Still the further problem confronts us: How shall we consciously and intelligently control telepathic communication as we now control our communication by speech, letters, or telegrams? A curious instance of unconscious and unaccountable telepathy is the following: There were two individuals who had never met, but who held some mutually antagonistic conceptions of each other,--conceptions that were, too, perhaps more or less mutually erroneous, and this condition had lasted over a prolonged period of time. Then one of these persons had the experience of waking in the night, simply engulfed in an overwhelming wave of tender and compassionate feeling toward the other: seeing, as if with spiritual vision, a nature unstrung, hardly responsible, and one that invited only the most infinite tenderness and care. This wave of new and perfectly clear perception was like a magnetic trance. It was an hour of absolute spiritual clairvoyance, and the evidence was furnished by a letter received, the next morning, from a mutual friend, which entirely substantiated and corroborated the telepathic impression that had been experienced in the night. Now the scientific question is: From whence did this impression proceed? Was it direct telepathy between the two persons concerned? Was it a clairvoyant reading of the letter that was en route during the night? Who can decide? The special point here is that these most vivid and intense experiences are largely, if not entirely, encountered unconsciously. They suddenly--come. One asks for them--and they do not come? Now how are we to pluck out the heart of the mystery?
The moment one realizes himself as a spiritual being, belonging by right to the spiritual world; one whose true interests are in and of that realm, and to whom communion with the Divine is the very breath of existence, the one elixir of life, that moment he asserts himself aright. From that hour his life becomes a significant factor in true progress. Prayer may be a formal and ceremonial act, and mean nothing: it may be the absolute surrender of one's soul to the Divine, when it enters behind the veil into the very glory of God. This spiritual truth is closely linked with certain scientific facts. The scientists have theories of inner ether by means of which psychic power is conveyed and which translate it into action, as the wire translates the electric current to express a message. A scientist asserts a new theory that there are no varying states of ether, but that all space is filled with matter in various states of vibration; and that what we had heretofore called air and ether is simply all one substance in degrees of lower and higher range. It is conceivable that this latest idea may approximate to the truth more than any previous theory. No one has yet discovered those forces of nature by means of which sense relates itself to spirit. There is certainly some great law, still unrecognized and unformulated, which acts, and which is acted upon by human beings, irrespective of any physical means; but why these laws sometimes do and sometimes do not produce given results, no one can tell. There are other existing laws in the physical world that transcend scientific scrutiny. The marvellous results of chemical combinations, the miracle nature of electricity and all its phenomena, fade into absolute nothingness beside the higher marvels of the action of spirit. The crude and merely approximate truth must be that in each human being is a part of the divine being; that this divine element may be nurtured and strengthened by living in its native atmosphere of spiritual life,--in the atmosphere of peace, joy, and love; and that this potency of God and of man, so far as he relates himself to God, can act upon that substance that fills all space; that this substance, whether it be ether, or whether it be matter differentiated in degree of vibration, is intensely susceptible, in the most infinitely delicate way, to thought, which acts upon it as physical force can act on physical matter. To realize intelligently one's relatedness to God, and one's own power over this subtle matter, whatever it be that fills all space, is to arise in newness of life. It is to realize one's self as a spiritual being, here and now, and an inhabitant of the spiritual world. It is to realize that one's relation to the physical world is a merely incidental thing,--a fact that has its purpose, its responsibilities, as a phase of development, and which it is most important to use aright; but which is inevitably transient.