Elementary Theosophy — Section 2, Chapters 4 & 5

CHAPTER IV. LIFE AFTER BODILY DEATH

One of the really remarkable facts of modern life is the disinclination to accept at apparent value the scientific and other evidence there is to prove that consciousness persists after the death of the physical body.

There is in existence a large amount of such evidence and much of it is offered by scientists of the highest standing; and yet the average man continues to speak of the subject as though nothing about it had yet been definitely learned.

It is the tendency of the human mind to adjust itself very slowly to the truth, as it is discovered.

Sometimes a generation passes away between the discovery and the general acceptance of a great truth.

When we recall the intense opposition to the introduction of steam-driven boats and vehicles, and the slowness with which the world settles down to any radical change in its methods of thinking, it will perhaps seem less remarkable that the truth about the life after bodily death has waited so long for general recognition.

The evidence upon which a belief in the continuity of consciousness is based is of two kinds--that furnished by physical science and that furnished by psychic science.

Together they make a very complete case.

The printed evidence of the first division--physical science--is voluminous.

In addition to that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research there are the researches and experiments by the scientists of England, France and Italy, among whom are Crookes, Lodge, Flammarion and Lombroso.

Crookes was a pioneer in the work of studying the human consciousness and tracing its activities beyond the change called death.

All of that keenness of intellect and great scientific knowledge, which has enabled him to make so many valuable discoveries and inventions, and has won for him world-wide fame, were brought to bear upon the subject, and for a period of four years he patiently investigated and experimented.

Many illustrated articles prepared by him, fully describing his work, were published at the time in _The Journal of Science_ of which he was then the editor.

Three vital points in psychic research were established by Sir William Crookes.

One was that there is psychic force.

He demonstrated its existence by levitation.

He showed next, that the force is directed by intelligence.

By various clever experiments he obtained most conclusive evidence of that fact.

He then demonstrated that the intelligence directing the force is not that of living people.

Crookes also went exhaustively into the subject of materialization and here, again, he was remarkably successful.

He was the first scientist to photograph the materialized human form and engage in direct conversation with the person who thus returned from the mysterious life beyond.

This evidence from the camera must be regarded as particularly interesting.

It was received with much amazement at the time, but that was before we had revised our erroneous ideas about the nature of matter and before the day of liquid air.

Materialization is no longer a startling idea, for that is precisely what liquid air is--a condensation of invisible matter to the point where it becomes tangible and can be weighed, measured, seen and otherwise known to the physical senses.

All these things Sir William Crookes did upon his own premises and under the most rigid scientific conditions.

All the methods and mechanism known to modern science were employed and he finally announced his complete satisfaction and acceptance of the genuineness of the phenomena observed.

As Sir William Crookes was the earliest, Sir Oliver Lodge is the latest of the famous scientists who have taken up the investigation of the continuity of consciousness.

In a lecture upon the subject, before the Society for the Advancement of Science, he declared not only that the subject of life after physical death was one which science might legitimately and profitably investigate but that the existence of an invisible realm had been established.

He declared the continent of an invisible world had been discovered, and added, "already a band of daring investigators have landed on its treacherous but promising shores."

Different scientists make a specialty of certain kinds of psychic investigation and while Crookes made a detailed and careful study of materialization Lodge has given equally painstaking efforts to investigations by the use of that class of sensitives known as "mediums."

A medium is not necessarily a clairvoyant, and usually is not clairvoyant.

A person in whose body the etheric matter easily separates from the physical matter is a medium and can readily be utilized as a sort of telephone between the visible and the invisible planes.

A medium is an abnormal person and is a good medium in proportion to the degree of abnormality.

If the etheric matter of the body is easily extruded the physical body readily falls into the trance condition and the mechanism of conversation can be operated by the so-called "dead" person who has temporarily taken possession of it.

In such cases it is not the medium who speaks for the living-dead communicator.

He is speaking directly himself, but he may often do it with great difficulty and not always succeed in accurately expressing the thought he has in mind.

He may have to contend with other thoughts, moods and emotions than his own and to those who understand something of his difficulties it is not strange that such communications are frequently unsatisfactory.

It is not often that an analogy can be found that will give a physical plane comprehension of a superphysical condition, but perhaps a faint understanding may be had by thinking of a "party line" telephone that any one of a dozen people may use at any moment he can succeed in getting possession of it.

A listener attempting to communicate with one of them may find that several others are constantly "switching in," much to his confusion.

If distinction of voices due to sound were eliminated and then a stenographic record were to be made of all words reaching the listener he would find that it would often be fragmentary and trivial.

