Foreword
These lectures are published as they were delivered, at
the request of many who had heard them. They are merely a popular treatment
of a large subject, but may prove useful to some who are repelled by more
technical expositions. They were intended to induce the hearers to use
theosophical teachings as a guide - or at least as working hypotheses - in
their study of Psychology, for every theosophical student knows how useful
Theosophy proves in arranging into some kind of order the chaos of facts
presented by modern psychologists. Theosophy in modern Psychology is truly
as a lamp in a dark place, as all who are willing to use it will find.
ANNIE BESANT
London, 1904.
Contents. |
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LECTURE I. |
THE LARGER
CONSCIOUSNESS |
9 |
LECTURE II. |
THE MECHANISM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS |
28 |
LECTURE III. |
SUB-CONSCIOUSNESS AND
SUPER-CONSCIOUSNESS |
51 |
LECTURE IV. |
CLAIRVOYANCE AND
CLAIRAUDIENCE |
74 |
LECTURE V. |
TELEPATHY |
95 |
LECTURE VI. |
METHODS OF
UNF'OLDMENT |
116 |
The Larger Consciousness.
Psychology has travelled far during the last forty years:
Some forty years ago it was accepted on almost all sides of the scientific
world that, in order to follow safely psychological studies, you must base
your psychology on physiology. Now there is a truth in that, which I do not
want to overlook; that you cannot deal accurately and fully with
consciousness without knowing some thing of the nature of its instruments.
But the sense in which that famous sentence was uttered was false, if it
meant that psychology grew out of physiology, that mind grew out of matter,
that consciousness was the result of the mechanical arrangement of matter,
and that therefore, in tracing the workings of the mind, we must start with
a thorough understanding of the brain and nervous system. Far have we gone
since that day, and what I have called the New Psychology is the psychology
that holds its mind open to all new facts and truths; that is not content to
march along a beaten [9] track; that is willing to consider facts the
most abnormal, provided only they are demonstrated to the reason;
understanding that in psychology, as elsewhere, the fact which seems to be
the most abnormal, which most seems to fly in the face of knowledge already
acquired, is the fact that is most likely to be of value, that is most
likely to act as a signpost along the hitherto undiscovered road. That, of
course, is admitted in most scientific investigations, but somehow people
seem to have shrunk from it in the science of the mind, where, if anywhere,
abnormal effects are likely to be the most significant. But the New
Psychology walks with its eyes open; it does not reject methods because they
are new, nor facts because they are unknown. Granted, it is a little
inclined to re-baptise the facts, that sometimes, along the lines of the
New Psychology this tendency shows itself somewhat prominently, as will be
seen in one of the cases to which I shall allude in a moment, where an
ancient and well-known fact has just been admitted into scientific society
under a new baptismal name. For the moment, however, let me give my reason
for coupling Theosophy and the New Psychology. Theosophy, having a theory of
life and of consciousness based on a very wide and very ancient
investigation of nature, is able to offer to the New Psychology a theory of
which it stands somewhat sadly in need. I say “a theory”, because it can
only be accepted as a theory, as a hypothesis, so far as the scientific
world is for the moment concerned. If there is presented to that world a
theory in which the facts acknowledged as true all find their [10]
places; if the theory offers a rational explanation for facts otherwise
inexplicable; if it offers a rational solution for problems that otherwise
remain unsolved; then it may surely be accepted as dealing with the facts,
and held for the time until some better explanation and solution are
forthcoming.
Now the New Psychology is terribly in need of a theory
under which its facts can be arranged. For you must remember that the stage
of hypothesis is a recognised stage in all scientific investigations. After
many facts have been collected and to some extent co-ordinated a
generalisation arises out of the co-ordinated facts, and our scientific
teachers put forward a hypothesis based on the facts which suggest the
generalisation. They then make that hypothesis the basis for further
experiment, finding experiment more likely to be fruitful when it starts
along lines definitely determined. If the new experiments do not strengthen
and confirm the hypothesis, it is thrown aside; but if it is confirmed by
them, the hypothesis gradually passes into the realm of the definite and
acknowledged teachings of science. I am only claiming the position of a
reasonable hypothesis for that which Theosophy lays down with regard to the
facts accumulated by the New Psychology, but I do not mean that I hold it as
a hypothesis myself. To pretend that would be to deceive you. I hold it as
knowledge, not as hypothesis; but I present it to you as a hypothesis for
you to re-examine and accept or reject.
Now, that there is a larger consciousness in man is
[11] a fact which is being asserted by so many, which is supported by
evidence so wide and multifarious, that one is almost inclined to say that
the fact is beyond dispute. Some will think this is going too far, yet I
doubt if you will find many amongst those who look into the experiments, who
carefully weigh the testimony, who are not prepared to say that, while they
cannot perhaps explain and hesitate to assert, yet they cannot but admit
that the evidence for a consciousness wider than the ordinary
brain-consciousness is touching on the overwhelming. Sir Oliver Lodge has
put forward his belief in very clear terms. He regards it as definitely
established that our consciousness is much larger than the consciousness
which manifests through the brain; that outside and beyond what we know
normally as consciousness there exists a great tract to which no name save
the name of consciousness can rationally be given - part of ourselves,
perhaps the most important part of ourselves, inasmuch as there come
whirling down from that unknown field of consciousness statements so clear
and definite, commands so imperious and compelling, that they overbear the
reason and mould conduct even against the logic of the human mind. That
there is such a larger field of consciousness he definitely asserts; of its
existence he is definitely convinced. Or if we take such statements as those
in the book of the late Mr. Myers, on Human Personality, you are
confronted there with an accumulation of facts and evidence which it is
impossible lightly to put on one side. Two things especially strike us in
looking at that remarkable work. [12] One, that the name given by Mr.
Myers to this consciousness is awkward, unsuitable. One wishes sometimes
that he had used a clearer name, asserting his belief in a consciousness
definitely higher than the brain-consciousness. And yet in reading Mr.
Myers’ book, I cannot believe his abstinence from such a statement was due
to any mental cowardice on his part. For when I remember that he asserted
the probability of the truth of obsession, of the taking possession of the
body by an alien and often hostile intelligence, and when he added that this
brought us bark to the belief of the savage, so brave a statement seems to
me to put entirely out of court the notion that he shrank from the assertion
of the Spirit in man from any kind of mental fear. Some reason he had for
not speaking more definitely. Personally it seems to me due to mental
confusion; that is, that he had a mass of facts he could not arrange, could
not understand, could not explain. He could mark them off as dreams, as
genius, as phantasms, and so on, but he had no theory which made them fall
into a coherent and sequential view of human consciousness. Over and over
again, in reading the book, I found myself saying: “Oh! if Mr. Myers had
only taken the opportunity he once had, and had become a Theosophist.” You
will say: “Yes, because you yourself are a Theosophist.” Perhaps so. None
the less; I find that when one reads that book in the light of Theosophy,
one can answer every question that he could not answer, and show the
explanation of facts which left him absolutely bewildered. This confusion
falls into [13] order when the theosophical theory is accepted, even
if only temporarily, as a hypothesis; and if he had arranged his facts into
an order based upon that, he would not have confounded the madman and the
genius, the lumber-room and the source of human inspiration. That is one of
the points I hope to deal with in the forthcoming lectures.
And another point I must mention is that Mr. Myers left
out the very strongest part of his case - that which comes from the study of
the religions of the world, and the testimony of mystics of every faith.
Why? He did it deliberately, I presume, because he did not wish to bring
into clash the ordinary science and the religions of the time, because he
feared lest science would listen less attentively if he went into the
dangerous regions of the mystic and the visionary. But in shrinking from
these facts, he left the study of human consciousness incomplete. The
testimony of the mystic to his own experiences, the testimony of the
religious man to the facts of his own consciousness, the visions of the
Sufi, of the Yogi, of the Christian Saint, are as much facts of
consciousness as any that you can gather from the records of the
hypnotises, any you can find in the recorded phenomena of hysteria; and it
seems to me that Myers, in leaving them out, shrank from the most effective
evidences of the larger consciousness which he desired so earnestly to
establish. For, as a matter of fact, it is in those facts of consciousness
that the highest reaches of the human consciousness are to be seen, as James
has quite truly recognised. And Myers, in his [14] psychology,
despite his exclusion of these, has offered in the very evidence that he has
collected the justification for the religious theory, and has begun to build
the foundation of a science on which the beliefs of religion will hereafter
be erected.
Turn from his book to the evidence for the Larger Self. I
will take first in order, what we call premonitions and intuitions, because
they are so widely spread. They range from the heavy sense of gloom which
hints at an impending and unknown disaster, or at some sorrow that is coming
to us across the world, whose news has not come to us by the slower methods
of ordinary science - they range from those vague impressions to the clear
sight of what are now called phantasms of the living and of the dead. Now
those premonitions and intuitions, those suggestions to us of a wider
consciousness than the brain normally responds to, whence do they come? how
do they reach us? how do they impress us? what part of our organism is it
which is the organ for their sensing? These questions naturally arise, and
we shall be able, I think, to give some answer to them when we study the
mechanism of consciousness. It is only with the fact of their
occurring that I am concerned at the moment - and how many among you can
bear your own personal testimony to the fact of their happening. How many
of you can find amongst your friends and acquaintances some who have
received such premonitions, dimly or clearly. An ever-increasing amount of
testimony to them comes forward, as they are regarded with less and less
ridicule by educated and [15] cultured people. We have, then, in the
very first rank of our witnesses these presentiments, these intuitions of
the distant. Then we come to the mass of evidence roughly included under the
name of “trance”; that is to say, artificially induced and generally very
deep sleep. These are so familiar to most of you that I need only remind you
of their transcendent importance as establishing a wider consciousness than
that which speaks through the senses, the intelligence, and the emotions.
Exaltation of the senses is one of the most marked characteristics of the
hypnotic trance, and that leads m to a particular case which I mention
because having happened only lately, it is probably less familiar than those
recorded in books on hypnotic research. For a long time people have talked
of “clairvoyance”, and everyone knows it is a dangerous word to use in the
hearing of the scientific man. It at once suggests all kinds of fraud. Only
if you can bring in the word with a suggestion of X-rays you may go a little
further. But now there has come a new title from the lips of a scientific
man, who has the right to baptise it. He has found some of his nervous
patients endowed with “auto-introspection” in the physical sense - a
literal looking into one’s own body. And some of these people have been able
to look very definitely into their own bodies, and, in one remarkable case
of a disorder which is very popular at the present time, the patient not
only described the disease, but stated exactly how it was caused, and
described a little bit of bone which got into the passage where no bone
should be. Afterwards the bone [16] was removed with the most
respectable scientific forceps, and no one could doubt the materiality of
the proof. But it would not do to say it was clairvoyance, so it is now
called “internal autoscopy”. It does not matter at all that in the first
thirty years of the nineteenth century these facts were observed over and
over again, and that some doctors were even driven out of the medical
profession for asserting these facts. They were branded as deceived or
deceivers, but now the phenomena may be safely observed under the shield of
“autoscopy”. Now the foregoing is a case of exaltation of the senses. I use
the word “exaltation” deliberately. It means that the senses are stimulated
to a greater keenness of perception. Exaltation of the intelligence,
exaltation of the emotions, these are other steps along the same line,
bearing testimony to a Larger Consciousness.
Exaltation of the intelligence is one of the commonest
things that happen in the hypnotic trance, and speaking the other day to a
famous Parisian hypnotiser, the Colonel de Rochas, he told me that he had
succeeded in pressing the memory of some of his subjects back into infancy
in the most literal sense of the term; that the memory had been pressed back
to the birth of the child. He was in search of certain facts; in search of
memory of previous lives, and he is working back and back along the present,
across the birth-gateway, across the intermediate life, across the
death-gateway on the other side, back to a previous state of existence in
this world. He [17] has found a greater increase of the power of
memory than had been before observed, but that is already so definitely
established that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it now save as marking
that it has been pushed further back than before. Memory loses nothing which
has reached us through the senses or the brain.
Exaltation of the intelligence carried to a further point
would be genius. Press the exaltation further, make it self-stimulated,
instead of stimulated from without; make it a simple heightening of the
consciousness without loss of consciousness, instead of a heightening of
consciousness with loss of consciousness of trance, and you have the
beginning of genius, one of the most striking testimonies to the existence
of a larger consciousness.
Then you have the exaltation of the emotions, which finds
its place sometimes in sudden acts of heroic courage, of marvellous
self-sacrifice, stimulated the man knows not whence; only he acts with the
courage of the hero, although in his normal state an ordinary man. You can
find these things scattered all over the world today. You can find in your
own self, if you watch your consciousness, that there are times when you
think far better than you can think normally, when your intelligence is
quicker, more alert, more piercing than in the normal state; and although
you may not touch the heights of genius, in that mere heightening of your,
normal consciousness, there is testimony of something larger in yourself
than that which is normally at work through the brain. And so with the
exaltation of the [18] emotions of which I spoke. In its lower stages
it is common enough. In its higher stages it reaches the ecstasy of the
mystic and the saint. So that just as the highest exaltation of the
intelligence is found in the man of genius, so is the highest exaltation of
the emotions found in the mystic of every faith, when he passes into what is
called ecstasy, beyond the stage in which he normally resides, and has there
experiences more real to him than the experiences that come to him through
the gateways of the senses, exercising over him a more compelling power,
moulding and shaping his life without appeal.
Now, of the same nature as those, though at a very much
lower level of evolution, you find that strange and much ridiculed fact of
consciousness that is called among some religious people “conversion”, a
most interesting and significant change of consciousness. Granted, much
exaggeration often goes with it; granted, it is sometimes only a passing
phase, and the man falls back from the exaltation of conversion into the
ordinary mud of his previous evil life; nevertheless the subsequent fall
does not alter the fact of the temporary elevation. And when, side by side
with that, you remark, in reading the records of conversions, that it is
only a minority who fall back into the mud, and the majority whose whole
lives are changed by that marvellous experience, then - unless you are
hopelessly prejudiced with that most bigoted prejudice of all, the prejudice
of the narrow-minded scientific man - you will recognise there also
testimony to a larger consciousness. [19]
And this conversion comes in a strange way some times.
While in India I had a letter from an English missionary. He was a man whom
I had met in the days when I was a freethinker. He had been one of those I
had met in a Secular Society in Manchester. He had taken part in the work of
that Society whilst I myself was in the Secular movement, and because of
that he wrote me, and he gave me a record of a strange experience through
which he had passed. Travelling in America, he had occasion to pass through
that State, wonderful for scenery and marvellous natural phenomena -
Colorado. Staying there for a short time, seeing the marvels of nature on
every side, his sense of beauty stimulated to a very high degree, his sense
of wonder at the power of nature so marvellously displayed around him
stimulated also, suddenly, without a moment’s warning, there came an opening
of the whole of his consciousness, a sudden rush, as it were, or
illumination, what he called a sudden revelation of God. And who shall dare
to say that the Life Supreme, which breathes in every atom of the universe
which is but His thought, did not reveal Himself to that Spirit which is kin
to Himself, and through the marvels of external nature touch a mind and
heart which were closed to the ordinary promptings of religion? This at
least remained out of that marvellous experience, that it turned him into a
religious man. He could not deny the fact that he himself had experienced.
He could not deny the breaking down of all the barriers of the ordinary
consciousness, of the inflow of a life higher and more compelling. And
[20] although it be true that, as was natural from the line of his
previous thought and education, the illumination by the eternal Spirit of
the Spirit encased in flesh led him on into a somewhat narrow path of a
crude form of Christian belief, what matters that, provided the ETERNAL
spoke to the ETERNAL, and the God without in nature manifested Himself to
the God within in man?
So that I suggest to you, as a line of very interesting
study, these facts of conversion. And I rejoice to see the stress Professor
James laid upon them, in his work on the Varieties of Religious
Experience; for it gives them their right place in the New Psychology as
facts in human consciousness. And this is at least to be remembered, that
the records of the history of the world show the most marvellous results
from the actions of those who trace them all to what they call “conversion”,
justifying that saying of Lord Rosebery; that the mystic who is also a man
of the world and of intelligence is the most powerful person it is possible
to find in human life. Absolutely true. For let the higher consciousness
play upon a capable brain, a strong heart, a sound nervous system, and you
have a union which nothing on earth is able to conquer, a force which
nothing on earth is able to shake.
And then you may follow along these ever-converging
lines of study into the strange land of dreams - worthy of most careful
consideration. For dreams deserve to be analysed, to be sorted out, to be
ascribed to the various parts of the human consciousness from [21]
which they take their rise, so that place may be found alike for the mere
jumble of rubbish due to some physical brain disturbance and for the dream
which opens up a new world of consciousness, or which supplies gaps in the
knowledge of the waking consciousness, which enables the intelligence to
pursue its studies with a surer foot, and with a keener insight. So that
from all these different lines there comes the testimony of a larger
consciousness in man.
Now what is that consciousness? Deliberately I have
simply called it here a “larger consciousness”, because I would not, as it
were, commit any one of us, hearers or speaker, to a theory to start with.
These varying lines along which facts may be studied force us into the
admission that there is more of us than works through the human brain. What
is the “more”? There are two chief views put forward. One I suppose would be
called, if we must label it, the scientific; the other, the religious. I do
not want to put these two words against each other as though they were still
in conflict, for although in the western world the history of religion in
the past has been a conflict between religion and science, the most modern
science of today is again becoming the handmaid and helper of religion, and
that co-operation between the two will, I believe, persist until all human
consciousness is illuminated by the light that comes from observation and
the light that comes from the Spirit. The first view is the one which
regards the unfolding consciousness of man as gradually evolving throughout
the growth not only of humanity [22] but of the kingdoms that lie
below humanity in evolution; according to some the increase of perfection
of the organism leading to an increase in the manifestation of the
consciousness, to growth of the consciousness; according to a growing
scientific school, the exercise of the consciousness leading to an
improvement in the mechanism whereby consciousness is expressed.
When you come to ask on this view: “What is the larger
consciousness?” you will find yourself somewhat puzzled how to explain it.
What we may call, for the moment, the sub-conscious, that is intelligible
enough according to this first view, as we shall see hereafter. For we can
readily understand that along the long line of evolution, there will be
countless cases in which consciousness worked to a definite purpose, then
found that that purpose could be accomplished without giving to it its whole
attention; then followed a gradual withdrawal of attention as the habit of
the action became more and more woven into the organism, until at last the
consciousness was able to leave to the automatism of the organism all that
class of acts which at one time it was compelled to superintend and direct.
