Telepathy, Or, The Science of Thought Transference
J. C. F. Grumbine
First published in 1910.
This online edition was created and published by Global Grey on the 30th December 2021.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Telepathy - A Function And Power Of Thought Under A New Name
Chapter 2. Thought Further Elaborated
Chapter 4. The Mystery Of The Origin Of Thought And Ideas
Chapter 5. The Brain And The Mind Superior Coherers
Chapter 6. Aspiration And Inspiration As Thought Generators
Chapter 7. The Hypothesis Of Thought Transference
Chapter 8. Psychic Unfoldment And Human Destiny Under Telepathic Law
Chapter 9. Spiritualism, Excarnate Spirit Thought And Telepathy
Chapter 10. Is A Telepathic Code Possible And Practical? Some Rules For Experimental Work
Chapter 1. Telepathy - A Function And Power Of Thought Under A New Name
Any function, faculty, sense or power of the soul which is not known to science may be termed occult. This does not imply that it is unknowable or that it is unthinkable, but that it is at present, so far as science or experimental knowledge is concerned, outside of the field of hypothetical or known causality. In fact, action or force, which as yet is traceable to no sentient cause is regarded as occult. The word by derivation means hidden, concealed, dark, recondite. All supernormal operations of the ego, which are also supersentient, are occult because the usual scientific method of explaining the normal phenomena of the mind cannot apply to them. Psychology cannot even admit them as evidence until they are proved to be facts. When once the facts are admitted, then while it is still a difficult matter to classify them, these same facts become a matter of profound investigation. Their source of action, the law of their nature and the cause of their existence may not be known, but science endeavors to bring them within the sphere of its inductive method. Unless this is or can be done, science will remain agnostic concerning them.
Nature and human nature are full of mysteries despite the wonderful and seemingly inexhaustible revealments of science. These very mysteries keep science busy; and in the end who can say whether she will not so uncover the so-called occult,— even make what now appears supernormal or supernatural the simplest of all simple facts,— as to cause the word occult to become obsolete? In science there can be nothing hidden. The word supernormal simply means that which is above the normal and not that which is unknowable. The word occult includes many very illusive phenomena,— phenomena which though recognized by scientists as facts, yet seem to baffle all explanation. Certain metaphysical phenomena called psychical, with which Spiritualism deals, will some day cease to be mysteries because other human powers or sources of knowledge not now recognized by modern psychology will become operative, and these powers or sources of knowledge will enable man to verify facts from pseudo-facts in the outlying fields of psychical research. As Baron Reichenbach, through the aid of sonnambules, distinguished the delicate auras of mineral crystals not visible to the naked eyes, so by the exercise of these new but as yet unemployed powers of the soul, science will demonstrate what now resembles a fairy tale, so incredible is the fact itself. If supernormal facts can thus be substantiated, the inductive process of science will be given a range of comprehensiveness not hitherto recognized by the modern or ancient schools.
The eye and ear for the vibrations of light and sound, the mind for perception and sensation, but these supernormal powers for the deeper, etherial and more spiritual phenomena, which might here be named noumena, which point us to the hidden trail of Divinity as it spreads over the universal pathway of the inner, higher, diviner or spiritual life. Thus armed, science can prove each new step free of that cant which sometimes passes for knowledge. Demarkations between nescience and science will be clearly defined, while what in the popular and theological mind is designated natural and supernatural, will no longer appear eternal parallels. The exercise of one’s supernormal powers will gradually strengthen the validity of the deductive method of reasoning, and the deductive and inductive methods will be accepted as arms of one and the same science or knowledge, of which modern inductive science is the right arm, taking hold of everything on the plane of the senses, while modern deductive science will be the left arm, taking hold of everything on the plane of the supernormal or super-sentient. Limited and one-sided indeed is either branch of science; for science, though regarded as empirical, has always been the religious method, and it is empirical only in so far as it theorizes and hypothecates what cannot be proved by the scientific method here set forth. Since psychical researchers (the Psychical Research Society) have reasonably proved the facts of the supernormal life, it only remains for them or for any independent investigator to show that these facts are the effects of the operation of supernormal powers which anyone who knows how may exercise. The religious life will not then seem an anomaly or a mystery as men of science have always regarded it. It will be more than either a credulity or a superstition. The mystical will not hang in the air as a something which has no place in the category of facts. Nor will the mythological and symbological be cast aside in our progressive age as atavistic relics of a primitive ignorance which has no meaning in the larger human order of civilization.
The word spiritual must here be defined. It does not mean less but more than material. It means what matter by derivation implies: the mother of form, from mer, mu, or M, symbol of water, the source of life, all matter issuing, as the ancients taught, from H2O (water), which is the mother-principle of organic, physical life. Spirit cannot be defined by any of its forms, nor can it be known by any of its expressions or manifestations. These are appearances or phenomena, and as such form conditions and create functions for the spirit’s operations. But as Paul, the Christian apologist wrote, spirit must be realized by spirit; that is, evidences which are only spiritual enable one to demonstrate and become conscious of spirit.
The ego, functioning on the sentient or sensuous or on the super-sentient plane, becomes aware of itself as such. The exercise of powers will not do this alone, although it may help. Pragmatism as exploited by the new school of psychology, which teaches that action is the measure of the life or divinity of the spirit, does not disprove what is here taught. For realization is the spirit’s highest action, which for the lack of a more spiritual word must mean the very opposite of action as experimentally or inductively conceived. In this sense realization and consciousness pretty nearly mean one and the same, if by consciousness is meant not mind or a collection of thoughts and experiences, nor the mere self consciousness, but the state of the spirit which all experiences of the life of the spirit imply or reveal. Broadly put, the spirit is to matter what the ego is to its form of manifestation. How spirit evolves matter into organic forms is not here a subject of discussion, but that the one is the cause and the other the sequential effect is what deductive science can and will demonstrate. In truth, inductive and deductive science is so permeated with intuitive, mathematical propositions that the one can hardly be separated from the other. In the end, when both are allowed the widest latitude, their distinctive differences will dissolve and both will be what each should be — the oracle of truth. It is here declared that the deductive method of science will soon prove that the occult is no longer outside the sphere of science, but is only awaiting the searchlight of its bolder genius.
The recent admissions of the old school of psychologists that the supernormal facts of life can not longer be denied, has made it easier for the more advanced students of psychical research to speculate on the spiritual hypothesis. It would be rash to say that these supernormal facts are accepted by all scientists as evidences of the action of the spirit. The presumption, however, is that no other hypothesis can or does adequately explain them. The spiritual hypothesis is entertained while the facts are accepted. Facts are so stubborn that they force acceptance long before any rational theory is advanced to cover or explain them.
One of the new theories growing out of the study of these facts is one touching the origin of thought which also lies at the basis of the science of telepathy. The theory is not new in the sense that it is a recent discovery, but rather it is new in its deep but novel application to facts.
Thought was once regarded as a secretion of the brain, the result of the impact of sensation. The mind, even the ego, was regarded as the result of this natural creative process. No one thought that there was anything divine or spiritual in the process. It originated, said the materialist, as the perfume of the rose, light from the sun, atmosphere or vapor from the sea and the land. There was nothing a priori or causal in its creation. Its involution and evolution, synchronous and simultaneous with the existence of the life or germ, were only natural and not spiritual products. Thus materialists apotheosized matter as the beginning and end of creation. All this is now passing away with the deeper understanding of the supernormal life.
The deductive theory explains that thought, while correlated with the brain and its activities, and matter the object of sensation, has its source in what is called for lack of a better name, the subliminal mind,—that portion of the mind which is immaterial, which is not the result of the sensational or objective life at all; and this leads to the ideal or spiritual origin of thought and mind. There is a spiritual as well as a physical basis for thought. The correspondence is so apparent that objective and subjective life must mean more than it once meant under a materialistic system. Thought is both objective (sensuous) and subjective (super-sensuous or idealistic), normal (a sense perception) and supernormal (a divine) idea. The one is the manifestation or form of the other. Both centre in and become a fact of the self consciousness. And in the field of the mind, both sentient and super-sentient, thought is expressed. The correspondence between the normal and the supernormal will be made an exhaustive study when psychologists realize, not only that it exists, but also that its existence furnishes the mystic link between the hitherto unexplainable facts of Spiritualism. For when thought can be traced from spirit to matter, from the ego to the brain, from the centre where Divinity, self creative and self existent, expresses and manifests all that is less than itself and apparently contradictory to itself, to the circumference, where forms are made up to vehicle the spirit, ego and Divinity, what a marvelous sphere of vision will open up! The spiritual hypothesis will revolutionize the canons of the old psychology.
Action there is in and of consciousness, but not the same kind of action; and here is where the word action has been very misleading. The action of matter is not the same kind or degree of action as that of the mind, nor is the action of the mind the same kind or degree as that of consciousness; and this means, that what is the passivity of the one or the activity of the other, differ as the silence from action; and more than this, what are the phenomena of the one are not the phenomena of the other, although both are the product of the same power. This is the point at issue. Vibrations differ in this respect of motion. Such is the law that phenomena occur which apparently contradict each other. Here is where “ The System of Philosophy Concerning Divinity ” clearly defines the relation of spirit to matter in this important respect. For unless the exact correspondence is understood between vibrations and the functions known which produce them, psychology will at best remain empirical.
Telepathy deals with thought; therefore the important question about thought is, how does it originate? If it can be shown that thought is not a secretion of the brain, but has its origin in the soul, that it is not a product of the senses but of the spirit in expression, then it will not be asking too much to consider thought as an immaterial or spiritual substance which can be employed independently of the brain by the soul through the control and use of its supernormal powers or functions. This must follow. There is no middle ground. If all experiences as all modes of action of the brain depend on thought, and thought itself is immaterial in its origin, then to use thought as the soul now uses it, only more freely—that is, more independently, without contact with normal sense or faculty— is simply to take advantage of nature. Electricity is in the universe—but how to use it? A wire and battery solved the problem. Thought, like electricity, is in need of a sensitive wire and more sensitized brain through which it can run from pole to pole, but this wire must not be a gross, normal one. Ether waves are good conductors, and no doubt play an important part in the transmission of thought by telepathy. But mind can be made to synchronize with mind, in spheres of thought, so as to produce the very phenomena required. This phase of the subject will be considered under its proper head.
Now as to the origin of thought, and its consequent nature, this much can be said. The impulsion from within the soul which leads to certain definite experiences is certainly an inspiration, mathematically ordered and arranged for each life in the sphere of its expression. How else is growth or unfoldment possible? This law or order of life makes progress more than a name. Even evolution is seen in a clearer light. Whatever history may show, it does not deny that the human race is led forward, under some such system of order as is here premised. The evidences are not always clear nor conclusive, because the cause of the superficial changes and the profound movements of the collective or mystic soul of the universe are not known, but when the life of the world is considered, then the programme of development will not appear either a coincidence or a chance. The human race, as Pythagoras and even the oldest Vedic philosophers of India maintained, is led, and this leading is by a system as inexorable as fate. It proves its Divinity in the evolvement of life, and like a flower, it unfolds in a rational, sequential order. This has often been remarked. Never has this fact been more apparent. From this impulsive beginning, the soul emerges into the light of day. Its activity follows the law of cause and effect. Life began to feel. This feeling became the basis of its creative and generative life—the seed of a vast and enormous psychic development. What but an inspiration guides and shapes man’s destiny from birth to death, from one incarnation to another, impelling him at first to use his senses, after the development of them, and afterward to think?
A simple metaphysical allegory will illuminate these abstruse statements. It was an allegory as popular in India and Persia as in Palestine and Egypt. It became the basis of Jewish mysticism as traditionally set forth in the Jewish Caballa. A god very much as a bird saw his image reflected in a clear surface; it might have been the air, or water, or its own consciousness. But the story goes that it fell in love with its own image. The confusion that followed explains the deepest problems of science and religion, known as ontology and eschatology—the beginning and end of things. Not being able to distinguish between the reality and the reflection, it chose the reflection, and so matter originated. Moses expressed the same truth in the reputed revelation of the Lord, who declared himself to be “I am that I am” If now, with the variety of phenomena called psychical, with which the Psychical Research Society deals, this allegory were applied to life, would not the law of reflection help one to understand the greater law of correspondence? The form in matter and mind is the reflection of what is within matter and mind. Who is the one reflected? Any one who is .looking out upon the expression or manifestation of life and is influenced or hypnotized by the reflection. Thus thought, like these ephemeral, excarnate spirit forms of Spiritualism, are but vortices of unreality, but such unreality as seem reality because of the hypnosis. Thus the senses deceive one as to the origin of thought itself.
Chapter 2. Thought Further Elaborated
Thought at first seems to be wholly objective, the product of materiality, the result of sensuous activity, and yet when the origin is perceived, it is but the form of the idea, which is its soul, and inspires to action. Aside from the other inferences growing out of psychical research and a profound understanding of Spiritualism, this one of the origin of thought is the most patent; for the spiritual hypothesis means this and only this, that there can be but one derivation of thought, and that is spiritual. The law by which this correspondence is accomplished may not be understood, but that it is operative is self-evident. How and why life should be thus involved and evolved is a mystery, but that astute men of science should fail to perceive this order of life is perhaps the greater mystery.
This much can be offered as proof of what is here declared. Experience of any kind is induced by an impulsion from within the soul. Why or what this impulsion is, is not always clear. That it exists is evidenced by certain thoughts and feelings which arise in the mind simultaneously with a sensation from the physical world. Some philosophers claim that ideas are causal to thoughts and so relate themselves to thoughts, which are their recognized forms or bodies. Be this as it may, there is no question but that in the sphere of what is nominally termed the consciousness ideas arise from seemingly occult sources, presenting to the mind an inspiration which, to say the least, makes the external sensation or mental impression intelligible. Some go so far as to say that this very inspiration makes sensation possible.
