BF 1999 .H5 Copy 1 Creative Psychics The Art of Regeneration The Science and Art of the Religion of the Future; a Positive Science of Metapsychics and the Art Expression of Regenerative Mysticism; an Inter- pretation of the Emancipation of the Age BY FRED HENKEL Printed for the Author by the GOLDEN PRESS 203 Tajo Building Los Angeles, California, U. S. A. 1917 PART TWO A series of essays for preliminary reading dealing with the: Evolution of Life, Spirituality and Art: (Part II and the subsequent prepared writings will be pub- lished in case the interest and sale of the first part is indicated by the demand for them. Those interested are requested to communicate with the author.) The general development of the human soul. The perception of the Supernatural. Life. Religion. Art. The fourth dimensional arts. Causes and effect. Life and its relation to fact and experience. Aestheticism. Mysticism, the cult of Reconciliation. The emancipating effect of mysticism and mystical art. The laws of psychic phenomena. Metapsychics and practical Mysticism. Emancipation through art, and the problem of art-creativeness. The spontaneous creative action of the subliminal mind. Revolutionist versus reformer. Re-creative evolution of life. The Trinity of Art, Philosophy and Religion. Duality in the evolution of life and nature. Education {hrough abuse. , Authority of Self. Man's conscious and unconscious conflicts. Psychology and the Art of Landscape gardening. Landscape Gardening and Architecture. Evolution of the Japanese high Art of Landscape Gardening. Illustrated. A Guide to Japanese Gardens and high Art. Illustrated. Fred Henkel Landscape Gardener, Los Angeles, Cal., U. S. A. Creative Psychics The Art of Regeneration The Science and Art of the Religion of the Future; a Positive Science of Metapsychics and the Art Expression of Regenerative Mysticism; an Inter- pretation of the Emancipation of the Age BY FRED HENKEL Printed for the Author by the GOLDEN PRESS 203 Tajo Building Los Angeles, California, U. S. A. 1917 ■Jjc To all who foster Self-Reliance, Self-Development and Sex Un- foldment as fruitions of the pro- creative urge ; who see in Creative Generation, Re-generation and Art generation; who value the divine importance of developing the In- herent Creative and Procreative Powers to encompass the "Whole of Divinity ' ' : Humanity as well as Nature. Copyright FRED HENKEL 203 Tajo Building Los Angeles, Cal. U. S. A. ©GI.A479822 W 19 1917 /Wt> \ Meditations and Reflections Mysticism — Creative Psychics — is caused through the sincere ef- fort to transcend the appearance of things and to recognize the causes as well as to find naturally automatically self-healing remedies. Our own insight into life and nature developes in the same degree as we exert ourselves to interpret and develop insight in others. As we try to understand others and help them to help themselves, to that extent do we redeem ourselves. Humanity alone can consciously develope supernatural power. Vigorous thinking about life's problems, the "fair" playing of the game of life, brings out the dynamic relationship between body, mind and soul, and self-critical unconscious cerebration, intuition and revelations. Mysticism is created through underlying feeling and aestheticism to the intellect, that is the beautiful to the useful, or what is the same : Eastern thought to Western knowledge. Mysticism implies character formation. Symbolism drags realism into art; mysticism shoves it out. All symbolical art is fictitious art and is the forerunner of all fic- tion. Truly relative art can only come through reaction against symbolical art. The modern efficiency man is a practical psychiatrist. Laughter, wit and humor as well as satire and swearing are reme- dies with mystical healing powers, which humanity had to create by necessity against the perversion through false reverence, fear and superstition. The dogmatist naturally lacks these self-healing quali- ties and also cannot appreciate them. CONTENTS OF PART ONE 1. Preface and the problem at large ,. . . 5 2. Religion, the evolution of perception of the Unseen. ... 6 3. Psychology, what it is. What is psycho-logic ? What is the law that governs psychic phenomena ? 11 4. Metapsy chics and creative mysticism, an introduction . . 16 5. The Creative Force, Its Principle, and the principle of the emancipation of the age 41 6. What is Mysticism, and What is a Mystic ? 54 7. How to Produce the Mystic 67 Price 25 cents. $2.00 per dozen copies PREFACE AND THE PROBLEM AT LARGE Metapsychics and creative Mysticism embody the Science and the Art of the religion of the future. The problem is presented in several series of essays interpreting the working principles which underly the principle of the emancipation of the age. This is an Emancipation through psychic Enlight- enment, that is: an emancipation through Aestheticism, ex- pounding the psychical and metapsychical aspect and an aesthetical view of evolution of life and creation : an aesthetical Weltanschauung. It deals with the perception of the supra- natural or supernatural Creative Force or God of Unity in ac- tion as Duality. It deals with such ancillary problems as the development of the human soul, with religion, philosophy and art of the past and the future, the development of Free Will, practical transcendentalism, creative mysticism, spontaneous creative action of the subliminal mind, organic fusion and growth, mental healing powers, practical psychology and oc- cultism and the laws of psychic phenomena in general. It aims in special at the interpretation of fourth dimensional arts, the psychology of a high art of landscape gardening and other higher dimensional vistas of art. As long as humanity in general, and the artists in particular cannot visualize the Creative Force or God in a high art with nature's beauty as well as with man, woman and child, so long is our concep- tion and vision of It partial and abnormal. It is the office of mystical high art to solve this problem. The whole problem of creative development of our psyche, that is of creative psychic or occult powers, depends on psychic exercise. We must cultivate, practice and exercise our psychic powers in order to develop and increase them, just as we must practice and exercise our intellectual and our physical endow- ments. We cannot expect to develop psyche without sincere effort. Creative psychic development, like creative physical development, and unlike intellectual development, depends on independent self development of indwelling, inborn individu- 6 CREATIVE PSYCHICS ality and originality. Creative psychic powers are, however, fundamentally transcendental powers, and we increase them in the proportion of the effort exercised to transcend their phe- nomena. It is not the result of a mechanical process of learn- ing through memorizing, but one of self developing and recip- rocal education through co-operation. The entire problem leads to the interpretation of the education of the future, an education through co-operation, and to the understanding of the beneficial influence which such development must exercise on the normal evolution of Feeling and Vision. The sources which create the power of Intuition, Revelation, and what science calls "spontaneous creative action of the subliminal mind": to the development of creative mystical or psychic powers in general, and the causes which necessitate their higher development, are manifold but have much in common if we proceed to transcend them. They are dealt with in another series of essays which represent various views of the inex- haustible solution of one and the same riddle of life and creation which presents and reveals itself to every human be- ing, in diverse ways. As all positive sciences have come out of reaction against abstract or alchemistic sciences and thus through a revolution, it must be evident that a positive science of religion and a positive high art must follow the abstract symbolical development of the past. II RELIGION THE EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION OF THE UNSEEN Metapsychics or meta-psychology is the science of the Un- seen Creative Force just as psychics or psychology is the science of the indwelling unseen creative force of the human mind. Re- ligion of the future is a science and an art dealing with evolution of perception of the Unseen. It is therefore with the evolution of high or religious art expression with which the religion of the EVOLUTION OP PERCEPTION OF THE UNSEEN 7 future is concerned. It recognizes thus only a positive science and a positive art of emancipation of vision, and has a positive psychic aim. It recognizes that all humanity needs is to be re- lieved from subnormal or psycho-pathological vision in order to see truth for itself afresh each day. This demands that every age evolves a higher inward vision of truth. As truth is the emancipating power, and as its vision is the principal thing it must be evident that the whole problem hinges on the evolution of high art and Art Consciousness. Religion cannot evolve unless high art evolves. Religion, as the term is herein used, is that Reliance that all sentient beings feel towards forces and powers that transcend the unde- veloped faculties of the mind. As the mind develops by experience from its vague and crude reliance, it seeks and attains positive justification in scien- tific supports and transcendental or aesthetical gratifications. Every advance in science opens wider reaches for the devel- opment of the Art urge. Religion evolves as high Art evolves. It has not evolved otherwise. It cannot evolve otherwise. Religion is thus fundamentally an Art Problem, and the re- ligion of the future creates a higher Art Consciousness, which is identical with God Consciousness. The religious instinct in humanity is thus the Visionistic Instinct : the indwelling desire to vision the Unknown and Unseen workings of the Creative Force or God ; it is the inherent desire of Feeling and Express- ing Feeling in acts and in art manifestation. The religion of the future is a constructive Science of Feeling and regards spiritual powers as indwelling psychic powers. It propounds principles which increase these fundamentally occult and mystical powers. It thus propounds principles which govern the development of an Occult or Mystical high art, whilst the religion of the past cultivates only a symbolic high art. It recognizes that normal psychic development can only be ob- tained through knowing oneself, as otherwise the vision is de- formed, which results in projection of our pathological self into our vision of the Creative Force or God. As the Creative Force in action is dual it must be evident that our vision of both aspects must be distorted and misleading. The principles underlying mystical high art expression are the 8 CREATIVE PSYCHICS principles underlying creation itself. Religious consciousness — God consciousness, means art consciousness : A purified per- ception of the Unseen. We look at religion solely from the point of view of art and thus have to purify and increase vision and imagination of the Unseen. The principles underlying the formation of normal vision and imagination, and therefore of true art, are the principles of evolution and growth. The past has created only a partial and subnormal, that is, psycho-pathological percept of the Unseen. Mysticism repre- sents a higher normal vision which must be created through reaction against subnormal vision, a process which revolution- izes the individual and creates a higher consciousness. The evolution of religion and art of the past is an evolution of subnormal vision. Mysticism brings a vision which is free from the psycho-pathological element of subnormal vision, which latter is created through fear of the Unseen. Reaction against Fear is one of the principal factors in the evolution of mysticism. Subnormal vision through fear of the Unseen has led to sup- pression of the knowing and developing of Self. It has nat- urally led to suppression of Truth, and suppression of psychical and occult creative powers of Self, with perversion of spiritu- ality and spirit-life in general as a result. It has led to mis- understanding between individuals, nations and races, and to the neglect to draw from collective experiences of nations and races their cogent lessons, as well as from individual life-ex- periences. It has led from tragedy to tragedy until history especially the historical aspects of religion, represents a dis- torted apprehension of the Unseen. It has led to the suppres- sion of the best and to the survival of the brute, to the rule of the stale, the old and the dead, to a cult of the possessive instinct and of its substitution for truth. It has led to a cult of second hand knowledge, instead of a cult of life experiences and consecration of soul in order to understand the divine and sublime inner workings of one 's own life and creativeness. In short subnormal vision has led to an abnormal and per- sonal apperception of the Unseen with all the shortcomings of the subnormal vision of the individual. A higher vision and higher visionary powers can only come through self-knowledge EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION OP THE UNSEEN 9 and from a positive science with the collation of life experiences of the whole of the human race, which creates a higher normal consciousness of the Unseen. The religion of the future deals scientifically with Principles of the Unseen, and with the principles which lead to a true vision of it. It regards the Unseen as an impersonal creative principle inherent, inborne and active in all life and creation. It visions the principle back of the Creative Force in all created objects, and naturally expresses it in all art-expressions in the same measure as it increases its vision. It sees Good in all created objects and recognizes all shortcomings as a necessary means to a higher evolution. It destroys all cult with evil, and deals with it scientifically, taking the sting and its poisoning property out of it. The problem of perception of the Unseen implies a positive scientific education in principles which govern creation, and the Creative Force as a principle of unity in action as duality with no evil in it. It recognizes that there is nothing wrong with life, creation and creator except our apperception of it, which naturally implies that our knowledge and conceptions are im- perfect and misleading. It implies further that we improve our vision automatically in the same measure as we improve our knowledge and conceptions of creative processes, and that our art expressions must increase automatically in the same degree. A positive science of perception of the Unseen takes an un- prejudiced, impartial and impersonal view of creator, creation and all creative processes, just as any other positive science is expected to practice although it calls for the development of higher means of cognition. It presents objectively and intel- lectually the aspect of the dual working forces of God in action so that such knowledge can also form and inform the sub- liminal or spiritual self of man as correctly as possible in order that the latter may give true expression of it. Like all positive sciences it will in time accumulate much second hand knowledge with extracts and " canned goods" as the result, but it will perpetuate the original scientific intent to induce and educate the student to scientific practice and experiment such as alone can lead to proper life experiences and forming and informing 10 CREATIVE PSYCHICS individual and original vision. This will reciprocally also im- prove the individual's art consciousness and art expression. Intellectual knowledge and objective perception have been increased and purified in the same measure as the human vision of the Unseen has been purified. Archaic vision of the Unseen distinguishes itself through its frightfulness which early re- ligious art implies. This terroristic expression has diminished in the course of evolution of art: the artistic striving towards more harmonious expressions of the Unseen. This upward process of evolution of vision must naturally continue and the art expressions must become in time more and more true to the Universal Creative Force itself, and must lose all expression of fear. Religion must naturally also lose its perverting aspect as a cult of evil, which it has inherited from its infantile past. Religion, and its expression in art form, was from its begin- ning a devil-cult, a cult of fear and superstition, which aspect must be obliterated in time. The old religion must destroy itself and a cult without fear and devil must take its place. The archaic survivals of religion and its derivative art make nat- urally for propagation of subnormal vision, morbid ecstasy, fanaticism and the reversion to sexual infantilism, as psychology has it, to perversion of psyche in general. The problem of evolution of perception is therefore the prob- lem of emancipation of humanity from a belief in evil. It has a dual aspect by necessity. It deals scientifically with the causes of evil through improving our intellect and knowledge, besides teaching principles which underly the formation of true vision and art creativeness. The latter implies the forming and in- forming of the psyche or subliminal Self. Both are interde- pendent by necessity and together lead to the emancipation of humanity. Ill PSYCHOLOGY— WHAT IT IS. WHAT IS PSYCHO-LOGIC? WHAT IS THE LAW THAT GOVERNS PSYCHIC PHENOMENA? The laws of psychic phenomena imply that every age and every individual has to produce its own remedies automatically and increases higher creative and augmented mental healing powers to the extent that it creates the need for them. This is the natural product of the higher consciousness which the age demands from the individual as well as from the race in general. The individual as well as the race must develop higher con- sciousness in order to advance. Psychology is a positive science of cognizing and developing the Unknown and Unseen Subliminal Creative Powers in hu- manity. It is a positive science of the Greater Self in man, lead- ing to a positive science of the greater self of the Cosmos and to Cosmic Consciousness. This latter object is the task of meta- psychics. Both deal with the Force that binds, unites, harmon- izes and elevates. We cannot understand nor interpret Life and the Cosmos with the intellect alone, but the latter must be assisted by Feel- ing into life and nature. For that purpose we have to develop our Psyche or Feeling Self. Feeling into life and nature teaches us that all life is evolved out of reaction against waste, which waste must naturally accompany every creative process. It teaches us also that evolution of life is an evolution of Psyche or soul, which is evolved through the sincere attempt and effort to compensate for waste. The greater the waste which an age produces the higher it develops its psyche in order to transmute waste into creative profit. Our age is an age of highest creativeness, inventiveness and productiveness and also accompanied by the greatest prodigal- ity of waste. It creates and demands automatically the highest 12 CREATIVE PSYCHICS development of psychic powers. Our age has therefore devel- oped a positive science called psychology which is the automatic outcome of our psycho-pathological development caused by our long continued cult of the male or possessive instinct. It has been created out of Unconscious Reaction against extreme pathological development of our Psyche and through the neglect of our educators to develop a higher consciousness in the indi- vidual and in the race in general. What is therefore the nature and what are the principles of a positive science to increase our consciousness and our psychic creative powers ? must be asked ; and on what principles is its logic based? Such principles must naturally be psycho-logical and express through a well formed and well informed Feeling into Life and nature. Psyche like psycho-logic is naturally created purest and strongest through transcending our own life experiences which form and inform feeling. It is therefore through the increase of such feeling that we can become conscious of higher cre- ative processes and develop that kind of logic through which we can present and prove the truth of the conclusions and validity of the principles which need to be applied to the higher devel- opment of creative psychic powers, and of the turning of waste into creative profit. The reasoning process must be based on our life experiences and the conclusions must coincide with the collective experiences of races and nations which collaterate such experiences and alone can form and inform feeling aright. Principles which form and inform feeling must be of psychic enlightening nature, and it is therefore with principles which enlighten our psychic with which psycho-logical development is concerned first of all, and which naturally enlighten our intel- lect also, and thus obliterate inner conflicts at the same time. This science has naturally two sides : a preventive and a curative or re-creative side. All conflicts naturally produce increased waste, and it is with the causes of waste and the transcending of conflicts with which mysticism is principally concerned. We form and inform our feeling best by transcending conflicts which accompany life experiences. The development of creative psychic powers is therefore forcefully affected by those con- flicts between human factors which are at the root of all exces- WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGIC? 13 sive waste. For it is conflict that increases sensitiveness — that is feeling, — and this increased sensitiveness is accompanied by the greater power to react against even the slightest traces of abnormal occurrences and leads to detection of the causes and agents. The principles which can develop creative psychic powers demonstrate how every age produces its highest re-creative and mental healing powers out of reaction against pathological development ; our age has created the need for it and produces the remedy automatically in the most sensitive and inspired minds. This is nature 's own secret. It represents the nature of the Creative Force itself, the principles of which must also govern us but which can only be recognized and developed through own inner effort to create a higher consciousness and a higher common sense. Our age has produced a higher com- mon sense by necessity through its increased wastefulness. Our age obeys the laws of psychic phenomena, the laws that every perverse and abnormal development must create its own natural remedy, which is of a mystical nature. We cannot define it ex- cept through the recognition of principles which lead to its development. Like all true products of the age it meets the de- mand of that age. It is developed because