of magic that they practise, and the teachers of this school instruct
their followers how to bring events to pass, how to demonstrate in
the material world the material desires of their hearts. They can do
it, the strong ones can, if their desires are not against the great
stream of desire that carries the race forward. But often these
material desires are not in strict accord with the karma of the person
desiring; that is, the balance of karma being worked out now may be
so violently drawn upon in one direction, that for the following life
there will be left only a lot of unhappy karma, weak karma, which has
not been wisely distributed over that time in which they have been
operating with this new plaything, this magic power which they are
using to make their present lives one glad sweet song.
The way to get what you want is to will what the great Law decides.
That is what the Masters do. And I am not denying the greatness of my
Brother whom I mentioned a few pages back. He wills the will of the
great Law, the same as all of us do; and if his tenderness for his
native land has inspired him to devise a plan which seems in harmony
with the great Law, he would not put the plan into effect if he could,
should he realize that it was not in accordance with that law.
There is always danger for the man who is not a Master in pitting his
judgment against the law of karma. If a poor man wants to be rich, and
if he wills hard enough, he can become rich; but he may miss by the way
other things that his soul needs far more than it needs riches.
One of the greatest dangers that face America in the future is the
danger of black magic. Among a hundred men or women who take up New
Thought, Christian Science, ceremonial magic, and certain philosophies
with even loftier verbal aims, there may be _one_ whose desire is
perfectly pure and unselfish.
There is great power in America. The untrodden hills and mountains
are full of fresh new forces that man may draw upon. Also the astral
world above America--that layer of the astral which lies immediately
outside the physical continent, as the aura of man extends beyond his
body--that layer of the astral world above America is full of forces,
elemental and astral forces, which can be used consciously by those who
know how to use them, and which are used unconsciously by those whose
personal desires are so strong that the more or less impersonal forces
are obliged to follow them--swung into line by the power of desire or
will.
Great danger lies that way for those who use such forces for evil, and
between selfish desire and evil the veil is very thin.
There are seeking incarnation in this new race many of those whose
magical work along dark lines was interrupted in the old days of
Atlantis. Yes, that story of Atlantis is true. Many of these souls are
now coming in, some here and some in other countries; but their main
course is in the direction of the New World. More and more the forces
of magic will be used in the New World. It is for you and for others
who know that magic used for selfish purposes is always black magic, to
warn those who are too much fascinated by the idea that they can be the
makers of their own fortunes at the expense of others.
This warning is much needed. And I want to say to those whose only
desire for occult knowledge is that they may use it for their own
selfish ends, that if they stand in the way of the Law that works for
unselfishness in the new race, _they will be destroyed again_ as
they were destroyed in ancient Atlantis. And I do not mean that their
souls will be destroyed, but that their lives will be cut short and
their influence for evil nullified.
Do not be shocked when I tell you that there have been working in
Europe during and before the present war “artificial elementals” that
were created in the time of Atlantis. Those beings, for they have a
force and a pseudo-individuality, have been used in this war by those
(now reincarnated) who created them ages ago. They have drifted to
their creators by the power of attraction.
One such creature was destroyed last July, and I assisted in its
destruction.
At the time of the birth of a new race, will has great dynamics. Use
your will _with_ the Law, not against it.
Do you realize, you who put your desires above all things, that each of
you is but a drop in the stream of souls? The drop that would isolate
itself from the stream may be sucked up by the sun in the form of vapor
and wait a long time before entering the stream again.
Now do not take any of this as applying to my Brother who wants to
soften the blow for his native land. I want to soften the future of my
native land, and that is why I am writing about the new race that is
going to be born in America. But if I should learn, through counsel
with my Brothers or through individual inspiration, that it was best
that the new race should be born elsewhere, I would work with the same
devotion to bring it into being in that other place. And so would my
Brother. We who work with the Law put the welfare of the human race
above our own individual loves. All races are one race--the human
race--and we work together as one.
