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HPB-SB-14-32: Difference between revisions
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| style="text-align:center; width:50%;" | {{Style S-HPB SB. Restored|LIG}}HT. | |||
| style="text-align:right; width:25%;" | [September 16, 1882. | |||
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| author = Podmore, Frank | | author = Podmore, Frank | ||
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| source title = | | source title = Light | ||
| source details = | | source details = v. 2, No. 88, September 9, 1882 | ||
| publication date = | | publication date = 1882-09-09 | ||
| original date = | | original date = | ||
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... | {{Style S-HPB SB. HPB note|1=Extracts from a long letter, answered<br>by {{Style S-Lost|…}} on page 416 {{Style S-Lost|…}}<ref name="editor-blue-note-32">Probably in HPB’s handwriting. This note is written vertically in the left margin, with a long linking stroke. Two passages remain illegible.<!-- HANDWRITING-ATTRIBUTION-RECHECK --></ref>|2=left}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Archivist note|1=• • • •<ref name="editor-dots-32">Dark dots have been added before the opening words of this extract; they are not printed in the original letter. The writer has not been identified.<!-- HANDWRITING-ATTRIBUTION-RECHECK --></ref>}} And yet I had thought that the issues in hand were plainly stated; that it must be obvious to all that my lance was levelled, not against Miss Wood as a medium, but against Mr. Collingwood as her champion. Indeed, I had stated categorically more than once that I brought, and intended to bring, no charge against the medium herself; nor only so, but I expressly, and in set terms, disclaimed beforehand the imputation of general scepticism which has been brought against me by more than one correspondent. <u>They say that there is no surer way of deceiving the subtle oriental mind than to tell the direct truth. Have Madame Blavatsky and those direful Brothers so far corrupted our Western simplicity that we must say the same of English Spiritualists?</u><ref name="editor-underlining-32">These two sentences are underlined in blue pencil. The writer has not been identified.<!-- HANDWRITING-ATTRIBUTION-RECHECK --></ref> I am as badly off as if I had propounded a new system of transcendental philosophy. I might almost exclaim with the dying Hegel, “There is but one man who understands me”—the editor of “{{Style S-Small capitals|Light,}}” to wit. | |||
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| style="text-align:left;" | London, Sept. 1st. | |||
| style="text-align:right;" | {{Style S-Small capitals|Frank Podmore.}} | |||
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<center>4, Ave Maria-lane, {{Style S-HPB SB. Restored|London, and all Booksellers.}}<ref name="editor-notice-fragment-32">This partly covered line belongs to the newspaper’s printed notice above “Letters on Theosophy.” Its obscured ending is restored from the same issue.</ref></center> | |||
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.. | {{Style P-Title|LETTERS ON THEOSOPHY.}} | ||
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{{Style P-Subtitle|From an Anglo-Indian to a London Theosophist.}} | |||
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{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|14-33}} | <center>No. II.</center> | ||
<p style="margin:0; padding-left:2em; text-indent:-2em;">[The impressive letter which follows conveys in language of admirable clearness what some Spiritualists at any rate have dimly thought of. I at least have long since thought that the facilities for communication provided by public circles were of very doubtful benefit to those attracted by them, and have contrasted them in my own mind with the seasons of quietude and meditation during which ''les esprits souffrants'' come and ask for prayer. I know more than one medium who devotes daily time to such work. Almost the first Spirit that manifested to me was that of a suicide. The advice I received was—You had better keep clear of suicides, ''both for their sake'' and your own. And the thought—I may say the knowledge—that crimes of various hues, drunkenness, lust, greed of all kinds, are directly fostered and suggested by human Spirits who thus gratify their own vicious inclinations is very familiar to me. I have repeatedly sought opportunity to enforce it. But nowhere that I can remember have I seen what I believe to be true knowledge, “necessary for these times,” more clearly stated than in this letter. It is a relief to dwell on the concluding words which affirm so plainly the writer’s conviction that this which carries to a thoughtful mind conviction of genuineness on its face is the authorised and authoritative teaching of those who ''know'', and do not merely ''speculate.''—“{{Style S-Small capitals|M. A. (Oxon.)}}”]</p> | |||
I have said that risks are connected with the practice of ordinary mediumship which no Spiritualists have yet thought of as far as I know, that is to say, for, of course, broad statements of that nature must be given with all reasonable reserve. But, at all events, it is exceedingly improbable that they have been thought of, for they hinge on to facts connected with life after death, known only to occult science, and now in process of being given out to the world in clear, intelligible language for the first time, I am assured. The risks of which I have now to speak affect, not the living people who take part in séances, but the disembodied entities with which they come into communication. | |||