there is need for it. It is not digged from the stone graves in the pyramids nor from the classical wisdom of ancient Greece, although all collective experiences increase our consciousness to a large degree. The intrinsic development of races is naturally less enlightening than the extrinsic values which they have created. Their col- lective experiences, the causes of their doom and their perishing interests us much more than their classical perfection which led up to their decline and extirpation. We learn wisdom from tragedies of nations, just as we learn from our own and other people's life experiences. We meet varied conditions today, and our life experiences must lead to as varied revelations. We cannot repeat eternally the old tragedies, nor can we count upon the duplication and repetition of the individual's experiences, because the experiences of each life are unique ; but all can learn from conclusions drawn by others if they conform to the col- lective experiences of races and nations and other individuals. Ours is a commercial age which has its roots in Babylonian U CREATIVE PSYCHICS culture. We need rather Solomonic wisdom and the sagacity of the fakir who tries to transcend the foolishness of humanity. What we need is more like the sublime power of the ' ' detective ' ' spirit which the age has created outi of reaction against its criminality. Psycho-logic is a higher kind of detective logic which transcends and recognizes both the causes and defects. Our age has produced highest inventiveness and produces nat- urally the highest " detectiveness. " The latter is as much a creative achievement as the former and is caused through the increase of the very same urge within us. Detectiveness repre- sents also therefor an increase of creative psychic power. In- ventiveness meets as much the agressiveness of brute forces as detectiveness. We are emerging out of an age where possession and might ruled over right, and intellect over psyche. We have developed higher consciousness and higher creative psychic powers out - of reaction against brutishness and intellectual aggressiveness. We have come to cognize the light within us and develop it automatically to get and keep us out of mental and bodily slavery. We are of an age which wants to get free by all means. We have set our hearts to it and we shall succeed. We live in an age which demands plain truth, and it gets it. It is not to be satisfied with less. The logic of the true psychologist is like the logic of the detective, somewhat obscure to the con- ventionally educated, because of the lack of the former to com- ply with the style of conventional literature of so-called artistic writing ; but he has his own way of tracing as well as expressing truth. He does not strive after an expression in artistic style, but rather after a plain scientific one. It must seem quite natural that the product of psychical development must differ from the intellectual product, and that the elegant is less obvious than the aims at which it strives. Our art and style will naturally change as much as our modes of education and our conceptions of authority change. There must be some- thing of the Unknown and the Unseen in all expressions which have come out of psychic development, because it is arrived at through Feeling, and must be transcended and felt to become an experience and a power. It must arouse the sensitiveness and the "sense of reaction" which it demands for its under- WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGIC? 15 standing. This is what the development of creative psychic or creative mystical powers implies. It means greater independence and freedom of self-exertion and self-expression. We enter an age which develops mystical creative powers out of reaction against mental and bodily age- old slavery and exploitation. It means the end of a culture which limits the development of mankind. Our age recognizes the subliminal self, the God Within, which rests on the harmonious development of the intellectual and feeling self alike, a true and happy conjunction which leads to higher or supernatural organic fusion and growth, which is of mystical nature. We emerge out of an age of symbol worship, which also makes us perfect to deduce the Unknown from the Known through a logic of psychic nature. Such detective logic distinguishes itself from intellectual reasoning from theories of the scholarly educated in that it ar- rives at the truth through a line of intuitive flashes of insight, which come from a well enlightened Psyche without losing contact with Reality. It distinguishes itself from the brilliant but defective deductive reasoning of the hypnotized person and the even short-circuited logic of the religionist and theologian in that it is accomplished through the aid of powerful and en- lightened intellect, which feat is possible only to a mind that has enlightened itself by first hand experiences and revela- tions. It is caused by the cleared vision of subliminal powers. It is the result of a cleared brain-focus of vision which leads to a higher consciousness than the non-creative conventionally educated can acquire. It is for this reason that our most in- spired minds evolve outside of conventional education through self development, and who also have to revolutionize our educa- tional methods and thus advance humanity. All progress of humanity comes from outside of conventional circles and their adulterated modes of expression. A positive science of psychics must naturally grow into a science of metapsychics — that is into a science which deals with higher dimensional realms, which interprets the laws and prin- ciples of nature on a higher plane of expression, that is in metapsychical art. Metapsychics deals, therefore, more with the higher development of the supernatural, which demands 16 CREATIVE PSYCHICS still higher critical and transcending powers. In its higher phases psychics is therefore applied to all the causes which de- grade humanity. It overcomes all limitations placed on the subliminal power through the restriction of perverted intellect and knowledge. This is naturally also a normal and inborn faculty of humanity, but demands common sense and vision of a still higher order, which is suppressed and perverted by the limitations placed on it through the teachings of age-old superstition. It too rises out of the masses, — we do not know whence it comes. It grows in many inspired minds until it finds expression through one of them, — one who transcends more clearly the principles which govern its development. Every age must thus emancipate itself. The development of creative psychic powers is today a necessity. Without it we cannot compete against those that cultivate it/ Nor can we meet the competition of brute force without higher psychic powers. Its need is caused by the great inventiveness of the age, and it is the inventor to whom we owe thanks for our progress, though we do not sufficiently recognize his services which are achieved through indefatigable perseverance in spite of all obstacles placed in his way through greed. The inventor is the mystic of our age. He is a creative mystic by necessity, and the age which we are going to enter is the Age of Creative Mysticism or mystical Creativeness. The inventors are the emancipators of humanity, but they are inspired by the artists. IV METAPSYCHICS AND CBEATIVE MYSTICISM Metapsychics or meta-psychology is the scientific relation- ing of the Unseen Creative Force just as psychics or psychology is the science of the human mind or the indwelling Creative Force. Creative mysticism is today the paramount educational problem, and all the foremost educators expound principles METAPSYCHICS 17 of it with the intent to evolve the Greater Self and a Greater Humanity. All such separate efforts aim at the development of Creative Psychic Powers of Spontaneous Creative Action of the Subliminal Mind and Organic Growth which all depend on Organic Fusion. The principles which govern organic fusion and growth govern the whole universe including the evolution of life, spirituality and art. These separate efforts represent steps towards a Positive Science of Sciences which is in the making, and it is my intention to introduce the reader into the fundamental principles of the religion of the future and its art expression of Metapsychics and Re-creative or Mystical Art. These outstanding educational principles of the present day aim at evoking and cultivating the psychic mental power in order to increase Creative Ability, and they serve to develop the subjective plane of our existence along with the intellectual and physical Self. Education through Play and Re-Creative Recreation, Vocational Training, education through Concentra- tion on Creative Principles and through Self Suggestion, Mind building through development of Mind Power, Mental Healing and the development of Self Reliance in order to overcome fear and to develop Personal Magnetism, are only a few of the most prominent features of the development of mystical creative activity and of higher creativeness in general; of Mystical Awareness of the Mind and of the Development of the Greater Self in Humanity. The evolution of metapsychics and creative mysticism may be compared to that of algebra, and demands and cre- ates a distinct line of logic and computation of differ- ent exponents, expressions and characters. It also makes use of terms of other sciences in order to express itself more fully. There exists a certain analogy and interde- pendence between all the different products of mental activity just as between various physical activities and physical and mental activities. Quite naturally all our activity and creative- ness are dependent and interdependent on other and cosmic activity and creativeness. We cannot produce anything which is not both inside and outside of us. All increase of our activ- ity and creativeness must naturally lead to a Higher Conscious- ness and in the end to Cosmic Consciousness. Thus everything 18 CREATIVE PSYCHICS in the universe is interdependent on the other and on the Whole, and everything is relative to the Whole. All is relative only, but the planes of that relativeness may he either below the normal and natural, or they may be above it and are, to that extent supernatural — that is higher dimensional. All acts and expressions are thus either related to one or the other of these planes with innumerable shades between, because they are fundamentally the product of all our creativeness and activity. The more they are related to the psychic plane the higher is their aim. Metapsy chics and Creative Mysticism are as much the out- come of the evolution of mathematics and physics as of the revulsion from superstitious religion. Metaphysics is as much a universal science of physics and a material interpretation of the universe as metapsychics strives for a universal psychic interpretation of the universe, or Universal Psychics. Religion, as we know it, is an arrested development as com- pared with its twin brother metaphysics, and has not yet reached the status of a positive science of psychics, which meta- psychics is destined to achieve. There is both a parallel and a distinction between metapsychics and religion. The former aims directly at an understanding of the Cause, the latter rather at the contemplation of the Effect. Metapsychics, the science of the religion of the future, aims at both the under- standing of the Cause and the Effect. It is a free and posi- tive science and teaches principles which govern mystical cre- ative processes. It attains and radiates a vision of the Cre- ative Force itself, or of God as religion calls the Cause. The religion of the future rests on a positive science of the Creative Force and teaches principles of higher creativeness which are revealed through all positive sciences as well as through contemporaneous study and experiment in creative processes. It is a positive Science of Sciences, but it is not a conglomerate. Such science of sciences is an Organic Fusion or a living Growth, and its development brings with it the understanding of Organic Fusion and Growth, which represents the actual Workings of the Creative Force or God. It is therefore essentially with Organic Fusion and Growth with which the religion of the future is concerned, which MBTAPSYCHICS 19 processes are at the root of all human creativeness, productive- ness and reproductive power, just as these constitute the roots of all creation and evolution of the world at large. The process of organic fusion and growth is mystical — or higher dimen- sional and of Psychical Nature, and its understanding depends on the development of creative psychic or constructive occult powers. This mystical process is reciprocal, which means that we develop along with the understanding of it our own psychic creativeness at the same time and automatically. All higher creativeness is, like life and creation, the result of the inherent mystical power of the Creative Force itself to Arouse Latent Energies and Hidden Talents — to stimulate and increase Radiant Energy through mystical overcoming of Fric- tion and Gravity, which thus makes organic fusion, gemma- tion and growth possible. All creative activity is radiant activity and produces a mystical effect just as it has a mystical origin. We may best compare it to the mystical creativeness of the inventive genius, who, with the increase of insight, ex- periment and reflex, and through concentrating on creative processes, increases his own creativeness. Or we may compare it to the mystical inquisitive and detective spirit of the cre- ative artist who transcends the actuality of existence and the past, that is "what was," and creates a vision of the future and "what might be." It is therefore essentially the Detective and Inquisitive In- ventive and Artistic Genius of the race which is representative of the Creative Force, and which has advanced humanity step by step automatically and produced human evolution. While the inventor concentrates more on the advancement of the Utilitarian side of life we find the artist concentrating more on the Aesthetic aspects of life and creation. The acts and thoughts of both are governed by principles which are most truly relative to the principles which govern the Creative Force in Action in its dual aspect, because both have increased their own creative psychic power through Inner Effort. They are not mere imitators but creators. The result is an acquiring of properties and character which create, attract and direct energy through creating higher energy, which is also the Po- tential of the Creative Force itself. 20 CREATIVE PSYCHICS Humanity in its course of evolution increases the potential energy of the universe through creating energy within the individual as well as through attracting it from external factors. It does that automatically in the measure of discovery of its Relationship with Outside Energy as well as with the In- crease of the Cognizance of its Inner Working Processes which increases its Consciousness. The evolution of humanity depends on its increase of consciousness, which increase is caused through the increase of Awareness as to its relationship and interdependence with other created objects. In other words: all real progress is caused by the Increase of Aware- ness of the Relationship of each phase of Being to every Man- ifestation of Life, Matter and Cosmos. It is thus Cosmic Consciousness that humanity strives for consciously and un- consciously. Along with the evolution and revolution of every religion has been produced and proclaimed one or the other of these Relationships only, which is represented in the emancipating principle of such religion. Through that principle it gets its Vision of the Creative Force, which vision is quite naturally a partial percept of the Creative Force or God. The true evolu- tion of every religion depends necessarily on the evolution of the emancipating principle and thus on discarding denatured and anti-natural pseudo-principles which made emancipation necessary. An Emancipation implies the revolution of Re- ligion. Broader vision and higher awareness of relationship can only come through the intercourse of different religions: with Interchange of their emancipating principles. The discovery and evolution of every emancipating principle is caused by and results in higher creative psychic powers. Its merit rests on its power of forming and Informing our Psyche on true creative principles, and results therefore in an increase of our supranatural or mystical productiveness, creativeness, inventiveness and art expression, because it advances our own creative power nearer the divine stage of the Creative Force itself. The problem of the religion of the future is: to stimulate creative psychic activity, in order that it may assist in pro- moting a harmonious and well balanced development of the METAPSYCHICS 21 mental and psychical powers of the awakened individual. This is what occult creativeness means — to cultivate the mystical power of the psyche to produce that magnetic force which is necessary to produce a higher voltage of energy, and overcome the gravity and attrition of the intellect. This is a parallel process corresponding to the electric current under the influence of the magnetic force which is otherwise subject to gravity. Our inventors produce, demonstrate and elucidate on the material plane what we neglect to develop on the psychic or spiritual plane. The inventions then in turn bring the higher cognizance of our own inner sublime workings. Our inventors did not invent electricity but have harnessed it, and humanity has to learn that it can similarly harness its own higher energy and make it productive instead of letting it go to waste, de- stroying the best within us. That is what inventors and artists strive for both objectively and subjectively. The inventor creates for the utilitarian plane as the artist creates for the aesthetic or spiritual plane through developing of increasing psychic power. Both create through reducing friction and gravity within themselves and thus reducing friction between individuals. They make humanity more efficiently creative and reduce their molecular weight. Our bodily molecular weight has decreased in the same measure as our art and in- ventions have increased. A few hundred years ago our fore- fathers could hardly swim, and bathing was considered abnor- mal. With the further increase of psychical development no- body will drown under ordinary conditions. It follows that higher creativeness is evolved through re- duction of friction and gravity within and without the individ- ual. All occult processes demonstrate the same fact, but what we are used to call occult processes generally avoid friction more or less altogether. They work on the psychic plane alone. All higher creativeness is occult and! all demonstrate the fact of a separate psychic plane within the individual, just as they demonstrate the duality of the creative force in action. The scholarly educated, mechanically cultured person naturally creates only products which increase friction and gravity evolving clashing concepts, contradictions and confusion, be- cause such culture promotes lethargy, anomaly of the psyche 22 CREATIVE PSYCHICS and subnormal psychic activity. The more of such adulterated knowledge an age produces, and propagates from its. inher- itance of the past the stronger is the natural reaction of psychically creative minds. Invention and art increase at the same rate in order to overcome the enhanced friction and grav- ity which the merely intellectual promulges. The demand for a spiritual revolution and a revolution of all culture and civiliza- tion which this misinformed age has perpetuated from the past becomes constantly more insistent. This process manifests itself today in its most pronounced form. The failure of our intellectual and so-called spiritual leadership is best demon- strated in the present day upheaval. We have to convince the conventionally educated that they are a nuisance and a menace, a thorn in our flesh. Higher creativeness and Spirituality in general depend on the development of creative psychic power through own inner effort, and the necessary revolution can be accomplished only through reaction against our perverted teaching and educating which suppresses it. The coming peace between nations will mark the beginning of still more revolutionary upheavals within the nations unless we can con- vince our educators that they are fundamentally mistaken and fallaciously informed. Democracy will be a complete failure so long as we do not revolutionize our entire educational machineries including our religions. These present survivals from a leisurely aristocracy, the rule of the stale, the palsied, the withered and the dead. The outworn must give way to the virile, the inspired unselfish youth of the age and to the blithesome feminine. The old sacrifice the young for their mis- takes, and the most unselfish are destroyed that the sovereignity of caste and greed may be upheld as long as their tatters will still bear patching. The outstanding remissness of our super- ficial educators consists of their lack of understanding that ultimate things cannot be perceived except through the de- veloped Psyche. This alone can produce the necessary self- reliance and self-confidence which obliterates abnormal vision, and leads to a revolution of vision and imagination. It leads to the necessary power of concentration on truly evolutionary processes and selfwill of a higher order. It brings quite nat- urally a better understanding of all truly creative processes, MBTAPSYCHICS 23 and creative activity in general as well as a higher esteem for the product of purposeful industry. Whatever does not pro- duce absorbs energy and increases friction and gravity. Futile effort withholds from the creative faculty its rightful share in the valuation of service. Abstinence from labour cannot recreate subnormal (and therefore abnormal) vision of the Creative Force and creative processes in general. Such ab- stention perpetuates the credulity that places reliance upon reactionary forces. It is therefore quite logical that the teach- ings of those whose livelihood and comfort are dependent on the creativeness of others have fallen into utter disrepute as the general creativeness has increased. This same increased cre- ativeness has augmented the conception of the Creative Force amongst the producing class far beyond the conception of the non-producing minority. Creativeness alone can increase the Creative Force within: the psychic power, and it is with the advance of this plane that our age is especially concerned, be- cause this has been neglected and perverted through the long continued and onesided development of the intellectual or ma- terial plane. It is with a cult of the psychic plane that the