“‘By intensifying the sleep,’ adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, ’I induce the manifestations of a living Philomene.  She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly and distinctly.  She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet.  She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomene Cherpigny; her grandfather on the mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived in Ozan.  In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.’”

Before her incarnation, Philomene had been a little girl who died in infancy.  Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in the darkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no time to do wrong.  Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.  He obtained analogous and even more surprising results with other subjects.

Maeterlinck’s comments upon all this are of negligible value.  He pays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation.  “There was never a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and probable creed,” he says:  yet for all that, it is clear that he has not been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching.

Colonel de Rochas’ success, and that of all other experimenters along these lines, is due to their unconscious following of the Eastern method.  He himself says that he “avoided everything that should put the subject on a definite tack,”—­that is, he refrained from voluntary suggestion.

Having referred so frequently and so familiarly to the Eastern belief in reincarnation, and hinted at a more solid foundation for that belief than the single series of experiments above referred to, it would be unfair to the reader not to gratify his curiosity more fully in regard to these matters.  In the light of our hypothesis they take on an importance which justifies their further consideration here.

VIII THE EASTERN TEACHING

ORIENTAL PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Western physical science, pursued with ardor and devotion for the past hundred years, has attained to a control over physical phenomena little short of magical, but in our understanding and mastery of subjective phenomena we are far behind those Eastern peoples who have made these matters the subject of study and experiment for thousands of years.  The informed Hindu, rightly or wrongly, regards the Western practice of hypnotism, both in its methods and in its results, with mingled horror and contempt.  To him it is not different from Black Magic, pernicious to operator and subject alike, since it involves an unwarrantable tyranny of the will on the part of the operator, and a dangerous submission to the obsession of an invading will on the part of the subject.  Eastern hypnotism—­at its highest and best—­is profoundly different from Western, in that the sanctity of the individual is respected.  Its aim is not to enslave the will, but temporarily to emancipate consciousness, under favorable circumstances, from its physical limitation.