Section 8

Hell 1 1 as though it were sometime hereafter, and not now^; as though it were on the verge of the universe, and not here; as though one small speck of a life, averaging scarce thirty years, were to be the gateway to an Inferno or a Paradise.
The level head and pulsing heart cry
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out against such dogma as unworthy a Nineteenth Century Priest or Sage, and hearing the cry, out steps the Dante of Hades to repudiate this false notion, with the irresistible logic of fact.
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NIRVANA.
It is amusing to read the oft reiterated interpretation of Nirvana. Those of us who belong to the Orient smile, and those of us who live in the Occident laugh. The conception seems to have gone abroad that the Nirvana is a state of being akin to the hjrpnotic trance — a placid placidity whose calmness is that of a dead desert — that the Nirvana is a smiling Buddha with eyes heavy with sleep, or a prostrate statue that stares vacantly upward and never winks. Pardon our sarcasm, but in face of modem interpretation we deem ourselves excusable.
If Paradise might be described as a swinging garden hung with uncertain ropes over a precipice, if Heaven is the refuge of all fugitives from Hell; then Nir-
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vana, by law of antithesis, must neces- sarily be the cosmic spinning, which defies chaos and holds by its very excess of motion, the orderly universe in its place. To be sure, in its literal interpretation. Nirvana means to blow out, and we make no objection to the putting of this con- struction on the term. He who knows nothing of the Nirvanic poise which arises from an acceleration of motion, who has no realization that the still fixedness of the stars means terrific speed, or that the bird, calm on the wing, Is quivering with an invisible velocity. He who knows naught of this, has no conception of the meaning of Nirvana. The apparent blowing out of chaos in man, by the ascendency of cosmos, the giving way of disorder and unbalance to the reign of order and poise, necessitates the vanishing of some thing, and the term seems true to itself. There is in reality however, no extinction except in appearance. The potentiality to the chaotic exists in nature, in spite of the law of Nirvana (in the Orient it is called a
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law) nevertheless, the poise, resulting from rapid motion in life once established, the chaotic tendency, while evident in con- sciousness, is not manifested in action.
Life I Life I Life! There is a speed of it that holds one balanced in the blue, where heaven is said to be, and thrills one with the rapture that inevitably follows on motion which generates heat and flame.
It is harder to paint Nirvana than to gild the wings of Love. The ever shifting point of view which the poise of motion brings^ the panorama of landscape, the sun-kissed seas and ice-walled kingdoms, the land where milk and honey flows, the parched but glorious desert, the depths beneath, the heights above, the garden, the tree of life, the serpent and the angel — Paradise!— Nirvana I — Heaven ! — Ecstacy ! But where? On Earth, here, now.
Move faster — faster; bum — warmer — warmer, shift your glance from point to point — see Heaven, see Hell — look north, south, east, west, and everywhere — Be! Be.' Bel And on you will steal the calm
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of motion ; along with you will fly a dove of peace. The reaction of action will be lost in the central poise of ultimate life, and the rebound from extremes swallowed in the vortex of the mean, where the eter- nal fires of self are in full flame.
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GHOSTS AGAIN.
The subject returns periodically, and sweeps over a locality somewhat after the manner of an epidemic. Man has a ryth- mic appetite for ghosts, and indulges it in accordance with the relation of supply and demand. The vast majority of ghost seekers are after excitement; take note that when business is dull, the country at peace, and stage stars and melo-dramas scarce, there will be an upstart-tendency in the otherwise stupid city or town to go ghost hunting. Secret meetings will be held by respectable citizens, who would seem by their mysterious airs to be seriously plotting against the government but not at all, they are making a raid on ghostland, nothing more. The very prepara- tions for this are interesting; the children,
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if there are any, are smuggled into their beds, as though they were stolen property; the doors are locked and barred, the blinds shut and the curtains drawn; all lights are extinguished, and darkness thick enough to be felt is the desired result.
The crusaders who are preparing for this mysterious expedition into nowhere, speak in whispers, as if the denizens of ether might hear them in advance. Somehow these seekers have for a long time felt that ghosts must have a table; why, it is hard to understand, but like many inexplicable things, it is so. Possibly the four-legged magnet serves as a sort of centralizing focus from whence a phantom can glide with sin- uous agility like a serpent from a lair; how- ever, a table there must be, if the still more mysterious cabinet is out of the question. Next the assembled investigators must necessarily clasp hands; the thrill which follows this is beyond the power of pen to portray; there is a subtle shiver in it preg- nant with fear — that delicious dread which is inevitably attendant upon the mysterious
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anknovn — it contains a hint of tlie awful charm cX birth and death, and is an experi- ence without which life would be incomplete. What follows all these ntunerons nncanny preparations? Sometimes something, some- times nothing. A weary waiting of silence, now and then broken by the singing of hymns, will occasionally result in what is called phenomena and again in an honest defeat. The invaders occasionally beat the ghost, bat more often the ghost beats them.
