THE ESOTERIC ART OF LIVING

CHAPTER I.

SOME BASIC PHILOSOPHY.

The Universe and man are inseparable. Universal law defines the individual expression as well as correlates all in the One. Individual consciousness differentiates the Universal, and evolves through sense, and psychic, to the higher states, by means of the life in which the ego seeks to express in ever-increasing degree of perfection the subliminal nature and wisdom. The higher life is a constant relating of consciousness to the Unchanging and the Permanent, and the emergence of the subliminal consciousness and its synchronizing with the supraliminal or objective consciousness. The art of living this life is first sought in the mastery of mind.

Whence? Whither? These are the eternal interrogatories that haunt the human mind. Dismiss them if you will; let the imperative world crowd them into the background of thought; but they will return with perennial freshness and demand consideration. "A wail between two silences" has not sufficed to express the philosophy of the soul.

Primitive man inquired of the sun and stars and read their silent message; the winds whispered great secrets to him, and Nature became an oracle through which he believed he communed with a higher intelligence. With us, the thoughtful child eagerly puts the question; but, receiving no satisfactory answer, or one quite irrational, soon ceases the inquiry; and the man dismisses it in favor of the more urgent problems of life, possibly to revert to it in declining age. But with the philosopher it is ever present. If he decides, it is only provisionally—only so far as the evidence at hand will justify, and always subject to revision upon the receipt of further light. Like the poet Shelley, he looks inquiringly into the eyes of children and asks the question. He searches the halls of memory for some recovery of the past, and tries to fathom the secrets of prophetic intuition to lift the veil from the future.

Thus the Sphinx sits by the path that each soul must travel; and to solve the riddle many have searched the universe of thought, and can say, with the Persian poet:

     "You wish to know the secret—so did I.
     Low in the dust I sought it, and on high
     Sought it in awful flight from star to star,"

—and, like him, have concluded that the search is vain, though ever feeling that the "secret draweth near," and that—

     "Sometimes on the instant all seems plain,
     The simple sun could tell us, or the rain.
     The world caught dreaming with a look of heaven
     Seems on a sudden tip-toe to explain."

Yet it must be admitted that the search has not been all in vain. The achievements in scientific thought, the advancement in modern metaphysics, and the study of Oriental philosophy have brought us to a much better understanding of the problem; while the systematic and intelligent work in psychic research has disclosed many of the latent and higher powers of the soul and given us some insight into the states of existence that succeed the physical—wresting much from the domain of agnosticism.

To-day we know that man is an integral part of the Universe, related to every part as intimately and indissolubly as a planet or a sun. The elements of the material universe we know are constant and ever have been so. Nothing has ever been added, and nothing subtracted. There is a constant change of form and aspect, but no change in quantity. If one atom could be annihilated it would throw the whole into confusion; for that atom is intimately related to all others, and they exist as they are by reason of that interrelationship. The proposition is equally true of a supposed creation of an atom. Energy also is constant, though ever changing in form. In short, there is nothing known with which science deals, either as matter or energy, that can be annihilated or created. They always have been; they always will be, in essence—only subject to infinite change of form and mode of manifestation.

Shall we say less of the soul-world, the residuum that science cannot resolve—that ultimate realm in which the cause of manifestation lies? Whether you trace matter back in condition to one homogeneous ether, with its vortex-ring as an atom in whose inherent energy you postulate soul-life, or whether you hold to matter and spirit as two distinct and parallel elements, you cannot consistently deny the eternal persistence of soul in the past and soul in the future. An impulsion in the ether occurs in the most remote realm of space; the farthest visible star transmits an energy to its envelope. With the rapidity of 186,000 miles a second, the atom takes up and communicates the motion, until after many years the atom immediately in contact with the optic nerve feels the impulse, and the consciousness translates it into a concept of light. What does this mean? Not merely that the body is in intimate relation of action and reaction with the distant star, but that the soul is as intimately related to the psychic factor everywhere present—the cause of the manifestation.

Hence we may say that the idea of the solidarity of the Universe includes man as a psychic being. He cannot be taken out of it; his history is inextricably woven in its past history, and his destiny is indissolubly linked with and held in its future. Man and the universe are one in history and one in destiny. This does not mean, however, that he will always be as he is, any more than that evolution in matter and life has ceased. Emerson says, "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." But it is true that we trace him (or think we do) as a physical and perhaps a psychic being back to a very insignificant beginning, the monad. Here the source is in truth hidden, except that we may say that it lies in the Ultimate, and hence is without source as truly as is the real Universe.

But to forms and states we may ascribe source: to the essence we cannot. The necessity for the thought of source springs from the limitation of the mind. It is an illusion, just as time and space may be said to be. It has been said that "the spirit sports with time,"—

     "Can crowd eternity into an hour,
     Or stretch an hour to eternity."

This annihilation of the idea of time is referred to in the Oriental legend of the experience of the prophet of Islam, who it is said was transported into the seventh heaven and had ninety thousand conferences with God, and returning found that the water had not all spilled from a pitcher that he had overturned in his first step upward.

This power of the mind to sport with time is further illustrated in the story of an infidel Sultan of Egypt, who expressed to a Mohammedan doctor a doubt as to the possibility of this alleged experience. The learned man said he would prove to him its possibility. A tub of water was brought, and while the prince and his courtiers stood before him he bade the Sultan plunge his head into the water and withdraw it. The Sultan complied, and at once found himself alone on a barren plane at the foot of a mountain. His first impulse was to rave at this act of supposed treachery; but, perceiving that this availed nothing, he submitted to the situation and sought some habitable abode. Finally he discovered some persons cutting in a forest and joined in their occupation. After a time he came to a town, and having had many adventures finally married a wealthy woman to whom were born seven sons and seven daughters by him. He was afterward unfortunate and reduced to poverty, and was compelled to ply as a porter in the streets. One day, while walking alone on the seashore bewailing his fate, a fit of devotion seized him, and, throwing off his clothing to bathe (agreeable to his Mohammedan custom before praying), he had no sooner plunged into the sea and raised his head above water than he found himself standing by the side of the tub with the learned doctor and the courtiers around him.* He found that his long series of imaginary adventures had occupied but a moment, and was only a psychological effect.

* Godwin's Lives of Necromancers.

One does not need to vouch for the story to understand the explanation of such an experience, having our present knowledge of hypnotic suggestion. I give it only to illustrate that the experience of men everywhere has been that time is an idea arising from sequence only. Persons have similar experiences in the dream-state. We grow weary and aged in spirit because we are too much under this illusion of time, and live in a changeful consciousness—by days and years, and by counting trifling events and measuring out our existence by a transitory scale; whereas we might remain eternally young in spirit by living more in the thoughts that never change, that are not superseded by others, as universal love and perfection, thereby measuring our consciousness upon a lasting scale.

As the past of man is held in the past of the Universe, and as the present phenomenal universe has been the result of evolution, it would be the natural thing to expect that man also is an evolution. And so we find him to be. All we know of him scientifically is of a being standing at the summit of evolved life. His self-consciousness has slowly evolved from baser and more limited states, and at present is mostly engaged with material environment, which conditioned his personality. He is habitually conscious of the external, of the other thing rather than the self, realizing the latter only by reflection and the experiencing of pleasure and pain. Being habitually conscious of environment, whose imperious demands draw out the soul's attention and hold it tenaciously, he has established a firm, conscious relationship with it, until he believes it to be the only reality. Other concepts, being mostly ideations and deductions; from and groupings of these, are as unreal as those on which; they are based.

Such states of consciousness are conditioned by matter and by phenomena; hence, they are impermanent, changing, and evanescent. With the passing of the phenomena the conscious state is gone; it survives only in memory, which in time fades away. These states are constantly supplanted by new ones; but they are ever a consciousness of environment and concepts built upon it. Thus he evolves for himself a conscious status that becomes his personality; but it is not his real self. Excluding from it the impulses and intuitions of the subliminal consciousness, it is as evanescent and transitory as that on which it is built. The subliminal phase of the true self, the sublime soul, potentially divine, is in truth behind it, seeking an expression, ever dissatisfied with the present result, always prompting to a higher ideal, and suggesting greater possibilities and a shorter and surer way to perfection and liberation. Says Emerson: "We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours—of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim?"

This evolution of consciousness, of which we have spoken, while it does not at once reveal the true self in its higher states, is nevertheless necessary. It has not reached the extent of its possibilities. It will continue until it" brings into knowledge the subtler states of matter upon this and other planes of existence; for we are as intimately connected with all. At present a knowledge of consciousness of only the grossly physical plane is all that most persons have, and the majority pride themselves upon this limitation. But further evolution and unfoldment will bring into the individual consciousness other and mere subtle states now unthought of by them. The blind man that would declare he can see no advantage in having eyes would present an analogous spectacle to those who endeavor to persuade themselves that they have all the faculties that could conduce to their advancement, knowledge, or happiness.

Parallel with this process of sense evolution there has been another evolution—of a higher consciousness, of states not dependent upon environment and not necessarily springing from it. It has been largely subordinated thus far; but if progress be made and the goal be reached it must be accorded greater attention, if not made the controlling factor in life. This may be termed the consciousness of the spiritual attributes. What is the spiritual in this sense? The difficulty of attempting a definition must be at once recognized, for it lies above the sense consciousness and the concepts based upon it, and still above the psychic, and must be related to the unchanging aspect of the Universe. We may say what it is not, and then relate it by necessity to the undefinable, but not, as Herbert Spencer would say, to the "unknowable"; for by reason of the soul's nature it may know. We may say that all things spiritual must be unchangeable and eternal; hence, the spiritual consciousness as distinguished from the other classes must be that which bears a direct relationship to the unchanging essence, or the attributes which in a sense may be said to belong to it.

Bear in mind always that man cannot isolate himself from the essential nature of the Universe, and it necessarily follows that he must relate himself to some of its aspects. What ones shall they be? Shall it be more largely to the unchanging, and thereby evolve an undying consciousness; or shall it be altogether to the evanescent, and thus remain an ever-changing, ever-dying, and unhappy consciousness? Choose either path and the result will be the equivalent of the life. It is the living that will ultimately make us the one or the other. No amount of confidence, or belief, or acceptance of a philosophy or creed, will of itself act as a magic wand to transform our present or future or to obliterate the past. As we find it true that in the past there have been no mighty leaps along the path of attainment, so will there be none in the future. There are no sudden and radical transformations. All we will experience will be a result of the past and the present and that which arises from our creative power; and our future will be only that which we have earned, modified by the power to create new conditions. Life is no gift enterprise.

CHAPTER II.

MENTAL STATES AND SELECTED CONSCIOUSNESS.

Having briefly considered the philosophy of unfoldment along the higher paths of being, we may next consider some of the right mental states that make such an unfoldment possible. It must be understood not only that the mental life is an expression of the ego, but that the further expression is greatly aided or hindered by past and present mental states.

But first it may be asked, Why all this philosophy? Because the living that is not conformable to some philosophy, some reason, some purpose, is only drifting on the tide of time: it is living by expediency, the reason of the moment sufficing to determine the acts and thoughts. It may be conceded that there is spontaneous and unreasoning excellence, which no doubt is a very high state; but we may be assured that, when we find it, it is a result that has been earned somewhere and some time.

The fact is not to be overlooked that the living is essential and not to be avoided. Unfoldment of the higher nature must come through an expression of it, which is only possible through the life—the thought. We must not make the mistake that achievement lies in shutting one's self up and lapsing into general indifference, nor imagine that we have become so superior that the character of our achievement will not be modified by our every act. Each act has thought behind it, and if the act be ignoble or harmful there is either a like thought correlated or an absence of the better and higher thought. In either case the ego stultifies itself.

To live the higher life is not an impracticable or chimerical undertaking. It is natural and practical in the highest sense, but not in the sense of being altogether best suited to all conditions; for it cannot harmonize with conditions that are the result of low ideals. It has been said that "art is the path of the creator to his work." In this case the creator is man; his work is living; and the method and manner of this living are the art.

The living, then, must be such a conduct of the daily life as is most conformable to the principles of universal and unselfish love and the manifestation of truth in every phase; the making of the life beautiful within, which will always insure its loveliness without; the masterful conquest of the lower nature, and the willing renunciation of the trifling and unnecessary habits and likes and dislikes that hold the soul in bondage to a lower and an imperfect state; the love of the true and the perfect, and the studious avoidance of the untrue and the imperfect; the attainment of some degree of mastery whereby come contentment, peace, and happiness. I do not now refer to possible higher states of consciousness.

Is this too much to hope for? It must come some time. Man must become a conscious creator. He must realize that his powers for good or ill are far-reaching; that whatever else others may do or be, his conscious universe will be made for and by himself. He must learn something of the potential powers of his soul—what natural means he is using daily to weave the web of life around him, and how they may be so used as to lift him into a higher condition instead of fettering him. Hence, the key of the life and the art of living are expressed in the words Mastery and Attainment.

