COLLECTED FRUITS OF GSSS G5&5 GSSS OSSS OCCULT TEACHING By A. P. SINNETT s/O THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES "^jfu^L^ar / is r lli^ V^ BY A. P. SINNETT AUTHOR OF "THE OCCULT WORLD," "ESOTERIC BUDDHISM " THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL," ETC. PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1920 First Published in 1919 Second Impression 1920 [All rights rt served] S&fc PREFACE Theosophical literature, from the outset of the great movement it inaugurated, has been largely concerned with previously unknown laws governing the origin and destinies of humanity, the birth and progres >; of worlds, the coherent design of the Solar System . and, in short, with the interpretation, in the light of - : knowledge till recently reserved for a very few, of the -.' stupendous Divine purpose underlying physical mani- festation. My own earlier books, The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism, forecast rather than embodied teaching along such lines, revealing the existence of those whom I called " the Elder Brethren of Humanity," who had risen above the level of generally current civilization, and thus had touch with the wisdom of the Divine Hierarchy. An experiment was in progress to ascertain if ordinary culture had attained a stage at which it would appreci- ate a flood of new thought relating to a science loftier than any dealing exclusively with phenomena per- ceptible to the physical senses, and in connection with that experiment I was privileged to receive a con- siderable volume of information relating to the early history of mankind millions of years antedating the range of historical record ; also to the concatenation of worlds and the ultimate destinies of our own. Though crude and incomplete, this preliminary sketch of occult science and of the agency through which, though unknown to the multitude, the purpose of creation was being worked out on the physical plane, thrilled the readers of the message all over the 5 6 Preface civilized world to an extent which gave rise to an organization, the Theosophical Society, which now covers Great Britain, Europe generally, and the United States of America with innumerable branches . Fresh teaching and information relating to the great subjects enumerated above has meanwhile been flowing into my hands, and much has been embodied in my book, The Growth of the Soul; also, since the publication of that book, in a large number of articles in reviews, pamphlets, and " Transactions " of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society over which I preside. The present volume collects these scattered contributions to our super-physical know- ledge, still growing and expanding in its scope and value. At some later date the fundamental principles laid down in the earlier books, the illuminating inter- pretation of these in the essays now reproduced and further light on mysteries previously obscure, may constitute something resembling a complete spiritual science. But students need not wait for this result before assimilating the knowledge already acquired. During this life we are each of us " imprisoned in the five senses," and, though thought reaches out far beyond them, its range is limited by the capacity of the physical brain. In time that capacity will expand. Ideas easily grasped by the man of modern culture are beyond the comprehension of the savage. The improved intellectual mechanism of future generations will no doubt deal freely with conceptions which present culture cannot appreciate. Spiritual science, however, is an infinitude, and no attempt to interpret it in physical plane language will ever be more than suggestive and alluring. But it is equally true that human faculty on this plane of life will develop as time goes on under the influence of effort to expand its range. Unconsciously in most cases students of the spiritual science within Preface 7 our reach will do more than profit by understanding it so far. They will have established a claim on Nature for improved vehicles of consciousness in later lives, and will have contributed to raise the level of human understanding. I am sure the ex- perience of many theosophists will show that within the limits of the current life ideas can now be easily handled in thought, which could not have been held in the mind during earlier periods of study. These may still defeat the resources of physical plane speech, but they forecast intellectual conditions that will ultimately outrun those resources. That state of things should be a stimulus to theosophical study in whatever direction it may tend, and few of the essays in this volume will be found destitute of hints that will attract thought into some new channel of spiritual, or, at least, of super-physical enlighten- ment. In no direction, as we press forward exploring the mysteries of Nature, may we expect to attain finality. Broad principles may be firmly established and at first they seem to be clearly outlined. Search for detail soon renders the outline shadowy without suggesting any distrust of the broad principle. For example, the most fundamental teaching of Theosophy in relation to current human life shows us Rein- carnation as essential to the spiritual growth of each EgOj/ In one of the essays in this book on Theo- sophical Teachings liable to be Misunderstood, so much detail is added to the original teaching on this subject that when we absorb this the broad idea without that detail seems as likely to mislead as to instruct. Earlier statements concerning the mechanism of the Solar System, the planetary chains, the successive " manvantaras," etc., were vividly significant at first. They remain as revelations of natural truth that we can never lose touch with, but 8 Preface surrounded by the later interpretation dealt with in some of the present essays, concerning the way in which the planetary chains are concatenated together and the way in which the manvantaras expand and contract, the first sketches of the truth are seen to fail altogether in showing it illustrative of the beautiful symmetry and purpose of the Divine design . Some readers of the earlier books are too easily satisfied. The genuine occult student will never stand still. Henry V., preparing for battle at Agincourt, declared that : " If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive." And the occult student may think of knowledge the true knowledge, the comprehension and appreciation of Divine mani- festation in the same heroic spirit. CONTENTS PAGR Preface - - 5 This World's Place in the Universe - - 11 Future Life and Lives - - - - 29 Religion under Repair - - - - 48 Religion under Repair : A Reply to Professor Lindsay 64 The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry - - - 79 Creeds more or less Credible - - - - 93 Imprisoned in the Five Senses - - - - in Our Visits to this World - - - - 129 The Masters and their Methods of Instruction - 147 Expanded Theosophical Knowledge - - - 160 The Nature of Consciousness. The Planetary Chain. The Astral World. The Infinite Future. The Pyramids and Stonehenge - - - - 189 Theosophical Teachings Liable to be Misunderstood 218 The Super-Physical Laws of Nature - - - 238 The Higher Occultism ----- 253 The Objects of the Theosophical Society - - 262 9 i o Contents PACK The Borderland of Science - - - -272 Astronomy, Overt and Occult. 1. Nebulae. 2. Within or Beyond our Universe. 3. Planets, Stars and Atoms. Meta-science. Atoms and Ether Atoms and Misunderstandings. Archaeology: Relics of Antiquity ... 291 Cataclysms and Earthquakes - 295 Poetry and Theosophy ----- 304 Note- ------- 308 COLLECTED FRUITS OF OCCULT TEACHING THIS WORLD'S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE Religious emotion was, till recently, at war with science especially indignant with astronomy for disturbing primitive conceptions as to the way this world was first opened for business. But a bold application of the principle that biblical language need not be taken at the foot of the letter gradually en- larged its interior meaning until the rotundity and annual revolution of the earth were fitted in to the story told in Genesis. Evolution as accounting for the human form then came within sight of a gloomy toleration if Modernists insisted on it. That, how- ever, which religious emotion has not yet quite realized is the sublime truth that, the more we are enabled to penetrate the deep mysteries of Nature, the more profoundly reverent we become in contem- plating the impenetrable infinitudes of that Divine Power which operates alike in guiding the growth of protoplasm and the majestic mechanism of the Solar System. Critics who preferred when Darwin first shattered the paraphernalia of medieval theology, like a bull in a china shop to remain on the side of the Angels, made the immense mistake of supposing that the Angels (regarded as agents of Divinity) would be disestablished if we began to approach an understanding of the way they did their work. A view growing familiar with some students of Nature 12 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching involves the idea that even natural forces are the expression of conscious will on some exalted levels of spiritual potency; that the so-called " laws " of Nature are definite Divine enactments not merely blind attributes of matter. And we can hardly begin to form a rational conception of the world's develop- ment under Divine control without including this idea in our thinking. The reconciliation of religion and science has been advancing by leaps and bounds of late, and " Seven Men of Science," all of the foremost rank, recently published a collection of addresses frankly declaring their belief in God, as a fundamental idea underlying scientific study. The record of the old " Conflict '* is now ancient history. But this result is not a con- clusion. It is only a beginning. The seven scientific leaders, quite in agreement as regards the main proposition, may be groping in various directions in the search for a definite mental picture of the God in whom they believe. Perhaps all would admit that the reality does not lend itself to the formation of a mental picture. Religion reconstructed on scientific principles must build up a conception of Divinity by working from below upward. The earlier fashion attempted to work from above downward. " In the beginning " certain things happened, we were told by teachers who, quite reasonably in dealing with young people, ignored the idea that Eternity has no beginning. But now that embryology must be recognized as a method of creation when we talk about the human form we feel the need of an embryology as applied to planetary creation. And so we come to recognize the subtle, mysterious laws of organic growth not as displacing the Divine creative Will,, but as the agency by which it is fulfilled in physical manifestation. So by degrees, with help available at the present day,. This World's Place in the Universe 1 3 for those especially who realize that human conscious- ness can be reached by other channels of perception besides the five senses, we reach the idea that Divine agency is worked out through an enormously elaborate and magnificent hierarchy of Spiritual Beings, beyond whom, in dazzling and (as yet) impenetrable mystery, there exists an incomprehensibly sublime Power, of whom the Sun may be thought of as the physical symbol. In the mental search for God we may pause at this stage of the effort. Human intelligence is more limited in its scope than early philosophers imagined, but is quite limitless as regards its expectations. It presumes to talk about the Divine power which accounts for the whole universe. Distant stars, though to be counted by millions and mostly gigantic compared with the star, or Sun, to which we belong, must come into the same creative scheme as the sparrows in Kensington Gardens . The Sunday School teacher can be content with nothing less than a God who is responsible for the Milky Way as well as for the milky mothers of the field. And medieval painters have even presented us with his portrait. In some foreign gallery I have seen him included in a family group the Father with a long beard is in an armchair with the Third Person of the Trinity as a pigeon perched on the back, and the Son in a chair of somewhat lesser dignity beside him. En- lightened members of the English Church would generally be shocked at this grossly materialistic presentation of the Divine Mystery, forgetful of their own declaration of belief that Christ ascended into Heaven and " sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty." From The Fudge Family in Paris we learn that a certain forcible expression, impossible in English, " doesn't sound half so shocking in French," and on the same principle an idea merely 14 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching formulated in words that no one stops to invest with a meaning is not half so shocking as the same idea depicted on canvas by means of oil colour. In the days of the old " Conflict " those who dealt with it Draper and others dwelt especially on the savage ferocity with which the early Church en- deavoured to stifle astronomical discovery. Faith, at that time, might have been correctly described as " the faculty that enables, us to believe what we know to be untrue . " It was endangered by the astronomical emphasis of the untruthfulness in question, but in the long run, as astronomy held the field, faith fell into line with discovery, and in spite of ecclesiastical opposition became ennobled in character. The God of a Semitic tribe might with an effort of imagination be fitted into an armchair. The God of a Solar System, including a central Sun many thousand times bigger than the Earth and the orbit of Neptune thousands of million miles in diameter was in a different order of magnitude. And if we attempt to strain imagination by looking upward in thought at that inconceivable splendour, we may realize the futility of the effort by attempting to gaze directly with open eyes on a fine day at the physical Sun. Human sight will not tolerate the unveiled light. Human understanding will not bring the God-idea, once cleared of blundering theology, to a definite focus. But astronomical discovery does not come to a standstill even after measuring the orbit of Neptune and accounting for the canals of Mars, nor after attempting, however unsuccessfully, to set time limits to the radiant energy of the Sun. We are all agreed though astronomy affords scope for disagree- ment in some directions that the whole Solar System the Sun attended by his family of planets is moving through space at about the rate of twelve to fourteen miles per second. Whither is it bound ? This World's Place in the Universe 15 Greenwich authorities would hardly yet venture on a definite reply, but we may if we* like indulge, in connection with that question, in the fascinating pursuit known to science as " extrapolation " the application to regions of thought outside the range of definite observation, of the assumption that laws operative within that range hold good to infinitudes beyond. Almost all the Heavenly bodies quite all if we merely except meteorites and some comets move in elliptical orbits more or less closely approxi- mating to the circular form. Plainly, it is much more probable that the Sun's motion is in conformity with this general principle, than that it is a blind rush in a straight course, which would infallibly in the long run give rise to a cosmic catastrophe. If the uniformities of Nature are maintained, the Sun must be revolving in an orbit around some definite sidereal centre. Obviously such an orbit must be so vast that any measurable arc will appear to be a straight line. Now I must venture to outrun even extrapolation in the explanation I have to give. I have been permitted in the pages of the Nineteenth Century to maintain the position that, in the course of the present " Armaged- don," Unseen Powers embodying loftier knowledge than common humanity has yet reached are taking part in the struggle. Some of us in conscious touch with them are sometimes with their help enabled to anticipate scientific discovery. In that way I was concerned, some dozen years before the dis- covery of Radium, with anticipations relating to the constitution of matter, ultimately verified by that discovery and subsequent work based upon it. Happily those anticipations were published at the time, so their character as a successful forecast is not open to dispute. In another direction certain future conclusions in connection with astronomy may be anticipated in their turn. The centre around which 1 6 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching the Solar System is gravitating will be found to be the star Sirius. Common knowledge gives us an approximate measure of some stellar distances. The figure accepted by astronomers for the moment as the distance of Sirius, taking " light-years " as the unit, is 8.8, or call it eight and three-quarters. A light-year is the distance light crosses in a year, moving at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. So it would be inconvenient to give stellar distances in miles. Moreover, there is a wide margin for possible errors in calculations concerned with the parallax of stars. Perhaps it will be found that Sirius is a bit farther off than the currently accepted calculation assumes, but anyhow the real distance is in the same order of magnitude. Estimates of the size and luminosity of Sirius vary very widely from 300 to 1000 times the size and brightness of our Sun, but either guess fits in with the main idea to be grasped. Obviously our Sun cannot be the only one that revolves around Sirius. Directly that idea is appreciated, we realize that Sirius must be the central sun of a vast system, in which such suns as ours must be, to Sirius, what the planets are to our Sun. That this is so, can only be ascertained definitely by those in touch with sources of information not yet within general reach, but at all events, meanwhile, as a hypothesis, the statement is clearly in harmony with the uniformities of Nature. To regard our Solar System and all the others presumably repre- sented by the millions of stars in the sky, as scattered at random about space would be insulting to Supreme Wisdom and Omnipotence. The conception could only be acceptable to thinkers at the kindergarten stage. Certainly up to the middle of the last century grown and grave men did discuss the question whether this was the only inhabited world in the Universe, but increasing intelligence has rendered us at once This World's Place in the Universe 17 wiser and more modest than when a doubt on that subject was possible. I need not go over the evidence that makes an important group of astronomers certain that Mars (to confine our attention for a moment to our own Solar System) is the abode of life not entirely unlike our own. The other planets may not have climatic conditions like our own, but the resources of Nature may easily provide vehicles of life appro- priate to any conditions of temperature; while those of us who know something more about life, conscious- ness and spiritual growth than mere surgery would suggest, regard with disdain the idea that any worlds whether around our sun or in the infinitudes of space can be mere inanimate masses of matter destitute of the loftier purposes that life implies. Just for the present all information relating to the Sirian Cosmos must remain hypothetical until the astronomy of the future overtakes the forecast, but its value as illuminating reverent imagination reaching in the direction of Divinity is very great. It helps us to realize that in all such upward reaching we must blend with the idea of which we are in search, the idea of infinity. In the search within the limits of our own Solar System we are hopelessly dazzled long before we touch those limits. But the conception of the Sirian Cosmos shows us that in- comprehensible as the Solar Divinity may be " That " (our miserable word " he " is degrading in such use) can only be in some dependent relationship to the Divinity guiding the whole Sirian Cosmos; in other words that " God " is an infinite hierarchy. Faintly we realize that God when we think of the Sirian Cosmos is, in some wholly incomprehensible way, greater even (in a stupendous degree) than God, when we think of the Solar System and of the various worlds within it of which ours is one. And, indeed, human intelligence, limited in its grasp of 2 1 8 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching detail, unlimited when reaching out towards infinitude, perceives, the moment this last idea is touched, that the Sirian Cosmos itself must be in relationship with some still more expanded and sublime organism; that Sirius cannot be a stationary body but must itself, attended by all its family of solar systems, be dependent on some other centre of energy, on some other superior manifestation of the infinite God . It is futile even to speculate as to where or what that centre may be, but the feeling that it must exist vaguely hints at a unity pervading the whole visible universe. Along that line of thought, however, lies a mental bewilderment that bars further progress. We can play in imagination still with astronomical figures. The bright star Arcturus is said to be 140 light-years distant from us, and yet it shines nearly as brilliantly as Sirius. What must be its actual magnitude and lustre ? What must be its place in the universal scheme ? And some other stars of almost equivalent brilliancy are beyond parallactic measurement altogether. But the purpose which all fulfil must be within the grasp of infinite Divinity. Science, growing more and more intimately welded with spiritual aspiration as human intelligence ex- pands, grants us some mental illumination as we seek to penetrate, so far as that may be possible, the mysteries of the Divine Hierarchy. Certainly, if we turn our attention from the appalling magnitudes of astronomy to the phenomena of the infinitely little, the measurements we have to deal with are equally bewildering. Physicists tell us that a cubic centi- metre of water contains thirty trillions of molecules. That if a glass globe four inches in diameter were absolutely empty and air molecules admitted at the rate of a hundred millions a second 50,000 years would elapse before the globe was full. Such figures are more amusing than instructive, but they may This World's Place in the Universe 19 help us, to some extent, in our attempt to formulate a conception of the Divine Hierarchy. The attributes of the physical molecules the laws they obey, are obviously as much an expression of Divine Will as the forces that regulate the march of solar systems in the Sirian Cosmos. Within our Solar System the Divine Hierarchy extends downward, as definitely as, beyond it, it extends upward ; and though, as we attempt to understand it in its lower levels, we shall soon find mental difficulties almost as insuperable as those attending efforts in the other direction, we can, with help from certain sources of information, arrive at some intelligible conclusions. Astronomy may still help us to some extent. The conditions that must attend life in the various planets of our system must obviously differ very widely. Temperature may vary from below that of ice to above that of steam. Vehicles of consciousness bodies of whatever matter may be suitable, must vary accord- ingly. We may safely assume that while some of the fundamental laws of Nature may hold good through- out the system, others, for example all appertaining to organic growth, may need local modification. Each world must be controlled, even as regards its physical manifestation, by appropriate Divine Agency. And very little progress beyond primitive theology makes us sure that first of all as regards our own world there are teeming regions of life that lie beyond the cognition of the physical senses. Talk therefore of our familiar planets should properly relate to planetary schemes, embracing much more than the visible globes. So we reach the conception that for each planetary scheme the Divine will of the whole Solar System must transmit itself througli an agency that is still so Divine in its character as to dazzle our mental sight. None the less a very important stage in our study 20 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching of the Divine Hierarchy is reached when we realize the principle of agency as working through it. The mind leaps to the conclusion that this principle must be operative right down to the subtle activities of Nature that we are in the habit of summing up in the word " Evolution." For the verification of this conjecture we must obviously be dependent on information received from those sources of super- physical knowledge above referred to, such informa- tion in turn being only subject to the check imposed by our own critical faculties. Does it appeal to our intelligence as essentially reasonable in its character ? Leaving that question to be determined later, I will first endeavour to describe the agency through which the purpose of the Divine Power presiding over the planetary scheme to which this world belongs, appears to be worked out in physical manifestation. We have to think of the Unseen realms of Nature as inhabited by hosts of spiritual beings concerned with the direction of the forces (emanating from super-Divine Will) which not merely guide organic growth but provide for the growth of the spiritual essence with which such growth is associated. Language is apt to break down in one's hands as a means of conveying ideas that are inextricably blended with still more subtle underlying ideas. We are living in a world the whole raison d'etre of which resides in the opportunity it affords for the growth and expansion of spiritual consciousness. The experiences of consciousness in association with physical environ- ment are the conditions providing for its growth. We may plunge down in search of the beginnings of such growth to levels of consciousness far below those of humanity. But leaving that vast area of thought untrodden, the growth of spiritual consciousness as focussed in humanity is itself under the guidance of Divine agency whose perfect uniformity of intention, This World's Place in the Universe 21 fulfilling the Divine purpose, would, if we could see only a little more clearly, present to imagination a system of natural law on the moral plane as un- alterable as the natural laws relating to physical matter that we deal with in the chemist's laboratory. Those natural laws of the moral plane are entangled with variable influences arising from human free will, but that only renders the task of the Divine agents who guide them more delicate, not less specific. The first glimpses we get in this way, of the intricacy of the work carried out by the hosts of Divine agents engaged in guiding the world's growth, prepare us to find that a distribution of function is carried out in that wonderful realm of activity, so that while one great host is concerned with the growth of conscious- ness, another is concentrated on the task of guiding the growth of form of carrying out the idea that, for want of a better comprehension of the process, we call the principle of Evolution. And such agency works again in its contact with matter through lower agency right down to the manipulation of the molecule. The Divine Hierarchy is infinite both ways; incon- ceivably exalted and inconceivably minute, but in the direction of minutiae still conscious and purposeful. Intelligence, with a certain range of freedom within limits, guides not only the gradual improvement of the human form, pari passu with the progress of spiritual growth, but the humbler development of form in the animal kingdom and even variation in the colouring of plants and flowers. The agency concerned with such work cannot be discerned by the physical senses, but finer senses can already sometimes cognize its operation, though most of us are still too young in evolution to have come into full possession of all the faculties latent in human nature. " We are ancients of the earth and in the morning of the times." So brief a sketch as this must be content in some 22 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching directions with mere faint hints. How do the Divine agents concerned, as declared above, with the evolu- tion of form translate their superphysical powers to the physical plane ? The answer has to do with what may be called the semi-intelligent mechanism of Nature. The mere phrase is bewildering, but it deals with certain aspects of Nature that science must concern itself with before long. " Elemental Agency " cannot properly be regarded as belonging to the Divine Hierarchy even in its lower levels, but it constitutes a vast subsidiary evolution by itself; cosmic in its character: related to much more than the interests of this world alone ; beginning on levels commensurate with the electron in magnitude and importance, rising to conditions in which definite forms in certain fine orders of matter are identifiable by observers, with adequately clairvoyant senses, as associated with specific functions in Nature. Ele- mentals constitute the link between will human or Divine and physical manifestation. Obviously the subject is one of stupendous magnitude. No fire could burn, no plant could grow, no human being could live on the physical plane, and carry on all that business transacted within his body of which he is wholly unconscious, without elemental agency. When science comes to grapple with the intricacies of this so far hidden aspect of Nature, it will look back to its present condition as one barely emerging from the dark ages. Thus vast and complicated is the agency by which Divine Will is fulfilled. But we have to struggle as best we may with the idea of hierarchies within hierarchies. The world is a theatre in which a stupendous drama is in process of performance. The scenery and decorations are provided by Divine agency, and the actors are responsible if we push the metaphor to its extreme limits for the parts This World's Place in the Universe 23 they play. In other words, while Divine agency invests them with their opportunity, their own free will is left to determine the use they make of this. But they must not be allowed to wreck the whole under- taking by too gross a misuse of that free will. The drama is intended to have a happy ending. So over and above or apart from the hierarchies that provide the conditions Divine ordination provides for a governing hierarchy that does not actually control the actors put words into their mouths, so to speak, or manage them like marionettes but causes them to feel disagreeable consequences from blundering; invests them with larger consciousness as they willingly fall into line with the Divine idea. Of course that governing hierarchy is merged in its loftier levels with the superior agents of infinite Divinity, but on its less exalted levels is in close touch with our own humanity. This thought leads up to what is perhaps the most important idea of all that I have been endeavouring to suggest. Humanity itself recruits the governing hierarchy. Its members on the first important level above ordinary humanity have been, at some remote periods in the past, human beings like (the best of) ourselves. We speak of them now, those of us who have the privilege of more or less knowing them, as great adepts, Masters of Wisdom, Brothers of the Great White Lodge, or by any other phrases approximately appropriate. They are in normal periods equal to the task under Divine inspiration of which they, of course, are vividly conscious of carrying on the government of the world in so far as it needs adjustment or interference. They are our Allies in this ghastly abnormal period in which humanity is confronted by an attack from such elevated levels of spiritual potency that, great as their power undoubtedly is, they can only for the moment resist the awful unseen foe inspiring our 24 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching physical plane enemies, whilst awaiting intervention, ultimately certain if it becomes necessary, from lofty levels of Divine Power. Will this view of the great current crisis seem, to some critics, at variance with the main idea that this world, like all others, is governed by an infinite Divine Hierarchy of quite limitless capacity and directing human evolution from the realms of infinite Love ? The problem has been dealt with at some length in articles for the Nineteenth Century?