As, however, “no confusion need arise” from my describing how I went about in my linga sharira, I will continue to use it as the term for my vehicle of transportation. Nor need there be any difficulty about my being in two
places at once. I have the authority of Mr Sinnett’s Guru for this statement, and it is fully confirmed by my own experience. For what says the Guru?—“The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places at once. But first of all, to a certain extent it can.” It is unnecessary for me to add a word to this positive and most correct statement; but what the Guru has not told us is, that there is a certain discomfort attending the process. Whenever I went with my astral body, or linga sharira, into the mysterious region of Thibet already alluded to, leaving my rupa, or natural body, in Khatmandhu, I was always conscious of a feeling of rawness; while the necessity of looking after my rupa—of keeping, so to speak, my astral eye upon it, lest some accident should befall it, which might prevent my getting back to it, and so prematurely terminate my physical or objective existence—was a constant source of anxiety to me. Some idea of the danger which attends this process may be gathered from the risks incidental to a much more difficult operation which I once attempted, and succeeded, after incredible effort, in accomplishing; this was the passage of my fifth
principle, or ego-spirit, into the ineffable condition of nirvana.
“Let it not be supposed,” says Mr Sinnett,—for it is not his Guru who is now speaking,—“that for any adept such a passage can be lightly undertaken. Only stray hints about the nature of this great mystery have reached me; but, putting these together, I believe I am right in saying that the achievement in question is one which only some of the high initiates are qualified to attempt, which exacts a total suspension of animation in the body for periods of time compared to which the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary science are insignificant; the protection of the physical frame from natural decay during this period by means which the resources of occult science are strained to accomplish; and withal it is a process involving a double risk to the continued earthly life of the person who undertakes it. One of these risks is the doubt whether, when once nirvana is attained, the ego will be willing to return. That the return will be a terrible effort and sacrifice is certain, and will only be prompted by the most devoted attachment, on the part of the spiritual traveller, to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction. The second great risk is that of allowing the sense of duty to predominate over the temptation to stay—a temptation, be it remembered, that is not weakened by the motive that any conceivable penalty can attach to it. Even then it is always doubtful whether the traveller will be able to return.”
All this is exactly as Mr Sinnett has described it. I shall never forget the struggle
that I had with my ego when, ignoring “the idea of duty in its purest abstraction,” it refused to abandon the bliss of nirvana for the troubles of this mundane life; or the anxiety both of my manas, or human soul, and my buddhi, or spiritual soul, lest, after by our combined efforts we had overcome our ego, we should not be able to do our duty by our rupa, or natural body, and get back into it.
Of course, my migrations to the mahatma region of Thibet were accompanied by no such difficulty as this—as, to go with your linga sharira, or astral body, to another country, is a very different and much more simple process than it is to go with your manas, or human soul, into nirvana. Still it was a decided relief to find myself comfortably installed with my material body, or rupa, in the house of a Thibetan brother on that sacred soil which has for so many centuries remained unpolluted by a profane foot.
Here I passed a tranquil and contemplative existence for some years, broken only by such incidents as my passage into nirvana, and disturbed only by a certain subjective sensation of aching or void, by which I was occasionally attacked, and which I was finally
compelled to attribute, much to my mortification, to the absence of women. In the whole of this sacred region, the name of which I am compelled to withhold, there was not a single female. Everybody in it was given up to contemplation and ascetic absorption; and it is well known that profound contemplation, for any length of time, and the presence of the fair sex, are incompatible. I was much troubled by this vacuous sensation, which I felt to be in the highest degree derogatory to my fifth principle, and the secret of which I discovered, during a trance-condition which lasted for several months, to arise from a subtle magnetism, to which, owing to my peculiar organic condition, I was especially sensitive, and which penetrated the mahatma region from a tract of country almost immediately contiguous to it in the Karakorum Mountains, which was as jealously guarded from foreign intrusion as our own, and which was occupied by the “Thibetan Sisters,” a body of female occultists of whom the Brothers never spoke except in terms of loathing and contempt. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that no mention is made either of them, or the lovely highland district they occupy, in Mr Sinnett’s
book. The attraction of this feminine sphere became at last so overpowering, that I determined to visit it in my astral body; and now occurred the first of many most remarkable experiences which were to follow. It is well known to the initiated, though difficult to explain to those who are not, that in a sense space ceases to exist for the astral body. When you get out of your rupa, you are out of space as ordinary persons understand it, though it continues to have a certain subjective existence.