"The things which belong to thy peace." The things which never die or fade, whose continuity is never broken, the Divine seeds that cannot perish, the things which are immortal. The winged soul in its æon-long pilgrimages through eternity to home.
I find it easy to write to-day upon psychic subjects, for everywhere I discern the dawn of what Conan Doyle, in his deeply interesting book, calls "The new revelation."
To one who, for the last forty years, has been immersed in all branches of occult research, the change of view that has come over the world in four years is very remarkable. Every one is now interested in the human soul, and all that appertains to it. The speeding up in the number of psychic experiences coming to light is enormous. So often now I come across "the last man in the world to see or hear anything" who has just been accorded a startling experience, and the rank skeptic is becoming a thing of the past.
Whilst sitting in solitude it is interesting to let one's thoughts slip back to childhood, and trace the present life in the mirror of the old. I discover that in the immediate now there is nothing new, but only that which has its symbol in the old. I seem to get only the much clearer vision of what once was vague and cloudy, or wholly unconsidered by the mind of youth.
In that garden of memory I can set old happenings in a new light, and measure my slow footprints in the age-long journey behind me. Two facts emerge from out such musings. Firstly, the journey of my soul takes a spiral path, which at intervals brings me face to face with the old things that I have learned to modernize by dressing in fresh thought forms, as new perceptions are won. Perceptions prophetic of the greater capacity for attainment when the Divine Power is permitted to unfold itself without let or hindrance.
Secondly, the further on the soul journeys the more solitary the road becomes. One by one the old companion pilgrims drop away. Perhaps it is that on that long, lone trail the traveler must be free.
Very early in my life came the consciousness that everywhere about me, in the infinitely above, in the infinitely below, permeating heart, mind and soul, is life—endless, eternal.
On this shoreless ocean of existence, without form or name, the soul is afloat. Birth and death are the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean of life. The human soul is but a ripple on the sea of existence, and phenomenal life is but a flash in the eternity of eternities. All the teeming lives of effort around us, all the travail and suffering to which humanity is destined, are ordained for the great purpose of soul evolution. God sets the balance at every grave. That which distinguishes every man is the vast dower of our nature, eventually the same to all, the passing incidents of station, fortune, talent, are mere surface varieties.
I find in my mind the existence of something illimitably beyond mind, doubtless a common experience. I do not know what that something is, but it is very real, and it invariably shows me how cribbed, cabined and confined this life really is. I cannot even tell what it is that confines me. I only know that there is a limitless world full of infinite possibilities all around me. I seem always to have known this, but I cannot grasp it. True, at rare intervals, I catch a glimpse through a rift in the clouds, then they close again.
At such moments I experience an ecstasy of heart sweet happiness, so marvelously sweet, so pure, so near Divine with its deep wordless thoughts of infinite beauty. Such regions are not so much impenetrable as ineffable. They are glimpses gained at some great altitude, from which I can look down on the mortal pageant and behold mysteries in which I take no part, but by which I am encircled, as an island, by infinity. Such are luminous and splendid moments, when the soul beholds the world in its real mystic beauty. It is the hour of transfiguration, in which the veil drops from the heart and the film from the eyes, so that we see life as God means it to be.