- and need only be referred to now. Freewill, in one word, is the answer. The ultimate evolution of individual humanity can only be accomplished by investing each unit with the Divine attribute of freewill in a greater or less degree. Half-fledged humanity of the kind around us in abundance is hardly conscious of the extent to which it enjoys this attribute. It becomes more and more available as spiritual evolution proceeds. By the hypothesis it may be exerted to fulfil the purpose of Divine love, in so far as that may be discerned, or it may be perverted to antagonize that purpose. Within the limits of our humanity the perversion may not be carried to any extreme degree. But other humanities have preceded our own and have reached exalted conditions in which free will for good or evil was enormously expanded in its scope. In that way it has come to pass that spiritual evil has assumed colossal proportions until at last it has challenged Divine Power on very high levels. That is the challenge with which we, on our humble level, are now contending. We feel sure of ultimate success because the mighty spiritual powers of evil, at war with the Divine idea of humanity (on this plane with ourselves, the Allied armies) have 1 " Our Unseen Enemies and Allies " and " When the Dark Hosts are Vanquished," Nineteenth Century and After, October and November, 191 5. This World's Place in the Universe 25 had a definite origin that we can discern and have reached a definite height of spiritual power. How- ever exalted that power, it is finite. The Divine Hierarchy is infinite. At whatever level Satanic power may confront it on equal terms, Divine re- sources above that level are limitless. If exerted they must subdue the finite power, and we have reason to feel sure that sooner or later they will be exerted to avert the ruin of the world. I have said that our Allies in this great struggle the Masters of Wisdom, or by whatever name we like to call them the Chieftains of Humanity, of whose existence, till recent years, humanity at large was wholly ignorant, are recruited from amongst ourselves although none the less constituting the first great stage of advancement, counting from below upward, of the Divine Hierarchy. But while, beyond them, conditions of existence begin to transcend physical brain comprehension we can understand to some extent the capacities and powers of the beings who have attained to them, and the functions appertaining to their stage of evolution. Certainly that mighty organization includes some who reached high spiritual dignity before this world's children had emerged from early races, in one sense their nursery. But none the less it includes some who have been to outward appearance within historic periods mere ordinary men. The world, indeed, has never been without a great ruling Brotherhood, though at one time it was indebted for this to a Senior humanity. The phrase needs amplification to be fully intelligible, but a very little thought will give reason to the idea that the history of this world and of our human races is not a " complete short story," in itself, but an episode in universal history. As our humanity became sufficiently evolved to furnish recruits for the great ruling Brotherhood 26 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching its existence was allowed to filter out gradually into the consciousness of the few candidates available. These were the few whose ardour in the pursuit of lofty knowledge and whose moral development were such that they could be trusted not to misuse enhanced knowledge. The world at large was not generally ripe for the proper appreciation of the fact that powers and knowledge beyond ordinary experience were attainable by certain means. A premature dissemination of that idea might have had unfortunate consequences. But for the chosen few it was re- vealed, and so it has come to pass that at the present day the great Brotherhood includes many members who have been men like (the best of) ourselves within a comparatively recent period. Experience of ordinary life does not enable us to understand their place in Nature altogether and completely. They work to a great extent on planes of consciousness beyond the cognition of the ordinary senses. They wield forces as yet unknown to Science, using the physical body merely as a vehicle to be occupied or left aside as convenience may suggest : the finest clairvoyance which ordinary students of that wonderful faculty have ever met with is, com- pared with theirs, a rushlight to an electric arc; and physical matter itself is plastic in their hands. In the higher vehicles of consciousness distances about the world mean nothing, and withal they are of course in absolute harmony with the Divine Will. The view thus reached that shows us the humanity to which we all belong as designed to recruit the first, as we look upward, of the spiritual degrees that in the aggregate constitute the Divine Hierarchy is of supreme significance. Properly understood it invests humanity with an entirely new meaning, as compared with that which merely treats each item in that humanity as destined to an infinitely continued This World's Place in the Universe 27 individual existence, happy or unhappy, as the case may be. The crude fancy thus presented to the mind by commonplace religion may have served its purpose while the world was young, as coaxing or warning an ignorant multitude not yet ripe for a more profound conception, but philosophically it is beneath criticism. The sublime idea, as directly affecting ourselves, to be derived from a conception, even if only broad and incomplete, of the Divine Hierarchy is that which shows it to be a coherent entirety stretching upward from this world as we know it, in the direction of absolute infinity. It enables us, for the first time, to comprehend this world 's place in the Universe. A misdirected modesty leads some of us occasionally to talk of this world as a small planet amongst many greater, attached to a tenth-rate sun in a Universe richly stocked with others of enormously greater magnitude and brilliancy, The infinitesimal creatures on its surface can only be regarded, in this way, as important in their own estimation; no more so really than the grains of sand on the seashore. That view is no less erroneous than depressing. The humanity for the sake of evolving which this world exists, represents a definite stage in the evolution of Divine consciousness, which, besides its limitless expansion towards infinity, is susceptible of infinite accretion from below. There are no stages in the Divine Hierarchy that have not been recruited, in some unfathomable past, from humanities more or less resembling our own. Eternity stretches both ways and the world the solar systems of to-day, though figures would fail to suggest their duration as measured in our time are manifestations of Divine power that have suc- ceeded others and will be in turn succeeded. We count the nebulae in the Heavens, and watch the growth of future suns destined to bear their progeny 28 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching of future worlds and future candidates for Divine evolution. But we need not torment imagination by following that thought too far. It is enough to know that here and now we are candidates for Divine evolution ; that there is no solution of continuity from this stage of existence up to those that have been faintly suggested in these pages and are hopelessly dazzling to mental vision as we dwell in thought on their attributes and power. This humanity of ours, even as we contemplate its visible varieties from the savage to the greatest philosopher, is obviously a vast procession moving through the ages, each immortal spirit ever seeking new and new incarnations till gathered experience and effort entitle it to those of the loftiest order. The appreciation of this idea marks a huge advance beyond the primitive con- ception of an eternal perpetuation of each grotesquely incomplete being. But such an appreciation is merely a step in the direction of the grander conception. The highest level of moral and intellectual attainment on the stage of this world's potentialities is but a new beginning, a point of departure for a progress beyond the precise comprehension of physically incarnate intelligence, but happily not altogether veiled from our view. No matter for the moment whether there be other worlds affording still more favourable opportunities for embodied consciousness. That is no concern of ours. We may be fully content to know that however the preparatory processes leading up to the Divine Hierarchy may be provided for in other worlds, this of ours has a place in the Universe in direct relation with all the infinitudes that simple word represents with all that the most illuminated reverence can suggest when we presume to speak of God. FUTURE LIFE AND LIVES Naturally enough the tragedies of the War have imparted thrilling interest to some questions care- lessly disregarded by the multitude during normal periods. Is there an after life for all of us when we " die " ? Can we find out anything about it in advance ? Can we communicate with those who have already passed on ? Most current essays dealing with such perplexities have a ludicrous aspect for millions of spiritualists in constant touch with departed friends, for all occult students and for most psychic researchers. A writer in these pages last month calmly asserts that communication with the dead " has never been definitely proved to be anything but delusion or fraud." If equally ignorant in other directions he might deal in the same way with any scientific discovery, say, the retrograde motion of some planetary satellites, or the transmutations of radium. The vast literature of spiritualism is flooded with proof of the main idea. More recently the literature of occult research is rich in detail con- cerning the conditions of the after life. 1 To say that 1 Simply to show that I am not talking at random I will men- tion a few books the perusal of which would guard writers of a certain class from making themselves ridiculous: Spirit Identity, Psychography, The Higher Aspects of Spiritualism, Spirit Teach- ings, A Wanderer in Spirit Lands, The Story of Ahrinziman, Collo- quies with an Unseen Friend, Out of the Vortex, After Death, Not Silent though Dead, In the Next World, Do Thoughts Perish ? The Hidden Side of Things, The Inner Life, Esoteric Buddhism, The Growth of the Soul, The Occult World, The Secret Doctrine, A Study in Consciousness, The Ancient Wisdom. Some of the books named 2 9 30 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching knowledge thereof has made " no substantial progress whatever " is like asserting that since Galvani's experiment with frogs' legs our knowledge of elec- tricity has made no progress whatever. Raymond,, attracting deserved attention on account of its authorship, is only the latest contribution to in- numerable records of a similar kind, the cumulative significance of which is overwhelming, while all who are patient and painstaking get personal conviction for themselves. Spiritualists for the most part are content with this. The)' know their departed friends still live and get assurance of their welfare. They look forward with confidence to their own future. Occult students find that, besides evidence of that order, minute in- formation relating to the conditions of the after life can be obtained by people still in this life when gifted with clairvoyant faculties of an appropriate kind. Abundant information is accumulating in the literature of occult research along these lines. In no department of human activity has more remarkable progress been made during the last thirty years than in this branch of superphysical science. That progress has carried the occult student far beyond elementary discoveries relating to the immediate experiences of the next life . Certainly these are intensely interesting , but do not in themselves enable us to obtain a com- prehensive grasp of the whole scheme of evolution to which humanity belongs. Comprehension of the next phase of life marks a great advance beyond the crass ignorance that doubts or denies even that, but it only helps us relatively a little way in the direction of understanding our place in Nature and our ultimate destinies. Later developments of occult science relate to Spiritualism, some to Theosophy or occult science gener- ally. They are a mere handful compared with any complete bibliography of either subject. Future Life and Lives 3 1 enable us to appreciate both the value and limitations of spiritualism. >CThe mediumship on which it relies is better understood now than at first. Physical phenomena are brought about when certain invisible factors in the medium's constitution can be withdrawn for use by elemental agency. Messages come through when certain organs in the medium's body respond to subtle vibrations that most people fail to perceive. But the medium in either case is a passive instrument in the hands of invisible operators, and these are of all varieties. That accounts for the nonsense that often discredits the method. The lower regions of the next world swarm with the (morally and intel- lectually) lower classes of humanity dying constantly b} r thousands, and (for a time at all events) remaining as unintelligent as they were in life. Their influences and messages are ignoble and stupid, but even then they serve their purpose. They show us in touch with another plane of existence. And meanwhile more enlightened inhabitants of that plane also communicate as the literature of spiritualism shows. But spiritualism, having broken down the deadly materialism into which thought was drifting during the last century, paved the way for the development of occult science. The later literature referred to above illuminates its origin and progress. The new view of Evolution, of human destiny, and the economy of Nature generally, which it has unfolded for us, cannot be fully interpreted within the limits of a Review article, but may be broadly suggested. -L The stupendous conception of the future which shows that physical life has spiritual progress for its purpose, that this world is the region in which that progress has to be accomplished, that other realms of existence are the regions in which the work done here bears fruit, and provides for invigorating rest, leads us to the important conception that each physical life is 32 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching merely one of a series; that whatever experiences intervene between each we shall all of us come back again and again to life of the kind we are familiar with here, that Reincarnation is as certain a law of Nature as the circulation of the blood. Reincarnation when first scientifically defined some thirty-odd years ago was quickly seen to solve many previously insoluble problems. The hideous in- equalities of human condition no longer seemed to insult Divine justice. Suffering became intelligible when the conditions of each new life were realized as the consequences of previous doing " (or Karma). The superficial objection, that the sufferer did not remember his former misdoing, was dissipated as we realized that the Higher Self did so, and profited by each physical plane experience. Further knowledge showed that humanity is still in its youth. A few more advanced than the multitude do remember former lives. The whole course of reasoning need not be repeated here. The appreciation of rebirth as essential to a comprehension ;of human life is already widely spread. By reason of misunderstanding details many people regard it with dislike, and the dislike has been accentuated by the eagerness of those who seized upon it at first to deal with it as though it covered all mysteries of the future. To think of the future as simply a return to this life is as great a blunder as to ttunk of the life which opens up to the person just set' free from the physical body, by its death, as entering an everlasting existence of a super- physical order. Only by failing to understand it correctly pan anyone fall into the habit of criticizing the Divine scheme of evolution unfavourably. The personality of a brutal criminal in the slums is clearly not fit for eternal perpetuation. The bishop in his palace, if he honestly considers the matter, will come to the same conclusion as regards himself. " We are Future Life and Lives 33 ancients of the Earth," etc., and, as we look back on those who millions of years ago were more ancient still, we can see how better worth perpetuation we shall be when wider experiences of life shall have lifted us as far beyond our present condition as we now are beyond that of our Stone Age predecessors ourselves in former lives. Probably, indeed, there will be no stage of growth from which the perpetuation of that stage would be conceivable. Spiritual pro- gress must be infinite, but with that which lies beyond the perfection of humanity we can only be concerned much later on J( Our present purpose should be to understand the laws of reincarnation so as to realize that it does not conflict in any way with the wide- ranging possibilities of life on higher realms after bodily death, and to understand that life so as to realize that it does not interfere with the necessity of returning here to gather fresh experience and get ready for loftier spiritual enlightenment on happier levels again. Those of us who have taken adequate advantage of modern opportunities need not speculate about the chances of survival after death. That is utterly familiar knowledge, and, with varying facilities, many of us are in communication with friends who have passed on, though it does not always happen that these have acquired any scientific comprehension of their own destinies beyond the stage actually reached. Even for those of us here who have taken best advantage of current oppor- tunities there are horizons beyond which our know- ledge does not extend, but the region in which people wake up after they have discarded the physical vehicle of consciousness is already a pays de con- naissance for many of us, and there is pathos as well as absurdity in the fact that, for much larger numbers, conventional teaching has left them still in doubt whether there is any waking up at all. 3 34 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching " The Astral Plane " is the term generally used by occultists to designate the vast realm of unseen life immediately surrounding this globe. It is not a well- chosen term, as the region in question has nothing to do with the stars, but it has become rooted in occult phraseology, and we cannot now escape from its use. It is really a vast concentric sphere of matter that does not appeal to our physical senses; far greater in size than the physical globe it embraces, including an enormous variety of conditions, some of them highly disagreeable; but of these it is needless to speak for the moment, as the vast majority of decently behaved people will have nothing to do with them but will pass at once, when free of the body, to regions where they will find themselves happier than they are likely to have ever been, even under favour- able circumstances, in the physical life. Naturally the character of such happiness is determined by the use that has been made of the earth life and the extent of spiritual development that the Soul (or Ego) has reached in its long progress through the ages, its innumerable immersions in physical life, its former incarnations. The distribution of the varied condi- tions is well understood by those among us whose faculties are equal to the' task of cognizing astral conditions, but for people who are not merely without such faculties, but have not been in touch with those who do enjoy them, some explanation is needed in reference to matter and sense-perception. Without plunging into metaphysics in the direction of Berkeley it is obvious that the reality of matter for us is due to the appeal it makes to our senses. Even on this plane some kinds of matter most gases make no appeal to the sense of sight, but we know of them by means of other senses, other avenues to consciousness. But most of us have no senses through which astral matter can affect our conscious- Future Life and Lives 35 ness. Many, however, have, and that is the whole secret of " clairvoyance " the actuality of which as a faculty in some people is no longer the subject of any sane denial. Clairvoyants can in some cases see the forms in which astral life is expressed . For the most part their astral senses are partially smothered by their association with physical senses. Those, however, who can as the phrase goes get out of the body, and exist prematurely in the astral plane, in the vehicle of consciousness that will not be in perfect order for use until the physical body, at death, is finally got rid of, such persons become at once fully conscious of the astral realm, and this is the im- portant point to realize cease for the time to be conscious of the physical realm. It does not exist for them any more than the astral world exists for the commonplace man in the street. All this is not guesswork or metaphysical speculation. It is the definite result of observation as scientific in its character as that concerned with astronomy or spectroscopic analysis. And the final result is that we are now in a position to know that when we look up into the sky and see nothing between us and the stars, we are really looking through a realm as rich in detail as the landscape we can see on a fine day from a mountain top. This region is inhabited by myriads of the human family, amongst them any we have loved and lost and will rejoin in due time, pending, at a far remoter date, our return together to this laborious nether world in which we have to work for any grand results above that may crown our ultimate endeavours. The astral world is not merely a concentric sphere surrounding the physical globe, it is one within another a series of concentric spheres, generally spoken of by occult scientists as " sub-planes." Counting from below upwards, the first and second, 36 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching actually immersed in the body of the earth, are regions of suffering with which none but the very worst offenders against Divine laws have anything to do. The third sub-plane, above the earth's surface, is still a comfortless region in which people who have been too deeply absorbed by the lower interests of physical life may have to spend a period of purification before ascending to happier levels; but this vast and highly varied range of experience may be ignored for the moment as it need not disturb the appre- hensions either of people who lead fairly wholesome lives while incarnated, or of the large numbers of gallant victims of the War who, on passing over, find the normal consequences of minor shortcomings obliterated by the sacrifice they have made of their earth lives in a noble cause. They, and the fairly well behaved majority, will slip through the third sub-level without finding themselves entangled in it, and awake to consciousness on the fourth level of the astral world, the circumstances of which are almost infinitely varied but on which, however varied, happi- ness is the underlying principle of all sensation and experience. Obviously the conditions that make for happiness will be very different for people who, however creditable in a humble way their earth lives may have been, do not represent advanced intellectual develop- ment. The great man of science, for example, and the simplest maid-servant may share one charac- teristic. Both may regard some other human beings with genuine love. Their happiness on the fourth level will involve reunion with such persons if these have passed on first, ultimate reunion in either case; and if they have to wait for this there will be partial reunion meanwhile, for the Egos of people in physical life are, especially during sleep, in closer touch with the astral plane than they realize in the normal Future Life and Lives 37 waking state. But the highly advanced Egos, the great men of science and others, have capacities for the enjoyment of other astral opportunities over and above those relating to personal affections. On higher levels of the astral, to which such capacities would be automatically the passport, magnificent opportunities for the expansion of knowledge, along the lines already laid down in physical life, would open out. And for such Egos centuries of glorious intellectual achievement are provided by the oppor- tunities of the higher astral levels. They will all come back to incarnation eventually, for no matter how great they may be, measured by our present standards they are merely on the way towards the summit possibilities of human evolution; but there is no hurry, and as a matter of fact all the great scientists, poets, and artists of the last three hundred years or more are still on the higher levels of the astral world, even though they may have access to still higher realms, and may avail themselves of that privilege from time to time. The higher astral levels, for intricate reasons, are especially adapted for the expansion of such knowledge and capacity as they generally desire. Those lofty levels share some characteristics with the fourth level but are less earth-like in their super- ficial aspect. The conditions of the lower fourth for the sub-planes include much variety are curiously earth-like. Life there is free from all the tiresome lower needs we are troubled with, but people live there in houses, enjoy beautiful scenery and social intercourse, although the delightful principles that prevail there sort them, so to speak, into congenial groups, besides respecting the individual attachments of a genuine character passed on from the love ex- periences of the earth life. The progress upward towards sublime spiritual heights ultimately attain- 38 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching able by all human beings, is a gradual progress just as the acorn becomes the oak by degrees, not between to-day and to-morrow. If anyone is discontented with this explanation because he thinks of a beloved daughter (for instance) as turned into an angel of light, the day after her death, and in touch with the throne of omniscience, he has failed to appreciate the magnificence of the scale on which human perfection is gradually developed. Some of us may already be exquisite in goodness, as we measure character, some of us already splendid in intellectual grandeur, but infinitude is a long story. Eternity cannot be hustled. The achievement of the modern occultist has to do with the illumination of the relatively immediate future. > -.'