Plato, following Socrates, declared for the innateness of ideas, that ideas are born not of sensation, but from within the mind, from a reservoir not mind but a source above or within mind. This might be the subliminal sphere of the ego, in which it functions when in the dream or subjective world, or when it realizes or contemplates itself apart from its experiences or its sensuous life; hence the deeper meanings of the words inspiration (breath, or life or impulsion from within the soul) and. intuition, or knowledge, which is a priori.
It is the doing of the doer which inspires thought, and it is that which is done which makes the fact — the experience. That doing begins, as has been hinted, in an impulsion from within. The mind, once a simple and potential function, takes on or assumes the complex and manifest forms of its expressions. The mind itself is virgin until touched by the generative power of ideas. This definition is not inconsistent with the idea that the mind is both an object and subject of evolution because it makes consciousness a uniform state of the spirit, co-extensive with and universal in all forms of life, conditioning all modes which differentiate it, the mind becoming an infinite series of modes, a reservoir of thoughts, to which the consciousness is made to minister as a searchlight is flashed over a large area of dark landscape, illuminating what was hitherto invisible, or when, to be more exact, the I light of thought, is the result of a particular sensation. Few philosophers and fewer psychologists entertain this a priori, divine state of consciousness, and for the reason that its evidences cannot be made sensuous.
Of course, the point of view has a great deal to do with an understanding of this arrangement, some men of science ignoring and even repudiating the spiritual hypothesis on a priori grounds of prejudice and ignorance. But now that the facts of the supernormal life are so generally accepted by men of science, the propositions here set forth will not seem unreasonable nor untenable. The time has passed when facts will be winked at. They not only force recognition, but they demand explanation.
Briefly, the spiritual hypothesis relative to the origin of thought is this: there can be no thought which has not its origin in the supernormal man, and the supernormal man is that part of him which is the higher, inner correspondent of his physical nature. It is more than the dream consciousness and the subjective mind. It is not the distinctively spiritual part of man, but the psychic in contra-distinction to the spiritual or exclusively physical. It can be explained by the word potentiality as applicable to the soul’s dualistic life,— that which is supernormal but so involved in the soul as to allow either or both to appear, under certain conditions, in the one human life. The excarnate spirit can manifest itself as incarnate, and the incarnate can manifest itself as excarnate because of spirit; that is, spirit by conforming to conditions, can appear in this dualistic form. To manifest at all on the plane of matter, the man must enter the subjective life before he can appear objective, and to transcend , that plane of the senses he must pass through the objective to appear on the subjective. The dream consciousness lies between the objective and the subjective mind and life, and this is made evident in sleep. But the supernormal sphere of the man is that part of him that controls the normal. This is saying a good deal, but a careful observation of the facts of life will show that one’s education is altogether on this inspirational and progressive scale. A child, a youth, a mature man sees, perceives and understands what is on his plane of experience. It is a geometrical allotment. He cannot transcend it. All that appears within the visible plane his eyes may catch, but he himself does not fully, adequately realize it. It does not enter into himself as an integral part of him and his life. That which leads him on, that is the inspiration of his thought; and it is this thought which becomes the basis of all of his experiences. Can the senses become useful at all, except as they become the servant not so much of outward, material excitation, but of the spirit? That is what these supernormal and abnormal phenomena through mediumship and the independent exercise of one’s psychical powers imply.
A seer is one who uses the supernormal powers independently of the senses. A medium is one who uses his potential, psychical powers, miscalled mediumship, abnormally. The result is the same, but the use of power is not the same. And it is because of spirit, and not mind, in the segregated sense, it is because of the spirit operating through its supernormal and abnormal use or expression of power that the inference is made that thought is a free agent in so far as it can be made to do the will of the spirit. As form implies life, as phenomena suggests reality, as the senses hint at powers greater than themselves, so spiritism implies Spiritualism.
If the subtle relation existing between ideality (idea) and imagination (image) be examined, an understanding of this law of correspondence can be had. Very little is known of the resources of both the ideality and the imagination. In fact, very little is known of the subtle relation of these two faculties to the senses and to the spirit; that is, their relation to the objective and subjective life. Ideality seems to lie on the great divide between the normal and supernormal life, and like a torch it casts a light outward and inward. Imagination, the seat of the form of the idea, called the image, holds a dual relation to the ideality, in that it is both creative and representative, manifesting the idea in a form and at the same time invoking the idea as though it were the ideality. The ideality presents the idea and, in a very occult way, affords a negative of the astral or spirit form, too elusive and spirituelle to appear before any of the normal faculties. That is why the ideality is the nexus between the normal and the supernormal life and powers. This is not denied by the old-school psychologists, but it is not accepted by them. However, if attention can be called to the fact of the relation, careful and painstaking investigation may prove what is here stated. All this is fully elaborated in the work “Clairvoyance.”[1]
The idea, generated in the ideality, is as spiritual as it is possible to conceive thought. It is experience which helps one to realize the sublime correspondence of the divine and human order, between the object (image) and subject (idea). And he who fails to perceive the wisdom in the end which experience subserves, who is ignorant of the uses of experience, who goes through the routine of experience without realizing what .it is for, certainly fails to conjoin the two forms of one and the same spirit. Thus evil and good, though opposite in their effects, nevertheless subserve the spirit in this respect and show that in the working out of the problem of life evil, so called, and good become, like electricity, the opposite poles of one and the same force. Experience is the end which both subserve.
The correspondence between the spiritual and the material is shown in the delicate relation which Nature maintains between the supernormal and the normal in the use one makes of the ideality and the imagination. But this use and relationship are but hints of the exact and unchanging correspondence which the physical sustains to the mental and the mental sustains to the spiritual in the operation of all of one’s powers. Thus it is evident that when it is said that “I” see, one should bear in mind that the eye as a sense and an organ could not and does not see of itself.
These statements have been reiterated again and again, but the average and self-satisfied psychologists who ride the hobby of materialism to death have laughed at the proposition, as though supernormal powers have no relation, in this respect, to normal ones. It will be conceded sooner or later that the “ I” of the spirit has the prerogative to express itself on the normal as well as the supernormal planes, and when these facts of telepathy, clairvoyance and Spiritualism are accounted for on a basis which proves what is here declared, the spiritual hypothesis will not seem absurd.
The word education as popularly conceived and taught is a perversion of the original meaning of the word. Education as modernly conceived is commercial and therefore useful, but the man is no nearer the solution of the problem of life, so far as any such culture solves that problem for himself. The commercial aspects of education are not here disparaged, nor are the uses to which education is put undervalued. Education should do more than merely teach one to be useful; that is, how to make money. To lead out what is in one, to unfold the flower of the soul, is the supreme end of education; but that which grafts on the soul a semblance of development, a culture which is a veneer, is a hindrance rather than a benefit. Such culture often prejudices the worldly man to the higher uses of education — an education which the more serious learn to appreciate and prize. Experimental education is all important, yet the end of it is neither the results which are attained nor the illusive goals ' which are ever held before the mind. Education should have the spiritual hypothesis as its basis and end, without in any sense becoming ecclesiastical or making public schools parochial. The spiritual hypothesis is a scientific one. As such it claims attention. And unless it becomes the inspiration of the higher education, the supernormal powers will continue to lie dormant, or be entrusted to the few who will labor, as in the past, against the popular prejudices or the legal restraints of society.
Now when it is perceived that telepathy is the exercise of a supernormal power, and that it is not as some psychologists are trying hard to show, the action of the normal mind; that it is wholly subjective and not objective at all; that the brain plays the least part in its expression; that there is in it nothing which depends upon outward stimuli or excitation,— then something scientific can be done to formulate a system of telepathic communication. And so long as the origin of thought remains a mystery, or so long as thought itself is traced to a source other than spirit, or at least the higher vehicle of the spirit—the soul—telepathy will remain as the philosopher’s stone, a lost science. But if the origin and nature of thought are accepted as telepathic, that I is, if thought is found to be of super-physical origin, then psychological science will have a new basis on which the ' higher education can build an enduring civilization.
The spiritual world impinges on the material. Nay, more than this, the spiritual life permeates the material life and is at the roots of it, although the two seem so opposite to each other. For though the light is not the darkness, yet the darkness could not exist without the light; though the spirit is not matter, matter could not appear without spirit. Thought and feeling, sensational as they seem and are, have their roots in that which is super-sensational, that which is essentially not of the senses. Inspiration is to experience what an idea is to a thought, what consciousness is to mind. This mystical hemisphere of being is as real as its more demonstrative shadow and fits into it. To use metaphorical language, the spiritual world swings somewhere within or beyond midnight darkness and our dawn. To prove this, and that “the highest,” as Victor Hugo wrote, “is only attained through the high,” one must not delve in the depths of phenomena, forgetting what is above in the clear light, to find or try to find what is or was never there, but he must ascend the spiral staircase within himself until he finds within himself, above the clouds of the human senses, in the impalpable, superphysical world, the central spirit of his being.
Chapter 3. Inspiration
The evolutionist and reincarnationist find it equally interesting to synthesize the culture and wisdom of the ages and note, if possible, a law of life and civilization. Although the civilizations of nations manifest many unique and by no means similar or uniform phenomena, still the philosopher of history has never tired in hoping to find a static basis for the upward, onward development of the human race; nor has he been altogether deceived by the signs of progress. For there is not only an ordained, but a preordained destiny for the individual and the race, and this destiny is not always so conspicuous or obtrusive as to expose itself on the well-trodden highways of universal history. As geology proves that the earth is composed of many strata or layers of rocky formation, so human life is a digest of enormous experiences. Still the plan is never lost sight of, and man moves in a mysterious way to unfold and consummate a divine order. Teleology is after all translatable into eschatology.
The question of a divine ordination for earth and her inhabitants will be considered elsewhere as hinting at the interior nature and scheme of things. At present, it need but be mentioned that ignorance of such a mysterious plan largely prevails among those who today on the human side have complete control of affairs and who, in their zeal to be masters of fate, forget how man proposes and God disposes. They cannot prophesy in the sweep of evolution what the individual or collective soul of the human race is to be. And yet what man becomes is hinted at in protoplasm! But where and how? Science does not know!
The theory that electrical corpuscles which form by vibratory motion all organic matter of which nature is composed, and which by a few daring and ambitious scientists is made to account for the origin of thought and even of life or spirit itself, is the extreme view and speculation of a new materio-spiritualistic school. For the very opposite is the case— life, thought, mind, spirit, are causal of all vibration, and the forms and movements generically comprehended by electrical corpuscles. So that whatever changes take place in the material world and life, in the brain and mind of man, they are sequential to the operations of spirit.
Human development is a fact, and as a fact is a fruitful field of investigation. Man unfolds in a natural, rational and psychic order. An interval of interruption, a gap or a cataclysm, progressive, introgressive or retrogressive steps,— all these movements are integral units of the scheme of things, in which the worst or best that is in man is brought forward to declare the spirit. If man fails in the struggle of the survival of the fittest, that very defeat marks a victory, for death and failure on one plane of life mean growth, consciousness and success on another. The exchange is legitimate, and is explained by the word transmutation.
Now as man must objectify, or put into action, or experience whatever he feels (subjectifies), must, in short, put into his life or living whatever is potential within him, it follows that the impulsion or inspiration to do so is first from within, or springs from within the subjective world in response to the sensation from without. For instance, I see, that is, I am inspired or impelled to perceive or see only the thing or things brought by the sensation of light to me in the sphere of sight in response to that particular impulsion or inspiration. So it is with all sense perception. Hence the correspondence and correlation between a thought as the object of sense perception and sensation, and an idea as the subject of creative being. Therefore these sidelights on the nature of mental processes can be found useful in solving some of the psychological problems of human development.
Broadly speaking, that is, from a divine standpoint, mankind is led to receive only what it is prepared to perceive; and inspiration is adapted to man according to his need and capacity. Thus divine inspiration which in method is telepathic in its deduction (that is, it follows an alignment or a sympathy established in souls between two polarized subjects or objects or an object and subject in electro-magnetic affinity), responds in each soul to a call from without by the plan hinted at or declared in this book.
Such is the nature and spirit of divine inspiration that, like electricity, it passes by friction or excitation between matter and spirit, one the negative and the other the positive pole, the mind itself being a coherer for thought very much as the brain is a coherer for sensation or action, the inspiration making light in the one case or heat in the other as the need appears. Of course, everyone knows that thought is not electricity. The law of its, action, however, is similar. It diffuses itself as a universal medium of light throughout the animal kingdom. It need not be said that light is but one of the important forms of its manifestation, yet as light emanates when thought touches or passes through the brain certain materialistic scientists have supposed that it had no existence separate from brain. The fact is that what the consciousness is to the mind, that divine inspiration is to thought. Thought is more than the mind. The mind, like thought, is a form of consciousness and subject to change. Consciousness is always the same.
The brain might be called the dynamo of the mind, as the mind, in a higher sense, might be termed the etherial dynamo of consciousness. Both are functional. Through consciousness God, or what may conveniently be termed spirit, or the self within every one of us, ignites the spark of inspiration which generates thought. The thought is perceived as occupying special and temporal forms or limitations. This naturally follows through the sensory because of sensation, sensation becoming the medium of the flow or current of thought outward through the sensory to the particular object to which it is polarized.
That all thought expresses itself through this mode, that divine inspiration itself is operating by the same mode on a higher plane, is patent to any critical investigator of mental or psychological phenomena. Divine inspiration, like ether or electricity, diffuses itself through and permeates all spheres of potential and manifest intelligence, its appearance signifying its presence under conditions which manifest it. But it is causal to, rather than a resultant of, experience and so makes evil its negative and alternative possible.
The mode by which divine inspiration conduces to thought is a seemingly complex one, when the variety of thoughts and experiences are taken into account; but in fact, it is a simple one when the machinery through which it operates is understood.
That truth in the form of divine inspiration or leading should be relative to human experience or its negation in human life, should touch it on all sides, by a thinking or doing which appears to be opposite, as in case of error or evil, is not at all strange; nor should such a claim be dismissed as impossible or even regarded as a violation of the law. For how else is life to realize its Divinity or mankind its apotheosis?
