War Letters from the Living Dead Man (12 page)

Can you imagine the life of such a being? Can you extend your consciousness so as to touch his? I am frank enough to say that it is difficult even for me, who have been able to remember so much of my own long past, and to work out so many of the probable effects of the causes which I myself set up in the far past, effects which will shape my future lives on earth. Imagine an independent entity of vivid life, yet without a physical or even an astral body, a being of thought whose lowest medium is thought, who influences his chosen instruments by contact with their naked minds. What personal wishes can such a being have? What ambitions can he have? The lower and limiting word ambition seems grotesque as characterizing the motive force of such a being.

He has a name among us, but I am not permitted to tell you the name. It has a great
mantramic
value, that name, and if you should repeat it too often it might raise your own consciousness, and the vibration of yourself, to a height which would make it extremely difficult for you to keep your hold on that physical body, without which you cannot do certain work that it is your privilege and duty to perform at this stage of your evolution. There is a certain initiation which the pupils of the great Masters take under the guidance of this being; but those who take that initiation retire permanently from the everyday life of men. They get into the center of causes, which make them so dynamic—which makes their personality and their thoughts so forceful—that for the sake of the world itself they must not come too close to it; because all things work by cyclic law, and to hasten too much the evolution of humanity would be dangerous to humanity. It can only go safely at a certain rate of speed. Above that speed it is likely to meet with accident. I know exactly the stage that I myself must reach before I can take the initiation which is presided over by this being. When I have reached that stage I shall not be able to come and write through your hand, unless you raise yourself a corresponding degree above your present consciousness, because to do so might dangerously accelerate your own rate of growth.

Since coming out here I have learned much about those beings who have in charge the higher evolution of mankind. Their development would be quite incomprehensible to the mass of even enlightened men at the present time. They are and must be very lonely beings, though they too have their peers and fellow workers. Can you imagine remaining alone a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, yet all the time extremely active in mind, following with your thought the course of an evolution which you yourself have long left behind in your own growth, following it with the mind alone, because the emotional nature you have also left behind, and doing all this not for any personal reward but because it is a labor in accordance with the great law of a Being still above and beyond yourself? Obedience is taught in certain schools, not in an effort to control the pupil in the interest of the Master, but that the pupil may thus take his first steps on the path which leads to obedience to the Cosmic Will. On that path he will have to go an immense distance before he can be trusted to do such work as is being done by the being who passed this night along the battle line of one of the opposing armies, shedding the light of his thought and the certainty of his purpose into a few minds whose receptivity made possible their grasping what he gave.

Do not weary on the path, you who are taking the first and easiest steps of the journey that shall one day lead you to the Masters! The path is indeed steep, and as one inspired writer said, it leads uphill all the way; but there are stages at which the traveler may pause and enjoy the prospect. I seem to have reached such a stage myself, and though I am always working now, yet I enjoy my work. The awful battle that some of us fought with the elemental beings is now over. The worst calamity that could have befallen mankind is happily averted. The labor of the present is light compared with the labor of that struggle. If the world could realize what it owes to the Masters whom most men regard as myths! But such Teachers do not work for gratitude nor for reward.

Follow you in their footsteps, for it is the only road that can lead mankind above the awful calamities that threatened recently to engulf mankind. (
I am not referring to a mere German victory.
) It is wise to keep from the knowledge of men in general the great evolutionary facts which govern the life of the planet. A mind must be lifted above the small circle of everyday interests before it could endure such knowledge. You all use words without realizing their meaning. You talk of guardian angels; you talk of hell and purgatory, and of vicarious atonement, and of sacraments. Sacraments! I could tell you of a sacrament that is verily an eating of the body and a drinking of the blood of God; but I refrain lest you should tell the world, and if you should tell the world the evil forces of the world would destroy you. But I am coming now perilously near the things that may not be spoken, so I will wish you a good night—a good night indeed—and go back to my labors, in the rear of that being of light who passed along the battlefields this evening.

April 17

Letter 27

Invisible Enemies 

You may have wondered why the elemental beings that as I have told you precipitated the Great War were so malicious at this time, why they hurled themselves upon mankind with such overwhelming force. There is no reason why you should not know something of these causes, having seen so much of their effects. The saying that man has made more material progress in the last hundred years than in the preceding two thousand, has become a mere newspaper commonplace. It is because he has not made a corresponding moral progress that the evil elemental beings, who fear for their rule in their own kingdom,
could
come so near to succeeding in their attacks upon the human race.

It is not merely in material ways that man has progressed with such amazing rapidity, for some of his inventions and discoveries touch the invisible regions. The doors of man’s mind are opening on the untracked spaces of aether in which these beings live. Man is chaining the elements, and to chain the elements may be to chain the elementals. One man in America has come so near to a great and dangerous secret that his eyes have had to be veiled by those who fear for man’s too rapid progress. Occult societies dot the world. In other days these societies were really secret, and no one had access to their knowledge until after tests were passed which proved fitness for further study and further secrets. But the doors of the unseen have been besieged by an army of intellectual enthusiasts who have not passed the tests. Curiosity demands to know that which only the nobility of the spirit was once trusted with. Democracy has spread even into the occult orders, and sacred mysteries have been published broadcast by those who put no curb upon their personal ambitions. The hosts of the unseen world have themselves suffered invasion.

Now the hosts of the unseen will obey a great soul that they know to be more powerful than themselves. They run like docile children at his call, and they go at his command as a dog goes. But the unseen hosts are very jealous of their freedom, and they will yield it only to one whose superiority is manifest to them. Many—yes, most—of those who are now seeking to open the doors of that region are unfit to command there; because he only can command the unseen forces outside who can command the unseen forces inside himself. In a former letter I spoke of the danger of black magic in America; but the danger is everywhere. And what is black magic? It may be briefly defined as a use for selfish purposes of those very forces of the unseen world. Not until a man has advanced beyond himself will the invisible forces serve him long without rebellion.

