Chapter 5

Ah Ben made no answer; he did not even smile, but continued to gaze into the fire and blow little puffs of smoke toward the chimney.

“You referred just now to the prize-fighter,” Paul resumed after a few minutes, “but I am going to squelch that argument.”

“Yes,” Ah Ben replied, now with his eyes half closed, “you are going to tell me that, although the man may have been battered and bruised, he really feels no pain, because of the unnatural excitement of the moment; but there you only rivet the argument against yourself; for I maintain--and not from theory, but from knowledge--that that very excitement is an exaltation of the spirit, which may be cultivated and relied upon to conquer pain and the ills of the flesh forever!”

“It would go far indeed if it could do all that, although I believe there is something in what you say, for in a small way I have seen it myself.”

“Yes, we have all seen it in a small way; and does it not seem strange that men have never thought of cultivating it in a larger way, through the exercise of their will in controlling their minds and bodies? This exaltation of spirit is only attained through effort, or some great physical shock. It is the secret of all power; it conquers all pain, and makes disease impossible.”

“Makes disease impossible!” cried Paul in astonishment.

“Yes,” answered the elder man quietly. “This soul power, of which I speak, is the hidden akasa in all men--it is the man himself--and when once recognized, the body is relegated to its proper sphere as the servant, and not the master; then it is that man realizes his own power and supremacy over all things.”

“But,” persisted Henley, “if you go so far as to say that this occult or soul power can conquer disease, you would have us all living forever!”

“We do live forever,” answered Ah Ben.

“Yes, after death; but I mean here!”

“_There is no such thing as death_!” remarked Ah Ben quietly, as if he were merely giving expression to a well-established scientific fact.

“And yet we see it about us every day,” Paul replied.

“There you are wrong, for no man has ever seen that which never occurs!”

“You are quibbling with words,” suggested Henley.

“There is a change at a certain period in a man's life, which, from ignorance, people have agreed to call death. But it is a misnomer, for man never dies. He goes right on living; and it is generally a considerable time before he realizes the change that has taken place in him. He would laugh at the word death, as understood upon earth, as indeed he frequently does, for he is far more alive than ever before.”

“You speak as if you knew all this,” said Paul. “One might almost imagine that you had been in the other world yourself.”

“_Had been_!” exclaimed the old man with emphasis. “_I am in it now, and so are you. But there is a difference between us; I know that I am in it, because I can see it, and touch it, and hear it; while you are in it without knowing it_.”

There was an air of authority that impressed the hearer with the conviction of the speaker. This was not theory; it was the result of experience. There was a difference as vast as the night from the day. “I suppose, when I am dead, I shall know these things too,” said Paul meditatively.

“No,” answered Ah Ben, “not when you are dead, but when you have been born--when you have come into life.”

“Pardon me,” answered Paul, pondering on the man's strange assertion; “but this knowledge of yours is in demand more than all other knowledge. Positive information about the other world is what men have sought through all the ages; why do you not impart it to them?”

“Impart it!” exclaimed Ah Ben. “Can you explain to one who has been born blind what it is to see? Can you impart to such a man any true conception of the world in which he has always lived? But _couch_ his eyes, remove the worthless film that has covered them, and for the first time he realizes the glorious world surrounding him. Likewise _couch_ the body, remove the shell that covers the spirit, and it is born.”

“I perceive, then, that it is only through death that most of us can hope to gain this knowledge.”

“Death, if you prefer the word,” said Ah Ben. “Yes, it is the death of the film over the eye that reveals the world to the blind; but I should hardly say that the man was dead because he had so entered into another existence.”

“Would you mind telling me how it is that you have gained this knowledge in such obvious exception to the rule!”

“The power of the occult is dormant in all men,” answered Ah Ben; “and as I have already said, may be developed slowly, through the exercise of the will, or suddenly, as in some great physical shock, and of a necessity comes to all in the event called death. Were I to tell you how _I_ acquired this knowledge, Mr. Henley, it would startle you, far more than any exhibition of the power itself. No, I can not tell you; at least, not at present; perhaps some day you may be better prepared to hear it.”