Experience is the issue in which Divinity is involved, although Divinity cannot be said to be either an object or a subject of creation or evolution, for it is self-existent. Yet by experience life realizes everything which is not itself, to find at the end of involution and evolution, education and knowledge, culture and civilization, what it is, was and will be—its Divinity, that is, God.
But the mystic formula, if put numerically, is one of addition before it is one of subtraction, or it is a subtraction by addition. Differentiation and variety are modes of division of the one, eternal spirit, or life, which, if added together as an infinity of parts, compel the alternative, a withdrawal of all fractions by subtraction, to realize unity through the one. As color is involved in light, so thought is concealed in divine inspiration. How, is, indeed, the mystery? It is by its mode of manifestation that thought is produced, and it is this mode which makes telepathy and thought transference possible.
Telepathy—which literally means, sympathy from afar—and thought transference—which is a psychic process (not organic) of conducting thought from one mind to another—are established upon the a priori mode of generating and transmitting thought by divine inspiration. If God or the self in each one inspires the soul from within and not from without, by a deductive rather than an inductive method, that inspiration is not organic but spiritual. Telepathy is a science of mental as well as spiritual processes of thought transference.
Visions and voices are so produced as to impinge on the mind from within the sphere of spirit, even though they relate to material things. They enter the atmosphere of human life, not by sense perception but from consciousness., of which the mind is a form. 1 he law is as exact as mathematics. These super-sensuous phenomena associate themselves with the soul's life. They satisfy its spiritual needs. They are involved in its destiny. They are no part of the dream world nor of the subjective life of the soul. They enter it as the light of Sirius enters our solar universe from a circle quite outside (in a mystic, inner sense) the sense world or the psychic, dualistic life. They are of the spirit—spiritual, and so float into the soul from within, and not because a product of mind or a product of experience.
This same principle which governs rudimental life in the form of the embryo or germ also governs thought; for thought is vital with life. Neither space nor time affects the action of the principle. They but comprehend the field of its phenomena.
A race is led or inspired as an individual. Collective peoples needing a uniform direction or inspiration receive it, despite their geographical location or their personal state. The wonderful, sublime part of it all is that as inspiration is no respecter of persons, and as it is an impersonal principle in the soul, each unit of intelligence receives precisely what it needs for its development, and receives it oftentimes, as is the case with gross numbers of men, unconsciously.
The mass of mankind think or do a certain thing unaware of the fact that they are automatically carrying out a prearranged—in fact, an ordained plan. The inevitable and inexorable enter into their wills, they know not how. They act and are acted upon. In fact, the only human freedom which is comprehensible is that expressed in the saying of Jesus, “ I am in the Father and the Father in me; the works that I do, I do not of myself.” And though the works of most men seem altogether in the interest of themselves, they platform an end higher and better than they know.
This law establishes a divine immanence which prophets have declared, and which is so interwoven in the scheme of life, that it is a difficult matter to say where divine inspiration ends and where human thought begins. It is too nice and fine a gradation for any but the highly idealistic or spiritual to realize. It can be said, however, that the process or mode of thought follows the order of divine inspiration, as effect follows cause. So it is not at all hard to accept the sovereign power of thought when one understands the sovereign power of inspiration.
As reflection gives to the shadow the form and outline of the thing reflected, so thought embodies inspiration. As it is below, so it is above, and as it is without, so it is within, with the difference only which marks the shadow as the reflection of the light, or thought conceived in the mind as the shadow of divine inspiration until it is realized as that inspiration.
If the student can realize that thought is thus created within him from the inspiration of the highest self (God) to the lower self, or from THE SELF to the segregated personal HlM-self or HER-self; that no thought is born in the mind save as it issues from this celestial matrix; that he has the power to invoke inspiration and understand or know each step of the way, the source and cause, the reason and lesson of experience,—then will he use thought as the creator uses inspiration and not as a mere consumer; then will he make thought the means of his liberation from the sense world, from disease, poverty, pain and death, because by it he will unlock the door which leads to self mastery, to freedom, happiness, sovereignty.
Omnipotence and omniscience may yet become a human realization,—the very principle or law of life and living which he can consciously employ and express.
Chapter 4. The Mystery Of The Origin Of Thought And Ideas
Anyone who realizes that consciousness in its pure essential nature has no definition nor annotation in time or space and who also becomes aware of the fact that the branches of mathematics known as algebra and geometry which have to do with time and space, begin and end with matter and mind, and therefore have nothing to do with the fourth dimension or the ether, for both matter and mind are phenomena of ether and spirit, the word telepathy will convey its particular and exact meaning.
What a ray of light is to the sun, that inspiration is to consciousness. The mode by which inspiration passes from mind to mind or from spirit to spirit is telepathy.
To aspire and meditate, to pray and spiritually concentrate, touch at once the secret spring of the spiritual universe and, by a direct appeal to this intelligent centre, whence all light and truth come, a response is brought.
True, the answer to a prayer or an inspiration is not a physical operation of the mind, and has no explication in natural causality. This is due to the fact that spirit is the cause and law of its own operations and results.
No scientist has yet satisfactorily explained what the ether is, or how it is the base or mother substance of matter, and yet the latest and most advanced school of scientists agrees with Professors Ramsey, Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge that vibration is the key of all chemical transformations and transmutations. In short, they teach that the resolution of ether into matter, and of matter into ether, is by the law of vibration, which science has not yet been able to define or explain.
So, to explain the response of the Divine Spirit to a human spirit by prayer, where a silent, supernormal and supersensuous cause is evoked to produce a normal and human result, a result which transpires in time and space, is impossible in terms of common experience or ordinary happenings, but that such seemingly supernatural results do take place, the facts of supernormal psychology and modern Spiritualism abundantly prove. It is possible that many of such strange occurrences as baffle science and derange the ordinary records of human history might yield, in rare cases, to the law of coincidence, were there such, but inasmuch as no experience can coincide with another, except as each is associated with or springs from a similar or identical cause, the inner world of cause or spirit will alone explain the facts. Aspiration or prayer does not interfere with the law of causation, when that law is understood in the broadest and deepest sense. The law of vibration adapts itself to the atom and galaxy—to phenomena and spirit, to life as expressing evolution and mind as involving spirit. And as the growth of the life of a crystal as well as of man proceeds from within, spirit always dictates the order.
The divine person of Christ as the manifestation of Deity cannot be explained by the merely historical life of Jesus of Nazareth, for the idealization and spiritualization of the man in the sphere of the Christ is a process which, though capable of symbolic and physical representation or embodiment, is explained truly by a celestial law of correspondence, which compels the outer to take on the resemblance and form of the inner.
And this representation is so interwoven with the higher, the inferior with the superior form, that no one would suspect the correspondence unless his attention were drawn to it. For instance, in the Bible story of the marriage at Cana, when water was transmuted into wine, the proof of the miracle or psychical phenomenon was in the fact that the wedding guests who drank the wine knew that it was wine.[2] This novel chemicalization of elements fitted into the natural order of relative effects in the life of nature. It was not a miracle, as one might be led, in the narrow use of the word, to suppose, for it was not accomplished by the suspension of any known law, or by a special act of Divine interposition. Yet, the spirit produced the result by psychic power. Who knows how much or how little of our lives is the product of the mediation of spirits or Divinity who minister to our human needs? Spiritualists and Theosophists who claim direct inspiration of spirits by telepathic law, through obsession (control) or possession (adeptship) find many of the mysteries of inspiration explained by thought transference. Thought transference is esteemed by them the mode of telepathic communications. They teach that impressions can be transferred from mind to mind as truly and exactly as a series of logically arranged or developed thoughts, called a discourse.[3] Some minds are attuned to the one but not to the other, but no rational being lacks the capacity for such a priori knowledge. The Zanzigs who astonished England, Europe and America by their feats of mind-reading are splendid examples of how psychically and sympathetically the minds of a husband and wife can be attuned to make such telepathic phenomena possible and easy.
Here it will be helpful to the student to explain some terms which are employed in the terminology of the new psychology and which definitions are used in this work. For much ignorance and misunderstanding arise from conflicting terms.
A thing is said to be normal or natural because it is object of or subject to the law of a material cause and effect as comprehended by our five physical senses.
A thing is supernormal or supernatural because it is object of or subject to the law of spiritual cause and effect as comprehended by the intuition or conscience, or any power above the sphere of the five physical senses.
The abnormal or unnatural is a deviation from the above law.
The consciousness is uncreate, immaterial, super-sensuous, primal, divine, eternal.
The mind is a form of the consciousness as a cloud is a form of the atmosphere or the atmosphere is a form of the ether.
Thought is a form of the mind.
Sentient is normal feeling.
The supersentient is supernormal feeling.
Spirit is Divinity, the eternal, intelligent, life principle.
The soul is the content or vehicle of the spirit, containing the dual male and female potential forms, seat of individuality, personality, identity and organism for expression and manifestation.
The body is the instrument or organism of the soul, through and by which the spirit obtains experience by birth, life, death, immortality and regeneration.
A thing is physical because material or objective, superphysical, because immaterial or subjective.
Inspiration is any impulse to thought which springs from within the soul or the deeper sphere of spirit.
Objective mind is that form of the mind which deals with so-called sensuous, physical and mental life covered by the five physical senses.
Subjective mind is that form which deals with life covered by the superphysical intellectual life, the potential objective, and seat of the supernormal powers. The subjective mind has been assigned by Thomas J. Hudson, author of “The Law of Psychical Phenomena” (in the broadest use of the word) as the supernormal, spiritual, divine part of us. While this use of the word is broad, it is misleading, for the supernormal is not always the divine part, although both supernormal and superphysical, as the divine is not the normal part. And what is further meant is one may live a natural or normal life without being spiritual in the use he makes of life, as he may live the supernormal as an immortal and still be earth-bound or unregenerate. The spiritual use one makes of the objective and subjective mind and life distinguish them forever from their functional natures. It is true that what the subjective is to the objective mind and life, the spiritual life is to the material, and yet few will admit that the outer and inner kingdom of mind and spirit are thus related. All supernormal powers called independent, psychical powers (not mediumship) belong to the subjective mind as all normal powers belong to the objective. And as the one affords evidences of the inner, superphysical spirit and spiritual world, so the other affords demonstrations of the outer, psychical spirit and spiritual world. On this perception of the difference between the two the student will realize exactly where and how the subjective and objective interrelate and correspond.
Underneath the objective world, in the esoteric sense of within, is the spiritual as over the subjective, in the exoteric sense of without, is the material world. The sleep or dream mind is that broader blend or composition of the two forms of consciousness, the objective and subjective, in which the ego oscillates, when released from active participation in the life of the senses, called the sense-consciousness or the objective self-consciousness, and when submerged in the fourth dimension of that unwalled mind where sleep or dreams are often all the ego can remember of its absent-mindedness, while celestial visions are received and retained by that ego or spirit that aspires and lives the spiritual life. It is not in sleep, nor trance, that the ego obtains its freedom from objectivity or sensuous, psychical limitations and environments, but it is in being able and willing to live the spiritual life while employing supernormal powers.
And here is where telepathy demonstrates its law, and proves to be rich in resources and the pregnant means of resolving mysteries into facts and revelations. Ideas arise in the subjective mind and become thoughts in the objective mind. A sensation is the psychical means of uniting the thought (ideal world) with the world of matter or forms. A perception is the intelligent, immaterial, metaphysical means of fusing the idea into the form. Thus the idea, the thought, the sensation and the form are related. Ponder this well, for on this arrangement is built the deeper mystery of the vital and spiritual correspondence of consciousness with mind and the action of the latter through the passive sphere of the former.
Now, in attempting to define inspiration in terms of intuition and Divinity, and as originating, not in ।mind or in sensation, but inspiring it, the difficulty is at once apparent.
To say that inspiration is causal of, and a priori to, thought, yet productive of both thought and experience, will be too radical a statement to be accepted without proofs. And yet the impulsion to act (from within the soul) under spacial and temporal conditions must be itself inspirational in character, and not a by product of experience or an accident of existence.
This becomes more evident when the nature of the mind and the character of the life are considered. Granted that there is a difference between the simple, potential mind of a savage or a child, and the complex, educated mind of a scholar, yet the difference, as is here explained, is a difference between the deductive I (subjective) and the inductive (objective) operations of the mind itself, as made evident in a leading which is causal of experience and an experience which proves the leading itself.
What correspondence, it may be asked, has Divinity or truth (as being the very source of thought and knowledge) with experience, which is a very composite matter and often mixed with error? Is error inspired?
Error is the negation of truth, and as such is its alternative. Error is not the product of Divinity or divine inspiration. It is no part of the Divine order. It is nevertheless involved and evolved in the soul’s life, and as such belongs to it, because like evil it is associated with the negative plane and sphere of thought and feeling, or action. Excarnate (human) inspiration, conceived in error, will create error wherever it touches a human soul who is in the sphere of error and any error in particular. Error has an affinity for error. God never inspired error. And while error is the negation of truth, it can never become the truth or inspire the truth.
Error has been defined as the perversion of truth, and as such it is an abnormality. Yet ignorance and error are twin brothers, as wisdom and truth are twin sisters. Error is only possible in the human order and on the human planes of life. If thought is a form of the idea or perception of anything, a truthful perception differs from an erroneous perception in that the one is divinely inspired and the other humanly conceived, or born of ignorance. This will explain what is here meant by divine inspiration of thought, and thought as inspiring human experience.
A thought is not divine because subjective or because inspired of excarnate spirits. It is divine only because truthful or of truth. And as all thought is inspired, careful and precise discrimination must be made between what proceeds from the Divine spirit within each one and human spheres of life.
That the spirit of truth is involved in and yields to human needs at every moment of the soul’s life and unfoldment is true, but the soul is free to choose and live the spirit of truth only in so far as it has no further use of error. Error is peculiarly egoistic personal) and truth (impersonal) spiritual. Both evil and good, error and truth, as touching and directing thought, show the conflict between the relative (temporal), and the absolute (eternal), in the sphere of Divinity.
