< Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits (continued from page 11-285) >
of further progress; but when dealing with a pure circle and speaking through a still pure medium (very few mediums, indeed, continue thus after a long course of mediumship) the better and less degraded side of their nature comes out and it is quite possible for elementaries to have a perfect intellectual knowledge and appreciation of virtue and purity and enlightened conceptions of truth, and yet be innately vicious in their tendencies. We meet plenty of men who have a sentimental love for virtue, and yet whose lives are one unbroken course of Just and self-indulgence, and as the men were, so are the elementaries, their rtliquiæ. If we at times speak bitterly of popular modern Christianity, it is because we know that with all its other ennobling and saving tendencies, just on this all-important point it leads to the destruction of myriads of souls. For it leads to the belief that it signifies little what a man does, if he only finally believes that his sins are forgiven him, and that by relying on the merits of Jesus Christ ho may escape the vengeance of the Lord. But there is no anthropomorphic Lord, no vengeance, no forgiveness; there is simply the action of a natural law impressed on the universe by the Absolute—simply a question pf balance of affinities, and they whose deeds and general tendencies are earthly, go down in the scale, rarely, very rarely, to rise again in their own identities, and those in whom these tendencies are spiritual pass upwards.
It is not, however, possible here to enter into the groat questions thus glanced at, and we return to the subject of high, or comparatively high, teachings through mediums.
Now it must not for a moment be supposed that all we hear from these latter comes from elementaries. In the first place, a groat many well-known mediums are clever impostors. There are notorious trance mediums, especially women, who steadily work up for their so-called trance orations, and these being really clever, and working at good books, deliver essay» of a respectable and at times almost first-class character. There is no spiritual influence at work here, the only apparently abnormal feature in these cases is that persons possessing such fair abilities should be willing thus to prostitute them, and that people who can talk so well and touchingly of truth and purity, should yet live such lives of falsehood and immorality. Alas! meliora videor proboque deteriora sequor, has ever found a response in too many human hearts and has in all ages rung the annihilation-knell of too many Egos.
In the second place, in the case of pore and genuine mediums, who in a trance pass entirely under the influence of their own seventh principle, the augoeides of the Greeks, the whole teachings come from the medium’s own soul, and it is very rare to obtain thus anything higher than the medium’s own intellect, when in a state of spiritual excitement, could produce.
It may be said that in many such cases, the medium says himself or herself, that it is Judge Edmonds, or the late Bishop of——&c., who is teaching him or her, but this is merely due to the intervention of mischievous elementaries who are always crowding about every medium, and who, if he is too pure to enable them to get command over him, yet, ever anxious to get a finger in every pie, confuse and deceive him. Only an adept can clearly and consciously place the spiritual Ego wholly under the domination of the Spirit. Mediums who in trances, unconsciously succeed in doing this, are unaware of the source whence they derive their perceptions and can be made to believe by any elementary exerting any influence over them, through any weak point in their character, that these are derived from it The same, though in a minor degree, is the case with those rare, high, because specially pure, mediums, whose Ego and Spirit can soar together, when the rest of the combination is in a trance, into the astral light, and there can read all the highest thoughts that man has ever thought True, the Ego of the highest and best mediums can reproduce in this material world only in a fragmentary and confused manner what it reads in the astral light, but still even this dim reproduction is sometimes of a character transcending the capacities alike of the medium and all those present. How it comes that the thoughts thus fished up like pearls out of the astral light come often to be attributed by the medium to spirits we have already explained.
But an even more common source of inspiration of mediums, is the mind of one or more of those present. When in a trance, the spiritual soul, (the sixth and seventh principles) can read all that is recorded in the mind or memory of those towards whom it is in any way attracted, and the medium’s utterances will in such cases be quite up to the highest standard of those with whom it is thus en rapport, and if these are pure, highly cultivated persons, the teachings thus received will be equally pure and intellectual. But here again the unconscious medium as a whole does not know <... continues on page 11-283 >