Curious Thoughts

An inhabitant of Venus able to visit earth at will! Yet it is not really difficult. It merely involves leaving the physical body and plane at one point and entrance to the astral or psychic plane. From this latter, it is as easy to return to the state of cause at any point—be it Alcyone or even further—as it is to return to the place departed from. The whole difficulty is in leaving the physical plane at all and for the advanced esotericist, this is as nothing because the normal state of his soul is always in the astral or psychic, instead of the physical. The difficulty with a student is in the repugnance he feels to the thought of returning to an inferior state of being, like life on earth. But the Life of Love is—I serve. So we return.

Phylos, the Thibetan

Becak driver, just outside of the city of Jakarta, Indonesia—Jonathan McIntosh—Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

No telescope will ever reveal human life on Venus; not that it is not there, but its forms are of the One Substance effected by a range of force rendering them imperceptible to earthly eyes. You will not think the air any less material or electricity any less real because your eyes cannot perceive them. Your eyes are very limited in their visual range; if the One Substance vibrates more or less rapidly than an exceedingly small length of time, producing correspondingly minute force wavelengths, your eyes cannot cognise such vibrations. It is the same with your ears and hearing. If your eyes and ears were not thus limited, you would see every sound and hear every sunbeam. Every rainbow would be vocal while heat, which now you only feel, would furnish amazing wealth of sound and vision. But so long as you fancy that because you have eyes you can see all that there is to be seen and that your ears hear all that is worth hearing, so long you will depend on these organs and gain that sort of false ideas of the Universe which must arise from entire ignorance of all except the tiny bit of creation you occupy. So long, too, will you depend on the telescope to reveal truths about other worlds; you will hunt for evidence of human life on the nearer planets, but you will never find any until you cease to expect that matter will reveal soul; it cannot do it, for the finite cannot reveal infinity. Turn it about; ask of the soul revealment of itself and of matter also and all worlds will draw near to you, show their teeming vitality of life and all nature will uncover such treasures as the hungry soul of science has never found before.

Phylos, the Thibetan

A Jicarilla Man, 1904, Edward S. Curtis

Now, in the soul realm, if a human being is content with the gradual, easy pitch of the Godward ascending plane of pure daily life, daily temptations to work in error, and too often fall, progress upward will be slow but very sure. But, on the contrary, if eager to learn rapidly, it must meet in a few hours all the crushing force of temptations to err and to sin which the ordinary man meets distributed through many, many incarnations, covering ages, aye, aeonian time. In the one case, the Father giveth sufficient of the daily bread of strength unto men to enable them to progress very slowly but with certitude. GOD-CHRIST in thee can alone win this struggle. There is only one Guide; follow and win. It is a new conception to thee to learn there is an animating ego, a world spirit, inmateriated in each star, each planet, every stellar body, just as there is an individual soul in each human, animal or plant body. Yet this is true. It is also true that the spirits of men will progress; will face the supreme ordeal, and, if they pass victorious, will enter that long rest, heaven, devachan—call it as thou wilt, Nirvana. But that is not the end, for life had a beginning—it hath also an end. And the perfect human ego emerging eventually from Nirvana, that long devachan of all the incarnations, emerges not as Man; it does not live, but It Is, and Its post-viviant existence is a state of Being which no human mind could understand, except inferentially it do so through the knowledge that that state is to Life as the senior to the junior. But ere then is the trial of transfiguration; if we fail, then that is the second death, for it cometh not until the essaying soul be perfect and be ready to leave the pupaceous state of Human Life, to be judged according to (its) works for Him who made it. 

I wish thee to observe also this—that if thou thinkest the judgment day, when according to its works thy soul is arraigned by thy spirit, which is God in thee, if thou thinkest that because that day may be in remote aeons ere it come and, therefore, thou hast ample time to lag, to err, I counsel thee it is a fatal mistake. For if, at the great trial, any man fail it is because, day by day, as the lives were run, he neglected his chances, either by omission or commission. Then shall such suffer the second death, be cast into the lake of fire, in other words, their Spirit will depart from the soul and go unto the Father, while the soul will be gathered into the sum of force—the Fire element—that which is sum of all lesser force forms, out of which springeth life, heat, and vibration. But this will not be until the erring one hath passed from his soul into his spirit. So the second death is not of the sinner; it is the cutting off of all his spoiled work and a chance to begin again, to build better; our Father damneth not His child but only the imperfect work, the sinning soul. In our library, thou canst see a book brought here to Hesper from the Earth, a book which speaketh of the order of the Rosicrux, wherein this supreme Fire is written of. 'Tis also that Fire once called in the Earth the Maxin.