But thought itself, whether the source of error or truth, and feeling, which seems to be the basis of thought and which makes evil and good possible, spring not from sensation but from spirit. And this is exactly what inspiration implies. A spirit (mankind) inspires error; the Spirit (God) inspires truth. One leads to a material, the other to a spiritual, life.
A spirit is not essentially a devil because it thinks error or is evil, and permits the life to be inspired by it. An incarnate or excarnate spirit is passing through experiences,—terrible as the result of such experiences is,—and will come into the life of truth as a matter of course. It can go only to the limit as insanity, disease and death show, and while no soul is liberated nor perfected alone by effects which are transgressions of beneficent laws, yet lessons are taught (as when fire burns or tissue is broken down), which when learned qualify the man for the spiritual life.
The office of intuition in the sphere of thought is to sanction truth and only the truth, as the office of conscience is to sanction good and only the good. Thus, the morale of intuition is to oracle Divine inspiration. And intuition and conscience are safe, authoritative and infallible guides to action, because both oracle from God what is God's will as touching the personal thought and feeling in relation to the soul's eternal life and destiny. No revelation is greater or more truthful than truth, and as God is love and love is the God of truth, God's will is the foundation of the feeling which often is confused with one’s sensations of pleasure or pain.
These propositions can be clearly announced and are fundamental of thought as expressed by the word telepathy.
First. Thought or feeling, as error or truth, evil or good, is inspired.
Second. The thought which is Divine (truth) is from the Divine spirit in man and inspires to a spiritual life, while the thought which is human (error) is from the human spirit in man, and inspires to a material life.
Third. Sensation follows thought, is the result of thought, and has no existence outside of thought.
Fourth. Experience is thought or feeling expressing itself in form in the life.
Fifth. The relation of experience to thought and of thought to spirit is that of matter to man’s spirit, and of mans spirit to God’s spirit.
Chapter 5. The Brain And The Mind Superior Coherers
As mind is pregnant with spirit, so the brain is pregnant with ether. Spirit acts on and through ether as mind acts on and through the brain. Ether is not electricity, nor is the mind spirit, yet ether is the mother of electricity as spirit is the father of mind. The inductibility of the mind to spirit is no less a fact than the inductibility of the brain to ether. And it is due altogether to this dual and relative inductibility that both the brain and the mind act as coherers. Coherence is a spiritual property of matter. Cohesion causes atoms, molecules and particles of matter to combine into solids, liquids and gases. Attraction and repulsion are the universal laws of matter which lie back of all the dynamic and static forces of nature. And yet whatever attracts or repels is following the dictation of spirit.
What a battery is to electricity and the practical application of electricity to human service, that the brain is to the mind and the mind is to the spirit. Never lose sight of the fact that spirit generates life and power, even organism and phenomena, not through external but internal agencies or functions. What the life of the tree is to the sap and form, that spirit is to the mind and brain. It is the life that generates the sap, as it is the sap which produces the leaves, branches, trunk and roots. All material analogies must be read, as it were, appositely, backward from within or esoterically by the spirit. If one supposes that a battery creates electricity he is in error, for electricity existed before the battery was even invented. The battery is only a conductor in the broadest and most technical use of the term. It displays or manifests the phenomena. The brain acted upon by the mind deduces, before it induces, thought; and thought exists and existed as it will continue to exist when the brain ceases to act; that is, when the organism is no longer useful as a function of spirit. Whence does thought come, and where does it go when the brain ceases to manifest it? It is in and of the mind as the mind is in and of the spirit, a fact or condition of spirit not recognized as yet in the text-books of either normal or abnormal psychology. The time is at hand when it will be. And then supernormal psychology will revise the canons and hypotheses of normal and abnormal psychology.
The brain as a conductor is the best instrument for thought coherence and radiation which could possibly be conceived. It generates thought only in so far as it provides room and function for its manifestation. And this is the larger and spiritual significance of generation as taught by the great teacher Jesus to Nicodemus. In this sense evolution is never creative. Involution lies back of evolution and governs it. Thought arises in the brain as moisture and dryness in the air from other sources than the apparent. The mind is the medium between spirit and brain in the translation, manifestation and conservation of thought, and, technically speaking, is a repository of thought or a thought collector. It is a much finer, sensitized and attuned coherer or instrument for the apprehension or ductibility of thought than is the brain; and yet the correspondence between the material (physical, sentient) ।and spiritual (superphysical, supersentient) world could not exist and would not be possible, were it not for the brain and mind. What the mind is to the spiritual world through the subjective, psychical or supernormal and spiritual life, that the brain is to the ।material world through the objective, sense and organic life. And so as this unity and harmony remain unbroken the spirit can do its work and live its life in a normal and supernormal way.
If all thought is inspirational and not sensational in its origin and essential nature, the office and function of the brain and mind as coherers become at once evident. To pass or impel thought from the ego,—the seat of personality and the personal life, the residence of the subjective and objective mind, and the source and resource of the multiple personality and all potential and manifest experiences to the mind,—is a matter wholly of the need of the ego, so far as its life and destiny are concerned. Remember, that the ego is essentially Divine and becomes individualized for expression: that is, to be one with God,—to attain the apotheosis. And this need lies back of its growth: that is, what is termed its material and spiritual expression.
The brain provides a means of deductively (from I the potential subjective sphere of the ego) and inductively (from the active, objective plane of the ego) perceiving and receiving thoughts which fit into the warp and woof of the soul’s needs. In this respect it coheres the thought from the mind only to manifest it by means of sensation on the plane or in the sphere of physical existence—the sense or self consciousness.
The consciousness is directly the source and reservoir of all thought, and without consciousness thought, mind, brain would have no existence. This is the normal order of the soul’s education and culture. The abnormal is a deviation from it, as the supernormal is a higher fulfilment of it.
A person is said to be moral when he obeys customary standards or rules of living, and immoral when he fails to do so; but he is spiritual only when his life is pure, loving, unselfish. The material—that is, the moral and immoral—and the spiritual, seem strangely mixed in each one’s life, as mixed as the Scriptural tares and wheat; but the mixture is the result of a refining and purifying process from which each soul will escape in time. One’s work or purpose in life, as well as one’s life in the material and spiritual sense, are involved in the use he makes of thought. And thought is given to supply human needs.
The thought is the intellectualization of the life— that is, what one is one thinks, or as expressed by the aphorism, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” The character, and the thought of the soul grow or unfold together. This is the mystery of thought. It arises from within the soul, as the mind is able to perceive and receive it. And the choice the ego makes of thought determines its life and direction.
Thus it can be said that thought adapts itself to the soul’s life in the sphere of time and space by a mathematical law. And this law fixes the character and the destiny of the soul. An idea is the generator of a thought, and so from the immaterial or spiritual idea to the material or sensuous thought the process of thought transference and telepathy is involved. Technically, the idea is the spiritual concept of the mental perception—thought.
Ideas and thoughts cluster together like angels and spirits who travel in groups or companies. And the reason many minds think the same thought or think alike, as the case might be, is because they are passing through or evolving the same condition and state of mind, which produce certain similar, but not uniformly identical experiences. Often seemingly stereotyped germs of thought, like formulae, give one an idea as to the inspirational forms or moulds of thought, but the inspirational forms are elastic and fit into the soul’s every need.
Phonographic or graphophonic impressions, which are the means of reproducing vocal and instrumental selections, hint at similar methods employed by the spirit. For surely the soul’s life is a book, the pages and story of which unfold in serial. form. There is logic in madness, sanity in the abnormal experience, and direction in what appears mental chaos.
Law is law, whatever the results. Forms, like organisms, serve a double purpose. They hold and convey, as well as concentrate and conserve, whatever is put into them. In the most subtile way possible the soul’s history unfolds, thought by thought, like the pages of a book, until the end is reached, and that end is not the limit of thought or life, but a beginning of endless revelations and illuminations. Thought precedes all mental awakening, all realization in consciousness, all experiences of character.
In this connection a word should be said of the feeling. Feeling is more than emotion and deeper than sensation. It is the spirit of thought and compels the thought into conscious action. It has its birth in love, although it may become in one a prayer or aspiration, in another an appetite or passion. The gross or coarse and the fine or pure feeling follow and depend upon the character of the life and the use one makes of thought. Right and wrong, good and evil feeling, feelings pleasurable and agreeable and feelings painful and disagreeable, synchronize in spheres of identical thoughts. Feelings and thoughts are inseparable; they follow or precede each other but are never divorced from each other. Hardness and obtuseness is a degree or quality of sensitiveness or feeling. To arouse the Divine in those who degrade their lives by evil thoughts and feelings is the purpose or end of experience. For the divine is the spiritual or God life, which can only be realized and expressed when the soul loves and lives divinely: that is, in the sphere of pure thought and feeling, which qualifies one for peace.
By the law of attraction and repulsion the soul orders its thoughts and feelings, and this law dictates through what the soul likes or dislikes the thoughts which it can easily and quickly assimilate.
When the mind and brain as coherers are saturated with sensitiveness they attract or repel such thoughts as belong or do not belong to them. And as touching the extraneous thought or thoughts of others, this law must be strongly obeyed if results are to be obtained.
In telepathy, both a percipient and recipient, a transmitter and receiver can obtain results in thought transference only by applying this law. How could the Zanzigs attract color, number or letter, however multiplied or complicated, unless they were sympathetic to them; that is, positively attracted them by the power of their will or by some occult sympathy not yet understood? And to the extent that the brain can be made to act in unison with the mind as coherers, and both made sympathetically sensitive to whatever may be transmitted or impressed, and all repellent thoughts or conditions temporarily removed or kept under control, submerged, as it were, in the stronger current of attraction, will results be a success.
Technically speaking, the human organism is also a battery, the brain, left and right lobes, a set of dynamos, the mind a coherer and thought a force.
Minds and thoughts synchronize in time and space. Hence the existence and need of uniform spheres and planes of action. A thought keyed to a certain degree of vibration or a certain quality of action has an attraction for minds which agrees with that degree or equality. This is why the mind is and acts as a coherer.
Minds in agreement usually synchronize the same message, experiences or thoughts, and therefore manifest the same actions. There may not be, indeed, there is no scientific way as yet known of proving that action of any kind in nature produces identically the same forms because of constant changes in the molecular particles of matter, due to physiological and psychical flux, to planetary influences, meteorological changes and geographical differences. The self-evident fact that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time must be taken into account. A wise ancient paraphrased this law of matter thus, “There is a time for everything under the sun.” Violets are violet in color, and it is true their blossoms look alike, yet though the color, broadly speaking, is the same, no two violets are identical in form, texture or color, nor do their blossoms emit exactly the same fragrance. This is true of every form of life from the crystal to a man. It is doubtful if the atoms show any closer agreement than that of two red or white roses. This is said to be due to environment— temporal and spacial extension. But there is sufficient similarity or agreement of types to make the rule a working hypothesis. In fact, the variation does not destroy the fact or action of the principle. For the current or force of thought acts upon all life with such impact as to produce these differences amid the variety of types. So that while phenomena vary and results differ, the life and thought forces are the same, and this thought force works through the human organism as electricity through a battery, the nervous system and the brain, in particular, becoming a negative and positive dynamo, causing any number of minds to agree and so register or attract the same vibration of thought. The process is superior to but in principle not unlike wireless telegraphy.
As everything has its negative and positive pole, and this physical fact lies at the basis of normal, organic life and its expressions, it furnishes a clue to telepathic communication. If inspiration is provocative of thought as electricity is of light or heat, according to the medium employed, then it is not difficult to understand how thought can be kindled in minds the world over. Nor is it hard to perceive how, since inspiration like electricity is a universal element,[4] and the brain by its structure and substance is a battery for the inductibility (generation) of its by-product thought, similar and kindred phenomena can be induced in other minds and brains and appear when these minds are keyed to the same vibration. The translation of thought from mind to mind, flashing as does a spark of fire to inflammable material, igniting it, is a psychological process classified as supernormal. Whether thought is considered as indigenous to each mind or a reflection from superior minds, (a view point very popular among classic philosophical writers, as Plato), or whether it be as a Vedantist teaches, an illusion of the negative of life, is immaterial, since it appears uniform under the conditions which have been described. That there are series and groups of thought existent in each one’s mind is evident to anyone who has made a serious study of the mind itself, and that certain notions, even ideas, which correspond with certain things in nature have a subjective as well as objective attraction for and relation to each other and so affinitize, prove the oneness, solidarity and integrity of the universe. To make this clear a common illustration can be given. A is a mother whose son B is a brakeman on the B. & M. R.R. She resides with her son in Lowell, Mass., and wishes to visit a friend in Boston who is C. Late in the day she makes up her mind to see C the next morning, but does not know where C lives. She desires to meet B, who started out very early the next morning on a trip, but there is but one chance in a hundred that she will see him on his train at the station. However, she does see him, receives the address, but he expresses the fear that as C is very busy A will not find C in. A comes to Boston, finds C in, who relates a vision he had early that morning, about 5 o’clock, of being on a train and actually doing the work of a brakeman. C had never met A, so the case was a peculiar one, if not one of telepathy. A, with a determination to see C, transmitted the thought through space, so that at the receptive moment C received a knowledge of B’s occupation when making up his train in the yards at Lowell and getting ready for this trip. C knew six hours beforehand that A was interested in B and that B had something to do with cars.
This not only illustrated in a novel way the relativity of ideas or thoughts, but it illustrates how material things are associated with thoughts by a psychical process which is more mysterious than wireless telegraphy. Whether the brains of A, B and C were irregularly synchronized or their minds occultly connected by ether waves, as most minds are, is not impossible. But C had no other way of knowing that A intended to call or that B was her son than through telepathic communication.
