XVIII
We were received at the guarded door of the fortress by a porter, whoseemed to be well acquainted with Amroth. Within, it was a big, bareplace, with, stone-arched cloisters and corridors, more like a monasterythan a castle. Amroth led me briskly along the passages, and took meinto a large room very sparely furnished, where an elderly man satwriting at a table with his back to the light. He rose when we entered,and I had a sudden sense that I was coming to school again, as indeed Iwas. Amroth greeted him with a mixture of freedom and respect, as awell-loved pupil might treat an old schoolmaster. The man himself wastall and upright, and serious-looking, but for a twinkle of humour thatlurked in his eye; yet I felt he was one who expected to be obeyed. Hetook Amroth into the embrasure of a window, and talked with him in lowtones. Then he came back to me and asked me a few questions of which Idid not then understand the drift--but it seemed a kind of very informalexamination. Then he made us a little bow of dismissal, and sat down atonce to his writing without giving us another look. Amroth took me out,and led me up many stone stairs, along whitewashed passages, with narrowwindows looking out on the plain, to a small cell or room near the topof the castle. It was very austerely furnished, but it had a little doorwhich took us out on the leads, and I then saw what a very large placethe fortress was, consisting of several courts with a great centraltower.
"Where on earth have we got to now?" I said.
"Nowhere '_on earth_,'" said Amroth. "You are at school again, and youwill find it very interesting, I hope and expect, but it will be hardwork. I will tell you plainly that you are lucky to be here, because ifyou do well, you will have the best sort of work to do."
"But what am I to do, and where am I to go?" I said. "I feel like a newboy, with all sorts of dreadful rules in the background."
"That will all be explained to you," said Amroth. "And now good-bye forthe present. Let me hear a good report of you," he added, with aparental air, "when I come again. What would not we older fellows giveto be back here!" he added with a half-mocking smile. "Let me tell you,my boy, you have got the happiest time of your life ahead of you. Well,be a credit to your friends!"
He gave me a nod and was gone. I stood for a little looking out ratherdesolately into the plain. There came a brisk tap at my door, and a manentered. He greeted me pleasantly, gave me a few directions, and Igathered that he was one of the instructors. "You will find it hardwork," he said; "we do not waste time here. But I gather that you havehad rather a troublesome ascent, so you can rest a little. When you arerequired, you will be summoned."
When he left me, I still felt very weary, and lay down on a little couchin the room, falling presently asleep. I was roused by the entry of ayoung man, who said he had been sent to fetch me: we went down along thepassages, while he talked pleasantly in low tones about the arrangementsof the place. As we went along the passages, the doors of the cells keptopening, and we were joined by young men and women, who spoke to me orto each other, but all in the same subdued voices, till at last weentered a big, bare, arched room, lit by high windows, with rows ofseats, and a great desk or pulpit at the end. I looked round me in greatcuriosity. There must have been several hundred people present, sittingin rows. There was a murmur of talk over the hall, till a bell suddenlysounded somewhere in the castle, a door opened, a man stepped quicklyinto the pulpit, and began to speak in a very clear and distinct tone.
The discourse--and all the other discourses to which I listened in theplace--was of a psychological kind, dealing entirely with the relationsof human beings with each other, and the effect and interplay ofemotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplestphraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly beenobscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selectiveinstinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, theattractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of classand caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the bodyon the soul and of the soul on the body. It came upon me with a shock ofsurprise that while these things are the most serious realities in theworld, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, littleattempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot hereenter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would beunintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at allapprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of allthe passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls.These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much of our timewas spent in discussing together or working out in solitude the detailsof psychological problems, which we did with the exactness of chemicalanalysis.
What I soon came to understand was that the whole of psychology is ruledby the most exact and immutable laws, in which there is nothingfortuitous or abnormal, and that the exact course of an emotion can bepredicted with perfect certainty if only all the data are known.
One of the most striking parts of these discourses was the fact thatthey were accompanied by illustrations. I will describe the first ofthese which I saw. The lecturer stopped for an instant and held up hishand. In the middle of one of the side-walls of the room was a greatshallow arched recess. In this recess there suddenly appeared a scene,not as though it were cast by a lantern on the wall, but as if the wallwere broken down, and showed a room beyond.
