PSYCHIC POWERS, THEIR USE AND MISUSE by Clive Bellgrove
This subject is a very complex one, giving rise to endless thought, study, discussion and writing. Many hours could be spent on a fascinating subject such as this; and since we have only a limited time to devote to it, the subject matter must be brief and condensed. There are several premises with which we can commence:-That Psychic Powers exist, are a fact in nature, and therefore beyond dispute.That Good and Evil are co-existent throughout Infinity. That there are Seven Principles to every human being:-
ATMAN: Divine essence.
BUDDHI: Compassionate spiritual nature.
MANAS: Mind principle.
KAMA: Desire principle.
PRANA: Vitality.
LINGA-SARIRA: Astral double.
STHULA-SARIRA: Physical body.
Nevertheless I shall try to speak about as many aspects of these as possible in the time available, and almost wholly from my own experiences. There are such things as psychic epidemics; there was one occurring in the latter years of the last century; there was one that commenced about the middle of the nineteenth century; soon after, in 1873, Mme. H.P. Blavatsky was sent by her Teachers to the United States of America to work with the Spiritualist Movement and explain the manifestations to them. There have been a number of epidemics in history, one of the most notable being the dancing craze at a time during the Middle Ages. There have been periods when so-called Witches were prominent and punished often with death. We little realise that we are using Psychic Powers all the time. Our five senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, are all located and manifest in our Astral body, not in the physical, which latter is made up of the lower and coarser atoms in which we function as human beings. Therefore all these five senses are actually Psychic Powers which we are using continually and normally. For there is a normal use of these powers, which are used not only by the human kingdom, but also by the beast kingdom. One’s heart beats continually, not needing our constant attention and direction; a baby knows its own mother among many women; a lost lamb will find its mother sheep among an entire flock; a lost dog or cat can sometimes find its way home over hundreds of miles; birds and animals migrate over thousands of miles by their unconscious use of psychic powers. All of these five senses have their limitations; there are ceilings and bases to each of them beyond which we cannot normally function. Animals can frequently hear sounds and see things that are beyond human capability, and among human beings there are variations of these two extremes. Nature has placed these limitations upon our senses for our own protection; because we have developed the capacity to cope with these manifestations within the limits of our present development in evolution we are safe. The moment we endeavour to penetrate these normal barriers we strike problems and difficulties, and often dangers. We humans possess the power to discriminate between right and wrong. If our endeavours are directed towards spiritual evolution which, after all, is the entire purpose of life, lives and living, then progressively we are aided in our search, finding the right book, person, meeting or other incident that will give us the opportunity of taking the next step “onwards and upwards”, if one may use that expression. But if our attention and activities are directed towards finding out how the various psychic powers operate, we become involved in one or more of the occult arts or practices, ranging from clairvoyance and clairaudience, psychometry, automatic writing, telepathy, to medium-ship, and many other categories. Persisted with, the searcher can destroy the barriers that keep one “safe”, to use the above expression; and having destroyed these barriers, they cannot be repaired in the same incarnation. As is said in the New Testament, why cast out one devil, and let seven others in? For the doorway, once opened by the spiritually inexperienced, it cannot be closed again, and any of the dark forces that inhabit the invisible realms that surround us can enter and take control, without hindrance. From the age of about five or six I began to hear stories about ghosts, knockings, apparitions, automatic writing, apports and hypnotism, so that the mysterious world beyond the normal physical life became part of my everyday thinking. When I was about ten my mother, who suffered greatly from migraine headaches, found that if I placed my hand on her head the headaches soon went. Thus many times when other members of the family were out playing, I was helping my mother rest and sleep and recover from these headaches. A few years later an elder brother returned from the first World War with his English bride. She had served in France as a W.A.A.C., and had suffered bombing, and was in a highly nervous state; she was also expecting their first child. Further, she sometimes became hysterical, which was a problem for everyone. Again it was found that if I put my hand on her arm she immediately became calm. Apparently my psychic energies had a soothing effect. When I entered the business world, another manifestation began. We