When these phenomena, now recondite and apparently too illusive to be gotten at by the usual scientific methods, are understood and classified, signals can be adopted and a symbological language invented which will supply an intelligible code of interpretation. Men now at a loss to know how to poise or condition their minds in order to communicate telepathically with each other, will find the means and by applying rules and conditions which make such intercourse possible and practical, will find the secret of spirit communion and communication. And when the brain can be made a responsible, intelligent coherer, so that disorderly and heterogeneous thoughts will not and can not intervene to interrupt the transmission of a correct message, (and this can be done only by patient, persistent practice), who will limit the power of this new and higher mode of transmitting thought?
Chapter 6. Aspiration And Inspiration As Thought Generators
To the extent that all things are coordinate, the material will be made to harmonize with the spiritual, and this is implied in the inductibility of matter to spirit or to life, to use the more common term employed by popular science to signify spirit. That also is what transubstantiation mystically implies, which another and better word, transmutation, will make clearly intelligible.
Matter receives and moulds spirit into form, only to prepare the way for the sublimation and the etherialization of the vehicle, the body compounded of matter. The two-fold purpose is never forgotten by nature, however obscured or concealed by her processes. So, as the aspiration ascends and prepares the way, inspiration, the answer, descends and affords the result, until at last—it may be in a moment, a month, a year or a longer period of time—the aspiration and inspiration become conscious and demonstrable. Aspiration always implies the readiness, on the part of the person who aspires, to realize the subject of his aspiration, and that subject is not to be had merely for the asking, as the foolish believe, but by attainment; which means that aspiration is a spiritual growth which makes possible an environment or material condition by which certain spiritual events and results are possible. Aspiration implies the law of spiritual causality.
Precisely in this manner, telepathy establishes itself on the impinging sphere of our common, practical life, and by methods which will be elaborated.
As inspiration usually makes a rift in the cloud of mental obscuration, letting in a superior, supersensuous light, so telepathy reveals the occult but luminous power of thought.
In the first place, this power is hidden, because it is not as yet intelligible or tentative to the senses; and secondly, because it operates in a deductive rather than an inductive way: that is, thought must be winged with inspiration or ballooned with a faith which is the evidence of spiritual realities, impelling it through the supersentient sphere of existence, thus overcoming the limitations of sense perception. The ego thus sensitized is free to act upon and to be acted upon by psychic or personal egos or coherers. These coherers catch the wireless messages or inspirations as sulphur catches a flame or amber the light, or a wire coil an electric spark, and convert them into corresponding by-products, thoughts.
Black magic is a form of telepathic communication, in which a person wills evil rather than good to influence his victims. And this is possible from a negative standpoint, for evil itself is negative. The power to think and do evil is involved in the same will that possesses the alternative, and the results are relatively as patent. But it must be remembered that while this is true, black magic destroys the operator as well as its victims, who as a prey to the power of thought do not know how to resist evil. White magic, on the other hand, blesses the operator and the one who is operated upon, because it is constructive and never destructive.
Professor James, late of Harvard University, wrote in his Ingersol lecture on “Immortality” that the soul, so far as science goes, operates through a series of functions, corresponding with each other in office on relative planes of action. This would mean if carried to its conclusion that the spiritual or divine part of man is the essential ego, is functioning through many disguises on the sentient and supersentient planes of consciousness, as the phenomena of the multiple personality will attest. The ego appears, however, on all planes as the same entity among all identities. That the whole organic and inorganic structure is a machine, controlled by a unit of life, and that the functions on the physical correspond with similar functions on the mental, as the mental corresponds with like functions on the spiritual or supermental planes, is true. Otherwise the system would not reveal, as it does in psychical phenomena,[5] the uniform kinds of form.
So one may perceive the correspondence between thought as a mental form of inspiration and a mental form as saturated with sensuous representation,—that is, so externalized and objectified as to conceal or totally eclipse the mental image conveyed from the sphere of pure spirit. For instance, the image of a chair dissociated from the idea which it subserves in teleology or Divinity would be a sensuous form, in which the inspiration of seeing it as it is and perceiving what it is and its purpose in the scheme of. life is a matter of the utmost consequence; but to realize this relationship the brain or mind alone is too gross. Few apprehend telepathically the celestial idea. Take another illustration which will appear more to the point.
In the clothes man wears how few realize that they are crude physical appearances or representations in variety of what the ego thinks and feels, what the man is in the idea of unity, or what the mind is in the differentiation of its thought, or what this fashion of clothes, both material, corporeal and mental, is to the etheric or spirituelle form, or the idea of personality which is neither a material nor a mental product. The relationship and correspondence are too subtile to be easily detected. Yet as light is relative to color, so the ideal form of the spirit, incomprehensible to the senses, is relative to the gross physical body, and the clothes which cover that body. The materialist will not accept what is here written, but he cannot disprove it.
Thus, as physical forms are related with each other biologically and organically, and in their differentiations still elaborate the type, still carry forward and evolve the potential idea implanted in the germ—as the butterfly is metamorphosed from the worm—so thoughts, ideas and visions bear similar relation to inspiration. They are the product of inspiration, as sensation is the result of the action of the nervous system.
How to know and prove this is easy enough if one is willing to apply certain tests—tests which are both mental and spiritual in character. They involve the ego in what at first would seem a mode of reflection and observation, in both concrete and abstract thinking. To associate intuition with tuition, and Divine inspiration with sensuous experience, is not the instinctive tendency of the natural man. However, if this comparison will be made of one with the other, of what is divine with what is human, of what is pure consciousness with what is sensuous thought, the expression “ authority and value of inspiration ” by the telepathic process of transference of inspiration to thought and thought to experience, will be clearly perceived and understood. What electricity is to a wire coil in producing light and heat, in a far deeper and more subtile way, the consciousness of spirit and its aura or radiations here designated inspiration, are to the mind and brain. They deduce thought and action. And as conditions are made for the radiation of consciousness, satisfactory experiments on psychological grounds can be conducted which will fully demonstrate what is here hypothecated.
Chapter 7. The Hypothesis Of Thought Transference
That thoughts can be transmitted from mind to mind at a distance by a process not understood as yet by the scientist is admitted by such distinguished authorities on psychical research as the late Dr. Hodgson and Frederick Myers, Professors Hyslop, Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge. That such extraneous thoughts when transmitted often appear in the mind as a natural and logical expression of the mind itself, as of external inspiration, is also true. And it is not always easy nor possible for the expert in psychology to separate normal from supernormal thought or the thought of another from that of one’s own mind, except of course in such remarkable and concrete exhibitions of telepathy as the Zanzigs perform. Such experiments are remarkable.
Most persons are as quickly influenced by extraneous or foreign thoughts, which touch and inspire them from sources and centers of radiation most hidden and distant, as by immediate subjects or objects of perception. And this is due to the subtle, insistent power of the foreign thought and the natural attraction of the soul for it.[6] Often thoughts are sent as important messages, just as a telegram may be sent in the usual or wireless form, and if the recipient is in that passive, sympathetic condition of mind which is so essential to successful experimentation, the message cannot fail in being received and perceived. A personal experience will make this point clear. Some years ago about 1898 we had our residence on the South side in Chicago. While on my way down town, both my wife and a governess prearranged, without my knowledge, to send me a thought to purchase for them a trifling gift — my wife willing or desiring that I bring her a bouquet of violets and the governess wishing that I procure for her a fresh bunch of sassafras bark. It was in the spring of the year, and the one naturally artistic longed for the violets, and the other very practical thought strongly of sassafras tea for her blood. While the electric car was turning the corner of Twenty-second street and Wabash Avenue, I chanced to look out of the window and saw a display of flowers, among them violets, in a florist’s shop. I acted immediately on the impulse, got off, purchased a large bouquet of violets, and then taking another car resumed my journey in town. After finishing my purchases and walking down State Street past Marshall Field Company’s department store, in an unobtrusive doorway, I saw a man with a basket, selling sassafras. The impression came instantly to purchase a bunch, and at the time I was very conscious that I had received two distinct thoughts: one from my wife and the other from the governess, and that I had responded correctly. The reader can imagine how pleased I was, when handing to each the article-she had wished, my wife laughingly remarked, “Didn’t I tell you that he would do it? ” A more startling test was the wish I personally made while in Washington, D. C., about 9.00 A.M., a certain day. I stood before a show-window of pictures in the store of Woodward & Lothrop, and as I stood admiring the beautiful colored photograph of Washington’s home, I mentally wished that I might have that picture. A voice from within me, or the silence, said, “ Why not wish that everyone in Washington had it? ” I said, “ Indeed, I do,” and I wished it. I turned up ' F Street (why I do not know) and stopped at the shop of a florist. A large dahlia with beautiful white blossoms attracted my attention. As I stood silently wishing that I possessed that plant, the same voice spoke to me, “Why not wish everyone in Washington had it?” “I do, and more, I wish that everyone in the world had it.” I went about my business and thought no more about these experiences. After lecturing in another part of the city, I returned to my rooms about 5.00 o’clock, and, incredible as it may seem, there on the table stood the identical picture and the dahlia which I had wished for that morning. The explanation which to some, unfamiliar with supernormal happenings, will seem as great a miracle as the miracle itself, is this, and telepathy explains it. A certain woman, who had become deeply interested in my work, and who in former years had been a novitiate in a convent in Georgetown, received the wishes the instant I made them, while she was busy at her desk in a room of a building in a certain department of the Government, and so insistent and precise were the impressions of the things which I had wished for, that she, acting upon the impulse, purchased both and had them sent to my rooms. That this might occur to one and not to another, I am not ready to concede, for the law of telepathy is no respecter of persons. In some such mysterious way a wish is father to the deed, and no doubt our holiest aspirations and prayers are thus answered by both human and divine agency. Thoughts are more than things: they are the souls of things, and can reach centers of intelligence under normal and supernormal conditions as instantly as the thought itself is conceived. Whatever mysterious law governs it, in its radiation, remains for science to discover, but that the law exists and produces as it governs the phenomena of thought transference, no one familiar with the new psychology can deny. No scientist as yet has been able to explain heat and cold, except to say that the one is the absence of the other. If heat is the absence of cold and cold is the absence of heat, what is that which produces either or both at the same time? Science can tell us exactly what produces heat and cold, but it cannot explain what they are. It cannot explain matter or life, but it can talk learnedly on some of its by-products and endless, various phenomena. How by the power of the will thought leaps from mind to mind, irrespective of vast distances, or how it seems to reach one, without any direct effort of the will, is still a hard problem of psychological science. Some claim that it is translatable through the medium of ether or by electrical conditions and is forwarded very much as any fine material substance by, for instance, some superior dynamic power, as is employed in wireless telegraphy. But such speculative notions are untenable, because how can thought, itself immaterial and inapprehensible by any physical apparatus, be pushed or touched by an agency or force inferior to its nature and quite outside of its own sphere of phenomena?[7]
It is absurd to entertain so material an hypothesis! A far more plausible and reasonable theory is, that thought is itself dynamic and possesses within itself all inherent power for infinite radiation and vibration. Neither words seem quite adequate to explain what thought does, except to show that thought moves toward a center of attraction after the same law as made Jesus say “the spirit goeth wherever it listeth.” And if it is explained that thought suffers from limitations: that is, its power telepathically is restricted by the same law which holds a spirit or a man, or, in fact, any life to a certain course, some idea of what is here conveyed will be realized. Certain thoughts appeal to and seem to be in sympathy with certain persons, and such persons can obtain them much easier than others. An artist or a poet who lives in the sphere of imagination and ideality would, as a matter of course, be a capable subject or sensitive of visions and inspirations, the finer, purer, sublimer, and more spiritual forms of thought would more easily touch and influence them by the law of attraction than coarser minds. A musician whose ear is attuned to the audience of the purest notes, would be the one to whom would come those tender vibrations which linger in the soul of harmony. As a saint is one to whom angels would choose to send their messages of love and light, for “the pure in heart shall see God,” so an evil-minded man would attract and entertain only coarse, profane, sinful thoughts. And the limitations of thought, so far as the law is concerned, is in the fact that thoughts are graded. All thought, as all minds, are susceptible to inferior and superior, material and spiritual expression, and while essentially thought, mind, spirit, are divine, their evolution or expression in the ego follow this law of attraction which governs them. A dark thought which is an evil thought, is a thought in which its own light and power are withheld. And while an evil thought has power, it is a negative power, harming and destroying the one who generates it more than the one who is negative to it. A thought when raised to its highest increment of divine power is most beneficial because illuminating. The evil thought when lowered to its deepest potency is chaotic and auto-destructive. To think and will evil is to reduce life to a negative. A so-called demon or devil is a soul that is obsessed: that is, enslaved by the trinity or three-cornered power of darkness — darkness of body, mind (soul) and spirit. Self-purification is the source of thought regeneration, constructive power and illumination.
The faculty or ability to transmit thought, in the technical sense, whether evil or good, is a power which while dependent on the quality of the thought which is transmitted and the state of the mind of percipient and recipient, can be cultivated to a degree which the trained student of telepathic phenomena would hardly think possible.
When to think and love good music, poetry, literature, or to love all that is refined and pure, is to place oneself immediately in the sphere of the musician, the poet, the artist and the saint, and so be receptive to their thought and influence, one can grasp the far reaching value of telepathy, both as a positive educational force in the life, and a source of information and illumination from the unseen, spirit world. For who, unless possessed of a sordid and selfish ambition, would and could seek or attract the influence and inspiration of the one, without seeking or attracting that of the other? For thought is of the mind and the radii of the mind are of the spirit, and the spirit is expressing and manifesting thought on all planes in and out of a physical body.
It is true that telepathy is but a mode or process of thought transference and does not qualify a thought as evil or good. This it is powerless to do. It is a common carrier of thought, and as such its purpose is to register or convey to and in the mind of the recipient what is thought or sent by the percipient. And common, though unconsciously so, as telepathy is with most of us, first as the law of our own guidance and experience, and as the mode thought takes to satisfy our human and divine needs, more and more will the principle and benefits of it impress themselves upon mankind as it puts into practice this ever new but old educational method.
