Old W.R. - Mediumism in Daily Life

I call “Mediumism” that sensitivity to external impulses which is reflected by the individual in action or habit, whether physical, psychic or mental, as apart from the present consciousness of personal responsibility. Mediumism is largely connected with the sympathetic instincts of the social nature of man, if indeed it be not their direct product. Wherever we turn in daily life, we see men and women swayed by external impulses and acting from an inertia quite dissociated from individual motive. And this mediumism is not confined to the social customs of any people; it is to be noticed as much in the world of thought as in that of action: nor does it arise entirely from the prejudice which we often connote with environment and heredity, since it would seem to have no special foundation in prepossession or partiality. Mediumism is sympathy in its irrational aspect, being purely of an instinctual and imitative nature. By reason of its very qualities it is commonest where the paths of life are most even and the intellect at the average level. Go into your streets where the crowd is thickest, or seat yourself at a window which overlooks the city life. Mark the people as they pass one by one. You know something of physiognomy, phrenology, pathognomy, you have a few of the keys to character-reading ? So much the better. It will be more interesting. You will judge how these passing units will face the problems of life, what share they are likely to contribute to the good or evil in the world, and what function they will represent in the Constitution to which they belong. But you may never know how unconscious they all are of the great importance of those problems of life which they are helping to work out, of the influence they may exert for good or evil, and of the part they are playing in the long drama of life! Of these things you may be as unconscious as they are themselves. The more you think of this, the more you will be assured that, apart from the mere effort to secure to themselves the means of existence and with it what they can of renown, the aimlessness of men’s lives is a fact as universal as it is deplorable. Look at them as they pass by! Do you see that pallid careworn face, with hard-set mouth and hungry looking eyes; do you mark the intensity of unrest in his anxious glance, the nervous motion of the fretful brow? Well, but except for this, he is much as those that go before him and follow after. His well appointed dress, cut in the latest fashion, shows points of contact with the crowd in which he moves. Do you think that beneath that incompatible exterior of dress and feature there is a soul at rest; one that has grasped the purpose of life, and knows the why and whither of its daily walk? Let us not flatter ourselves that this may be! We have seen enough, let the crowd pass on; and come away!

208 There are reasons which we must seek in the solitude and stillness of the heart. That man, in the broad slow-running stream of life, somehow seemed to struggle while others seemed to drift, and drifted too with ease. And why was this? It was because the mind of that man was beginning to awake, and shake itself free from mediumism – it was beginning to know itself, its powers, and the possibility of escape from its ceaseless, aimless drifting. But with every struggle his limbs were caught in the mass of tangled weeds which grew in the mire of those sluggish waters; and those other bodies that had drifted with him, pressed him round so closely that his efforts disturbed them, and they said: “Why don’t you lie still and drift as we do, life is too short for all that fret and worry”, and they thought themselves wise as they lay back at ease and slipped away with the muddy stream. That was the struggle seen by you in those fevered eyes, that was the purpose of the hard-set mouth, the trouble of the pain-drawn brow. Thus it appears by what a subtle persuasion of the mind the world exerts a tyranny over itself, and none know how difficult it is to emerge from mediumism into conscious responsibility save those who have effected the transition. The man who would convert the involuntary functions of life into the purposive action of an intelligent factor, must needs forego much that at present makes life easy and smooth. The influence of conventionality and custom in everyday life, and of orthodoxy in matters of religious ethics, are compulsions which affect the average mind to a degree which, if regarded in its full extension, render man little more than a instrument for registering the pulsations of a body in which he has no conscious individual power of direction, and upon which he is capable of exerting only a slight reflex impulse. If we were to enquire as to the origin of those tides of thought and feeling which at certain intervals have moved whole nations into a spontaneous and collective realization of a common evil or danger, we should eventually trace it to the efflux of a single mind, whose attitude towards the world at large was one of active intelligent responsibility and whose influence upon the great mass around was as that of “a little yeast which leaveneth the whole lump”. The subjection of the mind to collective impulse is one of the most striking examples of mediumism in daily life. A thousand persons will rush to their death like a flock of sheep, merely because self-restraint and self-reliance have not been previously educated in their minds, and instinctual sympathy is allowed to usurp the place of rational action. And this fact is one which enters very frequently into the first pages of the history of immorality in almost all its phases. Whether children, if not taught entirely to act by imitation, would naturally grow up into that frame of mind which renders them susceptible to such impulses as soon as they go out into the world, I cannot say (and none can until the experiment is fairly made); but I feel 209 in sympathy with Thackeray when he says: –

“If parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings, those thoughts and feelings which are a mystery to all (for how much do you or I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, or our neighbours, and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the pure lad or girl likely to be than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules them); if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a little more – small harm would accrue, although a less quantity of as in præsenti might be acquired”.

It is without doubt a fact that parents are too prone to educate their children to look well, and to pass for clever lads and lasses under a concrete of dry facts and apish tricks, an education which they have every inducement to preserve once they step out into the world with the empty ambition of “making a name” for themselves. What the modern world needs is more individuality born of freedom and self-reliance, more definition of purpose, more simplicity of life, to replace the time-serving egotism of ignorance and the self-seeking of world-worship by smooth and easy ways. Whoever would effect this reform in his own life, has need to be convinced of the rectitude of his opinions as well as the purity of his purpose, and with the courage of his convictions he must have the patience to endure. The sentiment of devotion to an ideal has need of the pure light of a dispassionate mind to direct its energy into methods more immediately serviceable to the attainment of that ideal; and this leads to a statement of that which is of present possibility as the first step towards the realization of an object which is of such a nature as makes it both sure and worthy of possession, not alone to the individual, but, by means of individuals, to all. This ideal, which Theosophy has ever upheld before the world, is a Universal Brotherhood, based upon a full conviction of man’s spiritual origin, a knowledge of his present needs and the nature of the means which make for progress, and a firm belief in man’s final destiny to conscious spiritual perfection; a conception which is primarily inclusive of self-emancipation, and ultimately fulfilled in universal love. And by its light the erstwhile inefficacy of much goodwill shall find direction swift and sure as the shafts of Perseus in the dawn !

Walter R. Old, F.T.S.

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