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

(_I am indebted in this chapter to Ouspensky’s remarkable work, “Tertium Organum”_)

I hope in this chapter to demonstrate that the views of the occult which I have put forward are meeting with strange confirmation in Western Science though there approached from a different angle. To put a very difficult subject briefly and clearly it is now thought that the universe of three dimensions (breadth, length, and height) in which our senses inform us we live and move and have our being is a universe wrongly seen and understood by those five very fallible observers and that in many respects the universe corresponds in truth with “The World behind the Looking Glass” as I have called it. In other words, that the so-called “occult” affords us glimpses of the world as it is beyond the perception of the senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing.

And science now adumbrates the possibility of a verifiable perception of its own transcending the senses on the mathematical side and this is the reason why we hear talk of what is called “The Fourth Dimension”; for it is found that the three dimensions of length, breadth and height by which we measure the world and on which all our logical and geometrical conclusions are based are not equal to the demands made upon them by late scientific discoveries and many advanced thinkers are crying out for a wider and very different definition to supplement and elucidate the real relation of man to the universe. This is profoundly interesting from the occult point of view for reasons which I shall indicate.

It is the fact that though the body of man could be made to conform to the three dimensions of length, breadth, and height, the intellect and the psyche in him, which have made all religions and all thought possible, could not. The psyche of man has always gone off on its own adventures and has declined entirely to be conditioned by the limits of breadth, depth, and height. Not only so, but the life and the psyche in animals and the lower forms of life, even down to plants, have been equally unaccommodating. They too have refused to be enclosed (if I may so put it) within the limits of length, breadth and height. A gallant fight to capture them was made by the Positivists, who, mistaking the machine for the man behind it, clung as long as they could to the belief that brain-movements accounted for Christ and Shakespeare. Like those of other dupes of the senses their theory lies dead on the dusty road of the past. The possibility that life may soon be produced by certain combinations of elements does not in the least support their assertion, for the cause of life resulting from the combination and its inherency in each one of the combining elements has still to be explained.

It is interesting to consider a few remarks of Plato’s made rather more than two millenniums ago. And let no one be startled by the great name of a great philosopher, for much that he said is really more interesting than the very best-selling novel of the present day, and of vastly more consequence. This quotation will show how very ill he thought we were served by those trustworthy five reporters of ours upon which we absolutely depend for knowledge until we find the way into the World behind the Looking Glass. And few persons since have been able to question seriously the issue he raises.

He records a dialogue of Socrates with an extremely interested friend in the course of which he gave him a very neat and striking allegory of man’s position until he has learned the way of realization (I condense and therefore to a certain extent paraphrase, but have kept rigidly to the essential):

“‘Behold a set of human beings living in a sort of underground den. They are chained in a manner which prevents their turning their heads. Behind them is a light and between them and the light a raised way along which pass figures of men and animals and so forth. And some of these passengers are talking and some are silent. These men who are chained and cannot move their heads can therefore see only the shadows cast before them. Is not this so?

“‘But they would suppose that what they saw was actually before them? And what they supposed to be truth would only be the shadows of the images?’

“‘Very true,’ answers the friend.

“‘Now suppose one of these chained men is suddenly freed and taken into the sunlight: Will he not be in a difficulty and at first believe that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects now shown him?

“‘And suppose the light dazzles his eyes: May he not even be unable at first to see any of the realities now affirmed to be the truth?

“‘But when at last he can see the sun as the cause of all he beholds will he not rejoice in the change and pity those who are chained? Will he not endure anything rather than live and think after their manner? But the chained men will say of him that there is no use in even thinking of ascending to the light and if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light if they caught the offender in the act they would kill him.’

“In this allegory the prison is the world of sight [i.e., the senses] and you will understand that those who attain to the blessed vision of truth are unwilling to descend to human affairs, but their souls are ever hastening to the upper world in which they desire to dwell.”