What intuition or Divine inspiration was and is to those who realized or now realize its sovereign and helpful guidance, that telepathy will become when man employs thought as a constructive, reformatory and spiritualizing force in his own life and the lives of mankind. And the hypothesis as here presented signifies the use of thought as the silent but intelligible, universal language which the spirit uses, not only to manifest and express what it is,—for the material world and life are but the complex manifestation of thought, while their life is its expression,—but also to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth and within ourselves. And since in the beneficence of God no one is denied the Divine plan and power of living, the most helpful source of inspiration, wisdom and grace lie potentially within ourselves.
Error can be outgrown, evil overcome, weakness and disease conquered, the insane and criminal class made whole and a new race made possible by the divine employment of thought. Our ignorance and hence our prejudices, our evils and hence our weaknesses, alone prevent us from being masters, and sons of God!
Chapter 8. Psychic Unfoldment And Human Destiny Under Telepathic Law
Scientists at length realizing the existence of super-sentient and supernormal facts,[8] began to speculate upon the cause. Many liberal researchers declared themselves in favor of the spiritual hypothesis as the only working and comprehensive solution of their origin. This meant not only that spirit was at once recognized as the basis and cause of life, but that life itself, being of spirit, was not destroyed at death. The spiritual hypothesis proves that man’s personality or identity, at least the intelligent and spiritual portion of it, survives the destruction of the body. This psychical science has pretty clearly demonstrated.
It follows that what has been written in previous chapters about the super-physical origin of thought and the reality of inspiration as the law and content of consciousness, creating the infinite modes or spheres of its expression and manifesting a correspondence of the inner cause with the outer effect, will not seem at all improbable, untenable or unscientific. For while telepathy is recognized as a fact, neither its cause nor its law is as yet known.
Therefore in advance of more definite revealments and precise scientific discoveries, the hypothesis of the supersentient and super-physical origin of thought and its modes of transference can be stated, not only as the plausible but feasible one.
Certain corollaries may now be presumed.
1. An absolute (Divine) order exists which each human life follows or obeys.
2. Spirit immanent in each one has access to a knowledge of this order and when necessary can wisely, inspirationally advise the ego functioning on lower planes.
3. Spirits incarnate and excarnate can flash upon the mind impressions, dates, facts,—events which belong to the past, present and future of the order of each human life.
As to the first corollary, how can it be proven that the sovereignty of God is at all opposed to the freedom of man?[9] Or how can it be denied that life with its variety of experiences and endless episodes is not exactly what both the will of man chooses and the will of God permits under immutable, eternal law? When it is remembered that sovereignty, will, freedom, mean law, who will any longer tolerate theological or moral distinctions between actions, when the relative need always subserves the absolute end of life? But in a far deeper sense, who will fail to perceive that actions, like water, find their own level and integrate or disintegrate their forms by their uses? So that thoughts and feelings (for essentially they are one and the same) relate to actions, not as a something which is either intrinsically good or evil as these terms are scholastically understood, but as natural impulses, inevitable, if not necessary, in the universal order of cause and effect. An action appears moral or immoral because of consequences. Yet these consequences are unavoidable under present existing conditions of human nature. What is temporal or relative, though necessary, is the evidence of the eternal and absolute law. The law or the order or the plan is involved in the development or action of the life itself and cannot be separated from it. Here is where and how the end justifies the means.
As to the second corollary, since action disposes of the substance of the soul’s character and destiny very much as a turn of the kaleidoscope alters the figure of the bits of colored glass, the principle of action is the ego itself. The ego is inspired by a variety of impulses, in which self interest is the strongest. If self interest is found at last by experience to be a disastrous cause leading to fatal results of action, the lower ego is so informed from the higher ego within itself, from a sphere of knowledge incomprehensible to the senses. Abstractly, that information comes from intuition and conscience, for the one appealing to the intellect and the other to the heart, become the popular oracles of Divinity.
So that whatever may be a man’s choice, however necessary his action, he is never free of these twin voices of truth. Thus the human and divine order interpenetrate each other, as ether the air, the one like fire destroying the relative, finite and temporal forms, all that the ego desires and hence manifests of love and life, because the creation of human nature, to make room for the realization of the pure and simple spirit.
If the Divine spirit did not interpenetrate human spirits, how could man know right from wrong, good from evil, truth from error, and so far as the survival of the fittest in life itself is concerned, how could the human spirit survive death? For that problem of problems .resolves itself into one of the conservation of energy or a mode of life which, producing the least friction, survives every change and becomes victorious over death.[10]
By conservation of energy is not meant asceticism, but such action as produces no reaction; a life which lengthening the period of time between birth and death, by increasing the increment of life itself, so sublimates human nature as to make possible eternal youth.
Eternal life after all is not less but more than conservation of energy, a life in which there is and can be no waste and consequently no need of experience. This is the Divine life. For when life has not apotheosized itself: that is, unfolded and perfected itself, waste goes on, until the alloy is separated from the gold and the pure gold remains. The mystical assignment of the power of gold to that of the sun implies what is here meant. Evolution means refinement, not reproduction of old or new forms of creation. And while this plan dominates life, evolution proves that life is actually working out the plan. The universe, illustrated by the pyramid of life, seems to incorporate the plan which the ancient builders embodied in these unique geometrical structures. Who knows but that this world of ours is a symbol, more vast in its significance than the pyramid Cheops?[11] For if it be true that it is an enduring monument of life, perpetuating as well as exemplifying by its numbers and measures those canonical laws which were the pattern and source of later theological systems, it is a fitting symbol of the universe itself.
The apparent resolution of life into phenomena, mind into thoughts and spirit into sensations, is no less a mystery than the permeability and penetrability of matter by spirit. Yet as matter is a veil which discloses life, as life is a veil which reveals spirit, the fundamental and ultimate object of life is related as the circumference of a circle is to its centre, so that the natural and spiritual life find a common ground of action and inspiration. Life waits upon spirit and its law, as mind upon consciousness and its law. As desire is at the basis of all experience or action, Divinity like the sun dispels all shadows of separateness, hurling darkness into the abyss of oblivion and permitting the ego to shine forth in its native, original glory. So that man, to say nothing of other creatures, has access to this source of omniscience and indeed is led by it. And the correspondence between the spheres of the ego,' in the material and spiritual world, is an endless chain of inspiration and thought, fitting into the normal life and indeed destinating it.
It is not remarkable therefore that the soul of mankind unfolds from the spirit of universal life within each separate life, or that in the human kingdom it is nourished in knowledge and understanding from a divine source quite beyond, but nevertheless within the sphere of, our own normal powers. Nor is it strange that thought should not only be the measure of life itself, but also the means by which the absolute and relative, the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite should meet on a common parallel or in a mystic sphere, where the mystery of Divine sovereignty and human freedom becomes intelligible from the human viewpoint. If experience is the product of thought, and sensation is the product of experience, thought itself is the product of the ego, acting in a sphere where, as Paul hinted, the natural which is first should precede the spiritual which is last. And by this is meant that thought, like fire, calcines the soul, so that nothing remains but the spirit of thought, which is the spirit of life itself, the first becoming last and the last first. But man is led and fed telepathically by the sovereign spirit to do and to be as he feels or thinks, to the end that the river of his thought may at last find its source in the ocean of being.
Chapter 9. Spiritualism, Excarnate Spirit Thought And Telepathy
It is neither scientific nor practical to make telepathy cover or explain the whole range of psychical and supernormal phenomena, an error into which many psychical researchers drift. That the subjective and objective mind of the percipient and recipient play important parts in telepathic and psychical communications no one who is familiar with the subject of Spiritualism doubts. How much the substrata of the subliminal or subjective mind tincture or affect telepathic messages will be known as the psychologist lays bare the inner workings of the mind and reveals the conditions on which all telepathic phenomena depend. But it is positively proved by the investigations of the most advanced psychical researchers that whatever influence the subjective or subliminal mind has on psychical phenomena, telepathy, in the technical and broadest sense, cannot be made the working hypothesis, nor can it be made the cause of all mediumistic and psychical experiences. There are so called mediumistic and psychical phenomena, hitherto unclassified, for which telepathy can account, and it is the province of the telepathist to know what the limitations of this branch of supernormal psychology are in dealing with cognate and similar abnormal and supernormal phenomena.
First, let it not be forgotten that normal phenomena are related to supernormal by the law of correspondence. Both clairvoyance and clairaudience as the supernormal powers of seeing and hearing are but higher forms of perception, dependent upon the same spirit and consciousness which the normal senses employ. But mediumship at once makes a distinction between normal and abnormal. As the supernormal is never abnormal, so the normal is never supernormal. The abnormal is a deviation from the usual, natural form or manifestation of life and law.
The mysteries of the multiple personality are not explained by mediumship, unless they are phenomena of spirit obsessions or pre-existent lives, or reminiscent experiences brought again to the surface of the self-consciousness through some brain or mental abnormality as was the case with Mollie Fancher.[12] And it might be possible, if reincarnation is true, that such singular phenomena as the multiple personality or as are involved in a chain of strange obsessions dug out of the occult spheres of the mind by suggestion or negativity under hypnosis, are after all the once familiar facts preserved in the supernormal memory and revoked by lapses of normal powers brought on by organic or functional derangement.
The distinction made between normal, abnormal and supernormal phenomena are distinctions which the teacher of the new psychology will make, and it will clear the atmosphere of much fog concerning words and terms now happily in vogue.
A phenomenon is not abnormal merely because unusual, nor abnormal because supernormal: that is, because the result of the operation of a normal power raised to a higher, purer, more spiritual vibration. An abnormal phenomenon can be produced both super-normally and often normally. And when it is claimed that mediumship plagiarizes the normal while it hints at or implies the supernormal, the law of supernormal in relation to the normal and abnormal is made plain. To illustrate: a body is the organic form or vehicle of a spirit called man. This body is a chemical composition. The spirit gives it form, life, intelligence, mortality. This is normal, and the body, life, mind, intelligence, may be called the NORMAL PHENOMENA of spirit. If this is so, and the spirit is immortal, then MEDIUMSHIP as Spiritualism and the Psychical Research Society have proved, affords the excarnate spirit the means (by a law not yet known) of producing similar (but abnormal) phenomena under natural conditions. This explains how the abnormal relates to the normal on the plane of phenomena. A hand, a face, etherialization, moving of ponderable objects, writings, inspirations, trance — these are possible through mediumship, because they are the natural, fundamental phenomena of a human spirit. As this is clearly perceived, mediumship will appeal to the investigator of psychic phenomena, with all that it implies in the supernormal world of spirit, and not as the operation of spiritual law in the material world in a supernormal sense. Physical and mental phases of mediumship do not disprove what is here claimed for mediumship. Nor does it disprove what is here affirmed of the supernormal powers. The law of correspondence obtains and holds good among all the powers, whether they produce normal, supernormal or abnormal phenomena. And if it be true that “spiritual things’’ (psychical or supernormal) must be spiritually discerned, it follows that the power of seeing or perceiving spiritual things is the same, only the ego is functioning on a higher (supernormal) plane.
It is not strange that telepathy as an hypothesis of psychical phenomena should show striking analogical agreement with Spiritualism. But these analogies simply show the more independent operations of the spirit in the thought world. Back of psychical phenomena are principles or laws which the spirit of man employs in telepathic communications; for, if thought is divine in its origin, and influences the ego from within the sphere of its potential desires and needs, if man is inspired telepathically, and we can transmit both normal and supernormal thoughts to each other and to excarnate spirits, as is proved by Spiritualism,[13] then telepathy and Spiritualism cover and explain much the same phenomena, in much the same way. And lest the student or expert in telepathy might at once conclude that if by telepathy man, without any consciousness or proofs of immortality, can produce many phenomena covered and explained by Spiritualism, then the evidences of Spiritualism are discredited, it must rather follow, and in fact it follows, that the reverse is true—Spiritualism proves telepathy!
Now savages have psychical experiences which the most highly civilized experience on higher planes. Dreams so blend with visions, reveries with ecstacies, that some pathologists and even psychologists have classified these phenomena under the head of hysteria, while others mare advanced have found in them the extraordinary evidences of a detached, supernormal intelligence.[14] They can no longer be set aside or dismissed as the product of imagination or superstition. The quantity is too enormous and the universality too common to consign them to the realm of fiction.
Imagination is a faculty of the human mind, but what one imagines is not identical with dreams, visions, ecstacies. What part imagination plays in the production of these experiences is an important study, but such phenomena still exist and persist when one is quite aware of the possible activity or intrusion of imagination. Nor are they the spasmodic ebullition of memory, especially that occult form of it called pre-existence; for they deal chiefly with future rather than past events. Dreams are made of experiences which are stored away in the memory, but visions, as the Prophet wrote, arise out of the potentialities of man’s future. “ Old men [because retrospective] shall dream dreams,” and “young men [because prospective] shall see visions.”
One revives or repeats in sleep his dreams, as it were from phonographic reports, but the other extemporizes and materializes before his mind’s eye the things that are to come.
This is the exact distinction between dreams and visions.
Another important fact about visions is that they seldom come—or if they do, are usually transmitted symbolically—at night, but they transpire early in the morning or often when awake. Day dreams are reproductions of the past, objective but conglomerate experiences or fancies, and like reveries, are often illusive, mental silhouettes or shadow pictures of dream stuff.
To say that visions could not appear is, a priori, to deny what does appear; but to say that they float into the mind without either law or cause and contradict the ordinary experiences of life, is to affirm what is neither scientific nor true. All psychical experiences depend for their expression and manifestation upon the same law of causality which governs nature.
Spiritualism as dealing with psychology proves that the ego functioning in or through the objective and subjective mind has psychical experiences of a supernormal order which are independent of spirit obsessions and are not wrought upon or within the mind of the active agent or percipient by outside telepathic means. Indeed, while this is true, it is further shown that it is not easy or always possible to separate telepathic from excarnate spirit or outside telepathic agency. All three forms of phenomena may appear in a single manifestation. Telepathy can explain its own and sometimes other phenomena, but never Spiritualism. This is the point which must be made clear and will at last be accepted as the only intelligent and reasonable position.
