< The Views of the Theosophists (continued from page 4-101) >
mediumship in general. The laws of polarity, in our judgment, make it absurd to expect that any pure disembodied spirit can come into, or near, or influence directly one of those mediums who have been teaching and living impurely, or among inquirers who perchance enter the circle flushed with strong drink, or steaming with the atmosphere of some demoralising association. Evil influences are alone drawn towards such magnets; and we firmly believe that the whole range of physical phenomena, from rapping to full-form presentations, are manifestations of the power of either earthbound elementaries, helped by elementals, or the souls of the mediums themselves, acting transcorporeally with or without the help of elementals.
To apply this theory, tests of the assumed identity of the communicating intelligence, such as are constantly being received by inquirers, may be given by the medium’s soul, or by an “elementary,” either one seeing the facts in the memory of the inquirer, in his surroundings, or in the stream of his family history, with which he is as directly connected as one bend of a river with the next bend above, or any other beyond it up stream. The medium’s physical brain may be either conscious or unconscious in such a case. Slade’s slate-writing comes under the same rule. The “spirit-hand” that is often shown at his table is almost certainly his own astral hand. Miss Kislingbury’s highly instructive experience with Watkins, a greater slate-writer even than Slade, seems to warrant the application of the same hypothesis to him. The Katie King of Miss Florence Cook may have been her own double or soul; in fact, I am quite sure it could not have been an elementary, since I am assured that she was a young girl of unblemished character. Her body being asleep, or barely active under the feeble power of the life-principle, her double was free to move about, talk, seem and act like an independent being. Other cases that I constantly see reported in The Spiritualist come within the same category, and hereafter may be touched upon. Suffice it for the present to say that I do not think that a single one of the materialised forms to which your circles have given names is that of a pure human spirit, but all are either the medium’s doubles, or their emanations worked into animated statues, and caused to behave like living beings. How wise or foolish in utterances, how constrained or boisterous in behaviour, how gentle, rough, kind, or malicious in disposition, depends upon the state of medium and circle, physical, mental, and moral. The mightiest question that your inquirers, with such opportunities as they possess, can solve, is that of the powers of the embodied human soul. Probe it with the divining rod of mesmerism. The earnest student of psychology owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Harrison for bringing out his edition of Gregory’s great book. I read the work more than twenty years ago, and gained knowledge from it that has served me well in all my inquiries into the phenomena of mediumship. But, let me say, that important as it is, the mesmerism of which it gives us glimpses is a nothing beside that phase of the science known and practised in the Indian pagodas and brotherhoods through untold centuries. The examples I have not merely read about but seen, so far exceed the belief of unprepared European investigators, that I shrink from the narration, lest my testimony be discredited. The little I have said in print already has, I learn, caused Dr. Carpenter to tax me with credulity while admitting my apparent honesty.
About other mediumship than physical—the agency by which physical phenomena are produced—I have said nothing. We thoroughly concede the action of pure disembodied human spirits in the sublime phrases of inspiration, prophecy, trance-vision, and direct writing. But not in all cases; far from it. The medium’s soul may manifest its power in all these, as may also the elementaries. Given an innocent, unworldly, spiritually-minded medium, a select circle of harmonious minds actuated by the same holy impulse, and the chances are largely in favour of the intellectual phenomena being produced by the pure denizens of the inner world. Judge this tree, like the others, by its fruits. And for the sake of logic and consistency do not call the vapid discourses and writings of any medium whatever the outpourings of spirit wisdom. “Le bon vin n’a pas besoin d’enseigne.” Bacon and Shakespeare, to say nothing of my old friend Judge Edmonds, and my old chemical teacher, Professor Mapes, have not degenerated into idiots.
Depend upon it, it is better for everybody to have no circles except in the light, no phenomena without test conditions, no mediums who are at the mercy of every chance moral leper who has a sovereign to spend. Place your medium above the risk of starvation, and isolate him from the impure, or expect a continuance of just what we have deplored, often blushed for, these thirty years.
Theosophists learn from their studies that temperance and a chaste life are absolutely indispensable for him who would be initiated into the higher wisdom. I see its results among our own number, and speak by the book. Not one of us but has been made better and happier by it, while in some a marked reformation in thought and deed has been effected. From the beginning of our society we made it the imperative rule that no free-lover should be tolerated in our fellowship. In the Oriental religions there is no abomination of a vicarious atonement. Man is taught that he must save himself (from annihilation) and so we who also profess them are led to aspire to a better living than we thought necessary under Christian tutelage. Did you ever understand what Jesus meant in saying that a man could lose his Psuche (Matt. xvi. 26)? Note, please, his soul, not his νους (immortal spirit); that cannot be lost, for it is eternal and immortal. It will illuminate you and me as long as we preserve our entity, until our soul or astral double is lost—annihilated, dispersed. I leave it to Spiritualists to say whether Theosophists influence society for good or evil.
While we discourage mediumship, except under the most favourable conditions, we highly approve of the cultivation of the WILL POWER under all conditions. Mediumship exacts passivity, receptivity to evil as well as good influences. I have seen pure women debased and pure men ruined by their “spirit bands.” The human will, on the other hand, is the greatest of all forces. Have faith in one’s self, and, as Jesus said, the adept can move mountains. Before the sovereign will of the truly great soul, empire plays the courtier, and mankind bows in ready submissiveness. See what the will of the mesmeriser does with his subject, and fancy what the adept of India, Thibet, and Ceylon can do by profiting by the instruction of twenty millenniums of sages! He needs no “guide” or “control” but his own luminous spirit.
I may be told that real or supposititious spirits sometimes declare to their mediums that immortality is the common heritage of all men; that evolution is not a fact in the spiritual side of the universe; that the elementaries all finally become purified of sin; and that there are no such things as elementals fixed within the limits of their several kingdoms. Well, my answer is that until the laws of spiritintercourse with us are understood and the phenomena wholly brought within control, the less use made of such testimony the better. Who cares to offset the asseverations of such unverified and unverifiable witnesses against the accumulated experience of thousands of trained seers, not mediums, not controlled, but able to sound the profoundest depths of nature, and who have sounded it. This very day the earnest truth-seeker may find in the far East the proofs of the doctrines I have enumerated. There are the facts, go and collate them; they will no more come to Great Russell-street than the pearls of Ceylon or the leaves of the letter-tree of Kounboum.
One word more before I close. We affirm that the indiscriminate attainment of immortality would be contrary to the analogies of nature and repugnant to the idea of strict justice. Everywhere, as Darwin and Wallace and their compeers have shown us, the universal law of the “survival of the fittest” prevails. There are positively no exceptions, the rule is imperative. Shall, then, this eternal scheme of the universe, which applies to physical man no less than to the animal and plant, be interrupted with respect to the spiritual man or astral human soul? Is this logical? We answer that it is not; and our interpretation of the saying of the initiated Jesus—that the “Kingdom of Heaven” must be taken by “violence,” is that he who would perpetuate his individual existence through the æons must win the im- mortal crown. This is the secret of the aspiration of the Buddhist for Nirvana, of the Brahman for Moksha; and <... continues on page 4-103 >