Let us examine them more in detail. Assuming that there is an agreement to the foregoing philosophy, or some other that recognizes soul and its destiny of perfection, the first consideration will be of Freedom. The soul is in bondage—in a thousand particulars it is a bond-slave: bound by birth, by the age in which it lives, by the conventional opinions of other human beings, by inherited dogma and philosophy, by its own errors of speculation, by its belief in the supremacy of the body, by the weakness of character it has brought with it, and by fear and ignorance. To be free from all these would, it may be thought, make a perfect being. Its condition would be only a negative one, however, and would lack the positive element of good. It may be asked, Can we free ourselves from all these? Yes; but not in a day, though great progress may be made in a given time—if one have the wish and the will. The soul must be free to be in a condition to receive and apprehend the truth. An angel may stand at your door, but, if you are sure that nothing will convince you that there is such a being, his visit will be useless.

The soul can never be receptive of truth so long as it is clouded by prejudice, opinion, and irrevocable predilection. If a gleam of truth occasionally percolate that condition, it is sure to become distorted and unrecognizable. Take as simple an example as that which arises from Nature. Emerson says: "The pairing of birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these glide into our spirits, and we participate in the invention of Nature?" And yet how very few have sufficiently divested themselves of conventional thinking to be able to receive such suggestions from Nature!

One must free himself also from the tyranny of approbativeness. This, like most other forms of bondage, is self-imposed. As long as we permit the opinions of others to determine our action and thought, we can never be free. We will have set up public or private opinion as the standard of conduct, rather than the right and the truth. Act rightly, and give no thought to opinion. The love of praise and commendation is ignoble; it holds the soul in bondage. The fear of disapproval is even more tyrannous. Break them both, and to that extent be free.

One of the results of freedom is original thought. It knows no limitations; it recognizes no obstacles. With a disregard that appals the weak and circumscribed, it complacently passes by and beyond for the moment the opinions and theories of others and seeks the truth itself. It raises without hesitation the veil from every Isis. It enters the sanctuary, and generally finds an idol instead of the Truth. It descends to the atom and reaches out to the stars. It is fearless; it is lofty. It is that which relates the ego to all things, as the sun's rays proceed outward and embrace illimitable space. It broadens the horizon of existence, and the soul that has it ceases to be merely of a race, or a country, or a world, but becomes a being of the Universe.

The soul must love Truth, and love it above all opinion, theory, dogma, doctrine, or philosophy. It must appreciate the fact that to know the Truth and live it is the highest state, and be willing to abandon every theory for it. Some who think they love the Truth are mistaken; they love their opinion of Truth. They are not free. The Truth of which I speak is not taught; it is not found in books. Only the method of knowing it may be thus imparted. It itself is internally perceived by him who fits himself to perceive it. It is an interpretation, or a self-revelation, of the Divine.

The soul must love the pure, and be pure. "The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body," said Emerson. The intellectual life must be kept clean and beautiful, the thought ever free from distortion, and then the consciousness will be so likewise. Ruskin wrote: "You can no more filter your mind into purity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure if you would have it pure, and throw no stones into it if you would have it quiet." So far as our own higher evolution is concerned, we should ever bear in mind the teaching of the Japanese Buddhists—that we should "neither hear nor speak nor see evil." No one who allows his mind to dwell upon the details of crime, or upon the many phases of moral obliquity, can keep his mind pure. In the use of the term pure I do not simply refer to the absence of obliquity: I use the term as comprehending the whole realm of the perfect. Whatever is perfect is pure; whatever is a deviation from the perfect is impure.

We must, then, recognize and make part of our lives only those things that approximate perfection, and disregard and refuse to take into our lives all that is a deviation from the purpose of perfection. This should be applied to conversation, literature, art, and the commonest thoughts of life; and, if studiously followed, will transform the habitual consciousness into one beautiful harmony in unison with the higher expression of soul-life on our plane, rendering the life sweet and fresh and free from monstrosities of thought.

What I have said is not to be taken to mean that we should be uncharitable and harsh in opinion—not that we shall disregard duties that deal with imperfect conditions—but applies to the realm of thought and action that lies within the free choice and is purely an individual condition.

It is not the highest philosophy that holds that we must learn virtue by studying vice: that we can appreciate sunshine only by passing through the night. If that were true the divinest nature would have to steep itself in vice in order to appreciate its own divinity. The philosophy I hold is a positive one, and teaches men to love the thing for itself—not a negative one, which teaches you by contrast. There is no real virtue in a preference formed by reason of a contrast. To be good in order to escape the result of evil is not to be good in a very high sense. Such will do for primitive men, who must have rewards to bribe and punishments to deter them. But to be good because of the good itself—that is virtue.

The next consideration is that of Being, as distinguished from seeming. The thought too often is, How may I seem to my acquaintances and the world in general? More stress is put upon reputation than upon character. Reputation is merely the aspect in which we appear to others; it may be true or it may be false, but in any event it is nothing in itself. It is a shadow at best. Character is the real man—reputation only the seeming. Men will be content to know that they are in fact ignoble, if only they seem to be otherwise to the world. The personal man is valued higher than the real man, and virtue is not esteemed for itself but for some extraneous reward. They should be content to know that they are noble, and unmindful of what they may seem to be. Emerson says: "Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying I AM." The soul can never appreciate Truth until it rises out of this illusion, this preference for the seeming over the being.

Ambition and the love of fame are to be classed here. All have them more or less, but they are not recognized on account of their insignificant aspects—because perchance they do not take the form of Napoleon's passion. They are the petty rivalries and vanities for social and other place and position. Of the more pronounced phases we may say, with Juvenal, "Go climb the Alps, and be a theme for schoolboys." It is sufficient comment: the words speak volumes. There is no real greatness or nobleness in such lives. Men think they love greatness and burn to do some noble deed: but they mistake; it is not greatness or nobleness they love, but themselves. They love the acclaim of the multitude. Greatness and nobleness are as great and noble in the obscurity of an unknown life as in the full glare of the world's eye.

One of the most conspicuous examples of this false view is to be found in Cicero's essay on fame: "Why should we dissemble what is impossible for us to conceal? Why should we not be proud of confessing candidly that we all aspire to fame? The love of praise influences all mankind, and the greatest minds are most susceptible to it." To this we may reply, briefly, in the words of Epictetus: "Is there no reward? Do you seek a reward greater than doing what is good and just? Does it seem to you so worthless a thing to be good and happy?"

Again, we must be self-centered. This does not mean selfishness. It means that we must recognize the power of self, and its legitimate field of independent and originative action; that our work which shall be effective for self and others must be projected from a self-consciousness of power; and that all true advancement must come from an unfolding of the life within—not through an expectation of a transforming power from without. Matthew Arnold finds a similitude to this in the sublime self-sufficiency of the heavenly bodies, where he says:

     "Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
          Undistracted by the sights they see,
     These demand not that the things without them
          Yield them love, amusement, sympathy,"

—and points to the mighty life they attain by pouring their powers into their own tasks.

The analogy may be faulty, and we may prefer the words of Epictetus, if in truth we feel the need of going to another for the expression of a thought: "What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only one—philosophy. But this consists in keeping the spirit within free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, nor feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything, and besides accepting all that happens and all that is allotted as coming from thence, wherever it is, whence he himself came." Interpreting this last clause as intended to include and recognize the laws of causation upon all planes of experience, we may say this is good philosophy.

Let us consider briefly universal love—that condition which holds within itself the possibility of every virtue. As a rule, it is weakly perceived and faintly felt by the soul of average unfoldment—so dominated by personal and selfish love that the very existence and possibility of this condition are often denied. Nevertheless, it is the golden cord that unites all humanity in a thought of ultimate unity; it is the state of consciousness that widens beyond family, friends, country, and race, and claims a kindred with not only all humanity but all life. It softens contrasts; it levels differences in favor of the higher principles that inhere in all. It varies in degree in different personalities, but it may always be known by the absence from the concept of the thought of requital. It goes forth as freely as the sunshine, and has no more thought than it of a reward or requital. It never asks a return of love for love: it is free from any idea of self. It gives itself wholly, an unqualified gift, and exists for naught else. It never diminishes love, but broadens the field of its application. It never withdraws affection when bestowed by reason of personal relations, but lifts it to a higher plane of thought and experience and makes it but a part in an infinite sea of love. The soul must grow into this state. It can do so only by the exercise of it.

In conclusion of this branch of our subject, let us give but a moment to the consideration of that without which one finds himself largely powerless, although he may believe he has attained much of what I have spoken. I refer to the Conservation of Psychic Energy.

As imperfect as is the bodily life rendered by ill health, so is all the higher life made largely ineffective by a failure to conserve the psychic energy. This is thrown away in a multitude of ways: by anger and irritation, by envy and jealousy, by worry, by useless anxiety and grief, by melancholy and pessimism, by useless and inane talking, by inordinate emotion, by useless acts and movements, by incontinence and a disregard of the laws of the creative function. If one would know the higher states of consciousness he must give assiduous attention to all these things. If he would feel the consciousness of a greater power within himself, and wish to know what richness of thought, aspiration, and realization it adds to life, he must in some measure master these defects and at once raise himself into another and newer classification of man.

CHAPTER III.

ELIMINATIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE MENTATION.

Professor Marsh pointed out a most interesting fact in evolution. It is well known that the gigantic animal structures of the geological ages disappeared from the earth and have been succeeded by smaller organisms. It seems to be true that in such changes the brain of the succeeding type has ever been larger in comparison with the organism than that of the type displaced. And if we remember that more brain means a greater and more complex functioning of mind, we may draw a most important conclusion, namely, that in the evolution of life there has been a survival of the fittest mind.

But our inquiry here leads us far beyond this conclusion. We find that the manifestation of mind alone most fitted to overrun the earth is not that manifestation of mind which has been prominent in the best thought and life of man of historic times. This has been a development of mind that natural selection acting through physical environment would hardly account for; that is, the evolution of morality, ethics, altruism, and esthetics. Thus we see that evolution must now follow the lines of higher mental states.

In the preceding paper there was a consideration of some mental states that constitute or induce the higher life. The question arises, Is there any method or art by which these may be attained; and if so, what? There is; and it is the mastery of the mind, and through it of the conditions and states of consciousness related to the objective life and impressed upon the subliminal states.

Mind has been said to be "the totality of the subconscious and conscious adaptive functions of the organism in interaction with the cosmos."* I would say it is the relation in entirety between the consciousness and the cosmos. We therefore see the reason for such proverbs as that of the Hindus: "The mind binds us and the mind sets us free."

* Professor Elmer Gates.

To master the mind is to master the relations with the cosmic environment. It is to select at will the character of the soul's functioning and thereby become the creator of the bodily conditions on the one hand and the states of consciousness on the other. It is to become a powerful psychic factor for good. It is to gain control over the only instrument by which the personality may be purged of the dross that prevents progress and a realization of higher states in this body and hereafter.

"We must be careful how we choose our thoughts; the soul is dyed by its thoughts." The mind is the spring of every conscious action, and it is the creator of the special aspect that the world wears to each individual soul. Says Emerson: "You have seen a skilful man read Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read your eyes out: you will never find what I find." So does each soul live in a condition made by itself, and everything upon this plane is interpreted by the mind for itself. "We may make the world a palace or a prison," says Sir John Lubbock. By the power of conscious creative mentation we may create a higher and purer world of thought into which we may retire at will, and into which no unlike or inharmonious elements can enter. We may be cheerful in the midst of adversity, and render ourselves happy in the possession of that which change and opinion cannot touch.

This mastery does not come by haphazard thinking, nor by spasmodic effort, but by systematic mentation and purposeful concentration. As far as the purposes here are concerned, it may be said that this concentration must be upon the concepts connected with the higher life. It is constructive in that it creates higher states and intensifies higher aspirations, and it is eliminative in that it displaces lower and antagonistic ones. It fixes the desirable states as habitual ones by building up brain-cells through which the conscious functioning takes place, and upon the psychic side it habituates the soul to those higher conditions by the law of exercise and use. It leads to original thinking, and gives a stronger and truer mental grasp. When sufficient mastery is attained to inhibit all habitual lines of thought, the subliminal mentation becomes vivid and states not theretofore known become apparent.

The practise divides itself naturally into two branches—one the constructive and eliminating, by which new states may be purposefully created, and the other the revealing, by which the soul manifests its latent higher states. The rationale of these will be spoken of particularly in a future paper. For our present purpose we may ask what is the first requisite to successful introspection, aside from the preparation shadowed forth in foregoing pages. There must be some degree of temporary retirement or withdrawal from distracting environment. This is an obstacle to very many who have not accustomed themselves to look within, but who seek all their entertainment and diversion from without. Says Sir Thomas Browne: "Unthinking heads who have not learnt to be alone are a prison to themselves if they be not with others." The advantages of solitude have been universally recognized, and many times unduly magnified. There are conspicuous examples of both. Petrarch retired from the allurements and fascinations of a luxurious court, where every material advantage was at his bidding, in order to be with himself and higher thoughts.

But to attain the result of which I speak it is not necessary to retire into seclusion. The healthful practise requires only a regular effort each day for the training of the soul's faculties by a rational system of thought and meditation. At first the student finds himself ran away with by his desultory, capricious thoughts. He realizes that he is not master in his own mental house. Gradually he begins to gain control; and, by the inhibition of special lines of thought and the concentration upon others that are desirable, he may engage in conscious, systematic character-building. He knows that he has the key to attainment, and the future to a vastly increased extent lies within his conscious control. No doubt most prefer to say:

     "Keep Thou my feet. I do not ask to see
     The distant scene: one step enough for me;"

—yet they must admit that they are not mere automata, and that it is the part of divinity to know and to become.