That would not, however, prove that the conversation did not come from living beings nor that there was not at least one intelligent person among them.

That scientists engaged in psychic research have similar experiences proves nothing more.

It seems to be a common opinion that the evidential value of such psychic communications, even under the direction of a skilful scientist, cannot be very great.

But there are ways of knowing.

It is not at all difficult for the investigator to confine his work, not only to incidents unknown to the medium, but to scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend.

It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge.

Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate.

Some of the most celebrated belong to the peasant class of Europe.

Let us suppose that Sir Oliver Lodge is about to attempt to communicate with a scientist who has passed on to join the living dead.

He will ask technical scientific questions that nobody but a scientist can answer and that the medium can by no possibility even understand when they are answered.

Or suppose he gets a communication from the medium's hand signed by a great author.

The living dead man writes a criticism, let us say, of some new book and does it in his characteristic style, full of the power of keen analysis and sound literary judgment.

Surely nobody can believe that the medium is producing such things on her own account.

If she could do so she would not be earning her living as a medium.

But the scientists do not stop there.

We often hear the expression "cross-correspondence."

Just what do they mean by that and in what way does it prove the personal identity of a dead man who is communicating?

The principle may be illustrated by the hotel clerk's method.

Sometimes a guest leaves a sum of money with the clerk, and he wishes to be perfectly sure of his identity when he returns to claim it.

He requests the guest to put his signature on a card.

Then he tears the card in two, gives him one piece and keeps the other.

That gives him a double proof of identity.

When he comes for his money he must first give his name and then produce the piece of card that fits into the ragged edge of the piece the clerk has retained, the two together making the whole and restoring the signature.

It's one of the simplest but most satisfactory proofs possible.

Neither piece of that card alone is intelligible.

If one piece should be lost and others should find it nobody could read it or make anything of it.

Nobody could guess the name unless he had the other piece.

He knows only about the part he holds.

He may be a thief and may earnestly desire to use what he has found to defraud, but he is helpless because he has only one of the two parts it requires to make an intelligible whole.

That is the principle involved in identity by cross-correspondence.

Part of a message is written through one medium and part through another medium at another time in another place and neither part presents a complete statement or has coherence until it is fitted into the other part; and that prevents a medium who is dishonest from manufacturing a story that may be more or less plausible.

We are by no means wholly dependent upon scientific investigation for evidence that the dead still live.

Hundreds of people are sufficiently sensitive to have some personal knowledge of the matter.

The number is far beyond what it appears to be for two reasons.

One is that the average person fears ridicule and keeps his own counsel about his occult experience.

The other is the feeling that communications from departed relatives are too sacred and personal for public discussion.

Tens of thousands of people have seen demonstrations at spiritualistic seances which, while possessing little evidential value from the scientific viewpoint, nevertheless have a legitimate place in the great mass of psychic phenomena.

But more convincing is the evidence furnished in hundreds of homes where some member of the family acts as automatic writer or medium.

The most convincing evidence is not always scientific evidence.

What can be more convincing than the evidence furnished in one's home by members of the family?

There is much such evidence, obtained both through mediums and by automatic writing.

Automatic writing--that is, the control of the hand of a living person to record the thoughts of another who has lost the physical body--is perhaps one of the least objectionable ways in which communications have come from the astral world, and to it we are indebted for some useful books with interesting accounts of the life in the unseen regions.

Here, of course, as elsewhere, discrimination must be used, for the wise and foolish, the useful and useless are to be found side by side.

In accepting or rejecting, one must use his common sense just as he does on this plane in separating the valuable from the worthless.

In such matters we should not lose sight of the fact that the living dead are unchanged in intellect and morality.

The genius here is the genius there and the living fool is not different from the dead one.

It is often those who know the least who are the most anxious to tell it and the medium or automatic writer sometimes gives them the opportunity.

Consequently we get many foolish communications and an enormous amount of commonplace platitude is delivered at seances.

But it is equally true that unquestionable proof of personal identity is sometimes secured.

There is much valuable non-scientific evidence that the consciousness survives the loss of the physical body and it frequently comes from sources that insure respectful attention.

The two following stories of that kind are cited as corroboration of the scientific evidence.

Little touches of the personality often constitute the most convincing of all evidence.

It is one thing to show that people in general live after physical death.

It is quite a different matter to establish the personal identity of one of them who is communicating, and that is one of the vital points involved.

W.

J.

Stillman, the eminent journalist, gives us some valuable evidence on personal identity.

In his earlier years he had studied art in London.

Shortly before the death of Turner, the great artist had volunteered to give Stillman some advice on painting, but had not redeemed the promise at the time of passing away.

