Part 8

This absolute personal control of each man over his own future lies in a twofold power: the one being that integrity, moral purpose, aspirations, have a creative power of the most potent character; and the other being in that one attracts to himself the spiritual companionship and sympathetic co-operation of just such quality as his own. There is an objection, often made to the faith in the companionship and communion with those in the Unseen,--that only those of a lower order in the life beyond death are attracted into the sphere of this world. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. One might as well refuse all social intercourse with those in this world, on the plea that if he have companionship at all it would be of a lower order, and therefore he will have none. Now the order of one's companions and associates depends on himself. If he is noble and exalted, he does not attract nor is he attracted to the base and the unworthy: and only more deeply and unfailingly does this law hold true in the realm of spirit. One attracts to himself from the unseen world companionship of the same order and quality as that of his own spirit, with the exception that in proportion to the purity of his aspiration does this quality of companionship come to him of a still higher order than his own. Thus one creates his own world. He need not abjectly feel that he must accept sorrow, trial, defeat, and disaster at the moment, because compensation somewhere awaits him. The law of transmutation supersedes the law of compensation. One may bring to bear, at the moment, the potent force that transforms all: that changes dullness into radiance, trial into joy, depression into exaltation. And how? Simply by bringing to bear on the events and conditions of the hour the intense and creative potency of spiritual power. By means of this we shall certainly gain those "new glimpses of a profounder scheme of cosmic law" to which Sir William Crookes refers and which his vision discerns as open to science.

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It is a scientific fact that any vibration set up in the ether persists to an unlimited degree, communicating itself to that which is in correspondence with its rate of vibration. This, of course, is the explanation of the phenomena involved in wireless telegraphy, and is equally the explanation of the phenomena involved in telepathy. At a meeting of the Society of Arts in May of 1901, Professor Ayrton, commenting on Marconi's system, said that we "are gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, at a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electro-magnetic voice, heard by him who had the electro-magnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. 'Where are you?' he would say. A faint reply would come, 'I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Atlantic.' Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Think of what this would mean, of the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole,--not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,--not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance, based on true physical laws."

Yet even this speculation fails to keep pace with the advance of truth, for there is no death, in the sense in which Professor Ayrton refers to it here, as a state of unconsciousness which no message can reach, and from which no reply can come. On the contrary, that transformation we call death is a condition of far more intense consciousness, of being far more alive and far more responsive to the call and the thought. We are learning to realize the literal truth of the phrase in the Bible, "dead in trespasses and sins." So far as one is in sins and faults and defects he is dead. Spiritual vitality is in goodness alone. So far as one endeavors to follow after righteousness, to achieve and live in truth, honor, and love, he is alive; so far as he fails in this he is dead, and this, quite irrespective of the fact as to whether he is in or out of his physical body. This present world has its dead people walking around, it is true: eating, drinking, dressing, travelling, taking part in the average activities of daily life, but dead, all the same, or, at most, only partially alive,--the "dead souls," as Gogol well terms them. The vital truth of immortality is to be immortal now, to-day; to be spiritually alive, spiritually conscious, and with this achieved, whether in or out of the body is immaterial. That becomes a mere detail of no special significance. Given the condition of spiritual vitality, and the electro-magnetic call would receive its reply from the friend who had "shed" his body.

Sir William Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society, remarked:--

"If any of the planets be populated (say Mars) with beings like ourselves, having the gift of language and the knowledge to adapt the great forces of nature to their wants, then if they could oscillate immense stores of electrical energy to and fro in electrical order, it would be possible for us to hold communication, by telephone, with the people of Mars."

It is hardly a bolder or more startling speculation to contemplate the establishment of intelligent and definite communication with Mars than it would have been, a half-century ago, to contemplate communication across three thousand miles of ocean without visible means. An evening's observation of the heavens, made recently through the great telescope of the Naval Observatory in Washington, revealed, in one of its phases, a sunrise in the moon. One gazed at the dark edge of a mountain range to see it suddenly grow light; to see the illumination increase both in area and intensity, precisely like a sunrise over a mountain range here on earth. The spectacle was as suggestive as it was sublime. It brought the observer into a new relation to the universe. The sun that lights the earth was then rising on the moon. One realized a new conception of the unity of the solar system.

Now it is this unity in the universe that scientists are everywhere affirming. This is the new note in science, and it is only one aspect of this truth to realize that wireless telegraphy and telepathy are both manifestations of the same principle,--that of setting up a magnetic disturbance in the ether, by utilizing the electricity in etheric currents. Thought is the most potent form of energy, and given the conditions of a certain rapport between two minds, and the result is the same as that discerned and verified by Marconi, in setting up two instruments that are attuned to each other.

