Man's First Initiation Comes in Dreams

William Quan Judge · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages giving Judge's reply to Question 18 in The Theosophical Forum, republished in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient. The question is printed first: is it possible, by a strong desire before sleep, to receive from the Higher Self in dream an answer to questions about right thought and conduct?

His answer is yes, and he builds it from three sources rather than asserting it. Bulwer Lytton is quoted from A Strange Story for the phrase that gives the file its title — that man's first initiation comes in dreams. Two passages from the Book of Job follow, both about a thing secretly brought and an ear that receives a little of it in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, and about God speaking once, yea twice, in a dream, though man does not perceive it. The state described in Job is then identified with what the Hindus call Sushupti. Man is said to have three principal conditions — waking, dreaming, and dreamless or deep slumber — and in the last of these communion is held to be enjoyed with the Spirit, the inner man passing back out through a short or long dream into waking. The claim Judge presses hardest is that the influences of Sushupti are highly spiritual and common to all men without exception: the greatest villain on earth goes into it and receives benefit from it exactly as the most virtuous man does. His reason for insisting on that is practical rather than charitable — if it were not so, he says, wickedness would triumph on earth through the overpowering downward tendency of the body.

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