Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences

by Violet Tweedale

The psychology of the people is a very interesting and curious study, to the aura seer. The analysis of the collective mind awaits some great writer who will give us a book of absorbing interest. Those who can see auras have a great advantage, if they are public speakers. During the period of my life, when I had a great deal of political platform work, I was always very sensitive to my audiences, because I could see how they were taking my remarks. I have always found big audiences of the people very colorless in the main. Flashes of bright color would be apparent all over the hall, but there was no sustained glow. Whilst sitting on some one else's platform, often that of a great orator, I have marked exactly the same phenomenon. The soul of the people is still young and childlike. It has the indifference of extreme youth, the forgetfulness and ingratitude of extreme youth.

I look back upon the fall of Parnell and Dilke, great minds whose earthly careers were destroyed by the people. All the world knows why. To-day I look on the "perpetrators" of the Gallipoli and Mesopotamia tragedies, and I see they have all gone up higher in the esteem of the people. They have risen in the world, and are looked upon as ripe for even higher office. The poor human brain reels before such anomalies. I was in London when the Gallipoli reports were given to the public. They shook me to the very foundation of my being. I think they were given out towards the end of the week, because I remember saying to myself, "on Sunday morning the British working man and woman will read all this abomination of desolation and crime in their Sunday paper."

Purposely I strolled about the London parks in the lovely afternoon of that Sunday. Crowds were there, reading, courting, sleeping. I went home realizing that no one cared. The collective aura of the people was as serene and indifferent as ever.

I have come to think more kindly of our people's pathetic indifference, because I am sure it is the indifference of very young souls, who have passed through but few incarnations, and "know not what they do." I see them exploited by the politicians, given a rag doll to amuse themselves with, anything will do, from the big loaf to the "Kayzer," and sent to the polls hugging their golliwog, but I doubt the returning troops being so easily amused and deluded.

The state of the Universe is the expression of man's desire, and man is really the builder of his own body, that "house not made with hands," though in his youthful ignorance he attributes both to an over-ruling intelligence, whom he alternately blesses and curses. When men learn that they must work with, and not against the mental laws, they will no longer ask why God permits the world to be so full of misery. They will cease to erect a scapegoat, because they will have learned that they are the makers of their own misery or happiness.

Many people seem to think that the power to see auras must be very useful in helping one to distinguish between friends and foes, but such is not really the case. Auras exemplify individual character, not individual predilections, and some of my friends being very bad characters, indeed, have shocking auras. I had one great friend who, at the beginning of our acquaintance, spent much of his time in prison, which was really a blessing for his ill-used wife. His aura was literally in tatters, just a little irregular circle of rags and patches.

I had just succeeded in making him sober, by insisting constantly and most seriously that he was "a cut above the public-house," and much too superior a man to mix with such degraded companions, when the war broke out. He went to the front, and on his first return to Blighty, badly gassed, he came at once to see me. I really felt a sort of personal pride in him, and an actual sense of personal possession in his enormously grown aura. It was clear evidence of his sprouting soul. He went back to France, but was wounded and again gassed, and this time his return was final, as he was of no further use.

For a few months he did odd jobs with great difficulty, then, finally, he succumbed to pneumonia. I was very proud indeed of his aura as I sat beside his bed, his hand in mine. There was real love in my heart for him that day. Here, indeed, was an infant soul that had begun to develop on the right road, and the tattered aura of rags and patches had become a neatly trimmed little halo round his poor tired head.

So he went west, and his broken body, wrapped in the British flag, went to a soldier's grave, and a firing party gave him the Last Post.

His wife returned home to find that her neighbors, anxious to celebrate the occasion, had brought their best china and had arranged a tea-party. As we sat down, she turned to me and said: