War Letters from the Living Dead Man (10 page)

Soon I left them in each other’s company and went back to the labors of the battlefield; for there were others who needed me, and my friend was safe for the time. After a while I shall help him onward to an experience still less restricted. We take an interest in those whom we have helped, and wish to help them further. Why did I choose this man for my friendly ministrations, you are wondering; for as I described him in the beginning of this letter he was not an attractive character. I tell you a little secret: It was because he was unattractive that I chose him. No one had ever loved him enough, and so he needed help more than others. Those who are loved are already helped by that love. As the Beautiful Being says, “Do you get my meaning, daughter of earth?” Just now I live to serve mankind through the horrors of this war. Serve also by loving those who least attract your love. So shall you learn the way to the Path where walk the Masters of Compassion.

April 14

Letter 22

Peace Propaganda

Were you shocked and grieved by what I told you of the futile struggle in that intermediate world between the bondage of dense matter and the freedom of purer regions? It is nothing to grieve about; it is nothing but the necessary transition stage. It lasts but a little while, a few days, a few years—what matter, in the endless leisure of eternity? You yourself have passed through it many times. All pass through it in going out to a freer life, though all do not suffer it consciously and lingeringly as my friend did. It is a nightmare, yes; but no nightmare lasts forever. Think of the joy and the freedom beyond! They are worth the boatman’s penny. It is true that I have not told you the most terrible things that are possible in this transition, have not told you the most terrible things that I have seen in my journeys round the battlefields. Those unwritten chapters are not necessary for the book which I dictate to teach brotherhood in place of separation, peace in place of war.

Would you know how you may do something to shorten this war, to hasten the coming of peace? Then listen! You can personally hasten the coming of peace! Is the idea startling? When I say “you,” I mean others, too, all those who are weary of war, and of hate, the mother of war. Has anyone injured you in the struggle of life?—for life is a kind of war. Go out in thought to those whose desires have clashed with your desires, those who have hurt you or hated you. Go to them one by one—not several at a time in this exercise, and one by one try to understand them. See yourself with their eyes, feel toward yourself with their hearts. If they still hate you, you may hate yourself at first in sympathy with them. But remaining there in sympathy with them, you will gradually feel their hard thoughts of you change, gradually begin to be friends with yourself through them.

This I am advising you to do is not a form of “black magic,” because the object is unselfish. You are making a beginning toward softening the enmities of the world. But I warn you against using this practice to win the regard of anyone whom you love selfishly or with passion, because the reaction would bring about a very undesirable condition of disharmony. When you have thus understood and forgiven all your personal enemies, enter the souls of the warring nations. Understand them also by sympathy, and soften their hearts. Though this is a much easier thing to attempt than the other, the results may seem incommensurable with the effort. But, small and great, you are all part of the Whole. And this brings me to the idea of race spirits, race entities, for every race has its guardian being—a composite being, yet self-conscious as separate, in a way you could hardly understand. Have you not noticed the effect on yourself of passing from country to country? Have your feelings—has your consciousness not changed almost at the frontier? Do you remember the shock you once had on setting foot for the first time in a certain foreign land?

The race spirits seem no larger to themselves than you humans do among your friends and acquaintances. Size is relative. Heretofore I have spoken of the races as organs in the body of humanity. In speaking of them now as separate beings I am not contradicting myself. What reason have you for assuming that the organs of your body may not each be animated by a more or less separate consciousness? Your cells exist in your organs, your organs exist in your body, you exist in your race, your race exists in the body of humanity on earth, the entity of the earth exists in the democracy of planetary spirits in the solar system, the solar system exists as one in the company of its fellows in the greater democracy of the Cosmos. A small blood clot on the brain could seriously hamper the working of your cosmos. So you see there is nothing preposterous in my saying that you can hasten infinitesimally the peace between the race spirits by forgiving and making peace with your personal enemies, especially if they belong to races on the other side of this war. The small is not so unimportant and the great is not so important as you have the habit of supposing. Yes, you personally—and all of you—can hasten the coming of peace.

April 16

Letter 23

The Mystery of Desire

I have written about the hunger and thirst of disembodied men in the astral world, and I have written about the evil astral beings who brought about this war to satisfy their malice. They too are hungry beings and the war has given them food. Do you know what they live on? They may live long on blood and the exhalations of slaughter. I have seen them by myriads hovering over a battlefield, gorging themselves on the blood that dripped from the wounds of suffering men and from dead men. The leaving of the dead unburied has also satisfied their hunger. Vampire entities came up from Hungary and from other countries and fed on the living. The awful weariness of war opened a door through which they might pass to the life forces they craved.

“Blood is a peculiar fluid,” as Goethe said. The life of an evil entity may be renewed for another long period of existence if he can have blood enough. If you stop eating the carcasses of dead animals, you will cease to feed certain evil entities in yourselves. It is not merely for reasons of sentiment that the pupils of the Great Masters are advised to refrain from animal food. You are told that meat eating feeds the passional nature. What is the passional nature but the hungry nature that longs to feed on something not itself? So long as you eat meat habitually you will never be quite free from the influence of entities who live on the blood and the other properties of meat. Eat purely, and by and by you will find yourselves thinking purely and desiring purely. I do not tell you to kill out all desire this afternoon, for desire is the dynamics with which you work for even the ideal; but kill out desire for blood and the flesh of dead animals, and all sorts of other desires which serve no necessary purpose in your evolution will expire.