Sohma, son of Mol Lang, to Phylos, the Thibetan

An elephant picks up a basket with its trunk. Set photograph from the film A wise old elephant directed by Colin Campbell (1913)—Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

As all forms of matter are but divine ideas clothed in the One Substance, it is possible to disintegrate the material form but preserve the psychic idea and transport that as other thoughts move, by effort of will, then rehabilitate it in matter. Thus, articles can be brought from the earth here to us. But if you think we can do this by our own bodies you err, for we are the ideas embodied. Truly we can emerge from these bodies and travel in one brief instant from one to any other star. But we cannot have two corporeal bodies at once. If we leave the one we have, we can, by putting it in a cataleptic trance, leave it in fit state to reoccupy upon our return. But if we leave it and make around ourselves a new one, like in all respects to the other, and abide in it, the deserted temple will perish. We could do it, but we have no need to and, consequently, do not. All about you is matter—every breath is matter, differing only from iron in its molecular speed. The air is matter; electricity is matter. I will show you. See, I wish a plate, several plates, cups, saucers, knives, and forks, so I image them (imagio—I create) in the mental or psychic form. Do you see them? Eyes of Earth could not; thou hast for a time Hesperian vision.

Before me was a pile of delicate tableware with the pattern upon each piece of a different kind.

These articles are really only thought forms; no eye unable to perceive a thought could see them. But now look, I gather to myself the higher rate of speed, the extra force which makes air of the One Substance and the force which I leave is just that of the various minerals of which I desire my ware to be made—observe that one plate is a ruby, the real crystal aluminium and another is a pearl—others are of various gemstones—as that cup and saucer—crystal carbon, diamond each one.

Consider this—that we who are illumined by the Spirit of the Creator do little with books or such crude methods of learning, caring only for them as specimens of the work of souls on certain planes. We have no need to read them, no desire—they serve only as texts, for when we would learn, we retire within our souls and listen to the All Knowing Spirit.

Here is an invention by Sohma which will render thy delight greater; I know it is always great where books abound.

She picked up a book from Earth, Shakespeare, and placed it in an instrument which turned the pages automatically and a strong electric light being cast on the visible pages, its beams reflected upon a metallic plate. Unseen wheels revolved within a case and a voice issued from a funnel-shaped mouthpiece. To my pleasure, I heard the reading of page after page of the great English literary gem, in appropriate tones for the various characters. 

Put these over your eyes.

It was Phyris, who gave me a seeming pair of spectacles. They were indeed spectacles which all the fortunes of earth could not obtain. As I put them on, all the shelves of books disappeared and a book being pieced in my hand, as I know from retrospection, for I did not know then, I found myself seemingly amid scenes of most familiar aspect. All the mental pictures conjured up by vivid perusal of Scott's famous poem, The Lady of the Lake, all the voices of its characters became seen and heard, as if I were on the spot where all was said to have transpired. For the time, I was transported by means of those magical eyepieces into the mental world of Walter Scott, which, while he wrote,

Lay around him like a cloud, 

A world he could not see. 

except with the vision of the creative imagination.

When Man was born into the earth from Mars, as he is eventually to be born from the Earth into Hesper, that was the basis of the allegory of Adam and Eve. Thus I have spoken of four of the seven planets of which the human race makes cyclic visits, going from One to Two, to Three, to Four (which is the Earth), to Five (Hesper), to the one to which Man will go after his years on Hesper, and thence to the Seventh or Sabbatic world. These two last, like the two first, are imperceptible to the eyes of man on Earth. Seven are the worlds and seven times the race of Man circles them; three times already hath Man circled the series and arrived en masse at the fourth of the number in this, his fourth round. So, Phylos, I speak of all these many race lives; of Earth, of Hesper, of Mars, and all other human planets, after the ordinary sense. But whosoever wills may go with our Great Master, escaping the Rounds, and of that Life, no words can tell. But such will is rare and there are few that find that Way. Yet here are some of the signs along that Path; hear them, heed, and thus find—me. Use all things as abusing none. Drugs, as drugs; food, as not gluttonously; drinks, as not bibulously; society, as a study; marriage as a Way, but continency as His Highway. The most of our race must go by the lower path, for the Cliffbrow Way is too dizzy; none can walk it, save He holds their hands and there are few that will to let Him, for desires tempt them. But they that refuse that Life now, how shall they find it again? They will not and so shall cease with the world. Being in the middle of its sojourn upon the Earth, the race is half through an experience of life that hath engaged it for a period of time too vast for thy real comprehension.

Phyris, Mol Lang’s daughter, to Phylos, the Thibetan

Aviator Hélène Dutrieu seated in her airplane (circa 1911)—Bain News Service—United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division