awakened me at dawn.”
He was among the men of his regiment. They seemed larger than usual,
and blurred in outline. He rubbed his eyes.
“Hell and damnation! Who have they put in my place?” For he saw a minor
officer who commanded where he had commanded.
He turned away, then came back again. He would demand to know! He
started toward the place where his superior officer should have been,
some distance away, and found himself _instantly_ there.
“What is the matter with me?” he thought. “Have I lost my mind?”
He saluted the officer, who paid no attention to him.
“Am I asleep?” he wondered.
He went up to a soldier who was loading a rifle and touched him on the
arm. The soldier also paid no attention. He gripped the man’s arm.
Still he paid no attention, but raised his rifle and fired.
My friend went toward two men who were talking together.
“Poor old ------!” he heard one of them say. “Shot through the heart!
He was a good officer, though a surly fellow. I’m sorry he’s dead.”
The ------ they spoke of was himself.
“Shot through the heart--a good officer--a surly fellow--dead!”
He knew. Knowledge sometimes comes more slowly. He was “dead.”
“Just my luck!” was his instinctive thought.
Another shell burst behind him with a shattering report.
Suddenly he saw before him a face that riveted his attention. It was
a malignant, an insolent face. Then it changed into the face of his
enemy, the German back in England whom he hated.
“So it’s you, is it?” he asked.
The spectre made no answer, but changed its shape again. This time it
was like the woman whom my friend had hated himself for liking.
“You, too!” he said, impatiently.
Again the spectre changed countenance. It was like a servant whom my
friend had cursed once too often, and who had left him the year before.
“Are you, too, dead?” he asked; but the face before him had now resumed
its original appearance. It was merely a malignant, insolent face,
resembling nobody in particular.
“What are you, anyway?” my friend demanded; but still there was no
answer.
The eye of the spectre interested him--the left eye. As he gazed at it,
the eye gradually enlarged until it seemed the size of a target in a
shooting-gallery. The iris, of a peculiar greenish-blue, was in the
very middle of the eye, so that the white showed all round. The black
pupil stared at him with its concentrated malice--a pupil large as a
saucer.
“Why do you do that?” demanded my friend; but the eye still made no
answer.
Then it vanished.
A troop of hateful shades came in its place, ugly shades, some human,
some subhuman. Another shell burst nearby, and the shades began to
dance. They caught at him and whirled him around with them, around and
around until he was dizzy. Then suddenly they stopped, and each and
all of them changed into the form of the German back in England whom
my friend had hated. Then another group of mad beings mingled with
them. They also changed suddenly--there were a dozen duplicates of the
woman whom my friend had hated himself for liking, and they and the
duplicates of his enemy caught one another’s hands and kissed each
other.
Sick, revolted, my friend wished himself away, and he was away. He was
over among the soldiers of the German army across the plain. He heard
the sounds of the language he disliked.
“What the devil!” he thought, and the devil stood before him, hoofs,
horns and tail complete.
“Hadn’t thought of me before, had you?” sneered the evil being.
My friend was hurt and bewildered by the appearance, for it looked,
with all its unlovely accessories, so like himself.
“Will you, too, change form in a moment?” he asked.
“Oh, no! I change slowly. I only change as you change.”
“What do you mean?”
“You only can change me.”
“Change, then!” said my friend. But the demon remained as before.
“Change!” repeated my friend; but still the figure before him changed
not at all.
“Then you lied when you said I could change you!”
“I said that I change slowly.”
“What do you mean?”
“I only change as you change.”
“And I have not changed, then?”
“It is my business to keep you from changing.”
In company with his devil my friend now went through scenes which I
refrain from describing, Goethe in the Walpurgis Night having done it
so well before me. Reckless, desperate, he followed his leader until he
was weary and exhausted. Days, weeks passed away, like a nightmare.
“Can I never get rid of you?” he asked his companion.
“Yes, you can get rid of me.”
“How?”