In the room, a comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, ahusband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserabledispute about some very trivial matter. The wife was shrill andprovocative, the husband curt and contemptuous. They were obviously notreally concerned about the subject they were discussing--it only formeda ground for disagreeable personalities. Presently the man went out,saying harshly that it was very pleasant to come back from his work, dayafter day, to these scenes; to which the woman fiercely retorted that itwas all his own fault; and when he was gone, she sat for a timemechanically knitting, with the tears trickling down her cheeks, andevery now and then glancing at the door. After which, with greatsecrecy, she helped herself to some spirits which she took from acupboard.
The scene was one of the most vulgar and debasing that can be describedor imagined; and it was curious to watch the expressions on the faces ofmy companions. They wore the air of trained doctors or nurses, watchingsome disagreeable symptoms, with a sort of trained and serenecompassion, neither shocked nor grieved. Then the situation wasdiscussed and analysed, and various suggestions were made which weredealt with by the lecturer, in a way which showed me that there was muchfor us to master and to understand.
There were many other such illustrations given. They were, I discovered,by no means imaginary cases, projected into our minds by a kind ofmental suggestion, but actual things happening upon earth. We saw manystrange scenes of tragedy, we had a glimpse of lunatic asylums andhospitals, of murder even, and of evil passions of anger and lust. Wesaw scenes of grief and terror; and, stranger still, we saw many thingsthat were being enacted not on the earth, but upon other planets, wherethe forms and appearances of the creatures concerned were fantastic andstrange enough, but where the motive and the emotion were all perfectlyclear. At times, too, we saw scenes that were beautiful and touching,high and heroic beyond words. These seemed to come rather by contrastand for encouragement; for the work was distinctly pathological, anddealt with the disasters and complications of emotions, as a rule,rather than with their glories and radiances. But it was all incrediblyabsorbing and interesting, though what it was to lead up to I did notquite discern. What struck me was the concentration of effort upon humanemotion, and still more the fact that other hopes and passions, such asambition and acquisitiveness, as well as all material and economicproblems, were treated as infinitely insignificant, as just theframework of human life, only interesting in so far as the baser andmeaner elements of circumstance can just influence, refining orcoarsening, the highest traits of character and emotion.
We were given special cases, too, to study and consider, and here I hadthe first inkling o
f how far it is possible for disembodied spirits tobe in touch with those who are still in the body.
As far as I can see, no direct intellectual contact is possible, exceptunder certain circumstances. There is, of course, a great deal ofthought-vibration taking place in the world, to which the best analogyis wireless telegraphy. There exists an all-pervading emotional medium,into which every thought that is tinged with emotion sends a ripple.Thoughts which are concerned with personal emotion send the firmestripple into this medium, and all other thoughts and passions affect it,not in proportion to the intensity of the thought, but to the nature ofthe thought. The scale is perfectly determined and quite unalterable;thus a thought, however strong and intense, which is concerned withwealth or with personal ambition sends a very little ripple into themedium, while a thought of affection is very noticeable indeed, and morenoticeable in proportion as it is purer and less concerned with any kindof bodily passion. Thus, strange to say, the thought of a father for achild is a stronger thought than that of a lover for his beloved. I donot know the exact scale of force, which is as exact as that of chemicalvalues--and of course such emotions are apt to be complex and intricate;but the purer and simpler the thought is, the greater is its force.Perhaps the prayers that one prays for those whom one loves send thestrongest ripple of all. If it happens that two of these ripples ofpersonal emotion are closely similar, a reflex action takes place; andthus is explained the phenomenon which often takes place, the suddensense of a friend's personality, if that friend, in absence, writes onea letter, or bends his mind intently upon one. It also explains the wayin which some national or cosmic emotion suddenly gains simultaneousforce, and vibrates in thousands of minds at the same time.
The body, by its joys and sufferings alike, offers a great obstructionto these emotional waves. In the land of spirits, as I have indicated,an intention of congenial wills gives an instantaneous perception; butthis seems impossible between an embodied spirit and a disembodiedspirit. The only communication which seems possible is that of a vagueemotion; and it seems quite impossible for any sort of intellectual ideato be directly communicated by a disembodied spirit to an embodiedspirit.
On the other hand, the intellectual processes of an embodied spirit areto a certain extent perceptible by a disembodied spirit; but there is acondition to this, and that is that some emotional sympathy must haveexisted between the two on earth. If there is no such sympathy, then thebody is an absolute bar.