A lot of nonsense is talked about desire. You desire to develop spiritually, you desire to do the work of the Masters; you are not merely led along like a lamb to do the work of the Masters. There is desire and desire. If it seems “desirable” that you shorten the road to conscious union with the All, you will desire that union probably; you are not likely to drift into it. I am not talking about the violent desires of ambition. You need not be ambitious for occult development. In fact, if you are too ambitious for occult development you will be in danger of becoming a black magician. But you can quietly “desire” even union with God. All action on this plane springs from desire of some sort, and it has been said that desire and will are the same. Perhaps they are. It has also been said that desire relates to the temporary, and that will is some kind of superior motive force; but I should be inclined to say that will in its more dignified phases was merely desire for a higher thing—that is, if I wanted to separate the two. Music may be sublime and music may be ragtime; it is still music. The force of the wind may fan the flame that burns your house, or it may fill the sails of the boat that takes you across the sea to your soul’s desire. It is still the same wind.

You may even desire to desire the higher things. You may will to will with the Law instead of against it. Is that not desire, too? In advising you not to feed by blood sacrifices the elemental forces in yourself which crave that impure food, I am not inviting you to kill out desire. You will have to desire to purify your system from the material of dead animals before you will willfully cease to feed on them. The evil in you, the hungry fiery selfish nature, sucks up the blood that passes your lips somewhat as the evil beings above the battlefields suck up the blood that flows from the wounds of the fallen. If you have no further use for these creatures, you can cease to feed them with blood. You will never kill out your emotional nature by ceasing to eat meat. You will merely purify it. The whole soul-world is a world of emotion, and the pure beings of the elements are very emotional, but they do not feed on blood.

Yes, mind is higher than emotion, it is beyond emotion. You can have mind without emotion, and you can have emotion without mind to any great degree, as in the animals; but man is made of both. He is dependent on his middle register, his soul-desire nature, in order to work in the soul world as a growing entity there. When you reach the highest heaven you will be living in thought with only so much of the desire nature as you have raised with you by memory and assimilation. You can raise more of soul-dynamics into the highest region if you do not clog your feet on the road by desire for bloody food. Leave that to the demons who gorge themselves on the battlefields. During the reign of brotherhood which I am trying to help in bringing about, the race will subsist on a pure diet. Even now there is a tendency toward the elimination of dead animals from the dietary. The desires of the new race will have to be purified, their emotions raised and intensified. The emotions of a man are much more intense than the emotions of a lion. The emotions of a god are cosmic.

April 16

Letter 24

The Scales of Justice

Lest anyone should think that in working for brotherhood I am either knowingly or inadvertently striving to bring about a state of lax acquiescence in the wrongs committed by my fellowmen, by my brothers, I want to talk about justice. As one who has been a so-called Judge in a court of justice, I have had some little experience in the practical working out of a balance between mercy and severity. Justice is one of the gods that I have always placed high in my personal pantheon, and never in handing down a decision did I, through weakness or sentimentality, hamper the right of the good in order to pander to the wrong of evil. I have given mild judgments when most good seemed to be promised that way; I have given severe judgments when it seemed to me that evil would be best curbed that way.

Much nonsense has been talked and written about universal brotherhood, as about most of the other ideals of mankind. Universal brotherhood is not universal acquiescence in evil; it is universal acceptance of the ideal of good. And you will never have a brotherhood worthy of the name until you raise, not lower, the standard of justice. Justice is balance, justice is equilibrium between forces, justice is poise. It is because I hope to see a more poised humanity that I am urging men to concentrate upon love instead of upon hate. Since I have been stationed in Europe and in the immediate neighborhood of the western battlefields, I have helped hundreds of souls to help themselves through the terrible astral conditions into which a sudden and premature dropping of their physical bodies has precipitated them; but in no case have I tried to upset the balance between cause and effect by helping a soul to a freedom for which it was not prepared. I have let men suffer when I could have shortened their suffering; I have let many souls work out in the astral world the slow battle with their lower desires, because I knew that if they were plucked from the tree of pain before they were ripe, they would have to go through it all anyway and battle harder in another life with those very forces which now by their suffering they were severing in the region where—from the very limitation of satisfactions—elementary desires are more easily starved out than on the earth.

There was in one of the armies a very cruel officer who was hated by his men. He came out here and many of the men came out here, and I made no attempt to protect him from their reproaches, because he needed to learn that injustice deserves reproach. On earth their mouths had been stopped by army discipline, but out here he had to realize how much he had wronged them. He could never have realized it in any other way. Had I preached to him he would have told me to mind my own business. The law of justice does not preach. It demonstrates. He had to endure the demonstration of his own injustice through the dark and reproachful shadows by which he was long surrounded. And I may say in passing that he is still surrounded by them. I have made no effort to help him. Perhaps I could have done so; but such determined opposition on my part to the law of justice might have let him go forward into his own selfish heaven with such a load of injustice on his soul that in his next earthly life he would have been crushed by it. The resentment of these men was very deep, and while I might have softened it for their sake—not his—I let it work itself out.

Had there been no one else needing my help and deserving it more, I might have spent a long time with these men and yet made little impression. I did exactly as I should have done on earth had such a case come before me, and I believe that I did it right. Whenever I see a soul afflicted by the unjust judgments of others I seek to set the balance true, as I should have done on earth; but I am not here to upset the law of cause and effect. When I can help, I help; but I am more useful in preventing the setting up of evil causes than I could ever be in deflecting the legitimate course of effects. When I urge men to help the Masters in holding back the awful karma of Germany, I am not talking sentimentally. I am talking as a just judge. The German people have been deceived by their leaders and have followed blindly a course they have not understood. Collectively they are responsible to the other races, but individually they are not responsible in the same degree; for they have been themselves deceived, and they do not know that their cause of national aggression is unjust and of satanic origin.