“By getting rid of yourself.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
“Yes, that’s easier said than done.”
Often they found themselves on the battlefield in the fighting line,
or at the mess of the soldiers. The smell of the coffee and of cooking
meats brought temporary satisfaction to my friend. He tried to drink
from brandy flasks tilted to the mouths of men who could not see him
or protest; he steeped himself in hungers and despairs. His companions
were always changing themselves into the forms of the man he hated and
the woman he loved. He witnessed their coarse love-making. Sometimes
the simulacrum of the woman turned to him with a friendly word. He
cursed her, but clung to her hand. But always she vanished when his
mouth yearned to hers.
Sometimes in a great battle the rage of war awoke in him. He hurled
himself at the men of the opposing army, as if he would take revenge
upon them for all he was suffering. He struggled to tear the rifles
from their hands, and when one of them passed out of the body he tried
to awake him from the darkness and the sleep into which he was sinking;
but never could he succeed in doing this. Never could he succeed
in doing anything. His very existence was failure and futility and
discouragement.
One day I came to him and touched him on the forehead.
“You are not like these others,” he said, dully. “Where do you come
from?”
“I came from a distance,” I said. “Would you like to go with me?”
“Anywhere away from here,” he assented.
“Do you want to be alone?”
“No. It is worst when I am alone.”
“The worst is over,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you have exhausted for the time the springs of your lower
desires. You are weary and disgusted with the life you have led since
you escaped from your body.”
“That is a strange expression--escaped! It is only now that I long to
escape.”
“And it is I who will help you to escape from another layer of your
prison, another skin of the onion that shuts you in.”
“And why do you do this?”
“To spare you unnecessary fumbling to break the skin,” I said. “Would
you like to go to sleep?”
“I should like to rest a little.”
While he slept I helped to loosen him further, and when he awoke into
another and a freer world I was still with him.
“What would you like to see?” I asked.
“Something beautiful,” he answered, “something beautiful and pure.”
“Would you care to witness a dance of elves?” I asked, smiling.
“A dance of elves? Are there really such things?”
“The universe contains innumerable forms of life and consciousness,” I
said. “And you who believe in devils from experience can surely believe
in elves.”
They came toward us as I spoke, lithe, tenuous forms, dancing with
joy across the flowery spaces of the Elysian Fields. They swayed and
circled around us, those beings pure as the air in which they moved,
light as the happiness they exhaled, enduring as hope and lovelier than
mortal dreams.
The shadows had all gone from my friend’s face, and he too seemed to
taste joy, he too was light as air, and pure. He joined their dance and
circled with them around me.
I tell you in a burst of confidence that I also have danced with elves.
This companion and friend of the Beautiful Being has swum in the sea
of universal life and floated on the wings of irresponsibility. He who
knows too much of the world’s sorrow must sometimes lighten the load by
knowing nothing but joy.
When the sylphs had gone to their more inviolable retreat, another
shape came toward us.
“What would you like to see now?” I asked him.
“Can I see a person who still lives in England?” he asked, half
shyly, yet with the winning confidence of souls who trust their own
desires--the higher wisdom which comes with the purification of desire.
“Perhaps,” I said.
The form that came toward us was unfamiliar to me, but my friend
recognized and welcomed it. A woman of intense and vital personality,
yet with that purity of atmosphere without which no communion is
possible in the region where we then were, was standing beside my
friend.
“Let us sit together a little,” I said. “It will seem more homelike.”
The two beside me seemed happy in each other’s presence.
“Sisterly-sweet hand in hand,” they sat together; and though I knew
that one of them was only the simulacrum of a living woman, yet she
also seemed real to me for the moment, for the kind sentiments of the
heart are real, and in the region to which I had conducted my friend
all sentiments are kind. No enemies are found there, and the woman he
liked also liked him, or she could not have been there.
Soon I left them in each other’s company and went back to the labors of
the battlefield; for there were others who needed me, and my friend was
safe for the time.
