Education, morality, religion, health, disease, happiness or misery, are largely the effects of the widely diffused auras of individuals continually given forth into the ambient atmosphere. As a man, or body of men, think, act, and live, such is the quality of the aura, or odylic sphere they emanate. This has an effect for good or evil upon all who approach within its radius; a formative, educating effect upon the ignorant, if it is of a high, intellectual, or spiritual quality; or a depressing, stultifying, deforming effect upon the minds and souls of innocent, or negative sensitives, when it is of an impure, debased, or brutal character.
Thought governs the world. It is by thought, and its embodiment in acts, that progress is made. Every thought has its aura, and nothing can prevent its diffusion in the atmospheres, both the astral and the natural or physical. Hence being continually surrounded by the effects of thoughts universally diffused, we are insensibly governed by their aura of good or evil, and we grow in beauty, or are warped in deformity, mental and bodily, from infancy, under the moulding consequences of the local thought-auras of the family, neighbourhood and nation in which we happen to be born.
Psychometry proves that even stones retain the impression of the scenes which have been enacted in their neighbourhood. That is, the stone having been bathed in the psychic emanations of creatures, human and animal, during, perhaps, centuries, retains such auras indestructibly in its atmosphere; and a psychometric clairvoyant will gradually perceive the most trivial details of the more active life which has daily passed in the vicinity of the stone. A fragment from the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, for instance, were it procurable, would enable a good psychometrist to describe every minute particular of the ancient temple worship and ceremonies. A stone from the Colosseum held in the hand, or to the forehead of a psychometrist, would produce a vision of the scenes in the arena which were wont to attract the Roman population. A fossil of some antediluvian animal would bring before the mind’s eye surroundings corresponding to the period in which the animal had lived. In truth, upon the plane of more ethereal matter adjacent to this, are to be found the images of all things, subject neither to time nor the changes of time; and there our image-producing faculties, temporarily divested of the blinding veil of flesh, may call them up at will.
The aura of a great crime becomes diffused in the neighbourhood of its commission, and concealment would be impossible if the psychic vision of men were open instead of being closed. A picture of the deed committed becomes impressed upon the astral atmosphere, with the faces and forms of those engaged in its commission. This effect is never destroyed, but may be recalled at will by a good clairvoyante. At the same time the aura of good deeds is equally powerful and indestructible. The one is like a transitory convulsion, disturbing the beauty of order and harmony with Nature; the other is the fixed and equable moral atmosphere arising from thoughts and actions consonant with wisdom. In short, the aura of good thoughts and deeds is the pabulum of souls; the invigorating and supporting air they inspire and respire, producing health, happiness, mental activity, and inciting to progress. If it were not for the good on the earth, we might doubtless often cry in vain—“Heaven help us!”—for we should be so smothered under evil auras that spiritual breathing, and rapport with purer realms of life, would be a radical impossibility.
A crime is the insane product of an unbalanced, disordered mind. It causes a species of astral electric disturbance, which is as sensibly felt by sensitives as any explosion or convulsion on the natural plane. Astral, or ethereal molecules become violently displaced, and forced into new conditions of juxtaposition. A mysterious terror pervades the air, which affects all neighbouring minds, even to the very animals. It is as if the living soul of Nature had been violently wrenched from its normal condition of peace and happiness, and stood electrified with horror, whilst upon its veil of ethereal matter is fixed an indestructible image of the painful tragedy which has been suddenly enacted.
We are, in fact, surrounded, upon the soul plane of life, by an atmosphere which receives, so to speak, a photographic impression of even our very thoughts, which is a mirror to reflect our whole life, an image-world, retaining sounds as well as forms. It may be made subject to our will, which can call up before the mind, and make visible to the eye of the soul whatsoever, without exception, we will to see, to hear, or to know. The phantoms or apparitions of which we so frequently hear, are matters of fact to all psychic seers; are things as absolutely existent as any objects on the more familiar plane of dense matter. Once to realise this great fact, and to understand some of the laws which would enable us consciously to control, and illustrate to our satisfaction, certain of the hidden mysteries of the inner world of ethereal matter, from which our own proceeds as an effect from a cause, would set us upon a mountain height of knowledge whence all clouds of superstition, doubt, and uncertainty, would roll away.
