Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Chambers, John. "Eileen Garrett: The Medium is the Message" Quest  101. 4 (Fall 2013): pg. 136-140.

 By John Chambers

Do mediums channel spirits and spirit messages from other planes of reality? No one can really  say. But today, when mediums are often TV performers as much as they are communicators with the beyond, hawk their wares like merchants selling medicine, and refuse to submit to scientific testing, it's illuminating to look at the life of Eileen Garrett. This vibrant, red-haired Irishwoman, who lived from 1893 to 1970, is remembered today mainly for founding New York's esteemed Parapsychology Foundation. But she was certainly the greatest medium of the twentieth century, and she helped numerous people in numerous ways while willingly submitting herself to every sort of scientific investigation.

In her autobiography, Eileen reveals her defining characteristic: a "quality of doing as I wanted to in spite of everything . . . [which] had no elements of active defi­ance, resistance or animus. And I lived as I was made." 

Her nature was loving, but also independent and imperious. She refused to blindly follow the dictates of consensus reality; instead, she bent reality, she forged reality, she created it. 

Eileen Garrett never knew her parents. She was born in Beauparc, County Meath, Ireland, on March 17, 1893. Her mother, raised a strict Presbyterian, eloped with her father, a Spanish Roman Catholic, while she was on a school tour to Morocco. The bride was ostra­cized by her family, except for her oldest sister, on whose property Anna and Anthony, the parents, lived until Eileen was born. The young mother drowned her­self a few days after Eileen's birth; she had been told her parents would never accept her, or her husband, into the family. Her father fatally shot himself six weeks later; he had been informed that he couldn't take his daughter back with him to his family in Spain. Recent research has suggested that this story is apocryphal and that either Eileen's aunt, who told her the story, misled her, or Eileen understandably misremembered what she had been told as a child.

In any event Eileen was certainly an orphan, and her upbringing was difficult enough. She was raised by her aunt and uncle on a farmhouse in one of the most isolated, if beautiful, areas of Ireland. As a child she felt closer to nature and the cosmos than she did to indi­vidual human beings. She wrote that she saw people "not merely as physical bodies, but as if each were set within a nebulous egg-shaped covering of his own. This surround, as I called it for want of a better name, con­sisted of transparent changing colors, or could become dense and heavy in character—for these coverings changed according to the variations in people's moods." Eileen later learned of "the positive importance of the surround as a protection to the physical body, receiving and condensing the impacts of sound, light and move­ment, and diminishing their violence."

She was constantly scolded by her harsh aunt, but discovered as a child that "I could involuntarily shut away the sound and sense of her harshness." Years later, she wondered if acquiring this skill had been "the beginning of that cleavage which later developed into my having more than one personality to live with." 

From the age of four, Eileen had imaginary play­mates—two girls and a boy. She called them "The Chil­dren" and communicated with them telepathically. The Children never changed as Eileen grew up. She wrote, "Their bodies were soft and warm. Yet they were dif­ferent. I saw all bodies surrounded by a nimbus of light, but The Children were gauze-like. Light permeated their substance . . . They possessed a hidden dignity that commanded respect. The Children loved every­thing that grew and flowered, and they helped develop my already acute sense of knowing things."

From an early age Eileen had developed a sense of what sounds very much like the plenum—a classical term, often used by C.J. Jung, that defines space not as a quantum vacuum that is empty but as an overflow­ing fullness. "Thus, from the beginning, space has never been empty for me. There was both sound and move­ment in the 'space' of every area, and I could discrimi­nate among environments by the impressions of this tremendous 'vitality' that I appear to gather otherwise than by means of my five senses."

While still a child, she found she could watch a being's spirit leave its body. In revenge for her aunt's acts of cruelty, she strangled all the ducks on the farm. She wrote, "The little dead bodies were quiet, but a strange movement was occurring all about them. A gray, smoke-like substance rose up from each small form." Eileen would have three sons, one dying just after birth, the other two dying in infancy. In all three deaths, she watched heartbroken as the spirit rose from the body. 

As a young woman the red-haired Eileen was bosomy and lissome, with a pretty face that often shone with beauty. She would many three times, each time with a kind of lofty detachment, and was able to dis­engage herself with only a little heartache from two of these marriages. The exception was her second hus­band, an army officer. When she married him in Lon­don at the height of World War I, he was about to leave for the front, and Eileen had a horrible premonition that he would be killed in just days or weeks. Not long after his departure, at a dinner party, she suddenly lost all sense of personal identity and found herself "caught in the shattering concussion of a terrible explosion. I saw my gentle, golden-haired husband blown to pieces. I floated out on a sea of terrific sound. When I came to myself, I knew that my husband had been killed." He had indeed been killed, and at the time that she was having this experience.

During her first marriage Eileen had discovered she could see "more easily and clearly through my finger­tips and the nape of my neck than through my eyes; and hearing and knowing, for instance, came through my feet and knees." This "knowing," gained through her paranormal senses, would always be more meaning­ful than the knowledge she acquired with her normal senses.

Europe emerged in tatters from World War I. Mil­lions of innocents were slaughtered in this war which had begun with so much patriotic fervor. A whole gen­eration of fighting British, French, and German youth was annihilated. Religious faith was shattered; people desperately sought new meaning in a universe where all traditional values had been upended. (Even during the war, Eileen had flirted with Britain's socialist Fabian Society, which advocated a system of governance by the workers.)

