into the shrinking eyes of the awakened man and holding them by his
will.
“The soul of man is immortal,” he repeated. Then in a tone of command:
“Stand up!”
The man struggled to his feet. Though his body was light as a feather,
as are all our bodies here, I could see that his slumbering energy was
still almost too dormant to permit of that really slight exertion.
“You live,” declared the Teacher. “You have passed through death, and
you live. Do not dare to deny that you live. You cannot deny it.”
“But I do not believe----” began the man, his stubborn materialism
still challenging the truth of his own existence, his memory surviving
the ordeal through which he had passed. This last surprised me more
than anything else. But after a moment’s stupefaction I understood that
it was the power of the Teacher’s mental picture of the astral records
round this soul which had forced those memories to awaken.
“Sit down between us two,” said the Teacher to the newly aroused man,
“and let us reason together. You thought yourself a great reasoner,
did you not, when you walked the earth as So-and-so?”
“I did.”
“You see that you were mistaken in your reasoning,” the Teacher went
on, “for you certainly passed through death, and you are now alive.”
“But where am I?” He looked about him in a bewildered way. “Where am I,
and who are you?”
“You are in eternity,” replied the Teacher, “where you always have been
and always will be.”
“And you?”
“I am one who knows the workings of the Law.”
“What law?”
“The law of rhythm, which drives the soul into and out of gross matter,
as it drives the tides of the ocean into flood and ebb, and the
consciousness of man into sleeping and waking.”
“And it was you who awakened me? Are you, then, this law of rhythm?”
The Teacher smiled.
“I am not the law,” he said, “but I am bound by it, even as you, save
as I am temporarily able to transcend it by my will--again, even as
you.”
I caught my breath at the profundity of this simple answer, but the
man seemed not to observe its significance. Even as he! Why, this man
by his misdirected will had been able temporarily to transcend the
law of immortality, even as the Teacher by his wisely directed will
transcended the mortal in himself! My soul sang within me at this
glimpse of the godlike possibilities of the human mind.
“How long have I been asleep?” demanded the man.
“In what year did you die?” the Teacher asked.
“In the year 1817.”
“And the present year is known, according to the Christian calendar,
as the year 1912. You have lain in a death-like sleep for ninety-five
years.”
“And was it really you who awakened me?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because it suited my good pleasure,” was the Teacher’s rather stern
reply. “It was not because you deserved to be awakened.”
“And how long would I have slept if you had not aroused me?”
“I cannot say. Probably until those who had started even with you
had left you far behind on the road of evolving life. Perhaps for
centuries, perhaps for ages.”
“You have taken a responsibility upon yourself,” said the man.
“You do not need to remind me of that,” replied the Teacher. “I weighed
in my own mind the full responsibility and decided to assume it for a
purpose of my own. For will is free.”
“Yet you overpowered my will.”
“I did; but by my own more potent will, more potent because wisely
directed and backed by a greater energy.”
“And what are you going to do with me?”
“I am going to assume the responsibility of your training.”
“My training?”
“Yes.”
“And you will make things easy for me?”
“On the contrary, I shall make things very hard for you; but you cannot
escape my teaching.”
“Shall you instruct me personally?”
“Personally in the sense that I shall place you under the instruction
of an advanced pupil of my own.”
“Who? This man here?” He pointed to me.
“No. He is better occupied. I will take you to your teacher presently.”
“And what will he show me?”
“The panorama of immortality. And when you have learned the lesson so
that you can never forget nor escape it, you will have to go back to
the earth and teach it to others; you will have to convert as many men
to the truth of immortality as you have in the past deluded and misled
by your false doctrines of materialism and death.”
“And what if I refuse? You have said that will is free.”
“_Do_ you refuse?”
“No, but what if I had?”
“Then, instead of growing and developing under the law of action and
reaction, which in the East they call karma, you would have been its
victim.”
“I do not understand you.”
“He is indeed a wise man,” said the Teacher, “who understands the law
of karma, which is also the law of cause and effect. But come. I will
now take you to your new instructor.”
Then, leaving me alone, the Teacher and his charge disappeared in the
grey distance.
I remained there a long time, pondering what I had seen and heard.
