Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences

by Violet Tweedale

I shall never forget that first interview with a much maligned woman, whom I rapidly came to know intimately and love dearly. She was seated in a great armchair, with a table by her side on which lay tobacco and cigarette paper. Whilst she spoke her exquisite taper fingers automatically rolled cigarettes. She was dressed in a loose black robe, and on her crinkly gray hair she wore a black shawl. Her face was pure Kalmuk, and a network of fine wrinkles covered it. Her eyes, large and pale green, dominated the countenance—wonderful eyes in their arresting, dreamy mysticism.

I asked her to explain her new religion, and she answered that hers was the very oldest extant, and formed the belief of five hundred million souls. I inquired how it was that this stupendous fact had not yet touched Christendom, and her reply was that there had never been any interference with Christian thought. Though judge of all, Christianity had been judged by none. The rise of Japan was a factor of immense potency, and in time would open out a new era in the comprehension of East by West. Then the meaning would flash upon the churches of the words, "Neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem."

I explained to her my difficulties, which she proceeded to solve by expounding the doctrines of reincarnation and Karma. They jumped instantly to my reason. I there and then found the Just God, of whom I had been in search. From that day to this I have never had reason to swerve from those beliefs. The older I grow, the more experience I gather, the more I read, the more confirmed do I become in the belief that such provide the only rational explanation of this life, the only natural hope in the world to come.

I have offered those beliefs to very many people whom I discovered to be on the same quest as I had been. I have never once had them rejected by any serious truth-seeker, and I have seen them passed on and on by these people to others, forming enormous ramifications which became lost to view in the passage of time and their own magnitude.

In these early days there was little literature available for the student, but the circle of clever brains which rapidly surrounded Blavatsky set to work with a will under her guidance, and now, after the lapse of thirty years, there is an enormous literature always commanding a wide sale, and the little circle that gathered round "the old lady" has swollen into very many thousands.

What was the secret of Helena Petrovski Blavatsky's instant success? I have no doubt that it lay in her power to give to the West the Eastern answers to those problems which the Church has lost.

In her way Blavatsky was a true missioner. "Go forth on your journey for the weal and the welfare of all people, out of compassion for the world and the welfare of angels and mortals," was the command given by the Lord Buddha to his disciples, and Christ, following the universal ideal, five hundred years later, commanded, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel of the whole Creation."

I began to study those, to me, new doctrines at once, and I also took up their occult side, no light task, but one of absorbing interest. Not till then did I fully realize that in no one human life could that long, long path be trodden, in no new-born soul could be developed those divine possibilities of which I could catch but a fleeting illusive vision.

"Thou canst not travel in the Path before thou hast become the Path itself." Did not the Christ warn his followers that the Path must be trodden more or less alone? "Forsake all and follow Me." So, also in the Bhagavad Gita it is written: "Abandoning all duties come unto me alone for shelter. Sorrow not, I will liberate thee from thy sins."

"The secret doctrine" written by Blavatsky proved a mine of wealth, and I read the volumes through seven times in seven different keys. The works of A. P. Sinnett, text books then, and now brought up to date by expanding knowledge, were extremely helpful. For advanced students "The Growth of the Soul" is unsurpassed. A very short time elapsed before mental food was supplied for practically every branch of mysticism and occult development, and students flocked into headquarters from all parts of the world.