Man’s first initiation is not in trance, as Lytton means. Trance is an artificial, waking, somnambulistic state, in which one can learn nothing at all about the real nature of the elements of our physical consciousness, and much less any of any other. None of Lytton’s admirers seems to have thought that he was chaffing at occultism, although he believed in it, and was not anxious to throw pearls before swine. Such a hierophant as Mejnour—not Lytton himself—could not have mistaken the tomfoolery of somnambulism for even the first steps in Raja Yoga. This can be seen from the way in which Lytton gives out absolutely erroneous ideas about occultism, while at the same time he shows a knowledge which he could not have, did he believe himself in his own chaffing. It is pretty well recognized that he at last failed, after some progress in occultism as a high accepted disciple. His Glyndon might be Lytton, and Glyndon’s sister Lady Lytton. The hieroglyphics of a book given him to decipher, and which he brought out as Zanoni, must be allegorical. The book is really the master’s ideas which the pupil’s highest consciousness endeavors to read. But they were only the mere commonplaces of the master’s mind. The profane and the cowardly always say that the master descends to the plane of the pupil. Such can never happen. And precipitation of messages from the master is only possible when the pupil’s highest ethical and intuitive faculties reach the level of the master’s normal and objective state. In Zanoni, this is veiled by the assertion that he had to read the hieroglyphics—they did not speak to him. And he confesses in the preface that he is by no means sure that he has correctly deciphered them. “Enthusiasm,” he says, “is when that part of the soul which is above intellect, soars up to the Gods, and there derives the inspiration.” Errors will therefore be due to wilful misstatements or to his difficulty in reading the cipher.
“In dreams I see a world so fair,
That life would love to linger there;
And pass from this to that bright sphere.
In dreams ecstatic, pure and free,
Strange forms my inward senses see,
While hands mysterious welcome me.”
Such indefinite descriptions are worse than useless. The inward senses are psychic senses, and their perceiving strange forms and mere appearances in the astral world is not useful or instructive. Forms and appearances in the astral light are legion, and take their shape not only from the seer’s mind unknown to himself, but are also in many cases, reflections for other people’s minds.
“Oh, why should mine be ever less
And light ineffable bless