Science fiction is an oxymoron. Science is about facts, and fiction is a simulation of fact, at best. Both seek meaning but, ironically, fiction sometimes seems to disclose more significant meaning than science. With a few exceptions, this writer is not a fan of science fiction. Philip K. Dick is one exception. He probes fundamental, existential, questions excellently. Bulwer-Lytton, beside writing the monumental occult novels, Zanoni and A Strange Story, also wrote an interesting science fiction novella called The Coming Race. Max Heindel liked this book so much that he titled one of the Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures after it, The story describes future, subterranean, humans, the Vril-ya. Each of them has the power of Vril. With this power, anyone can destroy the body of anyone else, even a child can wipe out an entire city. Due to this power, there is a general peace, because everyone must respect everyone else. It is a vision of the future that the NRA would love, except for the fact that the Vril-ya civilization has high moral standards which are not consistent with those of many in the NRA. The Coming Race book does not solve the Manachean problem of how to deal with evil in the future, which is mentioned in the The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. In the future, as seen by the Manacheans, evil people will be openly evil, and good people will be so good that they will not harm them or deny them freedom—a difficult problem, indeed. Nonetheless, The Coming Race is futuristic and it describes many believable human advancements and new values.

Many science fiction writers do not do well at describing the future. They do not anticipate new, unprecedented things. Instead, they offer exaggerated, extrapolations of the present, as the future. H. G. Wells wrote science fiction novels of this ilk. His most famous novel is The Time Machine, a term he coined for all time. In it, the protagonist builds a machine for traveling into the past or the future. The “time traveler” goes to a distant future (802,701 A.D.) where he finds dystopian conditions. He has all sorts of adventures— Wells was more of an adventure writer than a science fiction writer—and escapes to a even more distant future (approximately 36 million years ahead) where there are even more dismal conditions because industry, and flawed humanity, have made Earth conditions inhospitable for most living things. He keeps leaping forward until a time when Earth has frozen over and there is no life. He returns home in time to relate the adventure at a dinner party. The book was intended to warn humanity about the dangers of misused industry and technology, its success is questionable.

It is another Wells novel that is the departure point for this essay, The Invisible Man. This story begins when a curiously over-dressed man arrives by carriage at a boarding house in a remote British village. He wears gloves and even a scarf so his face cannot be seen. He pays in advance and takes a suite of rooms for weeks ahead. In his considerable luggage there are trunks of scientific equipment and chemicals. He is never seen but he can be heard working with the equipment. He has his meals left for him at the door, and he doesn’t go out. It turns out that he is invisible. He has discovered a means, using chemistry and physics, to reflect light around his body, rendering it invisible to the eye. As of this writing, this feat has proven to be impossible to do in this chemical world, though the Defense Department has been trying for many years. Physical invisibility is possible using the ethers. There is the famous case, reported by Philostratus, of Apollonius of Tyana, the neo-Pythagorean, a man who has been mistakenly thought to be the AntiChrist. At nearly 80 years of age, Apollonius traveled to Rome to confront the Emperor Domitian about his mistreatment of the people. He was immediately arrested and charged with sorcery, even though he lived by the highest of Pythagorean moral standards. The Emperor wanted to see him personally, because he was treated with such awe and reverence by the populace. He was removed from his dungeon and was brought before the Emperor for questioning. After questioning, during which he gave only lofty answers, the Emperor tells Apollonius that he is to be detained for more questioning. Apollonius expresses his regrets at not being able to remain. He faces the Emperor, draws his cloak around him, and says “You can detain my body but not my soul and, I will add, not even my body.” Whereupon he disappears in a flash of light. This was done before several witnesses. An hour later he was seen among his friends outside of the city. Of course, this is questioned by skeptical scholars. Modern initiates say it is possible.

The reason for the continuing research of the invisible man, is that he has not yet learned to reverse his invisibility. He is desperate. He is running out of money and there are rumors about him. Though an otherwise decent man, he has to resort to crime to stay alive. He ventures out from time to time, naked of course, and begins stealing. His problems mount, and soon rumor has it that he is invisible. The town is up in arms. A manhunt begins. By the effects of his actions, his location can be determined, and, eventually, he is trapped in a cul-de-sac where he is killed. After death his body becomes visible.

This is an essay about the advantage and power of invisibility. Though it was certainly not intended by the author, the story of The Invisible Man is a partial analog for a situation every mystical aspirant must face. All of us must confront, and struggle with, an invisible adversary. As well as being invisible, our adversary is within, making it doubly difficult for beings whose consciousness is focussed almost exclusively without. The inner adversary has an enormous advantage in being invisible.

