Supersensible world

“ What is of importance is that in this book a glimpse into supersensible worlds is attempted with the means which in our present period of evolution are possible and suitable for the human soul; and that from this point of view the problems of human destiny and human existence are considered beyond the limits of birth and death. ”

“ While we create and withdraw organs at will, we have nothing to correspond to your five senses. We derive knowledge through one sense only, or, shall I say, a super-sense? We see and hear and touch and taste and smell and feel and know, not through any one organ, but through our whole structure. The homogeneous force of our omni-substance subjects the plural world to the processing of a powerful unity. [232]
e can dissolve our bodies at will, retaining only the permanent atom of our being, the seed of life dropped on the soil of our planet by Infinite Intelligence. ”

“ Those who deny the possibility of other worlds being inhabited, endeavor to show that our position in the universe is unique, that our solar system is quite different from all others, and, to crown the argument, they assert that our little world has just the right amount of water, air, and gravitational force to enable it to be the abode of intelligent life, whereas elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable life to originate or to exist. ”

“ In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. ”

“ But when we are told that the sublimity of those dizzy heights is but a nameless speck in comparison with the globe of which they form the girdle; and when we pass on to think of that globe itself as a minute spot in the mighty system to which it belongs, so that our world might be annihilated, and its loss would not be felt; and when we are told that eighty millions of such systems roll in the world of space, to which our own system again is as nothing ”

“ If by this superhuman concentration one succeeded in converting or resolving the two cosmoses with all their complexities into sheer ideas, he would then reach the causal world and stand on the borderline of fusion between mind and matter. There one perceives all created things- solids, liquids, gases, electricity, energy, all beings, gods, men, animals, plants, bacteria-as forms of consciousness, just as a man can close his eyes and realize that he exists, even though his body is invisible to his physical eyes and is present only as an idea. ”

“ And so the supersensuous world grows and grows big with the invisible present, and big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the dead and shadowed with oracles and portents. It is this supersensuous, supernatural world which is the eternity, the other-world, of primitive religion, not an endlessness of time, but a state removed from full sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen, a world peopled by demonic ancestors and liable to a splendid vagueness, to a "once upon a time-ness" denied to the present. ”

“ Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"—the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural, left to the free play of volition—which has pervaded all later speculation, and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be Nature. ”

“ And finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on.
It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction 'and.' Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. ”

“ OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. ”

“ That which persists unchanging in quantity but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the universe presents to us, transcends human knowledge and conception—is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit in space and without beginning or end in time. ”

“ Thus Destiny is seen to be the true existence-mode of the prime phenomenon, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of objects and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined things, properties and relations, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.” ”

“ How marvelously strange the sight of the world-consciousness passing over into a higher thought-form! Each individual element suffering reversal to take its proper place in the new world-order! You see positive becoming negative, negative becoming positive, and Evolution giving place to Involution - a process as yet uncomprehended by our narrow thought. And the secret of the world-struggle across the sea you know; men passing their nature's bound ”

“ Self-styled rationalists love to point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all the unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, inhabiting such an infinitesimal speck of matter as the earth, which depends for its very life and light upon a second or third-rate or hundred-rate Sun. ”

“ In this distant system of our universe I saw that the same plan of creation obtained. Around a majority of the stars a group of various sized worlds revolves. On many of these worlds human life abounds in endless degrees of development and in a countless variety of manifestations. I marveled anew as I saw the endlessness of the Infinite Mind, supporting not only the conscious life of this whole constellation, but also of all the constellations of our universe, and of all the universes scattered at large throughout the unending depths of space. ”

“ The only one acceptable will be the real, true modern mystic having all the extended states of mind found in the asylum, but who, instead of becoming insane, has correlated them all into a perfect relationship—in other words a supraman who is enabled by his own enlarged consciousness to understand the disorganized states of mind in the wards.
The new world will be in the hands of its higher masters who, with insight keen, will direct them over a larger path. ”

“ The subject of our paper will limit us at present to the aerial, or soul-plane—the next contiguous, or astral world. The beings that more especially live in this [Pg 222] realm of the soul, have by common consent been termed elementals. Nature in illimitable space teems with life in forms ethereal, evanescent as thought itself, or more objectively condensed and solidified, according to the inherent attraction which holds them together; enduring according to the force, energy, or power which gave them birth; intelligent, or non-intelligent, from the same source, which is mental. ”

“ Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. ”

“ The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end,—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man. Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. ”

“ It is hard for the mind to grasp what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations. We see objects within the limits which make up our colour spectrum, with infinite vibrations, unused by us, on either side of them. ”

“ Nor is it likening great things to small when we compare the nebular hypothesis, or the theory of evolution, conceptions which have educated an age and vastly enlarged the boundary of human thought, to the theory of telepathy and the fact and power of the subliminal self. For if it was important that men should know the laws governing inanimate matter, to comprehend the orbits and motions of the planets ”

“ The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. ”

“ But soon the radiance of their Spirit World will penetrate their consciousness, and advanced Spirits will be able to disabuse their minds of their fallacious beliefs relating to the here and the hereafter, and ere long, aided by enlarged telescopes, their learned ones will be gazing upon the wonder of myriad worlds, moving in stately grandeur through measureless space. ”

“ We venture the forecast of future and greater outer universes of inhabited worlds, new spheres peopled with new orders of exquisite and unique beings, a material universe sublime in its ultimacy, a vast creation lacking in only one important detail—the presence of actual finite experience in the universal life of ascendant existence. Such a universe will come into being under a tremendous experiential handicap: the deprivation of participation in the evolution of the Almighty Supreme. ”

“ If we pass from these relatively near bodies to the thirty millions of remote suns and solar systems, where shall we find a reason for all this apparently unconscious existence, infinite in amount compared with the existence which is conscious—a waste Universe as it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery—whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? ”

“ Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. ”

“ Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
For ever changing form, but evermore
One with the boundless motion of the deep.” There is much to be said for some form of doctrine of a common psychological basis or union of minds—some kind of Anima Mundi, some World-Mind, of which we are all fragments, and to which all knowledge is in a manner accessible; but the analogy of ocean ripples or icebergs need not be pressed to support the idea of a cessation of individual existence, when a given ripple or a given iceberg subsides. All analogies fail at some point. ”

“ I shall trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the Reality, but that, if our power of introspection were fully developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us, and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the physical. ”

“ But the supreme moments of human consciousness, when the apex-thought of the complex vision is shooting its arrows of flame into the darkness, are but slightly concerned with the demonic sub-human life of hypothetical elemental personalities. They are concerned with the large, deep, magical spectacle of the great cosmic drama as it unrolls itself in infinite perspective. ”