< Spiritual Selfishness (continued from page 12-47) >
but they can reform all this without becoming adepts and leading celibate lives a midst the fastnesses of the Himalayas. In England there are abundant facilities for those who wish to avoid the evils and contaminating influences of large towns. No need to go far away— Nature is at your doors. Go into the green fields and by the babbling brooks, and you will find all the inspiration to purity and simplicity of life that you need, and you can take your wife and children with you and enjoy what you see and what you possess, and perhaps then you will have occasion to thank God that you are not an adept.*
* The above article is mostly inspirational so far as the writer is concerned. It was written without thought or preparation after reading Madame Blavatsky’s last letter in the Spirituals'' and in defence of the Theosophists.
Notes by the Way
I must apologise for unavoidable delay in answering Dr. Wyld’s letter recently published in “Light.” He propounds a series of six propositions, very carefully considered, to which he invites my adhesion. They hardly meet the point on which I was writing, and they also travel far beyond it; but they form an interesting statement of opinion. In dealing with them as he invites me, I must distinguish between knowledge derived from personal experience and hear-say evidence from other sources. The former is to me precise; the latter is vague, contradictory, and useful only as illustrating conclusions more or less exactly drawn by persons whose precise opportunity and power of observation we cannot expect to gauge with any accuracy. I shall be excused, then, If I differentiate my own experience, which I can gauge, from other evidence, which may be of the highest value, or of the smallest, but which I cannot exactly appraise. In so doing, I am but making a necessary distinction between evidence at first-hand and secondary testimony.
Dr. Wyld’s first proposition is: “I believe in the power of external Spirits to create solid objective bodies, either in their own likeness or in any other likeness, according to their imagination and will, just as I believe in the power of any artistic Spirit in the flesh to create his own portrait or the portrait of any other individual, mechanically.” That is so. The “solid objective” bodies are transient, and cannot, apparently, be maintained for any long period on the plane of matter; but while some are shadowy and impalpable, others are, to all sense of touch and sight, solid and objectively real. And they invariably (so far as I know) purport to be the work of external Spirits of humanity, and not of Spirits above or below the plane of humanity, nor of the spirit of the medium. I have repeatedly asked permission to isolate one of these Forms, to experiment upon it, and see how long its existence in this world could be maintained. This request has always been refused, no doubt, for sufficient reasons.
Dr. Wyld’s second proposition is: “I believe that many individuals in the flesh can project their own Spirits as visible objective doubles, and that these doubles can present themselves to third parties and operate as physical identities.” I cannot affirm this as true within my own experience. I do not know whether any individual of his own unaided power can project his double so that it shall be “visible and objective.” I have never been able to distinguish the point at which my own efforts were supplemented by the power of external Spirit. I do not know by what test such a point could be fixed. Nor do I know, of my own experience, that such “doubles can present themselves to third parties, and operate as physical entities.” On the contrary, in one conspicuous case, when I was able, from being present in spirit, to assure myself of what was going on at a distant place, I have no doubt that I was not visible to the natural eye of anyone: though I should probably have been visible to the clairvoyant sense of any seer, if present. There are, however, many recorded cases in which a double has made itself objectively manifest. Every one of such cases would need careful investigation before any such wide theory as Dr. Wyld’s could be founded upon it; and still the crux as to how far external Spirit operated in each would remain.
The third proposition depends on the second, and to it I must except still more strongly. “If so, then the Spirits of entranced mediums, being external to the body, can do likewise, and assume any form and perform a variety of physical work.” The Spirit of an entranced medium is, at all events usually, in a state of perfect passivity. If it be temporarily separated from the physical body, it is (with rare exceptions) kept perfectly passive and still, and certainly does not go about to “perform a variety of physical work.” If my memory serves me, however, Mrs. Hardinge Britten has recorded a case or cases of the activity of her own Spirit during the time that her physical body was possessed by another Spirit, who conversed through her organism. Such cases, if established, must be very rare; possible only in the case of a high development of medical sensitiveness. Assuredly they are the exceptions to the rule: and cannot be quoted as Dr. Wyld uses them.
Of the fourth proposition I have no knowledge at all; “Individuals in a condition of reverie or half entrancement can, by imagination, produce forms objective to themselves, and can ‘biologise’ others present so that these objects become to them as solid objective realities.” I should be much surprised to find any person in a state of reverie who could first produce a Form objective to himself and then “biologise” me into accepting it as real, solid, or objective.
These are the four chief propositions. To them may be added two others, with one of which I agree, while from the remaining one I am compelled to dissent. I agree that “the vast majority of Spirit forms are produced by external and rational Spirits,’” even when, as in some recorded cases of John King appearing in the likeness of his medium, an apparent double is produced. I do not know by what means the action of external Spirit can be excluded logically. The last article of belief, “that the Spirits of living bodies can, under certain conditions, enter the Spirit-world and act in all respects as if they were external Spirits finally emancipated from the flesh,” directly traverses such experience as has fallen to my lot. The temporarily disenthralled Spirit is, in the first place, chained to its body by the magnetic cord of life, and can only move cautiously. It is (unless in the case of those who have so mastered the body, and learned the conditions of spiritual life) far from the master of its spiritual senses, and unable to go alone. It can hardly take in what it sees, and would be, I should say, quite unable to do what Dr. Wyld conceives that it can. It is claimed, I know, that by long practice men have acquired the power of moving and living in the world of Spirit, free and unhampered by the bodily shell that lies to all appearance dead, but of this I have no such knowledge as would warrant me in accepting Dr. Wyld’s position as an established fact. It seems to me, indeed, that his first proposition alone is so far established that any deduction can reasonably be drawn from it as a basis of argument. At the same time, the others offer an enticing (but very illusory) field for speculation. We want more facts, and more time to study them.
In 1870-77 I collected and published a great number of cases of what I called Trans corporeal Action of Spirit. I selected cases from various sources, old and new, for the purpose of ascertaining, if possible, the laws which govern these appearances. Some were apparently aimless, but in a great number the influence of the affections was plainly traceable; and the power of trans corporeal action was found to be most marked before or at the time of death. In a number of these cases the double (if it be properly so-called) was seen only as a fleeting apparition ; in some, on the contrary, it seems to have had the power of “operating as a physical identity.” Mrs. de Morgan, for example, relates that she used to send a girl, whom she experimented with as a clairvoyante, on ideal journeys. One day she proposed to her to go to the house where the girl lived. She went, and came back saying that she “had given a rousing knock at the door.” The next day the account was verified. On inquiry, the woman of the house said that “some mischievous person had rapped at the door and run away”!— M.A. (Oxon.).
Editor's notes
- ↑ Notes by the Way by M.A. (Oxon), Light, January 14, 1882
Sources
-
Light, v. 2, No. 54, January 14, 1882, pp. 13-4