Pick up a common newspaper, and you will see the advertisements of men and women who promise for a fee to bring about results which can only be brought about by using those invisibles. What blasphemy! What presumption! If these advertisers could make good their claims, they would be more dangerous than typhus fever. Such advertisements arouse all the curiosity and ambition and fiery selfishness latent in the heart of the ignorant. These untrained dabblers in the mysteries attempt to do things which an Adept would never dream of doing, for most of their efforts have for purpose some attack upon the free will of others; they seek to influence the desires and the judgment of others in the narrow and personal interest of those who pay them to set the forces in operation. Would you let a child loose in a gunpowder factory with a box of matches in his hand? That is what has been done in the last few years all over the western world. No wonder the invisible beings have rebelled. They will follow a master, but they resent the interference of a fool. It is not the fools they fear, however. The men they fear are the great scientists. Man’s progress in science has been such that he must purify his motives, or he will be destroyed. That is one reason why I am preaching brotherhood, in an attempt to save men from their own folly. Once let the feeling for brotherhood become general, and these experiments with unknown forces would be less dangerous. Mankind as a mass might work with the power of a White Master, whose motives are always unselfish.

The great scientists come nearer than anybody else to that pure working with mind for mind’s own sake, which I recently described in writing of a great being, a great Initiator, who serves the world by influencing along the line of evolutionary law the thoughts of certain men who are the chosen instruments of evolution. How little men know of the unseen world surrounding them! I recently followed you into a lecture room in New York that was even more crowded with invisible beings than with men and women. Your restlessness there had a cause, as you well knew. The purpose of that meeting was to form a nucleus of a society of curiosity-seekers for investigating the unseen, for necromancy and ceremonial magic. Madness of madness! I heard one man express the determination that the proposed society should not, like the Society for Psychical Research, close its doors to the outside world; but that the society should invite all who were interested in the investigation of the unseen, including the newspaper reporters. A press agent for the occult!

Let me describe a few of the auditors who were invisible to any in the room except one person: A long lean hungry being with the face of a gargoyle and the stomach of an unfed leech yearned over the gathering. He was almost affectionate in his interest in one of the speakers. Another, bloated and lethargic, had already fed himself since entering the room. Another, frightened and tortured, was seeking an exit; but could not get outside the desire-aura of one of the participants in that orgy of curiosity. Another, powerful and malignant, moved from place to place, selecting his future victims. He will be present at the meetings of the society. He will try to keep it alive, for he knows of a fascinating possibility which I shall not record here. Why do you go to such places?

April 18

Letter 28

The Glory of War

I have written of the beauty of peace; but I now want to write of the glory of war, for war has its glories. Anything that arouses man to the highest pitch of enthusiasm is glorious; for what is glory but a radiation of light, a burst of that life which is the Sun in man? I regret this war. The suffering, the agony, the torment that I have seen and have felt through sympathy, have left their marks upon me; but had I remained in the safety of the neutral stars I should have missed the glory of the fight. Man had grown too tame, without acquiring the virtues of tameness; but this war has served the purpose of the gods by hurling man into the primitive, the savage, where life had its roots, but from which the sap flows that will blossom later in such a faith as the world has never seen.

Suffering and joy are forever opposite and equal. Man may rest for a time in the neutral condition of a well fed half-consciousness; but when the extremes of suffering and joy come to him, he is no longer half-conscious, but awake and alive, and glory shines round him. Could the Masters have prevented this war? They could have retarded it; but the causes were present in the hearts of men, in the invisible forces within them as well as outside them, and to have further delayed the explosion would have served no planetary purpose. The men who are not dead are more alive than they were twelve months ago, and even the so-called dead are living-dead. We pushed back the forces of evil, yes; but that was a part of the struggle, that was the struggle in our world. Let me tell you the story of one man whom I knew in the days of peace. He was well fed and half-asleep with prosperity, he prattled mild commonplaces about life, and ethics, and the duties of a citizen; but what did he really know of life, or of ethics, or of the duties of a citizen?

We will call him Johnson. He has been in this war some months, a fighter for England, and the integrity of England; and now when he speaks of life his speech has meaning, because life to him now is the opposite and mate of death. He feels enthusiasm for it, the glory of it shines round him. Johnson had a son, an only child. Fathers will know what I mean. In the great retreat in which Johnson was one of the leaders his son fell before his eyes—wounded but not dead. For one swift heartbeat the father turned to his boy . . . then he went on with his command that otherwise would have been leaderless, leaving his only child to the tender mercies of an army drunk with the pitiless glory of conquerors. Johnson will never again prattle commonplaces about life. He has learned the meaning of death, and of tortured uncertainty far worse than death.

April 20

(This letter was left unfinished—for no reason apparent to me.
Editor
.)

Letter 29

A Friend of “X”

A man died yesterday with your name in his thoughts. No, he was not a friend of yours, but someone you have never seen. Back in England last year he read the former book which I wrote through your hand, and was intensely interested in it. For months he wanted to meet you, but being a modest man he waited. Then the war broke out, and he went with the army to Belgium. Day and night since the first fighting he has been meditating the facts and possibilities of that book. Is there a future life continuous with that of earth? Can a man return as I claimed to return, and can he give to a woman still in the land of the living a record of his experiences among the dead? Had I really seen the things I reported, and did I go to the pattern world and the heaven world, where I saw the Savior of men with a lamb on his arm, etc., etc.?