_April 10._
LETTER XIX
THE ROSE-VEILED STRANGER
ONE day the angel whom we call the Beautiful Being came to me leading
another angel by the hand. Long association with this extraordinary
being has taught me never to be surprised by anything it does. I accept
its vagaries as expressions of a state of consciousness above and
beyond my own, and much that I have learned during the last three years
I owe to its whimsical but tender friendship for me.
As I explained in my former writing, the Beautiful Being--whom we call
an angel for want of a better term--has never shared the physical life
of earth. It is a being of another evolution than the human, and for
that reason its views of human life are uniquely valuable.
It smiled as it came to me, leading by the hand another similar to
itself but far less like mankind.
Introductions in the celestial regions are often very unconventional;
but the Beautiful Being, who has observed the life of men, sometimes
amuses me by delicious mimicry of the ways of mortals.
“Rose-veiled one,” it now said to its angelic companion, “permit me
to present to you my friend ‘X’, a Judge recently arrived from the
planet Earth, who will consent I am sure to act as your cicerone over a
section of territory where history is in the making. Ask him anything
you will and he will answer you--if he can. He is still unlearned in
the language of your distant star; but he can converse in thoughts with
you whose coarsest vesture is a body of thought.”
I expressed my pleasure at meeting the stranger, and asked if I should
show it a battlefield.
“I do not understand the idea--battlefield,” it answered; “but I should
like to see it.”
“You will understand far less when you have seen it,” smiled the
Beautiful Being.
It chanced that day that the opposing forces in France and Belgium were
unusually active in the beginning of the Spring campaign, and I led my
two friends to a point where they could watch the combat.
“What are those beings down there sending back and forth?” asked the
rose-veiled stranger.
“Those objects are known as shells,” I replied.
“Shells?” the stranger returned in bewilderment.
The Beautiful Being answered for me.
“Shells are elaborately convoluted houses in which our brothers of the
great deep live and disport themselves.”
The look of bewilderment increased on the face of the stranger.
“My friend forgets,” I said, “that you know not the language of earth,
where a word, an arbitrary symbol for an idea, may stand for two ideas
very dissimilar.”
“What are those objects that the beings down there are sending back and
forth?” the stranger repeated.
I have to translate its form of speech into ordinary English to make it
intelligible. Literally, its communication would stand like this: “?
Objects beings sending reciprocally?”
From my long association with angels, both those with astral bodies
and those without, such a form of speech is intelligible to me; and
I answered, translating my cumbrous native idiom into the simpler
language of ideas:
“The objects that are hurled back and forth between those beings on the
plain below us are explosive shells, with a marvelous power to shatter
the forms of other objects and to scatter them in all directions.”
“Is it a form of play?” asked the rose-veiled stranger.
“It is not,” I answered. “It is war.”
“War?”
All the horror that in my mind is associated with the word war was
conveyed by my thought to the mind of the angelic visitor, and its rosy
veil grew pale with pain.
“What is this strange emotion that I feel?” it asked. “Truly, were it
not for your presence here, my friends, I should desire to go away.”
“The emotion that you feel,” I said, “is a sympathetic reflection of
the emotions of war.”
“And what is war?”
“A horrible passion felt mutually and indulged by two opposing
aggregates of souls, by which they are enabled to overcome their
natural pity and to destroy each other’s bodies in vast numbers.”
The veil of the stranger grew almost white.
“And does God permit this horror?” it asked.
“He permits it on the planet Earth.”
Now the word God is not an adequate translation of the idea
expressed in the angel’s question, but let it stand. The real idea
is untranslatable by any one word in any language of earth. It was a
composite of Love and Time and Purpose, raised to the highest power, an
idea for which I can find no other word than God.
“Earth is a strange star!” the angel said.
“The inhabitants of this world have a common saying to that effect,”
I answered. “It is a fragment of race wisdom, handed down from their
remote ancestors, who, when they first tried to adjust their celestial
consciousness to the baffling conditions of this star on which they had
been placed for their education, observed to one another, ‘This is a
strange world.’”
“And are they obliged to perpetrate this horror before us by the
conditions of this planet?”
“No.”
“Then why do they do it?”
“From force of habit.”
