The Occult Influence of Man's Active Will

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of June 1881, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III as A Psychic Warning. The case is given in full first. A. Constantine of Agra and a close friend worked in the same government office and had arranged to travel together to Meerut for the holiday; at the last moment the friend withdrew, having to take his family to a sanitarium at Rambagh, and on parting said that though absent in body he would be present in thought and spirit. On the third morning of his stay at Meerut, Constantine was seized by a sudden dullness and melancholy, told his brother-in-law he must return to Agra at once, and insisted on going despite his relatives' remonstrances — reaching home to learn that his friend had died suddenly at Rambagh that morning, about the time the impulse first took him.

Blavatsky's reply declines the supernatural reading entirely: there is no need to attribute the warning to anything of the kind, many and varied being the psychic phenomena of life which are wrongly assigned to it. Her explanation rests on the position stated at the head — that thought is but a mode of energy and therefore material, and that although it keeps modifying itself it remains eternal, being the last thing to fade out in the brain of a dying person. The parting words about being present in thought and spirit are thus taken literally rather than as a courtesy, and the file belongs with Judge on the Inner Constitution of Man in batch 2, where the same materiality of thought is used to argue that thought is more punishable than act.

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