Page 16. “I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that without search I should soon meet people of a certain character, and so I met them.... I accepted what befell with resignation.... What we are alone has power.... No destiny other than we make for ourselves.” I have already expressed my doubts whether this is the whole truth. It is, of course, the familiar doctrine of Karma; but I do not think it can be interpreted quite literally. There is what is called the Love of God, as well as the Justice of God, and I would venture to add, with Blake, the Wrath of God. Judgment is something more than simple justice; it implies the consent of the whole of the judging nature, and not of its sense of justice only. Love enters into it, and so, perhaps, do many other qualities not usually attributed to the Supreme Judge. In interpreting such doctrines we must allow for the personal equation even of the highest personality we can conceive.
Page 19. “None needs special gifts of genius.” “Æ’s” Candle of Vision is confessedly propagandist. It aims deliberately at encouraging age to discover eternal youth, and to lay hold of everlasting life. It is to this end that “Æ” describes his own experiences, and offers to his readers the means of their verification. He is quite explicit that no “special gifts” or “genius” are necessary. “This do and ye shall find even as I have found.” The special gift of genius does not, I agree, lie in the nature of fact of the experience (though here, again, favour seems sometimes to be shown), but it does, I think, lie in the bent towards the effort involved. Anybody, it is true, may by the appropriate means experience the same results, but not everybody has the “desire” to employ them. Desire, moreover, is susceptible of many degrees of strength. Like other psychological characteristics, it appears to peel off like the skins of Peer Gynt’s onion. What is it that I really desire? Ask me to-day, and I shall answer one thing. Ask me next year, and it may be another. Years hence it may have changed again. But desire, in the mystical sense, is the desire that is left when all the transient wishes or fancies have either vanished or been satisfied. Only such a desire leads the student to make the effort required by “Æ,” and the possession of such a desire is something like a “special gift” or “genius.”
Page 20. “Our religions make promises to be fulfilled beyond the grave, because they have no knowledge now to be put to the test.... Mistrust the religion that does not cry out: ‘Test me that we can become as gods.’” This is an excellent observation, and accounts, to my mind, for all the so-called scepticism of modern times. It is usual to attribute to our predecessors, the most remote as well as the more recent, a quality of “faith” superior to our own. They are said to have been more religious than we are. I do not believe it; or, rather, I believe that they were religious because they had very good reason to be; in other words, they were not only told the mysteries, but they were shown them. Either they or their priests had the “open vision.” Is it conceivable that the primitive peoples had the confidence-trick played on them? Or, again, is it the fact that credulity is less to-day than before? I feel sure that if our ancestors were brought to belief, it was by means which would equally carry conviction to the present generation. To repeat myself: They believed because they were shown. “Æ” suggests that the after-life promises of modern religion are a substitute for or an invasion of present demonstration. Religions, that is to say, concentrate upon the invisible because their power over the visible is gone. It is not the fact, however, that the earlier religions ignored the after-death adventures of the soul; they were quite as much concerned with the life beyond the grave as our own religions. What they did, and what our religions fail to do, was to give present guarantees for their future promises. Their priests could procure belief in the after-life on the strength of their demonstrated power over this life. It is probable, indeed, that many of the elect experienced “death” before it occurred physically. The Egyptian mysteries were a kind of experimental death.
Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring pages “Æ” expounds his method of meditation—the means by which any “ordinary” person may acquire spiritual experience. “Æ’s” method follows the familiar line of the mystic schools, namely, unwavering concentration on some mental object. “Five minutes of this effort,” “Æ” says, “will at first leave us trembling as at the end of a laborious day.” I can testify that this is no exaggeration, for, like “Æ,” I have practised meditation after the methods prescribed. It is no easy job, and after months of regular practice I was still an amateur at the simplest exercises. There is no doubt, however, about the benefit of it. Much is learned in meditation that cannot be realised by any other mental exercise. The mind becomes a real organ, as distinct from the personality as a physical limb. And gradually one learns to acquire sufficient control over it, if not to use it like a master, at any rate, to realise that it can be so used. I have not the smallest doubt that one day men will be able to “use” their minds, and thus to cease to be “used” by them; for it is obvious that at present we are victims rather than masters of our mind. Meditation, as a means of mind-control, is the appointed method, and “Æ’s” personal experience should encourage his readers to take up the discipline.
