Part 2

Pity those who have died even tranquilly during the last eight months. They have passed through a region of torment--those who have passed through. Many have remained below, spun round and round in the whirlpool with those who died by war.

Had I not a great purpose, and the conviction of a great mission, in thus revealing the secrets of the other world _at this time_, I should not harrow your feelings by a recital of what I have seen and sometimes taken part in since my return from that journey among the stars.

Comfort yourself--if you need comfort--by my assurance that the race is passing through a rite of initiation. Those who have died in the service of an unselfish enthusiasm will in time rebody themselves and reap on the earth the fruits of their service. But not all who have died have been filled with this enthusiasm. Many have hated for hate’s own sake. They are the ones who have failed.

Pity them if you must, but it is better not to think about them. They are the willing victims of the demons who sought to bar my way, when I was commanded to return to the world and learn the mysteries of love and hate.

Love! Yes, there has been more love born of this war than the earth has known in all the two thousand years of Christianity. For the human race is awake at last, and that it may not go to sleep again is my purpose in once more breaking through the wall that separates me from you.

_March 5, 1915._

LETTER II

A DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD

THERE was one demon who seemed to be a leader of demons. He was unlike many of the others--more personal, more egocentric.

As we stood opposite each other I entered into conversation with him, partly to satisfy my curiosity, partly to throw him off his guard.

“Who are you?” I asked. “You seem to be a ruler among your kind.”

He straightened himself with pride.

“I am indeed a ruler,” he said, “a ruler on earth and up here.”

“On earth also?” I queried.

“Yes, also on earth,” he answered, “for I am the deeper self of a man who is great among men, a man who will follow my will as others follow his will.” Then he made a claim which startled me, and I forbear to repeat it.

“If you are the evil self of a man still living,” I demanded, “how do you stand as a separate entity up here? How are you apart from him?”

“You are somewhat ignorant,” he said to me.

“I am ignorant of many things,” I admitted. “Instruct me in any way you can. I have a thirst for knowledge.”

“Know then,” he said pompously, “that I broke away from the earthly form that had enchained me when he acknowledged my ruler-ship and worshipped me as his genius.”

“He set you free?” I asked.

“He set me free by acknowledging me as his Master. His knowledge is even less than yours, and he called me by a name that I despise; but so long as I rule I care not the name I rule by. Or I care little,” he corrected himself. “But such things as these are too deep for you!”

“I am deeper than you think,” I asserted, “and I have met your kind before.”

“My kind maybe, but not my equals. I am a King among spirits.”

“I had observed your crown,” I said, “it has a familiar look.”

During this colloquy the Teacher had stood silently by, but now I turned to him with an unspoken question. He led me aside a little way, and said:

“When a man exalts himself too much, he sets free the demon within him. He often thinks that he rules the demon, and sends him on errands through the Invisible; but it is really the demon who commands, and the commands of the man are only echoes.”

“And it took this vision of hell to teach me that!” I exclaimed.

“What you would have learned in due time by reason or by precept, you now learn by example,” the Teacher said. “You have truly beheld the evil self of a great ruler.”

“It is very powerful,” I admitted.

“It will grow in power for a time,” the Teacher said, “and then it will go to Gehenna.”

“And when will it go to Gehenna?”

“When peace returns to the world, after the war is exhausted up here. But the war will be exhausted up here before peace returns to the world.”

“What war is about to be fought?” I asked.

“The greatest war of all time,” the Teacher said, “the greatest war of all time up here, and also on the earth.”

“And when will it begin?”

“It is already begun here, as you have seen. Had you not been far away you would have known it before.”

“I have indeed been far away,” I said. “An angel has shown me many stars, and I have learned much.”

“The angel kept you away from the world until you should be strong enough, and rested enough, to work as well as learn.”

“And where does my work lie?” I asked.

“In many fields,” he answered. “But first you must fight your way through the astral world above Europe and save your friends who are in danger.”

Swimming the Hellespont was a minor feat compared to swimming that sea of devils, but I got through. A year before I could not have done it, perhaps, for the forces of good were overpowered. There is a tide in good and evil, as well as a tide in the sea. Evil was at the flood.

I saved one friend in danger, and saw that another was safe.

