THREAD FROM THE LABYRINTH
(a sermon-in-little)
* * * *
We write of the invisible ones whom men call dead. They are innumerable as sand grains or the stars. They walk our streets and throng our gatherings, and enter into the quietude of our homes. They are of every sort and condition of mankind, and being only human folk unseeable by us, they crave (a great company of them) our recognition and our remembering love.
Of the stronger and wiser ones, who have soon departed from our confines of darkness, we do not speak - but of the ignorant, the confused, the weary, and of the depraved ones, and of the multitude who are bound here by greed, by love, by sorrow (of the here-living also), by their own ignorance and folly, and bonds which we ourselves could loosen, but do not.
Many and bitter are the indictments brought against humanity. Our days are blackened with evils, stained with unspeakable cruelties. But it seems to us that the worst crime of all (because continuing through ages, almost universal) is not commonly written into these indictments. It is our crime against the invisible multitudes of the dead - thru forgetfulness, and ignorance, and foolish grief, but chiefly because we will not help them in the true ways which lie open to us.
How do we know that these facts are true? This is not place to argue for that knowledge. The whole formidable mass of data from spiritualistic sources confirms it. Communicators of the highest type have emphasized it a thousand times. The work of Wickland (for example), Thirty Years Among the Dead, is a door opening on chaos and old night. Into a thousand and ten thousand seance rooms come the baffled, bewildered, wandering ones. The birth-rate in the Western world has been estimated at perhaps 100 to the minute, and the normal death rate will not be far different. By pestilence and war this latter is enormously increased. What mighty incessant flood of souls, then, flows forever across the borders of the planes! How many of these, think you, make this crossing with true knowledge and with sureness? Let us not be deceived. They are a strange bewildered multitude, and the hands of the Helpers are all too few.
Where does the fault lie, for this cosmic tragedy? Surely not on planes astral, mental and spiritual. It lies here, on our own earth level; with us on our own dark planet. It lies here, because the newly dead have been taught nothing; because our civilization and our culture (save the mark!) gave them no true knowledge of death and the life to come. And also because, as we have said, at the hour of death we have abandoned them.
We bring the indictment against spiritualism, that it fails in its mission and high privilege. Suppose that in ten thousand seance circles we should cease our sensation mongering, phenomena hunting, chattering with our dear departed ones over a thousand trivialities, imagining that great deeds are afoot because trumpets float and tables tip, and mysterious lights and faces come and go. If we are spiritualists, cannot we accept these things as proven, and turn to things less childish and less selfish? Suppose, with the willing aid of guides and helpers, we opened the door to the distressed ones, asked them to come in, talked to them, explained their situation, reasoned with them and advised them. The technique of such work is known, and its results are known; it is a service deeply needed, unique in its kind, to all men everywhere.
We bring the same charge against the occultist and the mystic. Here we encounter, sometimes, the opposition of philosophy. It is an occult maxim, it is true (in some [9] quarters at least), that "the keyword of this incarnation is SERVICE." But there is also the doctrine of the High Indifference, and of the isolation, the autonomy, the self-sufficiency of the individual, of the triviality of earth sorrows and of unswerving aspiration toward the heights. To each man his own Path, and the choice of his Path! For this writer the principle of Indirection is of high importance; he who would save his life shall lose it, and the service of others is the only true service of the Self. Detachment and aspiration and mystical experience are good, but they are and must always be compatible with service.
Now here, in the helping of the newly dead, is an urgent duty and a bitter need, and it is something for which, in the large, we have no organized human effort. The Catholic Church has its prayers for the dead, and these have surely their own reign of usefulness. The brief and tearful farewells of Protestantism are familiar to us all. 'Loose and let go' is hard but salutary teaching. But we think of the innumerable bewildered ones, unaware even (many times) that death has come to them, earth-bound not only by love and hate, but also by ignorance, surrounded by those as unfortunate as themselves, obsessing the here-living, many times, without the knowledge or desire of either; and also the smug contented desireless ones, living for decades in their old familiar haunts of earth.
Do I hear you say, 'When the evils of our own world are so great, its problems so urgent and difficult, how can we burden ourselves with those of another life?' But to speak in this way is to be without understanding. The very words of our lips and the meditations of our hearts come to us, in good measure, subtly from out the invisible. So too do the inspirations of genius, and the whispered urgency of diabolism - of murder, lust, fanaticism, all things which turn into a hell - this erstwhile garden of the Lord. Who is the more dangerous to humanity - the living criminal and degenerate, or the one who is 'dead'? The occultist knows the answer, and every spiritualist who does not should learn it. All the world is alive with voices and with presences; there is a part of you and me which is well aware of them, and at any unguarded moment we hear the rumor of their insistency:
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when We sleep and when we wake"
We live and move in a living web of thought, of suggestions and impulses from the Illimitable - but most of all from the ever-living unseen ones who walk our streets and grieve with us or rejoice, or mock at all our foolish ways or long for recognition, sympathy, understanding, instruction in simple things which our life denied them - or who drift helplessly in the twilight or thick darkness, true outward symbol of confusion and ignorance and fear within the self. No, we are two-world dwellers, every one of us - and these two worlds are as one. Learn to serve the newly dead, if you would serve humanity, your neighbor, and yourself.
Practically, specifically, what is to be done? Every spiritualist gathering, every seance where it is at all possible, should devote some share of its time to careful, intelligent missionary work of this sort. Mediums and psychics should be trained for it; psychologists and psychiatrists (when they have learned these truths) should cooperate freely. Let spiritualists forget their controversies, their propaganda, their curiosities and wonders and trumpetings of evidences and strange events, and their petty personal desire for spiritual comfortings. There is a service here which no one else can perform, which the world does not even believe in, which orthodoxy fears and derides - but which is urgent, desperate, and all-important, a certainty of times to come, perhaps the only real clue and Ariadne thread out of the darkness of our labyrinth.
References
- Wickland, Carl A. Thirty Years Among the Dead. Los Angeles, Calif: National Psychological Institute, 1924. Print. [Digital: <http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000477528>]