Brilliant eccentrics and maverick geniuses flourished in this climate. At the end of the war, Eileen came under the spell of one of these geniuses. This was Edward Carpenter, then in his seventies. A prolific author and activist, Carpenter was known internationally for such books as Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, The Drama of Love and Death, and Pagan and Christian Creeds. He complimented Eileen on the "miraculous spectrum" of her early childhood experiences and declared that she was gifted with cosmic consciousness. (The term, which connotes a mystical awareness of the unity of life and the universe, was coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in his celebrated book of the same name.) Carpenter claimed to possess this awareness, and, telling Eileen she possessed it too, helped her sharpen it. Her elderly teacher was willful, cantankerous, and dictatorial, but Eileen stuck with him for two years. Thus had begun, she would later say, the period of her higher education. 

In 1920, she began to study with James Hewat McKenzie, someone else whose ideas had prospered in the iconoclastic postwar period. McKenzie had just founded the British College of Psychic Science in Lon­don; Eileen stayed with him until his death in 1930. He was the first to recognize and encourage her psychic gifts. He believed not only that potential mediums should undergo a long and careful apprenticeship, but that their spirit guides, or "spirit controls," should be trained as well. Spirit controls are the discarnate enti­ties who act as "traffic cops," deciding which spirits should or should not enter the mind of the medium they also do most of the communicating.

It was also in 1920 that Eileen had her firs real brush with a spirit control.  In 1918 she had given birth to a fourth child, a girl, Babette. Two years later, Babette  beame  gravely ill with whooping cough and pneumonia. Doctors were sure she would die. Eileen’s biographer Alan Angoff writes in Eileen Garrett and the World beyond the Senses that Eileen

was enraged by all of them [the doctors], refusing to accept this fate, and set about tying to save her baby in her own manner. She picked Babette up out of the crib, breathed air into her mouth, and tried to lend her some of her own mother's vitality as she held her close. In the midst of her efforts she heard a voice saying, "Be careful! She must have more air. Open the windows and allow a new cur­rent of air in the room."

She followed these directions without questioning who it was who spoke, or feeling any fear of the strong breeze corning from the open window. 'A moment later," she recalled, "I saw the outline of a figure leaning against the bed, a short lithe man; his face was turned away from me. I was too petrified to look very closely at him. Although my limbs were trembling, I knew I must approach the bed and put the child back on it.

"As I laid her down, I was aware of this man, in gray garments, standing beside me, with a sympathetic and kindly smile. His presence reassured me; fear left me and I knew he had come to help me save the child."

To the amazement of the doctors, Babette recovered completely in a few days.

It was not until 1930, when she was thirty-seven, that Eileen learned that this "man in gray garments" was an early manifestation of her second spirit control, Abdul Latif. He was identified with a historical figure, a great Muslim physician who was born in Baghdad in 1162 and died there in 1231. Abdul Latif traveled throughout the Muslim world and served for a time as a physician in the court of Saladin, sultan of Egypt.

For over ten years Eileen had already been reluc­tantly and gingerly dealing with her first spirit control, Ouvani, or Uvani, who claimed to be a fourteenth-century Persian soldier. She first encountered Uvani when, one night in the company of friends, she invol­untarily fell into trance and mouthed incomprehen­sible words in a strange oriental accent. Frightened, she consulted Huhnli, an eminent Swiss spiritualist in London. Huhnli made contact with Uvani and identi­fied this spirit control. He explained to Eileen: "This is what happened in your case. I spoke with the con­trolling entity who used your mechanism whilst you were apparently asleep. He is a man of unusual intel­ligence, who declares that he is an Oriental; he wishes to do serious work to prove the validity of the theory of survival."

From 1920 to 1930, with many hesitations because she feared the spirit controls might be early manifesta­tions of madness—and in the midst of a whirl of activi­ties that included healings, ghost "releasements," and a great deal of social work—Eileen increasingly and with greater and greater effectiveness made use of her psy­chic powers.

At a séance in 1929 she channeled the eminent British barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who had died earlier that year. Two years before, Hall had vis­ited a clairvoyant himself and had been told he would die within two years. Someone at the seance inquired of Uvani: "May we ask what sort of work he is doing now?" Uvani replied, apparently channeling Hall's words:

I fear I am going to disappoint you, but this is not heaven, neither is it hell, though it savors of both. My friends are still tied up with knots and problems, but I played at both things and was terribly sincere when I played. I am still playing. This is not a state of spirit any more than the one I have left, and I am young here, a mere baby. I have only been over a year or two. I am doing what the other infants do, opening my eyes, looking around and asking questions. There is still a lot of earth man left in me, thank God. I am still in a state of matter, with a more beautiful and much less troublesome body. I take a hand in everything that is going on ... This is a place where free will predominates . . . All experience is growth ... it can be Hell or Heaven . . . from my own point of view, I am not in Hell ... I am now in a comfortable part of the globe ... Here is freedom from pain, freedom from sorrow, the vision which has led me all my life and which I would not change.

During this period Eileen became fairly well-known; in late 1930, a single psychic feat made her world-famous. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, a great believer in channeling and a leader in the spiritualist movement, died on July 7. On October 5 of that year, the 777-foot British dirigible R101, on its maiden voyage, crashed in flames near the French town of Beauvais, killing forty-eight of its fifty-four passengers.

Two years earlier, while giving a sitting in the pres­ence of Doyle, Eileen had foreseen this crash. (Even before the séance, she had had multiple visions of diri­gibles crashing over London.) On October 7, two days after the destruction of the 11101, she held a seance to try to contact Doyle. Uvani appeared and spoke calmly. Then his voice became agitated. Speaking in clipped British accents, he conveyed a message apparently from Flight Lieutenant H. Carmichael Irwin, the R101's captain, who had been killed in the crash. During the seance (and six more, in which other alleged deceased members of the crew spoke out), Irwin provided tech­nical knowledge concerning the crash that no one else could have known at the time. Months later, the results of the official investigation confirmed everything that Irwin and the other crew members had said.

