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

of a part of our race into the possession of the higher consciousness are of amazing interest. Yet for those who have developed it in the cases we know, it has its terrors. Such a man is in the position of an aviator who from the sky watches two trains on earth rushing to the inevitable collision and cannot warn them. His consciousness rises above the plane in which the consciousness of the man in the street sees events divided by periods of time. The man of the higher consciousness will see all cause and effect as one, crime and punishment, sunrise and sunset, the birth and death of a man. Here again we touch on the wonders of Indian thought in the Upanishads and later, which indicated clearly many centuries ago the riddle with which science is to-day confronted. They saw that as long as science concerns itself with physical happenings only it stumbles in a blind alley, and that the only way out is in the development of the consciousness of man. On that all true science must ultimately be based.

In this view they received strong support from the great German philosopher Kant (born in 1724). According to his famous book everything known through the senses can be known only in terms of time and space, and nothing can be received by the five senses except in these terms. And what we perceive are not the properties actually belonging to things but what our senses ascribe to them and that in reality things exist quite independently of time and space and the conditions we impose by our limitations in this respect. Thus time and space have no real existence in themselves but represent our conceptions in the same manner as when looking through green glasses we perceive the world green.

It follows that we do not know the true relations of things among themselves, and that we possess only phantoms or visions of things, and for beings differently organized from ourselves the world would present a wholly different aspect. Briefly we have created a world (in which we believe) conditioned entirely by our limitations, just as we know that creatures of a more limited consciousness than ourselves perceive the world within still narrower limits and find it impossible to aspire to the comparatively boundless splendor of our point of view. It is a case of relative truth. No doubt our conceptions are higher than those of the mollusc or the snail, but it would be a bold materialist indeed who could be found to declare that the true universe is revealed to our conceptions in all its dimensions and possibilities. It must be made clear, however, that Kant does not attribute to us a confused perception of the real world. No. It is a very acute perception of an entirely unreal world—so acute that as a rule we never question it, and are difficult to persuade that it is mistaken.

Here we have to ask, What is space? As we perceive it, it is for us the form of the universe. We can measure it only in three directions independent of one another—i.e., length, breadth and height—and we therefore call our conception of space three-dimensional.

Yet there are things in the world which cannot be defined in these terms and yet most undoubtedly do exist, and with power. Ouspensky uses the illustration here of a house and an idea. You may destroy the house; the idea you cannot destroy—it will even thrive on your efforts at destruction. And so there are many different forms of existence. A book exists, but also, and in a different category, its contents. A coin, and its purchasing value. In fact every physical fact has its metaphysical side. Therefore it has been said: “Matter does not give us any trouble. We know all about it for the very good reason that we invented it. Strictly speaking matter exists only as a concept.”

Our senses prove its solid existence to us, but our senses unfortunately are untrustworthy witnesses who cannot be heard in the Court of Law to which man’s psyche appeals.

A great part of what most deeply concerns us in relation to the so-called “occult” is our sense-relation to time. It is necessary to ask why we are convinced that we perceive time as a form of motion running past the narrow five-paned window of the senses through which alone we can observe the world, and why we cannot, as it were, lean out of that slit and get a broader view to right and left of us which might revolutionize our conclusions. It is because our consciousness is usually chained to the plane of the three dimensions of length, breadth, and height by our senses.

Our sight extends for a certain number of yards, if unblocked by solid bodies; our hearing is in the same case and though, as Ouspensky puts it, the range of sight can be extended by ascending to greater heights or by the use of telescopes and magnifiers, this is only extending the range of the senses, not escaping them—a very different proposition.

All motion that we can perceive is conditioned by time. Can we transcend the idea of time as motion—can we imagine it as stationary? Kant declares that the motion or flux of time is created by ourselves as a part of our receptive apparatus for convenience in perceiving the outside world. If this is true and if the slumbering psyche in man is not bound by what may be called physical forms of consciousness, then it is conceivable that in different forms of consciousness man might perceive so much more of the world as it really is as to gain knowledge which he can never receive through the medium of the senses.

One great key to unlock the Gate is undoubtedly the true realization of time as a fourth dimension. This explains many a problem of clairvoyance, clairaudience, distance-apparitions and so forth, which has been inexplicable on the usual theories. It must revolutionize almost all our ideas of what is possible.

Thus we see that the knowledge which is opening on us with the enlarging consciousness of man is what will gain for science that hitherto dubious and hidden world known as the occult—which is really the sphere of realization of things as they are in themselves and in truth.

There must come a point where all science based on the senses guided by reason will find itself met by a “Thus far and no farther.” That point is not distant. But to the consciousness of man, which is a part of the Infinite, there can be no bounds. All it needs is training and discipline _and_ the necessary stages of evolution to bring it to the realization of its transcendent powers as exemplified here and there in those who have partially attained.

For the question now opening before us is stated in the great mathematician Minkowski’s brilliant generalization of Einstein’s new principle. This was quoted by Professor Oumov at a convention of Russian scientists in 1911.

“In Nature all is given; for her the past and future do not exist. She is the eternal present: she has no limits either of space or time. Changes are proceeding in individuals and correspond to their displacements upon world-ways in a four-dimensional eternal and limitless manifold. [Italics mine.] These concepts in the region of philosophic thought will produce a revolution considerably greater than that caused by the displacement from the center of the universe by Copernicus.”

“We are present,” added Professor Oumov, “at the funeral of the old physics.”

And again I must quote Ouspensky.

“The world as we know it does not represent anything stable. Phenomena which appear to us unrelated can be seen by some more inclusive consciousness as parts of a single whole. Phenomena which appear to us complete and indivisible may be in reality exceedingly complex, may include within themselves different elements having nothing in common. Therefore beyond our view of things another view is possible—a view, as it were, from another world from ‘over there.’ Now ‘over there’ does not mean some other place but a new method of knowledge, a new understanding.” I may add, a new understanding of the world we live in. We shall certainly agree with this if we have arrived at realization of the fact that man “is a toy in the hands of elemental forces, he is merely a transforming station of forces. All that it seems to him he is doing is in reality done by external forces which enter him through air, food, sunlight. Man does not perform a single action by himself. He is merely a prism in which a line of action is refracted in a certain manner. Just as the beam of light does not proceed from the prism, so action does not proceed from the reason of man.”

From all these conclusions follows another and a most important one. It is that, the psyche of man manifesting (except in supernormal conditions) through the action of the brain, we can (except in supernormal conditions) observe only those reflections which are similar to ourselves. We can know only about the existence of psychic lives similar to our own, and can know no others at all unless we can enter into their plane. Transcending this stage of consciousness we see and hear quite differently. This is the true realm of the occult—the real World behind the Looking Glass, and when attained it is no longer strange and occult but the natural home of our psyche. And from it proceed the strange manifestations and powers which startle and bewilder us coming in the alarming and sporadic way which is all that the average man can formulate as yet of their proceedings. It is little wonder that they have been met as they have, with alternate incredulity and fear.