Practical Occultism E-Book

Walter Winston Kenilworth

• Herausgeber: Walter Winston Kenilworth
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

CONTENTS PAGE

Apropos the Occult
Practical Occultism
The Philosophical Ideal
The Mental Ideal and Psychic Control
The Emotional Ideal
Psychic Development
The Nervous System
Interaction of Mind and Nerves
The Mind
Psychic Development and Mental Therapeutics
Psychic Suggestions
The Science and Secret of Hypnotism
The Development of Hypnotism
The Methods of Hypnotic Therapeutics
Physio-Psychical Conditions
The Drift of the New Psychology
Clairvoyance
Auras and Influences
Fate and Astrology
Karma
The Ways of Karma
The Spiritual Perception
Business and Concentration
Self-Education
Changing Your Environment
Impressions and Intuitions
Comments on the Philosophy of Good and Evil
Philosophical Reflections on the Nature of Reality
Deeper Meanings
The Divinity of the Soul
The Highest Ideal
The Higher Call and Response
Racial Disturbances and Self-Expression
The Higher Self
Concerning the Eternal Omnipresent Self

Leseprobe

Practical Occultism

WALTER WINSTON KENILWORTH

First digital edition 2016 by Anna Ruggieri

CONTENTS PAGE

Apropos the Occult

Practical Occultism

The Philosophical Ideal

The Mental Ideal and Psychic Control

The Emotional Ideal

Psychic Development

The Nervous System

Interaction of Mind and Nerves

The Mind

Psychic Development and Mental Therapeutics

Psychic Suggestions

The Science and Secret of Hypnotism

The Development of Hypnotism

The Methods of Hypnotic Therapeutics

Physio-Psychical Conditions

The Drift of the New Psychology

Clairvoyance

Auras and Influences

Fate and Astrology

Karma

The Ways of Karma

The Spiritual Perception

Business and Concentration

Self-Education

Changing Your Environment

Impressions and Intuitions

Comments on the Philosophy of Good and Evil

Philosophical Reflections on the Nature of Reality

Deeper Meanings

The Divinity of the Soul

The Highest Ideal

The Higher Call and Response

Racial Disturbances and Self-Expression

The Higher Self

Concerning the Eternal Omnipresent Self

APROPOS THE OCCULT

Practical Occultism

We cannot revert our minds these days, but we hear of the occult. Occultism, in various forms, is becoming in a tremendous and may be dangerous sense the fad of the world. The danger is evident in the important fact that the occult is so glibly handled by those who know it so little. There are those even like a child, ignorantly playing with fire, employ occultism for commercial and selfish purposes, and hourly curse themselves through the law of reflection. They invariably become neurasthenic. Occultism, in no sense, signifies the tinkling of astral bells, the gibberings of earthbound souls, and similar mob-attracting phenomena. The greatest occultist is the greatest child ; the greatest occult vision, the vision of the spirit; the greatest occult deed and rarest, the unselfish deed. Thrice blessed by the Karmic Deities are such who, in unison with the True White Brotherhood, perform the simplest act of kindness, and employ the higher senses and the soul-faculties in a simple, humble spirit for the benefit of the fellowman. The Samana Gotama, the Buddha, told his Arhats and chelas never to perplex themselves concerning four certain truths : one of these truths was relative to the psychological powers which evolve with soul-development. Another great teacher, Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna, instructed his disciples that psychological phenomena, in themselves, had a tendency to lead the seeker after Truth in vaingloriousness from the noble path leading to the goal. It is related that, on a certain occasion, when a disciple said: "Master, I have acquired the power to read the human heart," he replied: "Shame on thee, boy, for following such practices." The learned Swamije Vivekananda, who so ably taught the philosophy of the Vedanta in this country and Europe, and was a disciple of Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna, explained in a simple manner in his "Raja Yoga" those truths of psychology known to India for countless generations. His book was the result of the abnormal curiosity concerning the occult he found rampant in this land. Personally he never countenanced its practices. His religious aim was higher. Yet, it is said of him, when a Chicago millionaire ridiculingly insisted that he display occult powers, he simply looked in the man's eyes. Later the man declared: "In that look, I felt as if my entire life lay like an open book before the swami." India, that land of enchantment and magic, has produced also those sages who advised the people to turn their gaze from occult distractions to the vision of the Self and the Eternal.