religion of the future is concerned, and which brings with it also a competent valuation of the intellectual plane. It is a well recognized fact that the consciousness of the human personality consists of two planes: the intellectual or material plane and the psychic or spiritual plane, and we have to consider that the psychic plane is the higher dimensional, occult or mystical plane. It repre- sents the supranatural or subliminal workings of the Creative Force within us. All life is composed of a multitude of con- sciousnesses, all of them of dual nature. All represent the Cre- ative Force in Action, just like our entire organism. We are able to develop both planes to a higher status, and thus in- crease our consciousness and awareness as well as our creative- ness. Both planes are interdependent, one is just a plane higher and represents the Supranatural or subliminal within us. The neglect of its development leads to perversion of it, and it be- comes abnormal, immoral. As this plane influences all our acts and thoughts as well as our vision and art creativeness it must be evident that the neglect of it is anti-natural, leading to acts 24 CREATIVE PSYCHICS and art expression which do not conform to the Creative Force. It is upon a positive science of the Creative Force in action that the religion of the future will find its base. This science is metapsychics, a higher science of psychics which demands an indigenous computation and logic and as it evolves it will develop higher representative exponents and characters, that is, higher art expressions just as higher mathematics created its own exponents and nomenclature in order to simplify its problems and facilitate their solutions. Mathematical logic has created algebraic signs or symbols not unlike those of re- ligious logic, but psychology creates characters of quite a dif- ferent order. There is a natural interrelationship between all these developments which we have to transcend in order to understand and develop the Subliminal within. Metapsychics leads to a higher conception of what religion seeks to in- terpret, and is a science which deals as much with the increas- ing vortex of a becoming sun as it deals with the development of human character. It deals as much with the dual conscious- ness of the atom as it deals with mystical organic growth and symbiogenetic evolution of life. It views life and creation from every aspect, and perceives that the vortex of an embryonic sun evolves through an organic fusion of contradistinguished entities which thus develop the personality of matter, or its Gravity as it is commonly called. It recognizes that life evolves out of matter as the Flame of Matter through a decrease of friction and gravity. The entities or planes having become higher consciousnesses are still contradistinguished, but their harmonious produce is the individuated entity and its inherent and distinct char- acter. The evolution of metapsychics and mysticism in the further development of evolution of the human mind must become clear when we consider the difference between religious subnormal symbolism and mathematical scientific symbolism, and the dif- ference of religious and mathematical logic. The latter is an inexorable consequence of the former and represents in itself a reaction against subnormal logic and symbol worship, a step from the subnormal plane of vision to a material plane. Meta- psychics and mysticism represent a step toward the higher METAPSTCHICS 25 normal, with the normal development of the Psyche as a result. Humanity has evolved on the way from religion over meta- physics to metapsychics or higher dimensional psychics, and thus from religious symbolism over mathematical and scientific symbolism to creative mysticism. The intermediary step was made possible only through the development of the Greek cosmological view of life and creation. Mysticism is, funda- mentally speaking, a supranatural plane of symbolism. Sym- bolism evolved along with superstition and is the product of fear of the Unknown. Scientific symbolism is a natural anti- dote against religious symbolism which humanity has created automatically asf a mental remedy. Mysticism is simply the further product of further reaction against subnormal vision of the Creative Force. It represents the revolutionary and re- generative processes that find spontaneous expression on a higher plane of consciousness. Religious symbolism represents a retrogression below the material plane, whilst the symbols of mathematics are intellectual or material. The evolution of the human mind cannot halt either on a subnormal nor on an in- tellectual plane. It will inevitably reach higher. We can un- derstand the process of such evolution much better if we review the evolution of the art of the past and consider that of the future. High art of the past started with symbolism and ar- rived at realism which is induced by the realistic scientific spirit of the age. From there it will automatically pass with the advance of psychic development to mystical art expres- sion. Every phase in the development of art is the product of the times to a large extent. It ought to be more. It ought to be the leading and regenerating spirit of the times. It ought not only to mirror the times but ought to lead it to a higher plane of culture and civilization. In other words: every age ought to produce a higher art with a higher vision of the Unseen. It is therefore with the high or religious art with which the science of the religion is concerned first of all. This implies the increase of creative psychic powers in gen- eral, through the processes of forming and informing Psyche which lead to increase of Vision. It recognizes that all effort spent in clearing vision leads automatically to higher psychic powers. It believes that Enlightenment of mental processes 26 CREATIVE PSYCHICS has a creative effect just as it has an automatically Physical and Mental healing effect. It recognizes that Interpretations of relationship are of highest enlightening order. It interprets all that humanity has created in its proper relationship, and thus also how metapsy chics must naturally evolve from religion over metaphysics. It sees that metaphysics is the direct out- come of a cosmological religion, and thus more universal than religion. Metapsychics, analogous to higher mathematics, makes use of certain known quantities in order to understand and inter- pret the Unknown and Unseen, and it develops thus along with the increase of collective experiences a higher degree of logical understanding which is of psychological nature, just as it de- velops automatically the psychic urge within. The evolution of the human mind is an evolution of logic. Humanity has passed in the course of evolution from an a-logical state of reasoning to an illogical and irrational state, and is now pro- ceeding from a rational logic to psycho-logic. As regards the various modes through which the different sciences including religion try to solve the mystery of the Un- known quantity it must be evident that metapsychics differs in that its aim is direct and affirmative and represents positive psychics. Metapsychics, religion and metaphysics strive at understanding and interpreting the same Unknown quantity through different modes, exponents and characters which de- mand a certain amount of visualizing power in order to use these exponents and characters. Metaphysics and religion make use of symbols whilst metapsychics makes use of prin- ciples which govern mystical expressions. We best regard metapsychics as the science of the religion of the future and mysticism as the base of its art expression, just as religion of the past is best regarded as the science, and symbolism the art derived from epochal religion. We must regard all religious mysticism of the past as art expression, whilst the teaching of its principles has been the science. These differences become more clear coincident with the evolution of Creative Mysti- cism. The Religion of the Future : its Science and its Art, develope together like the religion of the past and its symbolic art de- METAPSYCHICS 27 veloped alongside of each other; or mathematics, algebra and metaphysics. The religion of the future is therefore accom- panied by its own art expression which it creates. All we can do today is to proclaim and interpret some of the principles which govern it, and which can lead to further development of that science and art. The principles which govern a re- ligion and its art must necessarily be the same. In the course of human evolution all such principles must the more and more accord with each other and thus the more conform with the Creative Force itself, and the same principles which govern our religion and art must also govern our life. This has always been the aim of all forward striving minds, but it can only be obtained and the wish fulfilled through a positive Universal Religion governed by Universal Principles. As the religious instinct is based on the inherent desire of Expressing Feeling, and as Feeling is of Aesthetical nature we must look at religious development solely from the view of Aestheticism, and it must be made clear that all human evolu- tion like all evolution of life and creation is fundamentally aesthetical evolution. We have to thank the religion of the past for the evoking of visionary power through creating Fear of the Unknown, and we have to thank it for the inducement of High Art, that is Visionary expression of the Unseen. The visualizing power of the past was necessarily subnormal as psychology and mysti- cism prove. The past suppressed the normal development of Psyche and psychic powers, with the result that the present has created by necessity first a science of Psycho-Pathology, the aim of which is to cure pathological mentality and to find out the causes of such derangements. Like the beginning of all posi- tive sciences the origin of psychology was of analytic nature, and it is now gradually becoming synthetic in the measure that it transcends the causes. The original of any science is at the very inception of its experimental, negative, alchemistic and ab- stract, and the religion of the past presents the negative an- cestor of a positive science of creative psychology. The course of the evolution of every religion ends in a revolution. We can clearly recognize the course of revolution as well as of the reformation in the slow and sure breaking up of religion which 28 CREATIVE PSYCHICS follows a schism. The moment a fissiparation breaks a religion into fragments a reformatory endeavor sets in, coincidental with a revolutionary movement. The reformers were the re- ligionists, the revolutionists the artists. The reformer led the religion of the past to extinction, the revolutionists create the religion of the future. The revolutionist propounds altogether new and universal emancipating principles instead of religious, dogmatic, sectarian principles. The religions of the past and the future have as much in common as the shadow of an ob- ject has with the object itself, and, as little as the alchemistic abstract philosophy of the past and the positive philosophy of life of the future. Pragmatism, for instance, represents a re- formatory process of outworn, dying, pathological, philosophi- cal theories and dogmas. The philosophy of the future is al- ready in the making outside of philosophical circles just as the religion develops outside of religious circles. Religion itself was an antidote against pure feeling of the Unknown, without formful representative expression,, that is, without high art. It was also like abstract philosophy an antidote against "common sense" without imaginative power and incentive. The mind exercises itself incessantly in trans- cendentalizing its powers of projection, and religions and philo- sophies of the past were adapted to this process. They repre- sent to us the puzzle of contradictions which we have to recon- cile and on which we can exercise and practice our critical transcending power — ever seeking to solve the riddle of life and creation for ourselves on a universal base of understanding. This riddle was not solved for us by our ancestors. They but added complexities that serve to spur our critical power of transcendentalization, from which we shall derive the strength, the equipment and the vision to solve it for ourselves. The basic fears of the past precluded a daring to encroach upon the secret of the Unknown. ' The developing present is unafraid to venture. All religions are built on archaic foundations, and the roots of all religions extend deep down into the remote past of humanity. As the roots have sprung from abnormal con- ceptions they are closely related to the Immoral and Egotistic, and religion of the past is therefore much more interested in METAPSYCHICS 29 morality than in aestheticism. It is also more interested in the Abnormal rather than in the Normal. This interest in the ab- normal and immoral must naturally exhaust itself in time, be- cause the continuous accentuation of the abnormal, or evil as it is called, must tend to the increase of it. It is a psychic law that the more we center on any process the more we develop it, and the present day's trend is therefore towards propounding the good instead of the evil by way of wholesome reaction against extreme abnormal development. The present day's revivalism through pronouncing anew a devil cult and the ex- istence of a devil is only the last stage of the Pagan Religion of the past, which has produced through its centering on evil such gross abuse that the defects become evident and their abolition hastened. Mysticism is a cult with the Normal. It deals with the normal and seeks to understand the causes of the abnormal and the immoral. It expands through developing the higher normal out of the abnormal. The extremely abnormal stage of our culture and civiliza- tion has reached such a destructive stage that we are searching for the real causes of it, and the effort we spend in transcend- ing to the causes leads us automatically to the Understanding of the cause of all things created. It leads us to a higher under- standing and a higher vision of the Creative Force itself and of the laws and principles which govern its workings. In order to understand these workings a high degree of Feeling, or aestheticism, is necessary, which enables one to react unconsciously against the abnormal, and thus recognize the higher normal. It is therefore always Feeling and Aestheti- cism to which we do wisely to yield, and the tendency of the age automatically opens the path to such development. It has recognized and developed principles which lead to 1 a readier recognition and a higher development of Feeling and aesthet- icism. It is therefore with such principles with which the teach- ings of the religion and art of the future is concerned. The means are practical psychics, constructive creative aesthetical occultism, or in short the Development of creative psychic powers. All that can be embraced in a positive science of psychology forms and informs our Psyche, and forms and in- forms thereby our aestheticism and Feeling. That all positive 30 CREATIVE PSYCHICS sciences reach out in time into the realms of the occult has long been recognized. No striving, however sincere, can obviate this because our visioning powers increase and clamor for expres- sion despite all attempted opposition. The trouble is that we try to avoid these realms because they demand deeper think- ing, and we are taught to undervalue our mental capabilities. As we become more familiar with the processes of Life and Mind we can no longer be intimidated by dread of what further progress may disclose. "We gradually but inevitably become accustomed to react to normal impulses and to remain unmoved by uncanny fears of what revelations of science may next com- pel attention. The principles of the religion of the future are the purely scientific principles of the Subliminal Mind. We see in such sciences as higher mathematics how visionary power evolves on a material plane, just as our visualizing power in- creases with the study of electricity. Their evolution is marked by the invention and use of formulas, signs and characters. In religion, art and mathematics this is still more evident. All sciences have been aided by the means of vision which higher mathematics has developed. Mysticism creates signs, formulas and characters representative of higher dimensional Creative Rhythm. Symbols are abstractions of rhythm only. Higher mathematics would have been impossible without the conception of realms of abstractions. Religion represents the first forma- tion of an abstract science, and all positive sciences have come out of reaction against abstract and alchemistic sciences. All depend therefore on the development of visionary powers which religion has initiated through fear of the Unknown. All strive toward cognition of the Unknown, but with distinct signs and formulas. All strive for an understanding of the Infinite, all express part of the Infinite, all help in a better understanding of it. It is the province of art to express it in spiritual form — that is in higher harmonious Rythm. All strive to relieve the strain which fear has placed on the mind in order that every one may recognize truth for himself. Higher mathematics, through its use of its scientific symbols, has reduced the pres- sure on the mind which religious symbolism had produced, and every progress in positive science reduces it further. Meta- psychics however, deals with subliminal creative and mental METAPSYCHICS 31 healing processes: a reconciliation of science with religion. Metaphysics has thus far been of all sciences the highest anti- dote because it has created a metaphysical view of creation, and we can best express higher dimensional things scientifically with the aid of metaphysical expressions of higher dimensional vistas. It is thus that we arrive at the interpretation of mysti- cal art as Fourth Dimensional art, resultant upon reaction against the restricting influence of fear. Complete reaction against fear cannot, however, come except by way of complete revolution of visionary power. All intellectual products of the past, including the products of organized religious effort, represent restricting forces which create and increase friction and pressure on the mind. They invite the inventor and the artist as well as the sociologist to work towards decrease of friction within the mind and between individuals. They invite all really earnest minds to increase their critical and transcending power — that is their psychic effort, which is aroused through unconscious reaction against restricting influences. Their work is therefore towards enlight- enment of mind, and their work represents mental healing, restoration of ease and surmounting disease. Metaphysics as well as religion differentiate themselves from metapsychics through the effort to find knowledge and vision of the Unknown through means of development of vision on the intellectual plane. Symbolism in art and religion is thus striv- ing towards the material plane although they contain elements of spiritual nature. The material plane is a necessary stepping stone from the subnormal to the higher normal or mystical. The higher normal can only be reached through Positive Develop- ment of Psyche which process implies the substitution of su- perior for inferior vision. This leads to a higher vision on the material plane and to a progress in inventions and sciences in general. These processes are all automatic and reciprocal. The development of the intellect is a necessary concomitant just as creative activity and physical training are necessary pro- cesses on their respective planes. The additional training of our psychic nature makes us more nearly perfect — more di- vinely creative, and makes for a Greater Humanity. Psychic creativeness or "spontaneous creative action" as it may be 32 CREATIVE PSYCHICS called, can be developed only side by side with general cre- ativeness — a heedlessness of and resistance to the urge to inventiveness, experiment, enterprise and adventure, furnished the excrementitious compost in which symbolism found rest. It becomes therefore evident why our modes of education have not perfected our culture and civilization in accordance with the demand of the age. The world war is only a sympto- matic incident of the neglect to develop Psyche to meet the requirements of the era. It takes such a catastrophe as a world war and perhaps still more bloody revolutions to blow our shallow culture and civilization from the face of the earth. The evolutionary process occasionally manifests in catas- trophic upheavals as evidence that organic growth is not the result of mere adaptation and leisurely reformation. Human society has lost its equilibrium and must attain a higher status. The process becomes clearer as we approach the cata- clysm. The futility of our educational experiments hitherto, the invalidity of the philosophical and theological percepts and of the pseudo-scientific maxims of a shallow materialism account for the distorted interpretation of Life — and the pen- alty for futility confronts us in such hellish outbursts as the devastations and brutalities of war. Education has consisted of contracting, instead of expanding that power of projecting the eager and discerning transcendent perceptions of the Imagination to serve as a bridge between Cause and Effect. Because of this, events quite inevitable take us by surprise. We stifle imagination for fear of what may be disclosed, and our very fear provokes disaster. Fear exercises a depression of the mind which calls forth an increased effort far out of proportion to the pressure. If this pressure is not removed through an increased transcendental Insight and a clearer Vision there comes an explosion which is destructive instead of creative. The excessive accumulation of energy produced in our age must be directed aright through higher enlighten- ment on spiritual planes or it leads to perversion. A credu- lous sluggishness serves to relieve the pressure for a while, but decreases self-control, thus diminishing psychic power. When, at length, the soporific effects of a too easy credulity have worn off, it is found that we have paid for our yielding METAPSYCHICS 33 to fear at the cost of a diminished power of wholesome self- suggestion. Then we have the mob spirit in action, which theretofore had been latent but not absent. Psychic self-control is the result of well cultivated instincts and emotions of psychic origin that had been neglected. The mob spirit of the religi- ous fanatic, of the aristocrat, of the rabid beneficiary of priv- ilege, differs in no respect from the mob spirit of the exploited classes. This mob spirit can be destroyed only through a higher application of the emancipating principle of love — itself