But what of this phenomena which is sometimes obtained? Ask Profs. Crooks, Wallace, or Zoelner; they weigh and measure ghosts with all the nicety of test machines. If you but use their method you may find a iact or two, unless, here comes the great dif- ficulty, unless you lose your head; and the chances are that you will do that very thing; even though a student of the exact sciences, once having crossed the sacred threshold of the sceance room, you are most likely a dif- ferent man.
The situation is strange, and utterly de- void of the fflare of day that floods science.
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The magnetism of your neighbors of both sexes is distracting. The hurt attitude of many of the investigators, if the slightest doubt is expressed; a difficulty of establish- ing conditions which is unheard of in most scientific investigations; the attitude of yourself^ which is liable to be exceedingly aggressive or unusually meek and bland; in fact the almost utter impossibility of get- ting used to the situation; all these make it the hardest imaginable place to undertake thorough scientific investigation. If you see- something, a floating light, or a hazy phantom which you are sure no trickery can produce, your credulity, in spite of yourself, is always shadowed with doubt, and never to your dying day can you feel quite certain; again, there is no proof that that phantasmal something that you saw was what it professed to be; however this cuts no figure. If it really were a phantom with all a phantom's attributes, it were cer- tainly a valuable thing to have and hold in memory, as a particular photograph of Satan, if nothing more.
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As we have said before, on ttis subject, get /acts if you cam; no fact is diabolic, as a fact. The dangers of diabolism in the sceance room do not lie in the verities found there, but in the falsehoods. We are not intending to commit ourselves on ghosts as to whether they are or not, in the generally understood sense. Your opportunities of finding out are possibly better than ours. We have no objection to them, nor beyond the possibility of them to appear, do we find them especially interesting. They so ex- hale their individuality in their effort to be- come, that the phantom that introduces itself at last, is too transparent to weigh much either physically or otherwise. Of course we are speaking now of the harmless ghost, who is worth nothing except as a feict. But against those others that haunt houses and destroy the value of property by the menace of their presence, terrifying weak women and children in dark places, against those terrible, devilish ghosts that return to commit murder in pantomime, and turn one's hair gray in a night, we
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hurl anathemas. From the point of data they are valuable beyond compare; but from that of law and order, altogether undesir- able.
The subject is endless, fascinating, start- ling. If flesh and blood stand correlated to a phantom, then has the ghost business to be, and all our efforts to down him will be as fruitless as those of the conjurers of Banquo. Besides there is another aspect, which has an essence of consolation in it; the everlasting phantom makes a material etetnity possible in some form or other, and substantiates the non-destructibility of matter.
Hail then ye spirits of the vasty deep I for by your subtle entities, we become aware of ourselves as solid, irrepressible verities.
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THE LAW OF RYTHM.
It must have been noticed by this time, by those who have followed the drift of these essays, that a law, veiled perhaps but defi- nite, well understood by the Orient though scarcely grasped by the Occident, is the fun- damental text of them all. This principle of polarity, accepted in speculative psychics, yet rarely reduced to practice, is none other than the philosopher's stone; and the comprehension and application of the same, must necessarily make of man a Master by the acquisition of power which the knowl- edge and practice bring. The aim of all philosophies is to discover Unity — to find in the heterogeneous maze of variety a sta- ble constancy, or indivisible chain which shall link event to event, change to change.
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Some law must certainly lie at the base of being which shall justify its very outbursts into multiple phenomena. The changeable must be the twin of the changeless, that Unity, the philosopher's quest, may be es- tablished. What is this law? It is action and reaction, or rythtn.
Before we go farther in this debate, we must postulate immortal Units of force and being, that swing like the pendulum of a clock between two extremes of expression, now at or near the limit in one direction, and again upon the verge in the other. To postulate Units of force and being, is more consistent with law and phenomena than to postulate a Unit of force and being. Assum- ing as a first principle, that variety can only be accounted for because it has always been, and that unity has no possibility except in an eternity of variety, we boldly declare that each individual Unit of force, conscious- ness, and being, always was and will ever be; there can exist no One, without the many, nor many without the One. Upon this con- stancy of force generation in each individual
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Unit we base variety, necessitated by the in- terdealing of these Units, one with the other; now potential, again kinetic; moving, bom- barding, and interplaying among themselves eternally.