The Philosophical Ideal

Practical occultism is a method of realizing the deeper psychological and spiritual life potentially existent within every creature, and which bears a practical significance to the daily experience of ordinary life. Higher truth, vision and life are not only for the great and eventful occasion ; they should as well serve in every moment, even the most commonplace; for it is only as the psychological life becomes the normal every-day life that the path can be trodden and the goal finally reached. Above all, to understand such a practical view of occultism we must get away from the obsolete, perverted conception of occultism which obtained in those earlier days when interpretation of the occult had its first apostolate in the Blavatsky coterie. With the coming of Oriental philosophers and psychologists to this country, and with the efforts of scientific investigators such as Muller, Carus, Rhys-Davids, Oldenburg and others, a higher understanding of the truly occult was given expression. The "sham" side, the element of the ominous and of the mystery-mongering, was divested of its meaning and influence and for it was substituted that religio-psychological definition which is to-day accepted by leading thinkers. Occultism is the modern revelation and symbolism of an ancient and well-guarded system of psychological philosophy involving a knowledge of psychology in comparison with which our modern psychology is relatively less fundamental. Occultism finds its greatest significance in the attainment of self-knowledge, that attainment which was suggested by the Greek of Pre-Socratic times. This self-knowledge is not merely a metaphysical conception of the nature of man. It has nothing to do with philosophy, for it is purely psychological. It is a psychical discovery of the essence and action of the mind and the control and direction of the will in relation to it. The mind is usually considered either as an intangible abstract something having a nominal existence while its real existence is confused with the physical brain. There are even those who think themselves enlightened who persist in such a view. They speak of all thought as inseparably dependent upon the action of the molecules of the brain and the condition of the nerve centers. To them thought is but a secretion of the brain. This opinion is of little importance apart from a philosophical sense, but, in the light of any system of metaphysical speculation, it becomes a dividing line between the materialistic and spiritual thought. The average person accustomed, to viewing the external perceptible universe as the solely existent accords to it a greater reality than to his personal self. The visible and the tangible are alone real to him. The personal self is regarded as a shadowy reflection of the actual, external world. Naturally, his relation in conduct to such a theory is expressive of the material attitude taken. It is necessary to discuss the philosophical side of occultism because this is of singular importance and because it is by it alone that occultism can be understood and put into practice. So long as man believes himself to be identified with the outer world, so long as he believes he is under its provision and control, so long as he disbelieves in the superior reality of himself, so long will he remain ignorant of the occult and unaware of the great blessings and power which such knowledge imparts. In all activity the mind finds that it stands apart from the world of phenomena. The percipient self is distinct from the perceptible world. Occult teaching distinguishes and emphasizes the comparative reality of the two and gives a permanence and reality to the percipient self that it denies to the phenomena perceived by the self. In Western thought the exact opposite position has been maintained. The external sense-world has been considered the sole reality, if not in theory, at least in practice. The soul has received only a quasi-importance. This extremely narrow conception has marked its influence upon Western religious sentiment so that, to the Western mind, the soul, after it has separated from the body, is definable only as something rather vaporous, airy and abstract than real, and of more importance and more vitally existent than the physical body which was its instrument of expression during the physical life. This has made the after-death states of Christian conception so ridiculously physical. The conception drawn in vital contrast to the reality of sense experiences, gives man a purely physical heaven and a purely sense life. This dual conception of reality, of life and soul is of vast occult meaning. If there is more of concreteness to the outward arrangement of things, then the inner soul has a relative existence and importance in comparison with the practical matter-of-fact circumstances we find in the world of physical association. It becomes, as it were, subjected to the more real outward world and is hopelessly controlled by it. Occultism begins by affirming the existence of the soul and asserts that it possesses a deep reality and a permanence of life that cannot be ascribed to anything different from itself. This being true, the soul is free, free to express the latent divinity, omniscience, power and bliss which form its essence and true self. It will be unhampered to inaugurate a spirit of self-control by which, in turn, it will learn, little by little, to control the outward condition of things. In this lies all the Occultism is the word used to designate the evolution of those powers and that attenuation of the moral consciousness which develop with the growth of self-control and self-regulation, which develop with the quest of Truth and the recognition and the assertion of the spiritual and of the superiority of the mind over anything with which it may come into contact. By controlling the lower self by the higher we control the substance and the life-force which composes the lower nature within. By controlling this substance and life-force we control Nature itself, which moves under the same law and is composed of the same substance and force of which the ego itself is composed.