a radiation of higher vision of the Creative Force. On the other hand, every effort of the dominant class in any community to restrict and suppress and pervert a subject class — usually the workers, the inventors, the useful class — serves to stimulate the psychic power of the victims of sup- pression. The emancipating Principle of Love, developed out of reaction against the ludicrous doctrine of fear, can no longer be checked with impunity. The contemplation and the knowledge of the Emancipating Principles which the dif- ferent religions excited, represent the bright spots in the evo- lution of mankind from the domination of fear. These emanci- patory principles were not postulated by the disseminators of theologies, but developed in spite of those cults of super- stitions whose office was the conciliation of an irascible and ruthless deity. It is always lack of visionary power of our educators and leaders through which wars and tragedies are caused. What our reactionary forces have yet to learn is that they cannot keep forever the vision of the kingdom of heaven from application on earth through maintaining fear and through resorting to the pagan Hebrew-Babylonian gospel of original sin for maintaining of their power, instead of culti- vating Christ's gospel of Love to its highest possible perfec- tion. This can only be accomplished through proclaiming a religion without a devil. All further abuse of the Creative Force can only lead to a higher conception and a higher state of love in the end, but at the cost of intermediate disaster and ruin. The logical deference to the Creative Force is necessarily a cult of Creativeness. All devil cult is pagan, subnormal and 34 CREATIVE PSYCHICS immoral just as all abstinence from creativeness is immoral, because it decreases consciousness and conscience. The real nature of the Unknown is psychic or spiritual and can only become known through increase of creative capability which must be assisted by psychic power. The Un- known increases in the same measure as humanity increases its creative psychic power. On the other hand, Truth flees from us in the measure that we neglect to solve its mystery through enlightening and forming our psyche. Or in other words : Truth becomes more fleeting as we develop onesidedly and therefore lopsidedly, and becomes more real and obvious to the extent that we cultivate our psychic power as well. We cannot solve the riddle of life and the Creative Force with the intellect alone. The riddle is that we ourselves are the Unknown, at least its foremost exponent. As we develop physically, mentally and psychically — symmetrically, so shall we understand the riddle of the Unknown of which we are an inseparable part. In the very same measure do we increase automatically the Unknown. The great Unknown, like our individual part of it, is always far in advance of our consci- ousness of it. The riddle can only be solved along with the development and understanding of Creative Rythm, the prin- ciples of which are exemplified in mystical high art. It can only be acquired through the sincere effort to Know Oneself as well as to understand one's neighbor. This effort leads to the relationship which exists between all humanity and all created objects and especially to the contradistinguished psychic relationship between humanity and the fruitful flower- ing of verdant nature. These different relationships have been expounded respectively by the emancipators of the West and the East, by Christ and Buddha. The study, knowledge and exercise of the principles which the different religions and beliefs have provoked are by necessity an indispensible help, because they represent the foremost exponents of the collective experience of the human race toward understand- ing of the Unknown, and its relation to the Known. This continuity of progress of the Unknown, and the prog- ressive ascendency of humanity to a higher plane of consci- ousness and a readier capacity for logic has manifested in METAPSYCHICS 35 higher planes of art expression. What was symbolism be- comes mysticism, and a consequent opening np of higher di- mensional realms for art expression. The positive science of psychology has shorn Supernaturalism, Occultism and Mysti- cism of their chief perplexity, and we have recognized that the principles which govern creative and re-creative psychic phenomena are the principles which govern the Creative Force itself. With the increase of our knowledge of the prin- ciples which govern mysticism and higher dimensional phe- nomena in general we have become acquainted with the Super- natural, so to say. It has lost its estranging aspect through excitirg our interest, and thus our emotion of fear is sup- planted by that trusting unafraidness — of Love. Herein lies the mystical aspect and power of Interest, Inquisitiveness, At- tention and Love as antidotes against fear and its perverting influence. There is no need to be afraid to explore higher dimensional realms no more than we need to be afraid to explore lower dimensional or subnormal realms, because we have the Un- known within us and need only be told how to study and con- ceive its workings through Experiment and Reflex in order to develop the higher out of the lower. The increase of perception of the Creative Force has al- ways depended on the inspiration of the artist, and we have to learn from him how to perceive it. The secret lies in the creative development of our psyche, and the power of per- ception depends on the same mental attitude which the mysti- cal artist has to acquire in order to create true art or Higher Reality as it is called. All that surrounds us and that we per- ceive with the intellect and the objective senses is natural — or Objective Creation — Reality. All that we have to tran- scend with the psychical or spiritual senses is Supernatural — or Higher Reality. Pathological psyche creates the subnormal, which the mystic has to re-create. The normal process is, however, that the individual re-creates himself through tran- scending' the causes of his aberrations, and the effort which we spend on transcending and Knowing ourselves is " Healing mental and bodily sicknesses." It rests in the inherent power of Self Suggestion. We have individually neglected to de- 36 CREATIVE PSYCHICS velop this power and our age has therefore developed the psychiatrist. The artist and mystic are essentially psychi- atrists. Mysticism, like all occult phenomena, is so intensely natural that it is supernatural. Everyone is born a mystic, but evolution demands that he lose himself in experiment into creative and procreative processes, acquiring higher Feeling and higher mystical power through Rebirth as a result of inner effort. The process of metamorphosis of the individual demands a Reincarnation of the Spirit in the Flesh, which makes him again a mystic. The Natural is in its essence Supernatural because it has the God within itself, but Fear of the Unknown — engendered by stifling of incentive, inquisitiveness, energy, interest, cre- ativeness, and general discouragement of the experimental urge — has made our conception of It perverse and anti-natural. The moment we transcend our wrong conception of it and recognize its true nature, we become mystical like creation itself. All is relative only and planes of relativeness imply different planes of understanding. Mysticism is a transforma- tion of planes of understanding which call powers into action that produce automatically something higher out of the lower. The mystery is simple to the understanding when we em- ploy comparative analogy and imagination. The higher di- mensional differs as much from the lower dimensional as universal ideals differ from sectarian ideals, or as the religions of the past differ from a universal religion of the future, which latter represents an organic fusion of the emancipating princi- ples which have been produced along with different religions and beliefs. Or in other comparisons : as much as metaphysics differs from simple mathematics, or a positive science differs from the alchemy of the middle ages. Higher dimensional things are supernatural because they are of psychic nature and origin. That process develops spontaneously, but a most experimental and inquisitive mind must dig things out be- fore the masses become aware of a process which is in the making. The mystical mind is the inquisitive experimental mind: the spirit of the inventor plus the spirit of the artist. It is for us to flexily accommodate ourselves to the Useful which the METAPSYCHICS 37 one invents and the Beautiful which the other depicts. We acquire through their example and their aid. Whether they will it or not they are leaders — they together reveal to us the Creative Force in action. In the past they manifested through their work alone, their more or less tardy followers profiting from it. As we emerge from the domination of Fear both inventor and artist, and their disciples more receptive of the significance of their achievements, our knowledge of the Creative Force has broadened and continues to expand. It is the combined inventive and artistic spirit which must be cultivated, and this spirit strives after universalization of all social factors. Humanity becomes higher dimensional as it becomes Universal. The mystical mind is the Universal Mind. As humanity becomes universal in that measure our acts and art expressions become mystical. Whether the changing order accomplishes its inevitable revolution tranquilly or in bloody turbulence depends on the contemporary disposition to cling to the institutionalized futilities of the past, or fall into step with the pioneers whose mission it is to blaze the path toward a Unison of mankind in order to insure a higher consciousness and thus a higher creativeness. It is therefore universal ideas, ideals and principles with which the teaching of mysticism and metapsychics is concerned, which principles conform to the Creative Force or God, as we are used to call it. The teaching and transcending of such principles has an enlightening and levitating influence both on the individual and the social organism, reducing friction and gravity within and without. It decreases the molecular weight of the individual and makes him easier to create. Like art and invention it is: "as if given." The value of Metapsychics and creative Mysticism rests on its capability to increase creative efficiency automatically, and the process rests on the self-evoiving principle of the Uni- verse which is inherent to ourselves and to the universe. The more we become acquainted with the workings of the Creative Force the higher creative do we become, because our Joy of Action increases in the same degree as the Richness and Joy of Life increases and the whole process depends on the in- 38 CREATIVE PSYCHICS terest which we take in creative processes as well as in all objects of creation. The first necessary step to develop mysticism is to become acquainted with the principles and facts which have an en- lightening influence on the psyche and clear our vision with- out which we cannot form and inform that entity of ours, and cannot develop it normally. The actual development comes through our inner effort along with creative activity. Creative mysticism differs from religious mysticism, which is created through a-social development and retiring from human inter- course and creativeness more or less. The present age is ad- verse to the development of purely religious mysticism, be- cause we cannot return to a purely, a-logical, state of mind. Its time is passed because symbolism has broadened. Human- ity has with greater universal intercourse created a broader vision. Unfortunately most of our becoming mystics fall in the course of development into the mazes of spiritism or revert to ascetic ecstasy. Ours is an age imbued with creative prob- lems and not of asceticism. A-social development, which for- merly led to transcendentalism and religious mysticism, leads today to perversion. The difference must be made clearer in further interpretations. Creative mysticism is the broadest of all current educational problems, and all the foremost edu- cators expound its principles with the intent to develop psychic creative powers. In order to develop creative mysticism and mysticism in general it is necessary to forget and revolutionize one's con- ventional culture and knowledge, and let one's psychic self become alive through fostering its activity. Interest in hu- manity as a whole and in individual endeavor, and all effort which makes for greater universalization of our knowledge, are all that is needed to set the supernatural machine within us in motion. As all spiritual and mystical things are dis- tinctly problems of vision and imagination these latter must be improved and directed toward the Whole as well as toward its main dual aspects, the Useful and the Beautiful alike. These latter two combine in the Avhole of the Great Unknown. There- in lies the mystical aspect of "the Creative Force in Action." We estrange ourselves from the Creative Force as we estrange METAPSYCHICS 39 ourselves from either the Useful or the Beautiful, and see it in symbols only with attributes, but not in true vision. All symbols are crutches for lack of something better. As long as we cannot see the Unknown in Everything our vision of it must be defective. When we once grasp the Principle it helps like a vaulting pole to swing us over all obstacles. Symbolism restricts the visionary grasp, and to the extent that we can see the Useful and the Beautiful — that is God — in everything, our vision of it increases automatically, and makes our acts and art expression conform more truly in rela- tivity with it. As long as we conceive the Unknown as the Unknowable we get estranged from it and " strain our eyes in vain in the dark, because we see without loving," quoting the saying of ancient wisdom. It is Fear which keeps humanity in bondage. As we emerge from that bondage therei comes into our consciousness spon- taneously an irresistible apperception of the principle of the Creative Force. This cognition becomes more vivid with the aid of self suggestion and Affirmation and reasoning through Feeling. We perceive that this Creative Principle underlies all evolution in any science, progress and success. Its cogni- tion demands the development and exercise of more than ordi- nary common sense on the plane of the supernatural as well as on other planes. Our reasoning power develops coincidently with the expansion of our phyche, or else our subjective rea- soning is as mischievous as our inductive reasoning process. Both reciprocally operative lead to truth. Our philosophy as well as religion deduces from theoretical principles and such abstract dogmas as do not conform to creative principles. Positive philosophy of life acknowledges that we cannot solve the riddle of life and creation with the intellect alone, nor solely with the powers of the psyche. We must lose fear of abnormal psychic products of spiritual life and spirit mani- festations in general, in order to develop our spiritual self. This necessitates a "clear brain," or better, a "cleared brain focus of vision." This can be accomplished only through critical clarifying of the psyche which is responsible for all vision and imagination, together with the materialization of it in the form of spirit and spiritual expressions. There are 40 CREATIVE PSYCHICS countless tendencies to get our brain chambers filled with impressions which darken our brain focus of vision, Every single impression leaves its impress in our nervous system. But it is much more difficult to disintegrate the abnormal and unsatisfactory impressions and winnow from out of their em- barrassing multitude a few good visions of "what might be." If we leave undisturbed our wrong and undigested concep- tions and impressions we store in our brain-cells condensa- tions which obscure the "Light." We must use our own in- born transcendental, critical power to discard the chimerical and unfounded — to UNLEARN, as modern educational science terms it. We can improve only through unlearning, and the creating of "First-Hand Knowledge" as the knowledge which comes with life experiences may be called. We can get first- hand knowledge of spiritual things only through developing our psyche,, and not through memorizing and repeating the litanies of the past. It is an axiom of biology that with the complexity of our knowledge individual consciousness must be increased in order that the Higher will no longer be sacrificed to the Lower. Our present culture and civilization is based on the abuse of psychic power and "the survival of the most cunning and the brute." Those who could not abuse and would not adapt themselves to the principle that only the brute can survive found no room in our ethical calendar of the past. It is quite natural that those possessing least Feeling manifest the least scruples. As the Creative power is invested in our Psyche or Feeling-self it is evident that the development of phychic power is ob- structed through educational principles which conform to the principles of reactionary forces, but not with the progres- sive ones. The real progress in human evolution exfoliates where least we are likely to expect it. Our present day's progress toward a higher culture and civilization is caused by the greater universalization of our visualizing power which process represents a more lucid in- forming of our psyche and the creating of a higher conscious- ness and, in consequence, a higher conscience. Universalization of knowledge brings with it a clearer understanding of col- lective life experiences of nations and races, and collective THE PRINCIPLE OF EMANCIPATION 41 experience will supersede pseudo theories woven by the ego- tism of reactionary forces. Such theories represent a restrict- ing force against the Enlightenment. The present day's de- mand is for theories which establish their validity by the cri- terion of positive results. A religion of the future rests solely on its positive results, and these results depend on the accept- ance of and reliance upon those effective principles that un- derlie the Creative Force. V THE CEEATIVE FORCE, ITS PRINCIPLE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF THE EMANCIPA- TION OF THE AGE LIFE AND CREATION. THE WORLD AND THE CREATOR. ARE ONE AND THE SAME AND SELF- EVOLVING. Herein lies the mystery and the mystical aspect of life, regeneration and evolution, and the power of the divine physical, mental and sexual creativeness of humanity. On this fact rests also the emancipating power of the Principle of the Creative Force which the transcendental power of the age has evolved, and through which it tries to conceive and interpret the Very Intent of the Creative Force or God. Dif- ferent religions have created various abnormal aspects of the Creative Force and different people have therefore generated diverging postulates of principles of emancipation. The dif- ference between any religion and its principle of emancipation represents a Positive Concept with no reserve or qualifying contingency which would leave room for doubt as to its very nature and intent. If we say God is Love we say there is no evil In God nor in Love. Religion, on the other hand, teaches nevertheless a Principle of Evil which must be of archaic na- ture and therefore abnormal, or subnormal as psychology proves. The principles of emancipation which have been brought to light along with the evolution of religions are of purified or acsthetical nature and their strongest appeal is directed to- 42 CREATIVE PSYCHICS wards the purification or enlightenment of psychic vision and imagination. Every emancipating principle purifies and in- creases the power of vision as collective experience and posi- tive history indicate, while the archaic dogmatic side of re- ligion postulating that principle remains anti-social and anti- aesthetical. With the advance of aestheticism the emancipat- ing principle becomes increasingly operative, while the retard- ing element of dogmatism declines constantly toward extinc- tion — requiring extraordinary drafts on credulity in order to delay inevitable collapse. The emancipating principles are the outgrowth of the artistic spirit; the Emancipators have been Artists. Religious evolution is fundamentally art revolution. Our creative power increases with, and in consequence of, ex- panding and extending power of psychic vision ; and with the cognition of the emancipating principle art creativeness as well as general creativeness increases. The reason for this increase lies in the fact that all psychic enlightenment has an elevating and levitating effect, which makes humanity more highly crea- tive. At the root of all creativeness and creation is a working principle we call God, and, as the conception of it has been evolving, the power of human creativeness has become more active. It is evident that the conception of the emancipating principle which stands for the Creative Force has been induced by the creative part of humanity, and represents also the eman- cipating principle of the age. The fact is that the credit for it has not been properly attributed. The process may be said to be reciprocally compensatory. The principle of emancipation is no less the matrix than the offspring of man's conception of the Creative Force. Through that consecration of soul that comes from the casting out of fear, man is prompted to conform his activities to principles and processes that he instinctively feels to be true — each successful outcome of this "unafraid- ness" to rely on the Creative Force has spurred to greater reliance, each forward step resulting in augmented creative power. In other phrase : humanity has evolved itself automat- ically through increase of its own creativeness along with the increase of its instinctive Feeling into creative processes. This implies that humanity's further advance in creativeness will be similarly attained through further increase of feeling, and THE PRINCIPLE OP EMANCIPATION 43 a consequently firmer understanding of principles which govern all creative processes. The principle of the Creative Force mirrors the workings of the creative Force itself. As this compensatory process be- comes increasingly obvious from multiplying aspects, the more securely we lay hold on that principle the more competently creative we become. Principles reveal themselves to the most acute aspiring and inspired in sharp outline — more vaguely to many sensitive if less inquisitive ones. At first but a few are animated to concentrate on the most diverse creative processes and to explore and chart the entrancing vistas they are gifted to perceive. Creative concentration leads to the soul of things, as it increases transcending power, and thus brings enlighten- ment with respect of the Creative Force. The cognition of an