Spiritual Discovery

Lord Lytton is famous for his book "The Coming Race" that included his vision for an energy called 'VRIL power.' The Third Reich was evidently quite aware of Lytton's visions and theories, as they named some of their experimental craft "VRIL". Many other of Lord Lytton's books are merely dismissed as literature or fiction. Though written in fiction prose, his other mysteries and visions are recorded in his less known works.

Fourteen years ago the writer of this volume entered the temple of Freemasonry, and that date stands out in memory as one of the most significant days in his life. There was a little spread on the night of his raising, and, as is the custom, the candidate was asked to give his impressions of the Order. Among other things, he made request to know if there was any little book which would tell a young man the things he would most like to know about Masonry--what it was, whence it came, what it teaches, and what it is trying to do in the world?

Student! Your life is your own. You have only yourself to thank for what you are, have been and will be. Take your present into your own hand. Consciously shape out of it your future. Direct your forces along lines of study and endeavour that have the strongest attraction for you. Such attraction is the indication of need. It is the hand pointing out your Life-purpose.

One of the most widely disseminated systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of existence that directed him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully conditioned experience.

A doctrine with more than one point of resemblance to the doctrine of Plato and Spinoza; a doctrine which in its form rises at times to the majestic tone of religious poetry; a doctrine born in the same land, and almost at the same time, as Christianity; a doctrine which developed and spread during a period of more than twelve centuries in the shadow of the most profound mystery, without any supporting evidence other than the testimony of a presumptive ancient tradition, and with no apparent motive than the desire to penetrate more intimately into the meaning of the Sacred Books--such is the doctrine found in the original writings and in the oldest fragments of the Kabbalah

Many years ago I heard of the existence of this manuscript from a celebrated occultist, since dead; and more recently my attention was again called to it by my personal friend, the well-known French author, lecturer, and poet, Jules Bois, whose attention has been for some time turned to occult subjects. My first-mentioned informant told me that it was known both to Bulwer Lytton and Eliphas Levi, that the former had based part of his description of the sage Rosicrucian Mejnour on that of Abra-Melin, while the account of the so-called observatory of Sir Philip Derval in the Strange Story was to an extent copied from and suggested by that of the magical oratory and terrace, given in the eleventh chapter of the second book of this present work.