Stillman had a friend whose daughter was mediumistic and he decided to experiment.

Immediately on beginning the seance the young girl was taken possession of by an entity claiming to be Turner.

Stillman asked his question silently, speaking no words, but mentally requesting Turner to write his name.

The only reply was an emphatic shake of the head.

He then asked if he would give some advice on painting.

The response was another decided negative.

Stillman felt that he was foolishly wasting his time and declared the seance at an end.

But the girl sat silent.

Then after a moment she slowly arose with the air of decrepitude, took a lithograph from the wall and went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of paper on a drawing board, sharpening a pencil, tracing the outline, the washing-in of a drawing, etc. , and then proceeded to show a simple but surprising method of taking out the lights.

"Do you mean to say that Turner got his effects in that way?"

asked the incredulous young artist.

The answer was an emphatic affirmative.

Stillman then asked if the central passage of sunlight and shadow through rain in the well known drawing "Llanthony Abbey" by Turner, had been done in that way and was answered by another emphatic affirmative.

So sure was the young artist that this could not be true that he gave it up in disgust and abruptly left.

A few weeks later Stillman was calling upon Ruskin and related the experience.

Ruskin, who had known the celebrated dead artist intimately, declared that the contrariness of the medium at the beginning of the seance was remarkably characteristic of Turner.

But what was much more to the point, in the way of evidence, was that the drawing in question was in Ruskin's possession and eagerly it was brought down from the wall for examination.

After close scrutiny the great art critic and the young artist agreed that, beyond dispute, the drawing _had_ been done in the way described.

Such evidence has an added value when it comes from those who are neither spiritualists nor professional investigators, but who have the things they doubt thrust upon them in such convincing manner that they feel impelled to record their experience for the enlightenment of others.

In the last literary work[C] done by Carl Schurz, we are given, quite incidentally, his testimony that at a seance soon after the Civil War he was told the future in such detail as to leave no possible room for the explanation of coincidence.

It was in July, 1865, when Schurz was on his way to Washington, whither he had been summoned by President Johnson, that he stopped in Philadelphia at the home of his friend, Dr. Tiedemann.

The doctor's daughter, about fifteen years old, could do automatic writing.

As a matter of interest and amusement in the family circle the girl gave an exhibition of her psychic abilities.

When Schurz was invited to ask for a communication he not unnaturally requested one from the recently deceased President Lincoln, for he had been personally acquainted with him.

The girl wrote a message purporting to come from Lincoln.

It related to politics and proved, in time, to have been an accurate prophecy of most unexpected facts which would not transpire for more than three years!

Schurz lived in Wisconsin at the time and had no intention of changing his residence, nor did he do so until two years later.

The message which the girl wrote asserted that Schurz would be elected to the United States senate _from Missouri_.

He did not regard the message as authentic and naturally enough considered the prophecy absurd.

In 1867 he took up his residence in St. Louis and in January, 1869, he was elected United States senator by the Missouri legislature.

So far as the scientific evidence is concerned, it will be understood, of course, that no attempt is here made to present that.

The intention is merely to call attention to some of the eminent scientists who have done notable work and to mention a few of the more interesting discoveries made.

Those who desire to come into possession of the evidence in full will find upon examination that it is voluminous.

From the viewpoint of physical science alone the evidence of the continuity of consciousness is not only convincing but conclusive.

Yet occult science has much more to offer.

To those who have no personal knowledge of the existence of occult faculties, such evidence can be offered only upon the inherent reasonableness of the statements made.

The truth of clairvoyance, like all other truths, must slowly win its way to general acceptance.

While large numbers of people still scoff at it, even as the world not so very long ago scoffed at hypnotism as a fantastic theory with no foundation in fact, there is nevertheless a large and rapidly growing number who personally know the truth about clairvoyance.

There is every conceivable grade of clairvoyant power and some degree of superphysical sensitiveness is becoming rather common.

There are two distinct kinds of clairvoyance and that which is most in evidence with the public is not calculated to inspire confidence.

It is employed almost exclusively in what is known as "fortune telling" and is often practiced by those who are interested only in the money they can earn by it.

As a matter of course, trickery and fraud are found associated with it among such people, and those amongst them who are both capable and honest suffer on account of it.

The fortune telling clairvoyant is usually one who was born with "second sight," as the Scotch have named it, and almost without an exception they do not in the least understand its rationale.

They find certain facts in their consciousness that could not be known to them by the physical senses, but why or how they get the information they do not know.

That form of clairvoyance is a sensitiveness related to the sympathetic nervous system, the center of which is the solar plexus.