LETTER XL
THE CELESTIAL HIERARCHY
I AM about to say something which may shock certain persons; but those
who are too fond of their own ideas, without being willing to grant
others their ideas in turn, should not seek to open the jealously
guarded doors which separate the land of the so-called living from the
land of the certainly not dead.
This is the statement which I have to make: that there are many gods,
and that the One God is the sum-total of all of them. All gods exist
in God. Do what you like with that statement, dear world, for truth is
more vital than anybody’s dream, even yours or mine.
Have I seen God? I have seen Him who has been called the Son of God,
and you may remember that He said that whoever had seen the Son had
seen the Father.
But what of the other gods? you ask; for there are many in the world’s
pantheons. Well, the realities exist out here.
What! you say again, can man create the gods of his imagination and
give them a place in the invisible? No. They existed here first, and
man became aware of them long ago through his own psychic and spiritual
perception of them. Man did not create them, and the materialists who
say that he did know little of the laws of being. Man, primitive man,
perceived them through his own spiritual affinities with and nearness
to them.
When you have read folk-tales of this god and that, you have perhaps
spoken patronisingly of the old myth-makers and thanked your lucky
stars that you lived in a more enlightened age. But those old
story-tellers were the really enlightened ones, for they saw into the
other world and recorded what they saw.
Many of the world’s favourite gods are said to have lived upon the
earth as men. They have so lived. Does that idea startle you?
How does a man become a god, and how does a god become a man? Have you
ever wondered? A man becomes a god by developing god-consciousness,
which is not the same as developing his own thought _about_ God.
During recent years you have heard and read much of so-called Masters,
men of superhuman attainments, who have forgone the small pleasures and
recognitions of the world in order to achieve something greater.
Man’s ideas of the gods change as the gods themselves change, for
“everything is becoming,” as Heraclitus said about twenty-four
centuries ago. Did you fancy that the gods stood still, and that only
you progressed? In that case you might some day outstrip your god, and
fall to worshipping yourself, having nothing to look up to as superior.
Accompanied by the Teacher, I have stood face to face with some of the
older gods. Had I come out here with a superior contempt for all gods
save my own, I should hardly have been granted that privilege; for
the gods are as exclusive as they are inclusive, and they only reveal
themselves to those who can see them as they are.
Does this open the door to polytheism, pantheism, or other dreaded
_isms_? An _ism_ is only a word. Facts are. The day is past
when men were burned at the stake for having had a vision of the wrong
god. But even now I would hesitate to tell all that I have learned
about the gods, though I can tell you much.
Take, for instance, the god whom the Romans called Neptune. Did you
fancy that he was only a poetic creation of the old myth-makers? He
was something more than that. He was supposed to rule the ocean.
Now, what could be more orderly and inevitable than that the work of
controlling the elements and the floods should be assumed by, and the
work parcelled out among those able to perform it? We hear much of the
laws of Nature. Who enforces them? The term “natural law” is in every
man’s mouth, but the Law has executors in heaven as on earth.
I have been told that there are also planetary beings, planetary gods,
though I have never had the honour of conscious communion with one of
them. If a planetary being is so far beyond the daring of my approach,
how should I comport myself in approaching the God of gods?
O paradoxical mind of man, which stands in awe and trembling before the
servant, yet approaches the master without fear!
I have been told that the guardian spirit of this planet Earth evolved
himself into a god of tremendous power and responsibility in bygone
cycles of existence. To him who has ever used a microscope the idea
need not be appalling. The infinitely small and the infinitely great
are the tail and the head of the Eternal Serpent.
Who do you fancy will be the gods of the future cycles of existence?
Will they not be those who in this cycle of planetary life have raised
themselves above the mortal? Will they not be the strongest and most
sublime among the present spirits of men? Even the gods must have their
resting period, and those in office now would doubtless wish to be
supplanted.
To those men who are ambitious for growth, the doors of development are
always open.
LETTER XLI
THE DARLING OF THE UNSEEN
I HAVE written you before of one whom I call the Beautiful Being, one
whose province seems to be the universe, whose chosen companions are
all men and angelkind, whose play-things are days and ages.
For some reason, the Beautiful Being has lately been so gracious as to
take an interest in my efforts to acquire knowledge, and has shown me
many things which otherwise I should never have seen.
