(4) Action On The Incarnation Of Life On The Planet

(A) Pre-Conceptual Suggestion Or Self-Suggestion

And if this has been already perceived in tracing spirit-influence on the material and etherial worlds, much more will it be manifest when we come to our next heading, - the influence, namely, of spirits upon the incarnation of life; upon its derivation from its unknown reservoir and its distribution into organic matter upon this planet. What have we noted thus far as to human influence on the incarnation of life, - either under supraliminal or subliminal guidance?

Under supraliminal control we find life incarnated for the most part with no conscious forethought, and when incarnated following certain laws of heredity apparently determined by terrene conditions in the remote past. And when we do set ourselves to influence the processes of incarnation our results appear slight and external. We can perpetuate some spontaneous variation; we can select parents; we can surround with helpful conditions the new-born offspring. But in our attempts at "eugenics" in the higher races - in the human race, - we tinker from without, we cannot mould from within.

And yet, if we stoop low enough, we can mould life more profoundly than we have yet realised. Let us go down to the very dust or spray of animated being, to that myriad life which even on this planet is in a true sense interpenetrant with our own, and we find the multitude of species as flexible beneath our rapid hands as our own ancestors have been beneath the slow choice of Nature and from the dawn of planetary time. Let us get beneath the line of definite birth, among the protean forms of "protoplasmic rejuvenescence," and we can alter almost every apparent character of the micro-organism, - inward to the very mode of reproduction itself. The smaller the parcels in which life descends into generation, the more modifiable is it in the terrene laboratory; the cell is waiting for its cue, and a day of our treatment is for it as a thousand years.

Under subliminal control, on the other hand, it is with the highest creature that we must begin. If we wish not to manipulate from without, but to suggest from within, we must approach the strongly centralised organism through "the ruling part" - - its legitimate and subliminal king.

And in which direction then do we find that the disembodied spirit claims to extend his control over incarnate being? He sometimes claims in the first place, - and it is a claim which we can neither confirm nor refute, - that he can push back pre-natal into pre-conceptual suggestion, and can so influence men and women already on earth, that they will give opportunity for the incarnation of some waiting spirit, who through such special access only can enter on the material world. And he claims too, with Plato, interpreter to men of the spiritual world, - that, as by a pre-conceptual self-suggestion, the descending spirit may choose and determine its earthly lot, somewhat as in the hypnotic trance a man may choose and suggest to himself the sensations and actions of subsequent waking hours. This may not mean more than that, in some few rare cases, a pre-existing spirit may have left the spiritual world to become a "missionary" to our planet.