. And some details of that fascinating period are already within the range of our comprehension. Astral matter is plastic to the creative power of thought. With a vivid imagination here we can mentally almost visualize objects we might desire to possess. On the astral plane under similar conditions, the things desired appropriate clothing, for example, pictures, furniture, houses even would assume objective reality, and even durability when many creative thoughts co-operate. But as familiarity with the delightful freedom from body necessities that the astral life confers enables people gradually to realize that they do not need houses, furniture, and so on, those cease to make their appearance on the higher levels, where scenes of natural beauty provide for all the wants of inhabitants incapable of fatigue, hunger, or thirst, unconscious of either heat or cold. They may be fully conscious, none the less, of the intellectual interests they have been concerned with in physical life, and may continue in touch with the progress of art or discovery down here, in a way it is hardly possible to describe in a few words. Future Life and Lives 39 This outline sketch of the astral life could, indeed, be filled in with much further detail and even be supple- mented with some description of planes or spheres higher and beyond the astral. But in attempting to explore these, incarnate human intelligence is up against conditions that defy the resources of language. For every Ego, indeed, each experience of astral life must come to an end sooner or later, though it may extend to many centuries of our time, and must almost always culminate in some touch with the lofty plane beyond; but for the humbler, less developed entities this touch would hardly involve consciousness, would merely be the prelude to an unconscious plunge back into incarnation. The better understanding of that plunge by the great many people in the present day who recognize the necessity of reincarnation as a principle, but dislike the idea for want of compre- hending its method, is supremely desirable. The law applies to all, but is so elastic as to fit in with very different volumes of circumstance. First we must remember that Egos ripe for rein- carnation represent very different stages of develop- ment . The humblest of these, leaving out quite savage races that we need not think about for the moment, is not a very expanded being when, after a long stay on the astral, he has shed all memories of his last life and remains its spiritual nucleus. The law, guided by Divine agency, puts that spiritual nucleus in touch with a new birth, and there is not much consciousness left on higher planes to be thought of as the Higher Self of the new personality. But in the case of the highly developed entity astral experience, instead of obliterating unimportant memories, has enormously expanded those that are important. The Ego as it stands ready for reincarnation is a being on the Astral Plane of immense complication, built up by the experience of many lives in the past, by that of many 40 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching intervening astral episodes. He is probably some- thing much more than can be fully expressed in its next immersion in physical matter. He will remain, all through the earth life to come, the Higher Self of the visible entity, of which the visible entity in its physical brain will have but little consciousness. But, by the hypothesis, enough of the real complete being will be expressed on the physical plane to make the new incarnation greater than ever along the lines of its former growth. If a great scientist before, a greater scientist again. If a great poet, a greater, and so on. But the point to be emphasized for the moment is that, while the new body is growing, the actual great intellectual being destined to use it at maturity is doing little more than looking on from above. If that idea can once be properly grasped, it does away with the fear some people seem to feel, to the effect that they with their present volume of consciousness will have to go through babyhood and all the experiences of the nursery when they come back to earth life. During all that time they will simply be looking on from above. To understand fully how it will come to pass that the baby and the young child will in a certain sense be conscious also, is very difficult for most of us, but, however faintly, that is what has to be realized. There is so little of the real Ego in the new child up to seven years of age that, if it dies within that time, the trace of consciousness it has been expressing simply reverts to the Higher Self, who makes another attempt a little later on and begins to animate a new form, not infrequently in the same family as the first. The mother's pretty belief, that a later child is her first baby restored to her is] often the outcome of a literal scientific truth. If all goes well the first seven years of the new child's life is spent in the growth of certain invisible accessories of the body, which medical science will Future Life and Lives 41 sooner or later be concerned with investigating. And, again, the next seven years are spent in further developments of the same order, but by the time the boy or girl is fourteen a good deal of the real entity is beginning to express itself. Not the whole by any means, nor even the whole of that part designed for expression in the new life. But now the old astral is beginning to be wanted no more. In the new life the Ego is forming for itself a new astral. The Higher Self remaining in touch with lofty planes will, for any expression it may need on the astral plane, make use of the new astral. Of course all these changes fade one into another like dissolving views. Nature is rarely addicted to abrupt metamorphoses. Mutatis mutandis, the process of incarnation as described above with reference to a well-developed Ego is applicable also to people at intervening stages of growth . The return to physical life is never attended by inconveniently premature consciousness in the new body. Or this broad rule is only in rare cases partially infringed. /H ere and there, for example, young children have been known to show musical talent at a ridiculously early age. In such cases the Ego of the great musician in the background is so eager to express itself on the physical plane that it cannot wait till the new instrument is properly tuned for the task. But even Mozarts who play the piano at six are not all there. Their condition is so excep- tional that it need not be minutely examined in connection with any sweeping survey of the laws governing reincarnation. ^r /TSut one essential principle must never be forgotten, fjuided by supreme wisdom and power, each new incarnation is conditioned by the merit or demerit of the Ego returning to physical life ./'Students of heredity generally make the mistake of supposing that ancestral attributes are the cause of characteristics 42 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching reproduced in the descendant. The descendant has been planted in that family because bodily heredity would there provide it with a physical vehicle qualified to give expression to its own inner nature. And, beyond this, because the circumstances of that life's programme fit in with the requirements of absolute justice as regards the claims of the Ego for happiness or its deserts as regards trouble. The infinite skill of the Divine Power regulating the details of each rebirth blends the intellectual or artistic necessities of the Ego with a worldly environment appropriate to its moral condition, its good or bad " Karma," as the case may be. The working of this law is intensely interesting and marvellously intricate. The consequences of good or bad action in one life partly reflect themselves, to begin the explanation, in happiness or the reverse during the astral life. But that is only the first part of the story. A funda- mental law, equivalent, on higher levels of nature, to the conservation of energy in mechanics, asserts itself with every entity coming back to incarnation in the earth life. Moral action, good or bad, must bear consequences fro m\ life to life. The external con- ditions, the happiness or the reverse of each life are the expression of forces set in activity during the previous life, or sometimes going back behind that, during previous lives. And, again, though the}' cannot controvert that law, aspirations in any given life, when sustained and intense, yjfre an important factor in generating the environment of the next. To work with the simplest example, a person in a humble rank of life may be wishing all the time that he or she belonged to a' superior class. The longing would have no effect if it were too vague. A carpenter thinking he would like to be a king does not know enough about the kingly life to long for it with pre- cision. But he knows a good deal about the con- Future Life and Lives 43 ditions of social life just a little above his own. He may or may not long for these, according to the measure of his contentment in his own station, but if he does long for them he does so with precision, with exact comprehension of what he wants, and then such longing becomes a natural force tending to colour his next incarnation. And the principle really operates so widely as to bring about a gradual upward drift in social station of the innumerable Egos emerging from the humble levels of existence. Of course that is merely a broad rule subject to frequent exceptions. Sometimes the Karma of a life spent on high levels may necessitate a plunge to lower, but normally the aspirations of our life do contribute to engender the environment of the next. Thus in thinking of future Life and lives we have to recognize the two-fold character of the consequence ensuing from the manner in which each life is spent. That definitely affects both the immediate future and the ultimate future; more specifically it colours life on the astral plane after the death of one body, and determines the welfare or suffering of the next in- carnation. For people who have led fairly creditable lives the astral period is happy and restful, often associated with opportunities of doing useful work. Even when the previous life has been faulty in some respects, it may be that such misdoing has been of a kind so exclusively identified with physical life that it can only give rise to consequences on this plane again in the next earth life. But when the misdirection of activity has been of a kind that deeply colours the surviving consciousness of the Ego, it may entangle him, when first passing on, in the third level of the astral world. That is a region of varied discomfort in which people have to realize the nature of their misdoing and shed the desires that have given rise to it. In bad cases that are not of the 44 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching supremely bad order, the purification may be rather a slow process, but assuming that the character of the person going through it is tainted merely not pre- dominantly evil the ultimate passage to the happy levels already (very imperfectly) described is assured, not merely in the long run, but very likely in a short one. In awfully serious cases the course of astral life is very different. / There is one variety of human wicked- ness that is altogether in a different category from those that are mere vices. The sinful character of these the mere vices is often exaggerated; but cruelty, that worst and horrible form of cruelty which takes actual pleasure in the infliction of and sight of pain and suffering in others, is an attribute that drives the authors of such hideous misdoing down into that appalling submerged level of the astral world with which most of those even in need of purification have nothing whatever to do. Even that region must be thought of as purgatorial. Its fearful experiences may at last cure or begin the cure of the most ghastly offenders against the Divine law of love (of which cruelty is the exact reverse). But imagina- tion shrinks from the attempt to realize the details of the sufferings incidental to existence on the terrible submerged level. Their duration, in the worst cases, may be counted in centuries of our time. In others, a brief experience of this character may give rise to the needful revulsion of feeling. But though it would be unwise to attempt a survey of the astral world without taking cognizance of its lower depths, it would be worse than unwise to refer to them in any way that could excite fear on the part of harmless, innocent people, too prone, as a consequence of clumsy religious teaching, to imagine themselves " miserable sinners." Talk of that kind is for the most part silly nonsense, culminating in something much worse when associated Future Life and Lives 45 with ghastly imaginings concerning eternal sufferings in hell. No decorous language is equal to the emergency in dealing with the criminal folly of those who terrify children and insult God by describing burning tortures to be inflicted for ever on hapless victims of Providential atrocities. Nature does pro- vide a penitential reformatory for souls of diabolical criminality, but even there reformation is the purpose in view. It need only be thought of as completing the broad conception of after-death conditions that modern research in spiritual science enables us to form. For the poor innocent " miserable sinners " of the churches, the view we are now in a position to obtain of happy life on the higher levels of the astral world is that with which they are personally concerned. But that view even is in need of amplification. The merely happy restful life to which people of ordinarily good life may confidently look forward is not the only possibility that the astral world holds out. To understand the design of the future correctly, we must realize first of all that the whole scheme of evolution provides for a gradual progress, through many earth lives and many episodes on higher planes, towards a condition enormously superior to that yet attained by the most advanced representatives of current civilization on earth. By most of the human family such conditions will ultimately be attained after periods of time that are bewildering to the imagination. But when the distant possibilities of human evolution are fairly well comprehended in advance, in the light of such teaching as occult research (and modern revelation) enables us now to deal with, we see that it is possible for those who appreciate the opportunities available to make a much more rapid progress than is provided for by the natural drift of events in reference to the multitude. Some members of the human family have been able to accomplish this long ages ago, and already 46 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching stand on levels of progress on which they become agents of Divine purpose in promoting the spiritual growth of mankind. These are referred to in occult literature as the Masters of Wisdom, and they are always ready to help forward the abnormal progress of people who have acquired some comprehension of their place in Nature, and are filled with eagerness to get on as rapidly as possible in the direction of those great heights. The earth life is the opportunity for be- ginning such efforts. In this supremely important aspect of the subject, as in minor matters, the earth life is the period for sowing all spiritual seed. The astral life is the period in which it begins to bear fruit. A perfectly commonplace earth life, however harmless and innocent, bears appropriate fruit in the astral world in the shape of happiness and rest. An aspiration during earth life towards real spiritual growth, coloured by such knowledge as is now available for all, bears fruit in the shape of personal touch with those Masters of Wisdom who may guide the aspirant to incarnations in which he may accomplish results the dignity and grandeur of which cannot easily be exaggerated. Something beyond mere personal happiness is then seen to be the object of attainment. This world is the expression of Divine Will: it is governed by Divine Law, but it is, so to speak, managed in detail by the agents of Divine Will evolved from the scheme itself. To become a part of, to be identified with that sublime agency, is the goal aimed at by those who fully realize the true meaning of spiritual growth. That such a condition involves a species of exalted beatitude which is some- thing greater than and beyond personal happiness is a thought that may fairly be associated with true spiritual aspiration, but one that does not cover the whole idea, too subtle perhaps for clear definition in language, though some trace of it should always colour, Future Life and Lives 47 for advanced thinkers, all reference to the changes inaugurated by each physical death. When the grave swallows any particular vehicle of consciousness that we have done with, it certainly marks an important stage of our progress through the infinitudes of life, and represents a very tiresome circumstance connected with this early period of human evolution; but only while we are suffering from the sad imperfections of conventional teaching is the grave surrounded with terror. The purpose of this article has not been merely to dissipate that terror, but to elucidate, for those who may long since have ceased to feel it, the detailed circumstances of the passage to the life beyond ; and above all, to show how the all-important principle of reincarnation does not in any way conflict with natural aspirations for spiritual existence after bodily death. Reincarnation is no hurried process. There is plenty of time in Eternity. Does anyone imagine that a thousand year\ of spiritual life after the fatigues of this one will not be enough for him ? If he con- tinues hereafter to entertain that view, then he will have more. Or if he has no such far-reaching aspira- tion, and finds himself content with the simple enjoyment of the astral life>pn its less exalted levels, he will fall asleep and drift back to physical life in obedience to natural law at the appropriate time. And both in his case and in that of his more advanced contemporaries, the return to physical life will be accomplished as easily as the processes of sleep and waking during physical life, with the iriner mechanism of which, for that matter, most people'are no better acquainted than with the method of rebirth, the fullest acquaintance with which carries with it the most complete acquiescence in the wisdom, beauty, and harmony of the whole design. RELIGION UNDER REPAIR On the 14th of April, 191 7, The Times published an article entitled " Sheep without a Shepherd," which, gently and without bitterness but in un- equivocal terms, described the conventional religion of the Churches and all their creeds as hopelessly out of date. Thinking men and women were represented as convinced that religion must be rediscovered from the beginning. The clergyman and his religion " belong to a dead past." Thinking people " turn away from the Churches more and more as their interest in religion grows." What they need is " a conception of the Universe in which they may take their place." They believe in Christianity but they need an expression of it that will satisfy intelli- gence. " The time of cleansing for the Christian theology has been delayed so long that there is a danger lest the mass of men should think it all litter and dust of the past." The Churches have fancied that the danger would be staved off "by the slow, reluctant relinquishing of this or that belief as it became impossible." The real need is for discovery and growth. The Church " must not be content any longer to talk pious nonsense in the hope that it will seem sense because it is pious." One might have supposed that so sweeping an indictment as this, directed against vested interests firmly rooted in social life, would have provoked a storm of criticism and a flood of sympathetic reiteration. Has orthodoxy preferred silence as on the whole safer than defence that would provoke 48 . Religion under Repair 49 fresh attack ? If so, the fear is misdirected, because it is based on a misunderstanding of the attack. The clergyman accused of talking pious nonsense thinks the accuser an atheist denying God. The accuser is simply indignant with the clergyman for caricaturing God. There would still be a place for that clergyman among us if he could be taught to reverence God wjsely. Has that attitude of wise reverence been-aftained by any of the earnest thinkers discontented with the clergyman's teaching ? Has discovery really anticipated the demand for it set forth in the article quoted ? Are there answers available for people who " ask real questions about the nature of the Universe," and may there not be already a considerable number of others who have profited during the last thirty years from wide publicity given to super-physical knowledge at one time reserved for a peculiarly qualified few ? The true answer to that last question is in the affirmative, and those who have been concerned during recent years with the assimilation of ideas reflected in the Higher Occultism believe themselves, at all events, in possession of definite knowedge which meets the intellectual craving represented by The Times article. Many books convey this to all who care to read, and describe the sources from which it is derived. For some of us who are students of occult science and philosophy the authors of the teaching given out are seen to have extraordinary claims on our trust. The nature of these claims can better be appreciated after we have fairly considered the general outline of the teaching they convey. It constitutes a complete response to the demand set forth in The Times article. It does give us a comprehensive view of the Cosmos to which we belong. It embodies a revelation which is, for the world at large, a " discovery," of previously unsuspected truth 4 50 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching concerning the fundamental facts of spiritual silence underlying all forms of religion. It does much more than this because it gives us a perfectly clear view of the course of human evolution, dissipating all the darkness that surrounds death; lighting up the conditions of the new life that immediately follows the change and pointing out the path to be ultimately trodden, leading to infinitudes of progress. The view of Divinity, Life and Nature thus afforded con- veniently to be described as the Higher Occultism makes its first claim on respectful consideration by its own inherent reasonableness. It is vast in its scope, widely ramifying in all directions, but perfectly co- herent, scientifically harmonious; all parts of the whole mutually supporting each other. In one way, that is a difficulty for the beginner approaching the study of the Higher Occultism. [ The comprehension of not necessarily the whole because the whole is an infinitude but of a great volume of super-physical knowledge is essential to an adequate appreciation of its parts separately. But eventually when enough is grasped, conviction sets in as an intellectual necessity, and then, among other conclusions, the honest student realizes that the Higher Occultism has been a gift to the world from Teachers who are obviously entitled to profound trust. But his perception of this is no longer needed as a guarantee of the teaching. It embodies its own confirmation. Perhaps this can only be fully appreciated after a more exhaustive study of super-physical science than can be provided for within the limits of a Review article; but a mere outline sketch of the knowledge accumulating on our hands will go far towards justifying the claim made above. Indeed, the most elaborate attempt to deal with detail would still leave us gazing at remote horizons beyond which human vision cannot penetrate, but that is by itself a con- Religion under Repair 51 dition which tends to fortify belief in what can be seen. No theory which invested Eternity with a beginning and an end could be otherwise than absurd. But while the idea of God, Divinity, the Divine principle whatever phrase we prefer expands into regions beyond the reach of understanding, we do find that in so far as this world is concerned in so far, indeed, as the Solar System is concerned Occultism presents us with an intelligible conception of the Divine Hierarchy; also, as already affirmed, clearly illuminating the mysteries of human origin and destiny, the course and conditions of evolution, and the manner in which Divine justice can be reconciled with the terrible irregularities of life in the physical world. It puts us in a position of intimate familiarity with the life on super-physical worlds surrounding our globe to which all pass after the change described as death. It enlarges our view of human destiny, to that extent that we see life on other planets linked with that of the Earth ; and the whole Solar System resolves itself into a definite Divine enterprise, with an origin and purpose vaguely appreciable, though in touch with mysteries of infinitude and eternity which we need not, at this stage of our progress, attempt to fathom. Incidentally occult science forecasts the future progress in various directions of physical science, and in some cases those forecasts, made ten or fifteen years ago, have already been overtaken by practical research. The proof of that last statement would involve a long digression, but is definitely available, as many of the conclusions arising from the discovery of radium were clearly set forth in a book entitled Occult Chemistry published many years before Madame Curie's luminous contribution to plain physical science. Indeed laboratory research has as yet only partly overtaken the occult discoveries though confirming them as far as it has gone. 52 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching The claims for occult science just set forth may be examined one by one. It does not shrink from the use of the word " God " except in so far as the word has been degraded by ignoble creeds. But Supreme Divinity is necessarily infinite and must have reference to manifestations in millions of worlds besides our own. And yet we feel sure that Divine Consciousness permeates this world. Occult teaching assures us that our own individual consciousness is a Divine emanation , though limited in its scope and range of power by the vehicle or sheath in which it is working for the moment. The idea is susceptible of expansion. All consciousness is a Divine emanation that working in animal forms in vegetable forms even also that working in super-human forms on planes or realms of Nature loftier than the physical. The idea at once leads to an appreciation of the sublime magnificence of the Divine Hierarchy intervening between our humanity and the nearest manifestation of the infinite Divinity. Reasonable occultists do not pre- sume to formulate a rigid conception of that nearest manifestation, but they know that the Solar System is a definite enterprise within the manifested Universe and therefore that in some way it can be identified with a vortex, so to speak, in infinite Divinity, and that is generally referred to as the Logos of the Solar System. Words are not well adapted to such thoughts, but we must be content to use the best we have got. The simple Christian who wants to discern a Father in God may be chilled by this awfully super-physical idea, but he need not be so if he clings to his faith in Christ which the occultist has no wish to disturb. Medieval creeds which the Churches perpetuate have caricatured the Christ idea, amongst others, but the occultist clearly understands Christ as belonging to the Divine Hierarchy, in close touch with this world, and that understanding carries with it a reverential Religion under Repair 53 feeling that no conventional Christian can possibly improve upon. Of course the Hierarchy of Beings representing various stages of spiritual evolution and a vast variety of functions in Nature include sublime entities on all imaginable levels, but the fundamental all-important idea to be held firmly in thinking of the hierarchy is that it constitutes the Agency through which the Divine purpose is worked out in manifesta- tion. This is one way in which a scientific com- plexion is put upon occult religion. Agency runs down to the minutest activities of Nature. There is no break in the uniformity of the method . Archangelic Beings fulfil the Divine purpose on their levels. Elemental beings on levels of consciousness below our comprehension are agents in promoting the growth of plants, or carrying out the laws (the Divine purposes) of chemical affinity. This last thought relates to a huge branch of occult science in a borderland that physical research must soon invade. A hierarchy that includes Beings of the Archangelic order (and also others of still loftier spiritual rank) together with humbler agencies below the level of humanity, concerned with the working of natural law, must obviously also include beings but relatively little above the human level. And this thought illuminated by definite information brings the occul- tist into touch with a realm of knowledge bearing equally on the government of this world and the possibilities of human evolution. There is a level of the great hierarchy definitely recruited from humanity. Common conceptions of human evolution have correctly hit off the idea that it is recruited itself from lower forms of life. Prevailing belief, however, has not grasped the notion that it expands into higher forms without any break of continuity. At an earlier period in the world's history this was more generally appreciated than it has been in recent years. In 54 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching ancient Egypt, Jbr example though the five or six thousand yeare beyond which modern research does not extend were a mere decadent remainder as com- pared with still earlier Egyptian civilizations the people generally knew that some few hierophants had risen to a high condition of knowledge and power as compared with ordinary humanityy^TDefinite sys- tems of initiation were known to lead upward towards those heights. Though later generations have lost sight of this deeply significant truth, it is still as true as ever. The (relatively) lower levels of the Divine Hierarchy are still recruited in that way. For recent ages the system has been veiled from common obs rvation.