A year later, Eileen was invited by the American Society for Psychical Research to participate in a series of experiments and go on a lecture tour of the U.S. Dur­ing this tour she managed to help many people with her psychic gifts. In Hollywood, at a private session attended by Cecil B. DeMille, she channeled the movie producer's deceased mother. DeMille deeply loved his mother. He had been a skeptic, but he was so moved and persuaded by this experience that the next day he filled Eileen's hotel suite with flowers.

Trapped in France in the first months of the Ger­man occupation, Eileen helped the French in every way she could. In 1941 she escaped to the U.S. with her daughter. Arriving in New York, she set up her own publishing company, Creative Age Press, in the space of a single month. Creative Age published the first New Age magazine, Tomorrow, which appeared regularly for over a decade, and a full line of books by well-known authors, including six by Eileen. She wrote the first, Telepathy, in six weeks. She penned a dozen works, including three novels; all sold well.

In 1957, the depth psychologist Ira Progoff talked to Eileen's spirit controls—there were four of them now — Uvani, Abdul Latif, Tahoteh, and Raxnah — while the publisher-psychic lay in trance. The conversations were published in Progoff's Image of an Oracle: A Report on Research into the Mediumship of Eileen J. Garrett. Prog­off wrote:

The psyche of Eileen Garrett is also a vehicle of something much larger than the individual whose name it bears .. . its capacities, its nature, its intent, and the contents of its psychological expressions are all symbolic manifestations of a principle and power that is not Eileen Garrett at all. It brings forth Eileen Garrett, as it brings forth all other indi­viduals. It supplies the necessary materials and utilizes them, and moves on its infinite way. The individual person may provide the temporary field in which the events take place; but the individual is not the cause of them, and the fullness of meaning contained in the events is not to be understood with reference to the individual psyche per se.

From an early age Eileen had suffered from health problems—tuberculosis, asthma, a heart condition, bouts with pneumonia, and much else. She was often hospitalized, though much of the time she bravely ignored these problems. They caught up with her. In 1951, ill and exhausted, she sold Creative Age Press and set up the Parapsychology Foundation, a New York-based research foundation and library that is still in operation. In a few years, the foundation was hold­ing annual conferences at sites around the world. On September 4, 1970, on the last day of the Parapsychol­ogy Foundation's nineteenth international conference, held at Eileen's French Riviera villa—and which she attended—the valiant pioneer in the use of paranormal abilities died of heart failure.

We're fortunate to have from the pen of Martin Ebon (1917-2006), administrative secretary of the Parapsychological Foundation for twelve years, a portrait of Eileen Garrett at work. On this particular day in the mid-1960s, the work consisted of exorcis­ing the supposed spirit of a witch who had invaded the mind and body of a wealthy young married woman liv­ing in an elegant town house on New York's Upper East Side. Ebon was the author or editor of more than eighty books, including They Knew the Unknown, Prophecy in Our Time, and KGB: Death and Rebirth. In his account of the exorcism in The Devil's Bride: Exorcism, Past and Present (1970), he disguises the identity of the upscale New York wife, giving her the alias of Victoria Camden.

Ebon tells us that, over a period of months, Victo­ria had suffered many strange and violent accidents in her home: "Without forewarning, she might be thrown across the room, and pitched down on her face. At one time, she nearly drowned in her bathtub and then found herself hurled, wet and helpless and naked, against the tiles around the tub and wall." Her body was bloody, scratched, and beaten; she suffered from contusions.

Eileen always made sure witnesses were present, one of them keeping a record, when she was involved in psychic experimentation. She had invited Victoria's lawyer to join her in this exorcism experiment in the victim's own house, and she asked Ebon to accom­pany her there to take notes and ask supplementary questions.

The moment Eileen, Ebon, and the lawyer entered the house, an historic old New York mansion, Victo­ria—who had just returned with her husband from an outing—exclaimed in a horrified whisper, "She is here!" Ebon tells us, "There was a tremolo in her voice. First her hands began to shake; then her whole body."

The terrified victim told them she sensed the pres­ence of Ruth, a spirit who had been pursued as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, at the time of the witch trials, but had never been caught or tried. There had been a lead-up: over the months, Victoria had been doing auto­matic writing without quite knowing what it was, and she had channeled entities who often made odd and provocative remarks such as "Midnight is a fool's myth," and "Oh, it's so cold in this merciless wind." Then Vic­toria began to see ghosts and hear bizarre noises.

That was before she and her husband moved into this house in Manhattan. Then all became a nightmare of possession. "I've been ill the whole time," Victoria told them. "The persecution of Ruth has made me sick­est of all with these violent attacks. You have no idea how violent they were— I mean, she'd throw you across the room ... always on the face ... You'd be perfectly all right, you'd start across the room ordinarily and then—wham! —down you go."

Now Eileen set about exorcising this ghost in her customary fashion. Ebon writes that she

began to go slowly through the house, from room to room, from floor to floor . . . In some of the rooms, and even on stairway landings, Mrs. Garrett stopped quietly, spoke inaudibly as if in prayer or pleading with an unseen force. On two occasions she rushed ahead, giving us little chance to catch up, and then stood still, as if listening. At one point she stared at a wall; later she said there had been an opening, a window or door or connection with another building, but it had now been closed off: its memory remained, like a phantom limb. Moving about, she was taking, as it were, the buildings psychic measure, search­ing for memories that might be felt and dramatized by a sensitive person, while seeking to put them in their proper place in time and history.

