from Dashed Against the Rock, 1894
The amplitude of vibrations is directly increased or diminished by increasing or diminishing the size or number of creative aggregates. The human EGO, subject to the forces of love or hate, kindness or cruelty, forgiveness or revenge, is according to circumstances ruled or dominated by these forces in proportion to their intensity. The intensity of a force is precisely proportionate to the number of units vibrating at that particular pitch. For instance, let fear assail one man, and according to its intensity will be the effect; but let a crowd of men experience fear, see the result in the augmentation of fear, though its source be relatively insignificant. A curtain in a theater, for example, takes fire; one or two persons, cowardly at heart, become afraid through the dominance of the purely animal instinct of bodily preservation; there is actually no real danger, but these two or three persons are sufficient to arouse the unreasoning dread which lies latent in every breast, with perhaps a very few remarkable exceptions. The fire burns nobody; but blind fear, which is extremely contagious among people mutually sympathetic, by reason of the rapidity with which etheric waves transmit all feeling, occasions a terrible panic, during which many severe accidents and many instances of fierce cruelty occur, all because of this sympathetic transfer of feeling starting from one or two augmented or intensified fear-centers, each person being a center emanating the feeling of fear. Were there no counteracting centers of influence in an audience, radiating contrary feelings, the result of a panic would be the total bodily extinction of a very large percentage of the assembled multitude. Thus the human race is immersed in forces whose intensity is vast in proportion to the number of EGOS adding each its quota to the already intense vibration, tending either to love or hate, kindness or cruelty, timidity or bravery. Those who intensify the force of cruelty in the place where they reside, may be strengthening a murder's hand to strike the deadly blow in a distant land. This result is brought about through the agency of etheric waves, which transmit forces with undiminished intensity even to uncalculated distances. This phenomenon may be termed transympathetic. They who feel that force called love, which on higher planes is known as sympathy, thrill with waves of force which are already strong, augmenting them or increasing their intensity. They who indulge such sentiments and encourage such forces may stop the falling hand on evil sped. In order to protect ourselves effectually from becoming the dispensers or propagators of deadly force, we must consciously and deliberately relate ourselves by resolute determination, to awaken within us such centers only as are concordantly sympathetic with all force radiating in the interest of universal goodwill, thereby aiding the establishment of universal brotherhood. All ye who feel a longing for a better life or nobler existence draw to yourselves streams of force which they alone feel who have attuned their bodies to the higher harmonies. For a moment you feel as they who dwell perpetually in communion with higher harmonies, living immersed in that higher force; they are the true heirophants, and you, O neophytes, struggling to attain the goal which they have reached, do not despair though at present you find yourselves unable to maintain this high altitude for long together. Though you fall many times, be not discouraged, for as yet your organisms and all their centers of resonation are not yet concordant to the focalized vibrations of the higher harmonies; being still related to the mass, you are drawn again and again into the whirlpool of the vibrations which affect the mass, for these you cannot resist. But know that you can change all this rapidly or slowly as your purpose is steadily intense or vacillating. With the cessation of your lower desires comes the cessation of the action upon you of the lower forces; the resonating centers which formerly distributed this force, no longer active, become latent and are absorbed back to an embryonic condition.
Let him realize fully the transient character of his own personality and contrast therewith his eager longing to know the immortal. Every man contains, developed or embryonic, all conditions of the Infinite; therefore no height is too great to reach. Impossibility is a meaningless word to the man who apprehends the fathomless contents of his own nature. Thou comest here, O man, with the instrument thou hast graduated in thy many past existences; how few of thy chord-settings, if thou art numbered with the many, respond to the higher harmonies! Universal unity or fraternity has been absorbed to almost embryonic conditions by the prevalence of material self-regard. Charity has been rendered almost latent, that beautiful chord-setting found even in the lowest forms of creation - LOVE, the dominant chord of the cycles. Love has an amplitude of action in the brute which may well make the selfish man ashamed, but until the crust of selfishness is broken through, the beauty of love is obscured, and though it exists all about him, the poor blind egotist has no eye to discern it. The centers of love, brotherhood, charity, voice their music loud and clear, yet the masses will not listen. I do not mean the immortal EGO when I say man will not listen; I refer to the personality which is the resultant of all the ages of action in this, now rapidly closing, cycle. You who exist to-day, to-morrow would exist no longer in your present personalities did you but dare to yield to these higher harmonies. I say YIELD because it is a yielding process for this personality. In a moment your outer life would end, and you, the warrior, would enter peace. The immortal EGO is an entity of which man can become thoroughly conscious while here on earth, but to arrive at this consciousness necessitates the entire abandonment of all the petty considerations involved in the transient and subordinate EGO, which is the only self of which the unenlightened man is conscious. Let him who desires to reach this inner consciousness enter his inner sanctuary, wherever that sanctuary may be; it matters not whether it be his own chamber, the open field, the mountain top, the seashore, the stately cathedral, or the humble village chapel. Let him realize fully the transient character of his own personality and contrast therewith his eager longing to know the immortal. Let him concentrate his whole consciousness upon his personality, fully arousing all his personal conditions as a distinct individual; then with all the aspiration of which this personality is capable, let him beseech of the immortal EGO - which is eternal and does not incarnate, but overshadows all incarnations, waiting until one is formed capable of illumination, to whom it may reveal itself - to consider him worthy of illumination, and according to his preparedness to receive illumination will it then be granted. He who asks this, knows not what he asks; for were the prayer answered, life henceforth for such an one would be a weary round, as Hamlet says: "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow brings in this weary round of life"; for, having seen the glory of this immortal EGO, all else seems so base, so commonplace and mean, so inglorious, that oftentimes the personality has utterly collapsed when thrown back from the radiant vision of this glorious immortal entity possessed by all alike, though scarcely dreamed of by any save the very few who, discontented with the ignorance and emptiness of terrene existence, aspire to know the great reality of the supernal. As the incarnations of every entity, passing through certain orders of experience through numerous lives, inevitably culminate in this moment of conscious realization of the immortal entity; the Buddha says: "All shall reach the sunlit snows." You who through your daily life move on unthinking, not caring, inactive, you shall hear when your supplications reach this high entity, "Lo! thou didst not even try, knowing that even thy failures were acceptable to me."