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Letter №17 p. 2

you personally far more useful than Mr. Wallace's work. It is at this sort of springs that Spiritualists ought to be compelled to slake their thirst for phenomena and mystic knowledge instead of being left to swallow the idiotic gush they find in the Banners of Light and others. The world — meaning that of individual existences — is full of those latent meanings and deep purposes which underlie all the phenomena of the Universe, and Occult Sciences — i.e., reason elevated to super-sensuous Wisdom — can alone furnish the key wherewith to unlock them to the intellect. Believe me, there comes a moment in the life of an adept, when the hardships he has passed through are a thousandfold rewarded. In order to acquire further knowledge, he has no more to go through a minute and slow process of investigation and comparison of various objects, but is accorded an instantaneous, implicit insight into every first truth. Having passed that stage of philosophy which maintains that all fundamental truths have sprung from a blind impulse — it is the philosophy of your Sensationalists or Positivists; and left far behind him that other class of thinkers — the Intellectualists or Skeptics — who hold that fundamental truths are derived from the intellect alone, and that we, ourselves, are their only originating causes; the adept sees and feels and lives in the very source of all fundamental truths — the Universal Spiritual Essence of Nature, SHIVA the Creator, the Destroyer, and the Regenerator. As Spiritualists of to-day have degraded "Spirit," so have the Hindus degraded Nature by their anthropormorphistic conceptions of it. Nature alone can incarnate the Spirit of limitless contemplation. "Absorbed in the absolute self-unconsciousness of physical Self, plunged in the depths of true Being, which


Notes: 

"Mr. Wallace's work": Probably refers to Alfred Russel Wallace's book Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, first published in 1874.

The Banner of Light was a Spiritualist newspaper founded by Luther Colby of Boston in 1857. The weekly newspaper proclaimed itself to be an “exponent of Spiritual philosophy of the 19th century,” and had the largest and longest circulation of any Spiritualist newspaper in the world. It ceased publication after 1910.