This went on for about an hour. "Mrs. Garrett was seemingly just building up energy while, as she put it, `smelling the place out.' It was all in preparation for the final encounter, the meeting of ghost with ghost."

Eileen now sat down on the living-room couch and, making herself comfortable by slipping off her jewelry, closed her eyes and leaned her head against the couch's back. She was waiting for her control entities, Uvani or Abdul Latif, to emerge and to speak through her. Finally sounds issued from her mouth. They came with the characteristic voice, intonation, and vocabulary of Abdul Latif. The spirit asked, "What do you wish of me?"

Victoria's husband, helped by Ebon, quickly explained Victoria's dilemma to the entranced Eileen and, supposedly, to the waiting shade of Abdul Latif. While they were speaking, "Victoria seemed convulsed, tossed about like a ship in a storm. While her body writhed, a croaking voice uttered from her throat, 'I want—I want—I want—peace!"

Then Abdul Latif asked Victoria to come to him. She stumbled across the floor and sank down beside the couch. A stream of reassurances came from Eileen's vocal chords. "We are here to heal you," Abdul Latif intoned soothingly, "to help you find you, to bring you peace." Victoria laid her head in Eileen's lap; she was sobbing, but the writhing had stopped. Abdul Latif spoke to the possessing spirit of Ruth, telling her she must leave Victoria and that she must leave this plane of reality. But she was not being abandoned, because others like himself would help her when she arrived at the other side. Then the spirit control, guiding Eileen's hand over Victoria's head as if in blessing, said a few more compassionate words that nonetheless urged the possessing spirit to depart—and Ruth was suddenly gone. Victoria looked around calmly.

Eileen, shuddering softly, emerged slowly and heav­ily from the trance and asked what had happened. She was told. She suggested they all have a drink and some food. This they did; and Victoria was a normally gra­cious, smiling, Upper East Side hostess.

Eileen paid a follow-up visit a week later; Victoria was still perfectly normal, and would remain so. The medium and Ebon discussed the exorcism, as they had discussed many others; both agreed that there might have been a certain degree of self-dramatization, of the unconscious but powerful use of the creative imagi­nation, in Victoria's seeming possession. Was that the whole truth? Perhaps so, but Eileen didn't think so. She didn't dwell on it, though, but merely added it to her data base of psychic experimentation. The point was that Victoria was cured. For the twentieth century's greatest medium, it was all in a day's work.

Sources

Angoff, Allan. Eileen Garrett and the World beyond the Senses. New York: Morrow, 1974.

Ebon, Martin. The Devil's Bride: Exorcism, Past & Present. New York: Signet, 1974.

Garrett, Eileen J. Adventures in the Supernormal: A Personal Memoir. New York: Garrett, 1949.

— . Life Is the Healer. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1957.

— . Many Voices: The Autobiography of a Medium. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1968.

— . The Sense and Nonsense of Prophecy. New York: Berkley, 1950.

— . Telepathy: In Search of a Lost Faculty. New York: Creative Age, 1941.

—., ed. Does Man Survive Death? New York: Garrett, 1957. Garrett, Eileen J., and Abril Lamarque. Man—The

Maker: From Fire to Atom: A Pictorial Record of Man's Inventiveness. New York: Creative Age, 1946.

McMahon, Joanne D.S. Eileen Garrett: A Woman

Who Made a Difference. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1994.

Progoff, Ira. The Image of an Oracle: A Report on Research into the Mediumship of Eileen J. Garrett. New York: Helix/ Garrett, 1964.

JOHN CHAMBERS is the author of a number of books, including Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo, which has been translated into seven languages; Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life; and The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds. His next book, Isaac Newton: Rescuing the Soul of Man, will be published in early 2014. He lives in Redding, California.

Printed in the Fall 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "Otherwhere: An Interview with Kurt Leland" Quest  101. 4 (Fall 2013): pg. 130-135.

By Richard Smoley

Kurt Leland is one of today's most intrepid explorers of the inner planes. A musician and author as well as a visionary, he has written books including Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-of-Body Traveler and The Multidimensional Human. A member of the TS, he has given lectures and presentations in Theosophical venues. In addition, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the writings of the Theosophical leader Annie Besant. His latest work, an anthology of her writings entitled Invisible Worlds: Annie Besant on Psychic and Spiritual Development (Quest Books).

I met Kurt during his visit to Olcott in the fall of 2011, and was immediately impressed with the depth of his knowledge of and experience in, the astral and mental realms, which are for most people little more than vaguely understood concepts. He seemed to be the perfect person to feature in an issue on the astral plane. The following conversation was conducted by e-mail in the spring of 2013.

Richard Smoley: What exactly is the astral plane? How does it differ from the other unseen levels that esotericism talks about?

Kurt Leland: Many ancient and modem religions posit the sky or the stars as a paradisal destination for the souls of the dead. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Gnosticism, and the Christianity behind Dante's Divine Comedy divide this heaven in the sky into multiple layers (often seven) in which immateriality and blessedness increase as the soul ascends. In some religions, the soul may be detained in one or another of these layers to be purified before continuing to rise or returning to earth in a new physical body—hence the notion of purgatory in Catholic teachings. In the fifth century CE, the Neoplatonist Proclus seems to have originated the term astral (Greek: "starry") body as one of the soul's "vehicles." Since then, the word astral has been assigned by various esoteric traditions to a number of bodies, states of consciousness, and nonphysical locations. Even in H.P. Blavatsky's writings, the terms astral body and astral plane may refer sometimes to a particular state of existence beyond that of the physical realm and sometimes to any such state.