The details of the art of meditation and concentration are many, and cannot be entered upon here. But even a slight practise of controlling mentation—of the systematic inhibition of harmful thoughts and the holding of beneficial ones—will bring ample reward for the effort; and those who wish to go beyond will find the way. It is well, however, to state here a fundamental rule that will be of benefit at any stage of practise, and one absolutely necessary to observe in the effort to eradicate existing undesirable thought or character. It is a simple one, but must be strictly followed. It is this—that a state of consciousness or a thought cannot be overcome by fighting it. When you only contest it, you intensify it because you hold it in consciousness—the very thing you wish to avoid. You must replace it by another thought of a different and perhaps opposite character, recurring again and again to it until it becomes dominant.

But it must always be remembered that these stages of concentration are but the instruments by which you may master. The mastery must be of the right character; the life must be true, and the aspiration high. If, for instance, one be grossly prejudiced or far from free, the probability is that his concentration (unless done under the immediate direction of one more competent) might tend to emphasize his errors. In short, all is accessory to the life.

While I speak of mastery and the building of character and the attainment of higher states of consciousness, I do not thereby depreciate the beauty and value of unostentatious living: in truth, I hold it to be the best preparation for higher attainment. Emerson says of the poet: "His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy on water." This simplicity and spontaneity should mark the life of all.

Nor do I desire to import into life the austerities of asceticism. Along the lines of advancement I would have the soul express its keenest appreciation of the lofty, the beautiful, and the true. This expression naturally seeks a formulation in music, art, symmetry, and proportion and harmony in all relations. I would encourage original thinking and expression rather than imitation, and the spontaneous rather than the labored and artificial; yet they all have their uses. I would have him who has a poet's instinct write or sing his own thoughts, however crude they might be, and he whose soul is tuned to harmony to compose and give forth his own conceptions. I would have all men thus look within themselves, and then write or sing or act accordingly, for the love simply of being what they express, and with no idea of merchandizing their talents, or of vanity, or of fame or applause; for then the virtue of the life actuated by the latter withers as the Dead-Sea fruit turns to ashes on the lip.

I would have men cease to regard living as an evil out of which they propose to extract the greatest amount of what is usually called pleasure, or as a patrimony to be lightly valued and spent. They should realize that life is a great privilege, the value of which is to be realized in the now of every soul. The past lives only in the present; the future is yet unborn, but must come out of the present. We must realize the truth of the poet's words:

     "Would you be happy? Hearken, then, the way.
     Heed not to-morrow; heed not yesterday:
     The magic words of life are Here and Now;"

—and regard them as expressing the philosophy of living most truly in each moment, but in no wise as a limitation upon attainment.

I have used the word esoteric, not to imply that the methods mentioned are necessarily confined to the few, but that the science of the mind's power and the art of using it for the ennobling of life are little known and appreciated; that the fact that man is an unconscious creator and may become a conscious creator for himself is not generally regarded; chat the commonest aspects of life have a deeper meaning than we think; that the familiar proverbs, which like unlaid ghosts haunt the intellectual life, are alive with significance; and that the consensus of philosophic thought is founded in profound truth.

We are only upon the threshold of true living. Let us learn these higher laws of Being, and, knowing them, so live that we may become more beautiful within and evolve a higher state of consciousness—thus uniting our immediate destinies with sublimer spheres of Being both here and in the next state.

CHAPTER IV.

ORIGINAL THOUGHT AND FREE EXPRESSION.

Man stands between two powers—Authority and Freedom. To the first he may subject his mind; to the second he may ally himself. The one seeks to enforce its ancient lien upon the soul, to foreclose the mortgage of ancestral making, to exact from new life a homage to the old, to compel the present to conform to the past, and jealously to guard that the future shall bring forth no new thought. The other is like a breath of sweet air in spring-time, exacting nothing, but laying all things in glorious gift before the soul. In its presence there is the suggestion of a new life. It invites the soul to think for itself, to live outwardly the inward conviction, and to aspire and build regardless of the failures or successes of the past.

The limitation upon the liberty of the soul, which Authority seeks to enforce, is the result of countless ages of life-history. Thousands of generations have added their moieties to the whole, and the burden has increased as the stream of life has flowed onward. It speaks to the soul through every relation of life—the institutions of State and the creeds of Church, the common customs of nations and the mandates of the law, and the recognized standards of art and literature, morality and ethics. It strikes with paralysis the spontaneous and original thought.

The child is born an heir to the ages, and the greater part of the inheritance into which it speedily comes is this bondage to Authority. The cradle is environed by its hard and unyielding dictum. It displays its diploma of experience, and with assumed wisdom undertakes the rearing and education of the child. To every original, spontaneous, and progressive question from the unfolding mind, it offers the opinion of the past, though formed in ignorance or selfishness. In the early years of youth, when perchance one wanders in the deep and silent woodlands, or is fortunate enough to know the trackless prairie whose expanding circle with unbroken dome above engenders concepts of unity and sublimity unthought before, and through this touch of Nature perceives the law of free life and expression, then for the time being this ancient phantom of Authority fades away as something belonging to an artificial world of transient things, and is replaced by the genius of light—the spirit of Freedom. For the soul, the past is then dead, and its gaze is turned to the future, which it claims to work with in its own divine way.

In such conditions have been born many great thoughts and purposes that have swept the race onward to higher levels of attainment. But such conditions do not come to all, and if to the few are of short duration. The soul is soon forced back into the beaten path of life, and to some extent must follow it. Conventional life and conditions claim him, and he enters an existence whose controlling factor is Authority. Would he fashion his life upon a higher social order of things than that which surrounds him, and with which his fellow-beings are content? He cannot; Authority in a multitude of disguises opposes his way and threatens to brand him with all sorts of disagreeable epithets if he persist. Would he evolve a higher religious conception than the average possess and manifest in life? He is anticipated; for Authority, knowing its strong point to lie in forestalling, has molded his plastic young mind after one of the prevailing philosophies or creeds, and if in time the evil be recognized the effort to gain the vantage-ground of fairness and unbias may be an uncertain one in its results. In business, in politics, and all the vocations that depend upon the multitude for favor, the soul must yield to the tyranny of the special embodiment of Authority which the multitude has set above it to rule its thoughts and define its limitations.

Thus does this psychological tyrant, whom the human race has created, dog the steps of every soul, exacting his tribute at every stage of life, lavishing material benefits upon his willing subjects and withholding them from the defiant ones, and does not yield up his office until what men call death claims the victim, and even then imposes conditions upon the disposition of the body. Under these conditions is it strange that people fear to harken to their own thought upon the problems of soul life, and seek to press them into the background, where they will cease to annoy or surprise them; or that they should wish first to have displayed the authoritative label of your philosophy before they consent to listen, and, if not able to classify your idea in some highly respectable and authoritative category, reject it as dangerous and visionary; or that they are timid and indolent in thought, scarcely claiming the right to think for themselves, deferring always to traditional opinion and that of their appointed masters and leaders?

What is more usual than the popular demand of "What is your authority?" or "Who says so?" as the first rejoinder to a new or an old thought which they are compelled to entertain, as if it could be more or less true on account of him who asserts it? Proclaim a profound truth, one as deep as human nature but without the stamp of Authority or the must of age upon it, and the average mind is little more than entertained or the heart little stirred. But declare a less deep or vital truth in the name of some one whose reputation is revered, and allegiance is gained at once. This is the mystic charm of Authority and its blighting influence upon the original, progressive, and creative powers of the mind.

An attempt to build from without, and not from within, is a false philosophy. It is a dependence upon another's mind, another's excellence, another's goodness or wisdom, rather than upon one's own. It is the mental and moral sloth from which nothing can deliver one but the exchange of this master of Authority for the companionship of the genius of Freedom and the power that will thereby come to attain for ourself.

If the one universal essence pervades all beings—if each be the temple of divinity through which the higher, subliminal consciousness is ever seeking to emerge—why should I inquire of Plato or Emerson what truth or virtue is? If they be nearer to it than I, is not that approach a result of their own self-evolution, to attain like which I too must follow the same road? No one can have a monopoly upon that which is the nature of all.

You may ask, Is there not a difference in the wisdom of men? Yes, surely; but that difference is not fundamental and create: it is a difference in unfoldment, or evolution, and the consequent apprehension of truth.

Did these men acquire their wisdom by collecting the opinions of others? Surely not. No doubt they were familiar with the thought of preceding souls, but they attained wisdom through self-evolution, by the process of unfolding that higher, subliminal consciousness which holds in potentiality all that man can ever become.

Here we may well ask, What truly great man who has had a message for humanity ever sought to quote some one else for what he declared to be his conviction of the truth or his conception of life? I think we may say, No one. Did Jesus quote some respectable Authority for his teachings? "Verily, I say unto you," is his reputed language. Did Socrates quote the philosophers or oracles? "Plato, it must be so," would be his words. Did Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius couch their teachings in the language and with the sanction of the then great schools of philosophy? Did Emerson or Shakespeare deliver his profound messages in the language of another, or borrow his luster to give them currency? No; because they spoke from the conviction of their own souls, and not from the dictum of another.

There can be no real progress or unfoldment except the evolution of the self. Another can give advice, good counsel, information; can teach facts, but never truth, nor wisdom, nor experience. These are matters of self-attainment. They cannot be borrowed or loaned or transferred. He who possesses them cannot part with them if he would, neither can he monopolize them: they are free to every one, because they are of the nature of the one essence of which all are the differentiated parts.

Any attempt to attain virtue by another's virtue must fail. The internal self-perception of truth must ever be individual, though there may be an illimitable number who possess it; but the perception by one can never supply the want of it by another. Neither can one become wise by the vicarious wisdom of another. We cannot build up our lives from without; hence, Authority is a false teacher if it stifle growth from within. But may we not be taught by others, and share the thoughts of the great and enlightened minds who have illumined the way before us? We may. They can show us the way and stimulate our endeavor to attain a knowledge of what they have known, and, as we attain it, enable us to participate in their elevated association. But, when a vital problem is presented in the life, the thoughts and theories of others will dissolve into nothingness and the question will be solved by the self, from the deepest promptings of one's soul, with as much light from the Source of wisdom as has been caught and retained in the aspiring ego. One will do this if he appreciate his own divinity and the opportunity to express it. Any other attempt to settle a vital question wholly by the standards of another's thought or conviction may perchance result happily occasionally; but as a scheme of life it must ultimately prove a failure, and involve its hapless victim in a vacillating and uncertain state of dependence and unhappiness.

What, then, should we seek to do? Dismiss the master Authority and accept the companion Freedom, which acts upon the soul's powers as the sunlight upon the unfolding flower. Live your life from your own standards, arrived at through the deepest search into your true self. Have a care not to become shallow or one-sided in an artificial exclusiveness, nor to become fanatical and egotistical. Keep a true balance with the cosmos, especially with the higher thought of your fellow-souls. Do not fear that higher thought will trick you. If by the effort you fall into occasional error it will be a blessing to you thus to discover where in your own personality there is something that needs rectifying: for the error will flow from that point, not from the nature of your effort.

Do not be fearful of your own thoughts. First to learn yourself, give them perfect liberty and freedom. One of the beneficial results will be a partial discovery of yourself. This aspect of the self may present two phases. One may discourage, because it will disclose your weaknesses. But do not flee; remain to conquer, and let the thought run on and show what kind of habit of life is beneath them. By this disclosure you will learn where improvement is needed; and, once learned, from that point begin the inhibition of harmful thought and the building of the higher. The other phase disclosed will be the sublimer one before which the intellect may stand amazed in the presence of its grandeur and beauty.

How many people will rhapsodize over a beautiful thought, read from an author of reputed standing, but fail to recognize the same when it flits through their own minds! Outside of science, the narration of empirical facts, what is there new in substance in books? Do you not sit down with your favorite one and read it as though you yourself had written it? Why is it so, but that you have many times thought the same thoughts yourself, and only half-recognized and never fully appreciated them? It may be that your favorite author has possessed the art of producing a happy concatenation of words, which lends an additional charm to the thoughts; but that is largely an artificial adornment. To know somewhat of other thoughts is in truth delightful; for it is association, and cheers the life. Books, if they be good ones, are excellent mental society (some have thought the best, as did Petrarch); but neither books nor society become an unqualified good if they tend to check or nullify the originative and creative activities of the mind. They are liable to be used as one would take a stimulant, and as long as one takes a stimulant the natural powers of the stimulated organ decrease; and when the stimulant is discontinued the healthful action becomes torpid.

Once recognizing the duty to think with untrammeled freedom, we will have another question to settle. We will be met at every step with the suggestion from ourselves or others that there cannot be much merit in our thoughts, for others have anticipated them. Suppose they have: if the thoughts be noble and sublime, we should feel encouraged that we are unfolding as did they who went before us and left recorded thought. Nor can we be dismayed with the thought that any one has a property-right in an idea to our exclusion. No one can monopolize ideas; if so, he could suppress soul life altogether, except as an acknowledged imitation. It is the privilege of every soul to express its highest nature. That some one has expressed it for himself, before me, is of no import to me; it is my privilege and duty to express it for myself. Hence, it is untrue to say of my thought, or of yours, that it is Emerson's or Paul's or Plato's. It is mine or yours as much as it was ever theirs.