Back in the sea of hate, when I was nearly exhausted, the Beautiful Being, that angel who had been my guide so long, came and whispered something in my ear. It was a spur to ambition.

“You may be the historian of this great struggle,” it said, “if you do not fail in your tasks.”

Do not be startled by the word “ambition.” There are many kinds of ambition, and a sincere wish to be personally of service may as well be called by that name as by any other, if there is love behind it.

_March 6._

LETTER III

AN ASSURANCE

TAKE it from me at this early stage of our writing: The forces of good overpowered the forces of evil a month ago, and the issue is settled here. The power set in motion will spend itself, and peace will return to the world.

_March 10._

LETTER IV

THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING

BEFORE I tell you any more horrors, I want to assure you now that out of those horrors will come a beauty such as the world has not known during this cycle of existence.

It will not come at once, for many adjustments will have to be made; but the way is open already for those who choose to walk in it.

It is a curious commentary on unregenerate humanity, this war in which each side declares loudly its own righteousness and execrates its opponent. As in all quarrels, there is more wrong on one side than on the other; but the side which triumphs--and it will be the side that has least wrong--will have to understand and to forgive its enemy before it can go forward to its own great future.

Though international organizations have failed for the time being, I am not discouraged about international organizations. They were merely shocked into failure, the peace people, the socialists, and others who make far higher claims to the ideal of universal brotherhood.

Even now, during the stress of the conflict, go out yourself in thought and in love to that nation which you feel to be your enemy. Try to understand it. And do not try to understand it by telling yourself that it is evil. That is not understanding. There is evil in all men. Try to understand it by becoming it, for the time. Put yourself in its place; feel as you would feel if you stood alone--even though by your own fault--with the whole world against you.

You draw back a little with the thought that you could not have placed yourself in a position where the world for its own protection would be obliged to range itself against you. But are you sure?

By entering the consciousness of that nation you _are_ placing yourself in such a position, and I tell you to do it temporarily, in order that you may be a centre, a beginning, an infinitesimal part of that international comprehension and pardon which must become general to a degree before the long-heralded and always misunderstood Universal Brotherhood can even begin to find room for itself in this unbrotherly world.

If all those aggregations of people who have long believed that they stood for this ideal would now try to make peace with one another, if they would acknowledge the ideals of one another, however much the working-plans of those ideals may differ, a force could even now be set in motion that would shorten this war and lessen the number of those who must die for their conflicting ideals of national honor and loyalty.

In the reaction from hate to love, in the reaction from criticism to understanding that will follow a formal declaration of peace, all these quarrelling spiritual organizations _may_ if they will, begin to work harmoniously. If their members cannot bring themselves, because of their narrow pride and the memory of all the harsh things which they have said against one another in the past--if they are too meanly afraid of eating their words, publicly to acknowledge one another as brethren, let them begin to feel thus in their hearts. Perhaps in time the greater courage will come, and some daring leader will say to his flock that those with whom they once worked, with trust and the profession of love, _may_ be trying, according to their lights, to serve the ideal.

I do not know that any further elaboration of this idea would make it any clearer to you, and these remarks are only an interlude, a relief, in the tension of the story which I have to tell.

_March 13._

LETTER V

ASTRAL MONSTERS

DID you know that I was near you when you crossed the North Sea more than two weeks before war was declared, crossed to England under an irresistible, an overwhelming impulse to _get away_ from the continent of Europe and back to the people of your own blood? I was near you.

But I did not remain when you were safe with your friends. I returned to the centre of war determinism, went back to that land which, despite all protestations to the contrary, hatched out the egg which an irresponsible bird had laid in the region farther south.

Did I say irresponsible? Only a madman is irresponsible for his acts. Let me say rather deluded, for not all deluded souls are mad. The hand that slew the Austrian Archduke was used, as others have been used, by the forces working against progress. Pity that man also, and let the law of cause and effect deal with him as it must, for there is no favoritism in that court and no appeal to a higher jurisdiction.

I returned to Germany. It will be necessary in this writing to call spades, spades. If I hurt anybody’s feelings, I am not writing to hurt anybody’s feelings. Facts are facts, and no specious pleading can change them.