After a while I shall help him onward to an experience still less
restricted. We take an interest in those whom we have helped, and wish
to help them further.
Why did I choose this man for my friendly ministrations, you are
wondering; for as I described him in the beginning of this letter he
was not an attractive character.
I tell you a little secret: It was because he was unattractive that I
chose him. No one had ever loved him enough, and so he needed help more
than others. Those who are loved are already helped by that love. As
the Beautiful Being says, “Do you get my meaning, daughter of earth?”
Just now I live to serve mankind through the horrors of this war. Serve
also by loving those who least attract your love. So shall you learn
the way to the Path where walk the Masters of Compassion.
_April 14._
LETTER XXII
PEACE PROPAGANDA
WERE you shocked and grieved by what I told you of the futile struggle
in that intermediate world between the bondage of dense matter and the
freedom of purer regions? It is nothing to grieve about; it is nothing
but the necessary transition stage. It lasts but a little while, a few
days, a few years--what matter, in the endless leisure of eternity?
You yourself have passed through it many times. All pass through it in
going out to a freer life, though all do not suffer it consciously and
lingeringly as my friend did. It is a nightmare, yes; but no nightmare
lasts forever. Think of the joy and the freedom beyond! They are worth
the boatman’s penny.
It is true that I have not told you the most terrible things that are
possible in this transition, have not told you the most terrible things
that I have seen in my journeys round the battlefields. Those unwritten
chapters are not necessary for the book which I dictate to teach
brotherhood in place of separation, peace in place of war.
Would you know how you may do something to shorten this war, to hasten
the coming of peace? Then listen!
You can personally hasten the coming of peace! Is the idea startling?
When I say “you,” I mean others, too, all those who are weary of war,
and of hate, the mother of war.
Has anyone injured you in the struggle of life?--for life is a kind of
war.
Go out in thought to those whose desires have clashed with your
desires, those who have hurt you or hated you. Go to them one by
one--not several at a time in this exercise, and one by one try to
understand them. See yourself with their eyes, feel toward yourself
with their hearts. If they still hate you, you may hate yourself at
first in sympathy with them. But remaining there in sympathy with them,
you will gradually feel their hard thoughts of you change, gradually
begin to be friends with yourself through them.
This I am advising you to do is not a form of “black magic,” because
the object is unselfish. You are making a beginning toward softening
the enmities of the world. But I warn you against using this practice
to win the regard of anyone whom you love selfishly or with passion,
because the reaction would bring about a very undesirable condition of
disharmony.
When you have thus understood and forgiven all your personal enemies,
enter the souls of the warring nations. Understand them also by
sympathy, and soften their hearts. Though this is a much easier thing
to _attempt_ than the other, the results may seem incommensurable
with the effort. But, small and great, you are all part of the Whole.
And this brings me to the idea of race spirits, race entities,
for every race has its guardian being--a composite being, yet
self-conscious as separate, in a way you could hardly understand.
Have you not noticed the effect on yourself of passing from country to
country? Have your feelings--has your consciousness not changed almost
at the frontier? Do you remember the shock you once had on setting foot
for the first time in a certain foreign land?
The race spirits seem no larger to themselves and among themselves
than you humans do among your friends and acquaintances. Size is
relative. Heretofore I have spoken of the races as organs in the
body of humanity. In speaking of them now as separate beings I am
not contradicting myself. What reason have you for assuming that the
organs of your body may not each be animated by a more or less separate
consciousness? Your cells exist in your organs, your organs exist in
your body, you exist in your race, your race exists in the body of
humanity on earth, the entity of the earth exists in the democracy of
planetary spirits in the solar system, the solar system exists as one
in the company of its fellows in the greater democracy of the Cosmos.
A small blood-clot on the brain could seriously hamper the working of
your cosmos.
So you see there is nothing preposterous in my saying that you can
hasten _infinitesimally_ the peace between the race spirits by
forgiving and making peace with your personal enemies, especially if
they belong to races on the other side of this war.
