CHAPTER IV—GHOSTS AND SPECTRES

Aside from the living inhabitants of the elements, there is another class of elements commonly called shades, ghosts, or spectres. We now group under a single heading as ghosts both decarnated spirits and the lifeless shells which float in the essences of the super physical planes. This is incorrect, for in truth the word ghost (taken from the word gast) means a passing shadow or the reflection cast by the light upon the surrounding darkness. Jehovah, the God of form, like the Shiva of India (the third aspect of the Trimurti) and Osiris (the third aspect of the Egyptian Trinity), is represented as the Lord of the shades or shadows of the underworld. In reality, all bodies are ghosts because they are phantoms of the real. That which is a shadow of the eternal is called a ghost or spectre, and it has no reality save through the reflection of life.

Over graveyards at night there hang globes of phosphorescent light and wavy draperies of phosphorus; for the human body, when disintegrating, creates a luminous mist. The ancient peoples called this luminous mist a shadow, or shade. It was also said that the shades of men walked the by ways of their past, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the castle battlement.

Generally speaking, we may divide the ghosts who walk in the night into two general classes. First, there are the disintegrating bodies of decarnated intelligences. Man dies not once in Nature, but many times. He sloughs off not only a physical vehicle but also an etheric body, an astral body, and lastly, a mental body. These are cast off, the densest first, like the layers of an onion. When cast off from the spiritual monad, each of these shells floats in its own essence of being for a considerable time before entirely disintegrating, because the subtle essences of Nature preserve for many ages the bodies of which they are composed, in the same way that alcohol preserves flesh. The essences of Nature are filled with slowly decomposing bodies which were cast off after their experiences had been incorporated into the spiritual organisms of man.

In these essences of Nature, there also dwell creatures who take upon themselves these slowly dissolving bodies, as a player dons a masquerade costume or wears a mask. These masqueraders are usually the elementals of the ether. The ghosts seen are usually etheric bodies from which the spiritual consciousness has fled, and they either drift past the vision of man, like a derelict floating on the sea, partly animated by the subtle substances of the ethers, or they have been vitalized (sometimes humanized) by an intelligence from one of these subtle planes.

People say, “The vision I saw was not a floating corpse; it moved, it raised its hands, it looked at me.” They do not realize that this drifting, moving mass of etheric protoplasm is floating upon the surface and in the midst of a sea of ether. If one could walk upon the ocean bottom and see the great waving branches of seaweed dimly outlined in the pale green light, one would see a substance incapable in itself of locomotion or animation beyond the vital principle of propagation. This substance sways and moves, twists and turns, as though alive. Long streams of seaweed, resembling the body of a boa constrictor, wave long sinuous branches, in the same way that the ghost of the night points its finger or directs its glassy eye toward the victim of the vision. The movement is not initiated within the thing which we see moving, but is the result of the movement of external forces.

Only those who have been conscious on the lower planes of ethereal worlds can understand what it means to see these floating shells drifting, drifting ever fainter, and many years later—sometimes centuries—a strange face, so faint as hardly to be visible, marks the final disintegration of the ethereal spectre.

The etheric plane is actually of the physical world. It is tied to the physical globe because in reality it is the mold into which the dense body is cast, just as the physical anatomy of man is really molded into the etheric double. The etheric body is purely a physical substance, but far more attenuated than the solids, liquids, and gases which we see. It is more or less tied to the physical body, sometimes disintegrating with it, but usually remaining differentiated from the substance of the astral world. The etheric body hovers over or near the grave where the body has been placed and sometimes leads to an earthbound condition. To prevent this possibility, the ancient occultists cremated the physical body. When this is done, nothing remains to tie the higher intelligence to matter, the body having been entirely reduced to basic inorganic substance.

The first dawning of etheric vision (which is nothing more than an extension of physical sight, and not clairvoyance as some imagine) brings man into the world of spectres—the borderland between the physical and true super-physical worlds. Here he sees these forms, in flowing draperies fashioned from the fine atoms of this world, seething and twisting, Dantesque fashion, in endless clouds. Millions of them stretch as far as the eye can see, floating in groups or wavy lines in the sea of ether in which they are preserved. In the endless march of time, they are slowly reduced, the atoms returning to the etheric world in the same manner that physical atoms return to dust. As the physical atoms are incorporated again into ever changing bodies, and as that which was once in the body of man may next appear in the organism of plant or animal, so the ether which once was attracted by the center’s etheric consciousness to build a body, when dispelled by time, finally gathers itself into new forms. The particles of man’s etheric body are made from the disintegrating atoms of the millions of ghosts that have been floating in the ethers since eternity began. To this sea of ether the physical body will be returned when its labor is completed, and when the records which man has implanted in it, and which are necessary for his soul growth, have been extracted therefrom and incorporated into his higher vehicles.