^The progress of humanity is worked out in accordance with a definite Divine plan./ For a time it was necessary that intelligence should be trained in the study of physical nature . The improve- ment of brain capacity was the task before the incar- nate vanguard of humanity. Super-physical know- ledge, the fascination of which would have attracted the pioneers of brain culture off the path designed for them, was hidden away for a time. Those men of science who resent the movements of thought bringing it to the light of day again are survivals of the regime to which they have not yet ceased to belong unconsciously bearing testimony, amusing to the occultist, to the accuracy of his diagnosis. The principle just hinted at 1 that human evolution does not stop short at the stage reached by the most brilliant representatives of current civilization leads on to the appreciation of the idea that infinitude is applicable to that evolution, as to the loftier con- ception of Divine nature. The idea is best understood by tracing it back to some extent into the past. Consciousness which eludes research in the dis- secting room is, in a certain sense, uniform in its nature; incomprehensible as regards its essence, but Religion under Repair 55 vaguely acceptable as somehow of Divine origin. As above pointed out, its scope and range are de- termined by the vehicle or sheath in which it is involved. The full development of that idea puts a new face upon the whole theory of evolution. In any animal form we like to think of, consciousness has obviously a very limited scope compared with our own. The splendid light Darwin threw on Nature showed us the growth of form, following certain physical plane impulses. The occultist at first only found fault with the theory as ignoring the simultaneous evolution of consciousness. A clearer view has since been obtained. In the lower animal forms consciousness has not been individual- ized. But an aggregate volume of consciousness animating many lower forms gradually feels the need of animating higher ones. Fully developed, the description of the process would be very protracted. Eventually in the highest animal forms consciousness is individualized and passes under well-understood conditions into the human form, not at once into one of high development. By this time, however, the individualized consciousness may be treated as an Ego subject to the law of reincarnation. At first its progress may be thought of as the growth of the Ego its spiritual growth going on concurrently with the improvement in the human form and the perfection of the brain . But how is this view to be reconciled with the theory that consciousness is identical in essence throughout Nature ? Quite easily, for all who profit by what is known concerning the laws governing reincarnation. Desire is one of them. Desire for an improved form providing improved scope for con- sciousness would be distinctly operative. But the man at a humble level does not know enough to formulate such a desire explicitly. He does it automatically by making the best use of the form 56 Collected Fruits or Occult Teaching or vehicle he has got. Natural law then gives him a better one in his next life and so on ad infinitum. The principle properly understood accounts for lofty as well as humble progress in evolution. The man in the beginning does not know what he wants, but gets it by unconsciously conforming to the law. On a higher level he obeys it consciously, and the result is the same. On all levels, of course short of those that are very exalted, action good or bad Karma, to use the technical expression, good or bad hastens or retards the result, and a mere recognition of the laws concerning reincarnation and Karma goes far to explain and justify the conditions of the world as we find it with all its ghastly irregularities of physical and moral welfare. That is a huge branch of occult study by itself. But in tracing the manner in which humanity is linked with the Divine Hierarchy the occult interpretation of the minor mysteries of current life on Earth may be left aside for the moment. A profoundly significant phrase, borrowed, I believe, from some Oriental scripture, runs as follows : " What- ever is, is, has been, or will be Human." Those few words cover the whole sweep of thought concerning the origin and destinies of Man, the meaning of creation, the essence of all religion. Such thought, of course, melts into the incomprehensible if pushed backward or forward into the infinitudes of Eternity, but is magnificently full of suggestion. That it accounts for all lower forms of life and the earlier conditions of this world is relatively uninteresting. It accounts for the Divine Hierarchy. That upward growth that we can trace from lower to higher forms of human life is nowhere arrested. Occult science has shown us from the first that living forms are not built merely of physical matter. During this familiar earth-life, even fairly advanced representatives of humanity are capable of passing from time to time Religion under Repair 57 into vehicles of consciousness built of finer orders of matter than those which build up flesh and blood. The full development of that subject would claim a long dissertation, but for the moment the important point is that, though physical humanity is an essential phase through which differentiated consciousness passes, a time comes when physical form is needed no more, and progress goes on without any break in the process towards conditions of being that, con- templated in imagination from the physical plane level, seem to represent different orders of creation. Beings on that level are simply among the members of the Divine Hierarchy referred to by the words " has been " in the phrase quoted above. But that does not mean that they have been simply human at any period in the history of this planet. From the point of view of occult science no world is a complete undertaking in itself. Life, the infusion of Divine consciousness into matter, is a vast coherent phenomenon in Nature, limitless in all directions. The idea may be approached by con- sidering its bearing on the Solar System, itself, as we are enabled now to realize, a coherent scheme of manifestation, all its parts inter-related one with another, and as a whole inter-related with a larger Cosmos. Common astronomy deals with the magnitudes, distances, and movements of the various planets con- stituting the Solar System, and to some extent with their relative stages of development.. Jupiter, for example, is obviously a world in an eaily stage of its growth, because it is still hot almost incandescent. Occult astronomy which might be called Vital Astronomy deals with the life going on in each planet, or for which each is in preparation. In most cases each planet is part of an (apparently) independent scheme of evolution. Thus the planet Venus belongs 58 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching to a senior scheme as compared with that which the Earth represents. Human life there has already been carried to stages of growth enormously in advance of the stage yet reached here. But there, as here, individual growth has been affected by the play of individual Free Will (which presents no mystery to the occultist), and, though a very large majority of the original human population of the Venus scheme have attained to highly exalted conditions, some have dropped off in the course of bygone ages, the Egos having failed to attain conditions qualifying them to reincarnate among the more advanced majority. Their destiny is intensely interesting, as illuminating the economy of the Solar System as a whole. There is no final perdition for the failures of each planetary scheme in turn. They pass on to the next scheme !y The failures of the Senior Venus scheme are merged m the humanity of the Earth scheme. The further details of this process are of increasing interest. The failures concerned, though left behind by the successful candidates for progress on Venus, fell off from their proper human family at a later stage than that generally reached so far by the foremost races, even, of the Earth scheme. So the present conditions of Earth humanity do not yet afford them appropriate incarnation. Nature deals with the difficulty in her usual competent fashion, but to make the solution intelligible the conditions of our own planetary scheme must be taken into account. In our case three planets are linked together in one compre- hensive evolution. Of course, the reason of this is intelligible, but that would be a long story by itself and may be left aside for the moment. Our human family is at present distributed over three worlds Mars, the Earth, and Mercury. Silly criticism based on ignorance may fall foul of this statement on the ground that Mercury so near the Sun must be too Religion under Repair 59 hot for human life. Too hot certainly for bodies of our flesh and blood, but the chemistry of Nature can solve more intricate problems than those merely of temperature. Mercury bodies are adapted to- temperatures in which our own could not exist. Now the main body of our human family is here on the Earth, but an inferior remnant at a very low and coarse stage of development the dregs of our humanity, so to speak is still on Mars. A vanguard of peculiarly advanced Egos is already on Mercury, leading a more beautiful life than any of which the Earth's main body has yet had experience. That advanced vanguard supplies the Venus failures with suitable opportunities for incarnation, and the bulk of the Mercury population at the present time had to begin with a Venus origin. Of course, the numbers are not great compared with those of the Earth taking those to include Egos in and out of incar- nation in physical bodies, that is to say, and on the higher spheres surrounding the physical planet. The importance of the explanation just given turns on the way it shows the whole Solar System as a coherent organism, for obviously the system now operative as between the senior evolution of Venus and the next in order our own will go on providing for the evolution, at remote periods in the future, of the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Circumstances will no doubt vary in these far-off regions of the stupendous Divine programme, but the leading idea establishes the unity within diversity of the plan that the Solar System repre- sents. This light though comprehensive sketch of the Divine plan will enable the reader incidentally to understand how the students of occult or Vital Astronomy obtain their information, obviously of a kind that no commonplace physical faculties can 60 Collected Fruits or Occult Teaching possibly deal with. We see human evolutions ex- tending upward, without any break of continuity, to the nearest levels of the Divine Hierarchy. We realize the unbroken continuity of consciousness beyond those levels, so that knowledge of the kind that seems at the first glance to belong to Divinity itself must filter down to the lower levels of the Divine Hierarchy. Then we begin to understand how the Beings on those levels in touch in one direction with relatively Infinite Wisdom, in the other with ordinary humanity may see fit to pass on to some qualified pupils in ordinary humanity some information illuminating the world and the Cosmos to which that ordinary humanity belongs. Indeed, it is obvious that sooner or later such information must be passed on, to provide for the fulfilment of the Divine Plan. At earlier stages of growth humanity was not in need of all this lofty teaching. It had to accomplish certain achievements now, from the higher point of view, essential preliminary under- takings. Humanity had to learn simple broad principles of moral science, to grapple with the vague idea that there was some Divine mystery pervading the world. The religions of various periods met this need with more or less success. It did not much matter at first that they were irrational in their design. In days of one early papacy, for example, when priests disputed as to whether Christ was the real son, or an adopted son, of God, religious intelligence was not ripe for more suitable discussion concerning the Divine Hierarchy. The writer of the article on " Sheep without a Shepherd " seems to think the Clergy of the present day are not much more ready for it. However this may be, some of them must be ready, and outside the Church a sufficient number have been found ready, to justify the full flow of the teaching which this paper partly embodies. Then, Religion under Repair 61 again, for the last thousand years or so, humanity has been getting ready for higher teaching by per- fecting its thinking capacity. The study of physical science has polished human brains to a high degree of delicacy. That had to be done before religion could be levelled up. Habits of scientific thinking have certainly paved the way for appreciating the credi- bility of occult teaching, better than the mental training of the theologian plodding in the path of medieval creeds. A considerable number of people thus prepared are ripe for superior enlightenment more than ripe: definitely craving for it. It has become incumbent on the custodians of the superior knowledge to give out that knowledge far more freely than was necessary or desirable in the past. Only as we become possessed of the knowledge can we appreciate the obligation. The further growth of humanity towards higher conditions of being can only be accomplished by a humanity comprehending its purpose and potential destinies. That level of the Divine Hierarchy nearest to and immediately above ordinary humanity has to watch over, guide, and promote the spiritual growth of that ordinary humanity. As those ready for new conditions become more and more numerous, the work of those who link humanity with the hierarchy becomes more and more important and exacting. The occult student generally refers to those who are the links in question as the Masters of Wisdom. The title will serve for the moment, though we may eventually adopt a better. Whatever name we use, they are the immediate agents of Divinity in carrying out the design in which this world and its inhabitants play a part, and, as time goes on, and they have more and more to do in a world ripening by degrees, their numbers must be recruited. That can only be done as the more advanced claimants for spiritual 62 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching enlightenment are mentally and morally cultivated. The evolution of a humanity, in fact, is analogous to that of a single entity. In childhood his growth, well-being and education depend on others. Teaching gradually enables him to realize that his own will and effort must be brought into play to accomplish growth beyond a certain stage. His later development must depend upon himself. So with humanity at large. The evolutionary law works under loftier guidance for a time; but the race cannot improve beyond a certain stage without understanding its place in Nature, without realizing the sublime truth that it must for its later development guide its own evolution, govern itself. We are now at an important turning-point in the World's 'history, even as the situation might be considered without reference to the enormously significant fact that the super-physical Powers of Good and Evil are engaged in the fiercest struggle for supremacy that has ever been waged in the whole history of the Solar System. The issue of that struggle is not in doubt. Beyond the horrors of the final crisis there stretches the assured vision of a beautiful future, but its beauty will be partly due to the continual expansion of the knowledge which has been gradually pouring into our hands during the last thirty-odd years, the ever-growing appreciation of which is no less certain than the ultimate defeat of the Satanic power hitherto directed, among other purposes, to stifle and impede its dissemination. That defeat accomplished, the World's progress along desirable paths will proceed with a rapidity for which no previous experience has prepared us, and the influence of that comprehensive view of Nature and Divine truth that has hitherto been "occult" veiled or partially obscured will permeate religious thinking and soon lead to a reconstruction even of the Religion under Repair 63 orthodox clerical presentation thereof, so that there will no longer be any inclination to regard that as " litter and dust of the past." The unseen laws governing the world and human evolution, the con- scious agencies through which they are administered, the higher realms of life intimately associated with the physical life on the Earth's surface, will all come within the range of human understanding in a near future and will bring about such a blend between science and religion, that each will be regarded as the complement of the other the piety of the Church no longer nonsense in the sight of Science, and the critical insight of Science no longer a terror for a Church which will lean on it for support. RELIGION UNDER REPAIR: A REPLY TO PROFESSOR LINDSAY Endeavouring to frame a crushing " rejoinder " to my attempt to show that conventional religion is badly in need of repair, Professor Lindsay, writing in the Nineteenth Century, provided his readers with so fair a summary of its contents that he is en- titled to my thanks for bringing these afresh to the notice of any among them who may have over- looked their first presentation. But in failing to appreciate their importance he shows clearly how minds untrained in the study of Nature's super- physical mysteries are embarrassed with prepos- sessions partly derived from medieval theology and partly from materialistic habits of thought prevalent in the last century. Current thinking meanwhile has been deeply coloured by the recognition of some capacities of human consciousness that transcend the physical senses. There are still many amongst us who resent subtle discoveries outrunning their own experience. jlfwhat they can't understand they refuse to believef and must be left in the rear of mental progress. But for those who do not protect their opinions by carefully guarding their ignorance, some broad convictions, at all events, are gathering strength. j Foremost among these is the certainty that there are avenues to perception over and above those pro- vided by the physical senses. If anyone now denies the possibility of clairvoyance, he does not express an opinion; he merely shows himself unacquainted with certain developments of scientific research. Again, while crowds of blatant assailants abuse the multitudes Religion under Repair : A Reply 65 who know that they have touch with conditions of human life following on the change called death, dis- belief in that matter where it exists is merely due to ignorance of the work done in that department of research. Those who challenge either of the state- ments just made are not entitled to attack a writer who takes them for granted. The literature dealing with them is abundant. No one addressing intelligent hearers concerning any fresh development of super- physical research can be fairly called on to waste his time in going afresh over the rudimentary discoveries of fifty years ago. A modern chemist, writing about the atomic weight of thorium-lead, does not include in his essay an elaborate argument to show that the measurement of atomic weight is possible. The stream of criticism Professor Lindsay directs against my exposition of lately expanded teaching concerning human and super-human evolution may be partly summed up in the question " How do you know ?" expressed in various phrases, few of which offend good taste in their form. But the answer is embodied in the various books I have written in the last thirty-odd years, and I do not want to go over all that ground again. I will summarize it briefly, recognizing this as by far the most important question that can be put by anyone meeting with the later results of occult research before having grown familiar with the earlier achievements of that great undertaking. But in the first instance I am tempted to deal with some amusing objections levelled by the Professor against various " assumptions " I have ventured to put forward as in no need of elaborate proof. My remark that occult research anticipated many of the " conclusions arising from the discovery of radium "is twisted into a statement that it anticipated the discovery of radium, and treated with sarcasm 5 66 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching accordingly. The fact, as I stated it, is simply indisputable to anyone who will take the trouble to read the book I referred to, Occult Chemistry, and observe the date of its publication. It is obviously impossible to repeat the contents of that book here. It will be found deeply significant for all persons interested in chemical science. Pantheism ! There is some resemblance between the true doctrine and the speculation going by that name, just as there is some resemblance between metempsychosis and reincarnation, but also all the difference that there is between a lump of gold-bearing quartz and a finished gold coin. Spinoza's pantheism absorbed God in Nature and left no God behind. Occult pantheism recognizes Nature as an emanation of God, but also recognizes the infinite, supreme, Divine incomprehensible Being of omnipotent con- sciousness which is God, as losing nothing by its infusion into matter. Thus occult pantheism includes Deism while clearing that conception of its limitations. It is true that almost all the finished mental products of modern occult research have been crudely antici- pated in a great many early philosophies and scrip- tures. The splendour of their modern presentation is due to the extraction of the interior truth from the rough ore its re-statement in terms of Western scientific thinking. That is the answer to the objec- tion that my " theory is as old as Gnosticism," and to the somewhat inane charge that " my pretensions to unfold a new and satisfying cosmic world-view are simply ridiculous." That which is ridiculous is the suggestion that in its present form with modern scientific precision and detail it can be found either in Gnostic writings, or even in Sanscrit Upanishads with which by the way our Professor may not be intimately acquainted as he refers vaguely to " Hindoo philosophy." That phrase might be Religion under Repair : A Reply 67 paralleled by a Hindoo who should refer to " the European language " as though there were only one. It may be in a certain sense true that " there is nothing new under the Sun," but as time goes on old ideas get sometimes so embellished by advancing knowledge that they seem the product of a new revelation . That is emphatically true of the cosmology developed now by students of what for want of any better term I have called the Higher Occultism. Reincarnation ! Our Professor thinks it " has never found favour in the West." I think it is commanding the assent of all intelligent people whenever it is understood. Unhappily it is very widely misunderstood as by our Professor, obviously, when he describes it as a paralyzing doctrine of which fatalism is the natural outcome. The natural outcome is exactly the reverse, because it shows each life in turn the expression of causes set in motion by the free-will of the Ego in former lives. Again, complete ex- planation of the real doctrine would claim very many of these pages. That doctrine is fairly set forth in my own published writings, but I do not feel entitled to advertise them here. If anyone thinks, along necessitarian lines, that acts in each life are inevitable, and therefore, as causes, encouraging fatalism, the answer is, firstly, a contradiction of the assumption arising from our knowledge of the way Karma is adjusted by the Elemental agents of the Lipika ! I use technical phraseology for the moment, to hint that in dealing with the Higher Occultism I am skirting the confines of an elaborate science. The words used above will have a definite meaning for every Theosophical student, and will, I venture to think, be quite destitute of meaning for the Professor. Secondly, the reason why incarnation provides for intellectual moral and spiritual growth and expansion is to be discerned in the fact, so ill-understood by the 68 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching materialistic science of the last century, that Thought is a force. Again, that is a statement that people ignorant of all that has been done in psychic research during the last quarter of the last century will not understand, and, therefore, will foolishly deny. The influence of thought on future incarnations has been elaborately traced in my own and other current books. In truth it determines their course. And, when understood, reincarnation becomes not only acceptable but the only thinkable method of carrying on human evolution. Some people are frightened of it, because they foolishly imagine that it means their own individuality and consciousness immersed in a baby form, and miserable in such a condition. Their consciousness during the baby period will be on a higher plane in another vehicle. They will not enter their new bodies till these are mature far beyond the stage of the nursery. How can I convey a glimmer of the truth in a few words ? The spiritual entity of an advanced representative of a highly civilized race may be older than this world. His or her incarnate personality, in any given case, may be only a partial incarnation. There is a Higher Self, the part of the whole self, on a spiritual plane all the while. Clair- voyants, adequately endowed, can see the law at work. Mesmeric practice will often enable one to get touch through a personality with his or her Higher Self, and thus not merely verify its existence but acquire voluminous information concerning the conditions of the super-physical i ealms of consciousness belonging to this world. These become so familiar to the qualified occult investigator, that current discussions as to whether they do really exist or not are more ludicrous in his sight than the outsider who never concerns himself with such inquiries can easily imagine. And students of occultism will be even more amused by the Professor's criticism to the effect Religion under Repair : A Reply 69 that their studies throw " no light on the problems of life and consciousness . ' ' Their literature is saturated with ethical teaching of an exalted order, which bears on every imaginable problem of life and con- sciousness. Some Theosophical writers, indeed, are so dominated by the thought that nothing matters except the cultivation of the loftiest moral virtues, that they are less interested in the knowledge con- cerning the previously hidden mysteries of Nature which it has been my special business to unveil as far as possible. To say that the Higher Occultism, which embraces or includes Theosophy, does not concern itself with moral problems, would be like saying that the branch of science called Physics does not concern itself with electrical phenomena. So now let me turn to the supremely important question Professor Lindsay puts impressively with reference to a statement I made about Venus and Mercury " How does he know ?" Quite uncon- sciously he answers his own question when, intending to be satirical, he says: " Mr. Sinnett would appear to have sources of information not generally avail- able." Precisely so. I first came into touch with those sources of information in the year 1879, and a year or two later wrote a book, The Occult World, fully detailing the circumstances under which I ob- tained that touch, and some of the intellectual results that ensued from it. That touch has been maintained to the present day, and it is hugely important that the consequent authenticity of Theosophical and Occult teaching should be properly appreciated. Explanation of the reasons which led many of us to trust them in the beginning, and of experiences con- firming that trust in later years, is thus due not so much to any casual critic exhibiting hostile in- credulity, as to the ever-increasing multitudes who are sympathetically attracted to occult teaching on 70 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching its own inherent merits. Already the Theosophical Society, which does not by any means exhaustively comprehend the vast movement of Theosophical thought, numbers according to last year's general report 989 distinct branches or " Lodges " all over the world, with 26,280 members, leaving " enemy countries " out of account. In the interest of these now constituting the second generation of Theo- sophical members, for I am almost the only survivor of quite the first generation as well as in the in- terest of the far larger numbers who will assuredly appreciate Theosophical teaching as time goes on, it is supremely desirable that the actuality and nature of that " Occult World " described (very imperfectly) in my first book should be correctly realized. All knowledge on which our welfare depends must be constantly brought up to date. A conviction once definitely and justly established in the mind ought never to fade, but for many people such convictions require to be refreshed from time to time. So, in reply to an inquiry, which on its own merits alone need not perhaps have claimed very earnest treatment, but may have a dull, wide echo if undealt with, I shall venture to explain once more " how I know" and what are my sources of information. The great developments, as far as they concerned myself, began in 1879, and, though the Professor thinks that Mme. Blavatsky and the Mahatmas are a little demode, the events of that period paved the way for supremely important results. As anyone who will read my first book will see, Mme. Blavatsky exercised abnormal powers. It is futile to suggest that later on she was accused of practising imposture. These accusations related to events occurring long after I left India. They are scorned by the multitudes who still reverence her memory, but it is not my business to deal with them. The record of her Religion under Repair : A Reply 7 1 magical doings which I put forward has never been challenged. Nor can it be challenged except on the hypothesis that I am not telling the truth. If things occurred under the circumstances I describe, no possible theory can be framed to account for them except the theory that she exercised power over forces of