We learn from this that we are constantly changing our place in the universe, and are entering new etherean fields, not only every year, but every day and hour. Since we are unconscious of this motion, it may seem to have no vital relation to us, yet, by a knowledge of the fact, we may gain an insight into the wonderful resources of this great machine for recording events.
Every thought and feeling of which we are conscious makes its mark, not only upon our bodies, both the outer and the inner, but also upon the ether through which we are passing. I am alluding not to the words in which we clothe or perhaps conceal our thoughts or feelings when communicating with one another, but to the thought-current itself at the point of origin.
This would be the same in the minds of all men of equal intelligence, without regard to nationality; and those beings who are able to read the marks left by these currents would find them written in unmistakable characters, and of a size proportionate to our rate of travel, on the fair ethereal page.
In one respect we are at an enormous disadvantage in our relations, conscious or unconscious, with the denizens of the Beyond.
Our thought-motions compared with theirs are like an ox-team to a locomotive. It is a fact, and there is no use in quarreling with it. On the other hand, through our association with matter we are able, without permanent injury, to bear oppressions of the spirit which would be death itself to them; and those among them who would take delight in insulting us are deterred from doing so by our insensibility to the stinging thought-current. We ourselves would not insult a post for being one.
These oppressions of spirit, or depressions, as we blindly call them, are a part of the system by and through which we are made to manifest what manner of person we are; and our blindness as to the real meaning of the life we have come into possession of, our persistent mistaking it for an end, instead of a means to an end, brings it to pass that the tests we undergo as to our fitness for this or that position in the real though hidden life that awaits us all, are real and genuine tests, which they could not be, to their full extent, if we clearly understood at the time just what was being done. Every thoughtful man and woman looking back over life can discern how this or that decision has been a turning-point leading on to unexpected success or paving the way to disaster or defeat. When the test is complete, some inkling of its meaning often dawns upon us, and we resolve to be on guard next time, and then perhaps we start off on some rainbow chase, only to discover that we are the prey of delusion once more. Then, perhaps, we get angry and curse the whole machine as the product of some stupid blunderer, thereby avoiding the confession of any mental obliquity on our own part.
Not all of the delusions of mortality are of a kind that lead to such a result. Some have been imposed upon us by our risen brothers of the other sphere, and have held sway over our minds, as they did over our fathers' minds, and over their fathers' before them, none of us living long enough on the mortal side, or obtaining sufficiently clear independent light, to enable us to become free. The shaking off of the fetters of this mental bondage is a special characteristic of our own day; and those who have listened to the torrents of eloquence poured from the lips of the young mediums upon this subject, know that this work, the necessity for which, as I have indicated, is largely due to other-world intelligences, is now being forwarded from the same quarter with tremendous power. Verily, there must have been a revolution in the heavens, or this would not be. And such, indeed, is the case. The tremendous power of an organized hierarchy under the controlling influence of a single mind so prominently in evidence here, is without a counterpart on the other side to-day, although the sins against humanity which have been charged against the priesthood of past ages should more properly be laid at the door of their invisible inspirers, then in the height of that power which is no longer theirs. To-day the enemies of racial progress are to be sought for on earth, where the intoxicating dreams of power without responsibility have found lodgment and worked their corrupting influence in the minds of not a few of our brothers, who seem to forget that they are still members of the race they are seeking to enslave, and that their responsibility for misusing the power entrusted to them will be accounted all the greater in consequence.
CHAPTER XXI.