emancipating principle may be compared to discovery of wire- less radiography or the invention of the flying machine on which many inspired minds had concentrated before a culmina- tion resulted. Like any invention or discovery it must be fur- ther evolved and developed. All is "in the air" so to say, there being always many inspired minds unconsciously working to- wards the emancipation of humanity just as other reactionary minds lacking this concentrating purposefulness, are constantly busy to hinder. The fact is : the creative processes need to be practiced to be understood, in order to come into an informed consciousness of the Creative Force. All reliable interpretations of the Creative Force, or God, depends on a true valuation of positive principles thus far discovered. Humanity thanks Christ for revealing the principle of the Creative Force as Love. This principle compelled rec- ognition despite the extreme anti-social and materialistic age to which it was promulgated. Its development is the result of reaction against the extreme egotism and materialism which the preceding age had developed and which still reigns. This world war is merely the beginning of a revolutionary move- ment which can only end when antiquated parts of our teach- ings, which have perverted our conception of the Creative Force, are repudiated. As yet our western civilizations, how- ever progressive, remain dominated to some extent by the sur- vival of vestiges of Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian and Jew- U CREATIVE PSYCHICS ish conceptions of religion. Here again we may see the re- ciprocal interplay of tendencies. A slave civilization develops from a religion in which fear is the predominating factor, and pari passu a slave religion develops in such a civilization. Such principle of the Creative Force as Love could only be developed amid conditions where Love is most scorned and the procreative faculty most abused. The same emancipating prin- ciple that got its most formidable impetus from the teachings of Jesus, was present in the religions that had preceded those revolutionary utterances. But the priests of those earlier cults, while not ignorant of that principle, preferred to min- imize its importance, where it was not more expedient to either ignore, or forthrightly to resist, its claim. It was scarcely to be expected that the interests that thrived upon the persistence of the fear-thought, should bestir themselves to dispelling fear. On the contrary, the merit and virtue of a dread of the Creative Force was constantly extolled. It cannot be doubted that among the master class, and the priesthood that ministered to that class, there was a recognition of Love as the cohesive force of any worth-while social relationship. But, like the master- class of all ages, they were more concerned for their immediate privileges than for the remote happiness of mankind in gen- eral. Nevertheless, from the preachments of fear sprouted in the minds of the slave class the consciousness that the creative forces manifesting in the very nature of things were benign. And when at length the Nazarene proclaimed the doctrine that God is Love, it was the common people that "heard Him gladly," for they were gratified to have confirmation of their own consciousness of the emancipatory principle, — a conscious- ness that had, in a vague and inarticulate way, permeated the minds of man. It required the divine daring of the Nazarene to bring that twilight apprehension to full light of day — to focus, as it were, the hazy concept lurkingly lingering in the hearts of the people — to give it coherence and stability. An age that invents the powerful motor or masters the electric current and studies the inner working of the atom has naturally a quite different conception of creative processes and of creative forces than an age which indolently lags. It is an axiom in human evolution that the most forward striving THE PRINCIPLE OF EMANCIPATION 45 and inspired minds, which are naturally the most sensitive minds, evolve within themselves that part of Creative Force which is most abused and derided at the time. It is this that emancipation of an age implies: the freeing of the age from its particular degradation. Love, however, does not represent the Whole of the principle, especially not to a symbolical age, but it is an essential element of it. Love is at the root of all creativeness and is a prime factor in the awakening and devel- opment of Feeling. It is therefore a psychic enlightening force, spiritual in its nature. The Creative Force is always broader and deeper than our conception of it. It is repre- sented within us by our psyche or feeling self which is always ahead of our intellectual self, and in the measure as we increase the creativeness of our psyche do we increase our creativeness, as well as the conception and vision of the emancipating prin- ciple. The progress in humanity is always reciprocal. Vision, feeling, creativeness increase together automatically, one helps the other just as our hands and feet and our senses help us reciprocally to climb a ladder with more or less agility, or to climb it at all. Those that "fear" do not start to climb. Love of the light is a product of visionary power. Visionary power is the product of our Psyche or Feeling Self, which in turn means an increase of Aestheticism. Thus all progress is of aesthetical nature, fundamentally speaking, and to the extent that we increase aesthetically in that measure do we increase our conception of the Creative Force automatically. What I wish to express is that love is the most essential part of aestheticism and therefore of emancipation, but aestheticism must aspire to greater and more exalted heights and express it- self on higher and higher planes unceasingly. Every emancipa- ting principle has both a creative and an aesthetical aspect, and religion must become in time a cult of aestheticism and creative- ness. Religion that will not overcome anti-aesthetical tenden- cies incident to every cult of negation (or devil-cult) is futile. Devil-cult implies a cult of fear, and fear reduces creative power to a lower level. Fear saps the love out of creativeness, rendering it impotent to generate feeling or aestheticism. The problem of the religion of the future is therefore a religion of higher creativeness, or a cult with human creativeness. 46 CREATIVE PSYCHICS It was among slave-holding races that the emancipating principles of love was pronounced, and is beginning to find recognition. Amongst people unacquainted with slavery there developed other principles of emancipation because their orig- inal religious conception of the Creative Force and creative as well as procreative processes were different. We have to turn our attention to the East in order to find different emanci- pating principles. The East has never abused and degraded the creativeness of humanity to such a degree as the West, and has naturally not degraded the procreative faculty, woman- hood and childhood, so much but that a cult of love and an emancipation through love could be developed and proclaimed. The religion of the East has also developed a cult of Fear of the Creative Force, but it was Fear of Nature rather than Fear of Man. This fear of nature created subnormal vision of an impersonal aspect of the Creative Force, and a symbolism with nature. The emancipating principle of the East is therefore created out of reaction against fear of nature, whilst the emancipating principle of the West is created out of reaction against fear of man. The principle of emancipation of the East is therefore of impersonal aspect and grew out of reaction against an impersonal symbolical high art, whilst the West has still to react against a personal symbolical art. The West has not yet developed a high art with nature because it had never developed a symbolical or subnormal cult with nature, but had developed a subnormal cult with man and a subnormal or symbolical art with man. The difference of the emancipating principle of the East and the West must therefore become evident as we come to understand art. An understanding of religion demands knowl- edge of what constitutes art. All creation is art creation. The laws that govern creation govern true art. We cannot define earlier religions unless we transcend different religions and their high arts, and when we have accomplished this we know the laws that govern the religion and art of the future. Nor can we interpret art and religion without interpreting life and creation. The true knowledge and vision of the Creative Force itself is a natural consequence. Religion is the result of sub- normal vision caused through fear, with the result of project- THE PRINCIPLE OF EMANCIPATION 47 ing the vision of the Creative Force outside of oneself. The greater the reaction against fear the purer and higher the art, and love increases in the same degree. We have to abolish fear by abolishing a religion of fear and replacing it by a religion of love, and this latter will be an aesthetic cult which appeals to the psyche. The East has evolved its principle of emancipation along with the reaction against symbolism and symbolical high art with nature, which principle of emancipation is fundamentally an art principle. It is like our own principle of emancipa- tion of mystical aesthetical nature. It is represented as "Harmony, Unity 'and Balance": the fundamental principles governing high or mystical art. The evolution and discovery of this Eastern Principle must be discussed elsewhere. We are interested in the principle of Love which Christ proclaimed because we can more easily trace the powers which obstructed its evolution as well as those which advanced it. It is as strange to the East as the Eastern principle is to the West. It must seem quite natural that a principle of Love must broaden both ways in the course of evolution : intellectually and spiritually, and that it cannot remain a dead letter forever. Why have nearly two thousand years of so-called Christian religion engendered more prostitution of love than develops in paganism? And why has the great striving for love not yet been realized? Love cannot be developed by a religion which keeps an archaic principle of fear alive. It has been developed in circles which make for fearless research into creative pro- cesses. Positive science, art, invention, sex equality, eugenics, all work for greater socialization of humanity and thefore for a more progressive civilization and assthetization. The creative masses have advanced civilization in spite of our religion of fear, through enlightenment as to creative processes. There is a logical reason why religion which bears Christ's name has failed to respond to His principle of Creative Force. Religion still regards sexual things as unclean, the woman as still soul- less, the child born in sin. Relations of love are not cultivated by religion; on the contrary we are enjoined to fear the most vital exercise of love, which cannot but make for prostitution of Love. 48 CREATIVE PSYCHICS That fear decreases creativeness has been proved through the increase of our creativeness since the weakening authority of religion. Nations which remained orthodox have fallen far behind their more enlightened neighbors in industrial, intel- lectual and sesthetical development. Religion has expounded the imagined creativeness of an outside god as well as an im- agined love and has exalted love and creativeness as abstrac- tions above, beyond and foreign to human love and creativeness. The religion of the future expounds the creativeness of human- ity which is increased through love of humanity. The highest gospel will be the "love of creativeness." The riddle is there- fore: What has the manifestation of the Creative Force to do with the creativeness of humanity and what has the love of it to do with the love between humanity and its creativeness ? The religionist's conception of God's love and creativeness is the abstract concept of human love and creativeness as con- ceived by such as think lightly or condemningly of human love and procreative processes. The prostitution of human love and reproduction is the result of projecting the inborne creative power towards an extramundane symbol through a perversion of the conception of the procreative power of hu- manity. It created thus an abstract conception or a symbol of the Creative Force. A symbol is always an abstract desocial- ized value. As our symbol- worship has decreased our creative- ness has increased. The symbol has lost its value and the human personality and its own inborne creativeness took preference. The social impetus of the recent past has already found en- lightenment through collective experiences and has replaced a worship of an imagined god creativeness for a worship of human creativeness. The abolition of slavery and the respect for the creative part of humanity has increased a thousandfold with the waning conception of a personal god belief. The fu- ture still more will discard the symbol for the reality and will create a positive] science w T hich represents a consecration of soul or psyche to creative ends. It replaces a worship of a symbol through an increased vision of inborne occult powers. This implies that we must conceive the Creative Force in action as revealed to us through our own inner consciousness. The Creative Force reveals itself to us only through developing our THE PRINCIPLE OP EMANCIPATION 49 own creative powers to the fullest extent, and that implies that we develop both our intellect and psyche, and both in harmony. Such harmony means essentially love. It proves also that there can be nothing evil in the Creative Force, and that all concep- tions of evil or devil originate in minds too undeveloped to overcome inertia. In a very important sense "the idle mind is the devil's workshop." The type of mind that abstains from creativeness develops a sense of dependence and fear. Noth- ing of progressive value can emanate from such sources. Never- theless out of such subnormal perversion of psychic power comes an impetus of revolt that inspires the more dynamic in the direction of greater inventiveness and higher creativeness. On the other hand all creative work begets confidence in oneself and therefore in the Creative Force. Thus we can trace the sourcs of emancipating principles, and see why this heaven- earth is still a foolhouse instead of a paradise. Manifestly sym- bolism denotes an unsound conception of the Creative Force. Prostitution of love and of creativeness spring from the same root. Our entire knowledge and wisdom as well as our cultural products are so utterly confusing that it becomes evident that it takes the development of a much higher consciousness than our educators thus far have developed. The real meaning of life and creation escapes the psychically and physically inactive. Their inability to grasp the causes of evil equals their failure to understand the nature of evil, and as well as the nature of Good or God in action. Organized religion, aristocracy and militar- ism for aggression have everything in common and little to dis- tinguish them from each other. All three represent waste which manifests the aspect of evil. As this becomes clear waste will be avoided and the substance and effort employed toward ad- vancing in the direction of a really divine state. Our appraisal of the principle of emancipation must be en- larged and broadened in order to become increasingly valid. We must look into the nature of love as it reveals itself in all its) aspects. Love is of mystical creative nature, a mystical or occult process which neither symbolism nor intellectual sci- ence can lucidly understand and competently interpret. En- lightenment as to love comes like all occult mystical processes 50 CREATIVE PSYCHICS and products through development of feeling, that is, through psychic discernment. The more we develop the one the more we develop automatically the other. Love's sex-expression is the highest power with which humanity is endowed in order to promulge its feeling into life ; and feeling, being of highest importance it must follow that love is an sesthetical process which reveals the laws that govern all evolution of life and creation. Besides being the highest creative power with which humanity is endowed, love is also the highest illuminating force, enlightening feeling and developing soul. Whatever therefore makes for enlightenment must lodge in that great principle of the Creative Force that compels to the conviction that GOD is ENLIGHTENMENT itself. It is upon principles which make for Enlightenment on which the, religion of the future must find its base. Quite naturally all positive sciences contribute to it, and it is funda- mentally a positive science of religion which replaces the re- ligion of the past. We may thank the non-creative integers of humanity of the past that we have a religion, which, though evolved by the creative factors of humanity, has derived no lit- tle stimulus from the inactivity of the indolent. The religion now evolving is as different from the religion of the past as is mediaeval alchemy from modern chemistry. What religion was developed out of the past is upside down and inside out. The religion of the future develops the God Within. This posi- tive science of religion has as many aspects as its principle of emancipation. The social, civic and economic will be as vitally affected as the occult, aesthetic and artistic aspect. The evolution of the coming religion proceeds upon the very re- verse of the animating purpose of earlier religions : the restric- tion of enlightenment. As the Creative Force represents a working principle which expresses itself in the makeup of every created object and therefore in the most different expressions it must be evident that our highest acts and art expressions must in future express and reflect that principle. As it is expressed in all individual life so too is it destined to manifest in a collective universal understanding of that principle. In other words, all humanity must reach in time a certain mental homogeneity. The genetic THE PRINCIPLE OF EMANCIPATION 51 and specific homogeneity of humanity is proved by the fact that reproductive sexual coition is not only possible but highly beneficial. All the progress of humanity has manifested through intermingling of blood and thought alike. All real progress in culture and civilization, and thus all progress of humanity, has been increased through increased intercourse. Intellectual and epiritual homogeneity of humanity will come in spite of all those reactionary forces which in the past have hindered it. If it cannot come in peace it comes through war. This homo- geneity is obviously of dual nature because all our mentality is dual, that is : intellectual or scientific on the one hand, and spir- itual, that is psychic, occult or mystical, on the other. This mental duality becomes pronounced as both the counterparts become developed. The more universal our intellect becomes the more universal must become our understanding of the prin- ciple governing our psyche. All separation of humanity has led to heterogeneity, and their unification must lead to univer- ealization and a homogeneity of a higher order. All universalization of ideas and ideals leads to higher ideals and to a universal conception of the Creative Force. The pres- ent day's trend toward a universal religion through teaching the most beneficial ideas and ideals that all religions have pro- duced, is the best proof that humanity is not going to follow the religious dogmatist in the future. To become acquainted with other religious and other high art expressions is quite nat- urally a better means of enlightenment than to hear only one side of the feud which keeps humanity fighting each other on the so-called heavenly plane. We long for an Open Forum whereon to settle material differences, and a tribunal in which intellectual differences may be compared, and so, in perhaps some similar fashion shall we learn to dispose of spiritual dis- sension. The better wisdom will survive just as it survives in positive science. The separation of humanity into castes and creeds belonged to an era of fear and distrust. Unity and harmony and mutual confidence are the offsprings of love. Every incursion into the realms of the supernatural centers on ideas which blossom into ideals. They must necessarily be of experimental nature at first, and must stand the test of use and practice. Cumula- 52 CREATIVE PSYCHICS tive experience indicates that they are pathological first and destroy themselves in time, and out of reaction and re-creation rises the higher ideal, which is wholesome and can evolve. This evolutionary process with consecutive revolution and re- creation represents always a greater universalization. We live in an age wherein pathological products are being revo- lutionized; we not merely reform them, because all reforming in the past has only led to greater obscuring and confusing of the truth. All progress in culture and civilization has been caused through a stern revelation of pathological processes, and the recognition of wholesome principles. This progress has been won by the revolutionist, never by the reformer. We are all aware that on the development of positive science depends the unification ' of humanity, and positive science of psychology must replace the negative religion of the past. That this sci- ence, which is in the making, has shaken the foundation of our religion to the very depth is proof of its efficiency. All positive psychic development disintegrates psycho-pathological impresses automatically; all improvement of occult or sub- jective powers integrates, that is re-incarnates the spirit in the flesh. Religion and art cover only part of the wide range of spiritual or occult processes, but, at present, the most prom- inent part. The future will take even greater interest in the development of other spiritual, psychic or occult phenomena and processes. The understanding of the manifold occult phe- nomena and processes leads naturally to their development. A positive science of religion of the future includes their de- velopment, because they make for higher creativeness. Re- ligion is quite naturally the cause of much of their malforma- tion, but just as religion has increased our power of vision through creating fear so has it also evoked other psychic or occult powers through fear. However, such perversions help us to recognize their origin and purpose. Humanity has never cognized the truth until after disaster had resulted from its earlier rejection. It was re-cognized, as it were, after cogni- tion had been denied. That religion of the past separated itself from normal occult processes and their development is only natural, and a logical consequence of extramundane ex- THE PRINCIPLE OF EMANCIPATION 53 cursions into