The Way of Power | Page 6

of a scientific communication ignorantly understood. But again the agencies of the World behind the Looking Glass knew their business better than I. Without my own agency the plan I had made for India was swept out of being, and on the succeeding Christmas Day events culminated in the possibility of my continuing what had become my work in Asia without any obstacle. And this was the more singular because I had clearly realized by that time that if one wanted to understand the thought of Asia in these esoteric matters it must be studied in Burma, Ceylon, Java, China, and Japan as well as in India, and of this there had seemed no possibility. Now the way lay straight before me to all this exploration and long after, though I did not dream it then, to my writing the books which the fortune-teller foresaw, nominally by looking in my hand, really by a force tuning the vibrations between himself and me until each responded to the same stimulus. In other words, that event which I had believed impossible made me a student of the innermost side of occult science and also made me a writer every one of whose books, whether as L. Adams Beck or E. Barrington, is engaged with the Mirror of the Passing Show and leading up to the perception of what lies behind it; the irony of life as it presents itself to those who have no psychic perception and its understanding by those who have.
I pause here for a moment to note the effect on my mind and daily life of the certitude that a very different world from the one which our senses propose to us really lies about us and that we move in it in ignorance as complete as that of cats or dogs in a library, surrounded by all the wisdom of the ages yet unable not only to taste it but even to guess that it exists. I had not reasoned this belief out as yet. I did not see in the least how it could be, though I felt blindly that it must certainly be so. There was no other way of accounting for the phenomena I had myself observed. So I resolved that I would devote myself to collecting and studying by the light of my own experience all possible evidence. It is of no use to cling only to one's own experiences, for they are very apt to run in one channel and to blind one to other real experiences. But I realized what a jungle of fraud, folly and mirage lay before me and was determined it should not be my only preoccupation, and that a healthy natural life, with what are called "outside interests," must be the accompaniment of this study. I thought it peculiarly necessary that there should be no fanaticism, no eagerness to believe. Our wishes, however ardent, are no guarantee of truth or even of hope. "Nor does our being weary prove that there is rest." I can truly say my wish was only to ascertain the facts in a difficult problem and not to deduce any moralities from it. That latter desire is an almost inescapable trap in the path of truth-seeking. But I saw that one must read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest with keen alertness of brain and a something beyond, which as yet I did not understand. Thus I had no axe to grind. I did not wish at all to assure myself of immortality or to console anyone else by promising it to him. I was by no means sure from Western teachings as to immortality that any sensible person need desire it, and though I believe in it now it is on very different grounds.
Thus my attitude was much the same as when, a child, I studied Euclidean geometry. It was a fascinating game. It could not appear on the surface to matter very much that the sum of three angles of a triangle was equal to two right angles, yet I was taught if it were otherwise the world as we conceive it would be quite other than it is. Might not something of the same be argued of what interested me now? I still think this was a fortunate attitude for beginning my investigation though I now know that more is needed at a later stage. But I certainly thought that if I could trace these facts to their source some conclusions as to life and death would need revision and that the logical conclusions accepted as basic facts might be thrown seriously out of gear, though how I could not tell. It was clear that many people who possess these powers in a small way use them quite carelessly and indeed unconsciously;