When we admit any such proprietary right in ideas, to our own exclusion, we limit the possibility cf unfoldment to that extent; for it is primarily through the mind that unfoldment in the objective life takes place. Under those circumstances we could never enter the field of thought without being a trespasser—without borrowing from those who have gone before and acknowledging an eternal and insurmountable indebtedness to them; whereas we should enter it as though we are passing into our own domain, expecting at every point to disclose to ourselves its beauty. This we can do only by perfect freedom and a due appreciation of the powers of the soul. So long as one feels that there is any subject of knowledge or wisdom which he has not the liberty to seek, uncover, and question in the sanctuary of his profoundest thought, he has failed to realize his opportunity and the right use of his mind. He has failed to relate himself to that part of the Universe. It is this attitude of perfectly free relation to the Universal Mind, without the aid of intermediary devices, that is necessary to a higher mental and spiritual development.

If, then, we shall hope to make the higher mental life our own, we must not relinquish its development to others, but must claim it for our own self-attainment. There is a great difference, in the store added to the soul, between reading or hearing the expression of another's thought and thinking like thoughts for ourselves: all the difference there is between borrowing and making a beautiful design or clever device. We must think boldly and fearlessly, and be assured that whatever wrong can arise from it will be from our own ignorance and imperfect manner of proceeding. There is nothing in the nature of things designed to be hidden from us. That would be imputing to Divinity ways that are ignoble, trivial, and childish. If men believe knowledge of a particular kind is forbidden them, it will remain for them a closed book. They will never pass beyond the circle they draw around themselves.

While with this freedom and faith one opens the mind to the flood of thoughts that seek self-expression on subjects of soul importance, it must not be forgotten that it is done with many imperfections in the evolved personality, which may tinge with their own special and erroneous color some of the conclusions. But there is a court of reason and conscience where we may detain such conclusions and guard against their possible error.

The reading of many books will not add the richness to one's mind that the attempt to write one poem drawn from the deepest and sincerest side of his nature will do. His own meditation upon the nature and destiny of his soul will add more wisdom than all others can tell him. His own concepts of the higher virtues, of the nature of truth, if formed with sincere and unselfish purpose, will be surer aids to advancement than the thoughts imperfectly gotten from others. The daily recognition of the beauties in sky and stars, in clouds and their forms and tints, in landscapes and flowers, in faces and souls, will be grander poetry than can be found in books.

To make the mind, then, the open door into the sublimer realm of the intellectual life, to make it the instrument by which all the true and noble things shall be self-perceived through our own powers and not induced as a vague thought from others, is the special duty and privilege that each must recognize. Thus, with no other authority but Truth and with Wisdom as a counselor, the soul may proceed with its work of more perfectly expressing its harmonious relation to the Whole and attaining to higher states of consciousness.

CHAPTER V.

SELF-REVELATION.

In subsequent papers, where will be considered the subject of the subliminal consciousness, it will be seen that one of the most potent characteristics of the present nature of man is his responsiveness to external stimuli: in popular phrase, it has been known as susceptibility to suggestion. It has been this faculty of responding to the character of environment, together with the ability to adjust the self to those demands, that has played the main part in his past evolution.

I wish to note another but a strictly psychological effect that this has produced upon man—one as old and universal as the race; to show that notwithstanding its age and universality it rests upon a false interpretation of experience, and finally to suggest the true interpretation, a better understanding of which, I believe, will greatly assist in the higher thought and life. This universal characteristic of responsiveness to the external world—this necessity by which the ego is obliged to recognize the natures of different external objects and conditions, or perish from the body—has had the effect of impressing upon the consciousness the idea that all external things have placed themselves in a distinctively personal attitude toward it; that they are ever making some demands that must be met; that they bear a personal import of good or evil; that they have some particular message to deliver to the soul.

It is not surprising that the long ages of struggle to adjust the organism to the imperious demands of environment should have engendered this state of consciousness and impressed it with the idea that the whole of Nature was engaged in a conspiracy to help or harm the individual, nor that it should have invested all things with a personal aspect. Browning has expressed it thus:

     ". . . man, once descried, imprints forever
     His presence on all lifeless things: the winds
     Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout—
     A querulous mutter or a quick, gay laugh.
     . . .

     The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts:
     A secret they assemble to discuss.
     . . .

     The morn has enterprise: deep quiet droops
     With evening: triumph takes the sunset hour."

By reason of this the ancients personified the elements and the aspects of Nature, which became deities—beneficent in the degree in which they affected favorably the immediate comfort and prosperity of the individual.

It may well be said that from it all there has arisen the thought that there may be an external effort to make a revelation to man. This conception is the result of a misinterpretation of experience. As a matter of fact the course of Nature is constant and invariable, but continually expressing its own purpose and evolving its own ends; and man as a part of it has been ever placing his own interpretation upon its phases, and changing that interpretation as a greater degree of wisdom dawned upon his mind. Yet there is a revelation; but not from without. There is an interpretation; but in conformity with truth, as well as error. That revelation and interpretation are the work of man himself, as we may learn.

All knowledge and all experience are subjective: the objective channels of sense are but the physical means of registering upon the organism different changes in the condition or state of his environment. Thus the eye and the optic nerve merely serve to register upon the brain the vibrations of the ether, and the consciousness of those vibrations we interpret as light. So the ear and nerves serve to register vibrations of the atmosphere, and the consciousness of those vibrations we interpret as sound. But this consciousness is wholly a subjective state of the ego. We do not see light or hear sound as we think we do; but our internal state, or consciousness, is changed by reason of the perception of a change in environment. Thus each soul perceives the world through the evolved avenues of perception, and interprets the whole of experience for itself. These interpretations bear an aspect for each one that is purely individual. No two see the simplest object just the same. Perception reveals a world of changing conditions to every one, but the interpretation of that perception is individual and may be independent of all others; hence, no world of one is entirely known to another. This must be true because all knowledge is wholly a subjective state of the self: it is consciousness within.

When one listens to the varying tones that result from breezes soughing through the pine woods, does he hear dirges? Is he in the presence of melancholy and decay? No; if he feels them they are wholly within himself, and not in the forest. By association of ideas, and perhaps by a deeper law that correlates certain characteristic tones with particular experiences, they awaken the consciousness of such states. The inner man is always enacting subjectively the drama of experience, using the external only as suggestion to fashion it upon. Thus may we understand some of the reasons for the differences between minds, and the causes for the infinite variety as well as similarity of opinion; why error is so universal and so lamentably confused with truth; why, though symbols are nothing in themselves, they are useful to some to enable them to raise a condition within themselves; and why Nature serves as a symbol to suggest to the mind its divine character. It is in this sense that the mystic sees there "the Father's face." The concept of the presence is within him, and the Nature-symbol enables him to reveal it to himself. And, as the mystic sees his subjective love of the divine thus externalized, the lover finds all Nature proclaiming his passion and sharing his secret—and the guilty sees his wrong frowned upon and condemned by sky and tree.

     "Let me not know the change
          O'er Nature thrown by guilt;—the boding sky,
     The hollow leaf-sounds ominous and strange,
          The weight wherewith the dark tree-shadows lie!"

It is all within the consciousness, and the same landscape that serves to show the mystic "the Father's face" will awe the guilty with a sense of ominous condemnation.

When will we fully realize that we are making the revelations to ourselves in all that we experience, and that the revelation or interpretation may be of the truth, of the divine nature of things, in the degree that the soul is free from the disturbing and obscuring thoughts and methods of life? We reveal all things to ourselves. There is no other revelation. It is a mistaken interpretation of experience to think of it as otherwise. No revelation ever comes to man except through himself—from the divine nature within him. There is no external, overt act needed. All things stand eternally uncovered, disclosed, declared; and it requires only understanding on the part of man to reveal them to himself. You can have facts disclosed to you, but not Truth. If an angel should attempt to reveal Wisdom to man, it would be impossible unless the man could come in complete rapport with the nature of the angel; and if he could do that, no revelation from the angel would be necessary, for the man would reveal the same state to himself. It would not be a revelation from the angel, but a participation by both in the same state.

This is true not only of the extraordinary, but of the commonest experiences of life. What do we find engaging in other people but the discovery or expected discovery in them of all the good that is latent in ourselves? Suppose that we knew nothing of love ourselves: could we ever understand it in another? If we were totally devoid of the sense of veracity, that virtue in others would be an eternal enigma. We continually hold ourselves up—to self inspection, knowledge, and criticism—in the lives and thoughts of others. We carefully (whether we know it or not) check off all similarities and note dissimilarities—it may be hoped for our betterment always—and still seek after the sublime, the unknown, the divine in others. We do not find it. Why? Because we have not evolved the realization of it—we have not fully known it in ourselves. When we do we will interpret or reveal it to ourselves again in all things. This is why a philosopher has said that when people learn your limitations they are done with you. The truth is they may be done with you because they have reached their own limitations, not necessarily yours alone.

Again, take the study of history, which passes from the individual to the complex problem. What does the student see there but his own nature in the lives and thoughts and acts of other men? He reveals himself as a possible history of progress or retrogression, of virtue or vice, of attainment or decay. All history is a history of every soul, and we may learn our position in the race of progress very well by observing what characteristics in history, or class of individuals or acts, as portrayed in history or fiction, most interest us.

Let it be said here that the harm that comes from reading, of whatever character, is this self-revelation, or the awakening of tendencies and habits that as individuals and as a race we have outgrown and risen above. So there may be here what the naturalists call a "reversion to original type;" and in reading of robber barons, of crime and perfidy, or needlessly reviewing the pageant of sensuality and brutality, unless we read for the philosophy of history alone we reveal in ourselves, ever so faintly it may be, that like nature which, like old and begrimed clothes, we have long ago cast away—a relic of a past evolutionary stage, which, if we are careful not to revive and foster, will gradually lose all power to hold us from the higher life.

It is the same with literature. Why does one find a world with all its people in Shakespeare, while another finds little to interest him? Because the one is accustomed to reveal to himself the depths and shoals of human emotion. What does Romeo and Juliet mean to one who himself does not love humanly; or Macbeth to one who does not recognize the terror of pursuing remorse; or Falstaff to one who is not himself familiar with the harmless vagabond nature? The page is dead and without meaning, but the symbols we call letters and words at once summon into our consciousness from ourselves a world peopled with thinking and acting beings. One reads "The Loves of the Angels" to revel in a sensual imagination; another finds in it an expression of something transcendently beautiful within himself. One reads Omar Khayyam for his agnosticism; another for his philosophy and veiled spiritualism. One admires art for its realism; another for its symbolism of the ideal.

But most persons fail to reveal to themselves much of the divine. They content themselves with the passing phenomena of the world—the transient thoughts connected with temporary conditions of things and people. The world thus revealed is an unreal and transitory one: it will pass away; in fact, while these lines are written it has passed away, and another temporary one has come, and in turn has gone as soon. Thus they continually die because there is nothing worthy of living, nothing really true. Such of the true as is revealed, however, lives through every vicissitude, above and beyond and independent of every change. It was Ruskin who said he was not so much surprised at what men are as at what they miss. It is what they fail to reveal to themselves that may be surprising.

The great masterpieces that have been preserved as the work of unfolded minds pass on down the ages with but a handful of understanding readers, while the multitude pass them by. Still, they are handed on; and those who read understandingly live in the thought, which is ever the same and which they reveal to themselves. The intervening ages vanish as by magic, and the writer and the reader are one in spirit and understanding.

This self-revelation of the divine finds a great development in relation to Nature, because Nature is an open book always before us. He that loves the whispering pines, the solemn quietness of the forest, the song of waving seas of grass, the gladness of day and the pensiveness of night, the grandeur of the storm and the beauty of sunset skies, has revealed to himself enough of the divine to make his life one long poem and joined himself to a mighty throng of like souls. Thus it is ever of Truth; no one can reveal it to another. He can put him in the way of perceiving it, but the soul must perceive it for itself.

If we will cease to live in trifles, this self-revelation of the diviner world will at once make life worth the living.

You will recall the beautiful lines of James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet: "There is ever a song somewhere, my dear." It expresses the esoteric side of this idea of revelation, in which all Nature is full of song for us. To express the esoteric view, I would add these lines:

     That song, O friend, is the song of love,
     And the words of the song are the thoughts we breathe;
     The tones are life's grand harmonies
    Between the soul and the life that Nature weaves.

     There's ever a song somewhere, 'tis true,
          But the song is one we sing ere we hear;
     For my soul is deaf to the song in you
          Till it sings the song in its heart, my dear.

     Then all the world is a songster gay;
     The zephyr's sigh, the pale star's ray,
     The joy of birds, the budding flowers,
     The north wind's plaint through ivied towers,
     The rippling waves—Life's mighty throng
     All sing to the heart that is full of song.