It has no relationship whatever to the mind, no association with intelligence, and will often--indeed, commonly--be possessed by the most ignorant and uncouth.

It is much more common among Indians and negroes than among more highly evolved people.

It is vestigial and will slowly disappear from the race.

It belongs to the realm of emotion, not thought.

The higher clairvoyance, the only true "clear seeing," is associated with the cerebro-spinal nervous system and its seat is in the brain.

It is not a "natural gift"[D] like the other, although it is latent in all human beings.

It has been highly developed in some who have had the unusual opportunity of long training under the direct supervision of great psychic scientists.

Such clairvoyants are never to be found among the fortune tellers.

Only people with serious views of life and intense devotion to human service would have the patience and endurance to undergo such training and only those of singular purity of life would have any possibility of success.

Such clairvoyants are people of keen intelligence.

By special training and tremendous effort, not possible to most of us, they have pressed forward in evolution and attained a development that the race will be many a century in reaching.

It is by the use of this exalted order of clairvoyance that invisible realms are explored, and additional knowledge is accumulated to the ancient wisdom.

Such a clairvoyant is not a medium.

The medium surrenders his physical mechanism for the use of another, who speaks through it, and at the close of the seance the medium knows nothing of what has occurred.

The clairvoyant is always in possession of his senses and is fully aware of what is occurring.

He is the explorer and discoverer.

He deals with the facts of the life after bodily death in a different way than the physical scientist does but it is soon found by the student that the physical scientist and the psychic scientist corroborate each other.

Together they bring overwhelming evidence to support the hypothesis that life is eternal; that the consciousness we have at this moment will never cease to be; that our individuality, with all its present memories, will eternally persist; that what we call death is in reality but a forward step in an orderly evolutionary journey and an entrance upon a more joyous phase of life, which is not remarkably different from that we live today.

The sum total of the knowledge that we have gained through the combined work of the physical scientists and the occult scientists leads us to the conclusion that the death of the physical body means neither the annihilation of consciousness nor a radical change in consciousness.

It is, in fact, but the release of consciousness from its confinement to the physical form, as a song-bird is released from a cage to the joyous freedom of a wider world, where woods and stream and field and sky give new impulse to its innate characteristics.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, Vol. III, p. 154. [D] There are, of course, really no natural gifts.

Nature does not favor some and ignore others.

When a few possess what others do not have, they earned it by giving special attention to its development or as in the case of the psychic sensitiveness of the sympathetic nervous system, it is vestigial, and has been possessed by the race in earlier ages.

CHAPTER V. THE EVOLUTIONARY FIELD

In a treatise on elementary theosophy the solar system may be reckoned as our universe and we shall have no need of considering more than a small fragment of even that.

It is septenary in constitution, as may be seen in its vibrations expressed in color and sound.

Beyond the seven colors of the prism we have only tints and outside the seven notes we can get only overtones or undertones.

There are likewise seven planes in the system but less than half of them require our attention, for the evolutionary field of the human soul is the three lower planes, known as the physical, astral and mental.

When the human being has outgrown them in evolution he passes on to superhuman evolution.

The word "plane," so often encountered in theosophical literature, should perhaps have some definition.

It has a wide application and is used as a synonym for region, place, sphere or world.

In referring to the physical plane the term embraces all we know of earth and sky and life through the physical senses.

There are seven planes in our solar system because of the seven different combinations of its ultimate atoms.

Each plane consists of a totally different grade of matter than the next plane, but all have for their base the ultimate atom of the solar system.

When modern science discovered, to its astonishment, that the physical atom was a composite body it confirmed the theosophical teaching that the ultimate physical atom was _not_ the final point of division.

Theosophy teaches that when the ultimate physical atom is disintegrated its particles become the coarsest matter of the next plane or region above it--the astral plane.

The process repeated with astral matter results in driving its ultimate atom from the highest level of the astral plane or world to the lowest of the mental plane.

That scientist who said that the atom is the brick of the universe stated a great truth, for of its combinations all forms are built; and if the idea be applied to the ultimate atom of the solar system it will then be true that of such "bricks" all the planes are built.

The relationship of the planes to each other is that of interpenetrating spheres of matter.

The physical plane, consisting of the earth and its atmosphere, is surrounded and interpenetrated by the astral plane, or world, which is an enormously larger globe of exceedingly tenuous matter.

This vast sphere of invisible matter is _within_ the earth as well as beyond it, interpenetrating every atom of physical matter to the earth's center.

Its grossest grade of matter is so rare, and its vibrations so intense, that they cannot affect the physical senses and therefore we remain unconscious of it while that matter moves freely through all physical objects.