In the end telepathy will take entire precedence of all other forms of communication. It will supersede the telegraph, the telephone, the cable, and wireless telegraphy. It will serve every demand, public and private. Distance will interpose no obstacle or difficulty, for thought overcomes space and time.

We are spiritual beings here and now. We are living in a spiritual universe. We are entering in more and more to the grasp and knowledge of spiritual appliances, and we can only say, reverently, that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

Is thought, itself, photographed on the ether? Does the vibration of the spoken word linger in the place where it is uttered? The question cannot but recur to one after recognizing phenomena that, apparently, point to this solution,--when, for instance, a caller comes, and, taking the chair of a preceding guest, repeats, substantially, the same words that the other had spoken regarding some subject or event. This is something that frequently occurs. Just what is the explanation? Do thoughts register themselves magnetically on the air, and is this magnetic writing perceived, unconsciously, by one sensitive to it? The question is certainly one of curious interest.

Again, are the daily occurrences of life pre-destined? How far do we make our own life? How far is it made for us? An individual was led in dreams one night through rooms that seemed to have granite walls, to be very bare, cold, and vast. The next evening he was leaving on a journey, and did start; but after he had taken his seat in the palace car, the discovery of a mistake caused him hastily to leave the train before it started, and return. In consequence of the mistake discovered he was obliged to seek a certain official in a great granite building, whose interior had, heretofore, been entirely unknown to him. Entering it, his way led through the same cold, vast, bare rooms that the preceding night in dreams he had traversed. Now the mistake that delayed his journey and brought about these results was not even his own mistake, but one made by another person. Was all this series of events--trifles of no importance in themselves, but very curious in their combination--foreordained? and if not, how was it that they were partly perceived, in the passive state of sleep, twenty-four hours before they occurred? It often seems true that the spirit, in the unconscious condition of sleep, has a certain clairvoyance, and looks out beholding and reporting to the consciousness the immediate future; but if the events it reports were not already formed, how could they be seen? The question involves many psychic complexities.

There can be little question that the atmosphere is electric, magnetic, and conducts thought from mind to mind, as the wire does the electric current. The higher spirituality to which the race has advanced enables one to perceive and experience this truth more or less, some to a great degree, some only in a minor; but some sort of perception is universal, and is seen as phenomena, or as indications of the working of spiritual laws, according to the individual who recognizes it. One of these striking phases may be seen in the experience that results from absence and separation. Let two persons who are mutually sympathetic and responsive to each other meet, and they at once strike the chord of ardent social enjoyment in their companionship, and the note of prelude to an enthusiastic friendship. Let a sudden separation come in the external world, and the mutual spiritual experience is strangely full of color, of vital sympathy, of vivid perceptions. Evidently, the spirits of each meet and mingle, independent of the fact that a thousand miles of distance lie between the individuals. What is distance to the spiritual being? It is not an element which bears any significance to that part of the nature which has transcended time and place. In such an experience as this, and one that occurred recently between two persons, one writes to the other:--

"I talk to you incessantly. I find currents from my life continually running out like telegraph wires to yours."

And a letter written by the other person, crossing this one on the way, had borne a message something to the effect:--

"I go about companioned by you. Far more actually present you are to me than those by whom I am surrounded. Everything I read and think keeps referring itself to you for response."

Between these two persons telepathy was working perfectly. Absence and separation made no blank, but rather a season filled with the most intense and direct sense of psychical communion. They were meeting--spirit to spirit--more closely, more clearly, indeed, than would have been possible had they been dwelling under one roof. For personality, and all the incidents and accidents and interruptions hinder rather than help actual companionship, when it is on this higher plane of spirit to spirit in mutual, swift, unerring response.

In this phase of actual experience may we not find a hint from which to study the words of Jesus to his disciples,--"It is expedient for you that I go away." Through that mystic silence that fell between them on His departure from the visible world, there thrilled the sense of a communion so near, so exalted, so divinely sweet, that it could never have been theirs in the external life. To give this it was expedient that He should go away. Here we find the key to the separations that must occur between friends by the demands of life, or that occur by death, but that may be in either case infinitely deeper in spiritual communion. The friend with whom we are in any real relations is nearer, even when the ocean rolls between, than one in the same room can be with whom we are not in special sympathy; and one who has gone into the invisible world is nearer still, as out of the realm of pure spirit the communion is still stronger and more direct and more intense. For this is "a universe of reciprocal forces." The very ether is the medium of communication between spirit and spirit.

