Having finished The Country Beyond, by Jane Sherwood, I thought I'd post a few more excerpts from the book that I found interesting. I'm not saying that these “channeled” claims are necessarily true–who knows?–but at the very least they are thought-provoking.
Jane Sherwood, summing up a long channeled conversation in her own words, writes:
Then we have two aspects of truth to connect… First, there are the four interpenetrating substances [physical, etheric, astral, and spiritual] in a man's body all geared in together to work as a harmonious whole. Secondly, each of these substances is related to and continuous with its own special universal field of force. Man would appear to be a complex area of density in four fields of force at once and this region of complex activity is his body, physical and spiritual. One must no longer think of him as a being separate from his world, an independent organism clear of control or influence and nicely segregated in a body. He is a kind of tangle, or knot in a continuous pattern woven in fourfold fashion throughout the universe and is thus in contact with all its fourfold activity. If this could be realized and acted upon, it looks as though man might learn to wield extraordinary powers as yet undreamed of. [Page 111]
The issue of the influence of our feelings on other people is discussed at length. As in many spiritual or New Age writings, the idea here is that our feelings have real, tangible effects on those around us.
Yet these emotions from other people are received, not as emotions, but as sensations. Thus to receive a pang of anger does not in the least arouse anger in return. The anger simply hurts the astral body which apparently reflects its injury down through the etheric and physical. It seems clear that the harm inflicted is due to inharmonious vibrations which have a jarring effect on the body, upsetting its normal rhythms and so causing real suffering. Just as the receipt of good emotions acts as a tonic, so bad ones cause injury.
Antidotes to evil emotions come to be known and used as experience increases. Love will smooth out any vicious vibration, speedily overruling it and tranquilizing the body again. [Page 115]
The point is pressed in a slightly later passage:
You are never immune from influences from your fellows. Even though you are insensitive to them your astral body has to absorb them.
Every man, then, must carry about with him all the time his own emotional atmosphere. He is a powerful center of influences which stream off from him and affect all within his orbit. There goes a red thrust of anger, there a pure beam of love, there a sparkling ray of fun, and each must be absorbed by the astral bodies of those he meets. You are blind to these exchanges, but there is no way of hiding our feelings here. They are all proclaimed by the visible colors and patterns of the aura. It is a pity that your real emotions are so easily hidden on earth since you can deceive yourselves that they have no effect unless they are outwardly expressed. But you must reckon with this: in the actual raying out of your own harmful or helpful emotions they are bound to have tangible effects on others and when you cannot understand [other people's] behavior, it may well be a deeply instinctive response to your real but hidden attitude to them. [Page 117]
I have a mixed reaction to such claims. On the one hand, I can see how they could be true, if consciousness is as powerful as psi phenomena suggest. On the other hand, I worry that excessive concern with monitoring one's own emotions could lead to emotional repression. If you're authentically angry, isn't it better to feel angry than to pretend you're perfectly calm?
On the other hand, I have experienced the calming effect of projecting a feeling of benevolence onto other people, even if that feeling is somewhat artificial. So perhaps the claims really are correct.
Later in the book, there is discussion of the so-called ego-principle, which can be loosely defined as self-awareness, and which is seen as the most advanced of the four elements of the human person, the other three being the physical, the etheric, and the astral. Ego in this context does not refer to the obsessive and insecure self-consciousness connoted by terms like egocentric or egotistical. It is more akin to the higher self.
The other work of the ego-principle is to infuse the whole of experience with the special value we call meaning. Thus, purpose grows definite only because emotions have meaning.…
Without [the ego's] agency the etheric brain could only reflect its record of changes in the chemical substances of the brain, to which the astral consciousness would give merely a confused sense of “feeling” reactions. No clear thought or perception could emerge unless the ego was present to translate all this into terms of meaning. One sees a tree, shall we say; that is, the physical reactions caused by certain vibrations in the etheric brain which are picked up by the astral in terms of pleasure-pain, but the meaning of the thing called a tree has to be supplied by the ego-principle. It alone can relate the reactions of the other bodies to the world of meaning, which is, in effect, the only real world. Apart from these connections with reality made for us by the ego all perceptions would be seen to be the illusions that they really are. A misty unreality would pervade the whole world of perception and feeling.
