To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

124 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
letter to the American theosophists written in April 1891,
shortly before her death, she urged them to ‘‘watch therefore
carefully this development, inevitable in your race and
evolution-period, so that it may finally work for good and
not for evil.’’ Her warning is explicit:
Psychism, with all its allurements and all its dangers, is necessarily
developing among you, and you must beware lest the
Psychic outruns the Manasic [mental] and Spiritual development.
Psychic capacities held perfectly under control,
checked and directed by the Manasic principle, are valuable
aids in development. But these capacities running riot, controlling
instead of controlled, using instead of being used,
lead the Student into the most dangerous delusions and the
certainty of moral destruction. — Ibid., p. 35
Notable, however, is the di¤erence in emphasis in psychic
interest today from what it was during the closing
decades of the nineteenth century. At that time — leaving
aside those who, as in all eras, are caught by the glamour of
phenomena — only a relatively few of the more intrepid
minds were attracted, for the scientific and cultured world
for the most part frowned upon such doings. In the twentieth
century, and particularly in its last decades, the potential
of human consciousness specifically and paranormal
phenomena in general have been subjected to controlled
testing. Experimentation in these and allied areas is being
conducted by neuroscientists and others in an e¤ort to
penetrate the inner layers of human consciousness. At the
same time, some very dangerous research is going on. We
have only to glance at current ‘‘metaphysical’’ magazines to