the powers and properties of a disembodied spirit, and can speak by psychological impression to another mind far or near. Says the northern Seer, "The speech of an angel or of a spirit with man is heard as sonorously as the speech of one man with another, yet it is not heard by others who stand near, but by the man himself alone. The reason is that the speech of an angel or of a spirit flows first into the man's thought, and by an internal way into his organ of hearing, and thus actuates it from within; whereas the speech of man flows first into the air, and by an external way into his organ of hearing, which it actuates from without. Hence it is evident that the speech of an angel and of a spirit with man is heard in man, and since it equally affects the organs of hearing, that it is equally sonorous." It was one of the arcane principles of the archaic wisdomreligion and science of man, that is now lost to the world at large, that it is possible for the intellectual soul to free itself from the trammels of the body, and emancipate itself from all material restraints and limitations. It then acts above time and space, and can transport itself, with all its senses, to any part of the world, guided and governed by the inner divine pneuma or spirit. It can make itself felt and seen by persons a hundred miles away, for it is where it thinks to be. In the tenth book of the Pymander (power of thought divine) of Hermes, it is said: "Command thy soul to go to India, and sooner than thou canst bid it, it will be there." "Bid it likewise pass over the ocean, and suddenly it will be there." "Command it to fly into heaven, and it will need no wings, neither shall anything hinder it, not the fire of the sun, nor the æther, nor the turning of the spheres; not the bodies of any of the stars;-but, cutting through all, it will fly up to the last and furtherest body." If any one should ask, “What becomes of the body, while the soul is absent from it?" the answer is that its life is I continued and all the vital processes are carried on by the Universal Soul, of which the individual soul is a part. This separation of the soul, and making it independent of the body and of the laws of matter, can be done when the person is in a perfectly normal state, without a trance, and only in a state of mental abstraction, which would not be noticed by others; or, as Swedenborg calls it, “in a state of perfect wakefulness." It would at first thought appear, that to free the soul from the body was the last thing reached, in our spiritual development, the very summit of human attainment. But so far is this from being the case, that it is viewed in the Hermetic philosophy as the first step to a true spiritual elevation, and the evolution of the deific powers of man. It is to be observed, as Thomas Taylor has remarked in the preface to his translation of the "Phædo" of Plato, that to separate the soul from the body, that is, to set it free from the limitations of the bodily senses, and disencumber it of all gross matter, is one thing, and to separate the body from the soul is quite another thing. The one is a philosophical state, the other is what men call natural death. To be able to emancipate the soul, and free it from all dependence upon organic conditions, is necessary to the highest form of knowledge and spiritual Plato says in the "Phædo": "It is demonstrated to power. us, that if we are designed to know anything purely, we must be liberated from the body, and behold things with the soul itself." When we do this we become inhabitants of an interior realm, the “intelligible world," the home of all knowledge, and see things in idea alone, and consequently in their reality. Freed from the earthly body, the soul appears in that world in a form or body that is composed of the pure substance of that world. "For according to the arcana of the Platonic philosophy," says Thomas Taylor, "between an ethereal body, which is simple and immaterial, and is the eternal connate vehicle of the soul, and a terrene (or earthy) body, which is material and composite, there is an aërial body, which is material indeed (like the nerven geist of Kerner, and the nephesh of the Kabala), but simple, and of a more extended duration. And in this body the unpurified soul dwells for a long time after its exit from hence, till this pneumatic (or aërial) vehicle being dissolved, it is again invested with a composite body; while, on the contrary, the purified soul immediately ascends into the celestial regions with its ethereal vehicle alone." Plato, in the "Cratylus," a treatise on the "rectitude of names," says that the body (σῶμα) of man was so named because it is the sepulchre (σnμa) of the soul. And it was the object of the Eleusinian Mysteries to show that union with the body and bondage to matter and sense, was death. This was taught also by Jesus and Paul. To free the soul from its material thraldom, and convince it of the illusory nature of matter, is the true anastasis, or resurrection of the soul from the dead. This is the resurrection to which Paul refers, and which he sought to attain. (Phil. iii. 11-13.) It was the aim of Buddhism, and also of the ancient Mysteries, to lead the initiate to this. To this Jesus refers when he says, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John viii. 32.) It is the state of ecstasy of Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and which they considered necessary to the attainment of the most exalted spiritual knowledge and power. It is a state in which the ordinary functions of the senses are suspended, and the pure mind is freed from their dominion. Says the Kabala, "Come and see when the soul reaches that place which is called the Treasury of Life; she enjoys a bright and luminous mirror, which receives its light from the highest heavens." ("Sohar," I. 65, b.) In closing this section, I would only say that the Rosicrucians claimed to be able to know all that was ever known in any part of the world and in every age; for all that was ever known still exists, indelibly recorded on the tablet of the Universal Mind, and our individual mind may be an inlet to it. All that was ever known exists in the "intelligible world," the world of ideas; and into this realm we rise when we learn to forget the body and become spirit. The action of the intellectual soul at a distance, and an internal perception of persons and things, which is not dependent upon the external organs of sense, which is sometimes witnessed in the present day, is no new phenomenon in psychological science. It was experienced by Paul, and hence belongs to Christianity, and is nothing foreign and hostile to it. He says to the Christians at Colosse, "Though I am absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ." (Col. ii. 5.) To the same effect he speaks to the Corinthian Church. (1 Cor. v. 3.) And also the remarkable experience recorded in 2 Cor. xii. 1-5. These states were only a liberation of the soul from the trammels of matter, and not a projection of the soul out of the body, as some have called it, for that would imply that the soul was in the body like a bird in a cage. This is not the real truth, but an illusion as much as the appearance of our image in a mirror, which is not in the glass at all, but in our sensorium, which is the mind on the plane of sense. CHAPTER XIV. EXECUTING JUDGMENT UPON OURSELVES, OR IN THOUGHT To think and to exist are one and the same. I think and I am are identical expressions. To think rightly is to be well and happy. The first thing to be done in curing ourselves of disease by the ideal or psychological method, is to separate, in thought, our inner conscious self, the immortal divine Ego, from the disease, placing the malady outside our real being, and viewing it as no part of ourselves, but as something foreign to us. This, in the expressive language of Scripture, is executing a judgment, or an act of separation, as the word means, upon ourselves. We learn to distinguish between ourselves and the disease. Of disease and pain, which seem to be the common lot of mankind, Fichte very truly says: "They can reach only the nature with which I am in a wonderful manner united, not what is properly myself, the being exalted above nature." ("Destination of Man," p. 125.) Supposing I had a wart upon my hand; I should ask myself the question, is that wart any necessary part even of my body? I am certain that it is not, but is rather a superfluous and needless excrescence. But I am equally conscious that it is no part of my inner self, -what Plato, and Paul, and Swedenborg call the inward man. The same is true of disease, which is always a deformity, or a deviation from the true idea of my being. It is no part of my real self. I disown and renounce all connection with it, and relationship to it. If I can maintain this attitude of thought toward it, the malady will disappear as certainly as a cloudy |