abstract realms, which led to disregard of the laws of nature. With the exhaustion of the abstract or super- stitious realm we arrive at a positive science which makes for a study of the laws of nature which must also be the laws of the Creative Force. Mystical or occult creativeness depends on the degree to which we transcend the principles which gov- ern the Creative Force. This transcending process develops us automatically as repeatedly stated. We cannot expand our own creative powers without expanding the Creative Force within us and our conception of it. We cannot develop a re- ligion cf the future without transcending what religion has generated through calling forth reaction. Thus we enter the realms of the religion of the future through better under- standing of the religion of the past, because we need some- thing pathological and spiritually bewildering in order to ex- ercise and increase our transcending occult powers. All effort exerted in transcending any psychic phenomena evokes and increases our own occult or mystical powers. All such tran- scending of phenomena which deal with creative processes serves to stimulate the psychic entity, thereby promoting aestheticism by advancing our feeling into life and nature. On the other hand all non-transcending dwelling on extramundane and symbolical imagination leads to the reverse, and has an anti-gesthetical effect. It is always with an increase of asstheti- cal powers with which we have to deal in order to increase various occult powers which vary in diverse individuals. All religion makes for destruction of inborn and original individu- ality and its higher or spiritual creativeness. The principle of the Creative Force is of aesthetical nature which leads in time to an sesthetical Weltanschauung, — an sesthetical appercep- tion of the universe. We see thus that our psychic entity is that part within us which makes for all spiritual and spirit expressions, and con- sequently for freedom of self expression through direct psychic appeal. Religion, as it will develop henceforth, must com- prise a science capable of interpretation by positive psychic laws, and will lead to an art which speaks directly and affirma- tively to the psyche. The negative intent of the religion! of the past resulted in a religion of negative concepts and must 54 CREATIVE PSYCHICS be replaced by a religion and an art with positive and affirma- tive purpose. It is therefore evident that the religion of the future recognizes only a positive Creative Force with positive principles, and strives to develop a Free and Positive as well as Universal Science, and its logical and suitable counterpart in Art. VI WHAT IS MYSTICISM, AND WHAT IS A MYSTIC? Mysticism is today a positive psychology and the mystic is a psychist, that is a person with Insight into higher creative processes. , The aim of all such positive, constructive or prac- tical psychology is dual: to interpret psychical, mystical or spiritual phenomena and to discover educational principles which lead to the development of such properties and qualities as have a reconciliatory recuperative and restoring or healing effect. Its aim is therefore to develop Insight — the result of well-developed power of Feeling into life and nature and into creative processes in general. The development of such Feel- ing has a positive generative and re-creative effect. Thus mys- ticism as a science deals with the development of various modes of creative and re-creative expressions and especially with mystical or psychic art expression, besides other expressions of soulful life. All these various terms such as psychic, spiritual, mystical, occult, magic and others have accumulated through interchange of language of different people, but all aim at the interpretation of manifestations of psychic origin. They all represent spiritual or spirit expressions, but as religion or spiritual language of any people has developed along with its art expression, and as mysticism and mystical art is developed out of Reaction against archaic religions and their art, we must apply to expressions of art the term mysticism proper. We have, however, come to perceive that all creation is funda- mentally of the same nature as true art creation, and that re- creative acts are truly religious acts, since we have developed practical mysticism. Creative psychics deals with practical WHAT IS A MYSTIC? 55 mysticism as exercised in all walks of life. We enter an age of practical mysticism. This practical mysticism has always existed, although not recognized; and credit has heretofore been given to the non-creative class while these have in reality drawn all their better inspiration from the creative class. Art expressions represent fundamentally speaking the spir- itual utterances of the people, just as every day language is the means of interchange of its workaday thinking. Every separate people and race has developed its own spiritual con- ception, mode of expression and view of life and creation, just as every climatic, geographical, geological and physiological condition has manifested in the formation of character inevi- table to it. With the interchange of the respective expressions, opinions, ideals and ideas the people of one country become bet- ter informed than any single nation or race can inform itself alone. Better facilities for travel and communication have enriched our means of expression. Intellectual Greece promulgated our intellectual scientific language, and we have actually accomplished a separation of intellectual from aesthet- ical concepts, which earlier peoples had but dimly sensed. We have become more dual individually as we have progressed beyond our extramundane religion. Never before have the lines between the life and the religion of any peoples been so distinctly drawn. Development of psyche requires specialized study, practice and experiment, quite apart from, however assisted by, the intellectual urge. Neither religion nor scholarship are equipped to form, guide or direct our psyche aright. It is not to reform our schools and religion but to revolutionize them, and whatever the outcome, the effort we exert in revolutioniz- ing our perverse teaching must result in a sprightlier Insight. The energy so devoted enhances our critical transcending pow- ers, enabling us to penetrate to the causes of our pagan civ- ilization which are rooted in abnormal psychic development. As the terminology of science allows us more candid dis- cussion of creative and procreative processes, which the con- ventional language and culture discountenances and would fain prohibit, it represents a universal language and universal means of exchange of opinions and ideas. It is more a free 56 crp:ative psychics thought language which the forces of reaction dare not boldly curb while they do not hesitate to abridge freedom of press and speech when couched in conventional language, in the expecta- tion that thought is to be denied freedom of expression by such abridgement. With the expanding universalization, or socialization, of a language of scientific expression, a more discriminating analysis and a higher criticism evolves. The "average man" takes less for granted and demands cogent support for every dogma. Clashes of opinion and conviction no longer center about personalities, nor erudite interpretations of ancient docu- ments, with their baseless hostilities; but partake of the spirit of friendly emulation, which, whatever else the outcome, arouses those engaged from lethargic indifference and conven- tional thinking, and contributes toward a subconscious, or psychic, development that opens the mind to the modern or emancipatory aspects of mysticism. A positive science of psychics gives to old and misused terms a new and a more cogent valuation. Such words as mystical, spiritual, occult, aesthetical and magical, formerly employed as signifying manifestations of an anti-natural char- acter, have been rescued from the captivity to which super- stition had subjected them, and have become useful as denot- ing phases of understanding in consonance with experience. Mysticism, as it is here termed, has its origin in ancient transcendentalism, and its connotations have followed the changes that religion has undergone. It represents a nult of God of Unity instead of a religious God which is opposed by a devil. It is essentially a cult of reconciliation of opposing concepts — a reconciliation that arrives at ''organic fusion and growth" of which we do not know the process, but cognize the principles which lead to its development. It is therefore mys- tical just as the electric current or gravity is mystical. Such mystical cult of reconciliation has been developed since ancient times by necessity because of the exaggeration of a religious devil cult and differences between and within diverse religions. Arising differences of opinion as regards creation and creator resulted in schisms in different religions. Every such schism represents the turning point of extra-mundane religion WHAT IS A MYSTIC? 57 to a positive religion, and a revulsion against extra-mundane reverence. This is a necessary revolution because every excur- sion into the extra-mundane fictitious causes greater com- plexity of opinion, and therefore a reaction and a return to cis- worldly affairs. Thus every cult of other-worldly powers leads in time back to a cult of human creativeness and divinity of humanity itself. The fact is that our attention is drawn away by sheer necessity from fictitious speculations into practical channels in order to reconcile what had led to hostility. We come therefore today back to a cult of reality of life and existence instead of a cult of speculations. An extra-mundane religious cult cannot solve, but serves rather to increase quar- rels, and we come back from a cult of "There and Then" to a cult of "Here and Now." Such mystical cult of reconcilia- tion is the result of Insight into creative processes, and is a cult of human creativeness, which is necessitated through the increase of caste and class distinctions and extends to every walk of life, and is caused through reaction against supersti- tion. It will in time take preference over extra-mundane fic- titious religion altogether. Mysticism is no longer religious mysticism as in the past, but we come upon the becoming mystic in every walk of life. The mystic of today is the artist with a positive philosophy of life engendered by a deep insight into life and nature, an insight of psychic nature, which by necessity demands a crit- ical enlightening of the intellect as well. Mysticism is an evolution of insight through revolution of one's personality, thinking and character, which represents broadening of vision and indicates radical changes in one's thinking. Our usual vision and thinking is by necessity conventional and habitual, and being largely influenced by symbolism, is imposed on us by hypnotism. The mystic, as conceived in the recent past, is both artist and philosopher, and the inborn personality and originality, and the path of his development determines whether he is a mystical artist or a philosophic mystic. Each has arrived at mysticism through a positive philosophy of life. It may be said of all of them that "their art expression is their religion," just as the practical mystic's creativeness is his highest reli- 58 CREATIVE PSYCHICS gious expression. All mystics have this in common : that they are " social universalists" as it were. They are revolutionists necessarily, being in a constant state of reaction against dogmatism, formalism and arbitrary abstractiveness. To com- pile a list of contemporary mystics is a sheer impossibility, for your practical mystic does not burst into prominence in an age where spiritual things are still regarded as other- worldly things, and are separated from life and human creativeness. In every age we find the mystic in the making — dominated more or less by vestiges of indoctrinated training, but aspir- ing always to surmount what limits the understanding to the palpable and tangible, and soaring into realms not subject to the limitations of a lower dimensional habit of investigation, bringing back rich booty for the intellect to play with, after its timidities had been allayed, and later — often very much later — to work with, to achieve with — and then, still later, to claim as all its own. The revolt against the incongruities imposed upon the human spirit by the dilapidated conventionalism of a discred- ited theology is not to be stayed. The decrepit survivals of fear-inspired theologies are everywhere giving way before the cheery and blithesome joyousness of humanity coming into its own; coming with a new appreciation of the boundlessness of its inheritance of possibilities; coming with song and love and play and laughter — with its capacity for discerning the whimsical, the sportive, the incongruous — with a sense of humor too long suppressed, as other clamors of the spirit have been suppressed. In every age, in every race, in every land there have been those sturdy pioneers of mysticism who dauntlessly rebelled against a rigid conformity to current ideals — or the lack of them. It is not to be denied that intellect has played an im- portant role in man's development. The mystic does not ab- jure those faculties that derive their exercise from dealing with what has already been accomplished, but he brings into operation a capacity for insight into what has not yet been achieved. He accepts the entire endowment of the intellect, but instead of stopping there, it is there he begins. From WHAT IS A MYSTIC ? 59 that base he projects the tentacles of psyche, giving free rein to an intrepid inquisitiveness. Awe in the presence of the mystical affects both the intellect and the feeling. The intel- lect, when unsupported by mysticism, is overawed by what it has not fathomed, and interprets his attitude in terms of fear. The mystic, on the other hand, while conscious of awe, recognizes in the awe-inspiring an invitation to explore, a call to comradeship with those higher forces that yield their secrets to the loving and the daring. The intellect makes a merit of excluding what is not yet known, tardily and grudg- ingly accepting what feeling has learnt to wrest from the whilom unknown, and meanwhile dismissing rather cavalierly and arrogantly as unknowable whatever itself has not yet been adventurous enough to penetrate. Mysticism, without disparaging the negative merit of intel- lectual dogmatism, recognizes the virtues of the intellectual processes, but observes that it is only in copartnership with, and under the guidance of psychic insight, that the intellect becomes efficient, Indeed, copartnership is scarcely the suit- able term to describe the conjunction, for, after all, it cannot escape the perception that it is the instinctive, the intuitional, the feeling faculty within us that dominates. It may rather be said that it is the feeling that seeks, that aspires, that per- forms, while the intellect is content to appraise. It is the scales on which the miner weighs his dust after the arduous labor of panning out the metal. Mysticism implies and necessitates ''freedom of self ex- pression." It is "feeling become articulate." As the age is eager to discover or discern a mystic it is fitting here that a few be named, without undertaking to compile a list, were that task possible. Ever since Rousseau. Europe has been in the throes of producing mystics, but such development is hin- dered and suppressed through extreme reactionary forces. Nevertheless the list of men who have developed deep insight is legion. Maurice Maeterlinck is an outstanding living ex- ample. The elder Tolstoy was a mystic in whom the mysticism indigenous to earlier religions was blended with that of the emancipation, and the tendency to symbolism so predominated in him as to curb his effectiveness, a condition quite logical in 60 CREATIVE PSYCHICS a period of transition; just as Oliver Lodge and some others permitted themselves to be swayed by an inclination to spiritism. What is the developing of a positive science of psychics other than the indices of an age of mysticism, when this science once becomes fully socialized and common property? It has remained for America to produce practical mysticism by af- fording the fecund environment for a luxuriant flowering of the dawning religion of the future and its concomitant asethet- icism — its new courage and its new faith, and its acceptance of the beckonings of the unseen forces as less a forbidding challenge than an alluring invitation. The outstanding determination of the resolute colonists who formed the republic was to tolerate no aristocracy, theocratic or political. There have been occasional veerings that bear the aspect of reaction, especially in the indifference to the presumptions of its land forestallers, but there has been no reversal and there will not be. Whatever the temporary hindrances, America is still the land of freest opportunity, and while obstructions to entire freedom are encountered, these are certain to be removed. A people that have once de- clared that they will not permit an invasion of life and liberty nor trammels on the pursuit of happiness may suffer some re- strictions for a while, but they have only to become aroused to awareness to defend themselves against encroachment. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman are conspicuous exponents of mystical insight. Thomas Edison is a practical exemplification of the creative principle of mysticism. Henry Ford is a most remarkable mystical mind manifesting in a practical adaptation of the compensatory principle by supply- ing the age with what it needs instead of abusing it. John Dewey, the pioneer preacher of the American move- ment towards civilization and education through play and creativeness, is one whose work will do much for the impend- ing emancipation. In ancient times such mystics were regarded by the masses as gods or demi-gods after they had been "discovered" by the cognoscenti. , The recognition of the practical mystic as the genius of the age has animated in America numerous indi- WHAT IS A MYSTIC? 61 vidual educationary endeavor in that direction. Such attempts are still hampered and obstructed by our self-satisfied arrogant educators. All effort towards abolishing unapplied teaching and against the hypnotizing influence of preaching increases automatically the psychic creative powers. The modern mys- tic is a practical man of affairs and altogether represents the creative genius of the age. Independent positive journalism is one of the greatest assets of our age which lessens the weight of the millstones which the past has fastened upon us. Our independent magazines, for which America is justly record-breaking, and which present all sides to the public which seeks in enlightenment its salvation, are of highest gen- eral value. There are others which are especially devoted to phychic insight while some are striving in their several ways to deal with various aspects of emancipation of humanity from the bondage of the past. We cannot get our insight from a few sources and not from old books, but alone from living thought produced by the most forward striving minds. Civic, economic, social and political matters must be given their share as well as what pertains to the life of the spirit and its expression in aesthetism and art. The evolution of mysticism has not escaped the invasion of the mountebank and the charlatan, but such impostors have, quite unwittingly, served to spur to genuine endeavor such as are capable of developing critical and transcending power instead of relying on a shallow belief in make-believe. There has been exerted along with religion a prodigious influence to arouse these powers through stimulating curiosity and inquis- itiveness. The adroit priest in ancient Egypt who veiled " Nothing " is as admirable as the Buddhist priest and Shinto guardian who places a mirror or a crystal to represent the Unknown, and leaves all to the imagination of those who really seek truth. Oracles, clair-voyance, clair-audience, clair- sentience, telepathy and the many other psychic phenomena all fall under the realms of mysticism, and the abuse and im- position which are practiced side by side with true develop- ment need deter none from developing his distinct psychic power which every individual possesses without exception. Neglect of the genuine, because of the presumptions of the 62 CREATIVE PSYCHICS spurious is the result of auti-social teachings which prevents "feeling to become articulate." Our spiritual or psychic senses are instinctive extensions of our objective senses, or, to state it in another way, all our objective senses are only further means created by our psyche to inform itself. We must therefore regard religions of the past as the ini- tial attempt to solve the riddle of life and creation by experi- ment and reflex but not as the final solution, because all such early effort must lead into the extra-mundane and to conven- tional habit of thought and custom, but not to exercise our own creativeness. The Creative Force is not a habit-forming force, but just the reverse, that it : a force which divides itself into dual contra-distinguished forces in order to ' ' create some- thing Higher out of the Lower." It is thus a Re-creative Force and an experimenting force. It divides itself in order to create,' and unites to re-create, and what cannot unite again must destroy itself. There must always arise mystical minds which through developing Insight into the true nature of Life and Creation produce that necessary Common Understanding which leads to constructive evolution instead of a destructive revolution. The examples of Sodom and Gommorrah, of Babylon and Rome teach us the lesson that life and nature exert a self-evolving experimenting power which tries to solve its problems in its own way, which we can "feel," and if it does not succeed we destroy ourselves in order that mankind can repeat the experiment again and again until we are taught the necessary lessons. Every effort towards greater separate- ness must be met by a greater striving after Unity, and the mystic tries to solve the problem the age demands for its emancipation. Emancipation means thus the pronouncing of a cult of what had been neglected or suppressed, which must follow as the necessary means of restoring the balance which had been lost. A cult of Cooperation must follow a cult of Separateness, a cult of Externalization must lead to a cult of Insight, which brings a higher conception and representation of the Infinite. The more we turn away from nature, the more must the suc- ceeding cult center on the simple and demonstrably relative. A cult of the male must be followed by a higher cult of the WHAT IS A MYSTIC? 