Inner Circle Kethra E'DA ,Trance-Lecture by Mark Probert 1-14
Mark Probert (1907-1969)
This article by trance medium/channeler Mark Probert is from the 1963 edition of The Magic Bag: A Manuscript Dictated Clairaudiently to Mark Probert by Members of the Inner Circle.
I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, February 1907, and went to school there as a boy. When I was eleven years old my mother passed away. A few months later, my father entered my younger brother and I in a private school near Hastings, New York. At the age of fifteen I had managed by much effort to get to the sixth grade.
Realizing I was playing a losing game with the "R's," I ran away and joined the Merchant Marines. The next two years of my life were ones of excitement and adventure and, I may add, a great deal of hard work. My last sea voyage was on the S. S. Manchuria out of New York via the Panama Canal to the West Coast. I left the ship when we docked here in San Diego.
It was now February, 1924. I tried my hand at many things through the years, as some men are most likely to do when they do not have the foggiest notion of what to do with their lives. This is called drifting. I thought it would be sort of romantic to be a jockey but it did not take me long to discover I would never make another Earl Sandy. It seemed that the horse and I were never able to make up our minds that, if any races were to be run, jockey and horse must be moving together at the same time and in the same direction. So I gave up this sport of kings and I am sure my horse was as tickled as I was about my quitting.
I then turned my efforts to being a bellman and worked in several of our local hotels. After about five years of hotel work I took dancing lessons and, having a fairly good voice, I went into vaudeville as a song and dance man. I continued in show work until "talking" pictures came in and subsequently killed vaudeville.
In the fall of 1939, I went to work for the Visual Education Department of the San Diego County schools. This particular department was housed in one of the many picturesque stucco buildings in beautiful Balboa Park. On the morning that I was to appear at my new job, I set out an hour earlier than was necessary so that I could wander leisurely through the park and enjoy some of the peace and tranquility that such a place has to offer in the earlier hours of the morning. I was almost at my destination when I came upon a small wooden bridge spanning a narrow canyon. The canyon was a jungle of ferns and palm trees.
As I stepped upon the bridge, I became aware of a young auburn-haired woman standing at about the middle of the bridge. She was leaning against the rails, looking down into the canyon. As I came abreast of her she turned her head and looked at me. Being a friendly sort of person who has never met a stranger, I gave her a smile and a cheerful good morning. We chatted for a few minutes on the enchanting beauty of our surroundings and on how wonderful it was just to be alive! Then she excused herself and went on across the bridge, moving in the same direction in which I would be going shortly.
It never occurred to me that I would ever meet the pretty auburn-haired woman again, but, when I walked into the Visual Education Department a half hour later, there she was sitting behind one of two railed-in desks, and, as luck or Divine Providence would have it,—the reader may take his choice—I was assigned the other one. Her name was Irene and I was to work under her direction.
The next thing I knew she presented me with a stack of picture cards on historical landmarks and told me I was to letter in the names and dates of these places on the backs of the cards. I protested that I was not a letter artist but a painter of pictures. She then assured me that I would get to paint all I wanted later on, but that the cards needed lettering now; so, I went ahead with the project.
I had been working steadily for about fifteen minutes when I felt my attention veering from the cards towards Irene. I turned my head and looked at her, hoping as I did so that she would be looking at me but I felt somewhat let down to discover that her mind was entirely preoccupied with her work. Then, suddenly, I became aware of a shadowy figure of a man standing directly behind Irene's chair and, while he was transparent or "shadowy," he had enough substance to him so that I could see in good detail the ruddy complexion of his face and all the rest of him.
He was looking down on Irene's head with a gentle smile on his lips and what I took to be a great deal of affection in his eyes. He had both of his strong-looking hands resting on Irene's shoulders. Then, even as I watched him, he vanished.
Knowing that I was leaving myself open to possible ridicule, I told her what I had seen and described the man to her. She listened to me with what seemed to be more interest than surprise or doubt. Then she said in a matter of fact way, "That description fits my father who passed away a short time ago." Of course we did not know it then, but this experience was to be the first of a great many steps we would take together into the world of the unknown.
I think that this is as good a place as any to state that the above experience was by no means my first encounter with the world of the psyche. Indeed, as I look back through the years I can recall but few of them in which I did not have at least one experience of a psychic nature. I am now in the process of putting these experiences into another book form which I hope to have published in some near future.
