CHAPTER XV

IRREGULAR PSYCHIC PROGRESS
NATURAL psychic faculties have been for a long time under observation one way or another, in the ordinary world, but this observation has been carried on in such an irregular, spasmodic, unscientific fashion that none of the many writers who have been con- cerned in the investigation have arrived at any satisfactory conclusion. Very often psychic faculties have been found in persons afflicted with various physical maladies, and lookers-on have jumped to the entirely erroneous con- clusion that in their nature such faculties are associated with diseased conditions of the body. The remarkable case of the Seeress of Prevorst, described by Dr. Kerner, may serve as a typical instance. Frederica Hauffe, the Seeress in question, was born in the first year of the nine- teenth century, at the little village of Prevorst in Wiirtem- burg. Her wonderful clairvoyance and remarkable visions connected with other planes of Nature were associated with conditions of extreme bodily suffering, culminating in early death. The strange and little understood nervous condition, vaguely described as hysteria, is again so fre- quently found in association with the sensitiveness which renders some people available for mesmeric experiments, that such capacity is again set down by virtue of a too hasty generalisation to some obscure disease of the nervous system, and recent medical inquirers in France, out of whose researches has arisen the commonplace view of what is called hypnotism, have been themselves concerned so generally with experiments in hospitals that they have communicated to the world at large the ever-current delu- sion that psychic faculty is a pathological condition.
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Again, looking at the subject in another way, common- place impressions connected with the matter are largely coloured by the estimation in which the world at large holds the ordinary spiritualistic medium. The ignorant section of the world at large simply regards the medium as an impostor, who practises by conjuring tricks on the credulity of his companions. Those who go a little further into the subject know that even though imposition may be mixed up with the mediumship which is purchasable, so to speak, in the market, even behind much of thisy some abnormal faculty or susceptibility is to be found. Many people have the experience of mediumship in private life under conditions which preclude any suspicions of imposture, and thus afford satisfactory evidence that communication is possible between beings on this plane of life and those on others which are intangible and invisible.
Mediumship itself is manifested, wherever it is genuine, under so many different aspects that it seems to defy scien- tific analysis, and where psychic faculty takes the shape of sensitiveness to mesmeric influence, that again runs into all manner of different manifestations, clearly showing for experimentalists along this line that the human creature is psychically a far more complicated organism than it is supposed to be from the physical point of view, though we are left without any clue to a comprehension of the reasons why one sensitive will be able to read in a closed book put at the back of his head, while another, quite unable to do this, will have visions of other states of existence, or be enabled to cognise events on the physical plane at a distance. Then it seems quite a matter of chance, as regards individual sensitives, whether their faculties come into play in the waking state or only in the mesmeric
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trance. Some who develop the so-called psychometric faculty in a high degree, and appear to become acquainted with places, people, or circumstances that formerly sur- rounded any object they may hold, will often be quite in- susceptible to mesmeric influence. Then as regards mes- meric influence itself, few experimentalists have been able to do more than record facts out of their own observation, and these, however plainly they may show that a potent influence is at work, are so divergent in their character that they help us very little towards a scientific apprecia- tion of that influence. But difficult as the whole empirical jungle of psychological inquiry may be, all these capricious and irregular workings of the astral senses are intelligible enough from the point of view of students who get above them, so to speak, and contemplate them from a still higher plane of observation. Anyone whom we might imagine seated in the middle of a huge crystal would not be able, from that point of view, to discern its contour, however transparent its substance might be. It is only when we get ouside that we can look down on the mass as a whole, and so it is only when psychic faculty, trained to the degree of being enabled to function on the manasic plane, looks down from that altitude on to the phenomena of the astral world, that it becomes capable 'of un- ravelling all mysteries connected therewith, and of perceiving how very largely, how almost entirely, the miscellaneous faculties which are described as those of the naturally born psychic, are concerned with astral plane phenomena.
But in their nature to begin with, the astral senses which may be partially awakened in the case of the naturally born psychic are not different from the senses which may be cultivated in the case of the regularly taught
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occultist. Indeed, it may almost be said that every person who may be thought of as available for systematic occult teaching independent of moral development, must have been in the first instance a naturally born psychic, even though his faculties may have existed in the beginning as a potentiality rather than as an actual accomplishment. The Etheric Double must have certain characteristics before the senses of the astral vehicle can connect themselves with the consciousness of the physical brain, and the attri- butes of the Etheric Double are so largely dependent on the Karma of previous lives that without something having been done in previous lives towards the growth of psychic faculties, no mere intellectual comprehension of the whole subject, nor even a genuine spiritual aspiration in the direc- tion of higher development, will give rise to these faculties or set them in a condition in which they can function with freedom in the life during which the attempt is first made. The astral senses, like everything else about a man, are his own creation, however little he may be aware of it, or even however little he may have consciously in the begin- ning set out with the intention of creating them. The aspirations and desires in one life, as we have seen in deal- ing especially with the problem of Free Will and Neces- sity, determine the capacity of the next, and if aspirations and desires set strongly in the direction at any given period of a human being's progress of penetrating those mysteries of Nature which can only be observed by means of the psychic senses, then these aspirations, acting as a Karmic force, set up capacity for astral development in the astral body of the person in question on his next return, always supposing that they are not counteracted by Karma of other kinds.
Now I have shown in the whole course of this treatise
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that the loftiest kind of spiritual development is attained along the surest road by virtue of aspirations which, in the first instance, set out with a nobler purpose than that of merely penetrating the mysteries of Nature for the sake of knowledge, and that the growth of moral qualities engendered by the desire to take part in the service of the Divine Idea governing the evolution of the world is pro- vocative in the long run of far higher achievements even on the psychic plane than those which can be attained directly by specific effort in that direction. The spiritual occultist, who seeks to assimilate himself with the elder brethren of mankind that he may the better perform his