Page 41. In regard to “visions,” they are usually dismissed by the commonalty as products of imagination, “as if,” says “Æ,” “imagination were as easily explained as a problem in Euclid.” This habit of referring one mystery to another, as if this latter were no mystery, is very common; and it arises, no doubt, from intellectual apathy. We cannot be bothered to reduce mysteries to knowledge, and, moreover, the realisation that literally everything is a mystery, that we simply live in mystery, is a little disconcerting. Hence our preference for assuming some things, at any rate, to be below the need of explanation. Imagination, however, provides us with no escape from the mysteries of vision, any more than matter provides us with an escape from the problems of spirit. “Æ” raises some difficult, and, probably, insoluble problems concerning imagination itself. What is it in us that imagines? How does it cast thoughts into form? Even allowing (which we cannot) that imagination is only “the re-fashioning of memory,” what re-fashions and transforms out of their original resemblance the memories of things seen? “Æ” has had many visions, some of which, no doubt, he could trace to recollected impressions; but, leaving aside once more the difficulty involved in this reconstruction, what of the visions that had, or appeared to have, no earthly progenitors? “Æ’s” conclusion appears to be indisputable, that “we swim in an æther of deity”—for “in Him we live and move and have our being.”
Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs between people having the same mental “wavelength”? Coincidences (another Mesopotamian word, by the way) are too frequent to be accountable on any other supposition than that of an established communication. Like many another, I could give some remarkable instances of telepathy, but they would be tedious to relate. Mental training, however, is certainly a means to this end; for in proportion as the mind is brought under control, its susceptibility to thoughts from outside palpably increases. The experience of the Old Testament prophet who knew the plans of the enemy before they were uttered is not unique, even in these days. It will be far less uncommon in the days to come.
Page 54. “Is there a centre within us through which all the threads of the universe are drawn?” An ingenious image for a recurrent doctrine of mysticism, the doctrine, namely, that everything is everywhere. One of the earliest discoveries made in meditation is the magnitude of the infinitesimal. The tiniest point of space appears to have room enough for a world of images; and the mediæval discussion concerning the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle was by no means ridiculous. If I am not mistaken, “Æ’s” problem is identical with it.
Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In this chapter “Æ” sets himself to casting some doubts (shall we say?) on the sufficiency of the Freudian theory of dreams. Dreams, according to Freud, are the dramatisation of suppressed desires; but what, asks “Æ,” is the means by which desires, suppressed or otherwise, dramatise themselves? “A mood or desire may attract its affinities”; in other words, there may be a congruity between the desire and the dream which serves the Freudian purpose of interpretation; but desire can hardly be said “to create what it attracts.” Between anger, for instance, and a definite vision of conflict, such as the dream may represent, there is a gulf which the theory of Freud does not enable us to cross. What, in fact, are dreams? Who or what carries out the dramatisation? Assuming, with Freud, that their impulse is a desire, what power shapes this desire into the dream-cartoon? “Æ” throws no light on the mystery, but, at any rate, he does not dismiss it as no mystery at all. Its philosophical discussion is to be found in the Indian philosophy known as the Sankhya.
Page 89. “The process must be conscious on some plane”—the dramatisation, that is to say, must be the conscious work of some intelligent agent or quality. I am a little doubtful of this, for reasons to be discovered in the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. Is the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate a “conscious” design? Are frost-flowers the work of intelligence? Forms, according to the Sankhya, are the reflection in matter (Prakriti) of the activities of the spirit (Purusha); they are consciousness visible. But it would not follow that they are themselves conscious or that their creation is a “conscious” process.
Page 90. “Have imaginations body?” In other words, are the figures seen in dream and vision three-dimensional? “Æ” describes several incidents within his experience that certainly seem to suggest an objective reality in dream-figures, and the occasional projection of dream-figures into phantasms is a further evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer “Æ” to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to Kapila’s commentary on them. The question is really of the general order of the relation of form to thought.