It is easy to see that, behind us on that evolution, there must be remnants
of promptings of every kind, remnants of the promptings of the animal, of
the savage, of the partly civilised man, all worked more or less into the
very material of the bodies in which we live, by physical heredity. So that
you may have there a vast mass of promptings coming from the evolution that
lies behind us, which has fallen below the horizon of consciousness [23]
into the sub-conscious self. But it is difficult along this line to explain
genius. For although it may be argued that you would find in the highly
complicated organism with which genius is connected greater variability than
in a simpler organism; although you might argue that there will be
occasional variations, forward-reaching, as we find them all through nature;
although you may admit those so-called accidental variations (remembering
however, that “accidental” means ignorance on our part, and not absence of
law), yet genius is too far ahead of the normal evolution to be explained in
that way. It is not a case of a slight forward evolution which may be picked
up and emphasised; it is the leaping over of an enormous gulf between the
talent of a clever man and the genius of the inspired. It is as though
nature, leaping over all connecting links, suddenly out of a stone produced
a plant, suddenly out of a plant an animal, suddenly out of an animal a man.
Nature does not make these leaps, and why should she make them in genius
more than anywhere else? Accidental variation is not sufficient to explain
the transcendency of genius. And there is another difficulty with regard to
it - the difficulty that genius tends to unfit its possessor for the
ordinary life of the world; that in the struggle for survival of the
fittest (for those who believe in that as the line of evolution) genius is a
distinct disadvantage, tends even to kill out its possessor, to render him
quite unable to survive and have offspring; and this outside the fact that
genius is mostly sterile, outside the fact that as the intelligence of the
nervous system [24] increases the fecundity of productiveness
lessens. Outside all these facts, and the possibility of the transmission
of mental and moral qualities at all, let us face this fatal fact, that
genius makes its possessor unfit for the struggle of the normal world. It is
marked in melancholy letters over the page of history. It comes out to us
in all the irregularities of genius - the result of a larger consciousness
battling with a world it does not understand, the result of forces it is
unable to control when those forces are thrown down into the physical plane;
it comes out as increased vitality along many channels, and not necessarily
along lines which can be controlled by the will and intelligence. Those are
points that need careful investigation, before you accept the view that
consciousness is evolving only from below.
The other view is of a very different nature, telling us
of a supernal entity, a living Spirit, “a portion of Myself,” it is called
in a great Scripture, a divine fragment, a part of the Universal Life,
gathering around itself veils of matter that it may come into touch with the
many planes or worlds of our system. A spiritual germ; we may call it,
planted in the soil of matter. I care not whether you call all matter
physical and divide it off by differences of density, or whether you take
the ancient and more accurate view that matter rises in an ascending scale,
marked off by the difference of subtlety of the atoms that compose that
matter, through all the subtler and ever subtler worlds of being. That
divine fragment veiled in matter comes, by the medium of that matter, into
contact with the phenomena of every plane, [25] the Spirit gradually
unfolding and awakening to its inherent, unalienable divine powers. It comes
thus into touch with every region of the universe. It recognises the
difference between itself and others for the first time on the lowest plane,
the physical. There are transmitted through its higher vehicles to its own
Self, the consciousness, vibrations from higher planes than these. And
slowly the physical vibrations organise in the physical body organs which
are able to respond to them, and each new organ opens out a new avenue of
knowledge. As the vibrations of the physical plane play upon the outermost
casing, consciousness answers from within with thrills of responding life,
shaping the matter of its own vehicle into ever-improving organs for the
reception from outside of those vibrations. As the evolution proceeds,
subtler and subtler vibrations are able to affect an ever-awakening and more
and more responding Spirit. And this responsiveness does not stop with the
limit of the physical body. The subtler bodies belonging to the planes
beyond begin to vibrate in answer to their vibrations, and those are
transmitted gradually to the physical vehicle, as it becomes more and more
receptive, delicate, and highly organised. As these vibrations are more and
more definitely recognised by consciousness in the higher regions, it
transmits them more definitely to its physical vehicle, and all that you
call premonitions, intuitions, exaltations of the senses, of the
intelligence, of emotion, the visions of the mystic and saint, the clear
vision of the yogi and of the trained occultist, all that you get in the
variety of dreams, [26] all that you get in genius, and in the
loftier states of human consciousness, all are the coming down into the
physical brain of vibrations received in loftier regions by loftier bodies,
gradually being organised for conscious life and work upon those planes.
While we are still half-evolved, the recognition of these is confused, but
they are never to be confounded with the promptings that come from the
evolution of the pas; they are the promise of the future, not the relics of
the past; they are the struggles of the eternal Spirit within us to make his
vehicles answer to his changes in consciousness. Genius is but the
momentary grasping of the brain by that larger consciousness, forcing it
into an insight, a strength of grip and a width of outlook that causes its
noble reach. It is the putting down more of the larger consciousness into an
organism capable of vibrating in answer to its thrills. So that we may now
drop the word “larger consciousness” and take a truer title. This larger
consciousness is our real Self; this larger consciousness is the real Man,
who is not the bodily garments that he wears. And all things that we see
around us that we recognise as hints of a larger consciousness, these are
the whisperings, scarce articulate as yet, but with all the promise of the
future, that come from the land of our birth, from the world to which in
truth we belong; they are the voice of the Higher Self who is truly the
larger; they are the voice of the living Spirit, unborn, undying, ancient,
perpetual and constant; they are the voice of the inner God, speaking in the
body of man. [27]
The Mechanism of Consciousness.
In the last lecture we followed certain lines of thought
which converged on the idea that the consciousness of man was very much
larger than the consciousness that expresses itself through the nervous
system and the brain. There were three other lines which I did not mention,
and which I will mention now before going on to our special subject “The
Mechanism of Consciousness”.
The first of those is the fixed idea, a most suggestive
subject for study, for the fixed idea is an idea that takes possession of
the whole man, that forces him along its own line whether he wishes to go or
not, which entirely submerges the ordinary consciousness, overbears the
reason, and subjugates the man’s wishes and logic, in spite of everything
driving him along the road it is determined he should go. Fixed ideas divide
themselves [28] into two classes. One class is called madness. You
continually find persons who are called insane dominated by fixed ideas, by
some idea outside all reason, all argument, an idea which overbears all
appeal, all rationality, and when such an idea is found to dominate the
consciousness and conduct, the person is called insane. On the other hand,
there is another type (some people might say it was a subtle form of
insanity, but if so insanity is very beneficial to the world at large); it
is the kind of fixed idea that makes the martyr, the saint, and the hero; an
idea that dominates all the ordinary attractions of life, in face of which
nothing can make an effective appeal, nothing can turn aside the man’s steps
from the path along which he is going. These are also fixed ideas, and we
find them in the very noblest children of the race. Such ideas need
explanation; we need to understand wherein they differ from the fixed ideas
which we regard as madness, otherwise we shall be inclined to slip into the
school of Lombroso, which declares all genius to be madness, and regards the
great teachers of the world, Christ, Buddha, and so on, as what are called
neuropaths. That is at once so terrible and so absurd, that it will be well
if we can distinguish between the fixed idea of the madman and the fixed
idea of the hero and saint. Along that line will go some of the study of the
larger consciousness.
Then comes the line of dreams, and, lastly, the line
along which many, people are inclined to go today, the line of telepathy,
the communication of mind with mind without so-called material or rather
physical means of [29] communication. These three lines we must add
to those I gave in the last lecture. All these are necessarily connected
with the larger consciousness, and find their only rightful explanation when
that larger consciousness is understood.
Now, I have called our special subject for tonight “The
Mechanism of Consciousness”. You remember that I started last week with the
phrase that it was an axiom some forty years ago with regard to psychology,
that all sane psychology must be founded on physiology. Now that is false
when it is made to mean that the physiological conditions produce
consciousness; it is true when it is meant to mean that the physiological
conditions condition the manifestations of consciousness and profoundly
modify it in its manifestations on the physical plane. Therefore it is true
that you do need to understand the mechanism of consciousness in order to
understand the manifestations of consciousness; that you must study the
mechanism in order to be able dearly to follow the means of manifestation
and, what is still more important, the method whereby the improvement of
the mechanism may lead to the fuller manifestation of the consciousness. For
just as you might study a pipe through which water was to flow, and you
would not say the pipe produced the water, though unless the pipe were
there the water would not come into the reservoir; just as it would be a
matter of importance that the pipe should not be clogged, so that the water
flowing through it should not be diminished in quantity; so it is important
that the mechanism [30] whereby consciousness manifests itself shall
be improved as far as possible, that it shall not clog the manifestations of
consciousness, and that if clogs exist they shall be cleared away, and the
circumference of the pipe shall be enlarged if enlargement be possible. To
do that, we must understand the mechanism of consciousness.
In the study of that mechanism the first question that
arises is: Is man, by the mechanism of his consciousness, related to more
worlds than one? And it is rather interesting that some of the earliest
thought here joins hands with the latest that the old Rishis of India are in
line with Mr. F. W. Myers. They do not use the same words, but they make the
same assertion. It is a commonplace in all the ancient Hindu teachings that
man belongs not to one world but to three. Each of these three worlds, it is
said, must be studied, and man, by the mechanism of his consciousness, is
related to each of the three. Truly, there are higher worlds still, but
those are effectively connected only with the man become superhuman. Through
the normal human evolution, it is said, every man is in touch with three
worlds. So also you find something of the same idea running through
Christian teaching. We read of a physical world in which man is living, of a
heavenly world towards which he is going, and of an intermediate world
called by the Roman Catholic Purgatory, by some others Paradise. In
theosophical literature you read about the three planes with which man is
constantly connected, the physical, astral, and mental, corresponding with
the physical body, the astral body, and [31] the mental body. And you
read in the last work of Mr. Myers of “three environments” - a phrase which
is more scientific and technical, but covers the same idea - the physical,
the etherial, and the metetherial, using the prefix “met” in the ordinary
sense of “above” or “beyond”, and that metetherial environment is, Mr. Myers
says, what is called in religion the spiritual world. So we find in the most
modern thought the assertion of a triple world with which man is connected,
although the third is ill-defined.
There now comes in a question which seems to me to belong
only to the modern world. The ordinary Christian who talks to you today will
tell you that you go out of this world into the higher worlds by death, not
that you are in them now, but that you will pass into them at death; so
that death is made the process of passing from one world into another. That
view is almost, if not quite, peculiar to modern Christendom. No such
thought is found in the older religions. In those religions you find that
man is said to be living in the three worlds now, and in the latest
view of Mr. Myers, you find that he is living in the three worlds now,
and the New Psychology demands that, in order to give a rational explanation
of the problems which confront it. And I venture to suggest that if you
would take the idea that man is always living in the three worlds now,
into Christian teaching, that idea would throw a flood of light upon some of
Christ’s teachings which otherwise remain obscure. You remember how, when
speaking of the kingdom of heaven, he presses the fact that it does [32]
not come by observation, that it is not here nor there, and cannot be found
by change of place; “the kingdom of heaven is within you” is His mystic
phrase, pointing to a profound and spiritual truth. And so again you will
find the phrase that “in Heaven the angels of the little ones do always
behold the face of the Father”. And yet we are taught that the angels of the
little ones are always guarding their charges upon earth, the truth being
that the three worlds are not separate in space, but interpenetrate each
other, so that all have a great area in space in common, and our being in
the one world or in the other depends upon the fact that we are clothed
upon with three kinds of mechanism, three bodies, three envelopes, each of
which puts us in contact with one of the three worlds, and any one of them
or all of them may be in use. It is not that at death we find another body;
it is only that the physical body is struck away, and we are left in the
other two bodies in which we are living, thinking, and feeling now. Death is
simply the striking away of the physical envelope, and the only difference
it makes to the man is that he cannot, after death, come directly into touch
with the physical world, having lost his medium of communication, the
physical body. Now if that thought spread among us it would sweep away for
one thing very much of the fear of death, for we should not feel ourselves
going into a new and strange world, but only find ourselves becoming fully
conscious of a world of which we have sometimes been dimly conscious here.
Moreover, it would give to religious teaching a far profounder meaning and a
far deeper [33] reality. For in truth, whenever remorse burns in the
human consciousness, the man is feeling the fires of purgatory, which do not
wait for their purifying action until after the physical body is dropped;
and whenever, amid the turmoil and trial of the world, you find a sense of
peace, of joy, of serenity, it is because the blessed breezes of heaven are
breathing upon your fevered brow, and telling you that heaven is around you,
and that only the density of your material envelope shuts you out from your
birthplace, from your real home. That is the view of our world with which I
start in dealing with the mechanism of consciousness. I shall try to find
three media of communication, each belonging to its own world, and each of
them active in us now, and serving to some extent as a mechanism of
consciousness; two of them are extremely imperfect at the present time, but
would readily become more useful to consciousness if only the reality of
their existence were recognised, and we were in the habit of trying to use
them, and so enabling them to function. For it is the law of developing
life that by the effort of the life to function, the organ of that function
is gradually builded. You do not induce a child to walk by an elaborate
explanation of the muscles of the leg, and of the principle of equilibrium
of moving bodies. On the contrary, all you do is to hold out a toy and say:
“Try to come and fetch it; you can come if you try.” And the child tries. He
knows nothing about his muscles, but he makes the effort to move, and the
life gradually takes control of its mechanism and the child walks, because
the life [34] demands movement and nature has supplied the
mechanism. Now it is the same with the mechanism of consciousness, of
which you know so little because you do not use it. Try to use it, and it
will gradually come under your control and serve you as the baby’s body
quickly serves the demands of the expanding life; the effort of the life to
know will make the mechanism of consciousness ready to be used by the mind.
Now what is the mechanism? I am going to take it coming
down, not going up; because coming down is our natural course. We do not
begin here and climb up. We are born above and we come down - an important
fact. Earth is not our home, but only a foreign country into which we come
from time to time for certain purposes of the Spirit. We live in our native
land for the greater part of our existence, and the mere fact that we happen
to be together in this foreign country just now by no means makes it the
most important, or the one in which our true life is rooted. So I will begin
above, and trace the man coming down to re-birth.
Now when he is starting on his downward journey to take
again a physical body, he is a living Spirit, not wearing any of that
mechanism of consciousness with which we are mostly concerned, but clothed
in what is technically called the “Causal Body”, the body of causes, that
name being given because in that body every experience is stored up; because
there resides the memory of the Spirit, there resides everything which,
during his experiences in the lower planes, he has gradually accumulated.
In that spiritual body resides the [35] spiritual memory, and that
includes the whole of his almost illimitable past, a past that only finds
its beginning in the eternal Being of God Himself. Starting, then, as a
Spirit, man clothes himself in mental matter, the matter whereby he shall
think during his life in the lower worlds. He clothes himself with the
matter of the heavenly or mental plane. Now how is that matter selected? By
a fragment of that mental matter which has been in connection with the human
Spirit through the whole of his long journeyings, “the permanent particle”
we call it in our theosophical nomenclature. And those who have studied what
has been said of the “permanent atom” will know the immense part it plays in
the evolution of the bodies, in the mechanism of consciousness, and will see
how that teaching endorses the scientific teaching of Weissmann, and gives
us a true continuity of matter side by side with a continuity of enduring
life, of Spirit. I have not time now to give an elaborate explanation of the
permanent atom;
I must ask you to take it simply in this sense: that it is a material
particle, like the biophor of Weissmann, which, having passed through the
experiences of life on the mental, astral and physical planes, has gained
the power of vibrating so that it can reproduce any of its past experiences,
and according to the more complex powers of its vibration will be the
complexity of the matter which it gathers round it by attraction for the
building of the new mechanism of consciousness.
Now those permanent particles are composed of [36]
three units, a mental, an astral and a physical which after death are stored
up in the causal body; at re-birth these are put out one after another. The
first of them, the mental, vibrating with all its past experiences behind
it, draws to itself matter congruous to its own expressions, so that the
mental sheath may be suited, in the complexity of its material particles,
for the evolved Spirit that is clothing itself with these bodies. The main
idea is that the matter of which the mechanism of consciousness is formed
should be congruous with the stage of advance of the consciousness itself,
so that the envelope should suit the agent who is to use it; and the
material of the very undeveloped man would not be identical in the
complexity of its particles with that which is used by the more highly
evolved. Identical chemically, yes, but in the complexity of its particles,
no - an important point when you come to deal with the sensitiveness of the
matter and its power of vibrating in answer to thy subtler vibrations that
come to it.
Now this first envelope, the mental, is the first that
the Ego draws round himself as he descends for re-birth. By “descends” I do
not mean movement in space, no such movement is necessary; he draws matter
towards himself. To realise this, think for a moment of the difference of
receptive power in the eye and in the ear. The power of vibrating which
exists in the delicate mechanism of the eye which responds to light enables
you to see, while the arrangement of the ear, responding to other
vibrations, enables you to hear. The eye opens to you the whole world of
sight; without it that world would [37] not exist to you. The ear
opens up another world; without it the world of sound would be closed to
you. Now that difference of mechanism shows exactly what I mean by the
difference between these three envelopes. They are not separate, they are
intermingled, but each of them answers to a certain range of vibrations; and
just as if you had not the delicate mechanism of the eye you would be shut
out from the world of vision, although you might hear perfectly well, so, if
the mental envelope is not vibrating fully the man is shut out from the
great mental world which is the heavenly world; and also, if the astral body
does not vibrate fully in answer to the contacts from the astral world, he
is shut out from that, like the deaf man from the world of sounds. It is a
question of answering by vibration, not a question of space. If you will
only hold steadily to that idea, you will be able to understand that, when
death strikes away a beloved one, you are not separated by difference of
space, but by the limitations of receptive power; we cannot vibrate in the
mechanism of our consciousness to the matter of the worlds in which the
departed one is dwelling at the time.