The small is not so unimportant and the great is not so important
as you have the habit of supposing. Yes, you personally--and all of
you--can hasten the coming of peace.
_April 16._
LETTER XXIII
THE MYSTERY OF DESIRE
I HAVE written about the hunger and thirst of disembodied men in the
astral world, and I have written about the evil astral beings who
brought about this war to satisfy their malice. They too are hungry
beings and the war has given them food. Do you know what they live on?
They _may_ live long on blood and the exhalations of slaughter.
I have seen them by myriads hovering over a battlefield, gorging
themselves on the blood that dripped from the wounds of suffering men
and from dead men.
The leaving of the dead unburied has also satisfied their hunger.
Vampire entities came up from Hungary and from other countries and fed
on the living. The awful weariness of war opened a door through which
they might pass to the life forces they craved.
“Blood is a peculiar fluid,” as Goethe said. The life of an evil entity
may be renewed for another long period of existence if he can have
blood enough.
If you stop eating the carcases of dead animals, you will cease to feed
certain evil entities in yourselves. It is not merely for reasons of
sentiment that the pupils of the great Masters are advised to refrain
from animal food. You are told that meat-eating feeds the passional
nature. What is the passional nature but the hungry nature that longs
to feed on something not itself? So long as you eat meat habitually you
will never be quite free from the influence of entities who live on the
blood and the other properties of meat. Eat purely, and by and by you
will find yourselves thinking purely and desiring purely.
I do not tell you to kill out all desire this afternoon, for desire
is the dynamics with which you work for even the ideal; but kill out
desire for blood and for the flesh of dead animals, and all sorts of
other desires which serve no necessary purpose in your evolution will
expire.
A lot of nonsense is talked about desire. You desire to develop
spiritually, you desire to do the work of the Masters; you are not
merely led along like a lamb to do the work of the Masters. There is
desire and desire. If it seems “desirable” that you shorten the road to
conscious union with the All, you will desire that union probably; you
are not likely to drift into it.
I am not talking about the violent desires of ambition. You need not be
ambitious for occult development. In fact, if you are too ambitious for
occult development you will be in danger of becoming a black magician.
But you can quietly “desire” even union with God.
All action on this plane springs from desire of some sort, and it has
been said that desire and will are the same. Perhaps they are. It has
also been said that desire relates to the temporary, and that will is
some kind of superior motive force; but I should be inclined to say
that will in its more dignified phases was merely desire for a higher
thing--that is, if I wanted to separate the two.
Music may be sublime and music may be rag-time; it is still music. The
force of the wind may fan the flame that burns your house, or it may
fill the sails of the boat that takes you across the sea to your soul’s
desire. It is still the same wind.
You may even desire to desire the higher things. You may will to will
_with_ the Law instead of against it. Is that not desire, too?
In advising you not to feed by blood sacrifices the elemental forces
in yourself which crave that impure food, I am not inviting you to
kill out desire. You will have to desire to purify your system from
the material of dead animals before you will wilfully cease to feed
on them. The evil in you, the hungry fiery selfish nature, sucks up
the blood that passes your lips somewhat as the evil beings above
the battlefields suck up the blood that flows from the wounds of the
fallen. If you have no further use for these creatures, you can cease
to feed them with blood.
You will never kill out your emotional nature by ceasing to eat meat.
You will merely purify it. The whole soul-world is a world of emotion,
and the pure beings of the elements are very emotional, but they do not
feed on blood.
Yes, mind is higher than emotion, it is beyond emotion. You can have
mind without emotion, and you can have emotion without mind to any
great degree, as in the animals; but man is made of both. He is
dependent on his middle register, his soul-desire nature, in order to
work in the soul world as a growing entity there. When you reach the
highest heaven you will be living in thought with only so much of the
desire nature as you have raised with you by memory and assimilation.
You can raise more of soul-dynamics into the highest region if you do
not clog your feet on the road by desire for bloody food. Leave that to
the demons who gorge themselves on the battlefields.