63 feminine. A cult of sex suppression must be followed by a higher cult of sex-evolvement. The further we have gone into the negative, abstract and unapplied, the stronger must be the striving after the applied and synthetic. The return move- ment represents always a revolution and a reaching out to a higher plane of consciousness and expression. We can thus clearly recognize from collective experiences East and West, that the Creative Force itself is a Principle, and by its very nature must be Impersonal and Neutral, and is represented to our conception as the World-Soul, of which our individual soul is just a part which we have to increase. We evolve the Creative Force in the measure as we evolve our- selves. Our soul represents the God in Unity while our dual planes represent it in action. We must develop our dual planes in order to develop soul and thus increase our stabilizing soul as well as the world-soul. Soul represents the gyrator, so to say, which draws the divided dual effort together to united re-creative action again and again, and the result is "organic fusion and growth." True art, like all true creativeness, is the result of this uniting of the intellect and psyche to unite and re-create through reflex what the separate planes have prepared through experiment. We come thus back to regard all true creation as Art Creation, and have to interpret art in order to understand life and creation. True art is essentially the representation of the infinite Creative Force or God, and must represent it in all created objects in a manner which re- veals the workings of it. True art must have a recuperative or mystical power which has a restoring and re-creating effect on the mind of the beholder. Without going further into the nature of such art at present I quote Schelling's definition of Beauty from Tolstoy's "What Is Art?": "Beauty is the rep- resentation of the Infinite in the Finite. And the chief char- acter of a product of art is unconscious infinity. Art is the Union of the subjective and the objective of nature and reason, of the unconscious with the conscious. And therefore art is the highest means of knowledge." How this art creativeness and art consciousness may be de- veloped must be left to further publications. What I wish to point out before closing is to submit to the reader the follow- 64 CREATIVE PSYCHICS ing consideration. The Creative Force, which art has to rep- resent in all created objects, must bring to bear relationship of these objects to each other. The Creative Force in re- creative action, which we alone can represent, reveals itself to us always as contradistinguished duality and pairs of duality, as in male and female or animal and plant. The ancient transcendentalists teach us that "life is the result of a recon- ciliation of pairs of opposites." Plant nature is the psychical complement to animal life just as woman is the psychical complementary part to man. Our psyche represents the plant self within us, which is most favorably influenced by nature. Plant nature is next to love and sex expression the highest psychic enlightening power. The duty of both is "to form and inform our feeling self" and thus produce insight. The fact is that "truly relative art with nature" alone can lead to the fundamentals which underly all true art expressions and must form the Insight for all art development. We cannot produce true art without practicing an art "truly relative to nature," or what must be called "a high art of Landscape Gardening," because verdant and flowering nature and the fruitful hillsides, slopes and valleys alone provide us with such "living plastic material" on which we can form and inform our Psychic Insight. Only through such complementary prac- tice is the artist enabled to produce highest art creations. God, the Creative Force, the World-Soul, is Unity, Harmony, a divine Self-Unconscious equipoise. In action it is Sex Force, the two complementary parts composing the united Allness. The dual forces comprising the Whole, enter our understand- ing in different aspects — one, the Restricting, the other the Enlightening, force; or, as the Useful and the Beautiful re- spectively, the first in this duality being what religion has called the Positive or God, the other Bad, or Evil. In other parallel aspects the duality appears as masculine and feminine, or as animal and plant life, or as social and aesthetical respectively, the former embracing the civic and economic, the latter the spiritual or artistic. Thus the masculine, the animal, social, civic and economic aspect of the duality stands for the useful, restricting or re- sisting intellectual power, and the feminine, aesthetical, artistic WHAT IS A MYSTIC? 65 for the beautiful or enlightening phychic part of the duality. The latter being the inherent and inborne higher representa- tive of the ' ' Unity, ' ' the former the part separated to increase reciprocal experience and thus as necessary catalytic Irritant to regenerativeness and for further enlightenment for the fem- inine or psychic part within. All actual regeneration is per- formed by the feminine or psychic within us, which is not absent in the male but overdominated by the intellectual part. In the feminine sex the Psyche is predominant. It is by such symbolical or abstract conceptions as God and Devil that religions have distorted the meaning and thwarted an understanding of these counterparts of Unity. Theology exalted the Intellect as the Good and decried Psyche as Evil, thereby degrading the Feminine as sinful and the sex-impulse as vile. In mathematics, in chemistry, applied electricity and the like, the religious and algebraic symbols and signs, such as posi- tive and negative, plus and minus, have already found revalua- tion in a more valid interpretation, and the positive science of Psychics shares with all applied sciences the higher enlighten- ment due to this advance. Mysticism too, like theology, postu- lates dualism, but instead of seeking to suppress either aspect of the duality, gives equal and divine importance to each. The suppression of Instinct — as contradistinguished from Intellect — served really to emphasize that which was condemned, thus accentuating the very manifestations against which it most eloquently inveighed. Sex-precocity, for instance, psychic and especially infantile sexual trauma, polymorphous perverse and all such abnormal states which psychology comprises under the collective name of infantilism of sexuality, prevail only among peoples to whom the suppressive endeavors of an inverted mora- listic thology have been represented as the acme of virtue. The requisite balance can be restored only by such higher recogni- tion as increases consciousness, for it springs from a restoration of consciousness which had been lost. The Intellect, being the restricting power (owing to the fallibility and limitation of our objective senses) must recede from its predominance in our culture and social life, and accede to Psyche its proper status as the higher Enlightening power. Primeval mystical ages were not contaminated with subse- 66 CREATIVE PSYCHICS quently-developed condemnation of sex-instinct. Among the ancient Japanese and the earlier Scandian races, and others, the equality of the feminine was never denied; and we, in the modern revolution against medieval monastic asceticism, are only returning to a higher consciousness of a fundamental truth, after having developed the Intellect far above the stages at- tained by the ancients. But we have reached the line of demarcation where the power of the intellect ends. Many of our most advanced phi- losophers and scientists have clearly recognized the presence of such a limitation, but few of them have as yet developed sufficient Insight into creative processes as to be able to cross the Divide into the realms of the mystical. It is for them to develop mysticism in order to clarify their understanding, just as the artist must do who aspires to produce higher art. The power of expression evolves quite spontaneously through the emancipation of the psychic nature from the bondage of the in- tellect. In the human species the Female is the higher representa- tive of the Creative Force, as plant life is relatively more highly important than animal life. Primordial life was bi-sexual. There was first plant-animal before animal life was segregated from the duality, just as the male is a segregation from a unified sex duality. Animal life cannot exist without the needful Vitamines or primeval love-food which the animal cannot pro- duce unaided. This higher creativeness incident to the feminine principle enters our consciousness as "psychic enlightenment." Nature- cult and sex-cult are expressions the development of which is of highest importance to our own creativeness. They are of psychic importance first of all, and the cult of the male is of intellectual importance. Cognizance of these relative "importances" and the constant tendency toward equipoise between them, which is "in the nature of things" and will maintain itself if not subjected to illogical hindrance and suppression, leads to the understanding that there is nothing really evil in nature or in any phase of the creative process. When we relegate to the category of Evil any aspect of the relation we deny ourselves the benfits that HOW TO PRODUCE A MYSTIC 67 a clearer understanding would confer. We get unsatisfactory results from suppression and then seek a remedy in further sup- pression. Starting with a cult of "evil" we proceed to a cult of Suppression, and the latter instead of discouraging the former only serves to drive it into subnormal perversion. Necessarily this silly canceling contest becomes useful by its inefficacy and futility. It compels an inevitable transvaluation that applies the lever to a higher normal state in which Feeling, or Psyche, becomes more affirmatively articulate. VII HOW TO PRODUCE THE MYSTIC It is only in recent years that any purposeful effort has been made to teach practical mysticism and psychic develop- ment. To this task no insignificant number of profound analysts have earnestly devoted themselves; and a growing number of publications is enlisted in the work. Their aim is to arouse psychic power and use it as the lever which increases human creativeness in manifold directions, quantitatively and qualitatively, in opposition to suppression by brute force. The effort was not the outcome of organized educational endeavor of long privileged standing, but has come in opposition to it and out of individual effort against the abuses of privileged and governmentally subsidized schools maintained to uphold privileges which are anti-social, anti-natural and " anti-Christ- like. " Creative psychics comes as a reaction against the prac- tice of branding human flocks like cattle in early youth, as fixed irrevocably to certain castes, creeds and orders; and against the discarding of the best and spiritually richest into the waste heap. It has come from those "people of affairs" "who en- deavor to make an art out of their life's work." It has come through sympathetic understanding and conceptual inspira- tional individualized insight. It has come through aroused "cathartic subjective" power and out of reaction against the hypnotization of humanity and suppression of subjective power. 68 CREATIVE PSYCHICS It has come through the instinctive emotional desire to express the deepest unconscious instincts through transcending to the "gist of things," and to the mystical occult significance of seemingly insignificant intuitive discernment. It has come through the active manipulation of human matter. It has come through the inborne desire in humanity to come into "sub- jective telepathic contact and intercourse" with other lives, with all nature and the cosmos. Mysticism in the past was caused through interplay of op- posing concepts, ideals and opinions that seemed irreconcilable, and the same still holds true today. Never was the mystic wel- come by the ruling class because feeling and its expression was feared by those who had been acclaiming the intellect as the god, stigmatizing psyche or feeling as evil and of the devil. Until very recent times the career of the mystic was shad- owed by the tragedies of the pyre, the cross and the gibbet. This was to be expected, for nothing is so calculated to arouse resentment as the employment of power that transcends the understanding of those who have become enfeebled by the over- cultivation of the weakest side of humanity and all life. The plant does not develop it at all, because its subjective or psychic entity is wholly predominant. The plant is the unconscious servant of animal and human life. Even the animal has little use for intellect. Humanity alone has developed intellect in a remarkable degree, and it had to sacrifice the psyche to bring intellect to its over-exalted station. Quite naturally this one- sided development reaches a limit, and the restriction imposed upon human progress through the intellect leads to an awaken- ing of the powers of the psyche. The child is not born with a developed intellect but with a strongly pronounced psyche or feeling self which however cannot express itself except in im- agination and pretense. It is this psychic power of imagination and make belief which is responsible for all our religions and arts and advance in creativeness in the past, nor may we expect that this psychic power (and its products) can be normal from its inception. The normal can only come from reaction against the abnormal and it is always a higher normal which must supplant the abnormal. The new-born child represents the un- conscious healing and regenerating power of the creative force HOW TO PRODUCE A MYSTIC 69 or God most fully, but the child has to go through a process of transformation aided through experiment, practice and reflex, in order to develop its divine healing and regenerative power to such an extent that it can, when developed, emancipate hu- manity from its errors and doubts, and reconcile what divides humanity. Just as the child has a message of reconciliation so has the mystic the same message only in different degree and mode of expression. The power of both the child and the mystic rests on " direct appeal to feeling and the direct or psychic apperception of truth." The mystic is a child at heart with the simple and elemental power of direct apperception of truth as it is exercised by the feminine nature instead of the detached principles or abstract propositions of the masculine intellectual mind. It is the opposition which distinguishes the "man of action" from the "man of thought." "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage" for the psychic. He learns to transcend such limitations. It is less important that we get man out of prison than the prison out of man. Formerly every estate was protected by stout walls. Later less formidable fences surrounded the homes of the people. Gradually the height of these barriers was reduced, and of late a parapet of any kind is a rare sight in our cities. We had learned to transcend fences long before we ceased building them. And so, too, we are encompassing the mind of childhood afid of youth with fewer and less sturdy restrictions, as we are becoming emancipated from the old theologic dogma that "all that pleases must be vile." Nevertheless the tyranny of habit will continue building intellectual fences, and each succeeding generation will learn to apply the emancipatory principles that mysticism promulgates, and will transcend all that limits humanity. We may imagine with what zeal the Chinese built their massive wall, but the imagination balks at the possibility of a like undertaking of the west to build an intellectual Chinese wall. We have been taught to regard the Far Eastern races as "inferior peoples," yet it cannot be denied that the Japanese in particular have developed a remarkable power of transcending and reconciling the antinomies of the philosophies, religions and the religious arts of China and India with their own. To transcend such antipodal tendencies is the 70 CREATIVE PSYCHICS task and function of the mystic. Because of their quaintness and unique peculiarity of charm alone the Chinese and Japa- nese arts are an indispensable means to exercise transcendental powers, insight and vision, but their extrinsic value lies in the fact that they are the only real antipodal spiritual products which humanity has produced in opposition to western spirit- uality. There is also much of antipodal quality in East Indian religion and philosophy, but not in high art. All exercise of transcending powers must include Japanese Shinto belief and its high art of landscape painting and landscape gardening. Shinto represents a religion and a religious art with nature just as India and the West has a religious art with man. The transcending of the high arts of both the personal western and the impersonal eastern conception alone can create that necessary complete vision of the whole of divinity. We stand in this age at the threshold of "that far-off divine event" when at length "the East and West shall meet" — and the common point of contact is destined to be the conjunction, without obliteration of either, of art ideals that, however far at any time apart have been constantly converging. Mysticism, like life and creation, is a reconciliation of con- gruous opposites — the reassembling of counterparts — the meta- psychic mating of the achievements of the intellectual facul- ties with their transcendental relativities on the psychic plane. Among the essential factors in the cultivation of a mystic are : Prenatal predisposition — not alone of the immediate parents — (the maternal factor predominating) but of an ancestry in which the emancipatory tendency has been progressive, largely through transfusion of blood and interchange of thought. Stimulation of the critical and self-analytic processes in early life, not necessarily by cultivation, for these processes are spontaneous in all sentient beings, but rather by refraining from suppressing or discouraging them when they manifest in the growing child. To answer frankly the naive question of the aspiring mind of childhood as it comes into perplexing con- tact with what to outward appearances are antipodal tenden- cies helps the child to find reconciliations of divergent opinions, ideals, and convictions, whereby it develops nature's finer forces as these strive to come to growth in his consciousness. HOW TO PRODUCE A MYSTIC 71 With such a foundation the child-mind develops so that later in life it becomes constantly less difficult to transcend the fundamental principles of antipodal religions and philosophies as well as their respective art expression; and to develop its own philosophy and at the same time its own inborne expres- sion in conduct and art — that is its "religious expressions in actions. ' ' The mystic or psychic nature in man is aroused through an awakening of enlightening critical aptitudes which set the psychic motor into action to draw from invisible channels that increased energy which makes him produce higher quality with greater facility. A critical enlightening fact at the right time and opportunity, the nature of which has been obscured to him or suppressed, may be all that is necessary to connect the switch with the unseen forces latent in the individual, which, when aroused, are self-healing and self-regenerative. The in- terchange of children of all ages, and of teachers between dif- ferent nations, races and classes, the interchange of children between town-living and country-dwelling people contribute to educational development. Educational progress does not come from the study of reverence and textbooks but through an awakening out of the illusion of desocialized and denatured value, just as it comes with the release from the fictitious and the acquiring of insight into the "truly relative to life and nature." Work with nature, gardening and flowers — a cult of scen- eries, trees and plants, leads to mysticism. Mysticism is cre- ated by the poet and the singer. Religion is a worship of the intellect of man, and is created by the architect or the "builders mind." Both minds developed together and in har- mony lead to mystical insight and growth. The student's psychic development will be arrested unless he learns to prac- tice his critical transcending powers on all kinds of problems and conflicts : civic, social, economical as well as aesthetical and artistic. He must learn to react unconsciously against the abnormal and unnatural, and to draw lessons of a positive philosophy of life from his own life experiences and to draw them from little things and little happenings in order to be able to draw them also from big events. The arousing of the 72 CREATIVE PSYCHICS critical detective, inquisitive and experimental spirit assures self-reliance and self-development. Occasional radical changes in environments, surroundings and food helps to bring finer forces into action, which tend to further growth. The mystic gives to the intellectual faculty and its achieve- ments its proper valuation, but while never disparaging these he does not make the mistake of extravagant ascriptions to it. He makes the best use of the intellect, because he knows how to employ it in higher dimensional accord with insight, and in harmonious balance with love. He conceives and interprets the past in the light of the present, thus obtaining glimpses and visions of the future, which faculty the sophisticated habitual thinker lacks. He indulges his quickened critical powers of transcendental- ization discarding the outworn through transcending it. He does not hesitate to cast aside what had been useful but is no longer so. His feeling is not tinctured with the sentimentalism that treasures the tool that has served its purpose and can serve no longer; any more than nature preserves the shell in which the chick was housed when that shelter has been outlived; no more than the builder permits the scaffolding to stand when the edifice is completed. The development of the mystic has been suppressed in the past just as the child's mind has been fallaciously appraised and as has been the office and influence of the feminine nature. All this suppression calls for a higher valuation of things sup- pressed and an increased application of inherent human powers and forces. There is no difference between human love, sex love and love of the creative force or god, and between god creativeness, sexual creativeness and human creativeness. A cult with the human body and its physics must follow a hide- bound mistreatment and obstruction of physical growth just as a cult of athletics and team play must follow a cult of war and destruction, and a cult of creativeness a cult of abstinence of it. The new cult is always created unconsciously through birth of a new generation which, under the predestining influ- ence of the mother reacts unconsciously against the abnormal outworn cult and lays the foundation of a new one. The prob- lem is very clear when we consider cause and effect. The result HOW TO PRODUCE A MYSTIC 73 of monastic and convent life finds its equivalent in bachelordom and prostitution, and a new cult of womanhood and childhood must lead the world out of anti-natural development, just as teamplay, rhythm and folk dancing, physical culture and dramatic social play must be unfolded in order to reconcile the deep distinctions which intercommunal, national and interna- tional materialistic brute strife has engendered. It is always the mystical spirit of an age which produces and enlarges such healing cults and exercises as lead to increased soulful life. To make the soul alive and active we must overcome fear and distrust, and thus create within ourselves a self-conscious- ness and self-will of psychic or "subjective" nature. A buoy- ant daring is indispensable to develop insight and vision which alone can form positive concepts and forthright expression of them. Who is to blame for the "hypnotizable and alcoholizable mob-spirit" that has long been manifest in society? Why blame anyone ? Why seek some convenient scapegoat that shall carry into the wilderness the burden of those silly antics we have learned to regard as our sins? Why brood in retrospect over the rugged steeps behind? Always loom higher peaks beyond, more torrential streams to cross — but by very reason of the pains of the pioneering we become hardier and more resolute to front what lies ahead. Undaunted and undismayed the mystic of our day draws new inspiration from what his precursors experienced, and what he has learned from their labors. And this the neophyte in mysticism must learn, not alone from what has gone before, but from the lessons of his daily observation, and what becomes to him increasingly clear as his insight develops, that the test of truth is liberty — that the say- ing "the truth shall make you free" connotes that what sup- presses and restricts the creative urge cannot be truth. As the creative force manifests in sex force, in love force and in art force it is for the mystic-in-the-making to practice these forces in their several aspects, without fear that the exercise of life- impressed creativeness on any plane, can be carried to a harmful excess. Mysticism, as the term is herein used, is applied psychics. 