The spark in the hanging lamp had almost expired, and the fire was reduced to a mere handful of coals, casting an erubescent glow over the pew and its occupants. Ah Ben stretched his hand toward the chimney, and as he did so, a ball of misty light appeared against it, just below the mantel. It was ill defined and hazy, like the reflection a firefly will sometimes make against the ceiling of a darkened room; but it was fixed, and Paul was sure it had not been there a moment before.

“Do you see that?” asked the old man, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” answered Paul; “and I was just wondering what it could be.”

“Watch! and you will see.”

They sat with their eyes fixed; but while Paul was staring into the mantel, Ah Ben was looking at him.

“Observe how it grows,” and even as he spoke the strange illumination deepened, until it assumed the distinct and definite form of a lamp. Then the mantelpiece dissolved into nothingness, and Paul was staring through the chimney into a strange room, whose form and contents were dimly revealed by the curious lamp which occupied a table in the centre. Two persons sat at this table, the one a woman, the other a boy, and near at hand was an English army officer. The woman was small, with dark eyes and hair, and a skin the color of tan bark. Her head was bowed forward and rested upon her arms, which were crossed upon the table. The man was looking down at her with a troubled expression, and in a minute he stooped forward and kissed the top of her head; he then turned suddenly and left the room. The scene was distinct, although the outer part of the room was in shadow. Presently the woman threw herself to the floor with a heart-rending shriek, and Paul started up, exclaiming:

“What has happened? She will wake everybody in the house!”

He bounded to his feet; but as he did so, the lamp in the strange room went out, and the chimney closed over the scene, leaving him with his old surroundings. Looking up at Ah Ben, he said:

“I must have fallen asleep. I've been dreaming.”

“Not at all,” answered Ah Ben. “You've been quite as wide awake as I have, and we've been looking at the same thing.”

Paul demanded the proof, which the old man gave by telling him what he had seen in every detail.

“Then it's magic!” said Henley, “for surely no room can be visible through that chimney.”

“That,” answered Ah Ben, “is mere assertion, which you can never prove.”

“Do you mean to tell me that the thing was real? There is a secret about this house which I do not understand!”

His manner was excited. He felt that he had been the dupe of the man before him, the prey to some clever trick; the thing was too preposterous, too unreasonable.

“Be calm,” said Ah Ben; “there is nothing in this that should disturb you. The room has disappeared from our sight, and will no more trouble us. Shall we have another pipe?”

The words had an instantaneous effect, so that Paul resumed his seat and pipe, as if nothing had happened. For several minutes he sat silently gazing at vacancy, and listening to the north wind as it moaned through the old pines. He was trying to account for what he had seen, but could not. The mystery was deepening into an overpowering gloom. The house, with its eccentric inmates; the girl Dorothy, with her freaks and manner of living; the odd circumstance of the stairway in his closet; these, and other things, flashed upon his memory in a confused jumble, and seemed as inexplicable as the vision just witnessed through the chimney.

Suddenly a thought struck him. Could this last have been hypnotism? He put the question straight to Ah Ben. The man passed his withered hand over his face thoughtfully as he answered:

“Hypnotism, Mr. Henley, is a name that is used in the West for a condition that has been known in the East for thousands of years as the underlying principle of _all phenomena_.”

“And what is that condition?” Paul inquired.

“_Sympathetic vibration_,” answered the elder man.

“Vibration of what?” asked Paul.

“Of the mind,” said Ah Ben. “The condition of the universal mind vibrating in our material plane, or within the range of our physical senses, is represented in the trees and the rocks, in the earth and the stars. Our physical senses, being attuned to his form of vibration, are in sympathy with it, and apprehend all its phenomena. There is but one mind, of which man is a part. Thought is a product of mind. Thought is real, and, when sufficiently concentrated, becomes tangible and visible to those who can be brought into sympathy with its vibrations. There is but one primal substance, which is mind. Mind creates all things out of itself; therefore, to change the world we look at, it is only necessary to change our minds.”

“Let me ask if what I saw was hypnotism?” repeated Henley. “I ask this, first, because I know it is impossible to see through a brick wall, even if there should be such a room in the house; and, secondly, because I cannot believe that I was dreaming, consequently the thing could not have been real.”

