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

realized psychic existences high above our understanding? I describe from the experience of the Greatest what this state and vision appear to be, and we can consider whether celestial flashes of it, as if a door opened and shut almost instantly, have happened in the experience of others less highly evolved. In this book I have told strange stories of things that have been observed and believed in times past and our own, and I must leave it to my readers to judge whether these have proved this stupendous fact in the sense in which a mathematical fact may be said to be capable of proof by man’s reason. But if that proof is possible in the lower forms of the Occult it is impossible in the highest spiritual flight of the consciousness. It is beyond the judgment of our reason. If we do not feel and understand by union we must wait our day.

Therefore in this chapter I touch upon remarkable experiences of what has been called the cosmic consciousness (needing not only volumes but libraries to describe them with any fulness) which lead to the gate of the mystery by which it appears man’s consciousness may be brought into relation with the highest source of light and power.

It is therefore necessary to speak of the mystics of all parts of the world and of all faiths, for the reason that they have perceived, by what may in part be described as intuition, the basic fact that in the universe is no duality but only One of which man is a part. On this all true appreciation of the “occult” eventually centers.

We now enter the region where dwell those who have been possessed of what may be called the highest form of Consciousness that man can conceive, though no doubt there are higher still beyond our ken. Professor James says:

“There is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. This is the liberation of the soul.”

Liberation from what? The bonds of time, space, and motion and all that binds a man to the earth as we know it.

There has come to some men and women of many races a sudden enlargement, a sudden consciousness and certainty of universal things hitherto unknown which has changed all their conceptions of the world and its values. And if it be objected that religion need not necessarily have anything to do with the “occult” let me repeat that religion is the strongest force known in the world for energizing what I may call the psychic nerve and arousing it into an activity of vibration which appears to relate it to other hitherto unfelt vibrations. And even where the impulse has been what is called “religious,” very often the results have entirely transcended all popular conceptions of religion and the realization is not that of confirmation of any dogma but of a great and universal liberation and much more. I will take some Indian examples first because in former chapters I have given the Indian method of discipline and training which they considered led the way to this realization and the attainment of what are there called “the powers.”

Let us take as example one of the most world-moving experiences, that of the Indian Prince known as the Buddha; because, though its results for the world were incalculable, it presents a typical case of what I endeavor to describe, and he was a man born of a branch of our own Aryan or “noble” race. He renounced the sensual luxuries and pleasures of the world. He cannot be said to have renounced love in leaving his wife and child because love in that connection was simply transmuted into a higher form of love. He essayed and abandoned a useless and cruel training by asceticism, then, adopting a reasonable form of disciplining the body, he gave himself to concentration and contemplation and at last, seated under a tree after the manner of many of his predecessors, he received what he and his disciples have since named Enlightenment. He is said, as the perception reached him, to have cried aloud, “Unbounded Light!” and to have henceforth perceived the world in quite other aspects than those it had hitherto presented and to have attained “the powers,” though he considered them in themselves so far transcended by other considerations that he seldom used them or commended their use by his disciples. He was known henceforward in India as The Supremely Awakened One.

What had he perceived? To what had he awakened? Here language suited to and invented by the commonplace perception of our senses breaks down. ‘We must get as near as we can but it will be only a shadow of the truth. As Walt Whitman (who had flashes of the higher consciousness) says:

“When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot.

My tongue is inefficient on its pivots.

My breath will not be obedient to its organs.

I become a dumb man.”

The Buddha perceived what is described as the Formless, the Beautiful, perfect Bliss, utter Enlightenment, a solvent in which all the sorrows of the world are dissolved and disappear. He perceived that all the universe is One and that the sorrow which breaks and bruises us is caused by belief in the separate and individual self in man, which belief is the root of all selfishness and grief and their concomitant crimes of ignorance. And he found that in realization of unity lay not only deliverance from sorrow but realization of powers more amazing than the sudden gift of sight to one born blind. He found that all life is One. And I believe it to be certain that when science extends its survey from the materialistic to the realm of ideas and consciousness the Buddha will be found awaiting its arrival with the serenity of The Utterly Awakened, he who achieved and knew by direct cognition the laws behind the phenomena revealed by the senses. He perceived an ordered universe, the smallest movement definitely caused and itself the cause of action, and he perceived that when these are understood power follows as a necessity. He became a Master of the Occult, a Master of Yoga by the two roads of asceticism and contemplation.