74 CREATIVE PSYCHICS That the designation formerly attached to the inception of a primitive percept of psychic power need not move us to forego and discard a useful appellation. Mysticism, even in its earliest aspects, and despite its crudities and its "entangling alliances" with that body of primitive guesses that comprise ancient the- ologies, laid nevertheless quite a secure foundation for the science it has become. Indeed those alliances were at no time co-operative. In their closest relationships they never clotured the revolt of aestheticism against the subnormal and fear- begotten moralism of archaic religions. The early mystic, in common with the priest of his time, derived what influence he exercised from the proneness of the people to yield to the claims of awe. With this important difference, which is today more pronounced than ever, that while the awe inspired by the priest was instilled by fear, the awe to which the mystic surrendered was the awe of admiration. One saw in the environing phe- nomena only the evidences of angry and vengeful gods, to be appeased — the other the benign operation of a harmonious system to be comprehended. One a destructive power to be propitiated, the other a creative force to be understood. The respective influences of symbolism and aestheticism, of the clashing tendencies of a lop-sided intellectualism against the dualism in which the psychic and intellectual faculties were each assigned its appropriate station, have been treated in fore- going chapters, and are referred to here for the purpose of insisting that even from its groping origin mysticism has not veered from its emancipatory principles. Mysticism, or applied psychics, instead of adding to the realm of the mysterious, as the careless might infer, has quite the opposite office — that of revealing what had been hidden, of liberating Avhat had been shackled, of enlightening what had been obscured. It is the result of "satisfied curiosity." It takes the mystifying and bewildering out of the realms of the unknown and unseen and makes it positive, creative, regenera- tive and healing. Its mission is therefore the opposite of sym- bolism, which is caused through "unsatisfied curiosity." Mysticism manifests in "feeling become more highly articu- late." The mystic does not appeal to the crowd. It is not his concern whether those of his own generation understand him HOW TO PRODUCE A MYSTIC 75 or not. His is a universal interpretation, a cosmic apperception, an aesthetical "Weltanschauung" entirely impersonal, individ- ually content with what advance humanity has achieved. Whether as an inventor, a constructor or an artist he is a' man of action inspired by a vision of what is to be ; wherein he dif- fers from those who, deriving their impetus from the past are content with the ephemeral applause of the present. Mysticism is the bringing of forces and energies into true creative relationship and represents an incarnating of spirits which had become dissociate and discarnate. Thus incarna- tion is application and mysticism is applied religion. The mystic artist like the inventor integrates and thus incarnates spirits, disintegrating at the same time automatically disso- ciated spirits which in their state of dissociation are harmful and are called evil spirits. There is no fundamental differ- ence between forces in life and in matter. In life these forces are more highly individualized, spiritualized and aesthetized for cooperation of bio-dynamic and bio-economic nature, that is for "symbiotic labor." The inventor harnesses the very same forces on the material plane, and brings them thus to application, which the mystic incarnates and thus applies. Applied forces are emancipated forces; nothing can be ef- ficient when wholly unapplied. The process of emancipation is a process of reincarnation, and represents an emancipation of finer forces from the restrictions which keep them from application. Mysticism represents thus an emancipation of humanity from education which keeps it indolent and ignorant of finer forces through unapplied and abstract teaching. It is applied God creativeness, the conscious development of the God within, and is in opposition to religious precepts which teaches abstinence from such divine creative power, substi- tuting praying for "doing," leaving to a fictitious God what one ought to do oneself with the help of God within, causing dependence through preaching fear and causing worship of dissociated spirits instead of integrating and applying them. Meditations and Reflections True religion is "healing of the spiritual mind, or the psyche" just as true philosophy is "healing of the objective mind or the intel- lect." True art is the product of organic fusion of a cleared intellect and a well-formed and informed psyche, and possesses highest heal- ing powers. The mother is the highest source and power for predestination and all that is wrong with our destiny and fate is caused by the masculine preoccupied and drifting bewildered mind. The whole uni- verse and all stellar constellation we have within us. There is nothing outside of Us which is not also within us, and our stellar constellation which destines our happiness and usefulness is always set right if our parents trust and believe in themselves. Every grave doubt in the minds of the parents must bring with it by necessity a wrong con- stellation which must be set right by the increased effort of the indi- vidual through acquiring higher wisdom and feeling: the law of com- pensation through reconciliation. All demand for stimulants and intoxicants originates in the sup- pression of psychic power and as means to open the threshold of the unconscious self. The excesses in the use of stimulants and intoxicants and their ill effects, the hypnotizable and alcoholizable mob spirit, will disappear with the depreciation of a cult of fear and dependence and of all those forces like militarism which make for fear, just as prostitution will disappear in the same degree. All our religious and philosophical dogmas, like all our laws, are made under the influence of alcohol, fear and dependence. On the coming into contact with and transcending the Feelings and Ideas of strangers and foreigners depends the arousing of our own critical powers and creative psychic development, because otherwise we do not even understand our own Feelings and Ideas, nor do we know ourselves. Creative Psychics is the art of divine or superhuman efficiency and the science of dynamic relationship. MEDITATIONS AND REFLECTIONS 77 Intuition and Revelations are the result of "aesthetically trained instinct." Psychic creativeness is unself-conscious creativeness or God creativeness and is the result of equipoise — an automatic harmonic poise — an effortless quiescence representing the reconciliation between Being and Becoming. True art production, like true religion ,and like true philosophy is the result of personal mental revolution, and like the latter pos- sesses healing powers. Symbolical and realistic art are the results of "inquisitiveness and curiosity unsatisfied and suppressed." There is no higher art than a truly relative art with flowering gardens and verdant landscapes, because it is susceptible of transcend- ing the limitations that are placed on all other arts and art expressions. What distinguishes a mystical, that is a re-creative art, from others, is that the Infinite is represented in re-generative action as: Force and Energy represented by Character; and Space and Time, symbolized in harmonizing Rhythm of Motion; subjective reality, rep- resented in a higher dimensional impersonal representation of objective reality; the Maker represented as a regenerative force, calling the spirit of Harmony and Common Understanding out of discord and intolerance. Religion of the future is developing through the orientation of the arts and the sciences by the principles of emancipation. Healing power, mental and psychic, is a manifestation of Feeling become active and articulate. Pathological psychic development is the result of obstructions to "Feeling seeking expression." Unless we develop the psychic exten- sion of the senses we invite disease, disorder, derangement, and from these arise Hate, terminating in destruction and self-destruction. 78 MEDITATIONS AND REFLECTIONS Japan and America are the only countries which during the last fifteen hundred years have produced an advance in religion through developing mental healing arts and sciences respectively. To become really religious one has to enjoy what beautiful has come out of all religions and must not adhere to a single creed. We cannot separate our conceptions of religion from our con- ceptions of life and nature, nor from our acts and art expressions and from our philosophy without necessitating a complete inner revo- lution and rebirth, and acquire through this a positive and affirmative religion and direct expression of truth in our actions, philosophy and art. Religion says: civic, social and economical affairs have nothing at all to do with spiritual things which are supposed to be extra mundane and other-worldly things. Creative, practical mysticism says: they have to do with it "all there is." Truth must be born anew every day. It can only come from reconciliation and organic fusion of opposing opinions, ideals and ideas, and thus represents a solution of seemingly unsolvable and unrecon- cilable differences, and an emancipation. There must always be minds willing to supply humanity with the "lever" which increases its power of creativeness manifold. This lever is "Enlightenment," which is also the Master Idea" of the Creative Force or God. There are two kinds of enlightenment: intellectual and psychic. The latter is Divine enlightenment. Sex enlightenment, sex expression are together with the intercourse with verdant flowering nature and landscape of the highest Divine enlightening importance. Humanity has created itself and has to raise itself higher through increasing its psychic power. The science of Emancipation connotes a process of discarding the chimerical, "unlearning" the maxims taught by intellectual fearsome- ness, and relying on the Regenerative principle; just as the art of Emancipation is the art of Regeneration. MEDITATIONS AND REFLECTIONS 79 The universe is governed by psychic laws, and the laws that govern our psychic plane and psychic phenomena in general govern also the Creative Force or God. The laws of psychic phenomena decree that all cults, culture and civilization which are based on exploitation and abuse must destroy themselves and give way to higher planes of cooperation. No creed can keep part of humanity in dependence and therefore in the gutter "without staying there itself." The law of reciprocation and retribution: All evolution of life and creation is reciprocal, that is symbio-genetic and psycho-genetic. It is reciprocal progressive differentiation and specialization for "evolu- tion through cooperation," the material law of gravity superseded by the spiritual law of reciprocity. Mysticism, like truth, implies and necessitates full freedom of self- expression, free speech and free press and as result free thought. All tragedies of nations, races and individuals are caused through sup- pression of mystical or psychic development — from ancient Egypt, Babylon and Greece down to our own great tragedy of a world war. All are caused essentially through suppression of Truth, which can only be revealed where press and speech are as free as the air and the sunlight. The principles of organic fusion and spontaneous creative action are the principles of self-creative evolution of life — of creation itself. They represent a reconciliation of opposites and therefore a revolution and a regeneration. They are at the root of all production of life true art and inventions alike which are the product of fecundation, gemma- tion and nourishment through unselfish love, with ultimate birth. Religion and high arts are by necessity originally products of the human male, but are ultimately destined to form parallels to the higher sex creativeness of the woman. But women will, when no longer denied Freedom and Equality, bring all these products to a much higher status than man can ever hope to bring them alone. No longer does an en- lightened woman believe in man's word "that she cannot understand his thoughts and actions." The fact is that she has been convinced "man himself did not know what he was talking about." True education means re-education just as true recreation means re-creation. MEDITATIONS AND REFLECTIONS Evolvement means regeneration through involution, evolution and revolution. Mysticism is forward vision and implies involution and evolution in order to revolutionize backward, subnormal and intellectual vision. The national and the universal mind must develop together har- moniously. The national mind cannot evolve alone as it always reaches a climax beyond which it cannot evolve without complete revolution towards greater universalization. Mysticism represents an emancipation from a moral view of life and creation to an aesthetical one. Genius is the faculty of self -developed subjective — that is psychic — power to recognize through feeling into life and nature the intimate relationship of a series of facts and appearances which are closely re- lated to each other, which power the purely one-sided intellectually educated and the dogmatist lacks. The development of such spiritual or psychic power serves to bring into cognition principles that hereto- fore were hidden from us. Mysticism therefore begins where material laws and intellectual powers of understanding ends and aestheticism becomes expressed. Then is it that we recognize that life after death is a higher aesthetical state of life on earth just as life is a higher aesthetical state than matter, and just as true art is a higher aesthetical expression of reality where the supersensual organic laws are trans- gressed "aesthetically." In realistic and symbolical art on the other hand, just as in every living creature, tree, animal, man, the lines and forms are subject to geometrical laws which are only "organically" transgressed. The end of occidental fallacy that nature geometrizes is therefore at hand. It has dawned on the modern mind that only the. one-sided intellect geometrizes, just as we have come to see that his- tory only repeats itself when we teach the same archaic utterances as truth which our ancestors believed in. The West instituted baptism because bathing was considered a disgrace; the East never lost the feeling that water not only cleansed the body but also the soul. The East never produced a wholly ab- stract and unapplied religion. Free thought is impossible without free press and free speech. MEDITATIONS AND REFLECTIONS 81 The Duality of the Creative Force in action implies determinative relationship of contra-distinguished planes, with auto -catalytic re- action as the result, which latter is at the root of all organic fusion and growth. Catalysis is caused through production of love food which is produced by the creative processes of the contra- distinguished planes. This respective love food which appears to us partly as irritants and waste causes action and reaction. The laws of catalyse become more obvious in higher states of matter such as colloidal matter which produce sufficient irritants to prevent crystallization which crystals do not produce. All evolution of life is the result of such reaction against excess products, just as all human evolution is the result of reaction against what we call irritants and waste. Such reaction is of unconscious, that is psychic nature, and is at the root of all Self Suggestion towards Self Regeneration and self healing power. Such unconscious reaction is promoted through development of Aestheticism or Feeling and represents a reaction against the abnormal which is: the immoral, with the recognition of the Normal as result. Such unconscious reaction is the first step towards the disintegration of pathological impresses which otherwise do not be- come regenerated in our subjective plane but cause psyche-pathological growth. Unconscious reaction is therefore the necessary means for unconscious cerebration, organic fusion and mysticism in general, and promote highest self-healing power and the power to heal others. The plant is wholly subject to unconscious or psychic law and uncon- scious self-suggestion. Humanity has evolved voluntary and con- scious suggestion and impress of the intellect on the psyche either for promoting growth and healing, or for hypnotizing and perverting. Self Suggestion takes the place of praying in mysticism, restoring Self Reliance in place of fear and dependence. Cooperation is the greatest emancipating and healing power. The future will regard all so-called evil and sin as the inevitable result of a strong and wholesome inborne desire to exert oneself to- wards experience, reflex and reaction against our abnormal culture and civilization, and will lead all such effort to higher wholesome exer- tion and expression, as all so-called evil is destined by the Creative Force to be the "lever" with which to raise oneself to a higher state of consciousness. Religion believes: that right is right and wrong is wrong, and that the non-creative part of humanity is right; Mysticism regards the wrong only as a step to a higher conception of right if we transcend to its causes and recognize its true nature. Mysticism rec- ognizes thus that all what the non-creative part of humanity pro- duces is abnormal and immoral, furnishing the stimulus only, and arousing the sense of reaction in the creative part to create the higher normal out of thp abnormal. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS .0 022 190 170 8 MEDITATIONS AND REFL, „„ te religious instinct in humanity is an inherent and inborne instinct for generative and regenerative balance and power, and pre- sents itself to us in "states of mind." Every change in religion is brought forth by a change of one state of mind into another. A mys- tical state of mind applies the help of inherent psychic power, and produces different expressions in acts and art, as symbolism which represents the product of an abstract state of mind. Every higher state of mind is created by transgression or tres- passing of the restrictions of the past, just as it is created through transgressions of man-made laws and even through transgressions of what we regard as laws of nature. Metaphysics is fundamentally the result of transgression of the intellect; metapsychics is caused through transgression of feeling. (All progress is caused through transgression into excess, bringing higher experiment, experience and expression.) All that is not physics in metaphysics is psychics, and metapsychics represents a truly rela- tive higher dimensional plane of consciousness. We must regard the fourth dimension and even further dimensional planes as higher dimensional states of mind, and not as expressions to be found in the material or physical world. But all effort spent in transgressing material and geometrical laws helps in the development of higher dimensional states of mind and planes of consciousness. All original and advanced thought is emancipating and healing. To come into contact with antipodal doctrines of different religions, arts, and antipodal opinions in daily life was the same effect on the child's mind and psyche as the switching on of the electric current has on the light or the motor. All that is needed besides is to direct the child's inventiveness, energy and courage towards optimism, good humor and kindliness, that is: in the right channels of self-knowledge and therefore knowledge of human nature, the sanctity of the flesh and the divinity of the mind and of nature. As imagining power, vision and phantasy making are of highest importance in the develop- ment of the individuals, nations and races alike for the casting of Destiny and Fate it must be evident that true education must pay highest attention to the transformation of the youth through child- hood to manhood, and must recognize that evolution of art conscious- ness and evolution of life's consciousness are wholly inseparable. The religion of the past centered on Healing through blind belief and which necessitated restriction of enlightenment; the religion of the future through complete enlightenment and a higher belief that there is nothing in the whole universe that is not God. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 022 190 170 8