I returned to Germany. I listened to war counsels. I _heard_ orders given, for by a special hardening of my astral ears I can hear what is spoken in the world of men and hear very distinctly. My astral body is a well-lubricated though tenuous machine that answers to the lightest touch of my will.

But do not jump to the conclusion that all astral bodies are like mine. Remember that I am the pupil of a great Master, and that his purposes are not _his_ purposes but those of the law of progress which he serves.

I saw again the monster of which I wrote you in my second letter. They speak truth who say that the German Emperor _did_ hesitate to touch the spring which should open the doors of hell. The War Lord had a certain pride in his record as a Peace Lord, and he shivered at the responsibility that faced him while gloating in that responsibility, which further exalted his already self-exalted ego.

Pity him too, but do not sentimentalize over him. Will is free. In yielding his will to the evil genius he was exercising free will. But those eyes of his were wet in the night and he _did_ pray to the Force he calls his God. The name of God was not only on his lips but in his inner thoughts. God is a word that means many things to many persons.

There were also in that conclave of evil spirits many who were not attached to individual men. There were vast elemental beings. When Lytton wrote, in one of his occult novels, of a gigantic foot which stepped through a gap in the magic circle drawn by a black magician in the primeval wilderness, he referred to a fact in Nature.

Nature! You with your narrow sight have no idea of the meaning of the term. All your studies have not taught you even the alphabet that Nature uses. Learn that alphabet. Begin to study that language. Study chemistry, biology, electricity, and study the mysteries of the vibrations of matter on as many planes as you can consciously reach. The knowledge of the future lies there. Man has only begun the conquest of Nature.

Any expression of hate which you ever beheld in the material world was only a weak replica of the hate that was let loose upon the earth when the hour struck last year, the hour when the orbits of certain planetary bodies blended their influences and allowed a free passage for beings who are generally more limited in their freedom of movement.

The giant foot! I saw the great being to whom such a foot belonged. It was a being of the air, but earth beings were allied with it and monsters from the deeper circles of matter where the light of the sun never shines.

Will you let me describe one of those beings? You need not fear it now for it has been driven back to its lair in the bowels of the planet. A gross bluish bag-like body, with a long fat tail covered with bristles, arms and legs like elongated bags, and a head that was a larger and half-submerged bag in the rolls of its monstrous neck. But the eyes! There was no fat-like substance in them. They were wide and round and glaring with a thousand years of malignity concentrated in a moment. Pale eyes they were. If you dread an evil dark eye, dread more an evil pale eye. Suffering unimaginable and hate of everything above it were expressed in the eyes of that entity from the deep of things which from the lowest astral plane spat and drooled its venom toward the surface of the planet. Immense it was in size, toothless and shapeless its mouth. What the nourishment might be which had kept it together I refrain from telling you.

Again I say, do not dread it. It cannot reach toward the surface of the earth now. Its existence is near its term. But the germs of astral disease which were spewed from its shapeless mouth have been multiplying in spite of all the efforts of those who know how to cope with such things.

The beings of the air are not filthy, however evil they may be, and few of them are really evil--few in proportion to those who are amiable or indifferent to man.

The more revengeful of the beings of fire may yet make themselves felt; for sporadic efforts will still be made, though the great struggle is won in the invisible regions.

Stay where you are for the time. A danger still threatens Europe beyond the danger of armies. Wait--and pray. For prayer is an astral force and its effects, being in the higher astral, are far-reaching.

Wait--and pray.

_March 15._

LETTER VI

THE ARCHDUKE

HAVE you ever thought of the posthumous feelings of him whose murder precipitated this war? No, you have not; but I have, and I sought for him and found him.

Others were seeking him too, the souls of the dead and the astral souls of those who slept on earth.

Truly his was not a peaceful passing, either in flesh or in spirit.

The dread of assassination which had long hung over him like a dark cloud predisposed him to a dark and stormy period after death, even if he had not been shocked out by the murderous assault. This was another illustration of that law by which the thing we fear attacks us sooner or later.

At first he passed into darkness and a period of somnolence, like a vague nightmare; then as he gradually awoke to a more vivid consciousness he awoke with pain and anxiety and wailing of soul. The dreaded thing had come at last, and he knew that he was outside his body and searched for it.