As the man goes down and clothes himself with this mental
body, the germs of faculties, worked up from the past life’s experiences
into powers of the mind, appear in the mental body - not the faculties fully
developed, as some suppose, but the germs ready to develop and quick to
unfold, so that under the vibrations of thought these faculties will
rapidly unfold and show themselves. He begins the next stage of his [38]
evolution, the astral. He puts out the permanent astral particle. That, by
its vibrations, draws to him congruous astral matter, and builds his astral
mechanism. Germs are there also to be found - germs of feeling, of emotion,
of all the faculties that belong to that side of his nature, the mechanism
of consciousness for desire, for emotion, for sensation. Then comes the
building of the physical body. Here another element comes in the physical
parents. The Ego builds for himself, with such aid as may be given to him by
the inhabitants of those planes, his mental and astral mechanism, but when
he comes down into the physical world, the father and mother there
contribute to the building of the physical body. Here comes in the working
of the Lords of Karma, guiding the incoming Ego to the family able to
provide the physical material suitable for his stage of evolution. And here
is a point of immense importance. Into that physical body will be built, by
the laws of physical heredity, the physical past that lies behind:
all kinds of dim and vague memories imprinted on the matter itself, far-off
remnants worked into the physical body of savage experiences in
semi-civilised lives, dream-like memories of that long past wrought into the
very substances of the physical mechanism, dim, strange gropings and
intuitions that belong to the long line of physical ancestry brought into
touch with the new body, where-into they are worked from the fabrics of the
bodies of the past, by that law of physical continuity contributing their
quota to the mechanism of the physical consciousness. [39] So that
you have working on the nervous system in man innumerable influences from
the physical past, which will have much to say as to the conditioning of his
consciousness, and contribute many an unintelligible fragment to the whole
of the physical consciousness as it appears.
Then, in addition to that, you have working; on the
nervous system, the subtle influences of the Ego himself, influences coming
down from him through the mental and astral bodies already partially formed,
contributing to the building of the nervous system in both its great
divisions, the sympathetic and the cerebro-spinal. The sympathetic system is
mostly connected with the astral body. There are lines of communication with
the astral body, many, and subtle, and potent, and during the building of
that sympathetic system currents of force have been poured down, helping and
guiding to a large extent the building, so that the Ego, with his already
developed emotional faculties, has much to do with the building of that
system with which the emotions are so closely connected. The cerebro-spinal
system comes more and more under the influence of the Ego as he advances in
intellectual power, in power of the higher emotions; for as the ages go on
and the intellect is developed, more of his direct influence pours on to the
cerebro-spinal, and less directly on to the sympathetic system. The
sympathetic is influenced more by his previous influences on the astral
body, while the cerebrospinal system is more influenced by his direct
working [40] at the time. Thus are these systems builded up for his
purposes in his physical life. And after birth the same influences persist.
Similarly, as he broods over and interpenetrates his physical vehicle, he
works continually on these two great systems that are his peculiar mechanism
of consciousness in the physical world. During the course of his long
evolution he at one time had only the sympathetic system to work with; no
other could he find in order to impress himself on his physical vehicle.
Gradually, as he advanced, that fell more and more into the background, and
the cerebro-spinal developed. Now comes a significant fact as the Ego more
and more manifested himself through the cerebro-spinal system (the brain and
the nervous systems connected with it), he gradually passed over to the
sympathetic system the parts of his workings definitely established in
consciousness, towards which he no longer needed to turn his attention in
order to keep them in working order. Slowly the Ego handed on to the
sympathetic nervous system the vital mechanism of the body. He passed on to
it the management of a large part of the body with which he no longer needed
to concern himself. He gave over to the sympathetic system the management of
the heart, the lungs, the whole of the digestive apparatus, and other
functions which no longer needed for their carrying out his immediate
attention. You no longer control the ordinary beating of the heart. Why?
Because the Ego has banded that over to the sympathetic system. You can
regain that control if you like. The Ego can [41] easily call back,
by turning his attention to it, his own direct control over the sympathetic
system, and regulate the movement of the heart, lungs, etc. But the taking
into consciousness that which consciousness has outgrown is taking a step
backward in evolution. So that when you read of people able to control the
beating of the heart, you need not think it so very wonderful. None the less
this connexion is a very interesting one.
Let us now for a moment look at our fixed idea. What is a
fixed idea? When it is a fixed idea that is madness, it is an idea handed
over by the Ego to the sympathetic nervous system for the carrying on of
some part of the physical mechanism; or, a past mood or idea which he has
outgrown; or, a “forgotten” fact, suddenly asserting itself, unaccompanied
by its proper surroundings; or, the connexion of two incongruous ideas; and
so on. The most interesting type is the second, the resurgence of a past
mood or idea. It has left its trace on the sympathetic system; and has
become what is now called “sub-conscious”. Now, there are countless ideas of
that sort with which the Ego has had to do in his past, and which he has not
entirely thrown out of the mechanism of his consciousness; they have
lingered in that mechanism although he has gone beyond them. They still have
parts of that mechanism that vibrate in answer to them, and so long as any
part of that mechanism responds, so long that idea may emerge over the
horizon of consciousness. And when it comes up, as it does, without reason,
without rationality, with the rush and surge [42] and passionate
strength of the past, it overbears the subtler mechanism that the Ego has
evolved for his higher purposes. For you must remember that those early
manifestations which we have outgrown are ideas stronger on the physical
plane than those we call the ordinary mental ones, because their
corresponding vibrations being coarser, slower, produce more result from the
denser matter. It is far easier to affect the physical body by the surge of
a barbaric emotion than by the subtle reasoning of a philosopher. All those
manifestations of the lower nature are stronger than those of the higher on
the physical plane, by virtue of the length of their past. The mechanism was
formed under them and is accustomed to vibrate in answer to them, and that
which is building is yet scarcely ready for the higher manifestations, and
is often thrown off its balance when the rush comes from below. Take it,
then, for the moment, that the fixed idea of the madman is generally an idea
that has left its trace on the sympathetic system, and that, during some
disturbance or weakening of the cerebro-spinal system, is able to assert
itself in consciousness. It arises from below.
But the fixed idea of the saint or martyr is a very
different thing. That comes down from the Ego himself, striving to impress
upon the physical brain his own loftier emotion, his own wider knowledge.
The Ego, who can see further on the higher planes than he can in the
physical encasement, tries to impress upon that physical encasement his own
will, his own desire for the higher and nobler. It comes with all-dominating
[43] power; it cannot approve itself to the reason, for the brain is
not yet ready to reason on those lines of higher knowledge and of deeper
vision and intuition, but it comes down with the force of the Ego on a body
prepared for it, and thus asserts itself as the dominant power, guiding the
man to heroic action, to martyrdom, to saintship. You can easily understand
the outer likeness of the imperious over-riding of the reason, but the
difference is of origin; for these fixed ideas come from above, the former
from below.
One of the great difficulties of the New Psychology is
that it lumps all abnormal happenings together in the “sub-conscious”,
because it does not understand the mechanism of consciousness, and because
it tries to explain impulses of the consciousness that belong to three
worlds, as though the whole of them were not only conditioned by, but found
their origin in, the physical mechanism belonging only to the one. So long
as that limitation is upon it, so long its problems will remain unanswered.
Take another problem: Madness and genius. Now you have in
both the instability which is complained of. Let us take hysteria. In
studying this, the brain-conditions of hysteria at first seem so much like
the brain-conditions of genius that they are lumped together as one and the
same thing. In both the brain is unstable. You need not shrink from that
fact. But what is the instability of hysteria due to? It is due either to
the violent surge upwards from the sympathetic system, or to the pressure
upon an unprepared brain [44] of the higher and subtler forces to
which that brain is not able to answer without throwing itself out of gear.
And there is a very important truth in the statement of Lombroso and of
others of his school, that very many of the saints were neuropaths. I
repeat, there is no reason to shrink from the facts. It is true. But why? It
does not follow that because he has thus been labelled, the neuropath is to
be a branded creature, an outcast from humanity. It is true that very often
the saint and visionary have overstrained their brains, unprepared for the
beating upon them of those subtle waves from higher regions, and the
physical mechanism has been strained and distorted and rendered unstable.
Nay, even more is true: it is sometimes true that the instability is the
condition of the inspiration, because the normal brain is not yet
sufficiently developed, nor delicate enough, to answer to those subtle
waves of consciousness. Maudsley hit upon a great truth when he suggested:
“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by
means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more
suitable instrument for a particular purpose”.
And James remarked: “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher
realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the
chief condition of the requisite receptivity”.
And, if you consider for a moment, you will see why the normal brain is not
the fit brain for a mechanism of consciousness [45] from the higher
regions. The normal brain is fitted by evolution for the work of the world,
for buying and selling, for scheming and planning, for lending and
borrowing, for speculating and trafficking, and for all the other lines of
work carried on in normal society. Suppose you send down upon that brain a
number of vibrations from the higher planes, suppose, beating on that normal
brain, there come great waves of consciousness from the astral and mental;
can you wonder that the brain prepared for earthly life becomes unbalanced
under the tension, or even breaks?
On the other hand, genius has an unstable brain because
the life pressing upon it in order to improve the mechanism keeps it in a
state of tension which is not suitable for the vibrations it meets in the
ordinary work-a-day world. The life there is pressing upon its physical
limitations, is trying to expand, and just as more life goes into the muscle
by the exercises of the athlete, although he may overstrain himself, so does
more life flow into the cells of the brain as the consciousness strives to
expand them for the expression of the genius, and it may easily go a little
too far and make that unstable structure break down under the strain. But
the brain of the genius is the promise of the future; it is abnormal on the
right side and not on the wrong. It is the very front of the crest of the
wave of evolution.
Now in India, where these things are studied, the science
of Yoga is intended to prevent the dangers of hysteria in those who are
coming into touch with the [46] higher planes. It is, therefore, a
science that works along two lines: a discipline and a purification of the
body, in order that the nerve cells may be able to vibrate in answer to the
higher impacts without disturbance and without the causing of hysteria, and
a training of the mind. Therefore, it is said that the food of a man who
would receive these vibrations uninjured must be what is called satvic; that
is, must have in it the dominance of rhythm, of harmony. For, as you know,
the Hindus regard matter - as indeed science does - as having three
essential characteristics, of which rhythm is one, and rhythmic food is laid
down as essential for the Yogi? Also he must use his mind in meditation, for
by the strain of meditation, of fixed thought, he gradually builds up a
mechanism of the brain which is necessary for the reception of those higher
waves of consciousness; and gradually, so that the physical vehicle may not
break under the strain, the mechanism of consciousness is trained to work in
answer to the three worlds, instead of only in answer to the one. Those are
the principles that underlie the science of Yoga.
We find, as we look at it in this way, that we are face
to face with wondrous possibilities as regards our mechanism. We find it may
be possible for us to make this mechanism more and more receptive to the
waves that come to us from above, and gradually we shall begin to
understand. All those vague premonitions, intuitions, dreams, come to us
because our astral and mental bodies are being affected in their own worlds,
[47] are responding to that etherial and metetherial environment of
which Mr. Myer speaks. The whole of these are to be referred to those
worlds, and consciousness is answering to them, and these answers affect
the physical mechanism of consciousness, coming through in this vague
indeterminate fashion. They could not reach us at all unless the mechanism
for their reception were already in our possession, unless we were in touch
with a higher world than the physical; so that, however unsatisfactory, they
bear witness to this inestimable fact, that the human consciousness is not
tied down to the physical plane, but stretches into greater worlds than
these. But when the knowledge comes through clearly defined, distinct, then
we know that it is not knowledge coming from the higher planes by way of
vibrations outside the mechanism playing upon it from without; then it comes
from the Spirit himself, sending down his own knowledge, his own
inspirations, and we can distinguish the inspirations from within from the
results of the impacts from without, by the clearness and definiteness of
the coming, from the illuminating nature of the revelation.
Now surely, if we grasp these facts, not only do they
open new vistas of hope, but in our present life also they are full of
encouragement, and give the justification for that in-eradicable instinct in
humanity which seeks for Art, Beauty, and Religion, even although they may
seem to be of what is sometimes called “no practical value” in the life of
men. I saw a quotation from a materialist in a book some months ago, to the
[48] effect that art and religion were bye-products - a most
significant phrase. A bye-product is something produced in the process of
manufacture, which does not conduce to the end aimed at in the manufacture,
but simply comes out in the process and is cast aside. Truly are Art and
Religion bye-products of human evolution, if the only mechanism of
consciousness is in the physical body. Truly, if the life of man is only in
this particular world, would Art and Religion be bye-products, for they
would not conduce to man’s material progress, they would not conduce to
man’s conquest of the earth. But if the evolution of man is not an evolution
in one world but in three; if man is not only the noblest of animals but a
living Spirit from God Himself; if the human consciousness is living in the
three worlds and not only in the one, with a boundless glory beyond those
worlds of which now we can only dream - ah! then, Art, which tells of
beauty, which is harmony and therefore divine, is a process of priceless
value for the evolution of the higher consciousness, and every dream of the
artist, every dream of the musician, every dream of beauty which has come to
the human brain, is only a glimpse of the Eternal Beauty, which is God in
one of His manifestations, and has in it the promise of a future evolution,
when that Beauty shall be unveiled before the eyes of men. And Religion,
which is the search after God, which is the deep in-rooted belief that man
can know God, and that man is one in his spiritual nature with God Himself,
that, instead of being a bye-product, is the most essential [49]
factor in human evolution, and its influence on man is the influence of a
wider future, which makes the guidance of life reasonable in regard to the
whole of this evolution, and not in regard only to the fragment of it that
we see on the physical globe. For Art and Religion are only justified by
this, that they belong to a greater world; that they belong to a longer
evolution; that they are the evolution of the Spirit and not of the body, of
the God in man, and not of the triumphant brute. And if that be true, ah!
then they are all important to human kind; if that be true, then all things
physical that men follow here are as dust in the balance when weighed
against them. Human wealth and human power, human fame and human glory,
these are only the things of a moment, unworthy of the eternal Spirit; but
Art, which is the pursuit of Beauty, and Religion, which is the seeking
after God, these are indeed the true ends of life; to them points our
evolution; towards them our growth is tending; and the triplicity of the
mechanism of consciousness reveals the ends of man’s true evolution, and the
purposes of the worlds in which he lives. [50]
Sub-Consciousness and Super-Consciousness.
I must ask you tonight to bear in mind last Sunday’s
lecture, “The Mechanism of Consciousness”, so that you may be able to put
into their appropriate places the phenomena with which we are this evening
to deal.
I have called our subject: “Sub-Consciousness and
Super-Consciousness”. I do not, of course, mean to exclude from our
consideration that very important part of consciousness -in fact to most
people the most important part - the Waking-Consciousness. We shall want to
understand the relation of the Waking-consciousness both to the
sub-consciousness and to the super-consciousness.
The difficulty you must all have in reading such works as
that of the late Mr. Myers, is the difficulty of classification, the want of
some arrangement under which [51] the facts may fall. And it is
really that kind of framework that I desire to place, if possible, at your
service. And first of all we have the necessity of distinguishing in the
mass of what Mr. Myers calls the sub-conscious, between the two factors
which I shall ask you to consider as the sub-conscious and the
super-conscious.
Now, Mr. Myers uses one very convenient simile when
dealing with the sub-conscious; he speaks of a diaphragm, below which fall
those facts of consciousness which he then calls the sub-conscious, just as
the diaphragm divides the trunk of the body, and there is no immediate
communication between the two halves thus divided, save the alimentary
canal. So he tries, as it were, to put a diaphragm across the facts of
consciousness. All that is below it is the sub-conscious; all that is above
it is the waking-consciousness. Now we can utilise that figure, if you
please; but then I shall want to have two diaphragms; one such as Mr. Myers
has, below which consciousness falling shall be called sub-conscious; and
another above the ordinary waking-consciousness, so that anything which is
above that second diaphragm may be called the super-conscious. I think we
shall be able to distinguish clearly between the one and the other. We shall
be able to find and to identify the part of the mechanism through which the
sub-conscious and super-conscious arrive in the waking-consciousness; and
although we shall find, especially on one point, that there will be a little
doubt as to how we shall classify one set of facts, [52] still,
speaking generally; the classification will serve us well enough.
Now, when we speak of the waking-consciousness, what do
we mean? And what is it that limits that waking-consciousness? Why does some
part of what we call our consciousness escape us, whether it sink below or
whether it soar above? What we call the waking-consciousness is that which
we find normally in or through the brain - I ought, perhaps, to say “the
centre of waking-consciousness”, for that place is not always the brain; if
we go back into the waking-consciousness of very slightly developed
creatures, we go farther back than the time when the brain appeared, and
then the principal ganglion of the nervous system would act as the mechanism
of the waking-consciousness. But for us today the brain is that through
which the waking-consciousness plays. I do not say that nothing more comes
through it, but. that which we find normally in the brain, and of which we
are aware, we shall call the “waking-consciousness”; and when we notice it,
we find it is made up of percepts and concepts derived from the outer world
primarily, and then manipulated by the brain - manipulated by our thought
using the brain as its instrument. This will be our general definition of
what constitutes the waking-consciousness. You must not forget to add to
that which is derived from the outer world, the results of the working on
that by the brain, for that is of enormous importance; and if it be left
out, the contents of the waking-consciousness may be too narrowly defined.
Nor must we forget that, [53] according to the development of
consciousness, there will be a greater or less working and manipulation of
that which comes into consciousness from the outer world. The faculties
which we possess, that we have brought with us out of our past, which we
have largely developed in our life between death and birth, these work upon
the materials coming from the outside world, and work upon them to very
different extents. According to the development of these faculties will be
the power of perception of the outer world. There is a very different power
of perception between, say, the artist and the ploughman. The same things
may present themselves to each, but the power of perceiving what is
presented will depend upon the evolution of the faculties. So that we cannot
leave out that question of individual evolution of faculty, when we come to
consider the contents of our waking-consciousness.
The contents of the waking-consciousness will be
clear-cut and defined; that is a characteristic of thought working in and
through the brain. Where the brain is concerned, the outlines of the thought
can be readily seen and grasped; and it would appear that one of the reasons
of this coming down of consciousness into lower planes is this obtaining of
clear-cut ideas about the universe. For it is a very marked fact, in
studying the evolution of consciousness, that the clearness begins on the
lowest plane, the clearness of the higher planes being gradually added; and
it is necessary that consciousness shall pass through the physical plane in
order that it may definitely grasp and understand. [54] This point
has a most important bearing upon evolution, for it must have struck some of
you as strange, when studying the evolution of the senses, that coming
downwards the senses increase in number. The sense-organs belong to the
physical plane, and they develop one after another; but as we return
homewards in our upward climbing, we lose these senses one after another, so
that on reaching the mental plane the phrase is used that there is only one
sense. The real meaning and interest of that lies in the fact, that we
cannot first gain on the mental plane this clear-cut definition; we can only
learn the outer world by coming down to the physical, developing the
sense-organs, learning to use them, and by their help developing the
centres in the astral body from which they originated; and after all that
has been done, and clearness of vision has been attained, then the means of
the gaining can be thrown aside, and we can keep the definiteness on the
higher planes which we could not have obtained without the descent into the
lower. And so a meaning attaches to the mystic words used in the Upanishats,
where it is said of the Supreme: “Without senses enjoying sensations”. They
could not be reached without the primary definition on the physical, but in
the upward course of man in his evolution towards divinity, he will be able
to drop the organs while still preserving the faculties
evolved by the help of and through those organs.