“Hypnotism is a good enough word,” answered Ah Ben; “but that which men generally understand by the real, and that which they consider the unreal, are not so far apart as they suppose. You say the room was not real, and yet you saw it; had you wished, you might have touched it, which is certainly all the evidence you have of the existence of the room in which we are now sitting. Hypnotism is not a cause of hallucination, as is commonly supposed, but of fact. Its effects are not illusory, but real. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they are _as real_ as anything else, and that _all_ the phenomena of nature are mere illusions of the senses, which they undoubtedly are. But whichever side we take, all appearances are the result of the same general cause--that of mental vibration. Matter has no real existence.”

Paul was meditating on what he had seen and what he was now hearing. Ah Ben's words were endowed with an added force by the vision of the mysterious room.

“When you tell me that there is practically no difference between the real and the unreal, and that matter has no real existence, I must confess to some perplexity,” observed Henley.

Ah Ben looked up and smoothed the furrows in his withered cheek thoughtfully for a minute before he answered:

“Unfortunately, Mr. Henley, language is not absolute or final in its power to convey thought, and the best we can do is to use it as carefully as possible to express ourselves, which we can only hope to do approximately. Therefore when I say that a thing is hot or cold, or hard or soft, I only mean that it is so by comparison with certain other things; and when I say that matter has no existence, I mean that it has no independent existence--no existence outside of the mind that brought it into being. I mean that it was formed by mind, formed out of mind, and that it continues to exist in mind as a part of mind. I mean that it is an appearance objective to our point of consciousness on the material plane; but inasmuch as it was formed by thought, it can be reformed by thought, which could never be if it existed independently of thought. It is real in the sense of apparent objectivity, and not real in the sense of independent objectivity, and yet it affects us in precisely the same manner as if it were independent of thought. What, then, is the difference between matter as viewed from the Idealist's or the Materialist's point of view? At first there is apparently none, but a deeper insight will show us that the difference is vast and radical, for in the one case the tree or the chair that I am looking at, owing its very existence to mind, is governed by mind, which could never be did they exist as separate and distinct entities. Therefore I say with perfect truth that matter does not exist in the one sense, and yet that it does exist in the other. I dream of a green field; a beautiful landscape, never before beheld; I awake and it is gone. Where was that enchanting scene? I can tell you: for it was in the mind, where everything else is. But upon waking I have changed my mind, and the scene has vanished. Thus it is with the Adept of the East, with the Yoghis, the Pundit, the Rishis, and the common Fakir; through the power of hypnotism they alter the condition of the subject's mind, and with it his world has likewise undergone a change. You say this is not real, that it is merely illusion; but in reply I would say that these illusions have been subjected to the severest tests; their reality has been certified to by every human sense, and when an illusion responds to the sense of both sight and touch, when the sense of sight is corroborated by that of touch, or by any other of the five senses, what _better_ evidence have we of the existence of those things we are all agreed to call real? Yes, I know what you are about to say, you object upon the ground that only a small minority are witnesses of the marvels of Eastern magic; but you are wrong, for I have seen hundreds of men in a public square all eye-witnesses to precisely the same occult phenomena at once. Now if certain hundreds could be so impressed, why not other hundreds? And with a still more powerful hypnotizer, why could not a majority--nay, all of those in a certain district, a certain State, a certain country, _in the world_--be made to see and feel things which now, and to us, have no existence? In that case, Mr. Henley, would it be the majority or the minority who were deceived? _All is mind_, and the hypnotizer merely alters it.”

“You said just now,” answered Paul, “that matter, being mind, was governed by mind, and that the tree or chair before me, owing its existence to mind, is subject to that mind; do you mean by that to say that the existence of that sofa, as a sofa, may be transformed into something else by mental action alone?”

“I do,” said Ah Ben, “under certain conditions; namely, the condition called hypnotism. On this material plane we are imprisoned; the will is not free to operate upon its environment, but in the spiritual state this dependence and slavery to the appearances we call realities is cast aside; the will becomes free and controls its own environment--in short, we are out of prison. But even here, Mr. Henley, by practicing the self-control we were speaking of, the will becomes so powerful that it can sometimes break through the bondage of matter, which, after all, is no more real than the stuff a dream is made of, and mold its prison walls into any form it chooses; in which case, of course, it is no longer a prison, and the other world is achieved without the change called death!”

“And why do you call it a prison, if no more real than a dream?”

“Have you ever had the nightmare? If so, you must know that your will was insufficient to free you from the horrid scene that had taken such forcible hold of you. Was the nightmare real or not?”