While this self-revelation of the divine is an ever-present factor in life, contributing all that makes life truly noble, and, like the gathering of many streams to make the river, is contributing to build up a permanent consciousness of a higher state, yet there are what may be termed arts whereby the unfoldment or revelation may become more certain and forceful. All arts, whether of this character or another, are simply modes of expression—methods of work; and, whatever glamour of mystery may be thrown around them, they are after all only a way of living. We will find it so here.

What, then, should we first do to arrive at a fuller revelation within ourselves? We must seek conformity with the perfect state. We must do the conforming: perfection will not conform to us. The trouble here is that most persons pay little attention to any effort in this direction. They plead in extenuation the average life. They live the ordinary life, which is neither better nor worse than the average, and, being what the world calls the normal life, they are eminently satisfied with it. That life is a tissue of continual falsehood from day to day. It is permeated with a lack of sincerity and honesty in daily intercourse. The mind is habitually engaged with trifles, with unnecessary and harmful thoughts, with fashions and gossip, with the office, the club, and the latest piece of fiction. As a rule their domination over the mind covers over and smothers the possibility of a higher manifestation of life.

By these conventionalities spontaneity and freshness of expression are lost. Original thought, except within a narrow field, becomes unknown, and men expect to get their mental food second-hand. In this state people fall easy victims to fads of every kind. It has been said that "men descend to meet." Is it not very true if they meet upon such a plane? The thing to do is to clean out the temple in order that there may be a higher consciousness. Cease the waste of thought upon the trifling in life and turn the attention devotedly to the highest. The divine in man is forceful and persistent, and all it asks is a fair chance. If we cease the trifling thought connected with the passing phenomena, and turn the desire continually to the higher ideals, then the subliminal nature begins to make itself known in the life.

There are many phases of this self-revelation, from the direct perception of truth to genius and the frequent states of consciousness that make the life happier and truer. If this systematic effort be made to rise out of the transitory life, and to live and think in the permanent, then what the mystics called recollection and we term meditation will become of value to us. But it will be of little use if all the while the mind be wedded to the frivolous phase of life. Indeed, meditation under such conditions may increase the folly. And one who thinks he seeks the higher life and all the while sacrifices his best efforts to the world in the sense I have spoken—like the lady who never lighted a taper to St. Michael the Archangel that she did not also light one to the devil, because she did not know which she would have occasion to call upon first—will never get a great deal out of the effort.

CHAPTER VI.

SUBLIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Of man considered in the profound sense of his ultimate relation to the essential cause of the Cosmos, it is only necessary to suggest the self-evident nature of this truth. The following of that stream back to its supposed source would be the exploration of the philosophies of genesis—a task that is no part of my undertaking. But of man as we familiarly know him—the ordinary personality that evolution has produced as that expression of the profounder self best suited to survive for the time being in the environment in which he finds himself—-I propose to present a theory of his most immediate source so far as his characteristics and inspiration are concerned.

In order to present this clearly we must understand by some definitional characteristic the limitations of this man thus considered, whom we expect to differentiate from his other self as such source. I have spoken of him as the personality that evolution has produced. He is more than that: he is the sum of those elements of the profounder self that have become expressed in that personality and become unified by the processes of natural selection. Thus he is that state of consciousness and volition directly related to our apparent world—the waking consciousness and thought. He is the ordinary man whom we know—that self-consciousness of the acts and purposes that make up the sum of what we call living, connected by a continuous "chain of memory related to that experience. This man is frequently called the objective self.

That beneath this self, this normal personality, there may be one or more submerged personalities or independent chains of memories, or planes of consciousness upon which this objective self or some other segment of a pro founder self may function, is a proposition that would meet with incredulity among most people. It is quite natural that it should be so, for as a rule human consciousness is so intensely concentrated upon this experience with material environment that any other degree or kind of consciousness appears, improbable; and if it rarely occurs the paucity of knowledge as to the nature of the ego even now leads most persons who consider it seriously to attribute such supernormal states to supernatural agencies.

Thus, though history and human experience are replete with examples of profound changes in personality, of remarkable accessions of talent, of the expressions of genius, of the exercise of supernormal powers and the possession of psychic faculties, and of the state of ecstasy in which the subject seems to enter a sphere of experience greatly transcending the normal one, their explanation has been attempted upon the theory of delusion, of supernatural interposition, or of divine gift, just as the predilection of the theorist dictated.

For some years past these phenomena have been the subject of serious, competent, and systematic observation and study, by an organized body of workers,* for the purpose of discovering their true explanation. The evidence accumulated is so overwhelming that there is no doubt left that beneath the threshold of our ordinary waking state of consciousness there is not only a complex of organic processes but an intelligent, vital control of them, and states of consciousness which, though ordinarily submerged, are ever emerging into the waking state with varying degrees of vividness, supplementing or modifying it, and under special conditions wholly supplanting it for the time being. These states of consciousness, as a whole, we may well call the subliminal self; and when evoked by artifice or when spontaneously manifesting and assuming independent chains of memories relating only to themselves respectively, they have been termed secondary or multiplex personalities.

*The Society for Psychical Research.

Among the simplest manifestations of the subliminal self of which we will interest ourselves here must be classed those which, though very frequent, are yet so unobtrusive that their significance escapes the ordinary attention. These are the multitude of the so-called automatic or unconscious actions—all the organized processes, as walking, eating, writing, piano-playing, and the great number of acts performed in the conduct of life without holding the consciousness upon them throughout their execution. Many of them require only that the waking consciousness should inaugurate them, and they are then carried on to completion without further assistance from it; but in other instances their very inception as well as their completion is entirely outside the waking consciousness.

It is in this field of manifestation that the subliminal self is most fully engaged with most persons, and in fact these functions are quite indispensable to the complex life we have evolved. If the waking consciousness were required to superintend in detail the fulfilment of all our acts, life would be an endless drudgery and the ego would have no time or opportunity to incorporate into its field of consciousness any thought higher than the details referred to. This is one of the ends and beneficent results of evolution. As in a community or body politic it is necessary for the highest State that there be a division of labor, so the highest state in the body is effected by a division of the labor of consciousness; and thus that part of the consciousness which we call the subliminal has not only assumed the duty of carrying on the ceaseless processes of the organism, but, as well, it superintends and carries to completion the multitude of acts that make up the sum of life, leaving the other segments of consciousness free for other and still higher activities.

What we may term the next degree of emergence is shown in that class of experiences where memories that seem to have become entirely latent, and are forgotten to the waking consciousness, either spontaneously reappear to it or are summoned by some one of the various methods hit upon by experience. These latent memories or states are of two general classes, one being the memory of individual experiences taken into the consciousness through the sense channels, either known or unknown to the waking state, and the other being the memories of things cognized by the subliminal consciousness by other means than the recognized methods of sense perception. I will speak of this second class when referring to telepathy.

Both casual experience and experiment tend to prove that everything we have experienced—all that has affected consciousness through the senses—-is retained in perfect memory somewhere by the ego. We well know that it is not so retained in the waking consciousness, or the primary personality, and we must conclude that the subliminal self is its repository and conserver. The memory of such experience becomes latent only to the primary self. In the ordinary course of life these memories are ever emerging, in greater or less degree, from their subliminal sum, pleasing, instructing, reminding, or even startling the primary self. In reminiscent mood the plane of consciousness is temporarily shifted from the objective world and thought to the borderland of the subliminal, and the "forgotten" past rises like a dream before the mind. So, if the voluntary consciousness be not strongly concentrated upon the objective experiences, or if the merging of the consciousness between the two planes be facilitated, then the latent impressions and memories continually emerge and blend with the objective experience often in a most helpful and satisfactory manner.

Experience has taught the race certain devices that tend to effect this result. I will refer to one that has for centuries been employed in some form the world over, and to-whose agency divine powers have been popularly attributed. It is crystal-gazing. When a person in whom that emergence of memory from the subliminal realm is especially facile gazes steadily into the crystal, the pool, the well, or other object for concentration, he sees images of scenes with which he was once acquainted but the memory of which had been wholly lost to his waking consciousness. This is not only true of things of which the gazer was objectively conscious when they were perceived, but also of scenes and incidents that were conveyed by the senses to the brain, but of which the waking consciousness. took no note—as, for instance, the particular spot of ivy upon a particular wall of a house situated on a street that one passes but of which he is wholly unconscious so far as his dominant personality is concerned. He may also see images that represent thoughts of others cognized telepathically by the subliminal self. It will be seen that this device serves merely to inhibit concentration of consciousness upon the objective environment, and thus permits the consciousness of the subliminal self to emerge into the waking state.

This practically perfect memory is also evidenced in some pathological cases, where the center of maximum consciousness is shifted, as in the oft-referred-to case of the servant girl who in delirium repeated, in languages unknown to her, matter she had years before heard in the presence of her employer. To this we may add the popularly admitted class where a person, finding himself in imminent danger of loss of life, is conscious of his whole past life, as the memories seem instantaneously to emerge from the subliminal whole; as Byron describes in the "Giaur"—

     "'Twas but a moment that he stood,
     Then sped as if by death pursued;
     But in that moment o'er his soul
     Winters of memory seemed to roll,
     And gather in that drop of time
     A life of pain, an age of crime."

We will next consider a function that seems to belong to the subliminal phase of consciousness, perhaps to the exclusion of the other. For the ordinary waking or supraliminal consciousness there are no means of obtaining knowledge of environment or of perceiving another's thought except through the recognized channels of sense; but this is not true for the subliminal consciousness. It is in direct relational touch with the subliminal states of others, and may also perceive the state of the waking consciousness or thought of another. This relationship has been termed telepathy, and by reason of it arise all the phenomena of the transference, psychically, either of the conscious thought or the subliminal thought of another, as well as the deeper psychic perceptions and reproductions of states of consciousness of others, whether formulated in thought or not. Says Professor Oliver J. Lodge, of telepathy: "Except by reason of paucity of instance, I consider it as firmly grounded as any of the less familiar facts of Nature, such as one deals with in a laboratory." In speaking of psychic science before the British Association, Professor Wm. Crookes said: "It would be well to begin with telepathy: with the fundamental law, as I believe it to be, that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of sense—that knowledge may enter the human mind without being communicated in any hitherto known or recognized ways."

The establishing of the fact of telepathy as a part of our common stock of information is one of the most notable advances of knowledge, and is largely due to the admirable work of the Society for Psychical Research. The evidence adduced has been convincing. Experimental cases are mostly of that class where the agent consciously projects a thought, and the percipient, being a party to the experiment, is tranquil and receptive in mind. The thought is first cognized in the subliminal consciousness and emerges into the waking consciousness, there forming an image, or thought-formula. The reception first in the subliminal realm seems to be indicated by the fact that there is sometimes a latency manifested before the thought emerges, as when the percipient, while engaged in the endeavor to perceive the thought at the time held by the agent, perceives instead the thought or image which the agent held in mind some minutes before, but which was not perceived then. There is a class of cases in which the percipient is unaware of the effort made to impress him, yet perceives the influence and acts upon it, even at a distance—as where hypnotic sleep is induced at a distance by the effort of the agent but unknown to the subject.

What have been called "phantasms of the living"—cases where the percipient sees or hears another, though he is at a distance and still in the body—have been tentatively explained upon the theory of telepathy. They are noted as generally having occurred at great emotional crises in the lives of the persons thus seen or heard, and it is believed that the intense thought is telepathically transferred to the subliminal consciousness of the percipient, who is at the time in a condition of rapport. If, however, they be included with "phantasms of the dead," and all considered as belonging to another class of experiences, they still point in most cases to the existence of subliminal faculties to perceive them.

As remarkable as all this is, it pales into insignificance beside the extension given to the theory of telepathy by those forced to adopt it as the only alternative to the "spirit hypothesis." But when the "trance-personality" of the medium reports in the form of messages facts that have never been in the consciousness of the sitter, and only reside in the knowledge of some remote and distant person, it must be admitted that such facts have never been produced experimentally in telepathy. As for the dramatic character of such communications, and the arrangement of facts and data into "mosaics of thought which, however defaced, still irresistibly suggest the habits, tastes, and memories of some friend deceased—for this I know of no telepathic or clairvoyant analogy."*

*William Romaine Newbold.

But we may let these facts prove their own special case; we have ample evidence of telepathy otherwise.

A faculty of the subliminal self is manifested in experiences termed psychometric. Here the subject perceives physical and mental conditions, thoughts, purposes, and characteristics that appertain to the persons associated with some inanimate object. When the object—as a letter, a ring, or a bit of lace—is brought into the subject's sphere of perception, he becomes, by attention, en rapport with its past associations, and can often delineate them more accurately than those who would depend upon discovering them through the objective channels of sense. This knowledge does not pertain to the waking consciousness and cannot be acquired in the recognized manner, but appertains to the subliminal self.

Clairvoyance and clairaudience are likewise to be classed here; they do not depend upon the ordinary means of perception. It may have occurred to many of my readers that what we term "the five senses" are only specialized consciousness, related to as many devices evolved for registering different ranges of vibrations, and that behind them all there is but the one sense—the faculty of awareness. This one fundamental faculty of knowing is not restricted to the five recognized avenues except when functioning through the supraliminal or waking normal self. There may even be an independence of them and yet a simulation of their use, as in the transposition of the senses—where the person apparently sees or hears through the agency of the fingers.