I have already recalled to your recollection our previous information about the ordinary course of events on the dissolution at death, of the bonds which unite that congeries of principles which go to make up the complete living human being. The “shells” are the barely intelligent disintegrating ''reliquiæ'' of human beings sufficiently elevated in the scale of existence to have taken away with them into a state of spiritual preparation their best attributes. Besides the shells, there are shells ''plus'' the complete animal souls of very depraved ex-human beings whose spiritual principle has escaped from association with the personality for ever, taking nothing away—in other words, leaving all that the creatures possessed in the way of a soul still to wander about the earth—for a time. But besides these again there is a third sort of disembodied entities, also ex-human beings, to be considered. These are victims of suicide and of sudden violent deaths. Anyone who will thoughtfully consider their case can hardly fail to see that in a world governed by rule and law, by affinities working out their natural results in that deliberate way which Nature likes, the case of a person dying by a sudden death overtaking him at a time when all his principles were firmly united and ready to hold together for twenty, forty, or sixty years, whatever the natural remainder of his life would be, may very probably be somehow different from that of a person who by natural processes of decay finds himself, when the vital machine stops, readily resolvable into his own principles, which, in their turn, are each prepared to travel their several ways. Nature, always fertile in analogies, at once illustrates the idea by shewing us an unripe and a ripe fruit, from one of which the inner stone will come away as cleanly and easily as a hand from a glove, while from the unripe fruit the stone can only be torn with difficulty, half the pulp clinging to its surface. Now, in the case of the sudden accidental death, or of the suicide, the stone has to be torn from the unripe fruit. There is no question here about the moral blame which may attach to the act of suicide. Probably in the majority of cases such moral blame does attach to it, but that will work out its consequences with the entity concerned in the future, we may depend upon it, whatever happens as to the immediate difficulty the person committing suicide may find in the process of getting himself thoroughly and wholesomely dead. This difficulty is manifestly just the same whether a person kills himself, or is killed in the heroic discharge of duty, or dies the victim of an accident over which he has had no control whatever. | |||
Now, the victims of accident and suicide ''can communicate'' with us through mediums, and that which communicates is the real entity of the once living man. They have to remain in the earth’s atmosphere (in most cases), for those affinities are not yet established which would carry them beyond it, and divide their essential attributes one from another in the natural manner. In other words, that particular wave of life-evolution which developed their existence must run on to its shore. But the less they are disturbed during this period of waiting the better for them, and if people only understood what they were doing, it would be little less than sin and cruelty to tempt them (by the cultivation of the lower sort of mediumship) to get half back into the living world and create all sorts of fresh obstacles to embarrass their progress towards that spiritual regeneration which, however delayed, in their case must precede their next active existence. | |||
I find it difficult to explain a condition of things which I have come fully to understand, in spite of its queer and unusual aspect, for want of a previous acquaintance on your part with the Occult doctrine (the actual state of the facts, that is to say, as ''known'' to the adepts, and affirmed by them with as much confidence as the motions of the planets are affirmed by astronomers to be what they are) regarding the mode in which Nature rewards and punishes her children for their acts in this life. Roughly speaking, our acts invest our inner Egos with affinities for good and evil, in a manner which, when those Egos come to be born again, draws them into union with happiness or suffering. Obviously, in ordinary cases, the account is closed at death, and the balance-sheet made out in due time. But the class of people with whom we are at present concerned—the victims of accident and suicide—are ''not'', as I have said, thoroughly and wholesomely dead. They are, so far, still alive, and so far still attached to this earth, that their accounts of good and evil are ''not'' closed. The idea is perfectly scientific, when looked into earnestly, though it is susceptible of the very popular and mundane form of expression just employed. The separation between the principles has not taken place; the inner Ego is still complete, and capable of going on engendering affinities. | |||
There need be no difficulty for the imagination in regard to the prolonged complexity of these affinities. Remember the atom of oxygen has certain affinities for atoms of hydrogen, other affinities for chlorine, others for nitrogen, for iron, for potassium, and so on to the end of the chapter. What is it in the infinitely minute atom which carries with it the certainty that, put in contact with other atoms at any future time, it will choose to unite itself with such an one and not with such another? How can one small atom “carry all it knows” as regards the innumerable varying characteristics of all other bodies in Nature? The mystery is not really greater than the mystery of those accumulated affinities which the human Ego engenders during the active life, and which occult philosophy gives one convenient name to,—''Karma.'' By-the-bye, I hope no critic will give himself the trouble to remark that occult philosophy has borrowed this expression from Buddhism. Buddhism, as known to the outer world, has borrowed it from occult philosophy,—and Buddhism, as known to the ''inner'' world, is of the same substance as occult philosophy. | |||
When ''les esprits souffrants'' I am describing—to borrow a phrase from the French Spiritualists, though I do not think the French Spiritualists have yet realised exactly to what class of entities the phrase applies—find themselves offered that partial return to life that mediumship affords them, they are tempted to ''overload their Karma'', so to speak, to assuage their thirst for life,{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|14-33}} | |||
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<gallery widths=300px heights=300px> | |||
Light v.02 n.88 1882-09-09.pdf|page=3|Light, v. 2, No. 88, September 9, 1882, p. 403 | |||
Light v.02 n.89 1882-09-16.pdf|page=4|Light, v. 2, No. 89, September 16, 1882, p. 412 | |||
</gallery> | |||