Marconi has recently completed a new wonder in the shape of a ship detector. By means of this instrument the course of any ship having one aboard can be traced, wherever she may be in mid-ocean. It acts on the principle of the wireless telegraph, but does not require a wireless plant to operate it. No operator is needed on the ship, the shore stations locating the ships by a system of tunings. It is proposed to install this system on the leading liners, and the home office can thus know at every moment the exact position of a ship and note her progress as she moves along her course. Should the vessel become disabled it will become noted, and by means of the chart her position can be known and assistance can be sent to her.

Here is one of the most marvellous among the new illustrations of the finer forces. But this "ship detector," which acts on the principle of wireless telegraphy, is less potent than are the electric forces in every human being, if it were known how to control and utilize these to serve the purposes of perception. For perception is a faculty that may far transcend both sight and hearing. Perception is a faculty of the soul--often undeveloped; rarely developed to anything like its full possibilities, but capable of locating objects or of discerning persons and events, or of apprehending states of mind in others, regardless of space, as the ship's detector and the shore stations become aware of each other through their relation of finer vibrations. A recent experimenter in electric and super-physical force, M. Tessier d'Helbaicy, states this theory: "Taking as his premise the fundamental law of physical science, that all chemical reaction is accompanied by a generation of heat and electricity, he said to himself that the human body, with the innumerable and incessant chemical reactions presented by all its cells, should create a thermo-electric pile of great power. In any case, the Austrian savant, Reichenbach, in his remarkable series of experiments, has already proved, fifty years ago, that we radiate electric waves of a special kind, visible in the dark under certain conditions, and these present positive and negative poles." This being granted, M. d'Helbaicy has measured the yielding power of the human machine in heat and electricity, and has compared these with what the heat industrial machines can do, such as those run by steam, dynamos, and electric piles.

The new year of 1903 was inaugurated by the scientific success of the most remarkable, the most marvellous achievement of any age,--that of wireless telegraphy. "Before you write 1903 I will have demonstrated the success of wireless communication," exclaimed Marconi, early in 1902; and ten days before the dawning of the year he named, the achievement was an undisputed success. It is so marvellous a thing that thought, without visible mechanism, can be flashed through the air, across the ocean, and record itself, that the success of Marconi can be held as nothing less than sublime. It is the most impressive of all the realizations of the past decade in entering on the unseen and intangible potencies. It has become a familiar thing to see the cars in city streets, and carriages move swiftly by a motor power that is invisible to the eye; a power that no one can analyze or detect save in its effects and its results. It has become so familiar a thing that one can carry on a conversation with a friend at a thousand miles' distance, that one forgets how wonderful it really is. Within the memory of men still living is the time when it required forty days to make the voyage to Europe, and to obtain, or to send, news between the two countries. Now, within forty minutes, the news is flashed under the ocean. All these discoveries that annihilate Time and Space are simply the result of the evolution of life to higher stages; of the advance of man into the ethereal realm. For is not the underlying and fundamental truth this: that all is spirit? One may talk of "the spiritual life," but there is no other life! Withdraw the spiritual element, and there is no life at all! The difference, then, between the physical and the material worlds is only a difference of degree,--as ice-water, steam, and vapor are only different degrees and conditions of the same element. Progress is the transformation of the physical into the spiritual; of the lower and cruder and denser life into the finer, the more potent, the more ethereal. Energy is proportioned in potency to its ethereal aspects. In its cruder and denser form there is only a low degree of potency, and in its more ethereal forms is there higher potency. The ox-team is a dense and crude form of potency, and the electric motor is the more ethereal and intense form of energy. Now the progress of humanity is unfailingly registered by its advance into the employment of the ethereal forces and the more intense energies, as these form conditions that react upon life. How far more intelligent a nation may be when its facilities for swift intercommunication foster and stimulate and instantly disseminate the knowledge of all events, discoveries, and experiences; and when its facilities for swift transportation facilitate all economic and social intercourse! Judged, then, by their unfailing measurements, how significant was the triumphal achievement of wireless telegraphy on the eve of the dawn of 1903.

If telepathy is "the science of the soul's interchange with God--of the interchange of the thought of one soul with another;" if it "reveal that realm of consciousness where all God's thought is interpreted to the soul:" if "its vibration never dies out of the atmosphere of thought;" the discovery of this great law must indeed take precedence of that of any other achievement of the past century.