I could look into the mind of Amroth and see his thought take shape, asI could look into a stream, and see a fish dart from a covert of weed.But with those still in the body it is different. And I will thereforeproceed to describe a single experience which will illustrate my point.
I was ordered to study the case of a former friend of my own who wasstill living upon earth. Nothing was told me about him, but, sitting inmy cell, I put myself into communication with him upon earth. He hadbeen a contemporary of mine at the university, and we had many interestsin common. He was a lawyer; we did not very often meet, but when we didmeet it was always with great cordiality and sympathy. I now found himill and suffering from overwork, in a very melancholy state. When Ifirst visited him, he was sitting alone, in the garden of a littlehouse in the country. I could see that he was ill and sad; he was makingpretence to read, but the book was wholly disregarded.
When I attempted to put my mind into communication with his, it was verydifficult to see the drift of his thoughts. I was like a man walking ina dense fog, who can just discern at intervals recognisable objects asthey come within his view; but there was no general prospect and nodistance. His mind seemed a confused current of distressing memories;but there came a time when his thought dwelt for a moment upon myself;he wished that I could be with him, that he might speak of some of hisperplexities. In that instant, the whole grew clearer, and little bylittle I was enabled to trace the drift of his thoughts. I became awarethat though he was indeed suffering from overwork, yet that his enforcedrest only removed the mental distraction of his work, and left his mindfree to revive a whole troop of painful thoughts. He had been a man ofstrong personal ambitions, and had for twenty years been endeavouring torealise them. Now a sense of the comparative worthlessness of his aimshad come upon him. He had despised and slighted other emotions; and hismind had in consequence drifted away like a boat into a bitter andbarren sea. He was a lonely man, and he was feeling that he had done illin not multiplying human emotions and relations. He reflected much uponthe way in which he had neglected and despised his home affections,while he had formed no ties of his own. Now, too, his career seemed tohim at an end, and he had nothing to look forward to but a maimed andinvalided life of solitude and failure. Many of his thoughts I could notdiscern at all--the mist, so to speak, involved them--while many wereobscure to me. When he thought about scenes and people whom I had neverknown, the thought loomed shapeless and dark; but when he thought, as heoften did, about his school and university days, and about his homecircle, all of which scenes were familiar to me, I could read his mindwith perfect clearness. At the bottom of all lay a sense of deepdisappointment and resentment. He doubted the justice of God, and blamedhimself but little for his miseries. It was a sad experience at first,because he was falling day by day into more hopeless dejection; while herefused the pathetic overtures of sympathy which the relations in whosehouse he was--a married sister with her husband and children--offeredhim. He bore himself with courtesy and consideration, but he was so muchworn with fatigue and despondency that he could not take any initiative.But I became aware very gradually that he was learning the true worthand proportion of things--and the months which passed so heavily for himbrought him perceptions of the value of which he was hardly aware. Letme say that it was now that the incredible swiftness of time in thespiritual region made itself felt for me. A month of his sufferingspassed to me, contemplating them, like an hour.
I found to my surprise that his thoughts of myself were becoming morefrequent; and one day when he was turning over some old letters andreading a number of mine, it seemed to me that his spirit almostrecognised my presence in the words which came to his lips, "It seemslike yesterday!" I then became blessedly aware that I was actuallyhelping him, and that the very intentness of my own thought wasquickening his own.
I discussed the whole case very closely and carefully with one of ourinstructors, who set me right on several points and made the whole stateof things clear to me.
I said to him, "One thing bewilders me; it would almost seem that aman's work upon earth constituted an interruption and a distraction fromspiritual influences. It cannot surely be that people in the body shouldavoid employment, and give themselves to secluded meditation? If thesoul grows fast in sadness and despondency, it would seem that oneshould almost have courted sorrow on earth; and yet I cannot believethat to be the case."
"No," he said, "it is not the case; the body has here to be considered.No amount of active exertion clouds the eye of the soul, if only themotive of it is pure and lofty, and if the soul is only set patientlyand faithfully upon the true end of life. The body indeed requires duelabour and exercise, and the soul can gain health and clearness thereby.But what does cloud the spirit is if it gives itself wholly up to narrowpersonal aims and ambitions, and uses friendship and love as mererecreations and amusements. Sickness and sorrow are not, as we used tothink, fortuitous things; they are given to those who need them, as highand rich opportunities; and they come as truly blessed gifts, when theybreak a man's thought off from material things, and make him fall backupon the loving affections and relations of life. When one re-entersthe world, a woman's life is sometimes granted to a spirit, because awoman by circumstance and temperament is less tempted to decline uponmeaner ambitions and interests than a man; but work and activity are nohindrances to spiritual growth, so long as the soul waits upon God, anddesires to learn the lessons of life, rather than to enforce its ownconclusions upon others."