nature as yet unknown to science, producing effects that were a defiance of conventional beliefs relating to the natural laws governing matter. No critics of my story accuse me of intentional falsehood. They would be laughed at by the large number who know me if they did. They may accuse me of having been deceived, but that accusation falls to the ground for all who read my records, because, if things hap- pened as I describe them, there was no room for deception. That position could only be established afresh by a tedious recapitulation of definite occur- rences, and it is useless for critics to assail it unless they will refer to the original statements and show how, under the circumstances, there was room for imposture. For the moment I must be content to repeat that such showing is impossible. I was far more deeply interested at the time than anyone can be now, in eliminating from the experiments I made all possibility of fraud. Anyhow the result was that I came to know that Mine. Blavatsky exercised, or was the agent through whom were exercised, super-normal powers. That made me inclined to listen to her statement as to how such powers were obtained. The statement was to the effect that they were a relatively feeble reflection of mightier powers and wider knowledge possessed by certain men whom she had personally known members of a great Brotherhood representing a higher stage of human evolution than had been attained by the foremost even of those representing the progress of scientific knowledge in the open world at large. j 2 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching This statement, though striking and impressive, did not seem to me incredible. Why should human perfectibility after crossing such gulfs as those which separate our greatest exponents of intellectual evolu- tion Faraday, Newton, Copernicus, Pythagoras, etc., etc. from the man in the street (not to speak of the savage), why should it stop short at the stage repre- sented by the names quoted ? Nor was any mental difficulty involved in the idea that still loftier stages had to do with knowledge and powers ensuing from it that could not desirably be diffused through the world at large in its present stage of development. That is obvious, and it accounted for the reserve and seclusion of the advanced " Masters of Wisdom," or, to use the favourite Eastern term, " the Mahatmas." When I began to write about them, shallow-minded readers fastened on a story which lent itself to derision, while more intelligent listeners in large numbers began to think seriously of " Theosophy," the com- prehensive term assigned to the new views of natural philosophy opening out before us. Satisfied myself (to go back to the beginning) that the exponents of the higher knowledge must exist, I was eager to get into touch with them and suc- ceeded. First a protracted correspondence began. How did letters pass between myself and unknown correspondents, in Himalayan seclusion ? By that time I knew (see The Occult World) that occult power could transport physical objects through space. I found that the " Master " could " take " my letters by means unfamiliar to the post, could give me the answers in strange and unexpected ways. But the " wonder " of this grew gradually subordinate to the importance of the communications themselves. Moreover, it was eclipsed by personal experiences of a super-normal character that put me in closer touch with the Occult World than that established by the Religion under Repair : A Reply 73 correspondence. I am now merely sketching the course of events. To describe them in detail would mean re-writing some of my books, but the sketch will, at any rate, suggest the nature of those " sources of information " which are within my reach, though " not generally available." And a moment's re- flection will show how reasonable it is to believe that the " Masters " (to use the Western equivalent for the Indian word Mahatma) are able, if willing, to give such information concerning the other planets of the Solar System and its general design as that which I made use of in my former article 1 for the Nineteenth Century, and in many books. Common knowledge here amongst us relating to the capacities of our own clairvoyants (though there are people claiming to be cultured who remain absolutely ignorant of them) shows us the way in which senses finer than the familiar five will reveal what is going on at great physical distances. Developed by Masters of super- physical science is it surprising that they should reach out to other worlds of our system ? Again, amongst us everyone following the progress of modern psychic research will know that it is possible for the consciousness (Soul, Ego, call it what you like) to pass out of the physical body for a time during life, to bid a conscious good-bye to the physical body left asleep, and roam the spaces of the " astral " world immediately around us, bringing back recollection of such excursions when resuming the use of the physical body. And during such excursions it may be possible, for those permitted, to have speech with Masters, as well as with lesser human entities who have gone through the change called death, and thus learn lessons of priceless interest. 1 See Nineteenth Century and After, September 191 7, pp. 536, 537- 74 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching There are indeed other ways of gathering in such teaching, and these have been to some extent at my service since the far-away days of the beginning that I have been describing, up to the present time. I am now in a position to deal, much more definitely than then, with the functions of the Masters in connection with the government of the world and of the stupen- dous Divine Hierarchy to which they belong. Vast numbers among us are ripe now to appreciate this revelation, though other vast numbers are still intellectually cramped by conventional prejudice from which they cannot escape, and it is to those thus ripe that I venture to address what remains to be said, rather than to assailants impatient with the disturbance of their cherished limitations. The condition described as Mastership can only be attained by the sanction of still higher authority, when the moral and spiritual evolution of the being in question has reached a condition which I have described in an earlier writing as follows : When he is in a position to survey the whole process on which the human family is launched, from its beginning in the remote past to its conclusion in the almost immeasurably distant future ; when all the natural laws and forces which play round it lie within his comprehension and grasp, whether they are operative on the physical plane with its wonderful complexity of molecules and forces, or on those other planes invisible to ordinary sight which interpenetrate it or surround it and are more bewildering in their complexity still; when all the myriad enigmas of good and evil, of sin and sorrow, and hope, are resolved into intelligible meaning, and neither the earth below, nor the heavens above, nor life, nor death, hold any riddles from his understanding, the Adept is qualified to attain the final rank in the vast concatenation of progress we have been surveying. Concurrently with the advance in knowledge and power thus suggested, the Master has been correctly described by another writer as necessarily endowed with " perfect compassion, an absolutely selfless devotion to the welfare of all sentient beings, and Religion under Repair : A Reply j$ a boundless love and fellow-feeling for them all." It has been my privilege in recent years to pick up some bits of information concerning former lives of some among the great Masters, and these have illus- trated what the writer just quoted meant by absolute selflessness, in a way that has thrilled me with emotion, though on the higher level self-sacrifice is taken as a matter of course. How, it may be asked, can a being on the Master's level be in a position to incur self-sacrifice ? If his body is menaced by injury or destruction, he can quit it at will and assume a new incarnation if he chooses. Undoubtedly; but though he may have been doing that at intervals (very pro- tracted intervals) for a long series of ages, he may sometimes as a definite duty, to fulfil some peculiar purpose, take quite a humble or commonplace incar- nation in the ordinary world. He will never in such cases be known as a Master in the ordinary world, but he may, for reasons connected with the welfare of other people, choose to remain with them and die, even a painful death in the ordinary way, though he might had he chosen have slipped out of the body without incurring the least inconvenience, or, as Apollonius of Tyana is said to have done when before Domitian, vanish from sight and remove himself from danger by occult means. Nor indeed does the mere exchange of one body for another mean any trouble for the Adept of Master rank. He can keep any one going for periods measured in centuries that dazzle our imagination, but in the course of ages may find it convenient to take new ones from time to time. And this thought alone is one which will help to dissipate the erroneous notion prevalent in the beginning of the Theosophical movement, to the effect that there was something especially Eastern in the higher Adeptship. The Master of Occultism is bound by no limitations of nationality, will be sometimes y6 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching in an Eastern as often in a Western incarnation. He belongs to the World ! not to any single section of its people, however large that section may be. The main idea in relation to the Masters that I want to enforce is this : they belong to the Divine Hierarchy that presides over the evolution of mankind, and as regards their work in guiding human progress, as definitely as they are able, are absolutely at one, in thought and intention, with the still higher agents in that sublime hierarchy. They may not always find it possible to steer humanity exactly as they would wish. We, in this life, collectively constitute a craft that often fails to answer to the helm. And, as I endeavoured to explain in a former article entitled Our Unseen Enemies and Allies," 1 we are terribly mixed up with inimical agencies bent upon interfering with the Divine purpose at every available oppor- tunity. If it were not for the ceaseless, untiring efforts of our unknown protectors to shield us from the consequences of such attacks, the civilization of the world, the further evolution of the whole human race, indeed, would be utterly wrecked. For various reasons it is highly desirable that the world should understand this. The services the Masters render us, in harmony with the influence of the whole hierarchy to which they belong, would be rendered just as zealously, however ignorant we might be of the benefits conferred upon us. Divine agents do not work for reward. But if the matter is rightly understood it will be seen that we are the people who would be richly rewarded, if we became cognizant of the benefits conferred, and were, so to speak, grateful accordingly. It is true, indeed, that if such gratitude were widely felt and associated with clear comprehension of the way in which our Elder Brethren, the Unseen Masters, are struggling on super- 1 See Nineteenth Century and After, October, 1915. Religion under Repair : A Reply yy physical planes with the Powers of Evil on our behalf, they would in a certain degree be strengthened in the struggle they are carrying on. Success does not depend on such reinforcement of strength ; that is certain and assured, but the duration of the struggle, on which the duration of the War depends, might be to some extent affected in the way above described. Meanwhile the more subtle reward we should secure by gratefully appreciating the protection afforded us has to do with a law of Nature familiar to the occultist, and of growing importance to humanity as evolution proceeds. Spiritual help of the kind affecting the spiritual welfare and progress of each human unit can only be rendered by higher beings in response to aspiration from the level of this life. We must look up, in order that they may look down, in the manner affecting individual progress. The progress of the world collectively will go on, anyhow, when the terrible crisis through which it is passing is over, be- cause some of us will assuredly be looking up, and these in the course of time will drag on the rest. In that way the evolution and progress of the race, as a whole, is provided for, but it will be appreciably accelerated if those who look up, in the way described, become appreciably more numerous than the mere laws of average would ensure. And the acceleration of progress, as regards the upward-lookers themselves, might be more remarkable than they can readily imagine. Not indeed that such a spiritually selfish motive ought to be mainly operative in bringing about the state of feeling that should prevail. From the point of view of the mere occult student on this plane of life, it is disgusting that the great multitude around us should be, so to speak, sopping up the benefits conferred upon them by the Masters col- lectively and failing even to feel decently thankful. Any Master who may take cognizance of this that 78 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching I am writing would, 1 fancy, laugh at the notion that they could be supposed to want gratitude, but none the less all that I have written above holds good, and anyhow I know that they are eager to help all who are ready to be helped, and therefore are more than pleased when such help is consciously invoked. At earlier stages of the world's growth they had to remain concealed. The^stake and the torture chambers of the Church awaited those who tried to proclaim any faith nobler than that of the priests. The Masters had to bide theirtkfie. But their time has now come. The world is ripe to have its religious thought levelled up to harmonize with the sublime realities of Divjjaegoyernment, and the dangers of allowing spiritual trutKHobe set free from medieval corruption have at last became negligible. A good deal in advance of the modern occult development, a book called A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, published fifty years ago, gave out some information about alchemy (the occultism of the Middle Ages) that some devotees of that study at the time thought dangerously frank. The author answers the criticism by anticipation in words which I will leave, in conclusion, as applicable also to such explanations as it has been my privilege to put forward : If we have been free in our expositions the spirit was not the more reckless, but because the thresholds of ignorance are already overpast. . . . They are all now incredulous who were formerly dreaded in their belief, and under that safe guardianship we leave them happily supine in the conviction that our conduct will neither be attractive nor intelligible, much less practically useful, to the profane multitude of mankind. THE OCCULTISM IN TENNYSON'S POETRY A few among the great host of his devotees who, besides appreciating the varied beauties of Tennyson's poetry, are in touch with modern developments of the Higher Occultism, will be alive to the significance of some hints scattered through his writings showing how he, in advance of modern developments, intuitively divined some important principles now emerging from obscurity into the light. Even highly cultured and appreciative readers, unless also students of occultism, may pass them by unnoticed. Sir Alfred Lyall, for example, in his generally admirable survey of Tenny- son's work, contributed to the series of " English Men of Letters," overlooks some glaring hints of the kind in question, while actually dealing with the mere literary charm of one poem mainly devoted to the presentation of occult ideas. The elucidation of the passages thus hinting at hitherto hidden mysteries of spiritual Nature is the purpose of the present article, but it must not be held to imply that the writer seeks to enrol Tennyson in the ranks of professed occultists . Of course, the splendour of his genius shone chiefly in his treatment of purely human emotion. And we, who have passed through life side by side with the poetic stream of h^s creation that flowed through the greater part of the last century, have derived our most intense pleasure from the perfection of his earlier verse, apart from the beauty of the thoughts it conveyed. Then came the Idylls of the King in their stately magnificence, but they have nothing to do with occultism. A truly great 79 80 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching poet can never be a specialist in any one vein of creation, though in whatever vein he is following, Tennyson seems for the moment to be a specialist in that. The Lady of Shalott, The Day Dream, The Lotos-Eaters, and many others of that period, surpass in their musical charm any previous verse in English literature, though Byron and Moore sometimes touched the same level. And the way in which Locksley Hall might be criticized, like Hamlet, as " full of quotations," shows how Tennyson was a specialist among poets in coining phrases that linger in universal memory, while the Idylls of the King lead some of us to forget that the supreme master of blank verse was equally unrivalled in dealing with rhyme. But after all, however highly we may appreciate his art, that merely renders the surface worthy of the substance of his poetry. So much in advance to show that the interest some of us may take in the flashes of occult inspiration to be discerned in Tennyson's poems need not separate us from the sympathy of worshippers who live in a more familiar atmosphere. Nor from the point of view of occult students, who have profited by the flood of light let in of late on mysteries previously obscure, will the flashes in question show that Tennyson was completely in possession of knowledge which humbler mortals at the present day are inheriting without an effort. Indeed, innumerable allusions to death and the hereafter in In Memoriam are hardly tinged with any philosophy deeper than ordinary religious feeling, and in The Two Voices the second voice, which sweeps away the comfortless reasoning of the first, offers merely A little hint to solace Woe A hint, a whisper breathing low, a mere " hidden hope." And yet the same poem contains a passage that might almost be reckoned The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 81 among the flashes of inspiration, suggesting the theory of life now reduced to a scientific shape, and gradually winning consent in all directions the doctrine of Reincarnation : I cannot make this matter plain, But I would shoot, howe'er in vain, A random arrow from the brain. It may be that no life is found, Which only to one engine bound Falls off, but cycles always round. As old mythologies relate, Some draught of Lethe might await The slipping thro' from state to state. As here we find in trances, men Forget the dream that happens then, Until they fall in trance again. I need not expand the quotation. The poem from which it comes will be familiar to all Tennysonian enthusiasts, and the passage to which I call attention embodies a thought far more fully treated in later utterances ; but before dealing with them it is worth while to turn back to one of his very earliest fragments entitled The Mystic, written when Tennyson could not have been more than seventeen, and to be found, I think, in one edition of the Poems by Two Brothers. It begins: Angels have talked with him and shown him thrones, Ye knew him not, he was not one of ye, Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn, Ye could not read the marvel in his eye, The still serene abstraction he hath felt. Skipping a great deal to the same general effect, we come to the final lines, which are as follows : How could ye know him ? Ye were yet within The narrower circle : he had well-nigh reached The last which with a region of white flame Pure without heat into a larger air Upburning and an ether of black blue Investeth and engirds all other lives. 6 82 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching As far as the form of this poem is concerned we need not trace any of the lines, though some of them are dignified and worthy of the subject, to anything in the nature of verbal inspiration. As the Memoir by his son shows us, Tennyson wrote verse when he was only eight years old, and the Memoir gives us some fairly long and harmonious examples of his boyhood's work, never published during his life, written when he was fourteen or fifteen. Everyone familiar with the principle of Reincarnation will readily under- stand that so great a poet as Tennyson must have been a poet already in former lives, and could not but bring over the capacity for poetic expression, so that inspiration, merely conveying an idea, could rely on the new personality to clothe it in appropriate language. Thus, although the ideas underlying The Mystic can hardly be regarded as originating in the mind of a boy of seventeen, the words conveying them may have been entirely his own . The description of The Mystic is not appropriate to any one on the ordinary plane of life to whom that term might apply. Writers on the philosophical system generally called " Mysticism " are " Mystics " in one sense, but may not have any characteristics resembling those described in the poem. Those are the characteristics which with others belong to the highly evolved " Elder Brethren " of the human race now generally spoken of as the Masters of Wisdom, of whom since they themselves have communicated more freely than in former times with the ordinary plane of life we have come to know a good deal. That they inspire many modern writers with ideas for them to work up in the progress of literature, art, and science is now clearly realized by their pupils in occultism. Conventional thinking has hitherto made at once too much and too little of inspiration. It has been conceived as only of very rare occurrence The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 83 in connection with writings of a sacred character, its frequency being thus very limited, while its source is thought of as altogether Divine. It is really of constant occurrence and emanates from all levels of the Divine Hierarchy. The extent to which writers and artists (those with some lofty purpose in their work) are " helped " by invisible beings, on a higher plane of life than theirpwn, can hardly be exaggerated, so there is indeed little reason to be surprised at finding a youthful poet of Tennyson's promise under inspiration from a very early period. But the world was not ripe in the year 1 826 for the gift of any detailed information concerning the actual constitution of the Divine Hierarchy, with its varied levels of dignity and power and intricate agencies. In 1892, towards the close of the great poet's life, con- ditions had changed in a very remarkable degree. And the flashes of inspiration to which Tennyson lent himself then became wonderfully distinct. A few verses to be found in the volume published in that year, and entitled By an Evolutionist, are deeply suggestive. We read as follows: The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man, And the man said " Am I your debtor ?" And the Lord " Not yet : but make it as clean as you can, And then I will let you a better." Occult students will recognize in these few lines a flood of significant allusion. The words alone may have no deep meaning for readers unfamiliar with the great principles hinted at, but for those who know more they are richly significant. They include, to begin with, the fundamental idea that humanity is evolved from humbler animal life, and beyond this they recognize the method of that evolution the transfer of Consciousness from Lower to Higher Vehicles as the consequence of its own craving for the higher. They recognize more than that indeed 84 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching a deep and supremely important idea concerning the nature of consciousness. This is one of the latest developments of advanced occult teaching. Con- sciousness that supreme mystery that baffles all physiological research is uniform in its character throughout all manifestations of life. There is only one kind of consciousness : that of human beings and of the animal creation is the same throughout. Its effective value depends on the vehicle in which it is working. In the body of an animal it is subject to extreme limitations. In the body of a man it has greatly expanded capacities. In the vehicles of consciousness belonging to higher planes it finds these capacities again expanded to an extent which ordinary humanity, at the average stage reached in this world at the present time, cannot even grasp in imagination . At every stage of the process the same law works. Any given volume of consciousness within any given vehicle, gradually becoming an individuality, estab- lishes a claim on Nature for an improved vehicle, by making the best possible use of the one it has got. " Make it as clean as you can, and then I will let you a better." We can understand the law best by concentrating attention on humanity at first. The man at an early stage of his progress cannot ascend to great heights of achievement. He may be fit for little more than the rougher manual work of physical life. But being by that time a man, he has if only a glimmering perception of the difference between right and wrong. He follows the guidance of this perception. He makes the vehicle of his consciousness (which is himself) " as clean as he can." In his next incarnation he infallibly acquires " a better." Thus the verse above quoted, among other ideas, clearly recognizes the principle of Reincarnation, which Tennyson evidently accepted without reserve and worked with continually. The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 85 In the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by his son we are told that he left a Note to Section xliii. of In Memoriam, which runs as follows : If the immediate life after death be only sleep, and the spirit between this life and the next should be folded like a flower in a night slumber, then the remembrance of the last night remains as the smell and colour do in the sleeping flower, and in that case the memory of our love would last as true and would live pure and whole within the spirit of my friend until after it was un- folded at the breaking of the morn when the sleep was over. In writing this Tennyson was evidently concentrat- ing thought on the idea of rebirth and the recovery of the love-relations of the previous life. Even if the intervening period were merely a sleep the true Ego would reappear in the awakening life. The more scientific view of reincarnation, of course while confidently recognizing that idea realizes the immense importance of the intervening life on higher planes. Sometimes, indeed, if the Ego is at a humble stage of its expansion, the intervening period, though restful and happy, is little better than a blissful sleep. In others it affords magnificent opportunities for the cultivation of intellectual or artistic capacity. True, such growth can only take place as a consequence of some effective seed of aspiration or effort sown in the previous physical life, but even minute seeds of that nature are nuclei from which splendid conse- quences may ensue, without in any way interfering with the revival of old loves and even minor friend- ships dating back to the past. The disregard of this important aspect of the subject operates to render the idea of reincarnation unattractive to people who understand it imperfectly. They think of themselves beginning a new life all alone as it were. This is a ridiculous misapprehension of the natural law. A moment's thought should show that probability points to the idea that generations living about the same 86 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching time will on the average get through their inter- vening lives on higher planes, and be ready for reincarnation at about the same time later on. Where personal ties of love or even less powerful affinities associate Egos together, their return together becomes a matter of certainty. Adequately trained clairvoy- ance is equal to the task of verifying that principle, and tracing back, even through ages in the past, the former lives of living people. Whenever genuine mutual affection unites people on this plane of life, they are always found to have been in affectionate relationship in former lives also. There may have been considerable differences in in- tellectual growth even, but the love-tie is supreme, and the ingenuity of the njjU*raTlaw or of tnbse who guide the natural lav7-i1f equal to the emergency in such cases, and to much more complicated problems of " Karma " the convenient term which embraces, among other meanings, the necessity that moral causes engendered in one life shall reap their appro- priate consequences in lives of later date. Now let us turn to the last verse of the brief poem, of which the first has been quoted above : I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past, Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire, But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher. The last few words of the last line " a glimpse of a height that is higher " hint unmistakably at the sublime possibilities of Initiation. There is no finality in the vast process of human evolution, but there are recognizable stages. The perfec t Man has reached one of these stages, from which he looks forward to spiritual attainment transcending any condition that can be limited by the term humanity. The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 87 I need not attempt to elaborate that idea; but we shall see reason to believe that the poet knew more of the height that is higher than he found it possible to put into words. The law under which Divine consciousness in humanity seeks and secures