During the reign of brotherhood which I am trying to help in bringing
about, the race will subsist on a pure diet. Even now there is a
tendency toward the elimination of dead animals from the dietary.
The desires of the new race will have to be purified, their emotions
raised and intensified. The emotions of a man are much more intense
than the emotions of a lion. The emotions of a god are cosmic.
_April 16._
LETTER XXIV
THE SCALES OF JUSTICE
LEST anyone should think that in working for brotherhood I am either
knowingly or inadvertently striving to bring about a state of lax
acquiescence in the wrongs committed by my fellowmen, by my brothers, I
want to talk about justice.
As one who has been a so-called Judge in a court of justice, I have
had some little experience in the practical working out of a balance
between mercy and severity. Justice is one of the gods that I have
always placed high in my personal pantheon, and never in handing down
a decision did I, through weakness or sentimentality, hamper the right
of the good in order to pander to the wrong of evil. I have given mild
judgments when most good seemed to be promised that way; I have given
severe judgments when it seemed to me that evil would be best curbed
that way.
Much nonsense has been talked and written about universal brotherhood,
as about most of the other ideals of mankind. Universal brotherhood is
not universal acquiescence in evil; it is universal acceptance of the
ideal of good. And you will never have a brotherhood worthy of the name
until you raise, not lower, the standard of justice.
Justice is balance, justice is equilibrium between forces, justice is
poise. It is because I hope to see a more poised humanity that I am
urging men to concentrate upon love instead of upon hate.
Since I have been stationed in Europe and in the immediate neighborhood
of the western battlefields, I have helped hundreds of souls to help
themselves through the terrible astral conditions into which a sudden
and premature dropping of their physical bodies has precipitated them;
but in no case have I tried to upset the balance between cause and
effect by helping a soul to a freedom for which it was not prepared. I
have let men suffer when I _could_ have shortened their suffering;
I have let many souls work out in the astral world the slow battle
with their lower desires, because I knew that if they were plucked
from the tree of pain before they were ripe, they would have to go
through it all anyway and battle harder in another life with those very
forces which now by their suffering they were severing in the region
where--from the very limitation of satisfactions--elementary desires
are more easily starved out than on the earth.
There was in one of the armies a very cruel officer who was hated by
his men. He came out here and many of the men came out here, and I made
no attempt to protect him from their reproaches, because he _needed
to learn_ that injustice deserves reproach. On earth their mouths
had been stopped by army discipline, but out here he had to realize
how much he had wronged them. He could never have realized it in any
other way. Had I preached to him he would have told me to mind my own
business. The law of justice does not preach. It demonstrates. He had
to endure the demonstration of his own injustice through the dark and
reproachful shadows by which he was long surrounded. And I may say in
passing that he is still surrounded by them. I have made no effort to
help him. Perhaps I could have done so; but such determined opposition
on my part to the law of justice might have let him go forward into
his own selfish heaven with such a load of injustice on his soul
that in his next earthly life he would have been crushed by it. The
resentment of these men was very deep, and while I might have softened
it for their sake--not his--I let it work itself out.
Had there been no one else needing my help and deserving it more,
I might have spent a long time with these men and yet made little
impression. I did exactly as I should have done on earth had such a
case come before me, and I believe that I did right.
Whenever I see a soul afflicted by the unjust judgments of others I
seek to set the balance true, as I should have done on earth; but I am
not here to upset the law of cause and effect. When I can help, I help;
but I am more useful in preventing the setting up of evil causes than I
could ever be in deflecting the legitimate course of effects.
When I urge men to help the Masters in holding back the awful karma
of Germany, I am not talking sentimentally. I am talking as a just
judge. The German people have been deceived by their leaders and have
followed blindly a course they have not understood. Collectively they
are responsible to the other races, but individually they are not
responsible in the same degree; for they have been themselves deceived,
and they do not know that their cause of national aggression is unjust
and of satanic origin.