“Then was it ever necessary?”
“In far away times,” I said, “men were more isolated than at present,
there were fewer of them in incarnation, and a brilliant archangel
who had their training in charge taught them to develop courage and
resource, and to accentuate their egos, by struggling with each other,
two by two.”
“But there are millions of beings down there!” the angel exclaimed.
“And I see bodies fall by thousands!”
“That is what they call a great victory,” I said, “and one of their
commanders gives to those who have slaughtered a vast number a little
iron cross.”
“An iron cross? Why iron?”
“Iron is the metal of Mars,” I said, “Mars, their war-god.”
“And why a cross?”
“It is the symbol of their Christ.”
“The one who died down here to make men love one another?”
“The same,” I admitted.
“Truly, I agree with the remote ancestors of these people, from whom
they have inherited the saying, ‘This is a strange world.’”
“Would you like to approach nearer?” I asked.
The stranger hesitated, then said, with a patient smile:
“My friend,” glancing at the Beautiful Being, “wishes me to learn
something of this star. I will approach nearer.”
We descended to perhaps a hundred feet above the lane which separated
the enemies.
“Look!” exclaimed the stranger. “The souls are leaving their bodies! Is
that the purpose of this business, to free souls from bondage?”
“Not directly,” I answered. “Each would like to hold the other in
bondage; but being unable to do that to any great extent, they take the
opposite way.”
The stranger looked more confused.
“My friend,” explained the Beautiful Being to me, “came from a region
where the Law of Opposites does not apply.”
“You have never taken me there in our wanderings!” I exclaimed.
“No, you are so attached to the Law of Opposites.”
This was an old jest between me and the Beautiful Being.
“Look!” the stranger interrupted me. “There is a soul coming toward us
now.”
I went forward to greet the newcomer. He was a German officer.
“Welcome,” I said, but he seemed not to understand me. The face of his
astral body was contorted, as if he had died in pain.
Now the Beautiful Being seems to know all the languages of earth;
and though the purity of its nature is such that few on earth can
understand it, yet when a soul leaves its body it can understand the
speech of the Beautiful Being if there is anything in its nature that
responds to the higher vibration which makes the life of that angel so
intense and wonderful.
“Welcome,” said the Beautiful Being to the soul, in the accents of his
native land.
“Where am I?” asked the bewildered soul.
“You are in the region above the world,” the Beautiful Being answered.
“You mean----”
“I mean that your name will be in the list of the dead.”
“Then it has come!”
“Yes.”
“But I always feared death.”
“You see it is nothing to fear.”
“Where is the Kaiser?”
“At his headquarters.”
“Can I not report to him?”
“If you wish.”
We moved farther east--slowly, for the newly freed soul had not yet
learned that distance is nothing.
We found the War-Lord seated beside a table looking at a map. His face
was drawn and haggard.
“There,” I said to the stranger, “is the man who is believed, by the
whole world outside his own country, to have caused this vast war.”
The stranger (and also the soul) approached and read the thoughts in
the brain of the War-Lord. I give them as they were, disconnected,
tragic in their import:
“The slaughter of our forces! God punish England! I am the Lord’s
chosen! I cannot make a mistake! My generals have blundered. I will
degrade--(the name of our newly-arrived charge). This defeat is his
fault. I ordered him to take those trenches. He has lost our own
instead. I cannot make a mistake! I am the Lord’s chosen!”
The Beautiful Being turned to the soul who had been a General.
“Do you wish to report yourself to the Kaiser?”
The eyes he turned to us were sad.
“I will not trouble the Kaiser,” he said.
A silence had fallen between us. After a little, the Beautiful Being
turned to the General again, and its face was soft with pity.
“Can I not do something for you?” it asked.
“Will you take me to my mother, who died of grief for my only brother’s
death, in the early days of the war? I am very tired. I want to see my
old mother.”
The eyes of the rose-veiled stranger were luminous with wonder.
“Why, there is even love in this strange star!” it said.