When a tour of the planet is personally conducted by an angel, the
traveller is specially favoured. Letters of introduction to the great
and powerful of earth are nothing compared with this introduction, for
by its means I see into the souls of all beings, and my visits to their
houses are not limited to the drawing-rooms. The Beautiful Being has
access everywhere.
Did you ever fancy when you had had a lovely dream that maybe an angel
had kissed you in your sleep? I have seen such things.
Oh, do not be afraid of giving rein to your imagination! It is the
wonderful things which are really true; the commonplace things are
nearly all false. When a great thought lifts you by the hair, do not
cling hold of the solid earth. Let go. He whom an inspiration seizes
might even--if he dared to trust his vision--behold the Beautiful
Being face to face, as I have. When flying through the air one’s
sight is keen. If one goes fast and high enough, one may behold the
inconceivable.
The other night I was meditating on a flower-seed, for there is
nothing so small that it may not contain a world. I was meditating on
a flower-seed, and amusing myself by tracing its history, generation
by generation, back to the dawn of time. I smile as I use that figure,
“the dawn of time,” for time has had so many dawns and so many sunsets,
and still it is unwearied.
I had traced the genealogy of the seed back to the time when the
cave-man forgot his fighting in the strangely disturbing pleasure of
smelling the fragrance of its parent flower, when I heard a low musical
laugh in my left ear, and something as light as a butterfly’s wing
brushed my cheek on that side.
I turned to look, and, quick as a flash, I heard the laughter in the
other ear, while another butterfly touch came on my right cheek. Then
something like a veil was blown across my eyes, and a clear voice said:
“Guess who it is!”
I was all a-thrill with the pleasure of this divine play, and I
answered:
“Perhaps you are the fairy that makes blind children dream of daisy
fields.”
“However did you know me?” laughed the Beautiful Being, unwinding the
veil from my eyes. “I am indeed that fairy. But you must have been
peeping through cracks in the door when I touched the eyes of the blind
babies.”
“I am always peeping through cracks in the door of the earth people’s
chamber,” I replied.
The Beautiful Being laughed again:
“Will you come and have another peep with me this evening?”
“With pleasure.”
“You could not do it with pain if I were by,” was the response.
And we started then and there upon the strangest evening’s round which
I have ever made.
We began by going to the house of a friend of mine and standing quietly
in the room where he and his family were at supper. No one saw us but
the cat, which began a loud purring and stretched itself with joy at
our presence. Had I gone there alone, the cat might have been afraid of
me; but who--even a cat--could fear the Beautiful Being?
Suddenly one of the children--the youngest one--looked up from his
supper of bread and milk, and said:
“Father, why does milk taste good?”
“I really do not know,” admitted the author of his being, “perhaps
because the cow enjoyed giving it.”
“That father might have been a poet,” the Beautiful Being said to me;
but no one overheard the remark.
One of the other children complained of feeling sleepy, and put his
head down on the edge of the table. The mother started to arouse him,
but the Beautiful Being fluttered a mystifying veil before her eyes,
and she could not do it.
“Let him sleep if he wants to,” she said. “I will put him to bed by and
by.”
I could see in the brain of the child that he was dreaming already,
and I knew that the Beautiful Being was weaving a fairy-tale on the web
of his mind. After only a moment he started up, wide awake.
“I dreamed,” he said, “that----[the writer of these letters] was
standing over there and smiling at me as he used to smile, and with him
was an angel. I never saw an angel before.”
“Come away,” whispered the Beautiful Being to me. “From dreaming
children nothing can be hidden.”
We then paid a visit to the future mother of my boy Lionel. Oh, mystery
of maternity! The eyes of the Beautiful Being were like stars as we
gazed upon this other flower-seed, whose genealogy goes even beyond the
days of the cave-man--aye, back to the time of the fire-mist and the
sons of the morning stars.
“Come away!” said the Beautiful Being again. “To brides who dream
of motherhood much also is revealed, and for this evening we remain
unknown.”
We passed along the margin of a river which divides a busy town.
Suddenly from a house by the river-bank we heard the tinkle of a guitar
and a woman’s sweet voice singing:
“When other lips and other hearts
Their tale of love shall tell, ...
Then you’ll remember--you’ll remember me.”
