SOUL FLIGHTS

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 101, 28 April 1917, Page 11

SOUL FLIGHTS

"For me I touched a thought I know Ha 3 tantalised me many, times. Just when I seemed about to learn Where is the thread now 1 Off again, The old trick' Only I discern Infinite passion and the pain Of finits hearts that yearn."

—Browning.

Did you ever lie on the grass at night and .look up at. the staraT (writes M. Forrest in the Australasian). At the close of a hot day the 'crackling turf seems to smell of hidden sunshine. Here and there a cricket chirps, busy about its own love affairs, and twig and leaf are black against the heavens. There may be a young, slim 1 moon somewhere; but it is on the- stars you concentrate, and, after a little while —I don't know if it is self-mesmerism or how it comes about—you almost seem to feel your soul tugging at your body, longing to take unfettered flight amongst those far, unexplored worlds.. Are they really so unexplored? Has not your soul a,t some time .or another escaped and _ soared there? Finding something it has remembered yearningly ever since, it returned to earth, and prisoned itself again in your present body—something which has estranged you for all time from poor earthly substitutes^ There are so many wonderful tilings in nature that this would not seem altogether improbable. Every day science adds to its store of knowledge, proving that which the world hitherto deemed the impossible to be the very simple. I am always more inclined to accept scientific explanations for the things one does not quite grasp than the occult. But who can say that on certain planes', the scientific and occult do not meet? Many great discoveries h-vve come as inspirations, and then been proved step by step by mathematical brain. Recently, in the newspaper, I saw a line, "Do the Dead Smoke?" and a resume of a late work of Sir Oliver Ledge's. To anyone who has lost from his circle a young and radiant life in the great war this kind of commonplace spiritualism must strike- painfully. Surely our glorious dead are inheriting something better than a negative earthly existence in a nebulous kind of sphere. Perhaps the book was treated ■ flippantly. I sympathise with anyone who felt the temptation to treat it so. -, . ; ■ I suppose all writers are in their work conscious occasionally of what seems to be a voice speaking to them. _They turn to a completed manuscript with a lhnd of amaze. "What made me think of that?" '■' What made me write this?' It appears almost as if something outside onself compelled. Yet this may be merely a cultivated imagination, or a waking of some sub-conscious life that was temporarily buried by the conventional existence of every day? All sincere writers must realise a sense of strange power i running from brain .to finger-tips, like an exhilarating fluid; or, like an electric connection, which interruption from the outside world disconnects—indeed, comes to almost' like a blow. When I say sincere writers I mean those who write from their own heart and brain. Some, unfortunately, only ■ select, hot all create. Echoes of old matter they have read; phantoms of the thought of others. I think that for the most part the selecting is nob deliberate; their minds unconsciously There are those who contend that all fictional writing is a recoil action from a .former-birth or births; that the stones and poems which flow from the pen are but details of past experiences. One can only say again;- " We do not know." These are fascinating, theories to be played with; but we never shallknow; and, after all, the most interesting theories-T-and , people — are those that can't be reduced to vulgar fractions! But that to concentrate with the physical eye upon a distant planet produces a strange sensation of uplift I can testify. It almost seems as if one did break away from the little. voices and petty aims of earth, and looked back at the tired body lounging in the chair or lymg, on the warm, dry grass, with a kind of challenge, " Ah; got away from you that time! Escaped your stupid headaches and heartaches; Can't catch me!" i' For, when you come to think of it, what a dreadful nuisance our bodies are! They have to be fed and clothed, and they will get weary, and insist upon. rest. I sometimes think that where the spiritual life is largely developed the physical shell is frail. I knew a woman once whose very soul seemed to shine 1 through her flesh. She died when she was thirty-three; and, when one thought about it, it seemed impossible that she could have lived to be old in frame, and, perhaps, soul-deadened. It would appear as if the soul fretted to rid itself of the clog of the body. Perhaps that is why, at times, in the highly intellectual- and spiritually inclined\j there is also a strong materialistic strain, the earthly rope as. it were, tethering the body to the world for the prescribed period of, the'soul's reincarnation. One might go on from theory to theory. We grope in'the dark along the roads of an alien country. Sometimes a torch is thrust into our hands.