_April 11._
LETTER XX
ABOVE THE BATTLEFIELDS
PICTURE to yourself a battlefield, a long-stretching irregular double
line of men and guns and horses and all the paraphernalia of war.
In the old days on earth I once gave some study to the theory and
practice of war, but that labor had little value in preparing me to
study this war. Not only did it take for granted conditions that no
longer exist, but my point of observation then was an imaginary station
on one side or the other of an imaginary field; now I am really here,
there and everywhere. I read the thoughts of the commanders on both
sides, I am with the men in the trenches sometimes half-buried in
mud and water, I am riding with the cavalry, I go forward with the
guns of the artillery, I go out and up with the escaping spirits of
the dead--go with them into the hell of confusion that almost always
swallows them for a time after they are violently thrust from their
bodies.
Truly, “War is hell!” Have no glorious delusions to the contrary, you
who dwell in the haunts of peace and babble of what you know not.
The horrors do not end when the guns cease firing. The dark and silent
night of rain is full of souls in bewilderment and torment. Often one
will grope his way hither and thither, seeking to find a trench-mate
to whom he had become attached in the _camaraderie_ of war--that
sweet flower which grows upon an ugly stem. Often they live over and
over again the rage and madness of the attack; they plunge an imaginary
bayonet into the form of an imaginary foe; or, if a mass of them are
together, and they generally are, they strike recklessly at anything
before them, conscious always of an _opposing_ force.
The General of whom I wrote in my last letter was a man of marked
spiritual development; he soon broke away from the entanglements of
matter; he was a devotee to whom his country was a god and his Emperor
a hero to be followed with aspiration. But most men who die on the
battlefields are common soldiers who fight because it is the will
of the mass behind them. They generally go out into darkness for a
time, and most of them wander in darkness and bewilderment for varying
periods.
Some, on the contrary, are vividly conscious almost from the hour of
death. These may attack the men of the opposing army while they sleep.
The dreams of the battlefields are terrible in their intensity.
Sometimes again, for in the general confusion distinctions may be
quite lost, souls that had believed themselves enemies cling together
in the tragic yearning of the dark that separates the worlds of the
“invisible.” In their great need they do not know their former friends
from their former enemies. Another pale flower that grows from the ugly
stem of war!
The astral forms of men of low development are often found here in
shocking distortion, their consciousness only a glimmer, and with
no power of feeling anything but pain. No wonder the dreams of the
unselfish lovers of humanity are full of horror during these dark
nights of the world, for there are many noncombatants in all lands
whose hours of sleep are given to a devoted labor for the souls that
need help so horribly. There is one man whom you know who bears at this
time a burden almost superhuman, and speaks of it to no one.
It is needless for me to say how you yourself spent the nights of many
months, and when we bade you cease that labor it was only that you
might have more strength for the labor of writing these pages at my
dictation. A soul still held in the flesh cannot work all day and all
night. That is burning the astral candle at both ends.
When you return to the countries now devastated by war, some of your
friends will relate to you experiences similar to your own during these
terrible months. They who can be used are called upon when the need is
greatest, and the need is immense at this time.
Realize that those souls in the lower regions of the astral world are
actually in space near the ground of the physical planet. Those who
hang over the battlefields where they met their fate are still thrilled
or horrified by the noise of the battle horns, they can still hear the
shriek of shells and feel the shattering force of the explosions. Day
in, day out these unfortunate earth-bound ones live over and over again
the emotions of war, night after night they dread the morning when the
sounds will begin again. They cannot get away. They are not free merely
because their bodies are buried under a few feet of earth, or worse
still left unburied.
I advise you to avoid for some years at least the actual scenes of
these battles. You can go to Switzerland or to the more southern
regions of France, but do not stay long in Northern France or Belgium,
or in any other place that may be thus affected.
The thought world of England is just now troubled, but the layer of
astral matter immediately above the earth is not full of the awful
emanations of death. Astral forms go there from the more terrible
region, but in order to go they must have themselves broken away from
the immediate scene of their worst suffering.
It is easier to protect oneself from sad thought-forms than from the
distracted astral entities and the “boiling” astral matter that lie
above those battlefields.