better and better vehicles operates also throughout the lower kingdoms. It is not easily traced through animal and vegetable mani- festations, but even faintly understood it illuminates the whole doctrine of Evolution. Occult students at one time were inclined to find fault with the Darwinian presentation of the idea, as ignoring the evolution of consciousness going on concurrently with the evolution of form. We see now that the evolution of form defines the evolution of conscious- ness. Consciousness is very far from being a mere attribute of the form, as some materialistic scientists of the last century imagined, but the expression of its infinite capacities depends on the form in which it is working. This view of the subject is worthy of protracted treatment ; but there are other poems that claim examination. A little fragment merely two verses entitled The Making of Man, is well worth attention, but does not do more than reiterate some of the ideas in the verses last discussed. It recognizes the nature of the tiger and the ape as necessarily manifesting in humanity at first, but Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, Till the peoples all are one and all their voices blend in choric Hallelujah to the Maker " It is finished. Man is made." We may now turn to the poem which is the fullest expression of occult inspiration among all that suggest that origin The Ancient Sage. This, indeed, in- cludes evidence showing that Tennyson in his own consciousness had attained to definite knowledge 8 8 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching relating to spiritual conditions far transcending those familiar to the average humanity of our period. The An cient Sage was published in the volume entitled " Tiresias and other Poems," just preceding the latest of all " Demeter and other Poems." The "Sage," obviously a Master of Wisdom, criticises a " scroll " by a young companion who has embodied sceptical, almost materialistic, views in very graceful verse- The scroll recognizes that " the earth is fair in hue," But man to-day is fancy's fool As man hath ever been. The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule Were never heard or seen. The Master comments on this : If thou wouldst hear the Nameless, and wilt dive Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou Mayst haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise. The scroll still quarrels with the mystery. And since from when this earth began The Nameless never came Among us, never spake with man, And never named the Name. And the Sage answers with almost the best passage in the whole poem: Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Npr canst thou prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one : Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal nay my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! J~ The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 89 After a passage in the scroll relating to the darkness and miseries of life, the Sage replies : Who knows but that the darkness is in man ? The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ; For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then Suddenly heal'd, how wouldst thou glory in all The splendours and the voices of the world ! And this leads up to the most striking passage in the poem, in which the Sage ; in this case Tennyson him- self got " out of the body," to use a phrase familiar to occult students, by adopting a method with which they are quite familiar. This consists of self-induced hypnotism brought on by repeating alone and aloud one's own name. The repetitions may have to be very numerous, running perhaps into hundreds, and even then the effort may be futile unless the person making it has some psychic potentialities in his nature. But granting that last condition, it is an effective process, and one which Tennyson seems to have been almost in the habit of using. His reference to it in the poem before us is as follows : for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self The gain of such large life as match'd with ours Were Sun to spark unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow world. I cannot identify any other allusion in the whole range of Tennyson's poetry that directly relates to experiences of this nature, but in the Memoir his Son tells us that in some7phases of thought and feeling his idealism tended more decidedly tomysticism. He wrote: "A kind of waking trance 90 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching I have frequently had quite up from boyhood when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of indi- viduality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life ! This might be said to be the state which St. Paul describes, ' Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell !' " He continued: "I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words ? But in a moment when I come back to my normal state of ' sanity ' I am ready to fight for mein liebes Ich and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons . ' ' In the same way he said that there might be a more intimate communion than we could dream of between the living and the dead, at all events for a time. So the spiritualists may fairly claim Tennysonian sanction for the fundamental principle of their belief, which indeed is quite in harmony with the views of advanced occult students, though some of early date were misled into a needlessly hostile mistrust of the system, apt in some cases to be itself rather misleading, but which as broadly designed to assure a world drifting at one time into materialism that there is another life after this, and so on was a generous gift to civilization from levels of higher wisdom. Readers of the Memoir will derive, from a very unexpected source, confirmation of the fact that Tennyson made frequent use of the repeated-name method of attaining spiritual illumination . It appears that the author asked Professor Tyndall to make some contribution to the work in hand. In the course of a long answer he says : I looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there to my profound astonishment I found described that experience of your father's which, in the mouth of the Ancient The Occultism in Tennyson's Poetry 91 Sage, was made the ground of an important argument against materialism and in favour of personal immortality eight-and- twenty years afterwards. ... If you turn to your father's account of the wonderful state of consciousness super-induced by thinking of his own name and compare it with the argument of the Ancient Sage you will see that they refer to one and the same phenomenon. The injunctions which the Sage ultimately gives to his pupil, described in the beginning as one that loved, and honour'd him, and yet Was no disciple, richly garb'd, but worn From wasteful living . . . sweep over the whole range of occult ethics. I pick out a few lines from a passage too long to quote in extenso : Let be thy wail and help thy fellow men, And make thy gold thy vassal not thy king, And send the day into the darken'd heart; Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men, Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue, Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine; Nor thou be rageful, like a handled bee, And lose thy life by usage of thy sting ; Nor harm an adder thro' the lust for harm, Nor make a snail's horn shrink for wantonness; And more think well ! Do-well will follow thought. Each injunction will be familiar to readers of theosophical books, and a fortiori to all students of the Higher Occultism, and that last phrase, " Do-well will follow thought," is an almost amusing reflection of a more elaborate doctrine set forth in certain manuals that profess to guide candidates for initiation in the higher mysteries. They are told first to purify thought, and secondly to purify conduct. From the commonplace point of view that seems putting the cart before the horse, but action may sometimes be thoughtless, and then if it were avoided for no definite 92 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching reason it would probably be repeated for no definite reason. If purified thought preceded its avoidance, the cure would be permanent. It is needless to carry on further the search for occult allusions in Tennyson's poetry. Fainter hints, in the order of those already quoted, might be pointed out in poems less definitely infused with occult inspiration than The Ancient Sage, but the broad con- clusion to be derived from them all is sufficiently well established . The deeper mysteries of life and nature were still veiled from general knowledge during the greater part of Tennyson's splendid literary activity. It was not his task to tear down the veil completely, nor did the rifts he made in it here and there afford his readers anything resembling that scientific com- prehension of great natural truths lying behind it which many of us have ultimately reached. This attainment inaugurates a new era of thought. But Tennyson intuitively forecast the revelation impending . And perhaps for the cultured classes of this period, slow hitherto to appreciate the significance of the Higher Occultism, the fact that its development was so clearly foreshadowed in the writings of a man so universally reverenced as Tennyson, may guide modern sympathies into regions of thought which they might never have explored but for that august leadership. CREEDS MORE OR LESS CREDIBLE Since the amusing period when Bishop Colenso discovered that the hare does not chew the cud as the author of the Pentateuch had supposed the " Allegory," on the banks of the Nile and elsewhere, has been busy chewing the primitive faith of good people previously content to accept statements in the Bible as necessarily true, even when somewhat surprising. Tempers were often lost during the dis- cussions of the Colenso and Darwin days, but Allegory has proved a more good-humoured beast than he was thought to be at first, so that critics and the Church can give and take now with a superficial pretence of being friends in reality. Beyond this, indeed, the attitudes of mind on both sides are undergoing change. The ribald scoffer is extinct. The D.D. who still attributes the sufferings of the world to Eve's con- versation with the Serpent hides quietly in cathedral towns. Science and Theology are on the terms that Talleyrand described as established between himself and the Host, when he raised his hat to a Roman Catholic procession: " Nous nous saluons mais nous ne parlons pas." And happily these relations are still improving. Science, of the old materialistic order, has had to endure many shocks of late. A police magistrate some years ago refused to believe overwhelming testimony in favour of a spiritualist medium on the ground that it was contrary to the known laws of Nature. The members of the Roya Society are no longer so sure of having completely catalogued those laws. And the doubt makes them 93 94 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching even respectful to the theory of miracles. Alter all, turning water into wine is child's play compared with the miracle accomplished whenever artificial incuba- tion turns an egg into a chicken. People who still disbelieve in the phenomena of genuine spiritualism as puzzling as any records in Christian story must guard their ignorance very carefully if they wish to preserve their opinions. Science in all directions is negotiating with the unseen, and the wise church- man realizes that some concessions on his part may lead to a settled peace, promising protection for institutions and substantial interests he sometimes felt to be in danger from the battering ram. Already there is an entente more or less cordiale between the enlightened Free Thinker shedding the folly of denying whatever he does not understand and the churchman who knows that he must adapt his faith to the uniformities of Nature, that it is often unsafe to insist that " sacred " writings always mean what they seem to say. But questions have arisen that are more em- barrassing than the reconciliation of Scripture with obvious physical facts. And these challenge state- ments that cannot take sanctuary in any theory of Divine inspiration. The language of the Creeds must at all events be ascribed to human authorship. This is complicated and to some extent obscure, but in criticizing the Creeds we are not in trouble with any theory of verbal inspiration from Divine levels. The Revised Version of the Bible humbly attempting to correct a few gross errors of translation has (according to a familiar anecdote) been treated with faint praise by a sturdy exponent ofjthe early faith who preferred " God's own words. "/ But the words adopted to define Christian belief at Nicaea in a. d. 325 were simply those of certain bishops, who prevailed over other bishops desirous of using different words, Creeds More or Less Credible 95 so we cannot well bring inspiration into the stonpr Again, the Nicene Creed was preceded by an extensive " creed literature " to use the phrase of an orthodox writer, though it would be scarcely possible now to identify any writing as the first attempt to put Christian belief on paper. Nor does the importance of the subject at the present time turn upon its historical aspect. The question arising is this: Do the Creeds, as they are put into the mouths of people who attend church at the present day, express beliefs they can possibly be expected to entertain ? The question may fairly be described as having arisen, because it has been recently the subject of corres- pondence in The Times^ Canon Glazebrook in a book called The Faith of a Modern Churchman says that the clauses in the Apostles' Creed " Born of the Virgin Mary " and " The third day He rose again from the dead " can legitimately be interpreted " symbolically." The Bishop of Ely, in a letter addressed to Canon Glazebrook and also published in The Times, refuses to accept this view, and supports his refusal by quoting a resolution adopted by " the bishops of the whole Anglican Communion assembled at the Lambeth Conference in 1908," which runs as follows: "The Conference in view of tendencies widely shown in writings of the present day hereby places on record its conviction that the historical facts stated in the Creeds are an essential part of the faith of the Church." Canon Glazebrook, in a long letter published in The Times of May 21, does not argue the question on its merits but quotes episcopal sayings that deprecate undue limitations on freedom of thought and inquiry, and attributes to the Bishop of Oxford a view of the Ascension which he summarizes in thisway: X Our Lord could not, for astronomical reasons of which the disciples were ignorant ,physically ascend into Heaven. But in order give to them a 96 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching right conception of His change of state He rose to a moderate height in the air, and then so veiled Himself behind a cloud that they believed Him to have gone right up into the vault of the sky^^Tf the Bishop is fairly represented by this summary the suggestion needs expansion. What was the later course of events ? When our Lord, having deluded His disciples in the manner described, wanted to come down again, how did He conceal His reappearance ? But while the Bishop's hypothesis tempts further comment, this might seem wanting in due reverence for the main idea concerned, so no more on that subject need be said for the moment. And yet that line of speculation in reference to alleged occurrences that outrage common sense, is one into which it is easy to be driven if people are content to think of Nature as simply consisting of that which appeals to the five senses, even though the whole may be vaguely regarded as bathed in spiritual con- ditions intangible as Thought, out of relation with Space or Time, offering nothing to the imagination that can prefigure a future existence, except of a kind to be spoken of with bated breath and avoided as long as possible. Only for those, happily a large and in- creasing number, who comprehend more or less com- pletely the intervening conditions of Nature lying between the dense manifestation of the physical plane and the "incomprehensible" (though not less real) conditions of exalted planes only by virtue of their superior enlightenment is it possible to get rid first of the dread commonly connected with the process of passing on, and secondly of the embarrass- ment arising from occasional occurrences which without such enlightenment must either be dis- believed in defiance of evidence or dealt with by some grotesquely foolish explanation. That idea applies very forcibly to the study of the Creeds More or Less Credible 97 Creeds. The writers who reduced them to their present shape may have been using physical plane language in a metaphorical sense, or they may simply have swallowed without hesitation statements absurd on their face. But in either case we have to recognize, in the light of modern occult knowledge, that some- where in the back history of the Creeds such knowledge must have been in the possession of some person or persons who inspired the earliest writers on the subject. And we reach, with the same confidence, the conclusion that current versions of the Creeds have been the product of painfully clumsy editing. Such work could only have been carried out properly by editors saturated with knowledge of natural conditions unseen by the multitude, while the actual editors were certainly not of that type^As a mere first illustration of that idea we may take the few words in the Apostles' Creed about the Resurrection and the Ascension: " The third day He rose again from the dead ; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father/' etc. For people who can only think of a Being still in touch with the Earth as of human flesh and bones, the state- ment must either be rejected altogether as fabulous, or must lead to conceptions which, followed out in detail, are deplorably degrading/ But directly we begin to understand how human personalities may function in full consciousness, after escaping (for a time or for good) from imprisonment in the physical body functioning in another available vehicle, the astral body we see light shed on alleged phenomena otherwise inexplicable. Many of us know now that natural law evert^provides for the temporary materializa- tion of the astral form so that it may become apparent to physical senses. The story of the Ascension thus comes within the range of comprehensible occur- rences, even if we make no attempt to interpret it 7 98 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching b y more profound thinking in another way alto- gether. Perhaps to understand its origin properly we must pay attention first to the ritual adopted in ancient Egypt in connection with initiation in the Mysteries, ages before the Christian era. The candidate lay down on a great wooden cross hollowed out so as to support the figure ; was bound on it (quite loosely so as to suggest the voluntary character of the sacrifice) and then was put (mesmerically) into a deep trance which involved the emergence from the body of his real consciousness in the astral form. The body was then deposited in a sarcophagus, to typify burial. In the astral body the real entity was confronted with varied experiences educating him in the idea that he the real entity was beyond the reach of injury from fire, water, or even the subtler perils of the under- world. Then, on the third day the physical body was brought up into the light of the sunrise, and its " resurrection " the return to it of the real Ego was accomplished. Followed out more closely, the Egyptian ceremony included other super-physical suggestions that may have been in the mind of those who sketched the earliest draft of the Creed. Before being awakened the candidate had touch, out of the body, with sublime levels of consciousness, as definitely an ascent into heaven as the under-world experiences were a descent into hell. The under-world in question is, of course, only a part, a low subdivision, of the enormous astral world that surrounds the physical globe, and is growing familiar in these days to many explorers. Its loftier realms are widely expanded regions that provide for happy conditions of life, and for happy conditions as varied as there are variations, amongst people still in life of aspirations pointing to happiness. ^How did it come to pass that allusions to the ritual Creeds More or Less Credible 99 of the Egyptian Mysteries found their way into the Christian Creed J^To frame a conjecture we must begin by realizing that the Egyptian ceremonial was itself an allegory based on fundamental ideas connected with the science of human evolution fully understood by those who invented the ritual. We can see this hinting at the ordeal of suffering incidental to the physical life, at the possibility of further suffering in the under-world as the penalty of evil-doing here, at the restful touch with happier conditions (the ascent into heaven), at the return to Earth-life after this the resurrection or more literally the rein- carnation of the Ego. Whoever infused into that early " creed literature " the first suggestion for a formula of belief must have had the Egyptian allegory in his mind, together with a perfect comprehension of its deep meaning, as also embodied in the Christian story. For many reasons besides those that have to do with the illumination of the Creeds, it is deplorable that the clergy at large do not avail themselves of growing knowledge concerning the unseen worlds, which might enable them in turn to become more or less competent spiritual teachers. Some few are emerging from the stagnant majority, but for the rest to pose as experts in dealing with the interests of humanity lying outside those of the current life > while remaining ignorant of all that is now becoming known concerning the life hereafter, is like claiming to practise as a doctor without knowing more about the human body thai! was known to the barber- surgeons of the Middle Ages. Even the humblest spiritualist has realized that life hereafter is accessible to investigation. He may investigate very clumsily His grasp even of the main idea may be very incom- plete, but he knows that he is in touch with another plane of existence; that death, for all decent people ioo Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching is an introduction to life of a more promising kind than that which the physical plane provides for as a rule. The average clergyman, meanwhile, will not avail himself of the means by which he with a more cultivated mind might not only realize this much, but expand his comprehension of the ultimate spiritual possibilities awaiting humanity, to an enormous extent. If it were not so profoundly distressing there would be something supremely ludicrous in the spectacle of a vast organization, whose raison d'etre is the general human thirst for guidance in spiritual thought, resolutely keeping aloof from avenues of research proved by abundant experience to be richly stored with spiritual wisdom for all who explore them . This view of the matter will become more and more impressive when attention is turned to those passages in the Creeds which relate to the Virgin Birth. For those who only can think in terms of physical plane matter, the Virgin Birth seems to strain imagination less than an ascent to heaven by a tangible flesh-and- blood Christ. Birth of any sort is a mystery. A virgin birth would be only a little more mysterious than one of the ordinary kincj,. But the first thought that suggests a pause for .reflection arises from the undeniable fact that othep religions before Christianity claim virgin births for/tneir founders. Is this merely due to a pious desirpan each case to dignify the origin of the founder, of can it bear a more intricate ex- planation ? TJafs is certainly the case in reference to the adaptation of the familiar doctrine to the Christian story. To get at the actual truth hinted at meta- phorically by the virgin birth idea, we must go rather deeply into modern developments of super-physical science. By its help we are enabled to recognize the creative achievement, when a Solar System comes into existence, as involving successive processes : first the Creeds More or Less Credible 101 formation of molecular matter from the atomic raw material pervading all space. We need not talk about the origin of that, any more than about the beginning of eternity. But a Solar System has a beginning and a destiny. It is an episode in eternity, and the creation of a world is an episode within the enor- mously protracted life of a Solar System. Molecular matter constituting in its various aspects the chemical elements (as they used to be called) becomes available for the formation of a globe destined to be a living planet. We see the process still going on in the growth of nebulae with which the heavens abound. At a later stage Divine power pours out from itself the life principle. The vegetable and animal kingdoms come into existence. Later, again, when the human stage is reached, a further emanation from divinity invests definite beings with what is sometimes called "the Divine Spark," with that which renders such beings immortal, capable of developing through successive Earth-lives the loftier attributes of intellect and spirituality. The three stages are described by many phrases: sometimes as three waves of Atmic influence; sometimes as the first, second, and third Logos; sometimes as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Now when we attempt to see how this view of creation affects the language of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, we have to keep touch with another line of thought. The history of the Creeds points to a definite human origin, bu the hints their language embodies point (as already suggested) to inspiration from a lofty source of wisdom ; while it also betrays the corruption of such hints as successive versions have been prepared. Lofty wisdom has always lain hidden in the hands of the Elder Brethren of the race, who well knew that primitive conditions of civilization would not allow of its general diffusion. 102 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching The general diffusion, however, of large extracts from it is now in progress, taking shape in the Higher Occultism of recent years. Thus we can now discern in much ancient writing of a religious character the streak of inspiration and the superposed blundering of unenlightened transmitters of the inspiration. The passage in the Apostles' Creed about the Virgin Birth is a thrilling example of both influences. The adjective " virgin " has been applied in very- ancient literature to matter, as due to the action of the First Logos, or the first creative wave. Only when after intervening development it is touched with the Third Logos (or Holy G?hfrf can it engender the Christ principle. That idea gets twisted, by primitive ignorance capable only of thought along the lines of the physical senses, into the idea of a conception by a woman free of th6 conditions that generally give rise to conception/And then in the Nicene Creed we get the gross misunderstanding developed into the un- fortunate expression, " the only-begotten Son of God." How does this subtle interpretation of the familiar language fit in with the Gospel story which the Creeds seem to follow ? The literal accuracy of that story has been challenged by critics who object to miracles, and nothing that can be called contemporary authentic history affords it any sanction; but from the occult point of view that is to say, from the point of view of knowledge that relies on something much more trustworthy than written history the story is con- templated in a deeply reverential spirit, but is not treated throughout as a mere record of occurrences. The occultist has resources at his disposal when investigating the past that leave mere literary re- search panting in the rear. The principle is intel- ligible to all who appreciate the significance of clairvoyance, in some of its suggestive developments. Creeds More or Less Credible 103 One kind enables the clairvoyant to take cognizance of events going on at the time in some distant place. Another kind deals with events distant in past time. There is a memory of Nature in which some clair- voyants can share, and that is faultless in its ex- actitude. Clairvoyants who can do this while living the ordinary life among us are few, but now that the veil between ourselves and the Masters of Wisdom, our Elder Brethren, the Great Adepts, has been lowered to an appreciable extent, many others besides clairvoyants are in touch with Teachers for whom perfect clairvoyance in time is as much a natural faculty as common physical sight with us. Thus we need not be all dependent, when desirous of knowing what really happened in Palestine when Christianity was inaugurated, on Alexandrian writers who endeavoured to frame the record some centuries later. The memory of Nature may discredit the literal accuracy of that record without impairing in the faintest degree the reverential feeling with which we contemplate the inauguration.