In later Theosophical literature, especially that produced by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, the astral plane is defined as the first nonphysical reality we encounter after death—less material than the physical plane, yet denser in substance than the higher planes and serving a purgatorial function.

Smoley: Could you talk a little about how the astral level fits in with other planes of reality that Theosophy discusses?

Leland: HPB defined a plane as "the range or extent of some state of consciousness, or of the perceptive powers of a particular set of senses, or the action of a particular force, or the state of matter corresponding to any of .the above" (Blavatsky, Theosophical Glossary, 255)

Thus the astral plane is a state of consciousness in which, by means of appropriate inner senses we perceive a particular state of matter (less dense than that of the physical plane, more subtle than that of higher planes). This matter corresponds to our states of desire and emotion. Thus the astral plane is sometimes called the plane of kama (Sanskrit: "desire") or the emotional plane. Higher levels of existence correspond to the mind (mental plane), the intuition (buddhic plane), and the spiritualized will (nirvanic plane).

Smoley: What does the astral plane have to do with the astral light as described by HPB, Etliphas Levi, and other occultists?

Leland: In Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge, HPB calls the astral light "the dregs of akasha," a Sanskrit word meaning "radiance" (Blavatsky, Collected Writings 10:251). For her, akasha, one of the five elements of Hinduism (along with earth, water, air, and fire), seems to be the "substance" of nonphysical reality. It has seven levels, of which the astral light is the lowest.

Sometimes HPB speaks of "Astral Light" (uppercase) when referring to the higher levels. She also calls the "astral light" (lowercase) the astral body of our planet and claims that we have filled it with destructive images (thought-forms) based on selfishness—negative thoughts and feelings that separate us from the whole. No wonder she refers to dregs!

Besant and Leadbeater speak of the astral plane in similar terms, so it seems reasonable to equate the astral light and the astral plane. However, Besant and Leadbeater often describe the planes in travelogue form, leaving the impression that they are quasi-physical locations. HPB's notion of levels of akasha reminds us that when our inner senses are attuned to these levels, we perceive illusory images superimposed on a nonphysical reality more correctly perceived as degrees of radiance emanating from the Source of our planar system. Such images are often symbolic, drawn from our personal experience. They help us understand what we perceive in subtle realms, but they have no actual existence there.

Smoley: Could you say a little bit about how ordinary people experience the astral plane?

Leland: I'm not sure that ordinary people do experience it! Though dreams ordinarily take place on the astral plane, they rarely give clues about the structure of that plane and its regions and inhabitants. An extraordinary amount of lucidity is required to experience such things directly. But perhaps you mean, how would an ordinary person suddenly catapulted onto the astral plane experience it? This was my situation when my projection experiences began at age fourteen. I had no training, no desire for such experiences. I wasn't seeking them. I didn't know what they were—and I found them terrifying.

Most people fear that separation of the locus of consciousness—what we call ourselves—from the physical body means death, or at least the possibility of not being able to get back into it. I experienced that fear. I knew I was someplace else. I could see nothing, hear nothing, and I couldn't move of my own accord—my astral senses weren't sufficiently developed for such purposes. A presence of some sort was drawing me along. I fought to get away from it and return to my physical body. It may have been a benign presence, even perhaps a teacher. But I had no way of knowing what it was.

Just as we don't know how to sort out our sense impressions when we're born into the physical body, so it is when we first experience the astral body. We have to go from what Besant calls a sheath—an unorganized astral body that has only the possibility of responding to the matter of the astral plane—to a body, in which we feel and understand the full range of human emotion and have mastered it to some degree, to a vehicle of consciousness, which allows us to be fully aware of, and to move freely on, the astral plane because we've mastered our emotional nature.

Several years after my first projections, I learned what they were. I began to develop the senses of this astral vehicle so I would know where I was, what I was seeing, whom I was interacting with, and how to get from one astral location to another. The process took about twelve years.

Smoley: What does this level of reality have to do with dreams?

Leland: Though much Theosophical literature focuses on the astral plane as a stage in our journey between death and rebirth, this plane also represents the state of consciousness in which many of our dreams take place. Astral dreams serve much the same purpose as the purgatorial stage of the afterlife. They allow us to confront and release the emotional reactions built up within daily life. We confront them as dream images, and the corresponding changes in the physical body allow us to release them.

Though people often think of astral projection as a specialized technique that may be difficult or dangerous to develop, we project onto the astral plane every night when we're asleep. In our dreams, we tend to be self-absorbed, not recognizing the astral environment for what it is—just as we may not notice our physical surroundings when we're brooding in ordinary waking consciousness. Exploring the astral plane may require little more than turning our attention away from personal dream imagery toward the more public aspects of the astral plane—its scenes, dwellers, and phenomena.

Smoley: There is some implicit conflict about astral travel and similar techniques among Theosophists. There is the idea that these powers can be developed, but there is also a tremendous reluctance to develop them on the grounds that this can be dangerous. Where do you stand on this issue?

Leland: HPB's writings are full of warnings about the dangers of developing abilities such as channeling (mediumship) and astral travel. Back in the 1970s, a book of selections from her writings called Dynamics of the Psychic World was published. The editor's choices were sufficiently alarming that anyone who read it would naturally be wary of such explorations. Yet the following passage was not included: "Subjective, purely spiritual 'Mediumship' is the only harmless kind, and is often an elevating gift that might be cultivated by every one" (Blavatsky, Collected Writings 6:329).