In all the foregoing classes the knowledge is acquired by the subliminal self and emerges into the supraliminal or objective state, while the normal consciousness is in most cases preserved. We have now to note that class where there is, to a greater or less degree, a segregation of personality; where there is little evidence of the blending of the two states; where there appears to be distinct but limited intelligences with separate chains of memories, acting independently and concurrently, or the one submerged for the time being by the other. This statement may suggest to the minds of some that I propose to confuse with evidence of dual consciousness the evidence that many hold to indicate extra-terrene influence, commonly called "spirit control." Such is not intended. There is ample evidence for both hypotheses, and neither one in my opinion will explain all the phenomena.

Leaving, then, the states where the subliminal consciousness emerges quite freely into the waking consciousness, we may note the borderland between these and those states that give no evidence of blending but maintain distinct chains of memories of their own. Much of what is called "automatic writing" has been classed here. This is an experience where the subject in a normal state of consciousness writes intelligently, but is unaware of what he writes. But we must not forget here, as at many other points of this inquiry, that, as Professor F. W. H. Myers has said, "the wide class of automatic 'messages' include phenomena of various types, some of which certainly point prima facie to the intervention—perhaps the very indirect intervention—of the surviving personalities of the dead."

The fulfilment of post-hypnotic suggestion should be mentioned here. These are cases where in the hypnotic state the subject is told that when awakened he is to do some specific act, as to open an umbrella, to write a poem, etc. When awakened the normal consciousness returns, but he has no memory of the suggestion. Nevertheless, at the appointed time the subliminal or the secondary self executes the suggestion. In some cases the normal self knows that the act is being done and seems to execute it, having received the impulse from the subliminal self, yet is still unaware that it is done at the suggestion, but supposes it to be of its own volition. There are other cases where even the knowledge of the execution does not come into the waking consciousness, as where the poem is suggested and the subject when awakened writes it, the hand being concealed from his view and he in the meantime reading aloud from a book and wholly unconscious of the fact that he is writing. But, while the waking or normal self has no knowledge of the act done, as soon as the subject is re-hypnotized he knows everything done in fulfilment of the suggestion, and if mistakes were made he corrects them.

Somewhat similar are cases where the waking consciousness comes under an inhibitory influence of the subliminal self by reason of a post-hypnotic suggestion, as where a female subject was told while hypnotized that when awakened some one of those present would be absent from the room, and when awakened, though normally conscious of every one else, she was unconscious of the presence of the one thus mentally banished, though he was there all the time. In like manner, in accordance with the appropriate post-hypnotic suggestion, the subject would see and not hear, or hear and not see, some particular person. In these cases we have an inhibitory influence of the subliminal self affecting the normal or waking consciousness; but that the subliminal self was always conscious of the true state of things is shown by the fact that though the agent was entirely banished from the waking consciousness he was able by assuming an impersonal attitude to get stealthily back into communication with a subliminal consciousness, but not with the same consciousness from which he had been expressly banished.

The independent knowledge and intelligence of the subliminal self are shown also in experiences with the anaesthetized arm. The subject has no sensation whatever in the arm or hand, but when it lies behind a screen out of sight, and an opera-glass is put into it, the hand takes it from the box, holds it properly and brings it into the range of vision, where it is for the first time perceived by the normal self.

CHAPTER VII.

SUBLIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS (Continued).

We may next note those experiences where there is first an independent manifestation of the two intelligences—the subliminal unperceived by the supraliminal, but followed by a complete usurpation of the field by the subliminal: as in the case where the subject was conversing in the normal state with A, and turns and continues orally the conversation carried on by signs with B, who was behind her and whose presence was unknown. The secondary personality had quickly emerged and controlled the field to the exclusion of the normal self. But it must be remembered that if there be other extraneous intelligences that may in any way act upon a person this same result would be possible and the manner of its occurrence would be similar.

Finally, in the phenomena of hypnotism we have abundant evidence of the possibility of the segregation of the personality, the apparent creation of one or more limited chains of memories, and of distinct and independent experiences, lying below the normal consciousness, that come into expression when the normal consciousness is submerged or inhibited. Neither the psychology nor the physiology of hypnotism has been satisfactorily explained. There seem to be in the hypnotic sleep a withdrawal of consciousness from the external attention and a concentration upon organic recuperation. In general there is inhibition to some degree of the normal state and a concentration upon others.

For my present purpose I desire only to mention hypnotism as one of the agencies that have disclosed the marvels of the subliminal self, from the "uprush of ideas and impulses, matured beneath the conscious threshold," to the emergence from the subliminal realm of states of consciousness so distinct from the normal self as to have earned the designation of secondary or multiplex personalities. Prof. F. W. H. Myers has said:

"I hold that each of us contains the potentialities of many different arrangements of the elements of our personality, each arrangement being distinguishable from the rest by differences in the chain of memories which pertain to it. The arrangement with which we habitually identify ourselves—what we call the normal or primary self—consists, in my view, of elements selected for us in the struggle for existence with special reference to the maintenance of ordinary physical needs, and is not necessarily superior in any other respect to the latent personalities which lie alongside it—the fresh combinations of our personal elements which may be evoked by accident or design, in a variety to which we can at present assign no limit."

The questions, of course, arise: What is the nature of these personalities manifesting in the one individual (I do not refer to alleged extra-terrene minds controlling)? What is the degree of their separateness? How distinct and independent are they? And, finally, how are they essentially correlated, and how may that unity and correlation be fostered rather than their separation accented? In the first place, the evidence shows so gradual a transition in the cases—from the simple automatic actions performed with some degree of knowledge on the part of the objective self to the apparently wholly separated chains of actions and memories constituting these secondary or multiplex personalities—that it is fair to conclude that they are but differences in the degree in which the functioning consciousness is concentrated upon the one or the other plane, or upon both in varying proportions. The distinct line of demarcation between the memory of one state and that of another will most likely be found to be a result of the physical basis of memory, or a correlation of experiences perceived and associated through limited brain areas. For instance, hypnotism has been said to be the suppression of consciousness related with all or part of the frontal lobe; hence, there is lacking in the hypnotic personality the memories and characteristics of the normal self, that part of the brain being correlated with that self.

But if we analyze the nature of consciousness and memory, I think it will throw much light upon the question. Consciousness as a whole—as, for instance, the state of the self at any moment—must be the state of the subliminal self plus the sum total of experience impressed upon it. Thus it will be evident that in the essence of consciousness there may be no memory aside from the sum total of experience surviving as a result, just as the individual characteristics of a race evolved at different periods exist simultaneously, and not otherwise, in the individual. Now, memory arises when that consciousness is segregated and its divided parts relate themselves to the ideas of time and place and these become further related to each other. Thus consciousness becomes individually related to particular moments, places, and persons; and these individual states, which have become differentiated as memories, become related to one another by association.

The placid sea presents a homogeneous and unified surface, but when acted upon by the zephyr it is broken into many facets, each related to an external condition; yet they are all of the same sea. Thus if we conceive the ultimate Self as the original essence, impressed with the sum total of experience and existing as an undifferentiated state of consciousness, we discover an adequate explanation for all the perplexing phenomena of the apparent loss, the segregation, and the sudden emergence of memory. The waking or supraliminal self is a segment of this sum total of consciousness, specifically related as a distinct chain of memories with a certain state of environment and purposes. The hypnotic self, or the secondary personality, is another segment of this sum total of consciousness, specifically related as a distinct chain of memories with another state of environment and purposes. The same may be said of sleep. Ecstasy is more than any of these, for strictly it is not a personal or memory state at all, but transcends them, and is a degree of realization of that sum total of consciousness, unsegregated and unrelated to environment in memory states. Barring ecstasy, all these will be seen to be merely emergences of the true and unified self into memory states, bearing some relationship to external environment or to subjective conditions. No doubt this sum total of consciousness becomes the reservoir of the effects of all experience. Says Professor Myers:

"Suppose that my arm is rendered anesthetic by hypnotic suggestion, and is then pricked without my seeing it—I shall be unconscious of the pricks. My normal self, that is to say, will be unconscious of them, and on the ordinary view my whole self will be unconscious of them. But I shall consider it as practically certain a priori that some phase of personality of mine must have been conscious of the pricks and must have registered them on some latent mnemonic chain. Thus, in a word, nothing which my organism does or suffers is unconscious; but the consciousness of any given act or endurance may form a part of a chain of memories which never happens to obtrude itself into my waking life."

The ultimate unity of all these states is indicated by many facts. There is a participation by the normal and the subliminal selves in many acts and memories, and, in cases where there appears to be no participation by the normal self in the memories or experience of the subjective personality, it would seem that the two have an actual basis of unity though not always evident in the experience. Says Professor Myers: "It sometimes happens, as Delboeuf and others have shown, that a subject who on waking from the hypnotic trance remembers nothing can be led by artifice to recollect all that he has done." This, if true in one case, must be true in all similar ones, and discloses the fact that phenomena that appear to constitute separate personalities have an underlying basis of unity; and to establish that unity in a state of consciousness it is only necessary to find the associational links, or to create conditions for their spontaneous interrelation.

The phenomena of dreams disclose the same truth. Dreamstates are as independent as if no waking state had preceded them; that is, they are not related by a chain of memories, and usually they fade away from the waking consciousness almost as soon as they appear. But in many cases, and under proper individual conditions, they become clear and perfect in the waking consciousness, especially when a slender thread of memory can be grasped by association with which the other memories are enabled to emerge with it. It must be evident, then, that any practise tending merely to evoke the consciousness in distinct chains of memories, in limited expressions, is not the method we should seek; but if we find there is a method that will unify into one consciousness all the memories which may emerge from the sum total, that method will deserve our earnest attention. I will refer particularly hereafter to what I conceive to be such a method.

It has been hardly more than my purpose here to state a prima facie case for the existence of the subliminal self, without adducing an array of evidence or refining upon an analysis of its functionings, but seeking to state its existence and general nature in order that the activities of the normal or primary self may be intelligently conceived as connected therewith, drawing its most vital aid and support therefrom—hence to emphasize the fact that no Esoteric Art of Living can leave out of consideration its study and a knowledge of it.

* * *

It is now evident that the normal man—that ordinary waking state of consciousness related to the apparent world—is but a limited manifestation of a larger and profounder Self from which it may draw knowledge and inspiration. I have suggested that in truth there is, as a whole, one sum total of consciousness, parts of which become manifested in the objective life under such limitations and with such independence as to suggest the designation of personalities, though undoubtedly comprehended in that profounder Self which conserves all knowledge and memories of the several. "It is conceivable," says Professor Myers, "that there may be for each man yet a more comprehensive personality—or say an individuality—which correlates and comprises all known and unknown phases of his being. Such a notion can no longer be dismissed as merely mystical. Analogy points to it; and, though no observation could fully prove it, there may well be observations which make it probable." This underlying unity is the source of all the differing phases of consciousness. Its maximum emergence in the physical organism, which it builds and controls, is the normal or supraliminal self, whereby it undergoes the differentiating process of evolution.

To suppose, therefore, that this emergent point, the normal self, were all, or that it were the most important under all conditions, would be very faulty. Says Professor William Crookes: "Whilst it is clear that our knowledge of subconscious mentation is still to be developed, we must beware of rashly assuming that all variations from the normal waking condition are necessarily morbid. The human race has reached no fixed or changeless ideal; in every direction there is evolution as well as disintegration." It is no doubt true that the normal self is the phase of consciousness best adapted to the maintenance of the physical needs of the individual; but the physical needs are but small in importance compared with the larger needs of the individual thus known. Hence we can understand the origin of the higher qualities of the mind and the loftier impulses of the deeper nature, which find no relationship to merely physical needs. Music, art, and estheticism, altruism and universal love, are emergences of this higher consciousness, related to our particular plane of existence. All deep and profound impulses are surgings of this mighty undersea of consciousness. Genius is the harmonious synchronizing of the lofty states of the subliminal with the normal man. Ecstasy is the abidance for the time in those subliminal states, unmarred by any cognition of the normal and limited. Of this constant emergence, Professor Myers says: "In this very question of emergence of unfamiliar faculty from a subconscious stratum, our next step shows us faculty thus emerging which is of real use; products of subliminal mentation up-rushing into ordinary consciousness which actually benefit the waking life. Does this emergence occur in the normal life? My answer is that it does, and when it does it constitutes genius."

It is evident, then, the highest condition of life for us is that one which effects the most perfect synchronizing of the subliminal consciousness with the normal and environmental self: that condition of life which recognizes the due importance and purpose of the normal and cultivates its healthy exercise, and seeks to incorporate therewith the processes and results of the subliminal consciousness. If it were possible to know the facts, it is probable that we would find the lives of the truly great, the spiritually enlightened, to have been of this type. If this be the highest condition we may presently attain, or the full measure of the immediate results of evolution, the question at once arises as to how it may be attained, or what course will conduce to its realization.