The Mental Ideal and Psychic Control

Since the birth of the human instincts the majority of men have been concerned with what happened outside of them. They have payed attention to the forms, events, circumstances and conditions which come under the heading of phenomenal existence. Rarely did anyone make effort to discover the mind which all these material things affected and which, in turn, had their meaning and existence through its perception. The Upanishads say it is in the nature of the mind to peer out into the world of the senses. It projects itself and the senses upon the phenomenal world and, once this projection has taken place, it becomes a fixed habit. The mind, actuated by external impress, throws itself about the cause of the impress and occupies itself solely with what it has covered, little heeding the fact that it itself is all that it perceives, that what it perceives is only a mode of self-manifestation. It pays no attention to the working processes which produce the manifestation. It does not consider the mind itself. It considers only that which is the symbol of its activity. Wise men, however, seeking self-knowledge and immortality, have turned the mind upon itself and therein found truths from which religion was born and the higher philosophy, from which were born those spiritual perceptions and psychological powers which are having their initiative development in our modern clairvoyance and clairaudience. This is the central fact in all occultism the centralization of the mind upon itself. This can be accomplished, however, only when the mind has changed from that shiftless, crowded condition which accentuates its normal activity and when it has developed a condition of selfpossession, reflection and repose which manifests in concentrated attention. It must be allowed to fix itself upon one thing alone, that of selfdiscovery. Other foreign strains of thought and feeling must be ejected, so that the mind remains absolutely and wholly busied with the task set before it. The soul of the mind is the only illuminative power in the entire universe. It spreads its light over objects and interprets and names the phenomenal universe accordingly as its light casts its varied brilliance and power, and accordingly as its brilliance on some things contrasts with the shadows its brilliance varies. It being the only light, it is only by the mind that the mind can be known, its field of activity explored, its past changed into different characteristics, its present ameliorated, its future specifically determined. When the mind sheds the brilliance that it imparts to the external world on its own inner self, then comes illumination and knowledge which transcends the knowledge of the limited and of the average person busied with what concerns the . body. One of the main factors in the leading to this self-illumination through the illumination of the mind is the fixedness of the mind as to the conviction that it possesses the power of reflection, of throwing itself upon itself. This conviction may come in several ways, but more particularly by the invocation of psychic processes, then, too, by philosophical meditation and discrimination. These latter enable a man to determine what reality is. He denies reality to this and to that until he at last reaches the soul and, finding it immovable, imperishable and deathless, accords reality to it. By the continued practice of such meditation the mind becomes fixed as to the principle of reality. It has made effort to discover reality in the phenomenal universe and discovered that it could not be found in the fluctuations and indecisions and complexities of matter. For the real is changeless, established and simple. The mind searches in its own depth by repeated concentration and finds that it, too, is changeable, susceptible to the variations of mental influences, that it, too, is complex and unestablished. Finally the mind, by insistent self-contemplation, reaches the last path where mentality itself manifests, reaches beyond mentality, beyond itself, and finds that beyond itself is the Purusha, the everlasting soul which has been confused with the mind, even as the mind had confused itself with the material limitations of Nature. There it recognizes reality, and the mind filled to its depth with the idea merges itself with the soul. It drops off into the ocean of universal matter and force all those things which constituted its bodily or mental formation, and attains unto that which is unknowable by finite mind, indescribable and supremely blissful. This contemplation correspondingly involves deep psychological states, states beyond the normal, those supernormal states which are feebly suggested by trance and ecstasy. It requires selfestrangement from all those circumstances and conditions which can, in any way, disturb the peace and equanimity of mind so necessary for concentration of mind. One cannot be busied about the myriad cares of social and business life and, at the same time, centralize his mind upon the finalities of existence. For this reason have the sages retired into the silent places so as to apart from the usual crowded situations of worldly experience. Not only is this applicable to spiritual contemplation, but to contemplation of any kind. Haeckel could not have written his master-works unless he had the peace of his Italian villa to assist in setting aside the