I pass to lesser cases in India and, as one, to the teacher famous in India in the middle of the nineteenth century, known as Sri Ramakrishna. His life is a wonderful record of realization and the powers that follow upon it, powers which in themselves did not particularly interest him, drowned as they were in the knowledge of the higher vision, but allied with the purpose of this book and therefore to be noted. Realization came to him in the typical way—devotion, longing for liberation from the bondage of the senses, and then one day, suddenly, a flood of light and the temporary loss of self-consciousness.

I will mention some of the powers it brought with it. They are described as “characteristics distinctive of the highest degree of concentration.” He would meet his disciples at the door, and begin to answer, without being asked, the written questions they carried in their pockets. He could tell by touch the character of anyone who had even come in contact with his food, clothes or mat. He would say of one from whom he shrank, that the contact “burnt” him. Sometimes—“Look, I can eat this. Some good soul must have sent it.”

His disciples have told of the strangeness with which they would listen to one side of a dialogue carried on for hours while Ramakrishna, resting, evidently believed himself to be communicating with beings they could not see. He had his own nervous force so completely under control that during his last illness he could remove all consciousness from the cancer in his throat and allow it to be operated upon as if under a local anesthetic. He could interpret the smallest detail of the physical constitution of others as expressing their inward personality. He would throw a disciple into the hypnotic state and learn from his subconscious mind all that was lodged there. At times, he said, men and women seemed to him like glass and he could look them through and through. Above all he could by his touch (and this power is strangely related to the central Figure of our own Scriptures) exercise a compelling power over other lives. Through this touch they also received flashes of the higher consciousness which molded their futures.

An example is given of his placing his hand on the heads of a row of persons with a different phrase for each, and each receiving a different gift. With one, overwhelming joy; to another a great light which never left him, so that he could never pass shrine or temple after without seeming to see there in that light a Form which he described as “the Spirit that dwells in the images,” and so forth. One of his disciples says, in speaking of the usual talk of men’s consciousness: “Consciousness? What does consciousness matter? It is as NOTHING compared with the unfathomable depths of the subconscious and the heights of the superconscious. In this I could never be mistaken, for had I not seen Ramakrishna gather in ten minutes from a man’s subconscious mind the whole of his past, and determine from that his future and his powers?”

Of this disciple Ramakrishna eagerly asked when he first saw him, “Tell me, do you see a light when you are going to sleep?” “Doesn’t everyone?” asked the boy, in wonder. He had indeed a consciousness of light so great that he took it for granted that someone had placed a bright lamp behind his head. When he was to speak in public, which he did frequently and with power, he would hear at night in his room a voice shouting at him the words he would say next day. It was given to him. This man was the well-known Vivekananda.

One might multiply such instances as these Indian ones, but I will come near to the greatest within our own intimate knowledge.

Who does not remember how on what may be called the initiation of the Christ he saw the heavens opened (again the great light) and after that the powers, and so much else that does not enter into the sphere of this book? Or the blinding flash outside Damascus that communicated the powers to St. Paul to which he so often refers with the perfect simplicity of true experience—“occult” indeed if not understood as realization of the world as it really is and the consequent power to use its forces as they exist in their might.

But there are many lesser who have plunged (to quote Professor James) “into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world.” There is the case of Boehme, the inspired shoemaker who in 1600 A. D. saw this great light and from a state of ignorance suddenly became one of whom it could be truly said:

“He learned to know the innermost foundation of nature and acquired the capacity to see henceforth with the eyes of the soul into the heart of all things, a faculty which remained with him even in his normal condition. In so much as viewing the herbs and grass he saw into their essence and properties and in like manner he beheld the whole creation and from that foundation wrote his book ‘De Signature Rerum.’”

In a third illumination it is said, in a beautiful analogy, “that which had in former visions appeared to him multifarious was now recognized by him as Unity, like a harp of many strings of which each string is a single instrument while the whole is only one harp.” He says himself:

“The gate was so opened to me that in one-quarter of an hour I saw and knew