The Beautiful Being touched my hand and whispered:
“The life that is so sweet to these mortals is a book of enchantment
for me.”
“Yet you have never tasted human life yourself?”
“On the contrary, I taste it every day; but I only taste it--and pass
on. Should I consume it, I might not be able to pass on.”
“But do you never long so to consume it?”
“Oh, but the thrill is in the taste! Digestion is a more or less
tiresome process.”
“I fear you are a divine wanton,” I said, affectionately.
“Be careful,” answered the Beautiful Being. “He who fears anything will
lose me in the fog of his own fears.”
“You irresistible one!” I cried. “Who are you? _What_ are you?”
“Did you not say yourself a little while ago that I was the fairy who
made blind babies dream of daisy fields?”
“I love you,” I said, “with an incomprehensible love.”
“All love is incomprehensible,” the Beautiful Being answered. “But
come, brother, let us climb the hill of vision. When you are out of
breath, if you catch at my flying veil I will wait till you are rested.”
Strange things we saw that night. I should weary you if I told you all
of them.
We stood on the crater of an active volcano and watched the dance of
the fire-spirits. Did you fancy that salamanders were only seen by
unabstemious poets? They are as real--to themselves and to those who
see them--as are the omnibus-drivers in the streets of London.
The real and the unreal! If I were writing an essay now, instead of the
narrative of a traveller in a strange country, I should have much to
say on the subject of the real and the unreal.
The Beautiful Being has changed my ideas about the whole universe.
I wonder if, when I come back to the earth again, I shall remember
all the marvels I have seen. Perhaps, like most people, I shall have
forgotten the details of my life before birth, and shall bring with me
only vague yearnings after the inexpressible, and the deep unalterable
conviction that there are more things in earth and heaven than are
dreamed of in the philosophy of the world’s people. Perhaps if I almost
remember, but not quite, I shall be a poet in my next life. Worse
things might happen to me.
What an adventure it is, this launching of one’s barque upon the sea of
rebirth!
But by my digressions one would say that I was in my second childhood.
So I am--my second childhood in the so-called invisible.
When, on my voyage that night with the Beautiful Being, I had feasted
my eyes upon beauty until they were weary, my companion led me to
scenes on the earth which, had I beheld them alone, would have made me
very sad. But no one can be sad when the Beautiful Being is near. That
is the charm of that marvellous entity: to be in its presence is to
taste the joys of immortal life.
We looked on at a midnight revel in what you on earth would call “a
haunt of vice.” Was I shocked and horrified? Not at all. I watched the
antics of those human animalculæ as a scientist might watch the motions
of the smaller living creatures in a drop of water. It seemed to me
that I saw it all from the viewpoint of the stars. I started to say
from the viewpoint of God, to whom small and great are the same; but
perhaps the stellar simile is the truer one, for how can we judge of
what God sees--unless we mean the god in us?
You who read what I have written, perhaps when you come out here you
will have many surprises. The small things may seem larger and the
large things smaller, and everything may take its proper place in the
infinite plan, of which even your troubles and perplexities are parts,
inevitable and beautiful.
That idea came to me as I wandered from heaven to earth, from beauty to
ugliness, with my angelic companion.
I wish I could explain the influence of the Beautiful Being. It is
unlike anything else in the universe. It is elusive as a moonbeam,
yet more sympathetic than a mother. It is daintier than a rose, yet
it looks upon ugly things with a smile. It is purer than the breath
of the sea, yet it seems to have no horror of impurity. It is artless
as a child, yet wiser than the ancient gods, a marvel of paradoxes, a
celestial vagabond, the darling of the unseen.
LETTER XLII
A VICTIM OF THE NON-EXISTENT
THE other day I met an acquaintance, a woman whom I had known for a
number of years, and who came out about the time I did.
Old acquaintances when they meet here greet each other about as they
did on earth. Though we are, as a rule, less conventional than you,
still we cling more or less to our former habits.
I asked Mrs. ---- how she was enjoying herself, and she said that she
was not having a very pleasant time. She found that everybody was
interested in something else, and did not want to talk with her.
This was the first time I had met with such a complaint, and I was
struck by its peculiarity. I asked her to what cause she attributed
this unsociability, and she replied that she did not know the cause,
that it had puzzled her.