HPB taught the students of her Esoteric School to seek the guidance of high spiritual Masters by "rising to the spiritual plane where the Masters are" (B1avatsky, Collected Writings 12:492). This is what she means by "subjective, purely spiritual 'Mediumship.— Some students may rise to that plane through meditation, with no awareness of bodies and planes. According to Annie Besant, these are the "mystics." Others may experience this journey more dramatically, as a rising from one subtle body and plane to another, with complete awareness of the scenes, dwellers, and phenomena encountered in each. Besant calls these the "occultists." She makes this distinction in her 1914 essay "Occultism," one of the texts I selected for Invisible Worlds.

I have learned that in nonphysical reality everything can be experienced as energy, information, and consciousness. Our inner senses are attuned to one or more of these aspects, resulting in what could be called our spiritual temperament. In meditative states or astral projection, the realities we experience correspond to our temperament.

If we're mystics, we respond to the energy aspect of nonphysical reality. Our experience will be filled with radiance, bliss, and a sense of ultimate truth—and may be otherwise indescribable. If we're clairvoyants, we respond to the information aspect. Our experience will be filled with vivid imagery and colors, seemingly real places and beings—which we tend to take literally, based purely upon appearances (for example, seeing the streets of heaven as paved with gold). If we're channelers, we respond to the consciousness aspect. Our experience will be filled with clairaudient encounters with seemingly friendly nonphysical beings— which we may not be able to identify as benevolent or malevolent or verify as truthful.

Ideally, we learn to counterbalance the strengths and weaknesses of our temperaments by developing our inner senses to respond to the other two aspects of nonphysical reality. Thus mystics who add information and consciousness to energy are able to sense the ultimate truthfulness of any nonphysical location or communication. I believe HPB was such a mystic. This is why she was so adept at finding the truths behind the world's religions and poking holes in the teachings of contemporary spiritualists, many of whom were insufficiently developed clairvoyants and channels. Of course, HPB was also a clairvoyant and a channel. The best teachers are highly developed along all three lines, but their primary temperament still colors their teachings.

Clairvoyants who add energy and consciousness to information know that the imagery they perceive as locations and beings represents a larger, otherwise inexpressible reality, and they recognize the need to interpret what they see as symbolic of that larger reality. I believe Leadbeater was such a clairvoyant.

This is why his descriptions of the astral plane are so vividly real to us as readers. But we must read them with our inner senses to discover the truth behind the often symbolic imagery

Channels who add energy and information to consciousness will have nonphysical contacts and will also know what they are, what their relationship to truth is, and the value of the information received from them. The twentieth-century Theosophist Geoffrey Hodson may have been such a channel. He's mostly known today for his vivid imagery of devas (angels) that he perceived clairvoyantly. But several of his early books, beginning with The Brotherhood of Angels and Men, were channeled by an angelic being called Bethelda.

Sadly, too many contemporary channels have access only to consciousness and information. They make extraordinary claims for the celestial origins of the beings who speak through them and they're fluent in delivering information, but to the discerning reader the results are little more than platitudes from the Pleiades.

So, to answer your question—I suspect that many Theosophists have the mystical temperament and are drawn to HPB's teachings because she also had this temperament. Such Theosophists will naturally distrust clairvoyant and channeled information as possibly less truthful than a direct experience of God consciousness achieved through meditation. The clairvoyants and channels may be more drawn to Leadbeater's teachings.

Some schisms in the Theosophical movement, as well as the resulting support or denigration of clairvoyance, channeling, and astral travel, may have been caused by unrecognized differences in spiritual temperament. Perhaps in moving forward, we can expand the notion of universal brotherhood to include these temperaments and recognize that whether we have the temperament of a mystic, a clairvoyant, or a channeler, the challenge for each of us is to add the missing sensitivities to our awareness, whether they be energy, information, or consciousness.

Smoley: There is some suggestion that images of future events lie embedded in the astral plane, and that having access to these is how prophecy works. Could you comment on this idea?

Leland: My understanding is that events take on energetic shape on higher planes and descend gradually into greater degrees of specificity, dropping from plane to plane until they manifest in the physical world. On the astral plane, such "event shapes" may have a high degree of specificity as to locations and persons, but not as to timing. As they get closer to occurring in our world, they begin exerting pressure to manifest on the physical plane, so that everything that is required to embody them lines up. People who are psychically sensitive may become aware of this pressure either as a hunch or sense of impending disaster or as an outright premonition with verifiable details. The closer these event shapes come to physical manifestation, the more likely such sensitives are to pick up on a specific time frame for their occurrence.

Theoretically, anyone who has access to planes higher than the astral can become aware of the shape of events as manifested on those planes — say, as archetypal imagery with a relatively low degree of specificity as to time and location. The prophecies of Nostradamus may be of this type: visions of archetypal event shapes that could replicate themselves on the physical plane in a variety of ways and that could generate any number of historically important events over the centuries since they were first uttered. This may account for their perpetual fascination as well as for the skeptics accusation that they're too vague to be applicable to a particular past, present, or coming event.

Smoley: Some esoteric traditions talk about things like egregores and (in the Tibetan tradition) tulpas —psychic entities that are created through thought power and will alone. Do you think there is any truth to this idea? Do you have any experience of these entities?