Returning from that slight digression - which seemed,
none the less, to be needed for the grasp of our subject - we come to the
fact that the content of our [55] waking-consciousness is that which
comes from without, and which is worked upon by the faculties already
developed in evolution. And we have one other thing to remember in dealing
with the waking-consciousness, that it is ever changing as to content, that
it only at each moment includes the things to which we are attending. The
enormous importance of attention has come out more and more in modern
Psychology. Now the attention of consciousness is like the fixing of the
eye on a particular spot. You can only see generally within certain limits;
you can only see clearly that towards which the eye is definitely directed.
But you are vaguely conscious of other things outside the clear field of
vision, and this has given to psychologists a convenient image; that that
which is in waking-consciousness is that which is within the direct vision.
There will be a fringe of which we are half-conscious, and of which at any
moment we may become fully conscious by turning our attention to it. The
power of attention is a thing which can be enlarged. Now, while many of you,
looking at a number of objects, would be able to define only three or four
of them, if you trained your physical power of attention to accurate
observation, you would find you could greatly increase the number of things
towards which that vision could be directed at the same time, with a perfect
recognition and distinction of the objects perceived. It is an area that
may be enlarged by practice; and this is also true as regards the attention.
You will find that by practising attention you can greatly enlarge it, and
attend to more and [56] more things at one and the same time; that
you can bring a larger number of ideas within the field of clear vision. It
is a useful practice, whether as regards the physical or the mental eye, to
seek to enlarge its area of observation, to make that field of clear vision
larger in both cases.
But still that curious question arises: What is it that
limits the waking-consciousness? We are told that our consciousness is much
larger than our waking-consciousness. But why? Why should we not be able to
bring into waking-consciousness everything of which we are conscious
anywhere? There are two points which we must understand in this relation:
the first of them is rather analogous to the vibration of the eye. We cannot
see below the red nor above the violet, although vision is possible beyond
these limits, the ant normally seeing by means of vibrations for which we
are blind; and there is something of the same kind with regard to the brain
through which our consciousness is focussed. It can only answer to
vibrations which fall within a certain range. In the first place, its power
of vibrating depends on the material of which it is composed. Let me recall
for a moment what is called the “permanent atom”. Remember that the atoms
you draw to yourself, all the molecules made up of atoms, are conditioned
by the amount of development and the power of vibration in your own
permanent atom, that which has passed with you through the ages, the magnet
on each plane whereby you attract round yourself your new body for your use.
According to the experience stored up in [57] the permanent atom will
be the nature of the material that we draw to ourselves; so that there you
have a very definite limitation.
You are limited, moreover, by your past experiences, and
the record of those, preserved in these permanent atoms, will exercise a
limiting power over your waking-consciousness; you cannot bring within it
more than is permitted by those stored-up powers of vibration which govern
the matter which you draw around you, the permanent atom exercising the
selective action of which I spoke last week. But that is not all; another
point is the absolute constitution of that atom, as regards the number of
spiral strands which are active in it, according to our stage of evolution.
Now, in the ordinary physical atom, at the present stage of evolution, four
of these spiral strands - technically termed “spirillae” - are normally
active; so that the matter around us, out of which we have to select the
material of our bodies, is normally developed up to a particular point;
according to the number of spirillae active in the atom will be the amount
of consciousness that you can bring into the brain, the amount of thought to
which those atoms will be able to respond. But the number of active
spirillae in the material all around us is increased in the brains of those
whose thought-power is more largely developed; so that those who are
definitely and carefully thinking day by day are not simply improving their
own brain, but also improving for others the amount of available material of
a higher kind. For you must remember that we have no life-tenancy of [58]
our bodies, but a tenancy which is constantly beginning and ending. Atoms
are constantly coming in and going out. While those atoms form part of our
brain, they are subject to every improvement, which our thought-power can
bring to bear upon them; so that we literally become helpers of the
consciousness evolving in the world by the evolution of our own. We cannot
live an isolated life. Nature has bound us together by bonds none is able to
break; and whenever we are thinking, and thereby improving the matter in
which we think, we are also acting as helpers of the world’s consciousness,
and giving to our brother man, by virtue of our identity of nature, better
material with which he also can work, making easier for him the coming down
of the higher consciousness into the brain.
There we have one side of the limitation - the material:
the other comes from outside us. It is the limitation set by those generally
spoken of as the “Lords of Karma”, the “Archangels”, who have to do with the
administering of human destinies, with the balancing of human affairs. They
form one, and perhaps almost the chief, of the limiting factors; for
according to our past karma is the general mould of the brain with which we
are to be born, especially according to that part of our past karma selected
by Them as sufficiently congruous to be worked out in a single earth-life.
According to that will be the general shape of the brain, we supplying the
material to be built into it, but not ourselves controlling that general
outline, that larger moulding of the shape of the brain. And it is quite
[59] possible that anyone, with some un-exhausted karma behind him which
needs for its carrying out a limitation of the faculties of the
waking-consciousness, might come into incarnation with only so much of the
physical substratum of thought shaped in the brain as fits the working out
of the karma which is to occupy that human life. That is a decided
limitation, for although it be ultimately self-made, it comes from without
so far as this present life is concerned. These limitations within which we
are compelled to work, this lack of these faculties that often distresses
and annoys us, are the signs of the limitations imposed upon us from without
by the working of causes we ourselves have initiated, although their
application at the moment is brought about by forces external to ourselves.
Those two things seem to be an explanation of the limitation of the
waking-consciousness - why so much comes down, and no more.
Pass from that to the sub-consciousness. Now here we have
to fare a difficulty: it contains a great mass of different things that need
to be sorted out and arranged. It has well been called a “vast
lumber-room”, and in it we find all kinds of relics of the past - all
sorts of rags and tatters of yesterday, which are still attached to the
vehicles in which we are working; and we need to sort out the lumber in
order to recognise, when anything comes to the surface, its place in our
consciousness, its root in our past evolution. First of all, there will be a
mass of things - to which I hastily alluded last week - which have been
handed over by [60] the waking-consciousness to the sympathetic
nervous system. Those we must separate and put on one side, as they differ
greatly in characteristics from those which have fallen a little out of the
ordinary working cerebro-spinal system, but lie still in the brain and
nerves, which are also in the sub-consciousness, but stored up in a
different part of the mechanism. There are many cupboards in the
lumber-room of sub-consciousness in which different things are stored, and
from which they may come forth.
Now those which are stored in the sympathetic system will
include all those strange and dim relics of our past that have come down to
us through our parents, and also through our own permanent atoms. They will
be vague, dim, difficult to grasp - remnants of savage lives, nay, even of
animal existences, dull gropings and searchings long left behind by the
advancing consciousness of man, memories dim and blind, which still have
left their marks on our physical system. To those belong very many of the
so-called causeless terrors to which some sensitive people are exposed, a
fear that comes they know not why, a fear which cannot be overcome by any
reasoning. Reason may dominate for a time, but if the fear be very strong,
the body will be carried away in spite of reason. Such causeless panic - I
am not speaking of the panic that sometimes sweeps over a crowd, a very
different thing - is occasionally found within ourselves when in bad health,
through the exhaustion of the cerebro-spinal system. A causeless terror will
sometimes rise up from the past. Sometimes [61] it takes the form of
a fear of the “super-natural”. That fear may, indeed, be given rise to in
another way; but there is a certain fear of the “super-natural” belonging to
the remnants left in the sympathetic system from the past, from the time
when men lived in constant fear of the unknown, and when, in the unknown of
nature they saw armies of super-natural enemies. That fear arises sometimes
from national and ancestral traits conveyed to the physical body, and things
which we do not fear in our waking-consciousness, assert themselves at
times as objects of dread. One instance of that comes to my mind in the case
of the great writer, Thomas Carlyle. He said that during the day-time he did
not believe in the devil, but that if he awoke in the middle of the night,
he thoroughly believed in him. He did not believe in the devil; but
the impressions of his Scottish ancestry, the impressing on the child-mind
of that terrible enemy, and the fear of being grasped by him in some moment
of folly - that remained sub-consciously, and rose up in the mind at the
time when the vitality of the physical frame was at its lowest point -
during the night. Here, however, there had mingled with the ancestral
reminiscences that second form of unconsciousness belonging to the present
life, where the thoughts had simply sunk into a deeper layer of the physical
brain, and had not been handed over to the sympathetic system. It is
possible by means of hypnotism to differentiate these two forms of
unconsciousness. You cannot, in the hypnotic trance, revive that which is
in the grip of the [62] sympathetic system, but you can revive that
which is in the deeper layers of the brain. Then there are all those actions
alluded to last week, which were purposeful in the past, but which have been
handed over to the sympathetic system to carry on, and those play a very
important part in the sub-consciousness. There is very much that we used to
do with attention, to which we now pay no attention. There is only a certain
amount of attention available, although it may be slightly enlarged, and as
the Ego finds he is able to take advantage of the automatism of nature, and
hand over to the vehicles the repetition of that which he has made them do
over and over again, this sub-consciousness increases, and everything which
falls under the sympathetic control becomes sub-conscious. You know how
readily in our already trained nerves and muscles this handing over a thing
to the automatic power of the physical body takes place. One of the
commonest instances would be the act of writing, or of playing upon the
piano. You know how a child throws his whole body into the action of
learning to write; how he makes all sorts of faces; how he writhes in the
agony of attention. He cannot help it; the whole force of his attention has
to be turned towards the difficult manipulation of his fingers. As the
automatic habit is established, the fingers write without his thinking of
the movement. And in the case of the trained pianist, well-known passages
are performed entirely by the automatic power of the body. And that is
continually going on. The Ego takes advantage of the automatism [63]
of his vehicles to put into their hands as much as he can get rid of.
Remember he is always striving upwards, trying to get rid of the lower
planes; he is always trying to throw off the burdens that prevent his
climbing. He does not want to be bothered, say, with the looking after of
the vital functions of the body, and only gives his attention to the
machinery he has trained when anything goes wrong. The whole of that we can
put aside as sub-conscious. All such workings are recoverable with pains,
but it is not worth while; on the contrary, the more we can hand over to
that automatism the better. The less we have to utilise our
waking-consciousness for the things that are constantly recurring, the
more shall we have to work with for the things that really need its
attention; and it is a distinct gain, as we hand over one part of our
purposive action after another into the careful mechanism of the sympathetic
system, with its power of doing after a certain amount of practice that
which it is most desirable that it should do.
But there is another part of the sub-consciousness a
little more difficult to define. I put it rather on the border between the
sub-conscious and super-conscious. It comes through the sympathetic system;
therefore it has the mark of the sub-conscious upon it. On the other hand,
it does not belong to the past, so that it loses one of the hall-marks of
our sub-conscious; for, speaking generally, the sub-conscious comes out of
the past. Now, we find coming into the waking-consciousness certain vague
intuitions; certain vague fears - not the same as that spoken of just now,
but others [64] that we cannot grasp - the fear of impending
misfortune which is often followed by news of misfortune, the
half-knowledge of the death of some friend, of an accident or illness of
some one dear to us; these come to us from the sub-consciousness in this
intermediate condition. We can trace exactly how they come, and you must
decide for yourself, after looking at the way of their occurring, whether
you classify them as sub-conscious or super-conscious. They come from the
astral plane, and they come from phenomena of that plane affecting the
vibrations of the surface of the astral body from outside. Some misfortune
which has just occurred makes a vibrating picture on the astral plane. That
picture, vibrating in astral matter, affects the astral body from without,
coming up against it just as you might feel a breeze, throwing the surface
of the astral body into vibrations. Those vibrations will convey themselves
to the sympathetic nervous system, especially by way of the solar
plexus-the most important plexus, perhaps, in that system, as regards the
communication with the astral body. By way of the sympathetic system
generally and the solar plexus particularly this feeling will assert itself,
will be passed on by the sympathetic system to the brain, and so, coming
into the waking-consciousness, make you conscious of the dread. It has
worked itself round in this way: from outside to the vibrating astral body,
through that astral body to the sympathetic nervous system, to the solar
plexus, and from the solar plexus it works its way upwards through the
connecting links to the [65] brain, where it emerges in our
waking-consciousness. This is often accompanied by a feeling of sickness if
the vibration be very strong, and that feeling of sickness is very
characteristic of the place at which it enters, the solar plexus, so
constantly connected with the mechanism of the stomach. You will often find,
if you observe carefully, that these manifestations of dread are accompanied
by a feeling of physical sickness. And so with many other sensations,
especially those of fear, of a different kind from that which I mentioned,
and said I would refer to again. Many people have a feeling of dread which
is not the feeling of dread transmitted from our ancestors, nor a dread
arising from the deeper layers of the brain, but is a dread originating in
the astral plane, and working its way down on to the physical in the same
way that the coming of the vibration I have just described makes its way to
the physical brain. There are many beings on the astral plane whose presence
is antipathetic to man, whose feelings are not friendly - partly because man
is so destructive an animal. The elementals having to do with the physical
and animal world are all more or less hostile to the human race, because of
the trouble the human race causes them. If you watch the thoughtlessly
destructive action of many people, you will readily see how the hostility
may arise from the astral plane, where these particular elementals have
their habitat; and this feeling of hostility arouses a trembling in the
astral body, and this causes vibration in the sympathetic system, and the
corresponding change in consciousness [66] appears as a fear in the
physical brain. This very often takes place at night for the reason alluded
to, that the physical vitality is then lower than during the day. Moreover,
if your nervous and muscular systems are out of order, you will often be
troubled by certain fears of the senses, which give rise to what are roughly
called hallucinations - visions which are often the dim catching sight of
beings existing in the astral world. To get rid of those, increase the
health, and, by understanding whence they come, oppose your knowledge to the
influence on the brain.
This leads us on to a consideration of the
super-conscious; and I should give as the general definition of the
super-conscious, that which is in consciousness on the super-physical
planes, and when sent down to the physical plane arrives directly in the
brain, not through the sympathetic system; where it comes from the astral,
it comes from the astral senses communicating with the physical senses, and
not from the surface of the astral body communicating with the sympathetic
system. This is an important point; because here you want to increase while
controlling, and not to chase away and get rid of. Now many visions and
hearings of voices come in this way, and the first thing in dealing with
them is not to be afraid. The moment you fear, you are losing grip of your
brain, and are falling under the control of your sympathetic nervous system;
so that fear is the most deadly enemy of the man who would bring the
super-consciousness into connexion with his normal waking-consciousness.
[67] If you are timid, leave it alone, for you may injure yourselves,
causing nervous disintegration which may go on even into madness. I say
that, because visions and voices are always regarded by doctors as signs of
danger; and they are signs of danger if they come accompanied with
instability of the nervous organisation. They are not signs of danger, but
signs of a widening of the brain-consciousness, if they come with health and
with sanity, apart from any symptoms of hysteria, any eccentricity of
thought and conduct. If you find the normal is disturbed with the coming of
these visions or voices from the super-conscious, then set to work to
improve your normal health. If, on the other hand, you find the normal is
not upset, if you find you axe sane for your everyday work while at the same
time this opening of consciousness is perceived, then you can go on without
attending particularly to the question of the nervous mechanism. I do not
forget, in saying this, that very often true visions from the
super-consciousness come hand in hand with a disorganised nervous system.
This is perfectly true; because, as I told you last week, the stage of
evolution we have reached is not yet sufficiently high for the sane
vibration of the brain in connexion with these higher vibrations. Therefore,
they need not be at once rejected, because you find them accompanied by some
instability of the normal brain; but such nervous trouble is a
danger-signal, warning you to take care of the body and not press it beyond
its possibility of healthy existence; a sign only to allow them to come very
slowly, [68] gradually, deliberately, to shut the door upon them to a
considerable extent, until the brain accustoms itself to the reception of
such messengers. You may say: “How can I do it? They come uninvited”. Still
you can shut your door. Occupy the brain with something else, and that
normal exercise of the brain will prevent these visitors from being too
insistent. It is not that you are going to shut them out altogether, but you
are not going to let them break up the mechanism whereby hereafter they
shall come normally into consciousness. You see that you are here treading
difficult ground, and knowledge is absolutely necessary for safety.
From the super-conscious region come down those impulses
which are called the promptings of genius. Directly from the higher
Self-conscious ‘I’ these promptings of genius come down, sometimes causing
instability of the brain which is not yet fitted for the reception of them;
but that is the instability of growth, not of disease. But you may say:
“Sometimes with the genius we find great irregularity of moral conduct,” and
that is a point which puzzles people very much. Why is it that hand in hand
with these rushes from the higher planes, coming from the higher mental
plane straight down into the brain, why should those be accompanied by
irregularities of life? Under that strange phenomenon is working a law which
it is well to understand, a law obscure in its workings, subtle in its
bearing upon life, but none the less of enormous importance, and most
important of all for those who [69] desire to quicken their evolution
and increase the incomings from the super-consciousness. It is this: when
any force comes down from a higher plane it is subject to transmutation in
the vehicle into which it comes. According to the nature of the vehicle will
be the transmutation of the force; not the whole of it - some will come
through in its pristine glory, and assert itself in the lower world in its
spiritual splendour, but a large part of it will be changed by the
vehicle into which it plays, and it will then be changed into the form of
energy to which that vehicle lends itself most readily. This is the law,
and a law of far-reaching importance; for it means that it is not well for a
great rush of spiritual or of higher mental life to come down into the
unprepared body - not now from the standpoint of the danger of nervous
disorganisation, but because the ordinary channels of energy in that body
will catch the flow, and will transmute part of it simply into greater
vitality, strengthening the force which is accustomed to run in those
channels; so that if an organism have a tendency, say, to sexual excitement,
genius will immensely increase the force of that sexual excitement by that
part of it which is transmuted into vitality. Some of you who are students
of the past may have caught a glimpse of the fact that it was this which
made necessary the coming of the Sons of Mind into the Third Race; the
downfall of the spiritual life into the channels of the animal man so
enormously increased his animal powers, that it was necessary that the Sons
of Mind should come to the helping, or humanity would have plunged down
[70] into the vilest of animal excesses, the very force of the
spiritual life would have increased the depth of the plunge into
degradation. So that when you are inviting, as so many are inviting today,
the down-flow of the super-conscious into the waking-consciousness, take
care as to the purity of the vessels into which that water of life is to
flow. It was once said by a great Teacher that just as the purest water
becomes polluted and muddy when it flows into vessels that are foul, so is
the Divine Wisdom defiled when it flows into minds that are unprepared, into
hearts that are impure. Certainly strive to bring within your being the
down-flow from the higher planes; certainly strive to open up the whole of
your nature to the rays of sunshine which come from those loftier regions;
but beware, in inviting that fecundating force of the sunlight, that there
are no seeds of foulness within your nature, which may be quickened into
growth when the sunlight falls upon them. Beware that you purify the nature,
before you invite the inflow of the higher forces. Hence has it been said to
the candidates for the higher teaching: “First, cease from evil.” Until you
have ceased from evil, the less of the higher life that flows into you the
better. After you have ceased to do evil, begin the control of the senses.