distractions of the outer world. Incidentally this contemplation leads to abstraction of the mind, so that it becomes unaware of what may be happening about it. It is so occupied with its ideal that it impersonates it. This contemplation may, not at first, be directed toward the high ideal of self-knowledge and selfliberation. Of course that is the goal, but there are numberless psychological states intermediate. As an example, concentration on any subject whatsoever will, if persisted in, turn the mind into self-reflection and it will find itself on another plane of existence to which its fixedness of thought has carried it. As soon as one becomes too concentrated, he loses sense perception on this plane and finds himself sensibly percipient on another plane, the psychic plane in which reside disincarnate human intelligences. Further abstraction carries the thinker beyond this plane and beyond and beyond until the highest planes in the universe are reached. Such contemplation is the secret of that spiritual ecstasy of which so much is heard in the Roman Catholic Church. Any number of instances are recorded where saints, rapt in devotional contemplation, were translated beyond the normal, human plane into the presence of disincarnate teachers living on incomparably higher planes. We need only mention that paragon of philosophers, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Catherine of Sienna, Saint Paul and others to assure ourselves of these things. Then the Orient furnishes us with any number of examples. Yet, it does not require devotional contemplation to become psychically percipient. The seances of spiritualism afford ample examples, examples which are indisputably true. All spiritualistic "sittings" involve the concentration of those who believe in the phenomena. In assisting this concentrating, singing is frequently employed. Apart from the fact that contemplation shifts consciousness from this to the immediately superior and to higher and higher planes, it also imparts unusual power of self-control and control over the forces in Nature. The methods employed in this contemplation have been synthesized by the Orientals and classified into one grand science—Raja Yoga. But Raja Yoga with all its accomplishments and attainments has its initial basis in ordinary self-control. Each effort at self-control is an effort at control of the mind, for all moral uncertainties proceed from the mind and, placed under submission, places so much of the mind itself under control of the will. That is the goal in the psychic portion of contemplation, the education and supremacy of the will over all mental states. When this has become fixed there will be no vacillation of the mind. What it decides upon that will it accomplish. And its desires will not any longer be whimsical and indeterminate. They will have been educated through the higher understanding which deep thought gives. To the outward senses all things in the universe are composed of solid, concrete substances, but chemistry tells us that even the most impenetrably hardened substances are in a perpetual state of flux. No matter how concrete the substance, it is composed of finer and finer substances until at length the substances become so fine that they are identical with thought and mind-stuff, which is only a highly attenuated form of matter. Now, if the initiate has once learned self-control, has once learned to regulate and govern his thoughts, determining how long they shall endure or if they shall affect him whatever, he has also learned how to control those finer physical substances which are the same as thought. And, controlling the finer states of any object, he controls that object itself. This is the explanation of those miraculous occurrences we read in Biblical and ecclesiastical accounts. The body is under control of the mind and can be regulated to each and every separate muscle and nerve. Call to mind such persons whom you may know who have the faculty of stopping perceptible beating of the heart, or such who control the breath-forces that they can stop breathing, and so forth. All such feats are accomplished by the mind and lend explanation to those more marvelous feats of levitation and materialization which have puzzled the most advanced of our scientists. Furthered contemplation, familiarizing the mind with the psychic plane, develops and specializes the psychic senses. Consciously or unconsciously all psychics employ these higher senses when they see or hear things at a distance. With highly developed souls not only is sight and hearing evolved, but also tactual sense. They can exteriorize the tactual sense, and lift and touch things physically separate from themselves. This has been frequently attested to. The methods of psychic control will also induce these faculties. If one lives on a cereal diet for any length of time, his senses will become evolved into psychic perception. Hypnotism and other psychic states will similarly invoke the unfoldment of these higher senses. These truths are a deviation, however, from the primary purposes of practical occultism which seeks to educate not the psychic as much as the spiritual senses and intuitions. The goal will not be reached until the mind has discarded the vanities of psychic evolution as being of importance in themselves. They are only of importance as they assist the soul in finding its true nature and essence.