Irene and I were married in Yuma, Arizona, on July 4, 1942. About a month later she informed me one morning that I "talked" a great deal in my sleep. When I asked her what I talked about she said she did not know because I seemed to speak in foreign languages. This information did not surprise me because I had been accused of it several times in past years, once by a local physician and surgeon who had spent many years in India. He had authored several books on Hindu philosophy. The incident occurred in February of 1935. The doctor, upon learning that I could operate a typewriter, had asked me if I would put a hand-written manuscript he had but recently completed into typewritten form. After I warned him that I was by no means a professional typist but would be pleased to type it, he suggested that we go to his cabin in the mountains.
It was quite cold when we arrived at the cabin so the doctor set a fire going in the fireplace, then he went and stretched himself out on a couch and I sat down and started to work on his manuscript. The subject matter dealt with the Yoga practice of rhythmic breathing. I had been working about two hours when the doctor suggested that I rest a while. Having nothing else to do I got up and going over to the fireplace, sat down in a large fan-back wicker chair and almost promptly fell asleep.
The next thing I knew the doctor was shaking me awake and talking to me in a very strange tongue. On assuring him that I had no understanding of the language he was speaking, he informed me it was a Hindustani dialect and went on to say I had been talking it quite fluently in my sleep and had been giving him some constructive remarks on his manuscript. Anyway, to shorten a very lengthy story, my "sleep talking" went on for about ten to fifteen minutes almost every night for the next three years, but I could find no one who could shed any light on its cause or purpose.
Then we met a man by the name of N. Meade Layne who had an excellent academic background. He had been a teacher at the University of Southern California and several other universities and had been a department head at Wesleyan, Illinois, and at Southern College, Florida. Quite apart from his academic training, he had considerable interest and knowledge in the fields of metaphysical and occult laws.
I spent two hours with Mr. Layne, in which time he quizzed me on a number of things including the state of my physical and emotional health. Then he asked me if I had ever had any experiences with psychic phenomena. I told him I had and related a number of them to him. He listened with what I thought was a great deal of patience and then said, "You may be what is called a trance medium. Your statement that you talk in foreign languages in your sleep seems to indicate that discarnate beings may be taking control of you during your sleeping hours." Mr. Layne suggested he would be glad to hold some experimental seances with Irene and me if we so desired. So it was that we held our first seance in September of 1945. The first thing Mr. Layne did when he got to our home was to have me sit at a small card table then, placing Irene on the right of me, he sat facing me and at the same time he turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness.
After a few moments of silence Mr. Layne said, "All we can do now is to relax ourselves and wait; then, providing the conditions in the room are suitable to the 'beings' on the other side of life, they may give us some sign of recognition." Then he said to me, "Mark, if your sleep talking is actually caused by discarnate personalities, it is likely they will try to entrance you."
The idea of suddenly losing consciousness was a little unnerving and I was about to express my feelings of uneasiness when I was struck with a wave of dizziness that nearly rolled me off my chair. Then the dizzy spell passed, followed by what I can only describe as elation. But what tremendous elation it was! Undulating waves of chills ran up my body from ankle to solar plexus to head. But they were not the kind of chills one experiences from being cold but rather like those we get when listening to exceptionally beautiful music or while observing an unusual sunset or sunrise.
How long I stayed in this state of ecstasy I do not know, but when it left me and I was awake again, Mr. Layne and Irene told me I had been in what seemed to be a deep state of trance for approximately forty-five minutes and that a voice, quite unlike my own, had spoken to them.
The voice had introduced itself by the name of Martin Latamore Lingford. He said he had been a showman and that he had lived in New York some forty years ago. Then he went on to say that there were fifteen others beside himself who had formed a band around me on the inner planes and that each one of them in turn would come and introduce himself as time went on. He said that they had spent many years conditioning my brain and body so they could use me to communicate through with the least possible harm to my physical and mental self.
It seems then that Irene asked the personality called "Lingford" if my sleep talking (always in foreign tongues) was part of the "conditioning" program, to which he replied that it was. "However," he continued, "none of the members of the group to which I belong have spoken through him during his hours of sleep but we have caused others to work through his brain and body as experimental units, while we stood by making careful observation on the effects they made on your husband's general physical and mental make-up."
When Irene asked why they had let only foreign speaking persons use me, Lingford said, "We were not ready for you to know what was going on, and the only way we could avoid your knowing and still continue the experiments was to use those who had no knowledge of the English language, and as neither you nor Mark comprehend any of the foreign tongues it made the situation, while baffling to you, truly ideal for us!" After this statement, Lingford said good night and left, and I became awake.