Why, even the field of Waterloo before this war was not a pleasant
place to spend the night. After a lapse of time you may briefly visit
the scenes of these recent battles, for the sake of the practical
experience; but do not go there just yet. The best place in Europe for
a long period will be the mountains of Switzerland. You should spend
much time there.
Do you remember telling me how, when a child, you used to see the forms
of American Indians on the hills and in the valleys of your native
State? They were those who many years before had walked those hills and
valleys in the sunlight, and who were still held in the tenuous matter
above that region. The eyes of childhood are sometimes very clear.
Above those battlefields of Europe the sensitive eye may see for many
years the forms of those who will not be able to make their escape. And
I do not mean akashic records. War is hell, and the hell does not end
with the signing of peace papers.
That is one reason why we want you, and those others who believe in
brotherhood, to carry that spirit of brotherhood among the nations
that have been at war. You have no conception of the power of a quiet
faith in a great and true idea. The man who really loves his fellows
has a wider influence than his own immediate circle of friends. The
atmosphere around him is permeated with that brotherly love, and
sensitive souls can feel it.
Some day sail up the Rhine with that sentiment in your heart.
_April 12._
LETTER XXI
A SOUL IN PURGATORY
DARE I talk to you of the purgatory to which the rage of battle
conducts so many souls that only a little while before walked the earth
as men, and went their daily round from house to office, loving their
wives and children and exchanging worldly commonplaces in the intervals
of work, all unmindful that they were hourly drifting toward the Great
Event? Yes, I dare.
We will follow one soul that I myself followed. His story I can
reconstruct from memory, for every act of it is stamped upon my mind.
No, I do not need brain-cells to remember with. Neither will you--when
you have escaped the prison of your brain-cells.
The man was an officer in an English regiment and he was a bachelor.
Outwardly he was much like other men, but his consciousness was
different. He lived in a world of his own, for he was a reader and a
thinker. He was not a very good man. Not _all_ Englishmen are
good even now when England is at war, you who bristle at any criticism
of your beloved maternal island--you who write for me!
This man was not very good because there was so little love in his
heart. He was not incapable of love, yet he was unable to awaken love
in others, and so was soul-starved. But sometimes he was conscious of a
great yearning, and when the yearning came he was impatient, and took
a drink, or cursed his servant, or both. Sometimes when he was most
impatient with the world and with himself, he went on a “spree.”
The war began.
His natural impatience found something congenial in the hurry and noise
of the expedition. He was glad to go.
He had known a German in London and had disliked him thoroughly. The
German talked too much, and his loud tones jarred on the sensitive
ears of the refined officer. As he led his men into battle he thought
of this German. He felt that he was battling with him at last face to
face, and the feeling gave him a thrill of satisfaction.
Hate had become an almost sensual luxury. The German had fascinated
by his blustering personality a woman of rather coarse type to whom
the officer had been impatiently attracted. He hated himself for the
attraction, and he hated the German for frustrating it. We always hate
those who frustrate the emotions we hate.
The officer was killed by a German bullet, in the early days of the
war. Where? Oh, no matter where! There are those who might recognize
the man, and I am not a betrayer of unwilling confidences. When I
listen at the keyhole of life I never report too much of what I hear. I
use my discretion.
I shall call this man my friend, for I was so much his friend that I
have a right to claim him.
Before the battle in which my friend met death I had lingered near him,
with a desire to soften the hard feelings in his heart. Those feelings
are not usual among the soldiers of a particular section of the
northern battle-line. To them fighting is a sort of glorified sport--or
it was so last September.
My friend was an exception, and that is why I choose to write about
him, that my assertion of his exceptional qualities may keep the reader
from shuddering too much. I should not like my readers to feel that
their friends went through a similar experience. You who hang above
this page, my friend was not your friend. The experiences of your
friends were less terrible. They were all better men than he, because
you loved them, and this man was not good because he was not loved
enough.
He met death by a rifle bullet. Then all became dark before him, and he
was unconscious for a time.
He was awakened by the noise of a bursting shell.