^ The sublimity of the Christ incarnation is all the better understood when we get rid of the idea that Jesus when a baby was already the Christ. No great spiritual being, taking a new physical plane birth for any reason or definite purpose, ever takes charge of the new body from infancy. That is done by one of his disciples. At maturity the disciple quits the body and the Master Ego occupies it. Most people at the present day are so densely ignorant of their own constitution that they may regard the idea as bewildering. At a certain level of knowledge the body is no more than a vesture to be put on or off as occasion may require. In the case of the Christ incarnation the Ego who took charge of the body in the first instance was indeed of no ordinary type. And through later births Jesus (if we cling to the use of the old name) has 104 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching ascended to great altitudes in the Divine Hierarchy. But the Christ, who made use of the body he sur- rendered in Palestine, descended for that purpose from a loftier altitude still. The bundle of miscellaneous statements at the end of the Apostles' Creed, and also imbedded in the Nicene Creed, need not claim much attention except so far as " the resurrection of the body " has been a stumbling-block for all who realize the gross absurdity of the phrase in its plain meaning, and may not understand that the astral body is that which re- surges. But if we pass on to a je6nsideration of the third great Creed with which^ -orthodox Christianity is entangled, we have to deaf with a blend of wisdom and folly that is very well worth the closest attention . In its naked brutalitv/fhe Athanasian Creed drives many people out of pmirches in which it is read aloud. Some clergymen ;mll not consent to read it at all. Others, whose orthodoxy is equal to the digestion of any horrors clothed in theological tradition, are able to do so. Meanwhile those in a position to reconstruct the teaching ludicrously caricatured by the language of the Athanasian Creed may easily divest it of its blasphemous absurdities and show it to have been originally inspired by profound wisdom and know- ledge. Summarized as it stands it consists of a series of assertions that contradict one another, together with a broad assurance that all who fail to believe them both ways will be damned. " Perish everlastingly " is the expression used at first, but a reference later on to " everlasting fire " invests it with 'more specific meaning. To avoid this fate we have to believe a tring of assertions frankly described as incom- prehensible. Strange to say, it is easy for any one who has profited by the light thrown in recent years on the course of human evolution to discern, behind Creeds More or Less Credible 105 the gibberish of the Athanasian Creed as it stands, the profoundly scientific ideas that some exalted teacher of the past must have tried to suggest to some insufficiently receptive mind engaged in the effort to express them . For there is a period in the history of every great human race (ours is only one of many) when the state of each person's " belief," or capacity to understand deep spiritual truth, has an important bearing on his subsequent progress. The Solar System includes other human races besides our own. Various planets represent humanities at various stages of growth. Super-physical faculties even far below those of " the Masters of Wisdom " (now for the first time in this world's history giving out such informa- tion freely) reveal the design of the Solar System. Another planet was senior to the Earth in its develop- ment, and its humanity is already on a far higher level of evolution than our own. But human evolu- tion is not a process in which superior Divine power pushes the pieces about, chessboard fashion, without regard to their own free will. The way in which this sometimes seems to be done is at the bottom of a hideous theological fancy, as grotesque as the language of the Athanasian Creed, to the effect that by Divine caprice some souls are " elect " from the beginning, and sure of salvation from hell-fire ; others as surely destined from the beginning to that fate. But what really happens is this : some use their free will to accomplish spiritual progress of infinite importance. Others neglect their opportunities so persistently that they are left behind; not doomed to any horrible penalties, not annihilated as entities, but left to carry on their evolution, if they are willing to do so, in the next great planetary scheme following on in due order after the one they have failed to profit by to its fullest extent. Of course, it is im- possible that anyone can begin to understand all this 106 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching without realizing the law of reincarnation as clearly as we all realize the circulation of the blood or any other fundamental principle of Nature. But the appreciation of that law corresponds to the state reached by a child learning to read, when he has mastered the alphabet. Now in the light simply of the principle just defined as guiding successive human evolutions in the Solar System, we see in a flash the underlying idea cari- catured by the language of the Athanasian Creed. Translate first the phrase " Whosoever will be saved " from the blasphemous meaning saved from hell- fire to that clearly intended by the original inspirer : " Whosoever would be safe from failure to attain the highest possibilities of his place in Nature," must " believe " or, in equivalent language, train himself to understand, certain great subtleties of spiritual truth which frankly for the physical brain at an early stage of its development are incomprehensible i.e., beyond its grasp. Physical, mental, and moral evolution proceed concurrently. In a world at a far more advanced stage than our Earth has yet reached, the majority of the Egos (Souls, spiritual entities, call them what you will) are engendering bodies adapted to express Egos of similar advancement. What is to be done, by the Powers that guide and control incarnations, with the Egos that have been so neglectful of their past opportunities that they are not fit to animate the bodies of the kind that are being- born ? The Powers in question and for the occultist they are conscious Beings on a very high level can only do one thing with them pass them on to the scheme of human evolution next in order of develop- ment. \ In other words, they have as a consequence of their own neglect incurred the inevitable necessity \o{ beginning again. They are not destined to perish everlastingly, but they are thrown back in evolution Creeds More or Less Credible 107 for a long period. All Oriental writings and our " sacred " scriptures including the Creeds are saturated with the methods of Oriental writers are prone to use words like " eternity " and " everlasting " as indicating any long period they are talking about, and not as we do with a specific mathematical idea behind them. Vastly more than the difficulty of reconciling the triple aspect of Divinity with the essential unity thereof is hinted at by the inspirer of the Athanasian Creed, whose clumsy interpreters have been content to hammer at the one problem of recognizing trinity in unity. But the elaboration of the teaching the inspirer sought to convey would only have been possible for writers fully illuminated with knowledge then " occult " in the strictest sense of the term. Early theologians were certainly not among such illutninati, and those responsible for the language of the Creed before us were so ill able to discriminate between credibility and absurdity, that they wove into their work the^most loathsomely ridiculous view of the Resurrection that any of the Creeds suggest. Christ is described as sitting on the right hand of the Father " at whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall giv^ account of their own works," with life or damnation everlasting as the only varieties of treatment available for their respective cases. And yet a Irftle progress in super-physical knowledge, available now for all who will profit by current revelation, invests the idea of the Resur- rection with j?6etical charm. The astral body, which rises again/fn every case when a discarded physical body melts away into its constituent elements, is susceptible of a wonderfully beautifying change. Leave the evil-doers out of account for the moment the very bad cases have to be dealt with for a time in an appropriate fashion as regards the vast majority 108 Collected Fruits ot Occult Teaching of decently behaved people, even though life may have dragged on till the physical vehicle is withered and destitute of all the graces of its youth, the astral body, in which the Ego passes away from it, soon undergoes a change the exact reverse of growing old on the physical plane. The old man or woman finds him or her self restored in appearance to the aspect worn in whatever has been the best period of the life concluded. All who are in touch with the astral world the first super-physical aspect of the Earth will be familiar with such changes; which, moreover, in the case of people who have, in the course of a long life, far transcended the mental and spiritual con- dition of what may have been physically their best period, wall somehow show by new expression in that recovered best period the mental and spiritual attributes imperfectly developed during the Earth-life. It is sad to think that multitudes of innocent people are allowed by ignorant teachers to grovel with the foulest misconception of la beautiful natural truth, when they ought to be instructed in the exquisite charm of the arrangements made by natural law in other words by Divine love for their happiness and welfare between successive lives (as they ought to be) of strenuous effort on the physical plane. And that same idea spreads over the whole area of conventional religious teaching. Creeds incredible as they stand are matched by theological doctrines that degrade the popular understanding, even when refined away to some extent by cultivated thinking, and represent the Divine nature capable of an anger so ignoble that it can be appeased by innocent blood- shed. The sublime Christian story in this way gets itself twisted into a shape in which it is offensive to any lofty conception of the Divine nature. Must the authorities of the Church go on ad infinitum, afraid to attempt a drastic revision of the language Creeds More or Less Credible 109 employed in its services, for fear lest the whole ecclesiastical structure should fall in ruins as a conse- quence ? Tf that fear checks them, the fact only shows how utterly they misunderstand the drift of enlightened spiritual teaching, available for all, now the veil has been drawn aside from what was previously occult. The wave of interest in that enlightenment is sweeping all over the civilized world. And far from making people hostile to the theory of an established Church, it makes them think how beautiful a condition of things would be realized if the Church would become a true spiritual University, representing the latest developments of super-physical knowledge, studying the varied conditions of life during and beyond physical incarnation, the possibilities of attainment inherent in humanity and the stupendous programme of the Cosmos to which our system belongs. In all lines of study with which intelligence can engage, if the mysteries of Nature are concerned, progress is obviously the bright lure of the future, stagnation an absurdity. And yet stagnation in thought is cherished as a principle by the defenders of the cut- and-dried formulas of medieval theology. Such defence can hardly be designed to shield faith; its purpose can only be to protect the institutions associated, to their deep discredit, with the stagnant thought. It is ridiculous almost beyond the reach of sarcasm that professed religious teachers should be the only kind who, parrot-like, repeat their lessons unchanged from year to year a senseless articulation of sound while out in the world *discovery and illuminated thought are widening our intellectual horizons in every direction. That clearing vision of spiritual truth which the champions of stagnation cannot dim is really the explanation of the strange way in which modern civilization tolerates its clergy. All who profit by the growth of spiritual knowledge 1 1 o Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching feel that this will assuredly, in the long run, permeate the Church, and that, once emancipated from medieval fetters, that organization may be destined to a magnificent development. The trust that this may be possible depends perhaps on a far-sighted view of the future; but when in its moral progress civilization deprived orthodoxy of its torture- chambers and the stake, a change set in which may be slow, like the movement of a glacier, but is as certain of effect, in the long run, as the glacier flow, and will ultimately turn the frozen ice into a dancing river, sparkling in the sunshine. IMPRISONED IN THE FIVE SENSES The " Palace of Art " was replete with interest and charm for its mistress up to a certain stage in her spiritual evolution ; but a time came when she found herself though still in its luxurious magnificence Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round With blackness as a solid wall. An emotion loftier than the thirst for pleasure con- strained her to break away from its limitations, and to " purge her guilt " in a wider atmosphere of sympathy with her kind. Tennyson's poetry is so full of meaning below the surface that one is tempted to discern a deep allegorical significance in the lines just quoted over and above their obvious bearing on the plain problems of human life on selfishness and sympathy. For all humanity at the present period of its progress is shut in within the shining walls of its gorgeous artistic and scientific Palace, the contents sufficing amply for its needs, as long as it is satisfied to ignore all that lies beyond. The walls of the Palace are the senses, inherent in the vehicles of life on the physical plane. As long as they are our only avenues to consciousness they are not windows through which we gaze out into kifinity, but dead walls confining our survey of Nature's mysteries to one aspect only of their manifold variety. Human intelligence of the usual type is, in truth, imprisoned in the five senses, although in the front already stand a few who have developed new senses which reveal the existence of worlds beyond worlds 112 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching in endless series, and, as turned back on the past show modern civilization but just emerging from conditions analogous to childhood. The character of the change achieved by those illuminated by new senses may best be compre- hended by focussing imagination on the condition of a person born without the most important of the five the sense of sight. He hears from others of natural phenomena he cannot himself cognize. Descriptions will not help him to realize colour or light. He will not understand what is meant by " seeing " things he cannot touch. Then grant him by a miracle the gift of sight, and picture in the mind the complicated revelation that ensues. The sudden endowment of an ordinary civilized man with senses already possessed by some persons in the vanguard of human progress would mean a revelation of even greater significance than that suggested in the case of the man born blind. The liberation of consciousness from previous limitations would be more thrilling in its effect than any change that could take place within those limitations. Human consciousness in its nature is qualified to give scope to perceptions all but infinite in their range. But with the ordinary run of mankind any given volume of consciousness incarnate in a human being can only deal with the fruit of the familiar senses. Of course faith and imagination seem to yield much more, but are cramped by the familiar senses as shown by some ludicrous features of anthropomorphic religion. For practical purposes the senses are the channels through which we gain knowledge. When we guess or speculate along other channels, the mental conception of one generation is apt to be thrown aside by the next, and the history of Philosophy becomes an amusing cinema film, that can hardly be called a kaleidoscope, a there is not much beauty about it. Imprisoned in the Five Senses 1 1 3 By far the most important discoveries which reward the efforts of those who escape from the imprisonment of the senses have to do with the definite possibilities of spiritual progress associated with enlightenment that may be attained through new channels of per- ception. But the laws and phenomena of Nature are not really divided by the hard-and-fast frontiers that sense-perceptions seem to define. Grant anyone amongst us certain new senses, and he will not merely be enabled to perceive new regions of existence with appropriate scenery and decorations, brimming over with life of many kinds, but will find the familiar features of the life around us all those of the physical plane much more full of meaning than they seemed to be previously. I will illustrate this statement by describing a scientific research carried on within the last few years by means of super-physical senses, and happily involving something like a self-contained proof of its conclusions. It began under my own guidance, when working with a friend brilliantly endowed with super-physical senses. I had found that, quite independently of results they gave us in reference to higher conditions of life beyond the change called death, they were ultra-microscopic in their character as applied to physical nature. Could they be so applied as to enable my friend to see an ultimate molecule of physical matter ? The magnitude of such molecules is so minute that mathematical calculations with which, among others, the great name of Lord Kelvin is associated, lead to the conclusion that thirty trillion molecules of water are included in the volume of a cubic centimetre. My friend undertook to try, and I suggested a molecule of gold as the body to be examined. My friend emerged from the condition in which he could attempt to do this, declaring that, although the molecules of gold could be individually ii4 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching discerned, they were far too complicated to be described. They each of them consisted of an intricate combination of smaller atoms clearly be- longing to a finer order of matter. This observation led me to suggest that perhaps molecules of matter of less atomic weight than gold would be more manageable, and we next dealt with a molecule of hydrogen gas. This was found to be composed of atoms like those of the gold molecule, but relatively few in number. They could be counted. They were eighteen in number, grouped in a definite design and in rapid movement. The rapidity of their movement did not interfere with the counting, for reasons I need not stop now to explain. We then went on to examine a molecule of oxygen. This was found to be more complicated, but still Within the reach of careful counting. The number of minor atoms was 290 a figure the significance of which was at once seen to be remarkable. Divided by 18 it gives us i6'i, a close approximation to the recognized atomic weight of oxygen. Atomic weights, on the usual scale, are calculated on the principle of reckoning the weight of an atom of hydrogen as unity. The relative atomic weights of other bodies are derived from calculations dependent on their varied combinations, again in a way I need not go into here, as that has to do with commonplace chemistry. Was the ratio 1 8 to 290 operative in other cases ? The atom of nitrogen was examined and found to consist of 214 minor atoms. That again gave the recognized atomic weight when divided by 18. The result was extremely suggestive, but did not yet constitute proof that the law would run all through the series of the so-called chemical elements. Meanwhile the minor atoms claimed attention. They were apparently the really ultimate form of physical matter atoms of ether, themselves below the limits of sense-per- Imprisoned in the Five Senses 1 1 5 ception. Only when in combined masses if the expression can be used in reference to masses so minute as the atoms of the chemical elements do they come within those limits. Thus incidentally the research I am describing brought out a new discovery. The etheric atoms do enter into com- bination in numbers less than 18, but then they do not constitute any known physical bodies. They are molecular varieties of ether, the atomic ether being the kind that fills all space, the molecular ethers being definitely aggregated around the planets. So far the research was carried out in the year 1 895, and happily the results, including all that I have described above, were published at the time and are available for reference. Six years later Mme. Curie discovered radium, and its entrance on the scene revolutionized chemical science in more ways than one. Study of the cathode ray had already intro- duced us all to the " electron " as an entity, but radium introduced us to the idea that physical matter consisted of electrons, and that transmutation was a possibility in nature, thus vindicating the alchemical theory of the Middle Ages which nineteenth-century science had ridiculed. Inquiry of the ordinary kind was now directed to the questions, what is an electron? and how many enter into the lightest known atom that of hydrogen ? The clairvoyant research above described had answered both of these questions in advance, but was not thought worthy of notice by scientists of the orthodox type. The electron came to be treated as an atom of electricity by some scientific leaders, though to others that view was unacceptable. Electricity is a force, not a form of matter. To speak of an atom of electricity is like speaking of an atom of gravitation, and that would be transparently ridiculous. Occult research had shown from the beginning that the electron, though itself 1 1 6 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching an atom of ether, carried a definite unit charge of electricity. Orthodox opinions as to the number of electrons in an atom of hydrogen vary within very wide limits. Some give us figures from i to 5; some others guess by hundreds, and 700 is rather a favourite estimate. The few of us who trusted the clairvoyant research felt sure the real number was 18. Then in a few years came the proof of this, a proof again so far ignored by science at large, though its ultimate recognition is really a matter of certainty. The research of 1895 was onr y resumed several years later by my clairvoyant friend, assisted then by another qualified observer. The task they under- took was much more elaborate than the former. Its purpose was to ascertain by actual counting the number of etheric atoms entering into the composition of a large number of chemical elements, also to depict the grouping of the etheric atoms. The complexity of the grouping was bewildering. Gold, for instance, consists of three combined groups, an exact description of which, unless illuminated by diagrams, would be hardly intelligible. The important idea to realize is that the counting could only be effected by degrees, the etheric atoms in each group reckoned up separately with the assistance of a secretary who wrote down the figures as they were called out, and only added them up after the protracted observations were complete. The total was 3,546. Then came the interesting question what figure would that yield divided by 18 ? The answer is 197. The recognized atomic weight of gold is 195*74. The deeply in- teresting principle was vindicated and, as the pro- tracted research went on, over fifty of the recognized chemical elements were examined, and in all cases the same principle was found to be operative. I have a table before me as I write, showing the figures reached in 57 observations of elements commonplace and Imprisoned in the Five Senses 117 rare ; and the result is nothing less than a demonstra- tion of the accuracy of the original observation show- ing the atom of hydrogen to consist of 1 8 etheric atoms. The notion that the counting can in any way have been made to fit the theory is dissipated by the complication of the work. Neither the observer nor the secretary could have foreseen how the figures given and recorded by degrees would fit in with the theory when added up. Eight of the observed elements have over 3,000 atoms each; eight more have over 2,000. And an interesting hint supporting the trustworthiness of the research is due to the fact that the observers found in the atmosphere two molecules that could not be identified with any known element. Their electric atoms numbered respectively 54 and 402, yielding the atomic weights 3 and 22*33. Now in the course of Sir J. J. Thomson's research (by ingenious electrical methods) into the vagaries of the electron, he found reason to believe and to announce that there must be two unknown elements with atomic weights of (about) 3 and 22. He little realized that the announcement vindicated a previous announcement to the same effect giving similar results attained by clairvoyant research. But the 3 and 22 discovery was of insignificant importance compared with the discovery of the true meaning of atomic weights. No work done in laboratories in connection with the electron or radio- activity is of such far-reaching significance as the atomic-weight discovery due to the clairvoyant research. It shows us ether to be ponderable matter, though in its uncombined form it defies examination by methods appealing to the physical senses. Optical methods tell us a good deal about the ether, but are silent in regard to its mechanical attributes. Clair- voyant research is the only kind that can expand our knowledge of Nature across the threshold of the region which lies beyond mere laboratory research. 1 1 8 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching In describing the work done so far by the clairvoyant method as applied to certain problems in chemistry, I have not stopped to give chapter and verse in refer- ence to the dates of magazines or pamphlets issued from time to time and duly recording results. In verifying what I have written I will gladly assist any serious scientific inquirer capable of appreciating the simple truth that the research described is the most important contribution to our comprehension of physical chemistry that has been made within any recent period. And yet, striking as it is, it is among the least important of the results attained by human intelli- gence when once that breaks free from imprisonment in the physical senses. The light shed on the gradual development of the human race by clairvoyant research illuminates evolution, and the magnitude of the design, to an extent that renders the earliest Egyptian and Chaldean records modern history by comparison. Besides being ultra-microscopic, clair- voyance of the highest order is retrospective almost to infinity. There is no mystery in the matter as treated from one point of view. The duly qualified clairvoyant can get into conscious touch with the Memory of Nature, which is infinite in its range. That is a great mystery, no doubt, only to be interpreted by very lofty wisdom; but without reaching to such levels the clairvoyant who has but just broken out of prison can share in the universal memory to a certain extent. One of the best books (Samuel Laing's Human Origins), written previously to recent clairvoyant research, but dealing with the evidence afforded by geological strata, pushes back the presence of Man on earth to the Tertiary period. But a few hundred thousand years represent a mere fraction of the time since the earth was first inhabited by humanity, and not merely by humanity but by nations of advanced Imprisoned in the Five Senses 1 1 9 civilization. The mists that hung at first over tradi- tions of Atlantis are now clearing up. Incredulity, scoffing at Plato's story, gave way at last to the soundings of the Challenger. The Atlantic bed confessed part of the truth. Geologists accepted the information and, having left off laughing at the idea, proceeded to indicate the exact region in which the last surviving remnant of the original Altantic continent lies now under water. But it was not the business of the Challenger or the geologist to describe the inhabitants of either the last remnant or the great original continent. That was accomplished by clair- voyant research and the results were duly published, years in advance of one occasion I remember when a map of the Atlantic bed was exhibited at a con- versazione of the Royal Society, showing " Posei- donis " (the last piece of the former continent sub- merged 9000-odd years b.c.) lying under the waves of the present ocean. Recorded evidence concerning the character and date of the great catastrophe has been derived from the hieroglyphics of Mexico and Yucatan, and fuller information on the subject has been obtained in another way. The few among us qualified to carry on super-physical research are enabled, by virtue of their abnormally developed senses, to get into touch with still more abnormally developed Beings whose progress, though they have emerged originally from humanity, has so far engaged them in work on higher planes of nature that they are lost to sight as regards ordinary mankind. But they have attained to loftier conditions of existence without losing their sympathy with humanity of the ordinary type. To do full justice to the idea would mean re-writing books devoted to the subject, but for the moment it should be enough to feel that the influences making for variety in human life that show us an ascending scale beginning with the savage and 120 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching culminating in the great Masters of science, literature, and art, are not likely to stop abruptly even at those levels. Its higher progress may stretch beyond commonplace vision, as the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum are beyond such vision, but we can gain certain assurance that ultra-violet rays exist in Nature, and that those who may be described as Masters of Wisdom and Knowledge exist also. Thus clairvoyant research and information com- bined enable us to trace the origin and progress of Atlantean civilization through periods in the past to be counted not in thousands but in millions of years. And behind them again back into other millions during which the human form, as we know it, was gradually developed from lower forms. Indeed, if we go far enough back we shall find life, which from some points of view we may call already human, functioning in vehicles of consciousness not yet entirely