6. Hauntings-i

It was an archaic soap-stone statuette, some nine inches high, and its owner had dug it up herself on the site of a Burmese city that had fallen in ruin and been swallowed by the jungle. It was placed on the floor in an angle of the stairs, and served as a doorstop upon occasion. I had a flat on the top floor, and had to pass the melancholy little Buddha each time I came in or went out, and to me it seemed a desecration to see the sacred symbol of another faith treated thus. I tried to point this out to her, and asked her how she would feel if she saw a crucifix thus utilised, but without result. Meanwhile the little Buddha sat there patiently, getting the carpet-sweeper pushed in his face and receiving libations of slops. One day, passing upstairs bearing a bunch of flowers, I was prompted to throw before him one of the traditional marigolds of Indian devotion. Immediately I was conscious that a link had been formed between myself and the little statue, and that it was sinister. A night or two afterwards I was returning home rather late, and as I passed the Buddha I had a feeling that there was something behind me, and looking over my shoulder, saw a ball of pale golden light about the size of a football separate itself from the Buddha and come rolling up the stairs after me. Thoroughly alarmed, and disliking this manifestation very much indeed, I immediately made a banishing gesture and the ball of light returned down the stairs and was reabsorbed into the Buddha, who, needless to say, got no more marigolds from me, and received a very wide berth until I left the flat shortly after. The experience was a singularly unpleasant one, and was a sharp lesson to me not to meddle with the sacred objects of another system unless I knew exactly what I was about. I learnt subsequently that some of these statues are consecrated with the blood of a human sacrifice. I do not mean to imply by this that all Buddhist statues have been so treated; such consecrations are, I should imagine, comparatively rare; but I think no one who has a knowledge of the facts will deny that they occur, even as one might occasionally come across a Crucifix which had been used upside down at a Black Mass. It is not every case of psychic disturbance, however, which originates externally. It is a well-known cosmic law that everything moves in circles, and whatever forces we send out, and whatever thought-forms we extrude from our auras, unless absorbed by the object to which they are directed, will return to us in due course. One of the most effective, and also one of the most widely practised methods of occult defence is to refuse to react to an attack, neither accepting nor neutralising the forces projected against one, and thus turning them back on their sender. We must never overlook the fact that a so-called occult attack may be evil thought-forms returning home to roost. There are certain types of insanity in which the lunatic believes himself to be the victim of an attack by invisible beings, who threaten and abuse him and offer base or dangerous insinuations. He will describe his tormentors, or point to their position in the room. A psychic who investigates such a case can very often see the alleged entities just where the lunatic says they are. Nevertheless, the psychologist can come forward and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the so-called “hallucinations” are due to repressed instincts giving rise to dissociated complexes of ideas in the patient’s own subconscious mind. Does this mean that the psychic is mistaken in thinking he perceives an astral entity? In my opinion both psychic and psychologist are right, and their findings are mutually explanatory. What the psychic sees is the dissociated complex extruded from the aura as a thought-form.