There are many stories extant of certain haunting apparitions which have been seen at various times during the lapse of centuries, reappearing again and again in the same families as warnings, or otherwise; or it may be a mysterious sound, such as the cry of the “banshee” in Ireland. The popular fallacy regarding such apparitions is that a human soul, or “spirit”—it may be wrongly called—is compelled, as a retribution for the commission of some crime, to remain on the earth haunting the scene of its former sins. Or, if the visitant be a benevolent ghost, it is supposed that it is some ancestor or ancestress, ever present in loving watchfulness over the destinies of the family, giving warning of death or danger. The idea of a human soul being chained in this melancholy fashion to the earth is exceedingly repugnant to most minds, and naturally excites the utmost compassion for the poor ghost which has to wear out so dreary a doom. Such a hypothesis contradicts all those religious teachings which assign to souls either a state of absolute unconscious sleep, until the day of judgment, or an abode, presumably in a conscious state, in heaven or hell. It contradicts all those more modern teachings of “progress” after death, of the gradual ascension of the soul to its place of rest. If we accept the ideas of Eastern teachers concerning those occult mysteries—that the higher self, the spiritualised entity, gradually separates from its more animal, or lower principles of organism, which adhere together for a longer or shorter period as a shell-like or shadowy personality—even then, these principles or ethereal molecules which go to form an astral body, disintegrate after a time. They would not be likely, at all events, to endure over a century. Apparitions of persons deceased within a century might be considered as essentially ghosts, or shades—the shadowy, sidereal shapes of personalities passed away from the physical plane, and in a condition of gradual separation from all that can attach them to the earth. And it is presumable that a phantom which is seen repeatedly during the lapse of centuries, is merely a reflection in the astral light, called up by the will of a seer; or projected upon the plane of soul-vision either by some psychological disturbance, or by some change of condition on the part of those who see the phantom. The immediate action may be due to “elementals,” those mysterious entities called by Liebnitz “Monads,” which are in close attendance upon mankind, and have so much to do with his very existence that he would fare but indifferently without them. Not only are they as intimately consociated with him as his own thoughts, but certain grades of them depend upon him also for their existence. These beings often become tutelary, or “house-spirits,” and the rôle of re-appearing again and again, as a sort of hereditary ghost, to give warning of death or danger, is not incompatible with their condition of existence. Time does not exist for them, and one century would be like any other. They live in the personal or family aura, and become intimately blended with the daily lives of its members. When, as in the case of royal or noble houses, the family aura remains undisturbed in its ancient palaces or castles during centuries, a haunting elemental would find it an easy matter to make itself visible, frequently by a semi-materialisation, or a condensation of the ethereal atoms of its body. In such a case it would be seen objectively by anyone who happened to be present. In other cases, when an apparition is only a reflection in the astral light, a sensitive in moments of abnormal or psychic lucidity would perceive it. Others sympathetically inclined would perceive the same. At length, after repeated similar visions, the locality would get the name of being haunted. The image so repeatedly beheld becomes fixed in the atmosphere of that particular spot. Upon entering a locality with such a reputation a species of psychological inebriation would assail every individual so constituted as to fall under the effects of the aura already established, and they would then always behold the spectre thus ideally produced. These mental or astral spectres need not necessarily be merely immovable pictures. They will move, or walk, threaten, or act a pantomime exactly as they may have the reputation of doing; or as the person who beholds them expects or imagines them to be doing.
In some respects these apparitions or warning cries may be mental legacies left indelibly impressed in the astral light by the powerful will of a departed ancestor, friendly or inimical, as a blessing or a curse; or even by a member of some alien family, as a pursuing Nemesis which falls as a retribution upon the perpetrator of evil, but can possess no power over the innocent and good.
Frank Fairholme.
(To be continued.)