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will indulge in a brief retrospect of principles stated.
We might leave out of the question the most vital point -- one, you would hesitate
perhaps to believe -- that the refusal concerns as much your own salvation (from the
standpoint of your worldly material considerations) as my enforced compliance with our
time honoured Rules. Again I might cite the case of Olcott (who, had he not been
permitted to communicate face to face -- and without any intermediary -- with us, might
have subsequently shown less zeal and devotion but more discretion) and his fate up to
the present. But, the comparison would doubtless appear to you strained. Olcott -- would
you say -- is an enthusiast, a stubborn, unreasoning mystic, who goes headlong before
him, blindfolded, and who will not allow himself to look forward with his own eyes.
While you are a sober, matter-of-fact man of the world, the son of your generation of cool
thinkers; ever keeping fancy under the curb, and saying to enthusiasm: "Thus far shalt
thou go and no farther." . . . Perhaps you are right -- perhaps not. "No Lama knows where
the ber-chhen will hurt him until he puts it on," says a Tibetan proverb. However, let that
pass, for I must tell you now that for opening "direct communication" the only possible
means would be: (1) For each of us to meet in our own physical bodies. I being where I
am, and you in your own quarters, there is a material impediment for me. (2) For both to
meet in our astral form -- which would necessitate your "getting out" of yours, as well as
my leaving my body. The spiritual impediment to this is on your part. (3) To make you
hear my voice either within you or near you as "the old lady" does. This would be
feasible in either of two ways: (a) My chiefs have but to give me permission to set up the
conditions -- and this for the present they refuse; or (b) for you to hear my voice, i.e., my
natural voice without any psycho-physiological tamasha being employed by me (again as
we often do among ourselves). But then, to do this, not only have one's spiritual senses to
be abnormally opened, but one must himself have mastered the great secret -- yet
undiscovered by science -- of, so to say abolishing all the impediments of space; of
neutralising for the time being the natural obstacle of intermediary particles of air and
forcing the waves to strike your ear in reflected sounds or echo. Of the latter you know as
yet only enough to regard this as an unscientific absurdity. Your physicists, not having
until recently mastered acoustics in this direction, any further than to acquire a perfect (?)
knowledge of the vibration of sonorous bodies and of reverberations through tubes, may
sneeringly ask: "Where are your indefinitely continued sonorous bodies, to conduct
through space the vibrations of the voice?" We answer that our tubes, though invisible,
are indestructible and far more perfect than those of modern physicists, by whom the
velocity of the transmission of mechanical force through the air is represented as at the
rate of 1,100 feet a second and no more -- if I mistake not. But then, may there not be
people who have found more perfect and rapid means of transmission, from being
somewhat better acquainted with the occult powers of air (akas) and having plus a more
cultivated judgment of sounds? But of this we will argue later on.
There is still more serious inconvenience; an almost insurmountable obstacle -- for the
present, and one, under which I myself am labouring, while even I do no more than
correspond with you, a simple thing that any other mortal could do. It is my utter inability
to make you understand my meaning in my explanation of even physical phenomena, let
alone the spiritual rationale. This is not the first time I mention it. It is, as though a child
should ask me to teach him the highest problems of Euclid before he had even begun
studying the elementary rules of arithmetic. Only the progress one makes in the study of
Arcane knowledge from its rudimental elements, brings him gradually to understand our
meaning. Only thus, and not otherwise, does it, strengthening and refining those
mysterious links of sympathy between intelligent men -- the temporarily isolated
fragments of the universal Soul and the cosmic Soul itself -- bring them into full rapport.
Once this established, then only will these awakened sympathies serve, indeed, to
connect MAN with -- what for the want of a European scientific word more competent to
express the idea, I am again compelled to describe as that energetic chain which binds
together the material and Immaterial Kosmos, -- Past, Present, and Future -- and quicken
his perceptions so as to clearly grasp, not merely all things of matter, but of Spirit also. I
feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words -- past, present and future!
Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the Subjective Whole, they are about as ill
adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving. Oh, my poor, disappointed friend, that
you were already so far advanced on THE PATH, that this simple transmission of ideas [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]