Subject them absolutely to the mastery of the mind; then bring the mind
under the control of the higher mind, and make the wanderings and errancies
of the lower mind quiet and still, under the influence of the higher. Only
when the man has thus purified the vehicles, only in the tranquility of the
senses [71] and the silence of the mind, can he see with safety the
glory of the Self. I do not give the warning in order to discourage you from
treading the higher path, from seeking for the higher life; the warning is
only the warning of one who has seen the dangers of the inflow of the life
into the unprepared and unpurified vehicles. I repeat the warning of the
ages and of the Wise, and simply put it into modern phraseology Climb! climb
as you will, with full courage, with steady heart, with open eyes,
fearlessly, without dread of aught that you may meet; for the Divine within
you is stronger than aught that is without you. But as you climb the ladder,
take care that the feet are clean with which you climb. Cleanse the feet
before you climb the ladder, and do not soil its rungs with the mire of
earth; for that will make your feet cling to the ladder, will prevent the
climbing, or even may make you slip and fall.
Climb as you will; but remember that only to the pure is the vision of the
Divine vouchsafed. Climb as you will; but remember that the
super-consciousness must come down into a waking-consciousness that is pure.
If you purify it, then climb onwards swiftly as your courage can carry you,
swiftly as your enthusiasm can raise you; for to the pure there is no danger
in any world, and to the heart of the pure will all Nature’s secrets be
unveiled. [72]
Clairvoyance and Clairaudience.
We are to study tonight certain phenomena very well known
in their outline, and becoming more and more common in our day. They are
still more common if we travel across the Atlantic, and even commoner yet as
we go West across America. This increase of people who possess powers at
present abnormal and unusual is very marked if you follow along the line I
have suggested. This increase appears to be partly due to the climatic
conditions, and partly, perhaps, to the temporary instability that is the
result of crossing races with each other - more, however, I am inclined to
think, is due to climatic influences than to the other causes. The electric
tension in the atmosphere has a remarkable effect upon the nerves, and the
condition of the nerves is closely concerned with the lower forms of
clairvoyance. I am told that the proportion of people who show capacity in
this way has increased even in late years. When I myself was on the
Californian [73] Coast some eight years ago, I noticed, in dealing
with a public audience, that there was no need to argue as to the reality of
the facts; so many people having had experiences of their own, so many more
having heard of the experiences of relatives or friends, the task of the
Theosophist there changes its character. One had to explain things which
they accepted, and not to argue, as you still must on this side of the
Atlantic, as to the reality of the happenings. So far as the reality of them
goes, however, we find a great change is coming over public opinion here as
well. The facts are so well authenticated, they have been subjected to such
careful analysis and scrutiny, that when you come to the irreducible minimum
you have facts, that even scepticism can hardly challenge.
This evening I want, if possible, to classify these
phenomena, and show you the lines along which they appear to go; to show you
the part of us which is concerned with them, as I may say, and so perhaps,
by giving you an outline of that kind, I may make it easy for you hereafter
to put such phenomena in their proper places; to deal intelligently with
them; and to explain to those who have not studied the theosophical theory
how luminous it is with regard to these abnormal happenings.
Let us recognise, then, that we are to deal now with a
perceiver, an inner Man, who is going to perceive as much as he can through
his available organs. He is well accustomed to use his physical organs - for
tens and hundreds of thousands of years he has been working [74] with
these, so that he has comparatively no difficulty with them; he understands
fairly well the phenomena that surround him on the physical plane. He can
sort them out according to reiterated observations, and he knows quite well
that he answers to these whenever the vibrations that come from them strike
upon a part of his body able to vibrate in the same fashion, whenever he is
able to reproduce within his body vibrations similar to those that strike on
that body from without. He knows that the power of perceiving varies in
himself and in others, even within the familiar physical senses. He knows
perfectly well, by innumerable scientific experiments, that the power of
hearing is not the same in all the people around him, but varies very much,
although it is not called “clairaudience” until it goes far beyond the
normal. Before that point it would simply be called “exceptional acuteness
of hearing”, and no sort of difficulty arises in the way of the most
scientific mind accepting these differences. Of course you know how the
siren is used to test hearing; higher and higher notes are given out, and as
the notes become higher and higher; one after another of the listeners drops
out, and says: “There is silence.” Now, there is not silence, but only
incapacity to hear; the machine is going on, and some are able to hear the
note after the first person has dropped out. A second says: “There is
silence,” but others still hear. So you can go on and on, until at last you
reach a note which no one present is able to hear. You have gone beyond the
limits of even acute physical hearing. What do we need, then, [75] to
go a little farther? We simply need to have the organ of physical hearing
made a little more tense, so that it responds to rather swifter vibrations.
And similarly with sight. Here we need to make the organ of sight a little
more delicate, so that we may be able to respond to vibrations to which at
present it is insensible; for the whole thing turns on that - the organ of
sensation, the nature of the vibration - endless vibrations are around us
to which we are wholly insensible. They do not exist for us.
Let us try, then, first of all, to classify, with regard
to sight, the phenomena which present themselves under the general name of
“clairvoyance”. The first of these will come when what you may call the
ordinary physical sight becomes a little sharper; and it can be made a
little sharper by treatment. I want to take you step by step, so that you
may see that there is nothing really marvellous here, but a ladder, the
steps of which are perfectly intelligible. The first thing is to make the
physical sight a little more acute by dealing with it in a particular way.
One successful way has been to shut the person up in a cellar for a time.
The darkness has a certain effect upon the retina, rendering it more
sensitive. This was observed by Baron von Reichenbach many years ago, but he
came a little too early. He shut people up for hours in the dark, and found
that a considerable portion of these people could thereafter see that which
they could not see when they went in; and the thing that they saw was simply
the light emanating from a magnet. He took his people from [76] all
classes of society, and he found a large number of them could see the magnet
in the dark, and notice that there was more light round the poles than in
the middle. Those experiments you can read at your leisure. And they have
never really been disproved, or improved upon. Among other things he noticed
was that people could not only see the light of the magnet, but could see
the mesmeric fluid emanating from the finger tips of the mesmerist.
Then we come to a modern experiment, an interesting one,
the details of which I was told the other day by a well-known French
scientist, who was interested in the debated question of the “N” rays. As
you may probably know from the reports, some people can see those rays, and
some cannot; therefore the first thing the scientist says is: “Oh! they are
a delusion.” But a little breach was made in that favourite and accustomed
attitude by finding that two or three of the scientific men, who could not
see at first, could be made to see by subjecting them to the same training
in a cellar, so that after sitting in darkness for three or four hours, they
were able to see the rays. And this seems to me a point of enormous
importance to the regular scientific man - that there is a possibility of
training the body to see more than it can normally see. For that is the
beginning of quite a new system: that a man may come into touch with subtler
vibrations, not by proving a physical apparatus outside himself, but by
improving the physical apparatus of his own body - a very popular way of
working in Eastern lands, [77] where the method of science is to
improve the body of the scientist rather than to make more delicate
instruments with which he can experiment outside. Of course, I do not say
that those experiments have established to the universal satisfaction of
scientific men the existence of the “N” rays; they have not. But they have
done much in that direction, and their repetition over and over again will
make the matter more definite and more generally accepted. You have there,
then, a slight increase of the delicacy of ordinary human sight by
subjecting it to certain conditions.
The next stage is that by changing the balance between
the muscular and the nervous systems a little, you can sometimes obtain a
greater keenness of vision, or a greater delicacy of hearing, than is normal
to the individual concerned. Where the person is in strong and robust
health, he will be blind and deaf to these delicate vibrations. Supposing
the muscular strength diminishes and a tension is put upon his nerves,
either deliberately by artificial action, such as fasting - a favourite way
in the Middle Ages - which lowers the bodily vitality and tends to, make the
nerves more sensitive; or accidentally, as in cases of nervous tension,
either by mental worry or in any other way. Under these conditions a partial
clairvoyance will show itself, which decreases when healthier conditions are
recovered. An old friend of mine, a materialist, was rather remarkable in
this way for her occasional clairvoyant sight - remarkable because she
remained a materialist in spite of it. If she were very anxious, worried,
over-worked, [78] or a little ill, she would find herself seeing
where; as she said, there was nothing. She saw in a very peculiar way a
friend of hers who had lately passed over. She saw what we call the “etheric
double”, and she described exactly the disintegration the etheric double
undergoes as the physical body decays; so that anyone knowing anything about
the break-up of the etheric double could trace from her description what she
had seen. At the time, I had nothing by which to explain these facts, but
later on I came to understand what it was she had seen. Another of her
experiences was one concerning a man she had known fairly well, and with
whom she had often gone to concerts. The man died. To her great surprise,
this gentleman one day appeared to her and walked with her, discussing
musical points, so that she could hardly convince herself that he was dead,
or that she herself was under a delusion. She told me that the whole thing
was so common-place and natural that she looked upon it as a most
extraordinary happening, and left it as a thing she could not explain. That
experience also I put by as an interesting and to the materialist an
unexplained, fact. There was in this case the change of balance I mentioned,
the lack of vigour of the ordinary muscular system, and the overstrained
condition of the nerves. It is no answer to that to say: “hallucination”;
for that explains nothing; because when you have said “hallucination”, the
next question that arises is: “What is hallucination?” These hallucinations
are very instructive. The fact that they come to people with overstrained
[79] nerves is very significant, for it means that the nerve is
vibrating at a higher tension, and that if it were possible to get that
higher tension without loss of physical health we should make a distinct
step forward in evolution, so far as normal vision is concerned.
We now come to another class of cases where the nature of
the clairvoyance is what we call “astral”, the foregoing being classed under
the head of “etheric”. Under the heading of “astral vision” you will have a
large number of those appearances of people at the moment of death, or
shortly before or after it, together with a large number of other phenomena,
the seeing of thought-forms, and so on; and among these will come that very
curious phenomenon called “second sight”, the more significant because it
generally, although not invariably, takes place with people who are somewhat
uncultivated, whose intelligence is not very highly developed, and in whom
the emotional character somewhat predominates over the intellectual. In such
a person the astral body will be very active, and readily thrown into
violent vibration. Moreover, it will answer readily to vibrations coming to
it from outside, when it is itself fairly quiet. Looked at still more
closely, we notice that for the most part in the phenomenon of “second
sight”, you do not get what we Theosophists should speak of as definite and
clear astral vision. You have a vibration in the astral body which is
somewhat general in its character, rather than an action of those centres
in the astral body which are specially connected with astral vision. But you
do have action [80] in the astral centres connected with the physical
eye, and that is an interesting point; for you must remember that the
physical sense organs have astral counterparts, astral centres which are not
the same as those we call distinctively the astral “chakras”, or wheels.
These astral chakras are the organs of the astral body as such, and are used
for clear vision, etc., on the astral plane, as the physical eye is used for
clear vision on the physical plane; but the others that I have called simply
“astral centres” are centres connected with the physical organs. They are
not distinctively astral, although they are aggregations of astral matter in
the astral body. They do not receive direct impressions of astral
happenings, which are then clearly seen and responded to on the astral
plane; they do receive astral vibrations which, being once taken into them
pass on to the physical centres with which they are in communication, so
that they are of the nature of connecting bridges between the astral and
physical planes, and are not developed astral senses in the proper sense of
the term. Second sight belongs to these - a movement in the astral sense
centres which passes on to the physical sight; and there is one
characteristic thing which points to this difference, and that is that
second sight is largely symbolical; it is not often the record of a distinct
happening, but a symbolical presentation of that which is going to happen.
Some Highlander sees a number of his neighbours pass by him, perhaps on a
certain day in the year when it is supposed that anyone who will die during
the year will be seen - and seen how? [81] With a shroud round him;
and the height to which the shroud is raised over the figure is taken as
representing the time which will elapse before that person will die. It is
symbolical; it is not a scene of what is actually taking place on the astral
plane, but the perceiver, who does see what is going on, transmits his
knowledge in this curious symbolical way. Where you get clear vision, there
will be a seeing of the thing as it takes place, and that is not usually,
although it is sometimes, put under this heading of second sight - where a
person, for instance, sees a sinking ship with a loved one on board, or
where any distinct vision of that kind is obtained. Pass a step farther in
clairvoyance, and you come to mental clairvoyance, the coming down into the
physical brain of vibrations from the mental plane; but this usually happens
in the case of genius. You come across it largely in connection with
painters. The painter sees and tries to reproduce, and the greater the
genius of the painter the greater will be his disgust at his imperfect
representation of what he has seen in the moment of inspiration. Now that
cannot be called astral clairvoyance, but rather mental clairvoyance.
Closely connected with that is a subtle form of clairvoyance which enables
a person to recognise a truth and a principle; where a scientific man
suddenly sees one principle which unites and explains a large number of
facts. When he catches sight of an underlying law which classifies and
renders orderly a chaos of observations, that man is, unconsciously to
himself, using a very beautiful form of mental clairvoyance, and it is
[82] in a very literal sense of the term that he sees, although he
himself would not recognise it as sight.
We find, then, an etheric clairvoyance which can be
reached by a slight strain on the ordinary vision; which can be reached also
by unbalancing the normal healthy relation between the muscular and nervous
systems, and which comes about very readily in cases of nervous tension and
overstrain. Then we find the purely astral clairvoyance, which may be
symbolical and more or less vague, but which may be, by training, precise,
definite, and clear. And all these cases I have been taking are cases in
which I am thinking of the person as being in what you would roughly call
his normal state; that is, he is not in a trance, and when astral vision is
developed by careful methods; by deliberately adopted means, then you will
have this astral vision going hand in hand with ordinary physical vision, so
that you practically have an expansion of sight. I mean that the man in the
normal state will then see all the people round him, but will see in
addition the astral people; so that the world to him will be far more
thickly populated, as he will see the astral crowds intermingling with the
physical, the normal consciousness being in full play, no kind of blinding
of that consciousness being necessary to observe the astral phenomena.
You may have astral, and even mental, vision induced in
very ordinary people by certain means which throw them into trance; and this
is very interesting, because if you can evolve from persons in trance
faculties which in their waking state they do not possess, you [83]
show the presence of those faculties in the people, and then it is only a
question of evolution, how soon those faculties will appear in the normal
way. There are many cases known to some of us where trained clairvoyance
has followed the stimulation of the astral faculties by means of the
mesmeric trance. Under these conditions the person would become “lucid”,
able to see in trance. That, repeated over and over again, will very often
cause such a development of the astral faculties as to enable that person
first to throw himself into the trance and see, and secondly to see without
going into the trance condition at all; so that you get in that case the
three definite stages; clairvoyance when thrown by another into trance;
clairvoyance when thrown by himself into trance; and lastly, clairvoyance
so established in the person by practice that it appears without the trance
at all, in the normal condition of the waking-consciousness. That seems to
me specially interesting, because it is so common; so many people become
lucid in the mesmeric trance. I should like to give you one case which seems
to me interesting and significant, because of the people concerned, and also
because of its triviality; so that all questions of thought-transference are
entirely put on one side. It happened to my friend, the late Charles
Bradlaugh. As you all know, he was not a believer in any life outside this
life. He was a materialist in the philosophic sense of the term, an
unbeliever in the existence of the human soul; but he was also a very strong
mesmerist and performed a considerable number [84] of rather
remarkable cures. At one time he was rather fond of experiments with this
mesmeric power of his. He did not understand it, but he was an open-minded
man and could not deny the facts which took place under his own observation.
He used occasionally to mesmerise his wife, and at one time he threw her
into trance when they were both many hundreds of miles away from London. In
the trance his wife used to become “lucid”, which greatly puzzled him.
Throwing her thus into the trance condition, he asked her to go to London -
he used to use these phrases as they produced the desired effect, although
he did not believe they represented the facts - and to go to the office of
the National Reformer, and tell him what she saw there. Presently she
said she was in the office of the National Reformer, and then,
remaining silent for a moment or two, she suddenly called out: “Oh! the
stupid woman, she has put the ‘R’ in upside down.” Next morning, the proofs
arrived by post. When he came to this particular proof, he found the letter
turned upside down exactly as she had stated had been done by the woman
compositor, and that always remained with him an unexplained fact. He knew
it was true. He certainly did not know of the setting up of the article, nor
of the woman turning the letter upside down in one of the words, so that
thought-transference was entirely excluded; and yet there remained the very
material fact that the proof contained the trivial error which had been
observed by his wife hundreds of miles away the day before in the condition
of trance. To me, that is a [85] valuable instance because of the
people concerned, who did not believe, and because there is no other
explanation possible except that she really saw that which she said she saw.
There, of course, you have clairvoyance at a distance in a state of trance,
and if you can get it in trance there is no reason why you should not have
it out of the state of trance. In throwing persons into a trance we have
merely rendered them insensitive to the strong vibrations of the physical
plane, so that the delicate vibrations to which normally they are
insensitive become the only vibrations able to effect them; and it is very
easy to understand how that happens. If you were in the tumult of Covent
Garden Market you would not clearly follow a very delicate tune softly
played on the violin; but in the middle of the night that same tune, played
no more loudly, would be perfectly distinct, and every note would fall
clearly on the ear. That is exactly what happens to the perceiver when his
body is entranced. The vibrations that normally strike on him, but are
drowned by the tumultuous vibrations of the physical plane, strike on him
when these tumultuous vibrations are still. While in trance, he is
insensible to these physical vibrations; you cannot make him feel, or see,
or hear. Being insensitive to these, he can become sensitive to the subtle
vibrations that otherwise are drowned. It is not that they normally do not
reach him; it is that he does not observe them, and a man is only conscious
of that which he observes. If, then, in the trance condition, it is
possible to gain this from most people, surely it is a fair [86]
presumption that these faculties are in a rudimentary condition in man
today. If evolution be true, and if Nature’s powers are not exhausted, and
if we are not so perfect that no higher perfection can be imagined than the
possession of five senses, then it is surely not impossible that these
acuter senses are in a rudimentary stage within us at the present moment,
and in the course of evolution will evolve in all of us. The idea I want to
impress upon you is that these things are on the line of evolution; they are
not supernatural but perfectly natural, only not as common now as they will
be in the future.