The emotional Ideal

It is the emotional ideal which is alone significant. As the soul grows in the attainment of greater power, glory and wisdom, the greater does its sympathy become, the greater its love. It possesses power, but what, it asks, shall it do with power? To use it would mean to emphasize the personal and selfish. That is, to use it out of vain gloriousness of heart. Using it for the best interests is alone a reason for its operation. Love and sympathy are the goal of all practical occultism and psychic effort. And initiating these virtues into our lives we may arrive at the greatest heights of occult development, even if we are ignorant of those particular psychic methods which develop the psychic senses.

PSYCHIC DEVELOPMENT

The literature concerning the occult is saturated with ideas of psychic development, particularly these days when so much attention is directed to the psychic element in human nature. With one or two exceptions, however, the variously presented systems are unintelligible in the light of the higher occultism and the new psychology, and those who are persuaded of these systems are actuated more by a belief than by any direct occult perception. There are many phases of psychic development which, if scientifically furthered, require a deep understanding of the latest developed scientific conclusions, and without this understanding the practitioner of psychic methods is liable to ramifications of psychophysical disorder, for if the development is undertaken in any uncertainty, there is most imminent danger of mental eccentricities, if not insanities. Psychic development, as it is modernly interpreted, is an effort on the part of an individual to widen the area of consciousness and to develop the faculties and intuitions of the subjective mind with its suggestions of indefinite unfoldment of the nature and power and divinity of the soul. The modes by which this development is accomplished are both physical and psychical. They involve the immediate development of those elements in the human body which, when aroused into special activity and into a higher condition, are suitable physical conduits for the expression of the psychic faculties potential even in the most primitive type. Among these elements are included the nervous and respiratory systems, especially as by these two almost the entire activities of the human body are carried on, either in a principal or secondary fashion. The psychical modes involved in the development are the increased specialization of the faculties of normal consciousness, such as the will and the concentrative faculty, which in turn evolve themselves into the higher activities of the supernormal consciousness with its possibilities of intuition and their manifestation. These have been the fundamental requisites of all systems and cults which emphasize the theory of psychic development.