The customary funeral was even more dismal for him than it is for most souls, because the slight opening of vision which his passing had given made him realize that far more than his personal death was bound up with this change.

He was not attacked by the evil things which had brought about his death. What more could they want with him? He had served their purposes.

Had there been anyone else round whose murder so much obscurity and so complex a series of misunderstandings and suspicions could have gathered, probably that other man would have suffered in his stead. But whose murder could have served that purpose so well as this man’s? Whose relations placed him in such a focus of rays? His relations with the German Emperor, the relations of his family with those for whom he had no sympathy, the relations of the present heir with Russia--all these and many other sources of error and doubt and confusion formed an ideal centre of tumult.

And the soul felt this tumult in addition to his anger and disappointment at being driven from the world. His anxiety for his children was not small, for they stood in a peculiar position regarding the families around them.

Imagine the thought of every man, woman and child capable of following an event like that, centred on one soul, in anger, love, grief, curiosity, doubt, uncertainty--every mind in almost every country of the world! It was enough to shatter his astral body altogether.

Generally when a ruler dies he is followed by loving thoughts, or thoughts of dislike, but not by confusing thoughts. His race is run. The King is dead, long live the King!

For some time this heir to a great throne was even driven away from the companion whom he loved. He had nothing to lean on. He was drawn upon and victimized by thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, from all directions and in all stages of intensity.

Even the prayers offered for the repose of his soul in purgatory had not the effect which such prayers of love generally have. They were only a drop in the river of thoughts which rushed in his direction. Yes, I say in his direction; for he remained a long time in that storm-centre of thoughts.

Even the band of helpers, of whom I told you when I wrote for the world before, were not able to assist him very much; for they too were attacked by the beings of evil who made war in the astral regions.

As a rule the death of one man makes little difference to the world. Those who love him grieve, and those who dislike him or who profit by his death are glad. This man went out with the flaming torch of war in his vapory hand.

After a time he sought and found his friend, the ruler of Germany; but that ruler could not see him, though he sensed a presence in the room. He was half afraid. What was the presence? he wondered. Was it his own genius? Did it come to remind him that the hour of his “great destiny” was at hand? The hesitation of his weakness was rather shameful to see; but the determination of his strength, of his evil self, set its heel upon the weakness and the preparations for war went on.

The soul of the Archduke was too confused to play a part in those counsels. He had been a strong man, and will be strong again; but during the time when he might have exercised an invisible influence, he exercised none; he strove to make himself visible, and in one instance at least succeeded.

Yes, I spoke with him and advised him; but I had other things to do just then and left him with a priest of his own church, a gentle and strong soul who stood like a rock in the tumult.

I only mention my seeing the Archduke because of one who will some day read these lines. I cannot offer much comfort, but she will be glad to know of the strong and quiet priest, and I shall have kept a promise which I made but have so far been unable to keep in any way save this.

_March 17._

LETTER VII

“THE CHOSEN PEOPLE”

THE nations began to declare war on one another. I stood with twenty others for hours in the palace at Potsdam, trying by the silent pressure of will to reduce the pressure of the war-will which surged in the German nation towards its Emperor. And they say that Germany did not want war!

“Der Tag” seemed near, and war seemed to mean triumph.

It is a commonplace to say now that Germany believed that England _could not_ go to war. And had England not gone to war, the issue would have been settled before the date of this writing. The German navy would have met the French in battle and would have worsted it.

It would be well for you to cease shrinking when I say what does not please you. I state what I know; you merely write down what I say.

I and twenty others centred the force of our will in Potsdam and in the Wilhelmstrasse. Not that we did not know what the issue would be. We knew. This war was written in the stars. But as the soldier does his duty though he knows that he will lose the day, so we stood our ground against the war devils.

The greatest of the Masters did not stand there with us, and I do not know where he was. Probably on some business that we might not have understood. Perhaps holding back worse forces from the outer stars.

No, that is not a dream, though it is only a supposition. There is evil as well as good in the outer stars.

Had it not been for the restraining influence of those who watched up here, many of the foreigners in Germany at that time would have been torn limb from limb.