The Way of Power, L. Adams Beck [beach books txt] 📗

own civilization are due to conscious or unconscious action of this type. It is a very interesting subject, which would repay investigation. I believe one of the root causes of the love of opiates in the East and alcohol in the West is the unconscious longing to be free of the bondage of the senses, to get beyond them into some region where troubles are left behind and life is a dream of pleasure. The drunkard’s paradise is pretty much what one would expect it to be. Singularly enough opium and hashish appear to have a different and higher effect in spite of the eventual ruin they entail. The famous case of De Quincey must be recalled, and the visions, melancholy, terrible, true and beautiful, which he saw under the influence of opium and has recorded in words worthy of their beauty.

Here again chapters might be written of the visions of Asiatics induced in this way, and I believe that some of the foretellings and jugglings are certainly performed by men under this influence or that of the smoking of charas; but this is not difficult to distinguish when one has experience. I believe that tobacco-smoking offers in a very minor and puerile degree the same sort of dulling and soothing of the objective self, inducing dreaming states, and that this is why men and women have taken to it with avidity.

In this connection Professor James’s wonderful book, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” should be studied. His opinions on the power of narcosis to produce these brief flashes of the occult or mystic state are extremely interesting. He says:

“This is a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness of its ideality. Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystic consciousness to an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. The truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself these prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless the sense of a profound meaning persists and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.”

In view of what I have written already it is quite natural that the nitrous oxide trance should by a means of revelation for those and only those who have reached a certain stage of psychic evolution, and I fully agree with Professor James when he sums up the conclusions his investigations have left him (I condense):

“Looking back on my experiences they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world whose contradictions and conflict make all our difficulties and trouble were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear! I have friends who believe in the anesthetic revelation.”

It seems to me to be a matter of certainty that the true and universal self in man may be occasionally liberated in this way, and, as to what is left behind sometimes sounding like nonsense, it must be remembered that in the Land behind the Looking Glass our logic is nonsense, and the truth as revealed there must appear to us to be dreams of madmen if we view them from the world of the senses. They have certainly often been so recorded.

I had once a most extraordinary dream shot through and through with beauty as a jewel with lights and perfections. I dreamed that I must write it down at once lest so much loveliness should escape me. But when I waked only one grotesque phrase survived—so grotesque though apparently meaningless that I never forgot it. Much later,—years after, events illuminated that phrase so that what it conveyed had become one of the most important events of my life. I believe the same might prove true of many of the remains of “veriest nonsense” of which Professor James writes, if they could be traced through the after life of the percipients. It will be interesting to give some specimens of experience under narcosis, and the first is of great value because it relates to a realization of time as the eternal “Now” of Indian Yoga. It was that of a man named Clark, who died young. (I condense.)

“In the first place the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional. It is the one sole and sufficient insight of how the present is pushed on by the past and becomes the future. The real secret would be the formul� by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself yet never escapes. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. His nose never catches up with his heels. So the present is a foregone conclusion and I am ever too late to understand it. [It has become the past before one can grasp it.] But at the moment of recovery from anesthesis, then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting. That is why there is a smile upon the face of revelation as we view it. It tells us we are forever half a second too late.

“‘You could kiss your own lips and have all the fun to yourself,’ it says, ‘if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there until you got around to them. Why don’t you manage it somehow?’”

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And the whole secret of the true occult is to know how to make one’s own lips wait until one gets round to them, and in kissing them one kisses the universe. That is Yoga with all its powers, revealing, in the immortal words of Plotinus, the great Neo-Platonic philosopher, the truth:

“For that which sees is itself the thing which is seen.” The transcendental logic of the Land behind the Looking Glass where “A can be both A and not A”! This is exactly what the percipient has realized in that experience.

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Here is another experience—that of a woman who had taken ether for a surgical operation:

“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured. My last dream immediately preceded my coming to. It only lasted a few seconds and was most vivid and real to me though it may not be clear in words.

“A great Power was traveling through the sky, his foot on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail: it was his pathway. The lightning was made of innumerable spirits and I was one of them. Each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I felt my flexibility and helplessness. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, and at the acutest point of [my agony] as he passed, I SAW.

“I understood for a moment things I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity.

“He went and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them. This was what it all meant. On waking I realized that in that half-hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of His achieving and revealing something to someone, I know not what or to whom. With that I came finally into what seemed a dream-world compared with the reality of what I was leaving.”

I should like to draw attention to one sentence in this experience:

“In that moment the whole of my life passed before me.”

This is a common experience of those who have been caught back at the last instant from death by drowning; it occurs also to those who are on the threshold of death in other ways and yet return. The explanation, I think, undoubtedly is the light of the higher consciousness breaking through as the body crumbles, revealing Time again as the Eternal Now. The dying man looks up and sees the past, present and future fused into a picture in which all parts are simultaneous. They are one and always were. Yoga again, and the explanation of clairvoyance, prophecy and many more of the strange signals the true occult flings out to assure us that Reality is there for the finding!

That a flash here and there of truth can be caught by the man whose objective self is strangled in the grip of narcosis is a most interesting fact, but I need hardly say it is no recommendation to making the great escape into Reality in that particular way. None of these things offer the true road. How should they? I think even those dullings and lullings of the objective self in East and West to which I have alluded in this chapter are a serious risk and damage to the body—the instrument by which the psyche of man manifests,—and in obscurer ways than that are also a peril.

How should people who live the ordinary lives of Western civilization hope to see into what is described in the East by those who know, as “the Formless, the Beautiful, the Utterly Desirable”? To injure the body, to force a glimpse of the higher consciousness by mechanical means is no true way to the enfranchisement of the psyche. Many voluptuaries in psychic sensation have discovered this to their cost. It is in the union of the best, the highest, the simplest, in the union of body, mind and psyche that the Way lies and in that only, and in studying the principles of Yoga this is forcibly brought before the student. In an article published before I had resolved to write fully on these hidden matters I said:

“But where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding? In small beginnings, in a certain personal austerity and circumspectness (in the East they call it recollectedness) which need not be ostentatious, which is not disquieted by passion or opinion. This the great faiths have taught. They recognized with true psychological instinct that here was a gate to the eternal Way, to looking upon the lower satisfactions of life as stranglers of the real joys. More than half our troubles come from trying to adapt man to his environment instead of his environment to man. The wise asceticism is a perpetual appeal to joy. It throws aside the useless burdens. I reflect on the teaching of the wise of all nations and I recall none who has not taught that self-discipline is what makes the man the master of his fate in the only way in which he need care to rule it. Meng-Tsu, one of the wise men of China, wise in her antiquity, said a rememberable thing in this connection:

“‘That in which men differ from beasts is a thing very inconsiderable; the wise are wise because they preserve it carefully.’

“It is a stern saying. It recognizes, with Froude’s definition of the Roman stoic, that ‘men who are the slaves of their habits are miserable and impotent, and insists