For almost three years thereafter, we held private seances once a week with Mr. Layne and occasionally a few of our close friends were invited in. By the end of the first year, almost all of the members of the group on the "Inner Planes" that Lingford had mentioned at the opening session had come through and introduced themselves, giving brief accounts as to who and what they had been on earth, but most important of all, they gave us some detailed information regarding the nature of the work which they hoped to do through me during the coming years.
They had not only chosen Irene to be my wife but to be their personal guide and assistant in the work. (And I'd like to say here that she has been much more than that, both to the wonderful beings we have learned to call our "teachers" and to myself through the fifteen years that this work has been in progress.)
They also instructed us that the work was to be almost entirely of an educational nature and that we must not expect much from them in the way of personal matters.
Not having a tape recorder in the early years of the work, a good friend of ours by the name of Mrs. Harriet Foster who was an expert stenographer attended the seances and recorded verbatim the talks given by the "Teachers" in shorthand. Later, Mr. Layne published these in a little booklet he called the "Round Robin," and then, at a later time they were printed up in separate booklets and called "The Mark Probert Seance Reports." These writings went out to hundreds and thousands of people in the United States and many other parts of the world.
In order to further the work, the teachers suggested that the time had come to open the meetings to all those who desired to attend. Observing the growing interest in the type of work they were endeavoring to do, the members of the Inner Circle (the new name the Teachers chose for their group) also suggested we start taking the work to the people in the form of lecture tours. It was at this time that they decided to dictate a book to me clairaudiently. They entitled the book The Magic Bag. This title is explained elsewhere in these pages by the Teacher Lao-Tse.
It took five years for the Inner Circle to dictate the contents of The Magic Bag to me, but in actual writing time I am sure it was much less than that, for the dictation was given periodically.
Then one night in 1947, the year they started to dictate the book to me, five of my Teachers suddenly appeared in the living room of my apartment. That I was "seeing" them clairvoyantly did nothing to lessen my sense of fright, and had they not somehow taken a hold on me mentally I would have bolted out my front door and perhaps without opening it! Anyway they quieted me down by assuring me that they were some of the members of the Inner Circle and so had no reason to fear them. Then they said that their only purpose in showing themselves to me was to have me paint portraits of them.
I made pencil sketches of the five and they left, saying they would return as time permitted to have me finish the portraits in oils. Some of these portraits have been photographed and incorporated in The Magic Bag along with some others that I painted at a later date.
In order to publish and disseminate the teachings of the Inner Circle, we formed an organization called the "Kethra E'Da Foundation." Kethra E'Da means "Teachers of Light." The organization was founded July 6, 1956, and is a non-profit educational foundation.
I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, February 1907, and went to school there as a boy. When I was eleven years old my mother passed away. A few months later, my father entered my younger brother and I in a private school near Hastings, New York. At the age of fifteen I had managed by much effort to get to the sixth grade.
Realizing I was playing a losing game with the "R's," I ran away and joined the Merchant Marines. The next two years of my life were ones of excitement and adventure and, I may add, a great deal of hard work. My last sea voyage was on the S. S. Manchuria out of New York via the Panama Canal to the West Coast. I left the ship when we docked here in San Diego.
It was now February, 1924. I tried my hand at many things through the years, as some men are most likely to do when they do not have the foggiest notion of what to do with their lives. This is called drifting. I thought it would be sort of romantic to be a jockey but it did not take me long to discover I would never make another Earl Sandy. It seemed that the horse and I were never able to make up our minds that, if any races were to be run, jockey and horse must be moving together at the same time and in the same direction. So I gave up this sport of kings and I am sure my horse was as tickled as I was about my quitting.
I then turned my efforts to being a bellman and worked in several of our local hotels. After about five years of hotel work I took dancing lessons and, having a fairly good voice, I went into vaudeville as a song and dance man. I continued in show work until "talking" pictures came in and subsequently killed vaudeville.
In the fall of 1939, I went to work for the Visual Education Department of the San Diego County schools. This particular department was housed in one of the many picturesque stucco buildings in beautiful Balboa Park. On the morning that I was to appear at my new job, I set out an hour earlier than was necessary so that I could wander leisurely through the park and enjoy some of the peace and tranquility that such a place has to offer in the earlier hours of the morning. I was almost at my destination when I came upon a small wooden bridge spanning a narrow canyon. The canyon was a jungle of ferns and palm trees.
As I stepped upon the bridge, I became aware of a young auburn-haired woman standing at about the middle of the bridge. She was leaning against the rails, looking down into the canyon. As I came abreast of her she turned her head and looked at me. Being a friendly sort of person who has never met a stranger, I gave her a smile and a cheerful good morning. We chatted for a few minutes on the enchanting beauty of our surroundings and on how wonderful it was just to be alive! Then she excused herself and went on across the bridge, moving in the same direction in which I would be going shortly.
