"W. Scott-Elliot - Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliot W Scott)

in which human consciousness functions on different planes of Nature. The
faculty of reading the pages of a closed book, or of discerning objects
blindfold, or at a distance from the observer, is quite a different faculty from
that employed on the cognition of past events. That last is the kind of which it
is necessary to say something here, in order that the true character of the
present treatise on Atlantis may be understood, but I allude to the others
merely that the explanation I have to give may not be mistaken for a complete
theory of clairvoyance in all its varieties.
We may best be helped to a comprehension of clairvoyance as related to past
events, by considering in the first instance the phenomena of memory. The theory
of memory which relates it to an imaginary rearrangement of physical molecules
of brain matter, going on at every instant of our lives, is one that presents
itself as plausible to no one who can ascend one degree above the thinking level
of the uncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, even as
a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something more than a carcase in
a state of animation, it must be a reasonable hypothesis that memory has to do
with that principle in man which is super-physical. His memory in short, is a
function of some other than the physical plane. The pictures of memory are
imprinted, it is clear, on some nonphysical medium, and are accessible to the
embodied thinker in ordinary cases by virtue of some effort he makes in as much
unconsciousness as to its precise character, as he is unconscious of the brain
impulse which actuates the muscles of his heart. The events with which he has
had to do in the past are photographed by Nature on some imperishable page of
super-physical matter, and by making an appropriate interior effort, he is
capable of bringing them again, when he requires them, within the area of some
interior sense which reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not
all of us able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimes
dim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasional
super-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. The circumstances
plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible if we know how to recover
it, or even if our own capacity to make an effort for its recovery is somehow
improved without our having an improved knowledge of the method employed. And
from this thought we may arrive by an easy transition at the idea, that in truth
the records of Nature are not separate collections of individual property, but
constitute the all-embracing memory of Nature herself, on which different people
are in a position to make drafts according to their several capacities.
I do not say that the one thought necessarily ensues as a logical consequence of
the other. Occultists know that what I have stated is the fact, but my present
purpose is to show the reader who is not an Occultist, how the accomplished
Occultist arrives at his results, without hoping to epitomize all the stages of
his mental progress in this brief explanation. Theosophical literature at large
must be consulted by those who would seek a fuller elucidation of the
magnificent prospects and practical demonstrations of its teaching in many
directions, which, in the course of the Theosophical development, have been laid
before the world for the benefit of all who are competent to profit by them.
The memory of Nature is in reality a stupendous unity, just as in another way
all mankind is found to constitute a spiritual unity if we ascend to a
sufficiently elevated plane of Nature in search of the wonderful convergence
where unity is reached without the loss of individuality. For ordinary humanity,
however, at the early stage of its evolution represented at present by the