Further Thoughts on Occultism
by Don Stevens
aving read and listened with great interest to various comments on the subject of Occultism, several thoughts come to mind which I feel are important to add to the record at this time. While personal experiences have been recounted in some instances, and also quotes from Meher Baba's Discourses, there remain two principal areas clarified by Baba himself that are essential to balance out the picture Baba gives us. These are His description of the natural development of occult powers in the spiritual ongoing of the aspirant, and secondly, some of His comments on why and how the Perfect Ones also make use of their own powers to help an aspirant at a critical point in his ongoing. Because of my own predominantly negative personal experiences and reactions to the occult, I have on several occasions committed serious errors in presenting and commenting on the subject. I would not like to see similar mis-
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takes made inadvertently by devotees of Baba because of incomplete knowledge of what Baba Himself has put into the record to guide us. As I have just completed a project for a Spanish publisher on Baba's life and philosophy, I have abstracted several portions from a chapter on Occultism which cover portions of the two aspects mentioned above, and offer them for whatever light they may bring. "The spiritual path leading to the emancipation of consciousness brings with it an unfoldment of many psychic capacities which are latent in the human soul. This unfoldment increases the scope and range of human consciousness. These new elements often play an important part in helping or hindering the spiritual emancipation of consciousness. Therefore, the aspirant not only has to understand the value of such experiences as unusual and significant dreams, visions, astral journeys, and glimpses of the subtle world, but he also has to learn to distinguish real occult
experiences from hallucinations and delusions. "Although it is customary to exaggerate the importance of occult experiences, it is not uncommon to doubt their validity, and to treat them with the contempt usually accorded to all forms of mental aberrations and abnormalities. The attitude of unqualified contempt for occult experiences is of course most pronounced in those who are not even abecedarians in direct knowledge of the occult. It hurts the ego to admit and feel that there might be vast unexplored fields of the universe that are accessible to just a limited number of persons, and from which one happens to be excluded. The undeserved contempt that occultism at times receives is almost always the outcome of profound ignorance about its real meaning. This attitude of contempt is of course different from a cautious and critical attitude. Those who have a cautious and critical approach and who are endowed with humility and openness of mind are ever ready to recognize and admit occult phenomena when they occur. "An aspirant is usually helped by a Perfect Master through ordinary means, and the Master prefers to take him veiled along the spiritual path. But when there are specific indications, he may also use occult techniques to help the aspirant. Special types of dreams are among the common methods used for touching the deeper life of the aspirant. Masters have not infrequently first contacted aspirants by appearing in their dreams. Such dreams, however, have to be carefully distinguished from ordinary dreams. In ordinary dreams the subtle body is active in exercising its functions of seeing, tasting, smelling, touching and hearing; but the soul is not using the subtle body with full consciousness. As these experiences in ordinary dreams are received subconsciously, they are in most cases purely subjective, relating to physical activities and concerning the gross world, and are the creations of nascent sanskaras stored in the mind. In some cases, however, a dream that is indistinguishable from ordinary dreams may be the reflection in the subconscious of some objective experience of