The following story is vouched for by a prominent real estate man of Boston, whose name and address can be furnished and the facts corroborated as here stated. Other names have been substituted for the original ones. The case is peculiar, for the experience covers a dream, an excarnate spirit visitation, a telepathic incident and a normal fact or report of a dream.
Mrs. Edgar B. Brown, widow, owing to her failing health, came down from Deerfield, N. H., to consult our family physician, Dr. George G. T----, who was then living either on Marlboro or Newbury Street, Boston. She and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Frank W. N----, also a widow, were boarding on Arlington Street. Mrs. B———, hearing that Dr. T---- had a slight cold, though it was not considered serious, had delayed her visit to him for a day or two.
A brother-in-law, Mr. Percival A. Jones, was at that time living in a suite on Quint Avenue, Allston, at whose home some months previously Mrs. Edgar B. Brown’s husband had died. A sister, Mrs. William Smith, was living on Beacon Street, Brookline, with whose family Dr. T—-—- was intimately associated, often calling on Mr. Jones after his professional visits for the day were ended.
One morning Mrs. Edgar B. Brown came into Mrs. F. W. N----’s room, saying she had a most peculiar dream the night previous, adding, “We were all out at Jones’ house, where in the parlor around the table sat Mrs. Jones and Percival, her husband. I came into the room and inquired of Mrs. Jones if she knew how Dr. T—---was. As I did not get any answer, I thought the question might not have been understood, so I asked again how Dr. T----was. The second time no answer was received, and, feeling provoked, I turned to Percival Jones and asked him the same question. He did not answer, but hung his head, arose and walked out of the room.
Soon after, I dressed myself to go in town. I walked down Quint Avenue to the junction of Brighton Avenue, and waited for a car. Soon one came along, into which I entered, and sat down by the side of my father. (He was at that time in the spirit world.) After our greeting I asked him the same question that I has asked Mrs. Jones and Percival. Did he know how Dr. T--- — was? He answered, “Did you not know that Dr. T-----is dead?”
Mrs. Brown had scarcely finished telling Mrs. N---- her dream when the telephone bell rang, and Mrs. N — was wanted on the line. The call was from her sister, Mrs. Smith, who notified her of Dr. T----’s death the night before, to which she replied: “Why, Grace (Mrs. Brown) has just been telling me about it.”
Here is another and equally remarkable case. The night of July 4, 1908, at about eleven o’clock, after my wife had passed away, she telepathed to a friend the fact, who in a dream was literally pulled up to a sitting position in bed and awakened while she saw standing before her my wife’s spirit, clothed in a street costume. The dream or visitation came no doubt as announcement of her death and to urge her to go at once to the house,—a mile or so distant,—and comfort the motherless children and bereaved husband. She did not learn however of her death until informed by phone a day or so afterward.
This incident is strengthened by the fact that Mrs. E----and Mrs. G----had just planned some summer outings, to which she and the family looked forward pleasurably with, however, this sad ending. Later, at a seance with an unprofessional psychic, the spirit of Mrs. Grumbine corroborated this incident.
The reports of the Psychical Research Society are filled with classified experiences of a similar and impressive sort. Spiritualism is an astounding historical record of even more extraordinary abnormal and supernormal facts.
If telepathy can be proven to be a law of thought or the means of thought transference,—whatever other mysterious or undiscovered laws lie back of or within it,—then abnormal and supernormal phenomena become exactly what might be expected. Among those who hitherto realized such phenomena and who sought for their source and explanation in vain, the spiritual hypothesis which modern Spiritualism propounded in the beginning becomes at last the only workable rule or law of life.
And whatever the advocates of the new psychology may claim for these facts, or whatever novel theory the exponents of psychical research may advance in the future, indeed, however extended, the sphere of our own Divinity may reach within the unexplored spheres of the human soul, the normal, abnormal and supernormal phenomena of spirit will each as a class occupy a characteristic sphere, though the psychologist may be unable to separate them to a nicety.
Mediumship, as here shown, will cover abnormal psychical phenomena, and all other such phenomena will have to be comprehended and explained by the word supernormal. The supernormal will never become the normal as the word normal is technically defined by science. And since Spiritualism proves by its abnormal phenomena that the normal and supernormal powers are one and the same, only differing in degree of expression,—that is, the supernormal powers, as clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience being the normal seeing, hearing and feeling raised to a higher, finer and more spiritual degree or increment of power,—it follows that the thought and the life can be sublimated and purified, so that our own spirits can function at will on the supernormal plane of being and have the fullest knowledge and joy of such communion and find at last the proofs or demonstrations of both immortality and Divinity, not outside of ourselves as through mediumship and abnormal spirit phenomena, but within ourselves.
And this follows that no psychical researcher or member who has earnestly, fearlessly and honestly pushed the theory of telepathy to the extreme limit of its application to abnormal and supernormal psychical phenomena has not seen it break down under the weight of evidence in favor of Spiritualism. Spiritualism not only hypothecates and proves that excarnate spirits are back of abnormal phenomena, but that spirit is the sovereign, active agent of all supernormal phenomena. A few hard-headed and conservative investigators like Podmore refuse to yield to the most convincing evidence, and sum up their prejudice by declaring with the late Sir David Brewster that ‘‘spirits will be the last things he will give in to.” Of course, such an egotistic and pseudo scientific attitude of mind is childish, to say the least. The time has passed when the enormous total of facts can be scorned or rejected! The cock-sureness of inexperience, the a priori ignorance and the boastful prejudices of men of science are today alike inexcusable, in view ‘of what is now accepted the world over as proved for all time. However, this does not mean that all that passes for abnormal and supernormal phenomena must be accepted under the name of Spiritualism nor without careful investigation and under the most rigid scientific or test conditions^ This goes without saying. But what is Spiritualism? Is it comprehended by spiritism: that is, by mediumistic phenomena only, produced under some form of spirit control, obsession and trance? This is the popular notion, and the public has been openly taught or educated by most of the spiritualists themselves, their speakers and mediums, that this is what the SPIRITUALISTIC, if not the SPIRITUAL, hypothesis means. So that Spiritualism and spiritism have come, until very lately, to be interchangeable terms, to signify one and the same thing. No explanation was more incomplete and unspiritual. As Spiritualism is not the invention or creation of man, as there is no patent on the word, as it is also an elastic word, capable of the profoundest as well as the most shallow interpretation, as no school of men or church are the oracles of its philosophy or religion, the word can and should be given a spiritual and scientific rather than a sectarian and necromantic definition. Emerson made it stand for spirit, the spiritual life, spirituality, in contradistinction to matter, the material life and materiality; and these words were not to be used as opposite to or antithetical of each other, but rather in the only way in which life and its phenomenal forms will harmonize with the law of cause and effect. Without spirit, the spiritual life, and spirituality, there could be no matter, material life or materiality, and peculiar as the juxtaposition of these words seems there is a logical and sequential correspondence, which the phrase divine immanence helps us to understand.
Life is essentially spirit and spiritual, however material we may make it. Spirit permeates matter, whatever agnostic science may say to the contrary. And it follows that since there is and can be no matter or life without spirit, our personal, individual spirits, by abnormal and supernormal phenomena, prove and seek to prove their Divinity: that is, their spiritual substance and nature by thus demonstrating their immortality.
To do this the excarnate spirits choose two means or paths to the one end — one is by MEDIUMSHIP (trance or automatism), so called; the other is by ADEPTSHIP (consciousness).
The former is the abnormal; the latter the supernormal means to the end. Both are allowable in the laws of our being and permissible by Divine wisdom. Mediumship or the retrogressive method is not so free, simple and conscious a source of knowledge as adeptship or the introgressive. Hence, no doubt, the universal opposition to the spiritistic movement. But when the spiritistic movement (mediumistic) is understood, who will doubt its daily blessings or its omnipresent providences?
Adeptship deals with that means to a knowledge of our personal immortality and Divinity which the spiritual use of our own supernormal powers affords. And since to practise mediumship and demonstrate excarnate spirit presence one must become a medium, he must allow his soul, mind and body to be overshadowed, inspired, impressed, influenced, controlled and obsessed by the excarnate spirits, as the case may require. In short, he must be willing to become a negative, on which the excarnate spirits can produce not only the phenomena which man is to receive as indirect proofs of his own immortality and Divinity, but of the immortality and Divinity of the manifesting spirit intelligences. The difference between the two, that which produces abnormal and that which produces supernormal phenomena, is at once clear. And it surely will not be a stretch of imagination, nor a twisting of the law of spirit to add, that mediumship hints at or implies potential adeptship, as a higher, more direct proof of immortality than that afforded by mediums through mediumship, as mediumship hints at and implies Divinity: that is, the power and realization of God in us. This deduction is all important.
From the normal to the supernormal is but a step, as from the normal to the abnormal is but a lapse, with the exception that all can realize their supernormal powers who will, and therefore can consciously function on the plane where communion and communication between incarnate and excarnate spirits is a blessed fact; while only a very few, perhaps less than one out of every fifty thousand is a medium who can receive genuine, abnormal proofs of excarnate spirit existence and identity.
No theologian or scientist who ponders or pondered deeply the saying of Jesus, “I am in the Father and the Father in me,” or that equally profound statement of Paul to the Athenians, ‘In Him ye live and move and have your being,” ever dared to explain where the Divine and human substance or intelligence begin and end. And under the circumstances it is far more in keeping with recent psychical findings to admit the Divine immanence in mind and matter, which God can withdraw as the spirit is withdrawn from the body, than to attempt to separate man and God, or the human from divine life by the sophisticated and false theories of theologians. Since as Paul taught in Corinthians II. that man knoweth the things of a man by the spirit, it is this spirit which can be called the spark of Divine immanence, which qualifies the man; so that when it is known as Spiritualism proves, that spirits produce the abnormal phenomena through mediumship, which affords the world a certain direct proof of their immortality and an indirect proof of our immortality, then our own Divinity, immortality and the potential, supernormal powers within us, which we should express, in order to substantiate and corroborate the other exotic material evidence, should at once impress their dormancy of potentiality of existence and their awakening upon us as the next step in the life and the greatest work ever placed before us! And since telepathy as a supernormal fact of being has hinted at what the abnormal phenomena of Spiritualism imply, why should there be any longer any clash among religionists and scientists as to the message of Spiritualism and the duty of the church? If the church has become corrupted by a false doctrine and worldly life, and today courts power and wealth more than the truth, it must accept the larger revelation of God by living the spiritual life or perish. And Spiritualism as the Universal Religion[15] in this high and only sense can never be error or evil; nor is it to be judged by any human product or personal revelation or the empirical standard, theological creeds or historical systems of ethnic religion. Its one source of knowledge should be truth, its one motive for action love, its ideal and end heaven, attained within and obtained without by truth and love.
If, therefore, it is emphasized that Spiritualism as a scientific, demonstrable fact of religion is mediumship plus adeptship, it is not to be forgotten that mediumship will only be supplanted by adeptship when man knows or realizes, not so much from the testimony of the senses that he is immortal, splendid as such a revelation is, nor that he can commune and communicate with deceased loved ones in this vicarious way, comforting and providential as such intercourse is, but that as spirit, he can, should and will now on earth at the present time, do the utmost to lift his own veil, remove his own conditions, exalt his own mind and purify his own life, that he may function on the supernormal plane in a free, conscious way, and so have the spiritual plus the material evidences of spirit presence and spirit communion within himself and incarnate such j facts in a divine life. And that this is the crying need of the church, the lay Spiritualist and worker, is sadly true. The church fails because it will not live the spiritual. The Spiritualist can succeed only by living the spiritual life. A means for such psychic and spiritual development is now in our hands. Will we accept or reject it?
Chapter 10. Is A Telepathic Code Possible And Practical? Some Rules For Experimental Work
When modern Spiritualism awoke the world from its sleep of death and its torpor of materialism, it presented to the intelligence of man a scientific code for the interpretation of its generic phenomena, which, in simplicity and comprehensiveness, paralleled all rules of ethics laid down by Jesus of Nazareth and other teachers since his time, when he said, “Let your communications be ‘yea’ and ‘nay’.”
In Spiritualism one rap is for no, the negative; two for doubtful, and three for yes, the positive, or affirmative.
It is a code which for economic reasons can not be improved upon or surpassed. Aside from the depth of meaning in the code, for the declaration of one, for no, the N placed before the O means the negation of spirit, or matter; the two, or doubtful, means the seeming balance and parallel between the yes and the no— therefore doubt and uncertainty of one or the other, concealed or revealed knowledge,—the one or no, for the yes or three; and the three, or yes, means the positive will or law of spirit concerning mind or soul and body or matter. All other and derivative meanings grow out of these simple ones.
To illustrate the value, power and authority of this code of raps, two questions can be put to the intelligence back of the phenomena of Spiritualism.
Question.—Who or what cause these phenomena? Excarnate spirits?
Answer.—(Three raps). Yes.
Question.—Death does not end life?
Answer.— (One rap). No.
Question.—Immortality is a fact? The personal identity survives the change called death?
Answer.—(Three raps). Yes.
Positive questions are answered by yes, negative by no. A doubtful answer is always implied in two raps, and it has been found that doubt does not always mean ignorance of the topic under consideration. Sometimes it is not wise to say yes or no, and so two raps are given. Sometimes a negative or positive reply would inspire terror—hence two raps are given, or. none at all. Should the question be pushed for either a positive or negative reply, error is likely to creep in. This forcing of the issue by stubborn, unreasonable persistence is one of the gravest dangers in the pathway of psychical researchers, and the fruitful cause of the mass of unreliable material which has libelled the fair and pure name of Spiritualism.