It is pertinent to suggest here the reason why such a method as the "hypnotic" is not the advisable one, and can never conduce to the desired end. The reason lies in the fact that the method severs or segregates the consciousness, creating and perpetuating separate chains of memories, and suppresses the normal state—two things, as I believe, we must avoid. If the end above spoken of is to be attained, the self-consciousness of the normal state is never to be lost, nor are new and distinct phases of personality to be created out of the subliminal consciousness; but the self-consciousness is to be preserved intact, and the subliminal consciousness is to be realized as far as possible and blended therewith—thus unifying all memory and consciousness in the one. This can best be attained through the evolutionary processes and results of living the higher life, as suggested in preceding papers, and by a proper and rational practise of introspection (or meditation) and concentration. The reason for the former is found in the nature of evolution itself; for the latter, it lies in the fact that it is the only method of practise which retains the self-consciousness of the normal state and at the same time creates special facilities for the emergence therein of the knowledge and states of the subliminal self: nothing being relinquished, except at will, and all gains of conscious states added to and blended with the one in possession. But I will refer to this specifically in a subsequent paper.

We have found the subliminal self to be the source of the normal or supraliminal self, and have noted some of its faculties and characteristics as it emerges into the normal phase of life. What is the ultimate nature of this vast storehouse of the soul? Has it always been individualized, manifesting through successive states of expression, or was there a time when out of the Infinite Consciousness it took the limitations of personality? In any event, can it be other than the original essence which in the past has been evolving, by processes of adaptation to physical environment and to the ends of individual well-being, into the complex and marvelous being called man? And as nothing can be evolved that has not existed potentially, must we not ascribe to it the vastest possibilities—the attributes of divinity? Says Professor Myers:

"If, as we get deeper down, we come on even more definite indications of powers and tendencies within ourselves which are not such as natural selection could have been expected to develop, then we may begin to wonder on what it was that the terrene process of natural selection, as we have it, began at the first to exercise modifying power. To such a question no answer whatever can be given which is not in some sense mystical, or rather metempirical, as dealing with hypotheses which no experience of ours can test. But it should be remembered that there is no metaphysical or physiological answer in possession of the field. The competition is open; the course is clear."

Leaving the profounder problem of the ultimate nature of the real Self, let us consider that which immediately concerns us; namely, its possibilities with reference to the life we are now living. These are, first, its influence upon the waking normal self by emergence into and blending with it; second, its responsiveness to the influences of external conditions and thought and its perfect memory. Accepting evolution, I would expect, a priori, to find these characteristics inhering in the profounder self. The ability successfully to adjust and adapt the organism to environment presupposes a high degree of responsiveness and plasticity; while progress and unfoldment require creative or originative possibilities, coordinated with retentiveness, or memory. If these be the essential characteristics of the subliminal self that have played so important a part in the past of life, it is evident that they must be reckoned with in any attempt to understand the possibilities of the future or to facilitate the highest attainment therein.

The emergence of the knowledge of the subliminal self at every point of life has been noted; it remains for us briefly to consider the other characteristics. The subliminal self is exceedingly susceptible to suggestion; that is, it is inherently responsive. This is abundantly shown in all hypnotic experiments, where for the time being the normal consciousness is more or less suppressed and but a segment of the subliminal manifests. This responsiveness has played a large part in the causes that have produced the mental differentiations in the evolution of man; but, without the controlling guidance of the reason and will evolved in the normal or objective self (as in the case of hypnotism), it could become destructive of the higher interests. I believe it is the intelligent and understanding control and guidance by the will and reason that may utilize this faculty and effect far-reaching and beneficent results to the individual. When one can, in a small degree, unify his waking consciousness with the processes of the subliminal, and blend his voluntary thought with the recuperative powers of the subliminal self, he may heal himself when the operations of the vital forces are disturbed; he may keep them equilibrated, and himself calm and peaceful, and with the right philosophy and aspiration may enter quite a new realm of experience and life.

The subliminal self has practically a perfect memory, and states of consciousness once fixed tend to persist or recur because of this faculty of retentiveness. The vast importance of this fact as related to our present life must be plain, and is the most ample justification for the insistence upon maintaining high ideals in thought and act. It explains how character is builded, and why it persists long after the experience which was the cause of the modification has faded from the memory of the normal or objective self. Thought does not only affect the momentary waking consciousness, but its effects sink far down into the subliminal and there modify the existing states— perchance to emerge again when the moment is opportune. How important, then, become our objective life and thought! And what a molding and constructive agency we have in our ability to select, to some extent, our waking states and thoughts; to engage in the building and shaping of the deeper and truer self for the higher expressions of consciousness, by using care and method in bringing into the normal state the true and noble and beautiful, and excluding therefrom their opposites! This I call selective mentation and psychism. Thus one may do for himself in a few years what the slow processes of evolution may require generations to do for a race.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RATIONALE OF CONCENTRATION.

Knowing the characteristics of the subliminal consciousness, which are so potent in their effect upon the life, we are in a position to understand the philosophy of concentration and introspection (or meditation). Certain profound experiences have been repeated century after century in the lives of many persons separated by time and country, and especially among those who have truly understood and practised the methods of life sanctioned by the esoteric philosophies. These experiences, though very real to those who have evolved them, have been regarded by the average mind as the result of imaginary illusion. They have taken varying forms of manifestation, but may be comprehensively spoken of as deep moral or spiritual regeneration, or a profound insight into and knowledge of the inner self, its latent beauties and powers, or of ecstasy. Various philosophies have been formulated to explain and express them, and perhaps the most cardinal and comprehensive feature of the best of them is the idea of the perception of the Divine Self within—a union with the Infinite, or at-one-ment with the Divine, or psychoplasm.

Thus the Hindu Yoga philosophy leads one by an elaborate preparation and practise to the gradual elimination of the follies and vain pursuits of ordinary life—from the attachments and aversions of average thought to a state where it is supposed the soul perceives directly its divine nature and abides in that realization. Much the same purpose, expressed in varying manner and pursued with varying methods of attainment, actuated the Mystics. They believed they attained a mystic union with God. The Quietists, the Children of the Light, and others believed in seeking the light of divinity within the soul.

The experience attained by these persons has been, in the main, inspiring, uplifting, and beneficial. If the whole life may have been marred by a too austere asceticism or a misconceived alienation from the duties of the objective life, it cannot be properly urged against the experience that has given a pro-founder knowledge of the real Self and its powers, but rather against the lameness of the philosophy by which it has been sought to explain it. Whatever else may ultimately be included in the explanation of such experiences, we may safely say, from our knowledge of the profounder man, that the individual discovery and emergence of the subliminal faculties and consciousness must be first assigned. This view is strengthened by the knowledge that introspection and concentration tend to furnish the conditions for the emergence of the subliminal consciousness, producing phenomena that transcend the ordinary experience.

Now that we have identified these world-wide experiences in similitude with those which scientific investigation has disclosed as possible in every soul, and further with what we may attain by these methods of concentration and meditation, we may consider the true purpose and effect of the methods that have been so much talked of in the philosophy of the New Thought. The purpose and effect of concentration are to mold the consciousness into new or more beneficent states; those of meditation or introspection are to disclose the higher states and faculties of the subliminal self, and merge them with the objective consciousness. Both of these may be properly classed as concentration, because the higher form of meditation is preceded by some degree of mastery in concentration.

It is evident that the methods as well the results may be properly divided into two classes. I call the first constructive and eliminative; the second, the revealing or interpretative. As to the first, we may formulate a law thus: The mind becomes that which it contemplates. There is a merging of the consciousness in the concept held or the idea contemplated. As the habitual life and thought, the influence of environment, and the complex conditions of existence are the factors that mold the habitual consciousness, so the special effort of thought by which the mind rules out of the field all concepts except that which it is desired to hold also molds and shapes the consciousness to that special end and condition.

I would add these corollaries to the above law: (i) With every expression of a state there is a tendency to repeat it; and, conversely, with every suppression of such expression there is a tendency to infrequency: and from these tendencies arise a permanent state. (2) Concentration builds up a brain structure through which the special functioning or manifestation of thought or consciousness correlated with it takes place with ever-increasing ease and perfection. (3) The soul's manifestations being known only in states of consciousness, it grows into the state held in contemplation, and the states become permanent by the law of use.

Upon the physical side the cellular brain tissues are thus greatly changed, and hence the usual functionings of the mind are also changed. Brain cells necessary to a healthful, cheerful, happy, and truthful functioning of the mind may be vastly increased. Mentation in conformity with ascertained truth, pure thought, and lofty aspiration may become accomplished and normal states; while brain cells that have become constructed through wrong thought, for harmful and untruthful manifestations of mind, may be atrophied by inhibition and the mind cured of its vagaries.

Upon the psychic side, the marvelous plasticity of the subliminal mind, its responsiveness to suggestion and to objective thought, together with its wonderful memory and retentiveness, are all powerfully affected by the practise; and, as the faculties and tendencies so impressed upon the subliminal consciousness are ever tending in greater or less degree to emerge into the supraliminal state, it will be readily understood why calm and peace, the uplifting influence of lofty thought, long succeed the actual minutes spent in the practise. It also conduces to mastery of the mental action—to increased power of application and more forceful and clearer thought. Mastery of one's mental states, irrespective of environment, follows; and the power to create one's subjective condition at will may be attained.

Among the important results of the possible use of power attained by proper effort is the conscious direction and control thereby of the subtle life forces, by which their maintenance in equilibrium or direction for healing and helpful purposes may be acquired.

The second class embraces the practises in what I have termed the revealing or interpreting state. This is best attained after some conscious mastery of the other, but is more frequently practised without special reference to any attainment in that direction. It consists in placing the mind, to some degree, in an impersonal and passive but not negative state, unperturbed by the legion of thoughts that distract and claim its attention in ordinary waking consciousness, and allowing its innate, impersonal, and higher nature to manifest in outward or normal consciousness. It is that attitude of mind best suited to "knowing" one's self—the Silence. In this state, no one section of the brain being dominant in mental activity, the whole organ may act as a unit, and a higher degree of knowledge and a clearer and more coordinated conception of a subject may result. In this attitude, and with aspiration and desire, the soul renews its more natural and original relation with the subtle and higher psychic forces, resulting in renewed psychic and spiritual power and a more equilibrated condition: as, we may say, the soul in natural sleep, left untrammeled by objective thought, renews its fundamental relations with the body, resulting in great recuperative effects. As we must conclude that there is no isolation in the Universe, but that all is in interaction, the experience in the "silence" and its effect upon the waking consciousness furnish prima facie evidence of such a proposition as is above stated.

As we know that the plastic and highly suggestible subliminal self has been impressed for years with the thoughts and limitations of the objective life, and that these elements in each life have been different, we shall not be surprised to learn that the silence does not at once and with all persons disclose the transcendent beauty and wisdom of the subliminal self. That which one has been accustomed to hold as his ideal, as well as the states of mind habitually indulged, the practises engaged in, and in fact the whole tenor of life, cannot but have affected the states of subliminal consciousness; and it will be no less than we should expect that they will emerge and greatly mar or hinder the higher manifestations. The stream will not rise higher than its source, and the states of consciousness will habitually rise no higher than the manner of life, thought, and aspiration will warrant; hence, the result will closely approximate in equivalency the elements one brings into the silence. Every thought and aspiration will cast a vote to determine the result; therefore, the daily life should in all respects be made to conform as nearly as practicable to the higher ideals. A permanent realization of the higher Self will never come to one not seeking to live according to the higher life. One must keep the thought habitually pure and the aspirations lofty, and must love truth and wisdom. If he set the soul's desire upon anything less he will tend toward that instead, and enlist the active efforts and interference of the unwise and undeveloped on the other plane of life. He should avoid criticism of persons, in thought or word, other than the recognition of a state for the purpose of some good and laudable end—and thus eliminate that evil from the consciousness, and destroy the rapport with beings who love detraction and are intensified and pleased with such a state in us.

The higher states we shall thus seek in the Silence will come from within—primarily, a revelation of the subliminal consciousness; but when they arise there may be rapport with the same or other states without. And, as we know from the demonstration of psychical experiment that one of the fundamental functions of the subliminal self is telepathy, who may at present set bounds to the perception by and the disclosures to the consciousness, through this method of purifying and controlling the self and aspirationally relating it to the higher conceptions?

Here I would, more particularly than heretofore, call attention to the wide difference between this practise and that of inducing a manifestation of the subliminal consciousness by hypnotic influence. Hypnotism has been defined by Norman Prince, M.D., as "the more or less (according to the stage) complete inhibition or going to sleep of the frontal lobes as a whole." And of the frontal lobes the same able writer says: "The activity of this level is the dominant consciousness for the time being of the individual, and, so long as it is in activity, is the personality of the individual." And again: "If, further, all the higher centers were removed or their power of functioning suppressed, the consciousness would be limited to the activity of the second level, which would constitute a second personality, and would be of a more or less automatic character." And Professor F. W. H. Myers says that "hypnotism is only a name given to a group of empirical methods of inducing fresh personalities—of shifting the center of maximum energy and starting a new mnemonic chain." Thus hypnotism becomes merely a method of suppressing the normal and dominant self and summoning into objective activity some subconscious chain of memories, some segment of the self, some weak and limited personal phase, uncontrolled by the will and reason of the dominant consciousness. Instead of finding the true self, that self is segregated and its alienated parts are brought into inharmonious manifestation.

