Mysteries Explored

When I commenced my investigations into spiritism, no desire for consolation attracted me to the study. For thirty years I had only lost one near relative, my father, and he had passed over nearly twelve years before, at a good old age. In this respect I have been unusually fortunate; but the most powerful incentive any man can have to delve into the occult was absent in my case. I wanted to know the truth. "If a man die, shall he live again?" - this was the problem to be solved.

To those who wish to understand the reason of this steady recurrence of mystic tradition in every century, these studies may be of some use. They will serve as literary landmarks to guide the seeker to those distant sources whence flow faint echoes of divine truths--the heritage of the divine human race; truths that bring dim memories to the soul which are its highest impulse, and give the clue that guides it to the inner "science of the soul"--the mystic quest of all the saints, and the hidden truth that all religions have tried to teach, and which only a few in each religion have ever realized.

IN all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest. Even to-day in certain quarters of the world, in remoter districts of Europe itself, Transylvania, Slavonia, the isles and mountains of Greece, the peasant will take the law into his own bands and utterly destroy the carrion who--as it is yet firmly believed--at night will issue from his unhallowed grave to spread the infection of vampirism throughout the countryside.

It is funny that one really never stops to consider what life is all about until it is over. When the physical body dies, and the spirit returns to its natural state of being, then the ways of the Universe become clear. Not everything is answered

Well, just about everyone does astral travel when they go to sleep. The astral body goes off, and the physical body is meant to remain more or less passive, twisting and turning a bit, of course, in order that muscles may not be strained by being contracted for too long in one position.

Few books have aroused more controversy in recent years than Lobsang Rampa's THE THIRD EYE, and the other works which have come from his pen.
The reason is simple enough. When an Englishman claims that his body has been taken over by the spirit of a Tibetan Lama, he can reasonably expect mockery.

This book is a picture of life utterly unlike anything we know in the Western world, and one in which occult powers and supernatural happenings play an important part. It is a continuation of the story of a man so completely possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan Lama from the Potala Monastery in Lhasa that he became, in fact, the Lama himself. This Lama suffered a long, arduous imprisonment, survived degradation, starvation, and soul-destroying tortures.