There are parallels between the Invisible Man and the inner adversary. At one time the inner adversary was a friend and benefactor. It was created to protect us when the hierarchies could no longer, ethically do so. It is still benign to some extent. At first, it was law abiding, like the Invisible Man, before he became desperate. Our problems began with the “fall.” We fell when, we put the divine creative force (which is expressed in sexual intercourse) into use to procreate, before we knew how to use it in harmony with the laws of nature. By doing this, we introduced discord into the cosmos. Our action was a declaration of divinity, because the sexual energy is a divine, creative, energy. All creation, including procreation, is an act of freedom, a greater freedom than the freedom of choice. Freedom is a matter of the highest spiritual ethics. For example, the Invisible Helpers will never use the divine creative force to heal without permission, because the freedom of the patient is a major consideration. After the fall, the divine hierarchies could no longer directly, and completely, control our evolutionary experiences. They could only work with permission, and they had to do so indirectly. The application of astrological influences—the stars impel but do not compel—are a good example of indirect application. We had taken bold action, but we were still ignorant, weak, and vulnerable. We needed help but it was not immediately possible to receive it until, through experience, we developed a division of the desire body between its higher and lower parts—the “knowledge of good and evil.” A “lower will” or “animal soul” was developed, with divine help, in the higher part of the stratified desire body. Its function was to protect the concrete personality until the threefold spirit, the true Self, could enter its vehicles, and control them from within. The “animal soul” did its job splendidly. Though benign, it could be violent when necessary, but when it was, it was with the impersonal innocence we see in animal violence today. Over time the animal soul “coalesced” with the mind. It was also purloined by the same beings that tempted us at the fall. Through its coalescence with the concrete mind, it took on a reflection of the Self. It became a pseudo-self or lower ego, with which we now struggle—the lower voice in the inner argument. The pseudo-self cannot think, which is a divine prerogative of the true Self, but it has a sly cunning. In that cunning it knows that it has an advantage in invisibility. It has set up shop for itself, and it is a marvelous imitator. If we hear the “still small voice” using exactly the same words twice, the second instance might be a counterfeit, suggesting something nefarious. To grow spiritually, we must become sensitive to, and discriminating of, progressively more subtle differences between good and evil.

One of our duties in the evolutionary creation is to completely enter all of our vehicles of consciousness, and serve by spiritualizing matter through them, i.e., by compounding soul out of experience. To do this, we must overcome the pseudo-self, which has its own agenda. We must tame it. It must become obedient, which we were not, at the time of the fall. It is to become a junior partner in a divine, inner, dialog. The taming is not easy. Over time, the function of the pseudo-self has evolved to become an outright adversary of the true Self. Max Heindel called it a “worth adversary” which it certainly is. It requires firm, steady, and consistent, self-application to be brought, and kept, under control, and transformed. We must do more than only talk or write about the inner struggle, we must act. If we do not act, we run the risk of inflating the strength of the inner adversary with our empty thoughts and words.

Most of us have been aware of the advantage in invisibility since childhood, when we tried to strike a piñata, or played Blind Man’s Buff. When the blindfold came off, everything was clear and simple; living the spiritual life, with or without clairvoyance, is not so simple. The advantage of the inner adversary isn’t only because it cannot be seen. Much of its advantage lies in our unconsciousness. Our sphere of consciousness is small. We forget some things, and are not aware of others, even though we can see them. Some of the forgetting is intentional. We don’t want to remember some things, especially if they are unpleasant things about our attitudes and behavior. This psychological resistance of the inner adversary, is one of the reasons retrospection can be so difficult. Under the influence of the pseudo-self that projects into our sphere of consciousness, we like to think of ourselves as fine people, even though there is no evidence to support this self-conceit. Some of our thoughts and desires indicate that we are not as nice as we pretend to be. We seem to want to live by the old adage “out of sight, out of mind.” If we want to expand our consciousness, as we say we do, we must bring to consciousness many things we have stuffed away into unconsciousness. Enlarging the sphere of consciousness means we must face ourselves in both our higher and lower natures—both exist in the inner worlds we ardently seek to enter. It is not a simple as taking off a blindfold. There is resistance. Much of the resistance is subtle, which means we must become subtle. Subtle things have more power than gross things.

Soul growth is a matter of slow, arduous self-application, but if we really want it, we can attain it. The words “really want it”, are important; soul growth is not for the half-hearted. We must “really want” the truth about our thoughts and desires. We need to see them for what they are, in our retrospections. They will not present themselves to us unless we command them . The inner adversary might even chose sleep, over being exposed and losing its advantage in retrospection. If we don’t expose and transform these thoughts and desires, they will be glossed over and forgotten until they influence us again. They will not die. Our thoughts and desires are our creations. They are formed, and their forms are elementals that live on. They must be transformed. Trying to destroy them proves to be futile, and only creates now ones.

