English
Such persons, commonly spoken of in occult writings as Black Magicians, are ever on the look-out for those whom they may impress into their service, and the wholly ignorant, untrained psychic, unprotected by affinity with spiritual influ- ences from above, becomes their ready prey, with results, very often as regards the Karma of the person so entangled, that reach over terrible periods of time, and may entangle the victim for a long series of lives in succession, with grievous miseries of a complicated sort. Just as often indeed the naturally-born psychic faculty may be due to aspirations which have been largely mingled with genuine, though often uncultivated Spiritual longings. ‘Chen the possessor is, by the very purity of his or her nature, shielded from the Black Magician’s attack, and ready, with a little help, even though up to that time such help may not have been earned, to get on to the right path of true occult develop- ment. It is necessary to be thus as much on our guard against under-rating as against over-rating the natur- ally born psychic capacity. It may be a blessing or a curse entirely in accordance with the circumstances just referred to; or if it may be regarded as in equi- librium between the two influences, then above all things it becomes desirable to shield its exercise by the 464 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. earnest cultivation of a lofty purpose and by a specific intellectual appreciation of the course of evolution leading to the sublime heights of spiritual development. I take it that cases are extremely rare in which the naturally born psychic faculty can be thought of as functioning on any region above the astral plane. Of course the Higher Self of every human being is akin in its nature to the Arupa level of Devachan, and in the infinite variety of human characteristics that we have to deal with, cases may arise in which by the continued feeding of the Higher Self with the essence, as it were, of many good and spiritually inspired lives, the Higher Self may have become so individually conscious on its own natural plane as to be able in some measure to reflect that consciousness back to its physical manifestation during sleep, or rather, when it has returned to the body after sleep. Such a person may thus have true touch with the Devachanic planes of consciousness, and even in this way in some cases with Devachanic opportunities for acquiring knowledge. Such an unusual condition of development might account for some of the more important prophetic dreams which sometimes consti- tute so curlous an enigma for the psychic inquirer, but it could not often happen that such development as I am here thinking of would be unaccompanied altogether by occult knowledge, for no one who is qualified to assimilate that knowledge in a useful way is left by Karma wholly without any hints which may set him on the true path. The hints or opportunities may come in one shape or another, but they come, we are assured, IRREGULAR PSYCHIC PROGRESS. 465 for all who are qualified to avail themselves of them, and though they may sometimes be uncultivated through a failure to appreciate their meaning correctly and thus quite blamelessly, it is not likely that they would be repeated in many successive lives without giving rise to the required enlightenment of the whole thinking soul. Leaving unusual possibilities out of account, however, the most interesting variety of psychic facility we have to deal with is that which is engendered as the fruit of some anterior attempts at occult development. In some past life the person in question may have had an opportunity of the particular kind I have just been referring to. He may have availed himself of that opportunity up to the limitations of his development, as it then stood, which may have been associated with such aspirations as would engender the growth of the astral senses, and then he gets launched on a life the Karma of which is probably favourable to his further progress, although in the beginning he fails to appreciate its significance. His dawning faculties are full of interest for him; there are spiritual forces in his nature which render such visions as he may have far more attractive than alarming. As soon as opportunity serves he assimilates on the intellectual side with marvellous facility all teaching pointing in the true direction of occult progress, and such a man may become, not merely a psychic, not merely an earnest devotee of Theosophical philosophy, but one of those open-eyed disciples whose consciousness has been trained to work freely on the spiritual levels above the astral, and whose beautiful privilege it is to GG 466 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. inaugurate their long career of higher usefulness in subsequent lives by constituting themselves a link between the great Masters and the awakening enthu- siasm of the many students still on the ordinary plane of life, who are thus enabled, in advance of their own development, to acquire such specific knowledge con- cerning the occult world that their own evolution in the next life as open-eyed disciples in their turn becomes surely guaranteed. For the correct appreciation, meanwhile, of the whole entangled problem which has to do with natural born psychic faculty it is necessary to consider the vast stratum of intervening cases lying between those by which some inquisitive explorer of the astral plane falls into the clutches of the Black Magician, and those, on the other hand, where the loftily inspired aspirant gains, through the expansion of his psychic powers, conscious touch with those who may lead him to the sublimest heights. Ever since the human race has come of age, so to speak, since the middle period, that is to say, of the Atlantean Race during this present world period, there have been people governed by the desire for occult knowledge and progress in all possible varieties, so to speak, of purity, as regards their motives. I suppose it may be assumed that Karmic influences, in the very loftiest examples of such aspiration, would guide the inquirer into the path leading directly to the supreme Adept organisation which merges, as regards its higher levels, as I endeavoured to show in the chapter on the Path of Initiation, in the governing hierarchy of this stupendous system, and so in the immeasurable IRREGULAR PSYCHIC PROGRESS. 467 spiritual grandeur of the cosmic hierarchy. But at the same time it has come to pass, at various periods, that other associations or lodges of occult inquirers have been founded, the character and purpose of which has been very admirable indeed, and with which great numbers of people have been associated, greatly to their own advantage and to that of others. The fact appears to be that all such subordinate lodges of occult- ism merge themselves sooner or later into the main stream, but following the bent of their own individual characteristics some people, gravitating upwards, may move for a long time in the almost exclusive companion- ship of their own original associates, and may in this way attain to positions of influence on the superphysical planes of Nature, from which they will be doing their best to help on the spiritual progress of others by the light of their own convictions. Now the movement which is known as modern spiritualism has been largely fostered and was practically set on foot in the beginning, by just an independent lodge of occult initiates of the kind I have been describing. Eventually the whole system acquired such momentum that it entirely outran the original design in one way, though in another —in reference to the effort to show mankind at large that forces independent of the physical plane are at work around us—it has attained a very imperfect success. There is much in the actual condition of the movement at present to discountenance the idea that good and intelligent beings of a high order are at the back of all that goes on. But persons who are familiar with some developments in spiritualism will feel sure 468 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. that the powers concerned have been, in definite cases, good and intelligent, and highly advanced in spiritual knowledge. No doubt in such instances the lofty occult influences I speak of have been at work. In the Allan Kardec development, for instance, instruction was given that directly points to that conclusion. Re-incar- nation is the leading idea of the Allan Kardec develop- ment. As I have already said, information concerning that all-important law of Nature has not often till recently come from beings on the astral plane. Spiritu- alists have thus been reluctant to accept the teaching their spirit friends have repudiated, and for those who have made no study of occult science it seems not unreasonable to assume that people actually enjoying the life of the next world ought to know more about it than those who merely study the subject from the physical plane point of view. But at all events, the tone of astral communications has latterly been undergoing a change. By familiar spiritualistic methods I have within recent years come into touch with friends on “ the other side ’’ who are fully instructed in the princi- ples of re-incarnation, and indeed in those of human evolution generally as defined in Theosophical litera- ture. The Theosophical movement is, in fact, in progress on the astral, as well as on the physical plane. And although no information from the astral plane can cover the whole area of Nature with which Theoso- phical research is concerned, the spiritualist is an inquirer with whom, it seems to me, the true Theoso- phist must necessarily sympathise to a very consider- able degree. Both classes share many important IRREGULAR PSYCHIC PROGRESS.