The Nervous System

The cardinal principle, according to the occultists, in the development of the psychic consciousness is the expansion of the nervous system in susceptibility to vibration. They assert that as all of the physical motions, such as light and heat, are conveyed to the mind through the action of the nervous system, so psychic vibrations, which are physical vibrations only acting beyond the normal sensitiveness, can likewise be translated through the nervous system if it be developed and its impressionableness heightened. Then they claim the possibilities of sense perception would be increased, allowing us to see and hear and feel beyond the point of normal sight, hearing and feeling. They term this development accordingly clairvoyance, clairaudience and the clair-intuitional senses. In this light much of the dreamy, vague and imperfect attitudes of occultism are dispensed with, and we understand psychic development to be a scientific conception of the specialization and the indefiniteness of specialization of the normal senses. It might be provisionally added that, in the terminology of the occult sciences, the essence of all sense consciousness is psychic. Our normal sense faculties are really psychic faculties retarded in more perfect expression by the inhibitions of the gross material body. Thus clairvoyance is not something essentially different from ordinary sight; it is simply an elaboration of it, simply a development in the degree. By confusing clairvoyance and ordinary sight as two separate conditions has arisen most of the misunderstanding. If we should do away with the occult expressions and, in their stead, speak of "increased sight," or "psychic sight," it might be preferable. The nervous system, therefore, being the practical, tangible, concrete, physical working basis for the development of potential psychic faculties, every special attention should be given it. In the light of recent scientific speculation the nervous system is a highly complex structure of minor systems of nerve parts. It is a complexity of complex nerve tissues of the most delicate fiber and sensitiveness. Its development has taken unthinkable aeons. In far-distant periods of time, at the very dawn of the evolutionary tendencies toward the formation of the human body, the nervous system was indefinitely simpler, even different in the extreme from what it is at present. The reason for this was that the subconscious mind of the species was still in potential development, and that the automatic activities now definitely carried on by the nervous system in an unconscious manner were for the greater part carried on consciously. In other words, our primordial ancestors were as aware of what was going on at their centers as at their periphery. But in the struggle for existence and in the attack and in self-defence, in its methods of procuring subsistence, and so forth, the consciousness of the animal was gradually and more and more fixedly centered at what was occurring at the outermost tangents of its physical life. In the ages of evolution this condition became more and more decided. Meanwhile the digestive, reproductive, respiratory and circulatory activities which were previously carried on consciously by ancestral life were gradually given over to an automatic development which performed the central duties with as active a diligence as was performed by the animal in full consciousness when, as previously stated, it was equally aware of what was going on both at its periphery and at its center. This automatic development in the unfoldment became what in the higher species is the nervous system. Herein lies the peculiar truth which shall be reviewed in a later article—the fact that psychic development, though not often considered in that sense, has also to do with the projection of normal consciousness into that phase of mind known as the subconscious which regulates the major portion of our body. The Raja and Hatha Yogis of the Orient claim that this can be readily accomplished, and that when once it is accomplished the entire "I" is conscious in the completeness, and that bodily and psychic distresses are forever banished. Mind, body and subjective self are in equal vision before the allevolved consciousness. As the development of the nervous system proceeded through the various stages of inferior human forms, greater and greater coherency and heterogenity of life became visible. Yet the distinction between ourselves and man of the tertiary period is incomparable, so accomplished has been the unfoldment of the activity of the nerves. And the neolithic man, the crude savage, unimpaired by the thousand fold nerve pressure of our heightened civilization, our acquired necessities, stimulated desires and their satieties, possessed only a semi-complex system limiting the sphere of consciousness to the narrower and more primitive forms of living, of thought and of feeling. Gradually in long lapses of time and in increased intricacy of life, the nervous system developed its potentialities into their present state. Each fiber, each nerve part of the system represents a link in the concrete consciousness of the sense and reflex mental experiences of the race's ancestry, whether immediate or in the remote beginnings of life, and in every genesis the totality of these subconscious experiences are hereditarily evolved in a manner as equally mysterious as paternal and ante-paternal characteristics and tendencies are transmitted to immediate descendants. Thus from incipient evolutionary conditions where muscular and structural development were in greater need, the nervous system has gradually unfolded to the present unimaginable delicacy of feeling which we find in the healthyminded hyper-sensitives. But it has also developed with corresponding