We are unconscious of its life and activities for precisely the same reason that we know nothing of the messages of intelligence carried on the vibrations of the wireless telegraph, although they pass through the room where we sit.

We have no sense organs with which it is possible to register such vibrations.

Messages conveying intelligence of tremendous import, involving the movements of vast armies, the fall of empires and the destinies of great nations, flow through the very space we occupy but we are wholly unconscious of them.

Even so we remain blind and deaf to the stupendous activities of life and consciousness in the astral world, notwithstanding the fact that it surrounds and permeates us while its forms, unseen and unfelt, move through the physical world as freely as water flows through a sieve.

The mental world constitutes a region of our earth still more vast than the astral portion of it.

As the astral sphere encloses the physical globe, the mental encompasses both, enclosing them and also interpenetrating them to the earth's center.

The term "mental world" may seem confusing to some because we are accustomed to think of the mental and the material as being opposites.

The mental world, or sphere, or plane, of theosophy, is a world of _matter_, not merely thought.

It is matter, however, of such remarkable tenuosity that it may properly be called mind-stuff, and in its rarest levels it is said to be "formless" so far as the existence of what the physical senses know as form is concerned.

All three of these worlds, or planes--the physical, astral and mental--are, then, worlds of matter, of form, of activity, of thought and of enterprise.

They are concentric globes, the physical enclosed by the astral, and both physical and astral enclosed by the mental.

Within and without all physical matter are both astral and mental matter.

Every physical atom is surrounded and permeated by astral and mental matter.

The relationship is precisely that which exists between the ether and the lower grades of physical matter.

If the relationship of the three worlds--physical, astral and mental--is fully understood later confusion of thought will be avoided.

Physical language is not capable of fully expressing much with which students of the occult must deal.

Because there is nothing better for the purpose, words must be used that express but a part of the truth and may sometimes prove misleading unless the constitution and relationship of the three spheres is kept in mind.

Thus, it is necessary to speak of higher and lower worlds, or planes, inner or outer, and of the soul coming "down" into the material world when, as a matter of fact, _no movement in space_ is under consideration.

The astral is commonly spoken of as an inner plane and while it truly is so because it can be known only to astral senses by a withdrawal of the consciousness from its exterior, material body, it is also true that the astral world is outside the physical because it envelops it as the sea does a sponge.

We usually speak of coming down from higher planes to lower and that may be true not only in the sense of changing the state of consciousness from higher vibrations to lower ones but it _could_ mean a journey in space from a point in the astral plane above the physical globe to a point at its surface.

"Up" and "down" are relative, not absolute.

"Down" for us is toward the earth's center and "up" is the opposite direction.

A spire in the Occident and a spire in the Orient are both said to be pointing upward but they are pointing in opposite directions.

On most parts of the earth's surface we have four directions, while at the poles there is, of course, but one direction--south or north, as the case may be.

East, west and north disappear at the north pole.

Reflection upon such facts leads one to at least faintly comprehend the possibility of space itself disappearing from the inner planes--space as we know it.

The matter of each of the planes consists of seven classes.

We are familiar with the solids, liquids and gases of the physical plane, and to them must be added four grades of the ether.

The seven grades of matter of the astral and mental worlds constitute an important part of the mechanism for the soul's evolution, for they determine the state of consciousness in the life beyond the physical plane.

But a study of those states of consciousness belongs to a later chapter.

A difficulty which the student of theosophy should make an early effort to eliminate, is the tendency to think of invisible realms as unreal.

It should not be forgotten that it is only the limitation of the physical senses that gives rise to the feeling of unreality beyond the visible.

We should keep in mind the fact that the invisible realms are composed of matter as certainly as the air is matter, or a stone is matter.

The water in a pan may evaporate, but it does not cease to be matter because it has passed beyond the ken of the physical senses.

It will some time condense once more and play its part as the liquid, water, or as the solid, ice.

Only when matter is in certain forms can we know of its existence through the physical senses.

We frequently hear people who are students of the occult speak of a deceased person as having left the earth.

But passing into the astral plane, or world, is not, of course, leaving the earth.

Both the astral world and the mental world are divisions of the earth.

As the atmosphere is invisible and yet is a part of the earth's physical matter, so the invisible astral and mental regions are other parts of the earth.

They are properly called worlds because the activities in consciousness that make up existence there are as remote from ours as though they were upon another planet.

We have erroneously supposed that with the physical senses we really see and know the earth, whereas we have known only that small fragment of the earth that consists of physical matter.

Beyond the limitation of our poor senses stretch in unsuspected grandeur vaster regions of our earth, swept by the vibrations of an intenser life.

CHAPTER VI.