Concentration, on the other hand, sacrifices nothing of self-consciousness, and gains the added consciousness of the subliminal states, blending and unifying them into a whole—or, with masterful effort, withdraws the consciousness from any field and centers it upon another at will. There has been much confusion upon this point, growing principally out of the lack, possibly, of a greater personal knowledge of the methods and results of concentration; from the fact that mono-ideaism may be a characteristic of both conditions; and from the further fact that many persons imagine that they can effect nothing through the agency of the subliminal except by the method of auto-suggestion, which, it is well known, can also produce hypnosis in some very susceptible subjects.

As to the condition of mono-ideaism, the difference between the two states is, as I conceive it, that in the hypnotic the idea is firmly retained by a sort of helpless responsiveness of the segregated subliminal personality divested of the will and reason of the objective or waking self; while in that of concentration it is the result of a masterful effort of the mind that is able to control its mentation, excluding at will from the field of consciousness such ideas as it determines to exclude, and holding such as it chooses to hold, with the ability to relinquish the same at will.

As to auto-suggestion, it is, in either case, only a method of inducing a condition. In concentration, and for perceiving subliminal processes, it is mainly useful to him who has not fully realized that there is no power whatever in the suggestion itself, but that the power lies altogether in the responsiveness of the consciousness to the suggestion; and that if the power lies in that source, then all one need do to accomplish the object is to substitute the original purpose, will, and action, aptly expressed or mentally held, and dispense with the indirect method of suggestion. Thus the same power that lies inane and inefficient, until called out in responsiveness to external suggestion, may rise into original and creative action. This is the exercise of self-knowledge of the inner self.

CHAPTER IX.

THE NORMAL AND THE SUPERNORMAL.

The man of the Stone Age—whose body was scantily protected from the elements by rude skins, whose habitation was the natural cavern of the earth, whose handicraft rose no higher than the chipping of flint stones for weapons, whose principal pastime was the fierce chase of the wild boar, and whose great peril was the ravage of the cave-bear and lion and the depredations of his benighted brother—was perfectly "normal" for his time. If we imagine a conclave of these poor souls, with a language little more comprehensive than the immediate physical needs demanded, discussing the possibilities of the race for expressing a higher ideal, we may readily conclude that, though there might have been vague longings rudely expressed, occasional gleams of a seemingly wild hope that there might be a condition in which men would live in huts constructed where the wish should determine; that there could be a happy respite from strife sufficient to enable the cultivation of the ground around the hut; that their mysterious fire would fuse the intractable iron and they would replace their good stone implements by others of marvelous strength; and that their women should abandon their bone ornaments for others of the shining metal—such a dream of the wild fancy was promptly discouraged by the majority expression as being too remote a digression from the "normal" man and his "normal" life.

Ages after, the lake-dwellers of Switzerland—with habitations constructed upon piles driven into the lake bottoms and surrounded by the protecting expanse of blue waters, in which habitations their families lay down to sleep with the assurance of some safety, and with whom the art of metal-working had dawned—had realized the cave-dwellers' Utopian dream, and, although still fiercely struggling with Nature and man, were daring to dream of other Utopias yet to come. But those among them who looked forward to such hopeful times were defiantly disregarding the normal standard of progress then recognized. The normal man, the average attainment, the conventional type of hunter and marauder, stood as the last word for human progress—as the average ideal of the race, beyond and above which it must have seemed folly to expect to attain.

Succeeding centuries brought slow but inevitable change, and the normal man of early historic periods, though rude and barbaric compared with us, was beyond the dream of the lake-dwellers; and the normal man and normal life of our own time, with its great exemption from peril, its liberty of individual action, its extensive grasp and development of natural resources, and the revolutionary advance of ethics and general knowledge, could hardly have been conceived by the normal man of those times as attainable. Every clime and age has had its norm, its average measure of attainment—the supposed limit of realization; but the human soul knows no such limit and pushes on, conceiving higher ideals and evolving up to them.

It is the personal man, that segment of the greater self which is ever engaged in the effort of adjusting itself to the imperative now, which insists upon this norm. When the same personal man feels the impulses from his subliminal self he begins to suspect that his normal attainment is not the last word; that his possibilities have not been exhausted; that other and grander chapters will be added to the volume written by evolution. This limitation of the normal ideal affects every kind of life expression. In civics it is the blind adhesion to the average conception of social relations; in society it is slavery to conventionalism; in religion it is worship of creed; in science it is reverence for accepted opinion. In all it is the adhesion to the habitual and accepted standard of attainment and thought, and a desire to reduce to it and confine within its limitations all other effort and expression.

It was entirely normal before the time of Copernicus to believe in the geocentric system, and quite abnormal to entertain the possibility of the heliocentric; it was also dangerous. It has been, and outside of our own country it probably still is, quite normal to believe in the divine right of one man to rule over others. It is still normal to believe that customs and privileges acquired through centuries of violence and usurpation are "vested rights." It is still normal to think it is right to abdicate one's own duty to think, and to decide for himself all questions, to some other self-ordained or custom-appointed individual. To-day it is normal to believe that there is no higher attainable expression of life than the average normality comprehended in money-getting and energy-spending strife; that no avenues of knowledge exist save the channels of the five senses; and that no other states of consciousness are knowable except those associated with the struggle for existence.

That these normal ideals will all be transformed into other and higher ones we must inevitably conclude. With those in the advance of progress they have long ceased to be their ideals of normality; but the higher and truer conceptions must be classed with the supernormal until the average attainment and thought shall have reached them.

Let us take a simple example to illustrate how a normal state of consciousness, though one that at present seems inevitable from our experience, may be nevertheless wholly false to truth. We apparently see the sun rise: yet we do not. We think of physical things as more or less solid: they are not. We may think their particles touch one another: they do not. We think of the so-called solid wall as impermeable: it is a shadowy veil through which the subtle forces and states of matter pass without obstruction; the atoms that compose it are far apart. We think there is perfect separateness in the universe: there is not; every atom acts and reacts upon others. We think that each mind is independent: it is not; the thoughts of one in some degree impinge upon the others. Thus we see how our dominant state may be limited by experience and the imperfect deductions drawn from it. With such misunderstandings and misinterpretations we have evolved states of consciousness that are not related to truth in all respects. They serve a purpose; but so long as we know nothing else we are out of harmony with truth. As we know that the untruth has no existence in fact, but only lives in the imagination, it can never have any permanency or element of immortality. So all such states evolved from and related to the non-existent, the unreal, must sooner or later pass away; for they correspond with nothing but a hallucination.

It necessarily follows that if we would rise higher in the scale of being we must seek consciously to relate ourselves or to come into correspondence with the true in every manifestation beneficent for us, upon every plane of existence; in other words, more perfectly to embody the cosmic mind and abide in its wisdom. To do this we must first be willing to abandon the untrue, though "normal," however dearly we have cherished it. And, speaking particularly of the realm of philosophy, ethics, and religion, I would say that all, irrespective of their normality, should be cited to appear before the bar of the higher self and justify their claim to continuance. Thus as the greater conformity to truth is attained the mind continually leaves the normal behind in discarded beliefs and relinquished ideals, and finds the way to progress through the supernormal.

But while many are willing to admit the propriety of advance along the line of changes in beliefs and ideals, they are quite skeptical as to the possibility of experiences commonly classed as "psychic" rightly becoming a part of our normal experience and life. I have spoken generally of these experiences as the manifestation of the nature and faculties of the subliminal consciousness. A man's opinion is weighty only so far as he has the opportunity to know, the wisdom to judge, and the impartiality to truth to declare. It is encouraging to find the theory herein held ably supported by men who at the same time are eminent in the field of science and psychical investigation. Says Sir William Crookes: "Whilst it is clear that our knowledge of subconscious mentation is still to be developed, we must beware of rashly assuming that all variations from the normal waking condition are necessarily morbid. The human race has reached no fixed or changeless ideal; in every direction there is evolution as well as disintegration."

The fact that, before psychic phenomena in healthy and normal people began to be scientifically observed and studied, such phenomena were conspicuously noted in subjects in admittedly abnormal conditions (malades) strengthened the conclusion that the phenomena themselves were abnormal. Professor F. W. H. Myers says that "these are not pathological phenomena, but pathological revelations of normal phenomena, which is a very different thing."

Viewed from the standpoint of psychic science, the normal man is limited to the primary self, the objective consciousness; and the supernormal is the modification of that by the functions of the secondary self—of subliminal consciousness. It is evident, however, that the supernormal at one time may become the normal at another. That the ordinary man, the primary personality, should be the ultimate expression, the limit of possibility, is wholly irreconcilable with the facts of this field of science. Says Professor Myers: "It may be that the very formation in us of anything so narrow and confined as what we know as personality is in itself a limitation of our essential being—a mere mode of concentration in order to meet the perils of environment." This is what we would expect, a priori, from the theory of psychical evolution. There could have been no unfoldment in progressive form without first the establishment of a stable relationship with the environment, and this is effected by the normal self. That evolution beyond that point has occurred proves the reserved potentialities behind the personal self and justifies the conclusion that the ego possesses the same possibilities for the future. Upon this point, Professor Myers says:

"Since the era of my protozoic ancestors the germ which is now human has shown absolutely unpredictable potentialities. Whatever be the part which we assign to external influence in its evolution, the fact remains that the germ possessed the power of responding in an indefinite number of ways to an indefinite number of stimuli. It was only the accident of its exposure to certain stimuli and not to others which has made it what it now is. And, having shown itself so far modifiable as to acquire these highly specialized senses which I possess, it is doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster. Nor can we limit the rate of change, which so far as cerebral modifications are concerned may probably be increasingly rapid, as it has an increasingly complex material to work upon."

Rather than attribute the present state of development to accident of exposure to certain stimuli, I would prefer to assign it most largely to the special power and purpose of responding to stimuli, though accidentally experienced. Now, of this normal man Professor Myers says: "So long as we are dealing with mankind from a rough point of view—as, for instance, in therapeutics—we may without serious error treat the ordinary state of health and intelligence as a type to which aberrant specimens ought to be recalled. But, if we wish to engage in a more original, more philosophic discussion of man's personality, we have no longer the right to assume that our common empirical standard gives any true measurement of the potentialities of man.." Again, if we agree that the normal man is a limitation of the essential being, and is "a mere mode of concentration in order to meet the perils of environment," this cannot be the end aimed at; there must be some other purpose conserved by this meeting and adjustment between the ego and environment. That purpose is amply evidenced and fulfilled (at least for the immediate present) by the expression of the higher thought and faculties, which are not such as natural selection could evolve, and the emergence of the subliminal qualities and their synchronizing with the normal self.

Says Dr. Max Dessoir: "It is only when Imagination is comprehended as a function of the secondary self, and Inspiration and change of personality are understood as projections from within outward, with more or less sensory clothing—manifestations, in short, of that externalizing process which is always at work within us: it is only then, I say, that the creative imagination of the artist is understood and traced to its root." These expressions of the higher self—the conceptions of the ideal, imagination, creative faculty, origination and invention, inspiration and genius—effect the divergence from the normal life, and class the man in the supernormal.

In view of all this, why should one hesitate to class the psychic faculties among the attainments that we will and should realize? Speaking of a class of these, Professor Myers's statement applies to all as well: "Now, I say that in so far as any one possesses a power of this sort, and can acquire cognizance, either by artifice or by some spontaneous uprush, of the impressions stored and the operations proceeding in strata deeper than his primary consciousness, to that extent is he superior and not inferior to ordinary humanity; more 'normal' than the average man—if any norm there be—because he is more perfectly utilizing the possibilities of his being." And if it be contended that the normal attainment and the normal man are more in harmony with the End of Life, and therefore more desirable than the supernormal, I would quote the same writer, upon the extreme contention for genius and ecstasy, thus: "Now, if Genius and Ectasy belong to the realm of the subconscious, then I say that you must first tell me what is Reality, and what is the End of Life, before we decide whether Genius and Ecstasy are out of harmony with these. What is undoubtedly true is that our waking, emergent personality is that which is best suited to carry on the struggle for existence. Itself, as I believe, the result of natural selection, it inevitably represents that aspect of our being which can best help us to overrun the earth. More than this we cannot say."

Bearing upon both the origin and the destiny of this mysterious and marvelous being as a whole, and as shedding further light upon the thesis herein attempted, I close the quotations with one from the same writer and thinker: "But the question of origin will still remain; and it is not really a hypothesis wider than another if we suppose it possible that that portion of the cosmic energy which operates through the organism of each one of us was in some sense individualized before its descent into generation, and pours the potentialities of larger being into the earthen vessels which it fills and overflows."

Therefore, if we conceive purposes of life more profound than are included in the normal thought; if we believe the potentialities of that larger being are capable of wiser and truer expression than it admits; if our ideals, with which our acts and thoughts shall seek similitude, transcend it; if we seek means of attaining them which are unthought of by it; if we catch glimpses of truths outside its pale, and believe in the attainment of states of consciousness other than those associated with the struggle for existence—we may be assured that such a supernormal state of being is logical in view of the past history of man, is in harmony with the inherent laws of evolution, and creates at least the primary conditions necessary to the individual realization of those hopes; also, that conscious recognition of and cooperation with the law will effect that consummation vastly sooner than ignorance and apathy left to the slow processes of natural selection.