down to pure sensuous perception of an object, such
as a face, a landscape; we mark only what the eye reports, and as far as
possible add nothing to that sensation from the mind that has perceived,
noted, registered, compared, so many previous similar sensations; we see,
as an infant sees, outline and colour, with no distance, no depth, no relations
between adjoining parts, no meaning. When we now look over a
landscape, we see into it countless observations, movements and
experiences made from our babyhood upwards; the infant's eye is as
perfect as our own, but does not measure the near and the far, the relation
of parts that makes a whole. When the eye sees under quite new
conditions it is easy to deceive it; the senses are continually corrected
and supplemented by the mind. Now when first the finer sense-organs of our
sense-garment begin to work, they are as the eyes of the infant on the
physical [Page
10] plane, but behind them is
an actively functioning mature mind, full of ideas built up out of physical-plane
sensations; this content it throws into the outline supplied by the astral
sense-organ, and the man
"sees" an astral object; as on the physical plane, by
far the greater part of the perception is mind-supplied, but while the
mind on the physical plane supplies details collected by countless physical-plane
observations of similar objects, and thus adds to the sense-report its
own store of congruous memories, the mind on the astral plane projects
into the sense-perception the same store of memories, now incongruous,
for it lacks the astral observations which should form its contribution
to the total perception. There is a fertile source of error, continually
overlooked, and hence early observations are most misleading, and the observations
of the untrained continue to be earth-filled.
In order that we may
be sure of our immortality, something quite other than this refining of the
sense-garment is necessary, something that is related to life and not to
life-vehicles. We may climb rung after rung of the world's ladder, and yet
remain unsatisfied; for infinities stretch ever above us as below us infinities
stretch, and stunned, dwarfed by the immensities above and below, it seems
to matter little whether we occupy one rung or another of the ladder. This
is ever going outwards, adding one mass of phenomena to another mass, a true
weaving of endless ropes out of illimitable sand. And if the Word of the
Mystics [Page
11] be true we must turn
inwards, not outwards, when we would seek wisdom instead of learning. It
is indeed obvious that no extension, no refinement of the senses can introduce
us into worlds really invisible, into that which is not phenomenal, into
the world of thought, not the world of thought-forms. For this the
consciousness must unfold the powers ever within it, and
make manifest the divinity which is its hidden nature. Consciousness is
the Real, conditioned by matter, and we must plunge into the
depths of our own being if we would find the certitude of
immortality in conscious union with the One. All other proofs are supplementary;
this is primary and final, the Alpha and Omega of life. Consciousness is
the Ever-Invisible: "Not in the sight abides his form; none may
by the eye behold him"; yet herein resides the full certainty of
the Reality of the Ever-Invisible, of that which escapes alike the senses
and the mind. As the eye responds to light, the ear to sound, the material
to the material, so must consciousness learn to respond to consciousness,
the spiritual to the spiritual. When this is learned, the question of death
can never more distress us, nor doubt of the necessary existence of worlds
for the continued life of the imperfect discarnate assail us; for when
consciousness realises its own inherent immortality, it knows itself essentially
independent of the three worlds, a spiritual entity belonging to a spiritual
world. [Page
12]
The
answer to the question: "Can we know this, not only hope it ?"
comes alike from religion and from philosophy. The greatest of our
humanity declare that this knowledge is within the reach of man; it is the
Brahmavidyã, the Gnosis, Theosophy. And the ancient narrow path along
which men have trodden from times immemorial, along which have gone
the teachers of every religion and the disciples that have followed in their
footsteps, that ancient narrow path is as open for the treading of men today
as it was open to the men of the past. The human Self is as divine in the twentieth
century as in the first, or as in thousands of years before; the life of God
is as near to the human Spirit. For the Spirit is the offspring, the emanation
of Deity, and it can know because it is like its Parent. It is said in an ancient
writing that the proof of God is the conviction in the human Self; that is
the one priceless evidence, that testimony to the divine Reality which comes
from the Real in us. Hence man may know the Reality of the Ever-Invisible,
as well as the Actuality of the, at present, invisible worlds.