The same is true of clairaudience. We have, with respect
to that, two famous historical examples mentioned by Mr. Myers, when dealing
with this particular kind of hearing - interesting because historical, and
because the evidence is so undeniable. I refer, of course, to the cases of
Socrates and of Joan of Arc. The case of Socrates is interesting, because of
the nature of the communications he received. He saw nothing, but heard a
voice, and the voice only interfered with him when he was either going
wrong, or when the action he was going to take would have prevented
something happening that was useful. As you know, he has left a number of
these cases on record, two of which seem to me to be of the profoundest
interest: one, the famous case where a man, sitting at supper with him, was
proposing to commit an assassination known to no one in the room except
himself; the man rose from the table, and the voice spoke to Socrates to
stop him, and he did stop [87] him, and kept him still sitting there.
A second time the man rose to go, and a second time the voice called the
attention of Socrates, and again he stopped him. On the third time he rose
the voice remained silent, and the man, determined as he was to go after a
double warning - for Socrates on each occasion had told him the voice had
spoken - went to his doom. The other case comes near his own death. His
speech has been handed down to us. He said a voice, which generally
interfered when he was going to make a mistake, did not interfere with him
when going down to the place where he made the speech which led to his
death; and while he was making his speech and saying things which provoked
his sentence, the voice remained silent; so that when he got to the end of
that speech which meant his condemnation, he declared that, as the voice had
not interrupted, it meant that death was no evil, - surely one of the most
splendid conclusions ever drawn by a human brain on the policy of a
“supernatural” happening. He recognised what it meant: that death was only
a passage to a higher state, which was not to be avoided.
The other case - that of Joan of Arc - must be familiar
to all of you; but the interesting point of it is that you have the whole
thing in a legal form - the evidence of the woman herself, knowing that her
evidence threatened her with death; the cross-examination by the subtlest
minds in order that her testimony might be shaken; the examination carried
on day after day, repeated over and over again, in case, by any
possibility, [88] she could be forced to a retraction or
contradiction; the clinging to it right through that terrible trial; and
when, giving way in a moment of weakness, she denied it, coming back to it
again and reiterating the reality of the voices she heard. There you have
definite, clear, repeated testimony. The reality you might prove by the
facts of her life; by the fact that the untrained peasant girl did the
things the voices commanded her to do. When you put the evidence given under
such mental stress side by side with the splendid deeds of her life before
the trial, then, it seems to me, you get a mass of evidence impossible to
shake, evidence of the most important and convincing kind which could be put
forward before any jury as proving the fact alleged.
Recognising, then, that these facts are so, let us look,
before leaving them, at a certain danger connected with them. It is well
known that the hearing of voices is one of the commonest signs of impending
insanity. When people begin to hear voices, the mad-doctors shake their
heads; and in a way it is, of course, a sign of danger, and means an
overstrained nervous system which may pass readily into insanity. But
leaving that aside, what is it such people bear? They are hearing voices
from the astral plane. But you may say: “They often say very foolish
things.” But do not you hear foolish things said on the physical plane? I do
not think any things heard spoken by the astral voices are more profoundly
silly than many of the things said day after day by people on the physical
plane. Sometimes a voice gives an incitement to crime. That is a very
[89] interesting question. A person with still enough hold over himself
to realise the danger says: “I feel a terrible impulse to murder some one.”
If you ask him: “Is it any particular person?” He will say: “No.” The utter
irrationality of that inclination to commit a murder without motive is very
naturally put down as a sign of madness; and certainly a person in that
condition should be under control, since he readily passes from the
prompting of the voice to the execution of the deed.
Whence come these promptings? They are often nothing more
than this: that some one who has committed a murder has been, by the folly
of our law, thrown on to the astral plane, when he should be within the
walls of a prison, and is left there free to roam about, trying to get
others to repeat his crime. It is a characteristic of the criminal that he
repeats over and over again in his astral body the crime which has sent him
out of the world. Repeating this time after time in the astral body, he will
try to impress it upon some one who seems a likely person to respond, and
especially upon a person whose energies are overstrained, and who has not,
therefore, the normal strength which would make him insensitive to the
vibrations. So that you may have this pressure simply coming from a criminal
very much alive on the astral plane after he has been hanged here; I may say
in passing that the most foolish thing to do with such a man is to hang him.
So long as he is in the physical body, being an undeveloped creature, he
cannot do much by thought-force, or on the astral plane at all; [90]
but, the moment you free him from the physical body his very coarseness and
lack of development make him wide-awake on the lowest divisions of the
astral plane, whence communication with the physical plane can be most
readily made. It is the duty of society to keep him shut up, and it is not
right to co-operate with him in his murderous instincts by setting him free.
The only possible way to quiet him after setting him free from the physical
body is to put him into an astral jail, but it is not always possible to do
that; there are conditions which render it generally impracticable, and
there is no particular reason for throwing the difficulty on to the astral
plane, when it can be so readily dealt with on this side, which is the
proper place to try, if possible, in some fashion to improve him.
Leaving that, what does it tell us of the danger? It
gives the much needed warning that you should deal with voices and sights
which belong to the etheric and astral regions just in the same way as you
deal with voices and sights which come to you through your physical
organisation. You must get rid of the idea that because a thing comes in an
abnormal way it is therefore beautiful and true. It is quite as foolish to
follow out suggestions which come to you from the astral plane without
weighing them and judging them, as it would be to walk along Seven Dials or
Whitechapel, and follow out any suggestion which might come to you from any
of the tramps in those regions. You should subject to your judgment and
conscience all things that you see [91] and hear from the other side,
and if they do not come out clear from that judgment, then, if they are
directions to do a thing, leave them alone; otherwise, the more sensitive
you become, by the more dangers will you be continually surrounded. You may
experiment, but experiment when there is no danger. There are many things a
sensitive person may see and hear which do not matter one way or the other,
which will not hurt anybody; those are a fair subject for experiment, for it
is only by experiment that you will learn to, distinguish If you hear a
voice telling you your friend, who is within easy reach, is in great
trouble, and you can, by listening to the suggestions of the voice, and with
no more harm than “making a fool of yourself”, go and see your friend,
there is no harm in doing so. And if you find your friend has no need of
you, simply make a note of the facts, and try to analyse them and find out
what were the conditions under which you heard or saw, and mistook or were
misled. Observe them carefully, keep a note of them, and preserve them for
future guidance. But if your friend happens to be in France or Italy, and
the journey would be costly and almost impossible, then let it alone, and
simply wait for the ordinary method of telegram or post to tell you whether
your friend is in trouble or not. And, again, make a record of the true or
false impression. Practically it comes to this: use your common-sense in
dealing with the astral just as in dealing with the physical world. Do not
hold yourself in an atmosphere of awe or reverence, merely because
something has come through a sense which at present is [92]
rudimentary and undeveloped; for that is the way of credulity and
superstition, it is not the way of knowledge and experience.
None the less, remember that along this line is the path
of evolution; that humanity is evolving keener and subtler senses; that
those senses have been evolved by many in the past, and are being evolved
now; that they will come to be normally evolved, when we have reached a
little way beyond the stage we occupy at present. Do not put yourself in
that most irrational position which you might imagine as occupied some
millions of years ago by some blind creature before eyes had been developed,
who, when he came across a creature that could distinguish a little between
the conditions of darkness and light, simply scoffed at him, or tried to
kill him. Remember that you are not perfect, and remember that you are
evolving. Hold close to those two undoubted facts: “I am an imperfect
being,” and “I am a being in a condition of evolution;” then you can utilise
any abnormal happenings which you may experience, or which your friends may
experience and mention to you. You can look at them without fear, without
undue curiosity, without excitement, without losing your head, and thus
carefully examining, experiencing, learning, you may be able to quicken your
evolution. And if it be better to see physically than to be blind, better to
hear physically than to be deaf, better to be able to speak physically than
to be dumb, then it is also better to increase the delicacy of those senses
and give them a wider area of exercise ; for next [93] to the folly
of declaring that these things are not, and the folly of receiving blindly
everything you hear, is the folly of saying that these things ought to be
discouraged and avoided, when they are in the course of Nature, and mark
another stage on the evolutionary road. [94]
Telepathy.
Let me remind you of the point at which we have arrived
in the course of these lectures. We have seen that there is reason to
believe that we are living in three distinct worlds: the physical, the
astral, and the mental. We have also seen that we are living in these worlds
as conscious entities, in bodies that, being made of the matter of these
different worlds, relate us respectively to them; so that by means of one of
these bodies we are in touch with the physical, by means of another in touch
with the astral, and by means of a third with the mental world. We shall
need to keep that in mind when studying the special division of our subject
today: that of telepathy; for it is by an understanding of the working of
these powers that we shall be able to solve many of the problems which are
before psychologists on this particular subject, and be able to recognise
whether a message comes by way of the physical, the astral, or the mental.
[95]
In thinking of ourselves as thus connected with three
worlds, we see opening up before us far larger horizons, far vaster
possibilities, than perhaps we were accustomed to connect with ourselves in
dealing with the narrower bounds of the physical consciousness. We see that
we are here in relation to worlds that not only exist for us while we are in
touch with the physical, but also exist for us when we have left the
physical by death; that just in so far as we have definitely made our
connexions with the astral and mental worlds whilst still in the physical
body, will the life on the other side of death become comparatively
familiar. It is clear that if we are able to communicate by means of
telepathy with people in this world while living in it, and with people in
other worlds while we are still in this, we have here possibilities of
knowledge far transcending anything that we can reach outside what are
definitely called “occult” methods - meaning by that phrase in this
particular relation the quitting of the physical encasement by the
consciousness, and the travelling in other worlds and bringing back to the
physical body the knowledge there gained. If we can establish the reality
of telepathic communication, we might then come into touch with many living
in those worlds, and by a comparison of their various reports might obtain a
fairly extended knowledge of them. For we should be able by means of this
telepathy, if the fact of it could be proved, to reach regions altogether
out of the range of the ordinary spiritualistic investigations, which are
admittedly confined to those persons who are still [96] in the
intermediate world, and for the most part are recognised as belonging rather
to the regions of that world near the physical plane than to those which lie
at a greater distance from it. Every one who has had much to do with
communications by mediums is well acquainted with the fact that the
statement is often made that the communicating entity is passing on into
higher regions and will no longer be able to communicate with the world;
while, if it be possible to establish this communication by way of the
vehicles which are in touch with these different worlds, then people without
occult training would still be able to keep in touch with friends passing
on into the heavenly realm, and thus would be able to communicate by way of
the mind after the lower communications of the physical and astral had been
entirely cut off. Clearly this opens up great possibilities; and Mr. Myers
did not over-estimate them in the immense stress he laid on telepathy, as a
means for extending the reach of our consciousness beyond the range of the
physical.
If we would communicate with these different worlds it
may be well, for the moment, to pause on the methods of communication, and
see what part of us in each case is the vehicle of communication. The first
and most obvious means of communication will be from brain to brain - both
brains on the physical plane communicating with each other by the ordinary
medium of thought present in the waking-consciousness and working in the
physical brain.
I was surprised the other day to see the editor of
[97] Truth state that thought-transference was entirely
unscientific; because any one who knows something of the science of the
present day ought at least to be prepared to admit its possibility. I am
only now saying “possibility”, although I go farther, and say that it lies
well within the limit of facts scientifically proven. Any one who knows
anything of wireless telegraphy will at once see that we are face to face
with just the same conditions as would justify the idea of
thought-transference; that you have started there a series of vibrations
through an all-permeating medium, without any need to lay down through that
medium ordinary means of communication like wires, and so on. Surely that
idea is now so clearly and simply before the minds of newspaper readers that
that which is closely analogous to it in principle cannot be said to be
outside scientific possibility, or in any sense antagonistic to it. For it
is well within the ascertained facts of science that thought action in the
brain goes on side by side with electric or magnetic action, these magnetic
currents increasing with hard thinking. And this altogether outside the
later investigations in France, with regard to what are called the “N” rays;
as to which, of course, some scientific people are still in doubt. So that
you have to deal with the fact that something of the nature of electric
action accompanies thought, and that we are still within ordinary scientific
experience when we state the possibility of these vibrations being conveyed
through the ether without wires, or other dense connections. For it is not
necessary to go [98] beyond the ether in order to deal with the
transference of thought currents generated in one brain and received in
another. I doubt whether, for the sending of messages from brain to brain,
it is absolutely necessary to utilise that special organ for
thought-transference, the pineal gland, which is developed in many cases by
certain occult methods, and then used for the sending of messages from the
physical brain.
That which science regards simply as the remains of a
third or central eye has possibilities in the future from the standpoint of
the occult investigator as well as a history in the past. It is in the
pineal gland, more highly developed than at present, that we find the brain
organ which acts as a generating instrument in the brain that sends the
thought, and as a receiving instrument in the brain to which that thought is
transmitted. But apart from that, ordinary thinking, if it be clear,
definite, and strongly sustained, would cause quite enough action in the
ordinary brain-cells to send out vibrations into space which could be
received by an instrument tuned somewhat to the same pitch. This relation of
the transmitting and receiving instrument is not without importance, for in
order to make the experiments as easy as possible, it is well for two people
to begin the practice who are in some close and sympathetic relation the one
to the other, such as husband and wife, or members of the same family.
Leaving that for a moment, let us see along what other
lines it is possible that thoughts might be transmitted. It would be
possible to transmit them from [99] the intermediate body between the
mental and physical - the astral; but in order that thought might be clearly
and definitely transmitted from astral body to astral body, it would need
that the astral development should have been carried to a fairly high pitch.
Supposing that the astral body is at the stage when it is fit to be used as
a vehicle of consciousness, then there would be no difficulty in the
transmission of the thought.
Going one stage higher, to the mental body, there is
again a possibility of thought-transference of an exceedingly effective
kind, if the thought body be sufficiently developed to be used in this way.
So that there are these three ways along which a thought message may go:
from brain to brain; from astral body to astral body; and from mental body
to mental body; you have here varieties which may explain certain phenomena
in thought-transference, as to which explanation has not been very
definitely given by our ordinary psychologists, and may explain why - as in
case I shall take in a moment - you may get more from a person receiving
information than is consciously sent by the transmitter, working in the
physical waking-consciousness.
Before taking up that point, there is another of
considerable importance that I would like to touch upon. It is this: that in
many cases in which a thought is sent to you, you may not have that thought
reproduced as a thought; it may also be reproduced as a vision, or as a
voice. Suppose that you send a thought of a very simple [100]
character to a friend - a thought about some object. It might arrive as an
idea. You have thought, for instance, of a person, and the idea of that
person has asserted itself in the consciousness of the one to whom you had
sent the thought. But it might be equally possible that instead of the
person receiving the idea of the person thought of, he would hear that
person’s name, or see a picture of that person; and naturally the question
arises: “Why and how is that?” It depends upon the receiver, not on the
sender, and allies itself at once with extremely familiar phenomena with
which every one of you will be well acquainted, with regard to the passage
of an electric current.
For instance, the first time I ever saw experiments in
wireless telegraphy in Calcutta by Professor Bose, the generating instrument
was placed in one room, and the spectators, including myself, put ourselves
some three rooms away. In the room in which we were, Professor Bose had made
a number of arrangements. He had arranged a chemical cell, in which an
electric current would cause chemical action; he had arranged a wire, in
which an electric current would cause the shining out of a light; he had
arranged a pistol which would be fired off by the passage of the electric
current; and he had also arranged that a heavy weight should be made to fall
when the current passed. Professor Bose generated his current, and all these
vibrations must have come throbbing into the room where we were; for
suddenly the chemical action took place; the light [101] shone out;
the pistol went off; and the weight fell to the ground - all these things
took place each according to the special arrangement which had been made to
receive and give effect in different ways to the same electrical
vibrations, and in this case each one of the results was conditioned by the
nature of the apparatus which the electric current touched.
Carry that on into the cases of thought-transference, and
you will see exactly how it works. The person who most easily receives
impressions by way of the ear would be very likely to hear the name of the
person thought of; an artist, or one accustomed to visualise, would probably
see the face of the person. Each would react in his own particular way. You
have simply sent out the thought-vibration, and the person catches the
thought according to his most sensitive apparatus. And this, again, is a
thing that joins itself with the knowledge of your own nervous apparatus;
for you know perfectly well that the sensory nerves, if pressed or injured,
answer to that injury by their own particular sense peculiarity. If you
press your eye-ball, the pressure is received on the retina as light,
although the pressure of your finger was not a generator of light in the
ordinary sense of the term. Each nerve answers according to its own
fashion; the optic nerve will give you light; the auditory nerve will give
you sound. The “spiritual sound” which the Hatha Yogi believes himself to be
listening to is an instance in point. He draws in his breath in a particular
way, and the effect of drawing in his breath in this way and holding it is
to cause a [102] certain pressure upon the auditory nerve; and this
pressure shows itself as sound. Every one inclined to try to develop any of
the powers connected with the astral or mental plane will do well, before he
begins to try, to make himself acquainted with ordinary physiological
facts, if he wishes to avoid continual confusion between physiological
phenomena and those of the higher planes.
Understanding, then, these possibilities, you may go
forward more safely in trying to understand the abnormal happenings. And let
me now take a particular case of thought-transference which I have chosen
because of its peculiarity. I have not troubled you hitherto in these
lectures with a number of cases, because I thought you could always find
them for yourselves; but this particular one I want to borrow from Mr.
Myers, because it works out in such a satisfactory fashion, both for what
might be expected by the ordinary student, but still more by what might not
be expected, and which seems at first sight to be quite irrational. It is a
series of experiments conducted by a San Francisco doctor and his wife. The
doctor is apparently a Theosophist, his wife a sceptic. This is an
advantage, because results which come by a sceptic are much more
satisfactory than results which come by a believer, as they shut out all
notions that the believer hypnotised himself. This gentleman and his wife
were about a hundred miles apart, and the first message sent by his wife was
very simple and straightforward. She was thinking it in her waking
brain-consciousness. It might be supposed [103] that the receiver
should get exactly the words sent, but no:
May 12.