Paul was silent for several minutes. He could not deny the reality of the scene through the chimney, for it had the same forceful existence to him as anything in life. Ah Ben, seeing that he was still puzzling himself over the problem of mind and matter, the puzzle of life, the great sphinx riddle of the ages, said:

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Henley--I might say several questions--which may possibly tend to throw a little light upon this subject, and perhaps convince you that matter is really mind.”

“Ask as many as you like.”

“Pantheism,” continued Ah Ben, “is scoffed at by many people calling themselves Christians as being idolatrous, and yet to me it is the most ennobling of all creeds. Without knowing anything of your religious faith, I would first ask if you believe in God?”

Paul answered affirmatively.

“Do you look upon him as a personal Deity--I mean as an exaggerated man in size and power--or as a Spirit?”

“As a Spirit,” Paul replied.

“Very well, then; do you believe that Spirit is infinite or finite?”

“Infinite.”

“Then, if it is infinite, there can be no part of space in which it does not exist.”

“That is my idea also.”

“If, then, that Spirit exists everywhere, it must penetrate all matter; in fact, all matter must, in its very essence, be a part of it; it must be formed out of the very substance of this infinite Spirit or Mind. Hence all is mind!”

“That seems clear enough,” said Paul; “in which case it seems to me that we are a part of God ourselves, and God being spirit, we must be spirits now.”

“Of course we are,” answered Ah Ben; “as I have already told you, we are in the spiritual world now, although much of it is screened from our view, because we are temporarily imprisoned in a lower vibratory plane, called matter.”

Ah Ben arose, and procuring candles, which he lighted by the expiring fire, the men went to their beds.

6

It was past midnight, and the house quiet, when Paul determined to have another look at the mysterious door at the foot of his closet stairs. He had sat for more than an hour before his bedroom fire, after bidding Ah Ben good-night, to make sure that the inmates of Guir House had retired; and as not a sound had been heard since locking his door, he sincerely hoped they were asleep. Before descending into the noisome depths, however, he concluded to climb up into his window, and have another look at the beautiful panorama of mountain and woodland shimmering in the meagre light of a hazy sky and a moon past full. The uncertain outline of a distant horizon; the interminable stretch of forest, which bore away upon every hand; the rugged heights, now soft and colorless; the aromatic smell of pine and fir; the distant murmur of falling water; and the assonant whispering of wind in the tree tops, had all become strangely fascinating to him, more so than such things had ever been before. “Never was a house so situated, so lost to the world, so tightly held in the lap of unregenerate nature,” thought Paul; “no laugh of child, no shout of man, no bark of dog, nor bellowing beast to break the stillness of the midnight air; an impenetrable, imperturbable, and silent wilderness shuts out the busy world, as we know it, forever and forever. It is a fitting place for such witchery as the old man seems master of, and I do not wonder that he has chosen it for his home; but the girl--the poor girl!--she must get away!” He closed the window, and prepared for his descent into the well.

Removing his shoes, he put on a pair of soft felt slippers, and then, with candle in his hand, a box of matches and a revolver in his pocket, entered the closet, and opened the scuttle in the floor. A mouldy smell rose upon the air, and Henley recoiled at the thought of what might be in waiting below. He had not the slightest idea of how he should open the door at the bottom, but would make a careful study of the situation, hoping that a solution of the difficulty would present itself. The steps creaked dismally as he placed his weight upon them, and it was necessary to use extreme caution to avoid breaking through the more rotten ones. He had not descended more than a dozen, when there was a terrible crash above his head, and he found himself in absolute darkness. The trap had fallen as upon the previous night, he having forgotten to fasten it back, and the wind had blown out his candle. Henley hastened back up the stairs, fearful lest the noise had waked some one in the house, and without relighting his candle threw himself upon the bed to await developments. After listening for some minutes, and hearing nothing, he became convinced that no one had been disturbed; and so, creeping out of bed, and lighting his candle by the dying embers in the fireplace, started in afresh. This time he was careful to fasten back the scuttle door, and in doing so discovered that one of the great iron hinges was loose. It was more than two feet long, and with very little difficulty he managed to wrench it off, thinking it might possibly be of service in forcing the door at the bottom. He was careful this time to let the scuttle down quietly after him, thinking it safer to do this than to prop it open.