lived fairly close to the city and I used to walk to and from the office. Soon I began to hear music inside my head; beautiful music; long sustained chords that evolved from one to another and continued until I got home. I have since learned that every atom has its own particular note; every plant, every animal, every human being, every planet, every solar system, every universe has its own sound. The music of the spheres of Pythagoras is a fact in nature. Then began streams of poetry, all in Homeric couplets, dealing with ancient history, philosophy, religion; and this was later followed by seeing, while walking along the street, ancient, medieval and modern plays, all with a variety of characters, all beginning on some theme, and working through stage by stage to the end. There were times when all these three manifestations were combined; but the moment I tried to remember any of them, they vanished. This was most interesting entertainment; but as I grew older and responsibilities increased I realised that I could spend the whole of my life listening to and seeing these manifestations, but to what good? I had to be practical, so made the decision to stop these experiences, and for years was without them. As a boy I had been taken to some spiritualist meetings and had heard and seen how readings were given by attending mediums. And so began my search for the meaning behind these mysterious happenings. In my early twenties I was invited to attend a so-called developing class for mediums. At the first sitting I saw so many visions, hundreds of them, that I was bewildered; but from that I learned how unstable the Astral Light is. At some of these meetings I began to see the lesser side of the subject; a medium crawling around the floor lowing like cattle, and such like. Mediums had been brought to our home for private sittings, and it had been prophesised that I would not live beyond fifty. I began to visit mediums for readings and had many experiences. On one occasion I had paid my money and sat down when I heard a clink. Looking down I saw the medium moving away behind her skirt and secreting a beer or wine bottle. I was not favourably impressed. Another time I visited a so-called trumpet séance. I had read about them, and knew how the trumpet floated around the circle and the guides spoke through them to various sitters. To my surprise, this trumpet lay on the floor. I could see by the luminous paint on it that the wide end of the trumpet was pointing towards the medium. To my further surprise I found that it was the medium who did the talking, she herself giving the messages. Later, again to my surprise I saw the trumpet rise a little, and then jump into the air and fall with a clatter on the floor. After the meeting, when the lights were put on, I picked up the trumpet and, again to my surprise, found the marks of shoe polish inside the wide end of the trumpet. Again I was not favourably impressed. Soon I began attending regularly various spiritualist churches, as they were called, and eventually began lecturing for them, not on phenomena, but on ethics usually based on some quotation from the Bible. And this I did for a number of years, until, in fact, the time when I made my first contact with theosophical teachings, from which I gained the explanations I had been seeking for years, but which I had thus far been unable to find; for spiritualism has no philosophy of its own. For instance, half the spirit guides believe in reincarnation, and the other half insist that there is no such thing; only their Summerland. Earlier in my search I had been invited to attend a private séance, held in a house in Albert Park, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. It consisted of about eight people. At first the meetings were harmonious and pleasant, and informative. There was a lady who had trained for opera, and a young man about twenty who had a good singing voice. These two often joined in singing music, making up the sounds and words as they went along, and harmonising excellently. This was indeed interesting. Various of the sitters gave messages to one another, and sometimes someone would take trance and give an oration on some subject. For myself, I have never taken trance, or lost or given up control of myself in my life, for reasons which I shall explain later. There was one young man who attended, and he was in his early thirties. I later found that he was perhaps the finest young member of his profession in
Melbourne; a brilliant mind. We became friendly. Later again I found that he had lived in both the
United States of America and
Europe, practising his profession. But I also found that, as he told me, he had lived a very unsavoury life as well; and that when he met me he had decided to try to reform his life. He was now a dreamy person, given to relaxing all the time and getting no exercise. At one meeting I felt the urge to “give him a treatment”, as we were encouraged to do; this I thought to be right usage of psychic powers. So in the dark I left my chair and went around the outside of the circle and stood behind his chair; then, after a few moments, I put the tips of my fingers over his closed eyes. It was not long before the most ghastly feeling came over me, and I quickly withdrew and went back to my chair and, the only thing I knew, began to pray as hard as I could for protection. Instead of imparting my vitality to him, I was attracting his condition to myself. In a few weeks’ time his health broke down completely; he was lodged in Mont