Spirit, soul (mind), and body (matter) are symbolized by three, two, and one, for the simple and fundamental reason that matter and spirit are the universal negative and positive of life. Matter absorbs, uses, destroys all that life manifests, while spirit reflects, conserves and preserves all that life expresses. This is the greater mystery of Spiritualism.
The triangle of spirit, soul and body is the sacred trinity of the Ancients. The apex is spirit. The content of the triangle is life, the three lines forming the three lines of the triangle, sometimes called the ego, individuality and personality, are the operative soul, and they form the organism, or the body.
Spirit is the eternal, the Divinity within us which matter occults or conceals in its dense, opaque forms or bodies. So that when one rap is made to stand for no, or the negative of life, it is to show by dissimilitude or antithesis the extreme but integral relation which matter bears to spirit. Whatever is less than spirit or more than matter is of course a doubtful, that is, impermanent, changeable quantity, and were a question asked about them it could not be answered always in the negative or affirmative because they are in a state of flux.
On such cardinal teachings or principles the cypher code of communication between world of incarnate and excarnate spirits was established and projected. The alphabet was brought into use as the key to thought. Whatever was manifested was accompanied with its own message or teaching. Thus the hypothesis of Spiritualism preceded and followed its phenomena as the only key or explanation.
There is no question but that efforts are being made by the spirit world, in fact, plans-are already laid whereby a system of teaching concerning the chemical and physiological effects of telepathic thought on the human mind and brain will lead the advanced scientist to discover some simple means by which the power and forms of thought can be known- and depended upon when transmitted from percipient to recipient. Conditions for such experiments are generally very simple, and when put into practise lead to astonishingly successful results.
The complexity of life and experience and the demands first for the commercial uses and advantages of telepathy rather hinder than promote the investigations and researches in this virgin field of our psychological life, and for the reason that ridicule and scoffing are the usual rewards of the ideal but pioneer workers. Still, whatever discouragements follow the heroic efforts of the few brave men and women who seek to associate the world of spirit with the world of matter and who apply the law of inspiration to the transference of thought from one mind to another, regardless of sensuous means and material distances and who employ the spiritual hypothesis as a basis of their experiments, these hindrances or limitations act in no sense as deterrents. And from such as fear no foe to truth, who refuse to be laughed into oblivion, who know what they are about though the ignorant and the Pharisee cry out impostor and charlatan and the mob shout crucify him, will come whatever the later generations will accept and use as a matter of course and without question. This is always so, and the pioneer, a fearless and brave reformer, looks upon his work as a mission divinely appointed, and therefore is neither afraid nor ashamed to announce a new idea.
Despite all that the Psychical Research Society has done to collect abnormal and supernormal facts of the strange operations of the mind, no important university or college has been brave enough to adopt the spiritual hypothesis as the only rule of life. Science has not yet discovered a system of philosophy by which these facts can be made the universal and common property of all who choose to put certain rules into practise. That a system of simple rules will and can be found which can at least apply to most sensitive persons, is a fact which cannot be too strongly emphasized and generally understood. The postal, telegraph, telephone and wireless service accomplish in a crude but very satisfactory form what telepathy will cover in a most economic and less laborious system, when man dares to use the virgin forces within him which now go to waste or are untouched, because of his indifference to and ignorance of them. Performances which the Zanzigs give could not be possible between two persons, unless the law of thought and consciousness made it possible between mankind and the world of spirits. Phis is an important inference, on which must be built the rules and rationale of the science of telepathic communications. Psychic powers which the Zanzigs exhibit are certainly puzzling to most astute minds because unusual, but their work must not be classed among the claptrap of the charlatan or mechanical feats of the prestidigitator. It is easier to explain away than explain such marvelous, supernormal faculties. How much of mediumship or the control of excarnate spirits enter into their work they have never told and might not care to do so, if they knew, for commercial reasons. And this element of occultism and mystery in all such extraordinary feats makes it doubly hard for the man of science who wishes to know and to get at the facts to account for and define. However, the Zanzigs do not claim to be mediums, and such feats, if not explainable by the old, are explained by the new psychology. Spiritualism reveals the law by which such phenomena are possible.
What then is the law? It is sympathy and never antipathy. Sympathy makes simple and intelligible what is meant by the statement quoted by the Zanzigs, “Two souls with but a single thought.” For it is one thing to think a thought foreign to your own mind, and quite another to transfer it to another mind, often regardless of distance. In the case of the Zanzigs it appears on the surface that the ether plays little or no importance in their experiments. At any rate, the so often quoted value of the ether as a medium of communication between percipient and recipient of telepathic phenomena is not a matter to reckon with or against. So quickly, almost instantly, do the thoughts travel or pass from the mind of Mr. Zanzig to that of his wife, that not even a frictional disturbance in the ether seems possible. What may actually happen in the ether, both as physical and superphysical matter is touched by the thought, may never be known, but it is so small and imperceptible and in no sense a condition of opposition that even as a medium it may not enter into the fact of such experiments at all. But sympathy is the very soul of attraction and as such is the secret of any telepathic success.
Sympathy is the basis of the finest and most cordial relations between souls. As a law it is as potent, universal and all pervasive as gravitation or attraction. It is the heart of attraction, without which atoms or molecules could not be drawn to each other by adhesion or cohesion. And yet so involved is it in our emotions and sensations that few realize that it could be both mother of and godmother to them. The sympathy has its origin in what, in the terminology of the new psychology, will be technically defined by the word sensitiveness. Sensitiveness is a supernormal power. It is that of feeling, by which one becomes aware of the spirit, its influence and effluence. Sensation, the senses, our emotions and feelings, are organic and physical in their outward appeal to the soul. But whatever appeals to the soul through the sympathies is inorganic, must come from within and is the product of sensitiveness. The sympathies are rooted in, and are born of, sensitiveness. To cultivate the sympathies, that is, make them acute, responsive and electric, one must strengthen one’s sensitiveness. To do this, the student must seek to function on the supernormal plane and think often,—in fact, live for the time, in the inner world of psychic vibrations. Above all, one must practise telepathy. No exercises or experiments which will produce results are to be spurned. In order to succeed, certain mental conditions are necessary. These conditions are the application of rules for action by which uniform results are obtained.
An objection may be raised here that telepathic phenomena are often secured when and where no rules at all are followed. True, but haphazard and sporadic results are proofs of the operation of the law, when they are not evidences of the application of the rules of the science. He who understands the science and the simple rules for producing results is better qualified to secure and understand results than one who is ignorant of them. Ignorance is never an advantage, but always a disadvantage. Patience, repose, courage, hope, faith, tranquillity, and above all, a sublime consciousness of one’s Divinity, are virtues one can never overdo or exaggerate. The mind should be clean: that is, free of objectional thoughts which mar ingress to subjective and spiritual states. Disharmonious thoughts should never be entertained. Lustful, selfish thoughts corrupt and darken the mind and harden the feelings. The affections should be exalted by ethe-rial and ideal meditations. A diet in which condiments and stimulants, as coffee, tea, liquors and meats, are absent, is preferred and recommended. Abstinence from food at times of experiment is better than indulgence or stuffing. Surroundings need” not be any different from the normal. Still, harmony and an agreeable environment are more helpful on the mind than their opposite, and therefore one should be pleasantly surrounded. The less catering to the physical senses, the quicker and more definite will be telepathic results. The times for experimentation are the times when -conditions can be best applied and the mind is ready for the work. Uniformity in time is unnecessary, although popular with public and experimental telepathic entertainers. Amateurs will find uniformity of time helpful in securing successful transference of thought.
Simple tests which anyone can use—in short, those tests which beginners employ—are the transmission of colors and numbers. Letters, words and sentences are more difficult because more complicated. If one begin with the simple colors, the practical and easy way is to think of the color red, blue or yellow, and then of the complimentary colors, until the recipient receives the thought of the color instantly from the percipient. This can be accomplished by practise. To think of red, blue or yellow, the percipient holds the mind strongly to each color to the exclusion of the others and to the extent that he or she can concentrate on it, and the percipient and recipient are closely en rapport, —that is, in perfect mental and psychical harmony and oneness,—the thought will reach from one mind to the other, regardless of distance.
It can be said that conditions of sympathy arid harmony between percipient and recipient precede and qualify perfect telepathic communication. In fact, if most attention is paid to the establishment of the spirit of sympathetic oneness between transmitter and receiver, successful results will be inevitable. No technique is available to anyone who rejects simple for complex rules and conditions, and who applies some elaborate system at the expense of primary and fundamental spiritual principles. An objection may be offered that for commercial purposes this oneness of spirit between percipients and recipients may not always be practical or available. Then accurate telepathic communications cannot be had. Because on this spirit telepathy depends and rests.
A little electrical device called a psychometer may be invented in the shape of a compass, containing the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the numerals from one to nine and ten (ten being indicated by a cypher), with a delicate needle, so magnetized as to be susceptible of thought vibrations, as the needle of a compass is to magnetic attraction, and such an instrument may serve the commercial world who are looking forward to some private means of communication with their friends on business interests at a distance. But it is doubtful if any instrument can be attuned to so delicate a vibration as thought or be capable of deducting thought from the mind as a copper wire coil can induct electricity. The brain is a wonderful dynamo; it is more than an electric battery, and yet its substance is alive with electricity. It, in some mysterious process not known to science, can pass an immaterial (spiritual) to a material (physical) substance—(thought), as a physical impact called sensation is conveyed to the mind and there transformed within the mind to a thought, as a thought can be transformed into a sensation or experience of a sensation of physical things.
There is this coordination existing between the phenomena and action of the supernormal powers and the normal senses, which staggers the imagination when man views the mind in its dual aspect to spirit and matter. To run thought off on to a machine will prove as difficult a task as to invent a machine which will receive thought. However, it is to be hoped that the inventive genius of science may yet find a way by which (as through mediumship in psychography or slate writing) messages can be conveyed not only from the spirit world to our world, but from one to another at a distance. If such a machine is invented, it will be the most delicate in structure which the human mind can conceive and will not depend as does wireless telegraphy upon a superior electrical voltage.
When the experimenter has proved the virtue of sympathetic oneness of mind and spirit, he is ready for telepathic experiments. Some such experiments as the transference of a flower may be next employed. A red or a white rose, or a pink or a white carnation, will be an easy exercise. Whatever two persons like the best may be easiest to transfer. Think of the object, say a red rose or a white rose, in a separate or segregated form. Individualize it. Picture one in the mind; hold it there with a definite idea of its presence, color, form and the sympathetic condition between you as percipient and your friend as recipient will make haste to transfer it at your will. Then a perfume may: be tried. A delicate fragrance as violet will carry as far as a perfume of a rose, a hyacinth or musk. It must be remembered that the mere thought or conception of the flower is not sufficient to carry forward or transfer to a distance or to another an odor.
In some rare instances this might follow, but it is best and always advisable to smell the flower strongly in the mind and concentrate on the particular odor, in order to make the experiment successful. From these simple experiments other and complex experiments can be made, until two persons can indeed translate messages and whole letters, for social and commercial purposes, and still be operating within the sphere of sane, healthy and sound minds and bodies.
And while Spiritualism has been ridiculed, condemned and neglected by the world at large, the time has come for it to show mankind that as all messages, either of the nature of physical or mental phenomena, are sent to the earth, as thought is flashed from mind to mind, so excarnate spirits communicate with incarnate, so even God, the Spirit absolute, eternal and infinite, source of omnipotence and omniscience, inspires all spirits throughout the universe.
In the years to come, telepathy will be as commonly practised as is the telegraph and telephone, and the one who is not a Spiritualist will be the one who is scoffed at, condemned and martyred.
THE END
Footnotes
[1] “Clairvoyance,” (Fourth Edition), by J. C. F. Grumbine.
[2] Even if this statements assailed by the old school psychologists, other similar recent mediumistic phenomena could be cited to strengthen the facts.
[3] This difficult test was accomplished by Sir Oliver Lodge, much to his satisfaction.
[4] The word element is employed to imply rather than define what inspiration is. It is more than an element.
[5] Psychical phenomena only show that material life must be represented on the material plane by material forms or phenomena, as none other but objective could appeal to the sensuous mind.
[6] Bulwer Lytton remarked in Zanoni, ‘‘Thought can meet thought, and spirit, though oceans divide the forms. Thou meetest Plato when thine eyes moisten over the Phaedo.”
[7] The force of gravity gives weight to matter, yet through coordinate functions of brain, nerves, muscles, matter can be moved; but no physical dynamic power can move a human soul or cause it to alter its mind without a direct appeal to the soul in the sphere of the soul. Sensation affects the soul because it wills, chooses or desires to be affected. This will in part explain why physical force does not avail in the mental and spiritual world. As Paul put it in another way, “ The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual.”
[8] Under the special head of Mediumistic Experiences certain telepathic, psychical and supernormal facts are noted.
[9] Consult the new work by J. C. F. Grumbine entitled “The Spirit World—What and Where It Is,” in which a special chapter is exhaustively devoted to “Destiny.”
[10] Gerald Massey truly says in “ Natural Genesis,” “ There may be more vital relationship to the source of life in creating a life that in all the asceticism of those who are still unconsciously seeking to save their soul as a spermatic essence, a Light of the World that may be typified by a wax candle, as it was by the oil of Horus, the Anointed. It is in action rather than in contemplation that we can plumb the dark profound and touch bottom or obtain response. The natural is the true, the unconscious way to the conscious source of all.”
[11] See “ The Canon,” published by Elkin Mathews. Also consult book of “ Measures ” by Skinner, and a recent work entitled “ Nuggets from King Solomon’s Mine ” by John Barnes Schmalz.
[12] Read the late Judge Abram Dailey’s history of the Brooklyn enigma, Mollie Fancher.
[13] At seances one need but think and the excamate spirits read the mind instantly and report the thought unmistakably.
[14] A detached, supernormal intelligence simply means the ego functioning on a plane independent of the normal self consciousness, as is the case often in catalepsy.
[15] See brochure on “Universal Religion” by the author.