abnormalities in modes of particular hysteria and neurosis of which the primitive man knew relatively little, if anything. Its receptivity is almost appalling. It may be slightly comprehended in the diagnosis of several psychic diseases, some of which affect the senses in such a method that the scratching of a pencil in the same room sounds to the sufferer like the rumbling of a powerful engine, while the striking of a match seems more dazzling than a flash of lightning. Of course this is the abnormal, the degenerated sensitiveness resultant from physical disorder. But yet this exceptional, misdirected delicacy only strongly suggests that the nervous system can be as favorably developed and to as great an extreme along evolutionary lines as it is possible of unfavorable development in these certain forms of neurasthenia and insanity. Abnormality of any description is simply retrogression or retardation; normality, the standard of evolution, at any given time, while supernormality is only the anticipated appearance of evolutionary forms and faculties. All that the nervous system accomplishes is in the subconscious mind of the race as former conscious, functional experience in times antedating the evolution of quadrupeds, and in times stretching beyond the imagination. The present state of the nerves, though in the normal, operative without the aid of consciousness, is still affected by our consciousness in processes of mental, psychic and bodily relationships, but when psychic progression has taken place, when the supersensorial has been attained, then we can consciously perform what evolution is now doing unconscious to direct sense perception. We will then be able to take up nerve development after a conscious fashion similarly as we did in a conscious though undoubtedly in a more instinctive manner when the race inhabited inferior forms. The same statements are equal of the automatic action which the sympathetic and cerebro-spinal systems carry on. Every automatic action of the body, every automatic reflex motion operating without personal will or consciousness, is builded on masses of sense experiences, inferences and perceptions gained in the infinite past of evolution which have subsided and by innumerable rectilinear repetitions have become self-operative and self-functioning. It can be readily understood that, if the normal consciousness could enter the threshold of the subconscious mind, the automatic actions of the body could be directed and consciously supervised. We could then regulate the beatings of our heart, the degree of respiration and, generally speaking, turn the currents of the body along the line of continuous health and development. Upon the nervous system is based the entire physical man with his sensations and their possibility of responsiveness, with his personality and mental expression. The nervous system, in respectivity, is, therefore, either the limiting or expanding medium by which an Individual's personality is determined in each incarnation, the particular nervous system being the sum-total effect of causes existing in a past life when the soul expressed itself either well or badly. For every variation of experience at the time of death becomes potential in subjectivity until it finds expression in the life following. For if our nervous system, as we daily witness, be modified, developed or degraded by our mental relationship with it, certainly the sum total of a life of such blending must have an important meaning; it will determine just how a future personality of an Individual will find itself. You must remember that in this universe nothing is lost, not an atom of individuality, no matter whether that individuality be greater than human, animal, floral, mineral, or simply chemical. The individuality may clothe itself in a new expression just as we change our wearing apparel, but that change is not a change of essence, but of form, of mode, of degree, of qualitativeness. The importance of the nervous system as the first essential in psychic development may be seen from the foregoing. It is also recognized by the psychologist as the primary requisite and working factor in psychopathic treatment and in psycho-physiological relationships of all character. And in this same light is it also recognized by the psychic adept, the initial steps of whose development is found in the control and purification of the nerve currents. Thus the seeker after psychic progression will find himself advised to direct the entire area of consciousness toward rendering the body a fit conduit for psychic unfoldment by adapting the bundle of nerves upon which the body's wholeness depends, to the immediate dispensation and regulation of the conscious will. If we have once acquired that delicate adjustment of the physical motions of the body, then the most significant step has been taken. The nervous system is the fundamental, biological factor, the most important of all operations in the vertebrate body. All health and disease, all mental and psychic well-being, all individual progression and retrogression of being is developed from its condition. By it we see, hear, feel, taste, smell and are conscious of sense perceptions, sense inferences and their ultimate emotional and intellectual synthesis. It comprises the complete expression of physical consciousness. Now as all psychic development, as has been previously stated, is simply an anticipation of evolution in heightening the sense possibilities and tlelicacy of nerve structure, the immediate and initiatory step to take is to familiarize the mind with the physiology of the nervous system and its operations and influences on the mental, emotional and psychic element in human nature. When this is performed, the second condition is to learn the methods and the [...]