Park mental asylum, and spent the rest of his life there. The combination of his former mode of life, the drain of sitting in those séances, and his efforts to reform combined to deprive him of his reason for the rest of this incarnation. Another manifestation at that circle which I seldom discuss and never describe is something I saw one night. It was not long before I ceased attending that or any other séance. There appeared before my closed eyes a dark figure so evil in its expression that I was horrified, and silently commanded the figure to go away, which it did. There was a period about this time when I used to hear a lot of chattering in my ear, as though someone was just behind my head talking incessantly; but I could not understand a single word of what was being said. This went on for many months, until at last I got completely tired of it. I remember that one day I was walking down Collins Street past Georges’ department store, when all of a sudden in exasperation I stamped my foot and said, silently, with all the emphasis I could: “Go away! Leave me alone!” This manifestation ceased immediately. There was one medium whom I visited in Albert Park. She used a glass crystal ball which she covered in black velvet. This she placed in my hands, one holding it, and the other covering it. She then placed her hands one under and one above mine, and thus we sat for about twenty minutes during which she gave me various messages. Then she took the crystal ball from me and drew back the velvet until there was an uncovered spot about the size of a ten cent piece. She looked into this for a few moments and then handed the covered crystal to me. I was seated about three feet in front of her. At her suggestion I took the crystal and looked into it through the uncovered spot. She asked if I could see anything, and I said: “Yes, I can see the face of a woman”. She asked if I could recognise the face and I replied, “No”. She then took the crystal back again, and we repeated the former process for a few minutes, and when I looked into the aperture again I saw a small torn piece of paper with a date written on it in pencil. She asked if the date meant anything to me, and again I said, “No”. In each instance she made no contact with me while I was looking into the crystal, and in each case the picture vanished in a few moments while I was holding it. Knowing something about the amount of psychic energy required to produce such phenomena, I thought to myself that she was expending so much that she could not continue doing it and live another six months. The head of one of the local Christian churches had visited her so many times to see this phenomenon that, as she told me, she asked him not to come back again. She did in fact die within six months. When I was about fifteen, an elderly member of the family offered to teach me hypnotism. He was a remarkable healer, and Mr. Leadbeater [a former leading figure of the Theosophical Society (Adyar)] had visited our home to interview him, but happily at a time when I was at school. This relative of mine, in earlier years, had used hypnotism frequently, and had one particular subject with whom, from his viewpoint, he worked very successfully. Came the time when he was to leave for Adelaide, a prolonged journey in those days, on a bowling tour. A friend of his, a medical doctor, also interested in hypnotism, asked if he could borrow his subject for further experiments. This was readily agreed to. On his return to Melbourne some weeks later he asked his medical friend how the hypnotic experiments had gone, only to be told the poor woman had died of a burst blood vessel on the brain, that he had written her death certificate and she had been buried. Well intentioned though these two men were, nevertheless they knew nothing about the clash of magnetisms, which proved fatal in this instance. When I was offered the chance to learn hypnotism I remembered this and a number of similar stories, and declined immediately and finally. In the sphere of pure occultism it is forbidden for a student either to be hypnotised or to hypnotise anyone else; to do so places that student outside the scope of the high teachings for at least the remainder of that incarnation, and possibly many more. I have some photographs and newspaper cuttings which anyone interested may see after the close of the meeting. One is of a Swiss man who had advanced far in yoga. The picture shows him standing, bare to the waist, with a sword run through his back and protruding through his stomach. He was able to have a metal pipe pushed through him, and a hose fitted to one end so that water poured out from the other end. He could also have a dagger pierce the front of his skull so that the point passed behind his eyes and came out under his chin. All these wounds were immediately healed as soon