CHAPTER XIX.
QUESTION.
I am still wondering what it all means.
The other day I asked Tony again. His answer was:
"Some astral force set in motion quite mechanically and affecting all those who are mediumistically inclined."
Dr. Marshall said, when I said I had heard voices:
"Ideas. Something that has happened to you and been lodged in your mind."
And when I said—
"Ideas! Yes, ideas. You all say 'ideas.' But I could not have imagined all these things. They are things that I have not read or been through or imagined."
"No," he said, when I told him I thought it was due to hypnotism or mesmerism. "It is that they are either ideas that have lodged in your own mind—"
"If you believe in re-incarnation it might be my submerged self," I broke in, "but they have never happened to me before and I have never read or imagined such things. If you think it is my subconscious mind how did they get there?"
"Either from your mind or another's," he said, smiling gently. He was the doctor who spoke fearlessly for lunacy reform. "And they have been entangled or knotted there."
All through these experiences, the latter part of them, since Dr. Weston came in, I have felt my mind becoming clearer and clearer. There are many voices now, though far away, and they speak in such natural and earthly tones that I am sure they belong to people.
But here I sit and behind me I imagine underground passages—a kind of maze in which I have been caught. Personalities float past, are pushed into mine, and have to disentangle themselves—with a laugh sometimes—before they can get away.
Sometimes they stay, and then my mind takes on something of their individuality. I get something of their outlook—I feel towards things a little as they do.
Generally they have been humanitarians, warm and kind. Most of them have been gentle and patient in their speech—how gentle it has surprised me, for I have raged and stormed sometimes at the intrusion, and, furious at the feeling that my thoughts and feeling travel through and are read against my will, have in terror tried to shut my mind off and pull the thoughts, critical and unkind, back again.
And once as I sat at a lunch-time meeting in the vestibule of the Town Hall, listening to a lecture against Spiritualism,