In search of this testimony
Religion bids the believer tread the road of Prayer. By intense concentrated
prayer, when the life is pure, a man may so rend the sense-garment that Spirit
may commingle with Spirit, the human with the divine. The rapt ecstasy of
prayer may lift the devotee to the Object of devotion, and he may feel the
bliss of union, the [Page
13]
ineffable joy of the Lord. Never
again may he doubt the reality of that high communion. And, far short of
this, the man of prayer may have experience of the inner worlds, may feel
their peace, their joy, may bask in their light. These experiences are facts
in consciousness, and lift the man beyond all possibility of doubt as to
the Reality of the Invisible. To call them
subjective, to talk of the reflex action of prayer, does
not explain nor destroy their value. That the consciousness may be widened,
uplifted, illuminated, is the all-important fact; the man feels
himself in touch with a fuller consciousness, an up-welling life; his hunger
is appeased, and the food reaches him from realms that are not physical.
Along this road of prayer he may reach sureness of the existence of the
invisible. For the simple, the devotional, this path is the easier to tread.
There is another road
to which Philosophy points, in which man turns inwards, not outwards, and
finds certitude of Reality within himself. The one certainty for each of
us, needing no proof, beyond all argument, incapable of being strengthened
by any act of the reason, is the sure truth:
I am. This is the ultimate fact of consciousness, the foundation on
which everything else is built. All save that is inference. We argue the existence
of matter from changes produced in our consciousness by other than
ourselves; we argue the existence of people around us from the sensations
we receive from them. All is inference save the one [Page
14] central fact of
consciousness; all else changes, but that never. In that stability, that
changelessness, is the mark of the Real; the Real is the changeless, the
eternal, and this one changeless thing is the Real ingarbed in form.
If,
studying man in his present stage of evolution, we seek to know the seat
of this Self-consciousness, we find that in most of us its throne is the lower
mind. In truth, the place in evolution of each conscious being may be
judged by the recognition of the seat of consciousness. If that seat be in
the physical body, we find consciousness, but not Self-consciousness;
there is not there the power of distinguishing the " I " from the impact of
impressions causing sensations. Higher in the ladder of being,
consciousness is seated in the second layer of the sense-garment, and this
is the case with animals and with large classes of men. The life with which
these identify themselves is the life of sensations, and of the thoughts
which serve sensations; from this they gradually rise to a consciousness
which identifies itself with the mind, which has risen from the life of
sensations to the life of thought. From this life of the lower mind, in which
sensations still play so large a part, man rises to the life of the intellect,
and the lower mind becomes his instrument, ceasing to be himself. From the
life of the intellect he must rise to the life of the Spirit, and know himself
as the One. The seat of Self-consciousness is moved from the [Page
15] lower
mind to the higher by strenuous thinking, by the intellectual travail of
the student, the philosopher, the man of science — if the latter turn
his thoughts from objects to principles, from phenomena to laws. And as strenuous
thinking can alone lift the seat of Self-consciousness from the mind to the
intellect, so can deep concentration and meditation alone raise that seat
from the intellect to the Spirit.
The man who would deliberately
quicken his own evolution must, having transcended the life of the senses,
strive to make his life the life of the intelligence, rather than the life
of mere outer activity. As he succeeds, he will become more, not less, effective
in the outer world, for he will fulfil all his duties there with less of
effort, with less dispersal of energy; a strength, a calmness, a serenity,
a power of endurance, will be marked in him which will make him a more effective
helper of others, and a more efficient worker in his daily tasks. While he
discharges these faithfully, his true life will be within, and he will practise
daily the higher powers of the intellect as they unfold; as these become
familiar, he will gaze into the darkness beyond the intellect, seeking by
concentrated meditation to find the light that is beyond the darkness, the
light of the Real, of the Self. In that silence will arise within him the
spiritual consciousness, responding to subtle thrillings from an unknown
world. First feebly, and then more strongly, with a courage ever-increasing,
that loftier [Page
16] consciousness answers to
the without and realizes the within; he knows himself as Spirit; he knows
himself divine.
To such a one all worlds
are open; nature has no veil in all her kingdoms.
The heavens spread around him, and living Selves, discarnate and
incarnate, people the various worlds. He knows that death is nothing, that
life is ever-evolving, not because he has seen with the finer organs of the
sense-garment the astral and mental bodies which clothe the departed,
and can thus view the unbroken continuity of life here and there, but
because he knows consciousness as eternal, not subject to death. To him,
the universe is rooted in life, and the changing forms are unimportant, since
the Real is, however forms may change. This sure conviction needs no
phenomenal proofs to make it more sure; it is based on the nature of
things. The actuality of the unseen worlds is, indeed, known to him, but his
rock is the Reality of the Ever-Invisible; all worlds are actual, because they
are the masks of the Reality, but they might all fade away as shadows, and
yet would the Real remain.