Man has a body in each of the worlds of Nature which now merge in his fourfold consciousness. The whole gamut of his expression—as manifest through form, growth, motion, and thought—is inspired by a complete organism, which in man is called a body, and in the Grand Man, a plane of Nature. Each of these bodies functions on its own respective plane. Man is born into each of these planes as the sutratmic atom descends and, by the law of attraction, assembles a body upon that plane. His body grows in a natural and progressive manner. Then, as he slowly sloughs off his vehicles in the decarnate state, until finally only the monadic atom remains upon the Arupa plane, he discards each of these bodies. These discarded bodies then become ghosts or shells in the superphysical world, just as the physical body, when the spiritual ego has departed, becomes a lifeless thing, preserving the shape of the living creature, but without consciousness or intelligence.

This process had for its ancient symbol the Moon, which is in truth a ghost, its intelligence having incarnated into the earth. It is a dead, lifeless shell impelled by the power of the great disintegrator in Nature, the Lord of the Ghost or Specter; in other words, the Regent of the Moon.

Again, there is the earthbound spiritual consciousness which sometimes visits the living, but in this case usually through the lower astral body. Consequently, it is never seen save when the individual is partly asleep. People who have seen these spectres always affirm by all they hold dear that they were wide awake. The consciousness is wide awake, but is functioning at the moment in the lower astral body. Hence, the physical body does not move during a vision. People are incapable of standing up and approaching the spectre. They think and are alive and awake, but always in a dreamlike state in which they are partly under the dominion of sleep. At this time, the physical body is in repose, and the lower physical qualities do not interject or express themselves. Then many people become slightly clairvoyant and see the ghosts and spectres of this world. The spectre usually takes a form outlined in gray, hooded in a dun colored garment, and surrounded by a bluish gray light. After the decarnate person has been absent from the physical plane for some years, the lower part of the body becomes merely a hanging drapery and finally vanishes altogether, because the higher astral plane preserves only the consciousness of the face. These spectres usually appear because of some earthly ties, such as jealousy and wrong doing. Great love or great hate also draws them. By his avarice, therefore, the miser is recalled to his treasures. These are the phantom forms which curse old castles with their presence, like the famous ghost of Hampton Court.

Once they are freed from the pangs of conscience or unfinished work, these spectres disappear because the consciousness dies out of the astral body, and this body becomes merely a shell. Often the shell is then assumed by elementals which continue to haunt the places where the spirit itself once did. A great percentage of the visions seen by mediums are merely these etheric shells vitalized by an elemental of the astral or etheric worlds. The earth binding ties of narrow concepts, ignorance, one pointedness of purpose, or similar attitudes can be found in numerous instances. For months after the close of the late World War, soldiers on both sides who had died fighting rose from the battlefield and fought in the ethers, wholly unconscious of the fact that they were dead. They maimed and destroyed each other, cursed and swore, and lived again among the bursting shells and shrapnel just as in former days. Others wander among the forests of crosses in the graveyards of Europe, wondering after many years of death what has happened to them. The sea is peopled with phantom ships whose crews, long since dead, still sail for the port which they were never able to reach alive. Aboard the ancient galleons on the etheric plane, the old Spanish buccaneer still counts his gold, tied by the bond of materiality and selfishness to the world of which he is no longer a part. The dope den is still peopled by the spirits of those who died slaves to its curse, and who came back to inhale its fumes and live in its filth. Like great vampire bats, they seek to gratify again the passions of their former earth lives by seizing and obsessing the minds and souls of the living.

All these facts teach a great lesson. The answer to the problem of the earthbound is twofold: right living and non-attachment. Those who have done their best in this world need not worry nor come back to beg forgiveness, nor haunt the footsteps of those they wronged, waiting for liberation. Those who are not attached to the things of this earth go straight about their Master’s business, fulfilling their duty in other worlds. Then again, if the people of this world would, in spirit and in truth, release the dead, they would not be surrounded by the specters who wail and pray, held by a force they cannot understand. When we weep for the dead, when we long for them to come back, we draw them from the Master’s work and surround ourselves with phantoms that can never return, but whom we can hold and divert from their life duty.

These shells, floating in the ether and in the lower regions of the astral plane, can no more help or guide us in our search for salvation than can a corpse save us here. These shells are the things most often seen in visions. They are obsessed by lower elementals and the larvae of the lower astral plane. They rap on tables and tilt chairs, they materialize their fruit and paint their pictures, and men foolishly make gods out of entities that are not even human. Let the student investigate these worlds for himself; or if he is incapable of investigating them, let him learn the great truth that man owes no allegiance to that which he does not know. To his God he owes only allegiance which his dawning consciousness has shown him that God deserves. Only with perfect consciousness will come perfect understanding and perfect co-operation with Nature’s workings. The ghosts of old graveyards and the specters of dreams should be sent back into the planes from whence they came, where as shells they will float until eternity dissolves them; or, if still the vehicles of consciousness of the spirit, should be liberated in order to learn the lessons of the new world wherein they dwell. There, unhindered by human emotion, they will absorb the fruitage of their respective bodies and build it into an eternal body—the temple of the soul—which is the crowning jewel, the great achievement of human evolution.