The constant Unity in the individual, to- day called man, existed ere the morning stars sang their first hymn in the dawn of an apparent creation. Back of protoplas- mic expression is the potential divinity of each beings which appearing in a million forms up to its high tide of rythm, has been christened with a myriad names, from Ameba to Jah-Jehovah. But as the mighty ocean has its limit tide, so has the sea of an entity, and included in it are lower forms of action and reaction down the ripple of an hour's emotion. The limitation then in an individual Unit of force (calling it in the present argument man) lies in his ryth- mic swing; this being greater or less in proportion as it exhausts his generative power, and according to the amount that each Unit's generative power is. The will (desire) of an individual Unit seems to have,
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througli motion, tlie power of generating a certain amount of energy in a given time, and the limit of this power and time can only be decided by the rythm of his being from its finality of reaction to the corres- ponding acme of action, and vice versa. Given then innumerable Units of forccj with an immortality behind as well as ahead of them, the basic law of their being — that of action and reaction, or rythm — each having a longer or shorter swing of its pendulum according to its force generative power, some in degree potential, others ex- tremely energetic, and we have, as a natural corollary, an eternal variety backed by per- petual unity. The homogeneous and het- erogeneous (everlasting mates) coming out in expression in so-called evolution, means nothing other than the tremendous rythm of a cycle of these Units of being.
The ascent of man from Hugo's tadpole to an arch-angel, is the long swing of his pendulum to his extreme of life and con- sciousness, nothing more, nothing less. And as the power to generate energy im-
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plies involution as well as evolution (for force must be constant) we retire back fin- ally to a non-destructible Ego or Will, whose very egoism hinges on its indivisible unity, while its consciousness can in no way be maintained save through eternal Egos, more or less like itself, which act as reflectors of its own being. Placing ourselves upon this premise, we repudiate Creation in the ortho- dox or biblical sense, and religiously declare in the name of Almighty Truth, that some- thing never yet came forth from nothing; and though we preach the new from morn- ing until night, year in and year out, it is after all but a rythmic return of the old^ called forth from potentiality into activity, with a gloss and sheen upon it that exhiler- ates, as though it never had been. The Creation which we contemplate and the Cre- ation of dogma are in no way related; the former we repudiate altogether and forever. But what of this rythm? As the earth turns on its axis each day, and revolves around the sun each year, and travels through space on its long journey toward a
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terrible magnet whose fiery eye draws it irresistably onward; as within itself it is moving from its internal fire outward to its cold crust, so man, in his Unit energy, is consciously whirling about on his diurnal axis, finding his two poles of being in his night and day — sleeping and waking — at the same time making his annual circuit around some star of his spiritual constella- tion, discovering his winter and summer or cold and beat, each year of his life — freezing or burning — while unconsciously or con- sciously rushing on in his evolutionary march up the arc of his ethereal sky, toward an unseen zenith; where, like the sun, hav- ing apparently paused for an instant, he plunges down the steeps of impalpable bine, and round again to meet the extreme pole of himself, having completed a grand cycle of individual existence.
But asserting this as law, what of the ap- plication? How make out of it the philoso- pher's touch-stone by which he detects the gold of power? Man knows very well that he begins earth life as an infant; that he
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grows and waxes strong, till having passed youtb he finds himself in full prime, to practically poise for a term of years before he takes the dowTi grade, traveling back to a second childhood, when be often becomes as bald, toothless, and helpless as when first bom. From low tide to high tide, from high tide to low, that is all; potential, kinetic — kinetic, potential.
But rythm is a -wheel within a wheel; in the cycle there are the lives; in the lives the years, in the years the months, in the months the weeks, in the weeks the day. There is rythm in disease, in health, in joy, in sorrow; the circle is always forming, or rather the spiral; extremes come round to meet and pass extremes; agony merges into unconsciousness, and ecstacy into despair. This has always been realized, but rarely understood and practically dealt with. We prate about pain and pleasure, but who ap- plies the mathematics of r3rthm to the same and regulates his life accordingly; who counts on his periodicity as he does on his bank stock, and deals with it as so much
lassed ^^| , here ^11
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capital in hand? Far off in old China this was done by one Confucius who prophesied with the accuracy of a seer, purely by the law of periodicity.
The sage reckons on the reaction as well as on the action; he carries the well-known maxim of physics up into psychology and makes of the latter much-abused study, a science. He ignores the modern loose method of speculative metaphysics, and reckons on his mind as he does on his body, by the imperishable principle of rythm ; postulating for himself an eternal entity, he counts on his cycles, his lives, his years, as an expert figures on the tides of the sea. He knows that there are hours in the day when life ebbs, and when it flows; he calculates the point when the tide will turn, and prepares for the low, by his measurement of the high.