as the instrument used was withdrawn, though it took him some minutes to steady himself after the ordeal. When doctors in one Swiss hospital saw some of these phenomena, some of them ran from the theatre because what they saw was against everything they had learned. When moving pictures of these events were shown in a London picture theatre so many people fainted that the police compelled the withdrawal of the film. The Swiss man claimed that he was doing these acts in Vaudeville shows in order to get together enough money to start some work for the benefit of mankind. When I came across these pictures and knowing, as said above, the great amount of psychic energy required to perform such acts, I thought that the man would be lucky if he lived another six months. I was wrong. He lived about twelve months, his planned benefits for mankind unfulfilled. There are so many instances of the misuse of these powers within my own experience or knowledge that it would take hours more to tell them. Lastly, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of this one, there was a group of gentlemen who met in Melbourne for séances. They had their own medium, and a spectacularly successful one he was. These séances were held in the home of Thomas Weldon Stanford, and among the small group of sitters were the then head of the Melbourne Harbour Trust (from recollection of what my elderly relative told me when I was a boy, his name was John Bligh or Blythe); there were also David Syme, the owner of the Melbourne Age, Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister of Australia, and this elderly relative of mine. When they met it was their practice to paste paper over the door, windows, ventilators and any other apertures in the séance room, so that nothing could be brought into it after the meeting started. The male medium sat on a chair on top of the long heavy table, which was usually covered with a huge table cloth that came down almost to the floor. When they took their seats and the lights were extinguished the phenomena started. Into that room, through the solid walls, were brought a profundity and wide variety of solid objects. There were Chinese embroidered silk robes, beaded aprons used by African natives, flowers, grass skirts, birds’ nests, and even birds in cages, pictures of which I have seen, and some of which objects I handled when visiting Stanford
University in
California. Every school boy knows that there is as much space relatively in an atom as there is in the solar system, so that there is space enough for solid matter to pass through solid matter if you know the process. But I could not understand how a cage full of small birds could be “disintegrated”, brought through the solid wall, and then reconstructed into living birds again. I knew this to be an impossibility, but was puzzled, so asked one of the professors at our Headquarters for an explanation; and he replied that it was not the birds that had been “disintegrated”, but the wall! The whole affair became complicated when some Babylonian clay tablets, covered with Cuneiform writing, began arriving at these séances. Because of newspaper reports it became known to the local Customs authorities that these tablets were arriving from time to time. Those authorities felt that, as antiques, customs duty should be paid on them. The recipients thought otherwise, and the case came before the courts and was fought out there. The Customs authorities lost the case, and the clay tablets were eventually sent to Thomas Stanford’s brother Leyland “for your University”. I have seen the published letter received from Mrs. Stanford acknowledging receipt of the tablets. During the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 they were destroyed; but I have with me photographs of some of these, and I also have translations of some of the inscriptions. On one occasion when visiting
California, I visited
Stanford
University to research in their Archives; and they found to their surprise that I had vastly more information on the subject than they did; and I was able later to augment their collection. During the visit I asked if they had any of the apports that had been brought into those séances, and they produced two boxes of them for my inspection. I was shocked to see such a collection of rubbish, which I thought fit only for the incinerator. I asked the archivist what had happened to the many beautiful and valuable things that had been brought into the séance room, and was told that many people had seen these objects over the years, and the best of them had been stolen and only the rubbish left. A few moments was enough for me, and I asked that the boxes be taken away immediately. One other manifestation in that séance room was the bringing into it of a large quantity of seaweed, with salt water pouring out of it so that it drenched the table cloth and the trousers of the sitters. No one could have brought that quantity of substance into the room surreptitiously. The sitters were all notable and honourable men, and unlikely to allow themselves to be deceived by the medium or anyone else. To make the fact clear to my relative, he had to take home one might the