PSYCHOLOGY

Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)


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Contents:

I. A Word on Man, His Nature and His Powers
II. Proofs of the Existence of the Soul
III. Individuality
IV. Emotion, Intellect and Spirituality
V. On Moods
VI. Hypnotism, I
VII. Hypnotism, II
VIII. Memory
IX. The Nature of Memory
X. Clairvoyance and Mental Healing

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An excerpt from the beginning of:

I. A Word On Man, His Nature and His Powers

A Lecture delivered on board the "Kaisar-i-Hind,"
in the Red Sea, Oct. 30th, 1893. (Reported.)


The last time I spoke to you I took a very large subject, which I was obliged to treat very roughly. To-night I have selected a smaller subject, although still a large one, and shall be able therefore to treat it a little more fully. I propose to put before you what the Esoteric Philosophy teaches concerning man: man's nature and man's powers, his possibilities in the future, as well as his state in the present. May I say in opening what I have to put to you, that I am simply laying before you that which I have been taught, and which I have to a considerable extent verified by my own personal experiment, so that it has become to me a matter of knowledge? I, however, only put it to you as a matter of reasonable hypothesis. I do not pretend to dictate to you your opinions; I do not pretend to formulate for you what you shall think, or what you shall reject. On each of you the responsibility of forming his own thought; on each of you the responsibility of accepting or rejecting, as your own reason, your conscience and your judgment may decide. All that the speaker can do, or has the right to do, is to put the truth as he sees it, leaving it to each individual to accept or to reject, the right and the duty being on each, and not on the one who speaks.

With regard to man, there is a fundamental difference in the conception of man as he is looked at in the East and in the West. According to the Esoteric Philosophy man is regarded essentially as a soul. What he may have of instruments which that soul employs, what bodies he may clothe himself in, what special forms he may adopt—all that is matter which changes in time and space. As you may read in the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad: "As a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, forms another shape ... so throwing off this body . . . the soul forms a shape." And so the man is the soul, the soul that lives to gather experience, that lives to subjugate external nature, that lives to unite itself with the Divine Spirit from whence it sprang; and as regards the soul's bodies, those differ as evolution proceeds, and the soul moulds them century after century into the fuller and more perfect expression of itself. But in the West, man is far more identified with his outer form; he identifies himself with his body and with his mind. To us the soul stands above body and mind, using both as instruments, whereas in the West, people think of themselves as consisting of body and of mind; and the things that interest them are the things that affect the body, while the mind, they think, is practically their master, and they never dream of mastering their own thoughts and being ruler of their own intellectual as well as of their own physical domain.

In order that these distinctions may be understood, let us sketch the different "principles," as they are sometimes called—"states of consciousness," as they are called at other times—which make up man when you take him completely, as man physical, man psychical and man spiritual. Those are the three great divisions accepted, let me say in passing, by Christianity as much as by other religions. For you find St. Paul speaking of a man '' as body, soul and spirit.'' I know that in popular Christianity the distinction between soul and spirit has very largely been lost. But that is not so in Christian philosophy. If you take the writings of the great thinkers of Christendom, those who have dealt with religion scientifically and philosophically, you will find they follow the lines laid down by the great Christian Apostle, and regard man as a triple and not only as a dual entity. Now the body which belongs to the man, which is a physical garment as we say, is a very changing and a very illusory thing, as I said to you the other night— changing continually from moment to moment, and from year to year; so that if you turn to any modern book on physiology you will find that every minute particle of your body changes absolutely and completely in the space of seven years, that not a fragment of it you had seven years ago is yours to-day. Not only so. In the later investigations of physiology you will find it recognised in the West, that a great part, at least, of the body, is made up of minute lives, microbes as they are called...