Part 37 (1/2)

You see, we have all imbibed traditional ideas with our mother's milk, however much our intellects may have modified them. Instinct is stronger than intellect, because it is more elemental.

The first thing that struck me was that truths which are latent on earth are made manifest here.

(Here comes an interpolation.)

You can take my words so easily that we must guard against wasting time in mere verbosity. I must teach you to condense more. We must strike some sort of balance between my brevity and your amplification. At present it is as well to get the instrument into proper working order before worrying too much over these details.

(He then resumed.)

It is as if you turned the old earth garment inside out, and saw the very fabric of it, which the earth looms have hitherto concealed by the warp and woof of the manufactured article.

For instance, you are told on earth that you are making your own future conditions by right or wrong thinking. _Here_ you see the absolute, _material_ results of right and wrong thinking, just as if you were looking at two different patterns, woven by two different workers. I said material results, because matter here is just as real as it was on earth, and just as illusory, in one sense, in both spheres. Your matter is unreal to us. Our matter is unreal to you. The truth is, both are shadows cast by an antecedent reality on the Screens of the Universe.

The screens are the school-houses through which humanity learns its lessons.

Don't be worried! There is no real difficulty in using your hand; it is only trying to compromise between your redundancy and my brevity.

Earth is like a gallery of sculpture. (Note by E. K. B.--This simile had flashed through my brain, and H. D. at once said: ”Yes, that is very good; you started it, and I pick it up and apply it.”) All the figures and groups are perfected and complete in their marble or bronze or terra-cotta, as the case may be.

Some groups or figures are n.o.ble, others mediocre, others again may be sensual and degrading, but they have one quality in common--for good or bad, they are _ready made_.

Now go into the sculptor's studio, having studied well in the great sculpture galleries of the world. You go to the studio, we will suppose, as a pupil. He puts a lump of clay into your hands, and for the first time you are invited to model your own statues and figures, to embody your own ideas in this clay, which corresponds to thought stuff _here_.

You are even made to understand that your houses will only be worthily furnished by the work of your own hands. _Here_ it is the work of your own hearts, of your loving or unloving thoughts.

So the first lesson we learn over here is that THOUGHT is not only Creative Power, as you are often told on earth, but it is also the very stuff out of which the creation must be moulded. It is, in very truth, the clay of the modeller.

Shakespeare said truly enough ”We are such stuff as dreams are made of,”

but he was referring to our embodied selves.

The difference between the two worlds seems to me, so far as I have arrived, as the difference between the pupil in the sculpture gallery and in the experimental studio. The chief part of the earth modelling is ready made--made by the racial thought stuff and the racial manipulation of it.

_Here_, for the first time, we must turn to and take a hand in the work ourselves. It would not be possible to give such individual power in any lower sphere than this, for it would be misused, and would lead to terrible tragedies.

You see some slight hints of this in what is called Black Magic--the wilful and intentional throwing of evil conditions on other people, making hard and cruel images of them in the mind, and so forth. But all that is as child's play to what would happen if the absolute clay were put into their hands, as it is here.

It is the difference between thinking out an ugly picture; and painting it and hanging it up in a gallery; for we have objectivity here as with you. Naturally what comes into objective existence has more power than what remains latent. The latter can only influence exceptionally sensitive souls, and that to a comparatively small extent, whereas the former, here as with you, has a much farther range of influence.

So this sort of gunpowder is not given to us until we are old enough to know better than to burn our fingers with it, in trying to make fireworks!

At the same time, as all stages of evolution overlap, it is inevitable that some hint of these possibilities should be already in your world.

Woe be to those who misuse them!

You have taken enough for this morning. H. D.

IV

The friend I have called Mr Harry Denton, during his psychic researches, came, as many others have done, very strongly under the influence of ”Imperator,” the chief of the Stainton Moses controls.