We have excellent tools to accomplish this transformation process. They are the spiritual exercises given to us by Max Heindel from the Elder Brothers. Retrospection is an especially good instrument for transformation and redemption. If we are sincere about retrospection, we recall more than the events of the day. We call back things we tried to bury, sometimes even things from the distant past.

The effects of retrospection are not always experienced during the performance of the exercise. Retrospection shakes things loose that are in need of redemption, and they come to consciousness at other times. Sometimes they pop up unexpectedly. They almost always appear when the egotistical lower nature lets its guard down, i.e., when psychological, self-protective vigilance is lowered. For example, one may be trying to pray, or trying to solve a delicate issue, when unredeemed thoughts come to consciousness. They distract us. The distraction has a quality similar to the temptation which fostered the very thing we are trying to redeem. There is then, a tendency to be annoyed, especially if one is trying to keep one’s consciousness in lofty prayer. Following the tendency to annoyance is a mistake. Instead of being annoyed, we should be grateful, because we are being presented with the things most ripe for transmutation.

If we are sincere and persistent in retrospection, things about ourselves become clearer. If we work really hard, the clarity becomes clairvoyance—the word clairvoyance literally means clear seeing. With clairvoyance, it would seem the advantage of invisibility would be removed, it isn’t. Max Heindel tells us, for instance, that if we could see the effects of our thoughts in the desire world, we would soon change our thinking. While that is true, it is not the whole truth. In fact, clairvoyance might increase our problems for a while. The desire world is rife with illusion, more elusive than the illusions (like optical illusions) of the outer world. We are told even puny elementals can make themselves appear as menacing ogres to neophytes. This is an example of another level of invisibility behind the forms of the desire world which now invisible to us.

In Greek mythology when heroes needed prophetic information, they often sought help from Proteus, a sea and river god. Being the first born of Poseidon, the Greek Neptune, he had magical powers. He was wily, elusive and disinclined to surrender prophetic wisdom, as might be expected from a child of Neptune. Those who would benefit from him were advised to catch him during his afternoon nap. Taking him in hand was only the beginning of the quest. While holding him, he would be transforming himself to escape the hero’s grip. He might appear as a poisonous serpent, and then as a violent animal, and sometimes even as fire, and so on. If the hero held him firmly and was not fooled by the illusions, he would be seen in his true nature, and was obliged to share what he could. This story is almost identical to advice given to neophyte clairvoyants. They are advised to disregard illusions and hold their attention on the object of their vision, until they come to its true inner meaning. The meaning is invisible even to the inner eye, and open only to the intuition. Intuitive insight is the difference between clairvoyance and spiritual sight. Benign invisibility.

There is more to invisibility, than mere advantage. There is power. As children of fire we were drawn to the mysteries in search of meaning. We wanted to know the why of everything. If we are true to ourselves, we continue to so seek. We do not sink into the slumber of contentment with our current knowledge. The invisibility of the unknown, has a powerful effect on our curiosity. The mystery novel industry takes in more than 700 million dollars per year. Moreover, few indeed, are those who can resist the drawing power of a secret. The unknown is “the eternal feminine which draws us on high”, with which Goethe ends his masterpiece, Faust.

The power of invisibility is more than an attractive power. There is also a commanding power. From both spiritual and material science we learn that the more subtle a force is, the more powerful it is. As one passes inward and upward through the spiritual worlds, each new world is more subtle and invisible, than it predecessor, and it is also more powerful. Things in the chemical world are driven by the energy in the ethers. The ethers are motivated and activated from the desire world, thought can control desire, and so on. Ultimately, we eventually reach Divine Spirit and its personification in the Father. Both the Bible, and Rosicrucian philosophy, teach that “no man hath seen God (the Father) at any time.” Nonetheless, the ultimate power of creation and dissolution is in the hands of the Divine Spirit and the Father. Trinitarian thinking is not exclusive to Judeo-Christian thinking. It was known to ancient Greek mystics also. They even saw qualities of the creation in the godhead, with its attributes of truth, beauty and goodness. Truth was the property of the Third in the trinity, just as it is in Christ’s description in John 16:13. Beauty was of the second attribute, the love-wisdom of Life Spirit. Goodness was the property of the first attribute. We are promised that if we align our microcosmic threefold spirit, with that of the macrocosm, the Godhead, all of its power is available to us. “Ask whatsoever ye shall in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” There are no limits in that promise except our ability to ask. Nowadays, these promises have become perverted into profanities such “for the Christ’s sake” or “for goodness sake” which are execrations. However, these perversions don’t take away anything from the power of these promises, any more than Proteus changing is appearance into a serpent, changes his character. Invisible power is there for the asking, in His name.