INTRODUCTION TO FAIRY WORLDS

Many people are willing and even longing to believe in the existence of fairies. The Little People are so bound up with happy memories of childhood that they are recalled with delight as part of a less materialistic world. But, to most of us, they stand as a lost illusion. Not so with everyone, fortunately. For I, amongst others, have seen all kinds of fairies for as long as I can remember, and I still see them daily. By seeing I mean that they are as much outside me as trees and are seen just as objectively.

In the following pages I propose to make these delightful beings as much a reality for you as I can. It is best that I try at the outset to make it clear why I have some special advantages for this enterprise. For one thing, having been born in the East, I have never been discouraged in my observations of fairies, because there are many people there who do see—and very many more who believe in—fairies. For this and other reasons, the not uncommon power among children to see them has in me persisted. Then, I have had the good fortune to fall in this life among family and friends who included several who could also see; and travel has enlarged the list. Therefore, what I have here set down is not the imagination of an isolated child. It is information gathered from many contacts and conversations with fairies all over the world in circumstances perfectly natural, however unusual. One can communicate with these beings in just as definite a manner as we human beings talk to one another—more so, for though the method (which I shall describe shortly) is slightly different, it is more rapid than speech, and, in some ways at least, it is a more accurate exchange.

It is important to mention these things, for once we see the world from the fairy point of view, we get a glimpse of a new universe. So many things that matter very much to us do not seem to matter at all to them. Life and death, for instance, are things that they know all about; to them there is no uncertainty and no tragedy involved. Human beings so often shrink from life and fear death. Fairies actually see the flow of life through all things. We live in a world of form without understanding the life force beneath the forms. To us the loss of the form means the end of the life, but fairies are never deceived in this way. They have a penetrating and powerful lesson for us.

Why do most people not see fairies? They live in the same world as we do, but their bodies are less dense than ours, though only slightly less dense than a tenuous gas. I feel sure that the veil between them and us is exceedingly thin—so thin that nearly anyone could penetrate it with a little effort along the right line. The difficulty is to indicate this line and especially to get others to comprehend it. Most certainly, one strong reason for our not seeing them is due to a difference in point of view. If, therefore, what I write here can help to change points of view toward the fairy world, it will help to make more and more people able to see them.

That, of course, is not all. A special sense must be awakened in people if they are to see fairies. The kind of world fairies live in does not affect our ordinary senses directly. They cannot be touched or felt, yet they can certainly be seen. In fact, ordinary sight is a help in seeing them, but that sense by itself is a little too coarse to catch the light they give off. However, everyone has latent in them a sense finer than sight, and a number of people—a surprisingly large number—have activated it. It is this higher sense perception which is employed in watching the antics of the fairy world. After all, everyone has a wide range of sensory equipment. Touch reveals solids, taste tells us about liquids, and the sense of smell reports on gases. Sight is still more subtle, and the series does not end there. There is a force of special seeing called clairvoyance—clear seeing.

The fact is that there is a real physical basis for clairvoyance, and the faculty is not especially mysterious. The power centers in that tiny organ in the brain called the pituitary gland. The kind of vibrations involved are so subtle that no physical opening in the skin is needed to convey them to the pituitary body, but there is a special spot of sensitiveness just between the eyes above the root of the nose which acts as the external opening for the gland within. It feels as if one were looking from that spot on the forehead, just as it feels in ordinary sight as if one were looking with one's eyes, although we all know we are only looking through them. Perception through that sensitive spot differs from percetion through the conventional sense organs in one way: within there is no nervous structure of the ordinary physical sort. But the perception works just as I have said, nevertheless. When it is necessary to look into that finer world in which the fairies and similar kinds of living beings exist, it is only necessary to concentrate for a moment along that line of sight, and the sense responds much as if the eyes (but in this case a single eye) has opened. I am told (for I do not pretend to be very well informed about biology) that there was once, in primitive animals ancestral to humans, a connection for the pituitary body to the skin and an outer opening for it. The present pituitary body is supposed to be an atrophied remnant from those days. But doctors know that the gland is far from being a useless remnant, for it secretes from both parts of itself some of those bodies which are an invisible part of the blood stream and have such a powerful influence on growth and other functions. So the pituitary gland is certainly very much alive and important in human beings. And it certainly has this use for receiving very fine vibrations from a world of things which are subtler than anything we know. I wish I could make it still clearer, but perhaps that is the best one can do. Maybe in a way it is just as well that this sense is not so readily at hand that people could force it to work. For any such violent effort to move nature ahead of her own time is in many cases fraught with danger. People sometimes try to press themselves forward into a clairvoyant state by using their will, taking drugs, or engaging in other practices. However, if its development is unnatural, clairvoyance is not usually safe. But this does not make it less real than in cases where the power occurs in a perfectly normal way.

The question will be asked why more people cannot see fairies. I suppose part of the answer is that almost nobody tries after they are grown up, or even in childhood for that matter, and the rest of the answer is that the few who know that fairies exist do not always try to see them in the right way. Toward the end of these pages I will have something to say about this, and so the matter may stand for the present. As far as I am concerned I can see fairies. I can...