In themselves, the processes of reasoning would go on in the etheric brain like reactions in a computer but they would be devoid of meaning and as automatic as a piece of machinery. Memory, too, without the intervention of the ego activity would operate in a purely mechanical way. It would be able to reproduce an experience with its associated feeling tone (astral record) but it simply would not mean anything at all. The ego alone deals with the world of meaning and although it can and sometimes does give wrong meanings to events, it at least deals with sense data in a meaningful way. [Pages 144-145]
This seems to be saying that what are technically called qualia are made possible by the ego-principle, and that without the ego-principle the nervous system would still function in a mechanical way, much as physicalists or materialists believe, but without the all important dimension of self-awareness and meaning.
Finally, here is part of a discussion of humankind's spiritual evolution. Some may object to this scenario, inasmuch as it suggests that “primitive” peoples were less spiritually advanced than us more modern types. In many circles today, the opposite assumption reigns. Still, I think there is some merit to this idea, particularly when you consider that as we go deeper into the past, we seem to find a much more joyless and even despondent picture of the afterlife than we do in modern religious or spiritual traditions. Very early religions in the historical era tend to picture the afterlife as a misty realm of bloodless and confused shadow figures–the Greeks' Hades, the Israelites' Sheol. There is also a disproportionate emphasis on devils and demons, for instance in the religions of ancient Sumeria and Babylon. It does indeed appear as if conceptions of the afterlife have progressed toward more vivid, inspiring, and uplifting imagery over the course of time.
Anyway, here are the relevant excerpts:
Primitive man had an astral being but barely the dawning of an ego-principle. After death his being would hover between the etheric and lower astral and would quickly descend again into a physical body. His highest experiences, then, would be those of the lower astral planes and in many cases no doubt the after-death experience must have been dominated by the animal plane from which he had only just emerged. When such a being went back to earth his vague yearnings for spiritual truth would bring back to him visions of animal forms, of elemental beings of earth, air and water and of the unformed primitive man-soul itself. Fleeting visions of these things would haunt his dreams and he would carve them into his images, symbolize them in his legends and sing them in his songs. But each life cycle would add to his development and enable him to reach a higher plane of existence here [in the afterlife]. In later lives, when he reached the higher astral planes after death, he would go back to earth with the power to create more beautiful forms, to imagine more beautiful beings and to experience more beautiful emotions. Angels henceforth mingle with the demon and animal symbols of his earlier worship. Heroes and demi-gods, half human, half divine, reflect in his religion the stages of his spiritual experiences up here. Then, still progressing, he reaches the higher spheres and becomes aware of exalted spiritual beings who lead him on to a knowledge of the higher spiritual truths and set him hungering to find and worship the supreme spirit.
When he comes back to earth the kingdom, the power and the glory of his heritage will be present in his inner being and he will know the hunger of the soul which cannot be satisfied by even the most wonderful experiences of earthly life. So his hunger, his urge to find again the pure joy once known by him here will influence his religious thought and will purify and ennoble the form of religion he finds as his inheritance on earth. If he has gone far here so that he brings back to earth a pure thought of God, his inner knowledge may lead him into rebellion against the state of religious thought he finds on earth. He may become a great heretic, a great reformer; but such a heretic is the saint of the future. The vision is always with him, the kingdom of heaven is within him. Earthly religious forms carrying the outworn symbols and images of a more primitive past must, for him, be purged and lifted on to a more enlightened level of spiritual truth. The connection with evolution becomes plain. But for this perpetual reaching up to the highest possible to manage lifetime there could be no progress since no higher plane can be reached here unless the power to reach it has been developed on earth. The earth experience is decisive and controls the rest of that cycle and the plane to which ascent can be made. [Pages 228-229]
Responding to this last channeled message, Jane Sherwood comments:
I suppose the chaos in psychology is largely due to ignorance of the existence of special powers of the four principles of the human body, for if every activity has to be accounted for by glands, secretions and reflexes muddle and contradictions are inevitable. It is as though the glass and the mercury backing of a mirror had to be accountable for all that moves in the mirror. [Pages 229-230]