Transmitter, Mrs. S. Arrived safely. Pleasant
trips. B. feels fairly well. - We have a nice place in an
old-fashioned house.
|
|
May 12.
Received.
Had a good trip. B. slept well. House squarely
built and plain; porch surrounded by trees; not fronting the road;
rooms very sunny (all accurate. What follows was seen clairvoyantly,
apparently. - ED.) Landlady wears sun bonnet with jacket of same.
Little boy three years old. (Boy expected but did not arrive till
next day. The description accurate). Fire in north-east. (Fire
occurred next night). |
|
|
|
May 13.
Transmitter, Dr. S. Theresa B. and her mother were
here yesterday; also Clara and Emma. Business somewhat dull. - W’s
house burnt yesterday. |
|
May 13.
Received.
I think Theresa B. was there or is coming. -
Something I can't make out about business; I think it is bad. |
You have there many additional particulars which are not
in the message as sent. Why were they received? If you apply what I told you
about the three roads, you will easily realise that the additional
particulars were not sent by the brain-consciousness, but run along the
other roads, for these facts were thoroughly accurate. The landlady was as
described, and had been seen by the transmitter of the message, so that the
facts transmitted were in her consciousness, although not deliberately
sent by way of the brain. These peculiarities run through the whole of the
numerous experiments. [104] You are continually finding more received
than was transmitted, but in some cases less.
For instance: “Theresa B. and her mother were here
yesterday.” It would appear as though the messages sent by the wife arrived
better, or were better received than the messages sent by the husband,
either because she thought more definitely, or because the husband was more
receptive. All that was received was: “I think Theresa B. was there or is
coming, and something I cannot make out about business, and I think it is
bad.”
I should think a large part of the above message was
received through the astral body, rather than through the physical brain. It
lacks the sharpness and clearness of the message that goes from brain to
brain. It is an impression more than a message.
There is a negative result on the following day. Nothing
was sent on one side, and “Forgot to keep the appointed time” on the other.
And it is curious that in cases where there is a failure both seem to
have fallen into forgetfulness.
Then comes a thing which seems quite irrational. “B. does
not seem well at all. Went for medicine.” What was received was this: “See a
lot of wine casks and demijohns. Something about curtains.” That does not
seem a very successful message. Go a little further, and what do we find?
Mrs. S. had visited a large wine cellar, and also the curtains in her room
had annoyed her very much, but although she said nothing, the impression
which was made had gone off without [105] the brain taking part in
the transmission. The annoyance about the curtains is an exceedingly
interesting and significant fact; the astral vibration of annoyance going
along its astral path was sufficiently strong to overbear the message sent
by the physical brain, and to enforce itself as the proper message on the
mind of the receiver.
We come shortly to another case which is very
interesting, because the receiver is more accurate than the transmitter:
May 20.
Transmitter, Mrs. S.
My clothes and shoes are all torn: I have poison
oak on my arms. - Hope it will not be bad.
|
|
May 20.
Received.
You went out riding. - I see you holding a shoe
in your hand. You have poison oak on your right arm. B. is better. -
You want me to mail you the Bulletin and Chronicle. (Mrs. S.
did ride out to some sulphur springs. Poison oak was on right arm
only. B. gained three pounds. She was hoping for the Bulletin
supplement only). |
Then appears, on the comparison of notes, that the poison
was only on one arm, and not on both, as the transmitter had stated, and the
one receiving it saw a picture of the right arm and the injury which that
right arm had undergone.
Now those cases are about as definite and clear a proof
of thought-transference as you could want. You have the very close sending
and receiving; the addition, in several cases, of more than was intended to
be sent; [106] but in every case the additional thing was present in
the consciousness of the sender. And then you have the most curious case of
all, where the sender sends a message of injury to both arms, and the
receiver receives the idea, of only one arm being injured, and that
the one on which the injury was really inflicted. The case puzzles me on one
point. I do not see why the statement of the double injury was sent in the
ordinary waking-consciousness. A possible explanation would be that the
sender was frightened and slightly hysterical, and did not recognise the
limitation of the injury. But I would rather leave that for the moment as
one in which the modus operandi is not quite clear. This is only one
case out of hundreds. It would be better for you, if you happen to be
interested in this line of investigation, to make your own experiments,
rather than rely on the records of experiments of someone else. But there is
one word of warning, and that is that you must not be too rigid in laying
down the laws, or the conditions, under which yon insist that your phenomena
shall take place. I know that the ordinary person of the scientific turn of
mind will at once say: “You are opening the gate to all kinds of fraud. We
must lay down strict test conditions.” Yes, if you know the whole of the
laws at work you may; but until you do know the conditions, it is perfect
folly to lay down conditions out of your own ignorance, and then complain
that the phenomena do not happen under “test conditions”. Let me borrow an
illustration which will show you how absurdly this thing works out. [107]
A photographer is said to have gone into the middle of
China, before photography was known there, and offered to take pictures by
the sunlight. Every one laughed at him; for how was it possible for the sun
to make pictures? It was clear that he was a fool. But further examination
into his methods showed that he was less a fool than a knave. The whole of
his procedure was an endeavour to delude the people. The first thing he did
for his picture-making was to put a black cloth over the box; and it was
clear that he could easy introduce under that cloth any number of pictures
ready made. The fact that he insisted on putting it over the camera showed
that he desired to cheat. He further insisted on bringing in a closed case
which nobody was allowed to open, to see whether pictures were not concealed
within it. He would not let any one look into that case, so as to prove
there were no pictures there, and he insisted on putting it into the camera
under the black cloth. Of course, you can see at once that he cannot make
pictures, unless he puts them into his little closed case beforehand, and
slips them into the camera under a cloth when nobody is allowed to look.
Clearly he is a fraud. And then, when he pretends he has got his pictures,
what does he do? Does he open the bog and show them? No! He wraps up his
little case in the black cloth and carries it off into a room into which no
sunlight is allowed to enter, although he pretends he is making pictures by
the sun. As if the sunlight that is said to make the pictures should not be
allowed to enter in where they are! So, in order to [108] prove that
he was able to take a picture by sunlight; they laid down as the test
conditions that he should do it in an open box, and that everybody who liked
should examine his plates to show that there were no pictures concealed. Nor
must he go into a dark-room, and talk to them about “developing”. They were
far too clever people to be cheated in that bare-faced manner; and he was a
miserable fraud. Such was the decision; but, of course, under those “test
conditions” they did not get any pictures.
That is exactly what people do when investigating this
kind of phenomenon. They say certain conditions must be laid down. In vain
does the unfortunate person, who knows the thing to be true, state that
those conditions render the happening of the thing impossible. You must make
your experiments, if you are quite ignorant, under every possible condition;
and gradually, when you obtain your results freely, you can change your
conditions bit by bit, and mark the point at which the results disappear.
Then you will be likely to be on the track of a fair knowledge. For nature
does not make her conditions to fit the theories either of scientific men or
of Psychical Researchers. She brings about the happenings in her own way,
and those who want to find them out have to take them as nature gives them,
and not according to the conditions that they think are the proper ones
under which they should happen. “Nature is conquered by obedience” is the
great rule of the scientific investigator. She is not conquered by
dictation. Ordinary science has gone so [109] far that many
discoveries may be made along the lines of previous investigations, and
scientists forget how much of previous investigation lies behind the lines
of investigation they are now carrying on. It is easy now for a chemist to
follow out certain definite lines, but the earlier chemical discoveries were
not made in that fashion. Roger Bacon, you find, experimented all over the
place. He just put different things together and noticed what happened - not
a very comfortable way of building the foundation of modern chemistry; for
he leaves it on record as the result: “I was stretched several times on the
floor of my cell.” “I lost a finger,” and so on. Those early chemists
mutilated themselves in seeking the conditions of nature’s workings. They
simply tried tentatively. Sometimes, something carried off a finger;
sometimes, they were stretched insensible; but after that, they were able
gradually to work out the conditions of the happening. If they had waited to
make their experiments until they knew the conditions, chemical science
would not be in its present position.
Now, as regards these psychical happenings, you are
rather in the condition of Roger Bacon. You must experiment and face the
results of your experiment; and if you are not prepared to face them, leave
it alone, since there is no duty upon anybody to find out laws of nature.
You can study in perfect safety in the realms of discovered laws. But if you
want to discover, you must take your courage in both hands and go boldly on
experimenting; and note what happens. After a time you will be able to
eliminate the unnecessary happenings. [110]
That is how Sir William Crookes experimented, and thereby
he gained very remarkable results; while every one around him was saying
that the fact that materialisations could only take place in the dark was a
clear proof that the materialisation was a fraud, he, the truly scientific
man, accepted temporarily the statement which was made, and set himself to
invent a sort of lamp, the light-vibrations from which would not be of the
character that would shiver the materialisation into pieces. And then he
found out that by means of this particular light that he invented, he was
able to hold up his lamp and examine the materialisation and the form of the
medium at the same time. But he did that, remember, not by saying
materialisations ought to take place in daylight; but by quietly accepting
the fact that they did not, and then going on to try to find the least
destructive kind of light. That is the road of the true scientific man, who
does not lay down the law to begin with, but observes the fact, and then
tries to devise means whereby the observation may be made more accurate, and
thereby more satisfactory.
Take, then, those suggestions as a guide to your own
investigations; and so far as thought-transference is concerned there is not
the slightest danger in experimenting. The only thing you need to remember
is do not always do the same thing - at least, if you are the receiver of
the messages; because in order to receive the message you must make yourself
exceedingly passive. Passivity on the part of the receiver is as necessary
as positivity on the part of the sender, so it is not wise to [111]
always play the receiver’s part. It is not good, in a mixed world, to be too
receptive to everything, that comes along; and if you practise too much
receiving without sending, you will become exceedingly sensitive to every
vibration about you, and will be receiving messages which you do not in the
least want. You must guard yourself against over-receptivity. In every way
it is a danger to people, especially when living under the conditions of a
modern civilisation. For remember that all we call “public opinion” is for
the most part thought-transference. The opinions that you form are more the
opinions of others than they are your own. You catch them from stronger
thinkers in every department of life. If you think along one line, it is
because Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Chamberlain is thinking along it. They are
sending out powerful thought-currents which are caught up by brain after
brain. Every brain adds a little strength to the thought-current, and so
these thought-currents increase; you do not want to be too receptive to
them. The man who would form his own opinions must keep, as it were, the key
to his own brain, choosing the thoughts he will allow to enter; and shutting
out the thoughts he wishes to shut out. When you want to understand a
question; open your mind to all the most opposite opinions and let them all
flow into the mind, and then judge for yourselves the value; but do not let
yourself drift along the thought-current and reproduce continuously your
favourite politician or newspaper. That sort of public opinion is of small
value in a nation; and if this nation [112] is to be truly great,
then the thought-atmosphere needs to be filled with vigorous, independent,
and carefully formed thoughts, and not be the mere atmosphere of echoes that
it is today; for echoes sound best in an empty cave, and thoughts are echoed
best, very often, from an empty brain.
Do not forget, however, that in addition to these
thought-currents on the physical plane, you will do well to open yourselves
up to the currents that come from the higher planes. Do not forget that by
the practice of meditation which I have so often advocated, the setting
apart of a little time every morning before your brain is active and your
thoughts busy, for the quiet thinking over of a noble thought, and then the
opening up of your brain and your higher bodies to thought vibrations from
above, so that you may gain knowledge that otherwise you could not gain,
that you may climb into realms of ideas which otherwise you would be unable
to penetrate. For one thing that keeps back our progress more, perhaps, than
any other, is that we do not realise our inner inherent greatness. If you
would only think of yourselves as living more out of this world than in it;
if you would try to realise what I know I have often said before, that your
birthplace is the mental plane and not the physical, that your native
atmosphere is the atmosphere of ideas and not that of physical phenomena; if
you would realise that by birthright you belong to that higher world, and
that all that is necessary is to give time and thought to come into
communication with it, how much more splendid [113] would become your
lives, how much swifter your evolution. It is not as though you had to
create a medium of communication you do not possess; all you have to do is
to throw into active working power apparatus already built up in the
numberless incarnations that lie behind, and only awaiting the necessary
touch to throw it into movement. Your mental body at the present stage of
human evolution is no mere cloudy thing; it is definite and organised, even
although its organisation will go much farther than it has yet reached. Your
astral body - in the most of you who are fairly cultured, who are reasonable
and thoughtful - is an organism which is ready to work to a very
considerable extent, if only you will make for it an opportunity. But if you
are always rushing down into the physical vehicle, if you accustom yourself
to work only through the brain, how is it possible for you then to know
those subtler workings of the higher vehicles, those messages which come
from above, and which might so ineffably illuminate your
waking-consciousness? Books, truly, give us one way of gaining knowledge;
but greater than any book, surer than any printed leaves, more illuminating
than any teacher who teaches with the lips and voice, are those messages
that may come to you from the higher worlds in which you are living all the
time, though your attention is not turned to them. All that I say to you is
that you should turn your attention in that direction; that out of the
greedy claims of the world today you should take if it be but one brief
quarter-of-an-hour to turn your attention to the higher worlds to which you
so [114] much more really belong. Do it, and you will find that those
vibrations will gradually, slowly, assert themselves in consciousness. At
first it may be a dim illumination, an insight into the meaning of favourite
books which you never enjoyed before, a grasping of the ideas of your author
beyond anything that in your normal study you had found; and then you will
know that thought-transference is going on from the higher mental worlds
down to the physical brain, and that you are coming into touch with the mind
and not only with the brain-consciousness of others. But if in this world
you cannot gain knowledge, even by the brain, without turning your attention
to the things you study, then how shall it be that, in trying to understand
the knowledge of higher worlds, you shall gain that without turning your
attention to it, and that those subtle vibrations shall assert themselves in
your brain, when you will not even for a few minutes free the brain for
their reception? [115]
Methods of Unfoldment.
I propose tonight to say something about the methods of
unfoldment, meaning by that the way in which people may develop themselves
as to the inner man, and so gradually acquire certainty and knowledge where
at present they are puzzled and bewildered. For this New Psychology that we
have been dealing with will never be thoroughly understood until people can
“see”, and trace out that which gives rise to those many phenomena which are
put together under the title of coming from “the unconscious”, without any
kind of explanation.
In the course of these lectures I have tried to show the
different sources whence these phenomena arise, so that theoretically, as it
were, you may be able for yourselves to classify them - to say, as you read
about this or that phenomenon: “That belongs to such-and-such a part of the
nature of things; this to another part,” and so on. But it is much more
satisfactory, if instead of [116] simply taking the theory to work
upon and applying it, you are able, by your own perceptive ability, to
decide when any new case arises, what is its real source. Therefore it
seems to me useful to put before you certain lines of possible development,
and the more useful, perhaps, because some of these lines are undesirable
and dangerous; whereas others have been, if not perfectly successful, at
least useful to those who practise them in quickening their development,
even if in the present incarnation they have not time to complete the work.
We must first consider what it is which is to be
developed; because the method will depend on the part of the nature in which
development is sought. And we see that along two main lines human evolution
will inevitably go - one the side of consciousness, the other that of the
vehicles. The consciousness itself will be greatly unfolded, and show out a
deeper, clearer insight, a fuller and firmer grasp. So that we shall have to
deal with methods of development as applied to the consciousness. And that
is in the most literal sense of the term a question of unfoldment; because
the consciousness has all these possibilities existing within it, and it is
only a question of bringing them to the surface, just as a bud may unfold
into the perfect flower. But it is not only a question of the development of
consciousness in which we are interested; because as the consciousness
unfolds on one plane after another, it does not thereby follow that the
consciousness will be able from the higher planes to directly affect the
physical brain, so as [117] to bring about effects in what we call
the waking-consciousness. For it is quite possible for a person to be so
developed that both as regards the consciousness and the higher bodies they
may be active on their own planes; and yet the knowledge acquired there may
not be brought down into the physical mind and “remembered”. But when the
consciousness is developed so as to be able to work, then comes in the
question of the vehicles in which it is to work, the various bodies which it
uses; and we are concerned with only three of those, for if three of them
are in active working order, the possessor does not need further physical
instruction to learn anything of the value or practice of unfoldment. If a
man has control of his physical, astral, and mental bodies, he can gain for
himself the knowledge that comes out of what the psychologists call the
“unconscious”, and from the higher and valuable side of it, the
super-conscious. But it is rarely that there will come down, at the present
stage of evolution, information from the consciousness above the mental
body. Of course it does happen in the case of the genius, for there are many
cases of genius in which the illumination comes from the causal body, the
lasting treasure-house in which all memories are stored. It may also occur
in the case of those who, by gradual evolution and definite practice, have
perfected their outer vehicles so that they are able to work in the causal
body. Mostly, however, and for our purpose entirely, these three lower
bodies are those with which we are concerned; and we want to know how to
unfold our consciousness; how to [118] improve our physical body; how
to bring the astral body into working order; and how to do the same for the
mental body; so that on the side of consciousness the powers may be
unfolded, and on the side of the forms, the organs whereby these powers
express themselves.
Now along some methods of evolution all the force is
directed to the vehicles, while the unfolding of consciousness is left
unattended to; and where that is the case the results are peculiarly
unsatisfactory, because the person may be developed as to the psychic
senses, which may yet remain practically useless, because, although they are
developed as organs, the consciousness is not ready to work through them. It
is an artificial forcing. Instead of the consciousness bringing about the
evolution and presiding over the building, it is possible to some extent to
force the evolution of the organs, and take them, as it were, ahead of the
evolution of consciousness; so that people may see and hear many things
which they do not in the least understand. And that is most often the case
when people are born “psychics” - people who have developed these qualities
in previous lives. Generally, where people are not very highly evolved and
yet are born with these psychic powers, they have in previous lives devoted
themselves to the methods which work upon the bodies, leaving the
consciousness unattended to; the result is considerable psychic development,
but the unevolved consciousness being unable to use these powers
intelligently, they are of comparatively little value, and more an annoyance
[119] than a treasure to their possessor. Such people are by no means
to be envied; and if they end themselves possessed of powers that they do
not know how to use, and which tend to disturb and distress them, bringing
into their life a number of phenomena which they do not understand and
cannot control, the only thing such people can wisely do is to set
themselves to the deliberate unfolding on the side of consciousness, and so
make up in this life what they have failed to do in a previous one.