physical. But leaving that part of the story out of account, the information already accumulated concerning the Atlantean races shows conventional speculation re- lating to anthropology and ethnology to be mere groping in the dark. Clairvoyant observation gives us a clear-daylight comprehension of the actual facts. Commonplace thinking on these subjects is entangled with phrases that are utterly misleading the stone, bronze, and iron ages; the neolithic and the paleolithic periods. Flint implements, of course, have their story to tell. They show that regions of the world where they are found, at dates vaguely suggested by geology, were inhabited by men of a very primitive type . Very likely . At early Atlantean perio ds before civilization had developed, migrations of early sub- races of Atlanteans spread all over the world. They slowly outgrew early conditions without sharing the stimulating influences operative in the evolutionary vortex from which they had been thrown off. Con- Imprisoned in the Five Senses 121 currently with a stone age in some fragments of land emerging from the sea in the region we now call Europe, an age of advanced science, of stupendous engineering achievements, of intricate sociology was in full activity in the West. As the geography of the world was shaped anew in some Eastern countries immense progress was accomplished there. In Human Origins Mr. Laing is impressive concerning the certainty that high civilization prevailed in Egypt long before Menes or the 7000-odd years of Egyptian history. Certainly it prevailed for hundreds of thousands of years before then, the direct gift of Atlantean civiliza- tion previous to its decline. Perhaps, however, the most deeply interesting aspect of the whole Atlantean story has to do with the moral changes that have gone on in the world since that strange period in which the decline becomes manifest. In their intellectual perfection the Atlanteans in some ways were farther on than ourselves. They con- trolled some forces of nature we have not yet got command of, and they were past-masters in the arts of metallic transmutation, which, as a theoretical possibility, our chemists have only just discerned. But they had not even got a glimpse of the moral beauty of unselfishness, care for the welfare of others, love, in any of its loftier aspects. Altruism, philanthropy, would have been ideas for which their language furnished no equivalent expression. Thus we gain a comprehension of human progress on the large scale as a series of spiral cycles, in the course of which we return to previous conditions, but on a higher level. Modern civilization is now return- ing to a stage in intellectual progress reached by the Atlanteans at remote periods in the past, but with certain very important embellishments. Aviation and transmutation, now beginning to engage our atten- tion, were, as already said, Atlantean achievements; 122 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching but we resume acquaintance with them, plus moral progress, in which Atlantis was sadly deficient. The limitations of sense, besides obscuring the past, veil the prospects of the future. Once they are broken through, the Divine plan of human evolution stretches out before us on a scale of startling magnificence. Clairvoyance of the higher order introduces us, as already explained, to those advanced leaders of our race described above as Masters of Wisdom and Knowledge. We are enabled to recognize them as linking ordinary humanity with the Divine Hierarchy. This extends upwards to infinity, but we touch a sublime truth in realizing that on what may be called (though only by comparison) its lower levels, it is recruited from ordinary humanity. The prettiest among conventional conceptions of the after-life show us no more than happy conditions of super- physical existence, dignified no doubt by the actual recognition of Divinity. But such beatitude seems, regarded by ordinary religious teaching, as a finality. Clearer vision shows the spiritual future as infinitely progressive, and the sublime conditions attained by Masters of Wisdom merely a stage of progress : a stage which the majority of the human race ought to attain in the long run, though the length of that run is all but beyond the reach of imagination. As some have attained it already, many more may do so in the future, greatly in advance of its attainment by the majority. The conditions of such relatively rapid progress are the principal subjects of study for pupils of the higher occultism. Incidentally in connection with that study light is let in on many regions of scientific research besides those to which allusion has already been made. Emerging from the entirely primitive or childish view of the Sun and Moon and starry heavens as designed merely to light up the earth, commonplace Imprisoned in the Five Senses 123 modern speculation assigns inhabitants to some, at all events, of the planets. And the stars are known to Astronomy as Suns, probably with families of planets in each case. That knowledge can be reached by simple intelligence working with the results of observation carried on within the limits of normal sense-perception. The methods of observation avail- able for the advanced leaders of our race put them in touch with a new kind of astronomy that may be called " Vital," as distinguished from the mechanical astronomy which deals only with magnitude and motion. Mechanical astronomy is as different from the Vital as a mere geography book, just defining the boundaries of the various countries, would differ from exhaustive accounts of the people inhabiting each, their manners, customs, arts and sciences, their political organizations and their sociology. Physical observation has shown that Mars must be inhabited by intelligent and competent beings, their huge artificial works proving this in spite of tenacious incredulity clinging in the case of a few astronomers to the idea that the Lowell's Canals are the offspring of chance. Vital Astronomy enables us to understand that the inhabitants of Mars are linked in evolution with ourselves, the inhabitants of this Earth, but at an earlier stage of progress. The various planets of the Solar System are not discon- nected from one another in their design and destinies, as they seem disconnected in space. On higher planes of manifestation regions of which the im- prisoning senses give us no hint the immortal units of humanity, the conscious Egos, migrate at stupendous intervals of time from some globes to some others. The plan in detail is much more elaborate than this rough sketch would suggest, but it has the intellectual charm of showing the whole system to be one coherent organism. The planet Mercury is also 124 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching blended as regards its vital purpose with the human life of the Earth, while already the human life of the planet Venus has attained to far loftier conditions than we here have reached as yet is, in fact, a senior evolution as compared with our own, and one in which humanity is set entirely free from the limita- tions of the physical senses. If anyone mentally still imprisoned in these objects to this statement on the ground that proximity to the Sun must make Venus and Mercury very hot, the answer is that while Nature has adapted flesh and blood to suit (with more or less success) the climatic conditions of the Earth, it is quite equal to the task of providing vehicles of consciousness for climates above our boiling-point, that can breathe comfortably in an atmosphere at the temperature of super-heated steam. Chemistry has still some discoveries to make, and the composition of liquids that provide Mercury, for instance, with lakes and rivers defying evaporation at, say, 300 F. would be very interesting if it could be ascertained. But less so after all than the contemplation, possible for our prison-breakers, of the delightful conditions of harmony and peace which are the keynotes of existence on Mercury, and in a greater degree still on Venus. The hints I have given so far of the way in which senses avenues of consciousness superior to those we are most of us used to, enlarge our comprehension of Nature, will naturally suggest the inquiry how they affect our comprehension of the conditions each of us encounters when we pass through the change called death. The answer is simple. They make the change perfectly intelligible; they render the region of existence into which we shall pass after undergoing the change a pays de connaissance. That is the fore- most discovery with which they are concerned. Current discussion as to whether we really do live Imprisoned in the Five Senses 125 again a possibility rendered doubtful for many people because religious teachers seem to know so little about it is sadly ludicrous in view of the certain knowledge on the subject lying ready for us only just outside our prison doors. People, indeed, still within them are already inexcusable if they doubt the main principle, for abundant information has been smuggled through to them, and telephones so to speak have been set up within the prison walls which enable us to talk with people outside. But one must get outside fully to understand what lies beyond. Dartmoor is big, but England is bigger, and beyond England lie other countries of stupendous magnitude. The physical plane is an extensive region, but regions within the cognizance of superior senses are more extensive in more than a corresponding fashion. Our astral world into which we pass when escaping from the prison of the senses is an envelope surrounding the physical globe, but enormous in comparison. To the appropriate senses it is as solid and variegated as this. And there are numberless variations of condition for dwellers in the vast astral globe. The Earth-life has been used by some in a manner productive as its consequence of great happiness and wide views of Nature by others unhappily in ways that entail consequences of a very different order, with which people who lead commonly decent lives need not trouble their imagination; unless, indeed, without any self-regarding apprehension, they want to under- stand the sublime harmonies of a Divine design which would be violated disastrously if the ulterior results of good and bad lives were uniformly the same. Thus the astral world provides purgatorial conditions of highly varying intensity, through which those who have badly misused the opportunities of physical life must pass before attaining happier con- ditions, while, for a very large number of people who 126 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching have led fairly creditable lives, the happy conditions are reached at once. The study of the way in which these vary in turn meeting the needs of the simply innocent immigrants as appropriately as they provide for highly evolved entities the foremost repre- sentatives of earthly wisdom and achievement is a profoundly interesting but a very elaborate study, to subserve which, however, abundant literature is now in existence. This, moreover, will enable anyone who wishes to push the inquiry farther to gather some information as to the way in which the five senses may be rein- forced by the development of new ones. In an imperfectly developed condition there are two organs in the human brain which, when fully matured, will respond to the higher vibrations of certain media in which we are unconsciously immersed, and convey impressions to the brain as vivid as those conveyed by the eye when dealing with objects normally visible. These organs are the Pineal Gland and the Pituitary body. In some few cases they are already active; in some others they might be cultivated into activity ; in the vast majority of cases they are hopelessly incapable of such development during the current life of the Ego concerned. Their development in the next physical life depends on the extent to which, in the current life, the person in question devotes thought, study, and effort to super-physical aspira- tion, for the laws governing the growth of form recognize thought and effort as potent forces con- tributing to the result. Indeed, if we cling to the prison metaphor the situation is abnormal in more ways than one, for the authorities are by no means anxious to keep their prisoners within their respective cells. They must in obedience to still higher authority refrain from actually helping prisoners to escape, but they do not Imprisoned in the Five Senses 127 interfere with those trying to do so . Prison-breaking, far from being an offence, is their right is regarded as altogether meritorious. Once clear of the walls the fugitive is never pursued or brought back. Authority wishes him well, and cheers his farther progress. He must, however, break out by daring and force, not by cunning. There is a door leading out of the prison into the free world beyond that is always unfastened. Any prisoner can push it open and go out that way if he chooses, but all are put upon their honour not to attempt an escape that way. And if they break faith and do so, they are terribly disappointed, for the door leads out of the prison, it is true, but to regions in which the conditions are still more distressing than those of the prison itself, and there is no short cut leading out of them in turn. To plod through the forbidden country may take a longer time than would have been spent in the prison waiting for the order of release, due in any case sooner or later. Nor must it be imagined that the period spent in prison is wasted time. Physical life is, indeed, subject to limitations trying to the patience of those who know something about the infinite realities that lie beyond, but the law of all progress defines the physical plane as the region of Beginnings. No one word precisely fits the idea; nor does it apply to the be- ginnings of Form. Divine Ideation, Creative Thought, takes its rise on much higher planes, but culminates on the Physical. There, individualized consciousness, human Egos working in forms completed from one point of view, though very far from perfection as con- templated from another can start on an upward journey. From that time on, their progress depends on themselves. They are launched on the upward arc of evolution and all the limitations accumulated during the downward arc fall away, or rather are 128 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching shaken off as the onward progress is accomplished. The work of shaking them off is difficult in the be- ginning. Most people are imperfectly aware of the disabilities under which they labour. The senses have given them a rich and apparently ever-growing store of knowledge and power. They are the foremost of them proud and content within their Palace. The multitude have not yet even risen to the appreciation of its opulent resources. None the less, the Beginning, for every single Ego of the count- less millions, must be made from the physical point of departure. And on the physical plane the prison of , my favourite metaphor the countless millions will accumulate and remain until they make it. In that fact lies the clue to the course that has been pursued in recent years by agents of the Divine Hierarchy who have guided the current out- burst of information relating to the higher destinies available for mankind, information which constitutes a feature of. ever-increasing importance in modern civilization. The steps taken were impossible at a former time. Bigotry dominated the mental atmos- phere. Ignorant power stamped upon all manifesta- tions of independent thought. It was only when freedom had " broadened slowly down from precedent to precedent " that a place was found among men for messengers from a loftier world. Now the message has been poured forth through many channels. In varying forms of expression it is the same in all cases. Look beyond the perishable interests of transient life in the physical body. Comprehend the scheme of infinite magnificence to which you belong. Get the clear view now attainable of the whole Divine programme. Make the beginning that every human creature must make soon or late, and the results are bound to transcend even the most glowing anticipa- tion. OUR VISITS TO THIS WORLD The materialist who regards human life as beginning in the cradle and ending in the grave is at all events consistent, though he insults Divine intelligence. But people who shrink from believing in final ex- tinction, and nevertheless regard each new life as a fresh beginning insult human understanding. They ask us, in other words, to accept the idea of a stick with only one end. We can think of a stick with no ends at all, or anyhow can talk of it as we talk of Eternity, but to be on speaking terms with Infinitude we must avoid the acquaintance of futurities that have no past. Some phenomena a bonfire, for in- stance may begin and cease to be, but human immortality is an idea that claims in the forward direction to share the attributes of Duration, and cannot do without them in the other. The word " life " needs to be handled with care. If people go on living after their bodies are buried or burned, their presence on the physical plane is merely an episode in their lives. If these continue they must, under other conditions, have been going on before on other planes. Seventy or eighty years of activity in the physical body constitute part of a life. Its con- tinuance has ceased to be a matter of guesswork for the millions concerned with the simple variety of occult research described as Spiritualism, and the current interest in that research is rapidly rendering the current contempt for it in most newspapers an illustration of their patient efforts to represent the greatest stupidity of the greatest number. A deeper 129 9 130 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching research than that content with merely proving that people are still alive after they are " dead " intro- duces us to the logical conclusion that they were alive before they were born, and thus, by stages, to the inevitable conclusion that consciousness functioning sometimes on one plane of Nature, some- times on another, is never " to one engine bound," but always cycles round and round. In hard scientific language this conclusion brings us up against the doctrine of Reincarnation, which, sharing the fate of many others, is made to seem an offence to lofty aspiration by getting itself profoundly misunder- stood. At first, introduced to the Western world in the earliest theosophical writings, it captured a great array of supporters because, for the first time, it enabled them to .contemplate the inequalities of human condition without feeling that they were incompatible with belief in Divine justice. One could fall back on the theory that Divine ways were inscrutable, but it was comforting to grasp a new idea that prevented them from seeming, on the face of things, ways we should personally be ashamed of. Objections were forthcoming none the less. Spiritual- ists said our friends on the other side do not know anything about the new idea. Others declared that they did not like this world, and did not want to come back to it, confident that Nature would not be so rude as to disregard their wishes. To others, again, the notion of beginning life afresh at the perambu- lator stage was intolerable; and affectionate parents, mourning a loved daughter, were horrified to think that on passing on themselves they might be greeted with the news that she had been reincarnated in Timbuctoo. From another point of view the dis- believer declared that he did not remember having had a previous life, therefore it was obvious that Our Visits to this World 131 neither he nor anyone else ever had one. Objections of these varied kinds are very amusing to all who under- stand more or less completely the conditions of human progress through the ages. The friends of the Spiritualist on " the other side " are enjoying the freshness of a renewed life, the reunion with others they may have cared for, the vivid reality of that next world they have reached; they are no more concerned with further changes that may lie in the remote future than boys at a school, full of enthusiasm for cricket, ponder on problems that perplex the invalid of sixty or seventy. Nor if they did develop a premature interest in the remote future could they readily get information. If they have it in them to advance to higher levels of the Astral world, beyond that they touch on first going over, they will ulti- mately acquire knowledge; but even that is not certain unless they have been tinged during physical life with some aspiration towards higher knowledge. A fundamental and deeply important fact con- nected with higher spiritual progress is hinted at by what has just been said. The physical plane of life is pre-eminently associated with all beginnings. Its importance in this respect cannot be overrated. This condition underlies the principle of Reincarnation, is the root of its necessity. Spiritualism and other forms of belief concerning the future life include a vague expectation that infinite spiritual progress is possible after death down here. So it is, but the permanent Ego is not spoon-fed with higher know- ledge unless he has engendered a desire for it in his working period On the physical plane. If he has not done this Nature gives him such blissful rest on higher levels of consciousness as he may be entitled to by the use he has made of his physical opportunities, and then another set of opportunities in the shape of renewed physical life. Of course, there are other 132 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching purposes to be served by that renewed life to be discussed later on, but for the moment, in reference to the first steps in our comprehension of loftier destinies, Reincarnation may be thought of as the system or method adopted by Nature for teaching the law of Reincarnation. At earlier stages of human progress the young Ego has not begun to concern itself with the study of natural law is merely gathering, life after life, preliminary experience of pleasure and pain, of right and wrong, of emotion and desire and their consequences. Does the use of the word " young " in this sense seem to involve the fallacy of assigning a beginning to that which has no end ? There is no real inconsistency in the language used. The essence of the young Ego has emerged from infinite Divine life, but at one period has crystallized as a centre of consciousness within the Divine life, and in conformity with laws coming to be understood develops expanded capacity by degrees. Gradually and slowly this result is accomplished. X ling Age of Man as yet is being made and ere the crowning Ageof ages, Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ? But his consciousness may be traced back through animal and vegetable forms, through solar systems and nebulae to past infinitudes of manifestation. Perhaps a simpler answer than has been given above might more easily meet the objection of spiritualists who say that their spirit friends do not know anything of Reincarnation. Some of them do ! But the fact that some of them deny it is quite intelligible when we comprehend their limitations, and unimportant. For most of us belief in the rotundity of the Earth is not shaken by the denial of a few who still believe it to be flat. When disbelief in the law of Reincarnation arises from dislike for the idea, one may first of all suggest Our Visits to this World 133 that people who deeply dislike the law which brings trouble on those who pick other people's pockets do not by such dislike divert its course. But in truth, people only dislike the idea for want of understanding it. They do not realize, for one thing, that the force which gives rise to Reincarnation in each individual case is a desire on the part of the Ego to reincarnate. If no such desire were generated, on the plane x}f the Ego, after the personal life of the entity in question has been fully enjoyed or worked out in the Astral world, and then has merged itself in the Ego on a higher plane, Reincarnation would not take place ; but the hypothesis for the occultist is unthinkable. The desire for fresh experience is as inevitably en- gendered in the Ego when all so far gathered has been absorbed, as the desire for fresh food is engendered during physical life in the body, when previous supplies have been finally disposed of. This state of things invests the familiar protest against having to come back to this vale of tears with a very ludicrous aspect. Even after eating too much and being for the moment disinclined for more food, people in general know that at some future time they will be hungry again; but, if while suffering from repletion they declared that for ever and ever they would detest food, the declaration would be unconvincing. The advanced Ego knows that he must come back to life on Earth in order eventually to get on. Certainly, by some, a god-like stage is reached when an Ego may have risen above the laws affecting ordinary humanity, but long before then his lives in connection with the Earth will have included complete comprehension of all such laws. People who criticize them on the basis of profound ignorance of the way they work have certainly not attained the condition which might enable them to be a law unto themselves. Of all the misconceptions prompting disbelief in 134 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching Reincarnation, the most ridiculous is that which makes some critics shrink with horror from the idea of beginning life again in the cradle. They somehow imagine themselves with their present elaborate con- sciousness subject to its miserable limitations. The law does not give rise to any such ghastly absurdity, but to get rid entirely of the painful delusion in question we have to go into a closer study of the way the process of rebirth is effected than was usually possible for those who accepted the main idea at the first blush, as accounting for the inequalities of life. The method Nature pursues in providing an Ego with a fresh incarnation shows the absurdity of what may be called the perambulator objection. When long after the close of the Earth period of the previous life the time has come for the Ego to plunge again into the experiences of the physical plane, the preparations for this are very gradual. And they vary within a very wide range of possibility according to the stage of growth the Ego has reached. But in any case the child in its baby stage is not an embodiment of the Ego, or of the last personality in which it manifested, any more than the sloppy clay foundations of a new house are already inhabited by the person who is destined to live in it when it is fully built and furnished. The amplification of this all-important view of the matter may be postponed for the moment, for the broad fact disposes of the delusion people suffer from if they think of themselves as enduring the limitations of childhood when coming back to Earth- life. Before dealing fully with the gradual way in which a new child's body is rendered fit for occupation by the appointed tenant, attention may as well be paid to a difficulty of a more dignified order than any already noticed. Does the law of Reincarnation conflict with the supremely important aspect of the Our Visits to this World 135 next world, in which we think of it as reuniting under happy conditions the loving friends, wives and daughters, sons and fathers, torn asunder by death so cruelly torn asunder as it often seems to limited vision. Reincarnation no more interferes with the reunion on higher planes of those who have loved one another on this one than our next summer's holiday will be interfered with by the precession of the equinoxes. That astronomical process will affect climate in future, but it need not worry us for the moment. Nor, indeed, as regards the law of Rein- carnation need the most far-sighted view of the future embarrass the conditions on the Astral plane of those whp have loved one another on Earth. On the contrary it expands to infinitude the value of that relationship . Other natural conditions operate at first in/the Astral life, and no /matter what in- tervals ofr'our time elapse between the passing over of the persons concerned, experience of Astral life shows Jmat the old look of an old-age body reflecting itself ^or a brief period in the Astral form rapidly disappears. As a broad rule people all grow /young again in appearance, after passing over in old age, or revert to whatever they -may think of as the prime of life, the aspect best worthy of perpetuation. The few years that for a time separate the person who dies first from the beloved other who lingers long in physical life, fade into insignificance/ in the long companionship of the Astral life.X TJlen eventually (after certain developments on higher levels), those who really care for one another reincarnate more or less simultaneously, and come into renewed relation- ships or intimacies on the Earth plane. To quarrel with the law of Reincarnation, because it separates people who can only be happy together, is a blunder for which it is difficult to imagine a parallel. One might as well complain of the Sun for not shining, or 136 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching of the Earth for not turning round. Reincarnation is a force that does not disperse people, but gathers them together. It does this not merely as regards loving couples : it unites great groups of people in sympathetic friendship. Whenever exceptional opportunities have enabled occult students to gain knowledge concerning the former lives of themselves and their friends or belongings, current intimacies are always found to be the fruit of similar relationships in former times. Where some man and woman are found united in this life by the beautiful bond of a real mutual love, they are invariably found^nave been man and wife in repeated lives forjj^jlfsands of years. And community of interest jjr^votio1r~

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