The thing cannot be better put and the experience of the world has proved. only too well how ready it has been to slaughter the man who attempts to knock the chains off the prisoners and lead them into the light of reality. What Plato has said may be summed up in one phrase. We live in the real world, but we perceive it wrongly. The entry into what I have called the World behind the Looking Glass means that we then perceive it rightly—each in his different degree. For that there are many degrees of perception none can doubt.

What we have to do is to understand the Real and decline to be misled by the shadows. Thus we shall apprehend what is called the occult—or the Hidden—which really lies all about us for observation the moment we are capable of observing. We walk about like savages in a library with the wisdom of the ages there for the taking and—we cannot take it for our own. That there are difficulties in the way I do not deny, though they have in instances which I shall give been triumphantly conquered. One great and pressing difficulty is language, for our languages (be it remembered) have all been evolved by Plato’s chained prisoners, sitting in the dark and taking the shadows cast before them for real. Therefore we must unfortunately use words quite inadequate to the truth some of us know. I am perfectly certain that when Plato’s emancipated man returned from the sunlight into the underground den he was extremely at a loss to convey his meanings to the cave-dwellers. Probably the real end of the story is that he sat down and gave it up as a bad job and they beat him to death—their legs and arms being the only free part of them. Analogous stories have very often ended thus in real life. The witnesses, however, have increased in number since Plato’s day and the vocabulary has enlarged, though by no means to the necessary point. We are still striving to express the inexpressible and a good deal of it still sounds almost impossible for that reason, but we are quite certainly beginning to realize “that this earth is the scene of a drama of which we only perceive scattered portions and in which the greater number of the actors are invisible to us.” And, it has been said that when we understand that drama we shall see that the so-called “solid” world of length, breadth and height does not really exist as we conceive it because we perceive it so wrongly that our perception is as illusory as the movement of the country past our eyes when we are rushing through it in a train.

I remember, as a child, being immensely impressed with what was put to me as a kind of catch or riddle, namely that there is really no such thing as motion because you are always stationary at some one given point. Think that out and you will find it very difficult to counter. To my surprise I met this poser the other day in the thoughts of an ancient Indian philosopher. Science, at the moment, is confronted with a difficulty of the same nature with regard to time, which according to our common conception is a form of motion because it is always flowing past us.

I paraphrase. Usually we think the past already does not exist. It has passed, disappeared. The future also does not exist. It has not arrived nor formed. By the present we mean the moment when the future changes into the past. In other words the moment when one non-existence changes into another non-existence. And this moment being only a fiction, we have a full right to say the present does not exist. For the present is not to be seized—it is always changing into the past, and strictly speaking neither past, present nor future exists for us, which is so absurd that it becomes clear that there is something very mistaken in our conception of time. When a man leaves New York for London only the memory of New York is left. And London does not really exist for him until he arrives there. But an observer at a sufficient height with sufficient vision could see both New York and London as steady points. In the same way we say: “Spring is gone. Winter is not yet here.” But we know it will come just as the man leaving New York knows that (bar accident) he will reach London. The new conception of time tends to be that at a sufficient height—i.e., in the more developed consciousness, spring is always there and winter also—and that the notion of the flux of time is pure guess-work at a thing we do not understand, and pure illusion, and that the truth is that there is no flux of time but the “Eternal Now” of the ancient Indian thinkers into which if we could look with clear understanding we should perceive everything as coexistent and co-eternal.

I pause for a moment to say if this is so how .clearly it explains the gift of prophecy or clear-seeing. In the flashes of higher consciousness which I shall describe the seer declares that a certain thing will happen. That is inexplicable on the theory of a future as yet non-existent. But if he sees the event he describes as part of the Eternally existent and unchanging it becomes by no means impossible to understand why under certain conditions such a sight can be obtained.

So the ordinary man goes forward blind, tapping his way with a stick, substantially believing only in what he touches at the moment, which alone exists for him. The man who can see beholds all round him the points by which he guides his course. The relation of the higher consciousness to the lower is as sight to blindness. The considerations which witness to the development