I think we shall most readily follow the methods of
unfoldment, if I put briefly, first, the theory as it is held, especially in
India, where these things have been studied for thousands of years; and
secondly, the methods we find recommended amongst ourselves today; we may
then see to which of these two great divisions of unfoldment the methods
amongst ourselves belong. It is always advisable to have a complete theory,
because then, when a new thing comes along you have a niche in which to put
it, and as no such theory exists in the West just now, we must go to the
East for one, and see how it bears upon things happening among ourselves.
In the ordinary psychological science of India - a
psychology many thousands of years old - there are two great forms of Yoga;
the Hatha Yoga, and the Raja Yoga; and under these two divisions all
development naturally and inevitably falls. The theory of Hatha Yoga is
this: that on the whole it is easiest to begin with the physical body,
because then you are dealing with a thing of which you at least know
something. That, starting with your physical body, you can bring [120]
it under control to a well-nigh incredible extent; that, as the physical
body corresponds in its various parts to the organs of the higher bodies, it
is possible to reach those organs of the higher bodies by stimulating the
organs in the lower; so that, starting with the physical eye, you would
gradually develop, going upwards, the corresponding organs in the astral
body, thus developing clairvoyance; that, starting with the physical ear,
you can, by stimulating that, bring about a corresponding growth in the
astral body, and so hear things on the astral plane. That theory of
correspondence is perfectly true. Our senses are not really in the physical
body but in the astral, and the centres of those senses are in the astral
body. All sight on the physical plane, before it conveys any knowledge to
the inner man, the perceiver, passes from the retina back to the optic
centres in the brain, and from those in the astral body, to the
corresponding centres which are really the centres of the senses. The brain
is merely like a telegraph wire along which the message goes; you see by the
stimulation of these astral centres. That is the first thing to remember.
But Hatha Yoga includes much more than the stimulation of the senses. It
includes a complete control over every part of the physical body, so that
all the muscles, voluntary and involuntary, are all brought under the
control of the will. The Hatha Yogi goes through a number of processes, many
of them extremely troublesome and even painful, in order to bring under the
control of the will every portion of his physical body; and, being taught
also the [121] correspondence in the astral body, he works up from
one to the other in the way I described with respect to sight and hearing.
There are in India a considerable number of these Hatha
Yogis, who are willing to show off their powers. They can do some very
extraordinary things. They can stop the beating of the heart, or the working
of the lungs, and many other things of that sort. And it is rather
surprising until you know how it is done. Only when you have done all this,
the question arises: “Of what use?” Is it worth while to go through this
long training in order to do things that, after all, you do not really want
to do? The only thing in which you may say there is some use is with regard
to the seeing, hearing, and feeling on the astral plane; and that they only
attain to a very limited extent, and after the novelty of the thing is over,
inevitably the man wants to go further and ask what it means. In many cases
they are not able to connect together the centres in the astral body and the
organ of the physical senses; so that they do not in many cases succeed in
seeing or hearing as far as their brain knowledge is concerned. They go
into trance, and when they come out of it they are as wise as when they went
into it. Nearly all Hatha Yogis can go into trance; but when they have done
it, what happens? Simply this: that the physical and astral bodies are
separated. In some cases the astral body is at work, so that as far as that
is concerned the man is having experiences, although they cannot be conveyed
to the brain-consciousness; still, the fact [122] that it is able to
work is an advantage, because much may be learned on the astral plane which
will filter down to the physical plane, not as memory, but as knowledge
which gradually makes its way through. But in many cases when the physical
and astral bodies are separated, the astral stays quite close to the
physical, practically useless and asleep. So far as I can find, along that
line no very great increase of knowledge is attainable; but one thing they
do attain, and that is magnificent physical health. They develop a
muscular strength and power of endurance, which enable them to carry the
body through fatigue which would crush an ordinary man. They also develop,
through the difficult nature of the practices they do, and the perseverance
necessary to obtain any results, a great power of will.
Now what theory lies behind that, as well as the
correspondence between the physical and astral? When we look at it we notice
this: that in the course of evolution consciousness has gone a little ahead
of organs, and the working of the consciousness has brought about the
building of the organ; that is a point of enormous and practical importance.
The function of life always precedes the shaping of the organ, the organ
being built by the exercise of the function. Tracing on the evolution, the
neat thing that strikes one is that as the consciousness develops, as the
thinker evolves more and more power of thought, he puts aside one thing
after another that he has done by the exercise of his will, handing it on to
the automatism of the body, and [123] turning his attention to higher
and more useful things. So that when we see the Hatha Yogi bringing again
within his conscious control the things that in the course of evolution he
has let go, we find he is going backwards instead of forwards, burdening
himself again with a number of things which are really done very much better
by the automatic mechanism of the body, and on which, if he interferes, he
must spend a great deal of trouble in order to reach the same perfection as
the mechanism has done by his previous work upon it.
We find we are going backwards also when we come to deal
with stimulation of the astral senses in this way; the astral centre was
first developed and through that the physical organ of sense, so that to use
the physical organ to stimulate the astral centre into independent working
is to retrace the path of evolution, and it does not bring out the true
sight or hearing in the astral body, but brings into abnormal and
undesirable activity those sense centres which have built for their own
expression the sense-organ in the physical body; the astral having a set of
senses of its own which do not necessarily communicate directly with the
organs in the physical body. The astral senses are directly related to the
astral plane, whereas the sense-centres are bridges for communication
between the thinker and his physical vehicle. You do not want to make those
active independently, for they will never serve your purpose thoroughly and
completely. You are taking an instrument made for one purpose and clumsily
adapting it to another. What you want to do is to [124] evolve in the
astral body its own sense-organs, the “charkas”, or “wheels”, which belong
to that body as a body, and not to that body as a means of communication
between the thinker and his physical vehicle. To stimulate those centres
which are bridges, instead of evolving the living “wheels” which are the
right organs of the astral body, is a complete blunder; you are falling into
an abnormal evolution, and one which is utterly undesirable and likely to be
mischievous.
Let us now see what western methods of unfoldment
partake of this Hatha Yoga principle: that you are to stimulate the physical
body and thus arouse certain powers in the astral. All methods which begin
by turning any of the senses to the careful close observation of a physical
object are part of this Hatha Yoga method. For instance, the favourite
eastern method, which is now being advised for practice over here, is to
make a black spot on a white ground and stare at it for hours together.
Crystal-gazing is another method which is recommended. I have received a
large amount of American literature, suggesting all sorts of things on these
lines. All these belong to the Hatha Yoga system; and are fundamentally
mischievous, not only because they are going backwards in evolution, but
because of their exceedingly injurious effects on the physical organs. One
result of gazing at a black spot for hours is that it spoils the sight. The
ages of the eyes are often put out of order, producing strabismus, more
commonly called squinting. Another thing you find is a gradual dulling of
the physical sight, due to [125] the overstrain of the nerves of the
retina, which overstraining gradually passes back through the optic nerve
to the optic centre, so that after many years of practice atrophy of the
optic nerve may arise, causing dimness and even blindness. There is a
difference here between the Indian and the Westerner; the Indian does not
care about the physical result. the European or American does. When the
Indian gets a well-established squint, he is as happy with it as without it.
He does not want to look at the things round about him; he has set his mind
on something different, and he is not disturbed by the squint. He does not
mind even blindness; but the western man minds it very much. Over in India
these things are known, but that is not so over here; and it is rather a
cruel thing, it seems to me, that systems of that sort should be scattered
broadcast all over the West, without any explanation of the dangers that
every Indian knows are connected with them. Some few people may get safely
through, but many are injured; and even supposing a man does escape these
things, and throws himself into a trance; when he comes out of the trance,
he is as wise as before; he has simply performed self-hypnotisation, and
doing that is of no value to the man who does it. So also with hearing. It
is quite possible to hear sounds by breathing in a certain way; but it is
only through pressure on the nerves connected with the ear, in the throat.
People seem to think that doing this opens up the astral senses. There are
many things like that which you can read if you like. But do not practise
them; it is better to [126] give them a wide berth. The fact that the
people who circulate these things among an ignorant public do not tell of
the effects likely to be brought about by these practices may be because
they are ignorant; I do not suppose they do it maliciously.
Crystal-gazing, also, leads to nothing but the very
lowest order of clairvoyance. I was once very much puzzled by a fact with
regard to crystal-gazing. I happen to know one of our members who has
developed astral sight to a remarkable extent, and I asked him one day, for
my information and amusement, to look in a crystal and tell me what he saw.
He gazed at it, and turned it in all sorts of ways, but not a solitary thing
could he see, although he worked at it for some time. The reason of this is
quite clear when you come to think about it. The vision of the psychically
developed man is not a vision which comes through a stimulation of the sense
centres in the astral body, but from the chakras; and the man who is using
the one would be the last man in the world to be using the other, which is
only wanted, so to speak, on the downward path of the bridge, in order that
physical impacts may reach the thinker and give him information. I have
never known a case of crystal-gazing which went beyond the possibilities of
the lower astral plane. It is true that you can by practice see, but you do
it at a serious risk. I strongly advise you not to go largely into
crystal-gazing, popular as it is, for although you may gain some small
results from it, you will be shutting yourselves out from the higher
possibilities. [127]
Turn from that line of evolution to the Raya Yoga system.
That starts quite differently. It starts with thought, with a process of
meditation; and before that process of meditation, which is the beginning of
the Raja Yoga, there is a preliminary course to be followed by the man
desiring to practise. He must to a certain extent have purified his physical
body, not because he is going to use that body to stimulate the astral, but
because, as the powers of the consciousness grow, they will work down on to
the physical body, and unless it be prepared to receive their workings it is
likely to be injured, and hysteria, diseases of all kinds, breakdown of the
physical health, sometimes even lunacy may result. All these things have
been observed and studied in India, and it has been found by practical
experience that if a man starts these methods with an unprepared body, while
he may get some very remarkable results by the play of the consciousness
downwards, he will very soon break up as regards his health, and he will
become a nervous wreck. The purification of the body is effected by an
elaborate system of food, drink, sleep, and so on, of which the centre note
is moderation not starvation, not lying awake so that the nerves are
overstrained, but moderation in everything. The kind of food the Raja Yogi
takes is to be satvic, a term generally translated “pure”, but which I
think is better translated as “rhythmic”; that is to say, food in which the
vibrations are regular, harmonious, balanced. This is based on their theory
of matter having three attributes: one, Inertia, which predominating in the
[128] human body, would mean sloth and heaviness, so that foods
tending to produce this quality are barred. So also all foods that tend to
produce ill-regulated activity, restlessness, in which predominates the
second of the attributes of matter, Mobility, are barred. That leaves the
foods in which the quality of Rhythm predominates. A whole system relating
to the food-stuffs is built up to help in the preparation of the body to
vibrate in answer to the higher consciousness when it is wanted.
The next step is the complete mastery of the emotions, so
that a man may never be carried away by them. A man must have made some
advance along this line before it is thought safe to teach him the methods
of Yoga itself. When he has thus partly purified his body, and learned to
control his emotions, there comes in the training of the mind, the “great
enemy” as they call it; because all the ordinary use of the mind is to run
out to the outer world, and that mind is usually regarded as the best which
moves most rapidly from one thing to another, which is able to grasp one
thing and then turn to another, and so on. Now those qualities are
exceedingly hindering when you come to the evolution of the higher
consciousness, and the Raja Yogi turns all his efforts to the evolution of
this higher consciousness, which demands the quieting of the mind, in order
that it may shine forth. So his practice consists partly in the steadying of
the mind, which is done by the use of the imagination to a large extent, a
mental picture being formed and the attention fixed on it; then withdrawn
[129] from all the picture but one point, and fixed upon that; that
point finally being dropped so that the mind remains absolutely still. The
difficulties here in the West with regard to this method are these: that the
mind is more restless than it is in the East, by the line of evolution; and
again, that people expect results too rapidly. The first result of trying to
fix the mind is to discover that it is much more restless than you thought
it was. A mind which thought itself fairly steady is found to be restless
and all over the place, when it is ordered to fix itself on a thing which
does not attract it. Then, again, you must practise this for years before
you get a really satisfactory result, and that is a thing which seems rather
long to the hurrying and busy life we find here in the West. If you have
done it some lives before, you will do it soon now; but if this is the first
life, it will be a weary task, but it is inevitably necessary if you desire
to grow along the path that means wisdom, power and service. When the mind
has grown fairly steady, so that it can be reduced to quietude and kept
there without thinking, then comes the time when the higher consciousness
asserts itself, and with that one enters on the real practice of Yoga.
In addition to the fixing and gradual emptying of the
mind in this way, there will be considerable practice simply in
concentration, keeping the mind on a single thought, not so much now on a
mental picture as on an idea, and, as it were, sucking out of that idea
everything it has in it, by a curious process in which the idea takes
possession of the man. What really [130] happens is that the mental
body moulds itself into the form of the idea, so that the idea becomes part
of the mental body of the thinker; and when he can do that, those fixed
thoughts mould and shape, and create the organs in the mental body necessary
for the work which he has to do. When those organs are partially developed,
then the thought-power comes down through them on to the astral, and builds
there again the organs that it requires. You see you are coming down, along
the true line of evolution - the higher builds the lower and this more
highly developed consciousness, having shaped the mental body, proceeds to
the shaping of the astral; and as the man proceeds with his meditation and
concentration day by day, the thought comes down on to the physical plane,
and shapes the brain, also for the expression of the higher powers. And when
the thought-currents at last pour down, they find an instrument which is
able to vibrate without injury; and in addition to that, the whole of the
man’s previous thinking has improved the cells of the brain, has enlarged
them and made them very much more complex, creating a better instrument both
in the organisation of the cells by the whole course of thinking, and by the
power of vibrating to the subtler currents when they come down from the
higher planes.
Now that is the practice of Raja Yoga put in a general
way. Laborious, difficult, demanding a great sacrifice of time and labour,
it must become the first thing in life ere one can expect success. But,
after all, that is only what is true of every other science. The [131]
man who is going to be a really great mathematician must give his life
to it; the man who is going to be a great scientist of any kind makes the
science in which he chooses to be an expert the one object of his life,
bending all his efforts that way; and can you expect the science of the
soul, hardest, most complex, and most subtle of all sciences, shall be
mastered with less of effort than is given to the ordinary science, which
works in the physical plane and by the physical brain? If you think of it,
you will see that this only can be the rule of evolution here as elsewhere
that the man who would really be a Raja Yogi must make it the object of his
life. And as he proceeds in this way, notice the sequence: consciousness
unfolding first, and then the organs of the body shaped for its expression.
That means that whenever the organ is able to work, the consciousness will
be able to understand and master. It means that the man has evolved within,
and so will be able to deal with all that meets him on the different planes
of existence; and as he enters into one plane after another, he will find
that the powers that he requires on that plane are evolved in his
consciousness, and that none of the mechanism that has been created by their
use goes beyond, in its power of response, the powers of the consciousness
to understand. I grant that it is much more difficult than the other plan;
but then it takes you somewhere. It really quickens our evolution and makes
our lives nobler and grander than otherwise they can possibly be. It is the
road of evolution traced by the Divine [132] Will for the whole of
humanity; and all that the Raja Yoga does is to quicken evolution; it does
not turn aside from it, nor go against it.
Along this line of meditation and of practice it is that
the great Teachers of the past have gone. It is the road that They have
proved to be safe for human feet to tread. And the prize that lies at the
end of the efforts is great beyond all speaking.
I have been talking here all the time of this New
Psychology; but the understanding of that is as nothing, is but, as it were,
child’s play to those who are working for the evolution of these higher and
nobler faculties. For there is only one motive that makes the strength, the
courage, and perseverance to follow this toilsome road to its end, and that
is the will to serve, and to become a channel of the Divine Will in
evolution. You may tread part of that way with the desire to serve your
separated self; you may find something of courage, endurance, and patience
by the prizes of power held out to you along this path. But this also will
fail as the difficulties grow greater; for the man who fixes his thoughts on
power for the separated self is working against the Divine Will which works
for unity, and although he may become splendidly intellectual, although he
may develop to a great extent that body which for age after age is not born
nor dies, he cannot touch the innermost life of the Spirit, which knows no
separation, but lives by unity alone.
Along these paths of unfoldment I have mentioned, you are
truly unfolding consciousness and form. But [133] the highest path of
all, on which the eyes of those who tread these paths are set, is that
spiritual evolution which means the recognition that all lives are one and
not separate; that all beings live but in the Self, and the Self in them;
that knowledge which is of the highest, in which all are seen as one and not
as “others”. So that the man who reaches the threshold of the spiritual
world sees in that world himself indeed, but himself as part of a common,
universal life; realises that all the forms that lie on the lower planes are
his so far as his life and his powers are concerned, and that the one
particular form that he has been evolving by his struggles and his labours
is in very truth no more his, as a separated thing, than any of the other
objects which he sees around him in the universe, whose life is one. So that
it is not for him, as his eyes open to the greatness of the spiritual world,
to see differences in those around him any more, nor to think of himself as
other than they. The criminal in his lowest degradation to him is part of
himself, and the form of the criminal is his form as much as his own highly
evolved one. It is the glory of such a life that it can share any form,
however low, however base or vile, and, pouring part of itself into that
form, can raise it a little higher than by its own unaided efforts it could
climb. That it is to be a Saviour of the world; to know no difference, to
look on the saint and criminal with equal eyes, as both manifestations of
the Divine, as much identified with the one as with the other - perhaps even
more with the lower than with the higher, because the lower needs aid
[134] and effort more than does the higher and the more intelligent.
That it is to be a Saviour of the world: to be wise, but only that the
wisdom may go out among all the ignorant and make every ignorant man a
little wiser because one has known; to go out among the foul and the impure,
having gained purity, and make them a little cleaner because one has risen
to the heights of purity; to learn, but only to share; to gain, but only to
give; to rise to the highest in order to be able to touch most effectively
the lowest. For this is true that the higher you climb, the more easily you
can touch the lowest; not by stooping down to them, but by feeling your own
unity and identity with them. It is the part of the truly spiritual man to
feel himself one with the sinner, and to share his own purity with him. That
is what is meant by the spiritual life, beyond all intellect and beyond all
enveloping form; that is the true glory of Divine manhood; that the reality
of the spiritual life. Worthless is all unfoldment, worthless all swift
evolution, worthless all development, unless it subserves this one supreme
end - to put an end to separateness; to think no more of others as
different from one’s Self, but to know that the whole universe, inasmuch as
it is in its Creator, is also in every life that is one with Him; to know
that, as we share the Divine life, we come nearest to every form in the
universe; for true is it only of that which is of Spirit: “Closer is he than
breathing, nearer than hands and feet.” [135]
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