bowling shoes which he had not brought there with him. He at least needed no further proof of the facts of apports and psychic phenomena. In other areas there are practitioners who claim that they can levitate and float around a room, betimes bumping into one another or the walls. There are those who strive to learn how to stimulate the various chakras, and kundalini. There are those who through inquisitiveness rather than the spirit of investigation, delve into black magic and its dread practices. There are those who take drugs to gain otherworldly experiences; but no one can penetrate spiritual realms by means of practices of the dark side of nature. One therefore comes to the point when one asks what is the purpose of practising the use of psychic powers. There is the right and natural use of some of these powers, and these are hemmed in with the safeguards which Nature knows are necessary for human beings in their present stage of development. For those aspiring towards higher ranges of consciousness, there are and always have been available the pure teachings of the Brotherhood of Compassion, to be found in all major cities of the world in this day and age as readily, possibly more so, than in any or most of the mystery schools of the past. All these teachings warn the beginner to have nothing to do with manifesting psychic powers; to do so is to exclude oneself immediately, and for who knows how many incarnations. If a chela has some work do to in the world that requires the use and display of psychic powers, these can be conferred on that messenger, and withdrawn when the need is finished. This happened in the instances of Colonel Olcott and William Quan Judge, co-founders with Mme. Blavatsky in the Theosophical Society. When they were in
India they were endowed with the ability to heal. It is clear that the people healed by them had it in their karma to be so healed. But in time, and in both instances, those powers were withdrawn, and thereafter they could do no more physical healing. There are many other instances of the use and misuse of psychic powers which could be mentioned if there were time. There are such matters as transfiguration, and protection. There is the form of manifestations such as exhibited at the famous hauntings at Borley Rectory in
England, with an elemental that played with fire. There is vampirism, and also the widespread psychism of the Atlantian period of human development. There are the dangers. Those who undertake to tread the pathway to wisdom are forbidden to become entranced; they are forbidden to hypnotise others, or to allow themselves to be hypnotized. They may not take alcohol or hallucinatory drugs, all of which stimulate the emotional nature. Even anger, or violent rage, does the same thing, and are impediments on the path, and must be overcome and cleansed from one’s nature. The hypnotist pushes one’s consciousness to the outside edge of one’s being, and replaces his own to fill the vacuum. In trances more or less the same thing is achieved, and the medium has little choice as to what type of entity is going to take over his or her consciousness for the time being. It is our inalienable right to live in our own body, without the intrusion of other consciousnesses; these latter can be only of a lesser quality or degree of development; the good will never intrude, but will seek to evoke, slowly and progressively and without danger, the splendour, veiled in varying degree that exists within every one of us, that is already part of us, the pinnacle of which is the spark of divinity within. In this brief survey of the good and the wrong sides of psychism, it has been my hope that any who may be attracted to the lesser side will realize the enormous dangers associated with such an approach, and turn their thoughts (which after all are also a psychic manifestation) to the pure, splendid and exalted teachings of the right-hand path, the end of which is spiritual enlightenment. However strongly people may feel that they can control themselves and the darker side of psychism, they will eventually realize that they are working against the laws of Nature, and come to know that unless they cease Nature will destroy them, at least for the time being. The purpose of all Nature, our purpose in being human beings, is the infinite, universal, urge towards spiritual evolution and attainment, on whatever plane of being each entity may be manifesting. However long it may take, this attainment will be achieved by every member of the human race, and all else besides. We live and work in eternity; although we live in realms where good and evil are co-existent it is infallible that good, in every instance, will triumph in the end. How can descent consciously into the darker side of being aid us in the onward and upward struggle? Perfection is not handed to one on a platter; it must be earned. The entire lesson regarding the use or misuse of psychic powers can be summed up in the one phrase by the great teachers of the human race: - “YOU CANNOT TRIFLE WITH OCCULTISM.”
This is the revised text of a lecture given by the authors at a public meeting of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena).