On this matter William Judge wrote the following:
IMAGINATION AND OCCULT PHENOMENA
The faculty of imagination has been
reduced to a very low-level by modern western theorisers upon mental
philosophy. It is "only the making of pictures, day-dreaming, fancy, and
the like": thus they have said about one of the noblest faculties in man.
In Occultism it is well known to be of the highest importance that one should
have the imagination under such control as to be able to make a picture of
anything at any time, and if this power has not been so trained the possession
of other sorts of knowledge will not enable one to perform certain classes of
occult phenomena.
Those who have read Mr. Sinnett's Occult
World will have noticed two or three classes of phenomena performed by H.
P. Blavatsky and her unseen friends, and those who have investigated
spiritualism will know that in the latter have been many cases of similar
phenomena done by so-called "controls". Others who made no such
investigations have, however, on their own account seen many things done by
forces not mechanical but of a nature which must be called occult or psychical.
In spiritualism, and by the Adepts like H.P. Blavatsky and others, one thing
has excited great interest, that is the precipitating on to paper or other
substances of messages out of the air, as it were, and without any visible
contact between the sender of the message and the precipitated letters
themselves.
This has often occurred in seances with certain good
mediums, and the late Stainton Moses wrote in a letter which I saw many years
ago that there had come under his hand certain messages precipitated out of the
air. But in these cases the medium never knows what is to be precipitated,
cannot control it at will, is in fact wholly ignorant of the whole matter and
the forces operating and how they operate. The elemental forces make the
pictures through which the messages are precipitated, and as the inner nature
of the medium is abnormally developed, acting subconsciously to the outer man,
the whole process is involved in darkness so far as spiritualism is concerned.
But not so with trained minds or wills such as possessed by Madame Blavatsky
and all like her in the history of the past, including the still living Adepts.
The Adepts who consciously send
messages from a distance or who impress thoughts or sentences on the mind of
another at a distance are able to do so because their imagination has been
fully trained.
The wonderworker of the East who makes
you see a snake where there is none, or who causes you to see a number of
things done in your presence which were not done in fact, is able to so impress
you with his trained imagination, which, indeed, is also often in his case an
inheritance, and when inherited it is all the stronger when trained and the
easier to put into training. In the same way but to a much smaller degree the
modern western hypnotizer influences his subject by the picture he makes with
his imagination in those cases where he causes the patient to see or not to see
at will, and if that power were stronger in the West than it is, the
experiments of the hypnotizing schools would be more wonderful than they are.
Take the case of precipitation. In
the first place, all the minerals, metals, and colored substances any one could
wish for use are in the air about us held in suspension. This has long been
proved so as to need no argument now. If there be any chemical process known
that will act on these substances, they can be taken from the air and thrown
down before us into visibility. This visibility only results from the closer
packing together of the atoms of matter composing the mass.
Modern science has
only a few processes for thus precipitating, but while they do not go to the
length of precipitating in letters or figures they do show that such
precipitation is possible. Occultism has a knowledge of the secret chemistry of
nature whereby those carbons and other substances in the air may be drawn out
at will either separately or mixed. The next step is to find for these
substances so to be packed together a mold or matrix through which they may be
poured, as it were, and, being thus closely packed, become visible. Is there
such a mold or matrix?
The matrix is made by means of the
trained imagination. It must have been trained either now or in some other life
before this, or no picture can be precipitated nor message impressed on the
brain to which it is directed. The imagination makes a picture of each word of
each letter of every line and part of line in every letter and word, and having
made that picture it is held there by the will and the imagination acting
together for such a length of time as is needed to permit the carbons or other
substances to be strained down through this matrix and appear upon the paper.
This is exactly the way in which the Masters of H.P.B. sent those messages
which they did not write with their hands, for while they precipitated some
they wrote some others and sent them by way of the ordinary mail.
The explanation is the same for the
sending of a message by words which the receiver is to hear. The image of the
person who is to be the recipient has to be made and held in place; that is, in
each of these cases you have to become as it were a magic lantern or a camera
obscura, and if the image of the letters or if the image of the person be let
go or blurred, all the other forces will shoot wide of the mark and naught be
accomplished. If a picture were made of the ineffectual thoughts of the
generality of people, it would show little lines of force flying out from their
brains and instead of reaching their destination falling to the earth just a
few feet away from the person who is thus throwing them out.
But, of course, in the case of
sending and precipitating on to paper a message from a distance, a good many
other matters have to be well known to the operator. For instance, the inner as
well as the outer resistance of all substances have to be known, for if not
calculated they will throw the aim out, just as the billiard ball may be
deflected if the resistance of the cushion is variable and not known to be so
by the player. And again, if a living human being has to be used as the other
battery at this end of the line, all the resistances and also all the play of
that person's thought have to be known or a complete failure may result.
This
will show those who inquire about phenomena, or who at a jump wish to be adepts
or to do as the adepts can do, what a task it is they would undertake. But
there is still another consideration, and that is that inasmuch as all these
phenomena have to do with the very subtle and powerful planes of matter it must
follow that each time a phenomenon is done the forces of those planes are
roused to action, and reaction will be equal to action in these things just as
on the ordinary plane.
An illustration will go to make
clear what has been said of the imagination. One day H. P. Blavatsky said she
would show me precipitation in the very act. She looked fixedly at a certain
smooth piece of wood and slowly on it came out letters which at last made a
long sentence. It formed before my eyes and I could see the matter condense and
pack itself on the surface. All the letters were like such as she would make
with her hand, just because she was making the image in her brain and of course
followed her own peculiarities. But in the middle, one of the letters was
blurred and, as it were, all split into a mass of mere color as to part of the
letter.
"Now here," she said,
"I purposely wandered in the image, so that you could see the effect. As I
let my attention go, the falling substance had no matrix and naturally fell on
the wood any way and without shape."
A friend on whom I could rely told
me that he once asked a wonderworker in the East what he did when he made a
snake come and go before the audience, and he replied that he had been taught
from very early youth to see a snake before him and that it was so strong an
image everyone there had to see it.
- "But," said my
friend, "how do you tell it from a real snake?"
The man replied that he was able to
see through it, so that for him it looked like the shadow of a snake, but that
if he had not done it so often he might be frightened by it himself. The
process he would not give, as he claimed it was a secret in his family. But
anyone who has made the trial knows that it is possible to train the
imagination so as to at will bring up before the mind the outlines of any
object whatsoever, and that after a time the mind seems to construct the image
as if it were a tangible thing.
But there is a wide difference
between this and the kind of imagination which is solely connected with some
desire or fancy. In the latter case the desire and the image and the mind with
all its powers are mixed together, and the result, instead of being a training
of the image-making power, is to bring on a decay of that power and only a
continual flying to the image of the thing desired. This is the sort of use of
the power of the imagination which has lowered it in the eyes of the modern
scholar, but even that result would not have come about if the scholars had a
knowledge of the real inner nature of man.
(Path, December 1892, p.289-293; Echoes I, p.307-311)
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