HPB-SB-8-159

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vol. 8, p. 159

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

vol. 8 (September 1878 - September 1879)

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eng • рус

< Traces of Low in the Appearances of Spirits Embodied and Unembodied (continued from page 8-158) >

must take a new departure. Their mental estimates have been changed. They must construct a new scale. Their philosophy has been shattered. They must reconstruct a new scheme from new experience. Their religion, in its external form, has been modified, shaken, shattered, perhaps annihilated. They must look for another system. They must seek, if haply they may find a truer, nobler faith, suited to the greater light that is in them. Whether that system be one already existent, or whether it be evolved from the necessities of the yearning spirit within, or whether it be suggested in germ by the ever-watchful guardian, and moulded by the pressure of circumstances; or whether, like the holy city, the New Jerusalem, it descend out of heaven from God, with a beauty not of earth, and a Divine adaptation to extraordinary needs, such as was the voice of inspiration to the prophet of old, all this will depend chiefly on idiosyncrasy.

But in some way, and at some crisis in the experience, all earnest thinkers, children of the new dispensation, who come within the sphere of this spiritual influence, will be driven to correlate their facts with a philosophy, and with some form of religion. To these it will matter little, once they have grasped the phenomena and made them their own, whether they are ever represented. The external system, the concrete system, typified by the phenomena, may die. Nay, it may be in some cases, the Pauline analogy will be true. It will not be quickened except it die; but dying, it will bear abundant fruit. That which is of the earth, earthy, must give place to the reign of spirit, and the physical be superseded by the spiritual, in just such sort as the physical body, dead and buried, is replaced by the resurrection body of the new life.

Now, some of us have reached this place where two roads diverge. Some of us, I say, for we must not expect that there will ever come a time when the simplest and most elementary phenomena will not be necessary to some, aye, to many for whom they form the only adit to spiritual knowledge. For some, I verily believe, during the whole period of their bodily life, these phenomena, appealing as they do to the bodily sense, will be as essential as the daily meal to the physical system. The members of the one body have varied needs, and the wise agencies of the all-wise Father have various ways of satisfying them.

But for some of us the time has come, by a beautiful and orderly evolution, when the cry for spiritual enlightenment is bearing its fruit. The husk is being cast aside, because the time of germination has come, and it is the spring-time of spirit.

This has been very clear from the tone of the papers that have lately been read here, and especially from the correspondence that they have elicited in the Spiritualist.

The papers which Mr. Harrison, Miss Kislingbury, and I have lately read here have been concerned with the action of embodied and unembodied, or, perhaps, disembodied spirit. I spoke of the action of disembodied spirit through a medium, Mr. Harrison of the action of unembodied spirit without a medium, and Miss Kislingbury of the rarer and less-known action of the embodied human spirit.

Can we discern any underlying law that governs these phenomena? Miss Kislingbury described some of the phenomena which she recorded as apparently objectless. (I do not profess to quote her exact words.) They were, as I may say, the vagaries of a wandering spirit, in some cases at least.

Perhaps some light may be thrown upon such phenomena by the community of sensation which has been observed in the case of those between whom there is a strong natural or induced rapport, such as that which exists in the case of persons twin-born, and between a powerful mesmeriser and his subject. Dr. Passavant records such a case of sympathy between a sister and her twin-brother. She was suddenly seized with unaccountable horror, followed by a strange convulsion which, the doctor said, resembled the struggles and sufferings or a person in drowning. Her brother, then abroad, was drowned at that precise time, as was afterwards ascertained. There the accident of birth provided the intimate rapport.

The same phenomenon is frequently observed in the case of a mesmeriser and his patient.

[Transeorp. Action. Human Nature, July 1877, p. 297.]

In the cases recorded by Miss Kislingbury it may be that there was a magnetic rapport between the persons of whom she speaks. Strong community of feeling, identity of interest, an interblending of the personality might set up conditions in which the astral spirit might make itself temporarily manifest. The link is often too subtle for us to discover; but I believe that we shall find a link in all cases. None of these things are objectless. It is that we are too dense to discover the rationale.

Nothing, indeed, is more curious than the strange links of attraction that we can discover. The depths of the nature when stirred seem to cloud the spiritual faculties and to defeat the desired object by the very intensity of the forces that are set in action, but causes the most trivial will operate when the power of transcorporeal action is present.

There is a familiar story of a cook in the Sister’s House at Ebersdorf, whose double was constantly seen by the herbed, her natural body being in the kitchen, when she wanted some herb for her stews. “There you were again by the onion-bed” was a standing joke against her. Her mind, directed to a very trivial matter, caused an apparition of herself to be seen, and that, apparently, by a number of persons.

This same projection of thought, intensified by mental anxiety, has, in many authenticated cases, produced an apparition. Dr. Kerner (in his Blatter aus Prevost) records such a case.

[Transcorp. Action. Human Nature, July 1877, p. 298.]

We have then got thus far.

1. There is an observable community of sensation in the case of some persons such as twins.

2. Where the power of disengaging the spiritual body exists either naturally or by development, very simple causes will set it in action.

3. This power is intensified by any mental anxiety.

This transcorporeal action exists with much frequency during sleep.

Sir Humphrey Davy records such a case of himself. He was in bed asleep, and dreamed that he was ill in Italy. The details were most vivid—the room, furniture, his nurse, a young girl whose features he remembered distinctly. He thought no more of it, but the details were imprinted -on his mind. Some years after he was actually taken ill while travelling in Italy; he did occupy the very room he had seen in his dream or vision, and was nursed by the very same young woman whose features he remembered so well.

We must all know or have read cases in which the spirit, liberated during the sleep of the body, remembers more or less perfectly what it then experiences. In this category come all the cases of prophetic dreams and warnings which, however little we may be able to explain them, are too numerous to put aside as coincidences.

Cases of activity of spirit outside of the sleeping body present less difficulty, it may be admitted, than do those equally authenticated cases where the body is active as well as the spirit, but in different spheres of action. Many such cases are within my knowledge, and they are to me inexplicable, except on the hypothesis of a sub-division of consciousness, or of the control of the body by an external spirit, or, alternatively, of the personation of the spirit of the individual whose apparition is recognised by another spirit. Unless we admit a sub-division of consciousness, an external agency must be postulated.

We go one step further, then.

4. This power exists naturally and frequently during sleep.

Many recorded cases also point to its action during abnormal states of the medium.

Judge Edmunds records that a circle at New York used regularly to evoke the, spirit of the medium then sitting at a circle in Boston, and obtain communication from him, and vice versa. His daughter, in certain abnormal states, had the power of projecting her spirit. So had Mrs. Tappan, and Mrs. E. Hardinge Brittain, and other mediums of my acquaintance. It would seem that one note of mediumship is the facility with which the spiritual body is disengaged from the trammels of the physical body, and that in a high degree of development the spirit suffers no lack or cessation of consciousness.

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