“What do you talk to them about?” I asked.
“Why, I tell them my troubles, as one friend tells another; but they do
not seem to be interested. How selfish people are!”
Poor soul! She did not realise here, any more than she had on earth,
that our troubles are not interesting to anybody but ourselves.
“Suppose,” I said, “that you unburden yourself to me. Tell me your
troubles. I will promise not to run away.”
“Why, I hardly know where to begin!” she answered. “I have found so
many unpleasant things.”
“What, for instance?”
“Why, horrid people. I remember that when I lived in ---- I sometimes
told myself that in the other world I would not be bothered with
boarding-house landladies and their careless hired girls; but they are
just as bad here--even worse.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you live in a boarding-house here?”
“Where should I live? You know that I am not rich.”
Of all the astonishing things I had heard in this land of changes, this
was the most astonishing. A boarding-house in the “invisible” world!
Surely, I told myself, my observations had been limited. Here was a new
discovery.
“Is the table good in your boarding-house?” I asked.
“No, it is worse than at the last one.”
“Are the meals scanty?”
“Yes, scanty and bad, especially the coffee.”
“Will you tell me,” I said, my wonder growing, “if you really eat three
meals a day here, as you used to do on earth?”
“How strangely you talk!” she answered, in a sharp tone. “I don’t find
very much difference between this place and the earth, as you call it,
except that I am more uncomfortable here, because everything is so
flighty and uncertain.”
“Yes, go on.”
“I never know in the morning who will be sitting next me in the
evening. They come and go.”
“And what do you eat?”
“The same old things--meat and potatoes, and pies and puddings.”
“And you still eat these things?”
“Why, yes; don’t you?”
I hardly knew how to reply. Had I told her what my life here really
was, she would no more have understood than she would have understood
two years ago, when we lived in the same city on earth, had I told her
then what my real mental life was. So I said:
“I have not much appetite.”
She looked at me as if she distrusted me in some way, though why I
could not say.
“Are you still interested in philosophy?” she asked.
“Yes. Perhaps that is why I don’t get hungry very often.”
“You were always a strange man.”
“I suppose so. But tell me, Mrs. ----, do you never feel a desire to
leave all this behind?”
“To leave all what behind?”
“Why, boarding-houses and uncongenial people, and meat and potatoes,
and pies and puddings, and the shadows of material things in general.”
“What do you mean by ‘the _shadows_ of material things’?”
“I mean that these viands and pastries, which you eat and do not enjoy,
are not real. They have no real existence.”
“Why!” she exclaimed, “have you become a Christian Scientist?”
At this I laughed heartily. Was one who denied the reality of astral
food in the astral world a Christian Scientist, because the Christian
Scientists denied the reality of material food in the material world?
The analogy tickled my fancy.
“Let me convert you to Christian Science, then,” I said.
“No, sir!” was her sharp response. “You never succeeded in convincing
me that there was any truth in your various fads and philosophies. And
now you tell me that the food I eat is not real.”
I puzzled for a moment, trying to find a way by which the actual facts
of her condition could be brought home to the mind of this poor woman.
Finally I hit upon the right track.
“Do you realise,” I said, “that you are only dreaming?”
“What!” she snapped at me.
“Yes, you are dreaming. All this is a dream--these boarding-houses,
_et cetera_.”
“If that is so, perhaps you would like to wake me up.”
“I certainly should. But you will have to awaken yourself, I fancy.
Tell me, what were your ideas about the future life, before you came
out here?”
“What do you mean by _out here_?”
“Why, before you died!”
“But, man, I am not dead!”
“Of course you are not dead. Nobody is dead. But you certainly
understand that you have changed your condition.”
“Yes, I have noticed a change, and a change for the worse.”
“Don’t you remember your last illness?”
“Yes.”
“And that you passed out?”
“Yes, if you call it that.”
“You know that you have left your body?”
She looked down at her form, which appeared as usual, even to its rusty
black dress rather out of date.
“But I still have my body,” she said.
“Then you have not missed the other one?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know where it is?”
My amazement was growing deeper and deeper. Here was a phenomenon I had
not met before.
“I suppose,” she said, “that they must have buried my body, if you say
I left it; but this one is just the same to me.”