Leland: In Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel tells the story of creating such a tulpa as an experiment in the application of techniques learned from Tibetan teachers. She vividly imagined a fat jolly Buddhist monk as a companion—who then seemed to be constantly near her. She could see it and feel its touch. It traveled with her, and she could watch it perform actions she hadn't willed it to do. It was also sometimes visible to others. However, after a while, it began to change form, becoming increasingly malevolent. Six months of constant practice were required to dissolve it.

Certainly this is a cautionary tale about the power of the will and the dangers of ignorant experimentation. HPB would probably say that because David-Neel had stopped refreshing the tulpa with her will, it was taken over by an elemental (a nonphysical being, not necessarily good or evil, but indifferent to humanity and often unintentionally inimical) or an elementary (the astral shell of a deceased person of evil disposition).

I've had no experience of egregores, which I understand to be similar to tulpas, but are created by the combined will of a group. However, I may have experienced a tulpa. In college, I developed a reservoir of ill will toward some fellow students who lived down the hall from me and who frequently interfered with my sleep by playing loud music into the wee hours. One evening, I made the experiment of trying to influence them to stop this behavior by the exertion of my will in meditation. The result was surprising—a lit firecracker was thrown through the open transom above my door and exploded. The shock to my system, when so relaxed, put me into a strange state of consciousness in which my ill will became objectified as a sinister beckoning presence in my dorm room. I ended up wrestling with it all night in a half-awake state until I'd bled off the feelings that created it and awoke.

Smoley: What dangers are there in trying to navigate the astral plane?

Leland: In an early article, HPB wrote of "the philosophical necessity of there being in the world of Spirit, as well as the world of Matter, a law of the survival of the fittest" (Blavatsky, Collected Writings 1:289). If we're going to explore higher planes, we need to keep this in mind—and make sure we're "the fittest." The same would be true of any expedition in the wilderness of physical reality. We try not to be part of the food chain.

Being the fittest would mean studying the rich literature on planes, bodies, and beings produced by the world's religions and mystics, including HPB, Besant, and Leadbeater. Trying to understand the similarity of function that underlies the often dissimilar imagery helps us to develop our inner senses (for example, recognizing that Hindu devas are similar in function to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim angels). It would also mean knowing how to protect ourselves against undesirable astral influences, or negative entities.

Perhaps the best way to think about the astral plane is that is presents a set of initiatory challenges we must confront to achieve the higher plane where he Masters await us. Every moral and emotional weakness will be tested on the astral plane. If we're possessed by such weaknesses in physical life, we may draw negative entities to ourselves on the astral plane, They may try to consume or possess us. If we learn how to deal effectively with such beings there, then we learn to master ourselves here— and vice versa. Thus the best protection against the dangers of the astral plane, as many Theosophical teachers have said, is purity of thought, feeling, and action.

According to Besant, as mystics, we may achieve the higher planes by meditation and selfless service. The practice of brotherhood with all beings gently draws to us higher contacts and opens us up to them. However, as occultists, we may seek to understand and master each plane of being. This is where the initiatory challenges of the astral plane come in. Those who fear such challenges may not feel ready for them—and for good reason, since fear itself will draw to them fearful experiences on the astral plane. For them, the path of the mystic is not only a safer way to the high teachers, but also a safer set of methods for a spiritual organization to promote. Thus it has become a primary focus in some Theosophical organizations.

In my opinion, the most radical thing HPB taught was that every level of our consciousness is provided to us by a category of higher beings who mastered that level in previous evolutionary schemes. When she says that our mind was given to us by such higher beings, she means that our mind is the result of participating in that higher consciousness. If we're separated from it through selfishness, we have a limited use of the mind. If we dissolve that separation through the practice of brotherhood with all beings, we become one with those who create and sustain our consciousness at the mental level. We thereby become one with the universal mind as expressed by those beings. They aren't our servants, as in black magic; and we're not their slaves, as in possession. Yet all they know is now our knowledge, and we become active agents on the physical plane in their task of sustaining and furthering the evolution of all beings. This is what it means to become an adept, at least at the mental level.

The astral plane represents the same challenge at a lower level. The so-called negative entities we encounter there are aspects of our own desires and emotions that stand in the way of oneness with the beings who create and sustain the emotional level of existence. They bar us from the great teachers until we have mastered our emotions.

References

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. 15 vols. 
    Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977-91.
—Theosophical Glossary. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892.

Printed in the Fall 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "Motive Is Everything" Quest  101. 4 (Fall 2013): pg. 124-125

Tim Boyd
National President

In 1971 a man named Theodore Goias wrote a short  book that went on to become an underground sen­sation. The setting for this phenomenon was San Francisco just past the tumultuous peak of the 1960s. San Francisco had been a hub of activity throughout the decade and had developed into a little mecca for the hippie and drug culture of the era. The contempo­rary mantras of "Peace and Love," "Free Love," and "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" had attracted a popula­tion of young people pushing the boundaries of sexual and chemical norms. The buzzwords of the time were peace, equality, fairness, love, justice, and freedom. It was a mixed bag that included both intense darkness and light.

By 1971 much of the social and cultural upheaval that characterized the period was waning, and many of the young people who had been such a driving force in the various powerful movements of the time were look­ing for sustainable avenues to channel their energies. Woodstock had come and gone. The Vietnam war was winding down. The civil rights movement was losing focus. A cycle of prominent assassinations and bomb­ings was ending. The flood of Eastern holy men and women and gurus coming west was cresting. The prom­ise of a chemically induced higher consciousness had degraded into addiction, broken lives, and legal repres­sion. With so many currents of thought going on at the time, it would be difficult to identify a unifying theme.

