of one kind; knowledge of the physical, astral,
mental, or of the worlds beyond is knowledge of another kind, of the
phenomenal, and the phenomena is in stages, differing in degree but not in
kind. This knowledge of Nature, visible and invisible, reaches the
consciousness through the sense-garment in which it is clothed. That
sense-garment is more complex than many think, and senses subtler in their
nature lie behind the physical senses. But always the consciousness through
the sense-garment knows by observation; if through the physical part
thereof, by observation of the physical world; in the next layer of that
sense-garment the consciousness comes into touch with the astral world, the
world of the dream-consciousness, the sub-conscious of the New Psychology.
Call it, if you like,the world on the other side of death; for the world on
the other side of death is certainly included therein, although there is no
world which is exclusively a world on the other side of death, for that
world may be entered ere the physical body is shaken off. It sounds
startling in modern ears if it is stated that it is as possible for men of
the twentieth century to enter that other world as it was possible for the
teachers of Christianity, of Islam, of Buddhism or of Hinduism in the elder
days. And yet it would seem a natural thing that what man could know at one
age he can also know at another. In the old days how common was the
declaration that men could know the world invisible. Some men came to the
Buddha when he was teaching upon earth some five centuries before the coming
of the Christ, and they asked him about the [Page 6]
worlds into which, as their religion taught them, men went on the other side
of death. And the Buddha answered plainly and simply: " If you want to know
the way to a village you go to a man who has lived there, and who knows the
road because he has often trodden it. And so, if you would know of the
worlds beyond death you do well in coming to me, for I know those worlds and
have oft-times trodden the way." So he spake in the elder days, and so ought
the teachers of religion to be able to speak today; for they should speak by
knowledge and not by hearsay. It is no new and strange thing, then, when the
Theosophist says that man may travel into worlds that to most people are on
the other side of death. For every one of you possesses in the sense-garment
that deeper layer of subtler matter which makes you free of those subtler
worlds, and it is only the ignorance of the super-physical that shuts you
out from a knowledge that might rob death of its terrors, and make the
passage thither a passage of joy instead of grief. And that sense-garment
has not only the physical and astral layers, but also that layer of matter
which belongs to the worlds beyond the astral — the heaven-worlds. And it
seems as though, along the lines of study of the New Psychology, men were
beginning to recognise the existence in consciousness of more worlds than
one. For whence the numerous premonitions, warnings, dreams, apparitions,
phantoms of the living, and those strange prophecies which are realised from
time to time ? Whence the vision that sees beyond the physical, if only in
the hypnotic trance ? Whence the hearing with keener hearing than the
physical? Whence all these strange phenomena, if it be not that what is
called the subconscious is largely the super-conscious — consciousness
beginning to utilize a subtler vehicle, that vehicle evolving as the
physical vehicle has evolved in the past ? And all that view of the
super-physical grows out of this thought that man can know directly God and
Nature, and that in his sense-garment he has gathered together matter from
all the different worlds that surround him, and [Page
through that veil of matter he can contact worlds other than the physical.
This is the first great work of Theosophy in the world — to proclaim the actuality of such knowledge, now as well as in the past. It is not the proclamation of a creed. It does not rest on books, however sacred; it does not rest on tradition, however 