"Yes," I said, "I see that. What, then, is the great hind
rance in thelife of men?"
"Authority," he said, "whether given or taken. That is by far thegreatest difficulty that a soul has to contend with. The knowledge ofthe true conditions of life is so minute and yet so imperfect, when oneis in the body, that the man or woman who thinks it a duty todisapprove, to correct, to censure, is in the gravest danger. In thefirst place it is so impossible to disentangle the true conditions ofany human life; to know how far those failures which are lightly calledsins are inherited instincts of the body, or the manifestation ofimmaturity of spirit. Complacency, hard righteousness, spiritualsecurity, severe judgments, are the real foes of spiritual growth; andif a man is in a position to enforce his influence and his will uponothers, he can fall very low indeed, and suspend his own growth for avery long and sad period. It is not the criticism or the analysis ofothers which hurts the soul, so long as it remains modest and sincereand conscious of its own weaknesses. It is when we indulge in secure orcompassionate comparisons of our own superior worth that we gobackwards."
This was but one of the many cases which I had to investigate. I do notsay that this is the work of all spirits in the other world--it is notso; there are many kinds of work and occupation. This was the one nowallotted to me; but I did become aware of the intense and lovinginterest which is bent upon the souls of the living by those who aredeparted. There is not a soul alive who is not being thus watched andtended, and helped, as far as help is possible; for no one is everforced or compelled or frightened into truth, only drawn and wooed bylove and care.
I must say a word, too, of the great and noble friendships which Iformed at this period of my existence. We were not free to make many ofthese at a time. Love seems to be the one thing that demands an entireconcentration, and though in the world of spirits I became aware thatone could be conscious of many of the thoughts of those about mesimultaneously, yet the emotion of love, in the earlier stages, issingle and exclusive.
I will speak of two only. There were a young man and a young woman whowere much associated with me at that time, whom I will call Philip andAnna. Philip was one of the most beautiful of all the spirits I evercame near. His last life upon earth had been a long one, and he had beena teacher. I used to tell him that I wished I had been under him as apupil, to which he replied, laughing, that I should have found him veryuninteresting. He said to me once that the way in which he had alwaysdistinguished the two kinds of teachers on earth had been by whetherthey were always anxious to teach new books and new subjects, or went oncontentedly with the old. "The pleasure," he said, "was in the teaching,in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what theyknew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I likedit; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheelsturning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change theirsubjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interestfirst, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it." Thecharm of Philip was the charm of extreme ingenuousness combined withdaring insight. He never seemed to be shocked or distressed by anything.He said one day, "It was not the sensual or the timid or theill-tempered boys who used to make me anxious. Those were definitefaults and brought definite punishment; it was the hard-hearted,virtuous, ambitious, sensible boys, who were good-humoured andrespectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as aterrier shakes a rat--but there was nothing to get hold of. They were acredit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yetthey went downhill with every success."
Anna was a woman of singularly unselfish and courageous temperament. Shehad been, in the course of her last life upon earth, a hospital nurse;and she used to speak gratefully of the long periods when she wasnursing some anxious case, when she had interchanged day and night,sleeping when the world was awake, and sitting with a book or needleworkby the sick-bed, through the long darkness. "People used to say to methat it must be so depressing; but those were my happiest hours, as thedark brightened into dawn, when many of the strange mysteries of lifeand pain and death gave up their secrets to me. But of course," sheadded with a smile, "it was all very dim to me. I felt the truth ratherthan saw it; and it is a great joy to me to perceive now what washappening, and how the sad, bewildered hours of pain and misery leavetheir blessed marks upon the soul, like the tools of the graver on thegem. If only we could learn to plan a little less and to believe alittle more, how much simpler it would all be!"
These two became very dear to me, and I learnt much heavenly wisdom fromthem in long, quiet conferences, where we spoke frankly of all we hadfelt and known.