Theodore Golas's book began its life with him hand­ing out mimeographed copies to friends. These became so popular that he self-published it in book form. When these first copies quickly sold out, an actual publisher picked up the rights. It has been in print ever since. Having read the book years ago, I can say that the writ­ing is accessible and interesting, but for me the book's most outstanding feature is the title. It is called The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. Priceless! Whether or not you appreciate the writing, that title is guaranteed to capture your interest.

The first two lines lay out the author's premise. “I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue." For longtime spiritual practitioners, these two sentences would be enough to lead to the conclusion that there could be little of value in the book. At the very least someone who has invested years in strict self-discipline and training in virtues, the idea that it is all unnecessary could be a little disappointing. But like so many things, laziness is a relative term, and the author himself shows no signs of conventional laziness. His focus is on awareness, and it could easily be said the sustained awareness he writes about only results from an extended regime of discipline and practice. Even for the lazy man "it don't come easy."

In my opinion, the book's popularity is completely due to the appeal of the title. While it does not suggest that we can get something for nothing, it does seem to say that there is a royal road, easy to walk, to the wisdom and contentment that we imagine enlighten provides.

What if there were a royal road to enlighten a single quality that stands out above and beyond all others? In Theosophical literature there is a saying that is frequently repeated. In letter 54 of the Mahatma Letters we find it expressed as "motive is everything".  It is a sweeping statement that demands a deeper consideration. What does it mean? In what sense is motive all-encompassing? A brief example might help.

I have known people who changed their diet from meat eating to vegetarian. They had reviewed the numerous medical studies about the superiority plant-based diet. In reading they found that heart disease is dramatically reduced; cancer is much less Iikely; high blood pressure, constipation, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and elevated cholesterol all are greatly reduced with the change to a vegetarian diet. Their motivation was the clear benefit to their health. After trying it for a short time, they also found that they slept better at night and seemed to have more energy. There was the added benefit that when summertime came, they looked much better in their bathing suits.

Other people I know also changed from a meat-based to a vegetarian diet, but for different reasons. They too had read the studies and discovered the personal health benefits, but they had also steeped themselves in other research. These new vegetarians had read books like John Robbins's Diet for a New America and had gained some insight into the practices of the meat industry. They discovered the enormous cruelty that went into the production of the foods they ate. They found them­selves moved by the suffering inflicted on the animals at every phase of their lives from birth to the moment of slaughter, and they made the commitment that they would not allow their eating habits to support system­atic cruelty to other feeling beings. 

So what are the results? To the chicken whose life is spared because these two vegetarians are no longer purchasing flesh foods, it makes no difference at all. Why she is not being eaten is probably not uppermost in the chicken's consciousness. It's just good to be alive. But how does it affect the two individuals who have become vegetarians? In terms of their personal health, they both reap the benefits of improved vitality and dis­ease prevention. What is the effect on the thinking of the two? Initially, for the one who is focused on her personal health, there is little change. Although the motive is self-improvement, the focus is still the self. Although it might be a healthier self, there is no expan­sion beyond personal boundaries, no broadened sense of connection with others, no extension of the sensitiv­ity to the needs of others. To the one who is motivated by compassion for the suffering of others, there is a dra­matic expansion of the boundaries of self. It is simply a fact that when we care for others, we enlarge the scope of our feeling and our thought. The limits of our sense of self expand as we identify with others. Our sensitiv­ity to the feelings and needs of others grows. These are not things that necessarily make themselves known in greater income or personal recognition. The effects are invisible, but real and lasting.

Our motivation colors everything that we do—all of our thoughts and actions. Often the consequences of our actions are unanticipated, but the productive motive behind them is something we can know quite intimately. Of the world's religions, Buddhism seems to address this idea of the primacy of motive most directly. From countless recorded sayings of the Bud­dha it is clear that he "got it." The first lines in the Dhammapada are: 'All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage ... If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him." The second step in Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path is right motive/ intention. In speaking to his monks on one occasion, he made the point even more strongly: "O monks, what I call karma is motive."

Not long ago someone told me a quote from Sig­mund Freud: "Buddha was the greatest psychologist in the history of the world." I thought it was a won­derful quote. In the interest of accuracy I Googled it, only to find that it is one of those great sayings that was never said, but should have been. In any case, as with Theosophy, one of the beauties of the way Buddhism approaches the subject is that it is not simply theoreti­cal. Like any good doctor, it must produce more than a diagnosis. Some cure needs to be prescribed. While there are countless methods that are said to assist on the road to enlightenment, the only one that seems to guarantee a safe journey is an awareness and elevation of motive. 

In The Voice of the Silence the all-important first step is "to live to benefit mankind." Mahayana Buddhism maintains a similar focus on bodhicitta, the wisdom mind, which is the motivation to attain enlightenment in order to benefit all sentient beings. Like many profound statements we encounter, it is simple. The difficulty for many of us comes because we mistake simple for easy. The discovery of the countless "how to's" involved in living to benefit mankind is a life's work, but this part is secondary. Once the course is set, though we stum­ble and make a thousand mistakes along the way, ulti­mately the end is assured. Motive is everything.

VOLUME 101, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

Otherwhere: An Interview with Kurt Leland
Richard Smoley

Eileen Garrett: The Medium Is the Message
John Chambers

Clairvoyance and the Fairy Realm
James A. LeFevour

Parallel Planes
Amy Gardner

The Sidhe and the Guardian Exercise
David Spangler

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Motive Is Everything
Tim Boyd

President's Diary