The nature of Human Personality holds the secret of spiritual evolution. It doth not yet appear what man may be; but the increasing knowledge of his powers; the development of those heretofore latent and unrecognized, are combining to throw a new illumination on not only the aspects, but the purposes of life. Man is coming into enlightenment concerning the environment of the spiritual world as one more immediately controlling him, as well as one far more profound and significant, than the environment of matter and of ether. As things go, the chief emphasis has always been placed upon the material environment. Man has not infrequently been willing to sell his soul for a mess of pottage--his chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire devotion of all his energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and shelter,--for a palace in which to live, for private cars and steam yachts in which to go about, and all the paraphernalia accessible to the multi-millionaire. But it is not all that these possessions typify which constitutes his most important environment. It is that degree of the spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H. Myers,--"of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that pre-existent and limitless power. We human beings exist, in the first place, in a world of matter," he continues, "whence we draw the obvious sustenance of our bodily functions. We exist also in a world of ether; that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws, ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. On this environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the material environment, although less obviously,--but ... within, beyond the world of ether, as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect of the Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life."

This world of spiritual life, a deeper reality, a profounder realm of energy than the ethereal world, is the true environment of the spirit even while embodied in physical form; and the secret of all success, of all achievement, of all progress, of all happiness, is to discover increasing means by which we may thus relate ourselves to our native realm. Science and Psychical Research are supplementing Religion; are, indeed, incorporating themselves into Religion as vital factors of the spiritual progress of humanity. Far from being hostile elements to the revelation of the Divine Power given in the Bible, they explain, they extend, they interpret that revelation. As Archdeacon Wilberforce so finely points out, God is ever the same, "but what men see of Him changes,--changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."

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"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop, spiritualize the conceptions of the early Christian faith, revealing gradually, as men should be able to assimilate them, higher, nobler views of the nature, character, and purpose of the Eternal Father," continued Archdeacon Wilberforce in a memorable sermon preached in Westminster Abbey, and he added:--

"It is, I suppose, inevitable that timid hearts, rooted in the traditions of the past, iron-bound in antiquated definitions, should imagine that the foundations of faith are shaken. They forget that the Christ told us that when His visible presence was removed He would speak by His spirit, as He had only delivered the preliminaries of His full message; that there were truths yet to be unfolded which men would receive and assimilate as the generations succeeded one another,--'as the thoughts of men widened with the progress of the suns.' I have been told by experts that the astronomers who built those marvels of antiquity, the Pyramids of the Nile, pierced a slanting shaft through the larger pyramid which pointed direct to the Pole-star, and that in those days had you gazed heavenward through the shaft into the Eastern night, the Pole-star alone would have met your eye. It was in the ages of the past, it was when the Southern Cross was visible from the British Isles. Slowly, imperceptibly, the orientation of the planet has changed. Did you now look up into the midnight sky through the shaft in the Great Pyramid you would not see the Pole-star; new brilliant space-worlds would shine down on you. But the heavens have not altered, and the shaft of the pyramid is not guilty, so to speak, of unorthodoxy. A new view of the heavens has quietly come, for the earth's axis has changed its place. Similarly, it is the work of the spirit of the ascended Jesus to advance the axis of the Church of God from glory to glory. Conceptions of the Universal Soul once prominent before the telescope of human faith and aspiration grow, enlarge, expand. He changeth not; He is ever the same. And these conceptions will change until knowledge, in the sense of the acquisition of facts, shall be no more, and intuitive perception of the transcendent majesty of the Universal Life shall fill our souls forever."

In these latter days one may hold all his old faith and add to it knowledge, as Saint Paul himself enjoins. One of these powers of the spiritual man now being rapidly developed is that of telepathy. We shall learn to talk in thought, as well as in oral speech. We shall learn to "call up" the friend at a distance, or the friend in the Unseen, as unmistakably as we now call up a friend by telephone. Time and Space are the limits which define the terrestrial life as distinct from the celestial. But man is, primarily, a celestial being. He is, first of all, a spirit, belonging to the spiritual world, and only secondarily and temporarily a denizen of earth. He can regain, to some extent, at least, his celestial faculties. For centuries he has accepted imprisonment in the senses. His release is at hand. He has but to assert his own pre-eminence as a spiritual being with spiritual powers. He has but to exert these in order to prove to himself their existence, and to develop them to their increasing use. Extension of power over the material universe, more wonderful and more potent, and more all-comprehending than even Marconi's wonderful wireless telegraphy, is at hand. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but that man can create and control his destiny to an increasing extent, is true. It is the evolution of religion,--of that faith which has added to itself knowledge. Thought is the highest manifestation of energy; and when man learns to live in thought he acts upon all his environment with energies that are immortal.