It never occurred to me that I would ever meet the pretty auburn-haired woman again, but, when I walked into the Visual Education Department a half hour later, there she was sitting behind one of two railed-in desks, and, as luck or Divine Providence would have it,—the reader may take his choice—I was assigned the other one. Her name was Irene and I was to work under her direction.
The next thing I knew she presented me with a stack of picture cards on historical landmarks and told me I was to letter in the names and dates of these places on the backs of the cards. I protested that I was not a letter artist but a painter of pictures. She then assured me that I would get to paint all I wanted later on, but that the cards needed lettering now; so, I went ahead with the project.
I had been working steadily for about fifteen minutes when I felt my attention veering from the cards towards Irene. I turned my head and looked at her, hoping as I did so that she would be looking at me but I felt somewhat let down to discover that her mind was entirely preoccupied with her work. Then, suddenly, I became aware of a shadowy figure of a man standing directly behind Irene's chair and, while he was transparent or "shadowy," he had enough substance to him so that I could see in good detail the ruddy complexion of his face and all the rest of him.
He was looking down on Irene's head with a gentle smile on his lips and what I took to be a great deal of affection in his eyes. He had both of his strong-looking hands resting on Irene's shoulders. Then, even as I watched him, he vanished.
Knowing that I was leaving myself open to possible ridicule, I told her what I had seen and described the man to her. She listened to me with what seemed to be more interest than surprise or doubt. Then she said in a matter of fact way, "That description fits my father who passed away a short time ago." Of course we did not know it then, but this experience was to be the first of a great many steps we would take together into the world of the unknown.
I think that this is as good a place as any to state that the above experience was by no means my first encounter with the world of the psyche. Indeed, as I look back through the years I can recall but few of them in which I did not have at least one experience of a psychic nature. I am now in the process of putting these experiences into another book form which I hope to have published in some near future.
Irene and I were married in Yuma, Arizona, on July 4, 1942. About a month later she informed me one morning that I "talked" a great deal in my sleep. When I asked her what I talked about she said she did not know because I seemed to speak in foreign languages. This information did not surprise me because I had been accused of it several times in past years, once by a local physician and surgeon who had spent many years in India. He had authored several books on Hindu philosophy. The incident occurred in February of 1935. The doctor, upon learning that I could operate a typewriter, had asked me if I would put a hand-written manuscript he had but recently completed into typewritten form. After I warned him that I was by no means a professional typist but would be pleased to type it, he suggested that we go to his cabin in the mountains.
It was quite cold when we arrived at the cabin so the doctor set a fire going in the fireplace, then he went and stretched himself out on a couch and I sat down and started to work on his manuscript. The subject matter dealt with the Yoga practice of rhythmic breathing. I had been working about two hours when the doctor suggested that I rest a while. Having nothing else to do I got up and going over to the fireplace, sat down in a large fan-back wicker chair and almost promptly fell asleep.
The next thing I knew the doctor was shaking me awake and talking to me in a very strange tongue. On assuring him that I had no understanding of the language he was speaking, he informed me it was a Hindustani dialect and went on to say I had been talking it quite fluently in my sleep and had been giving him some constructive remarks on his manuscript. Anyway, to shorten a very lengthy story, my "sleep talking" went on for about ten to fifteen minutes almost every night for the next three years, but I could find no one who could shed any light on its cause or purpose.
Then we met a man by the name of N. Meade Layne who had an excellent academic background. He had been a teacher at the University of Southern California and several other universities and had been a department head at Wesleyan, Illinois, and at Southern College, Florida. Quite apart from his academic training, he had considerable interest and knowledge in the fields of metaphysical and occult laws.
I spent two hours with Mr. Layne, in which time he quizzed me on a number of things including the state of my physical and emotional health. Then he asked me if I had ever had any experiences with psychic phenomena. I told him I had and related a number of them to him. He listened with what I thought was a great deal of patience and then said, "You may be what is called a trance medium. Your statement that you talk in foreign languages in your sleep seems to indicate that discarnate beings may be taking control of you during your sleeping hours." Mr. Layne suggested he would be glad to hold some experimental seances with Irene and me if we so desired. So it was that we held our first seance in September of 1945. The first thing Mr. Layne did when he got to our home was to have me sit at a small card table then, placing Irene on the right of me, he sat facing me and at the same time he turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness.
After a few moments of silence Mr. Layne said, "All we can do now is to relax ourselves and wait; then, providing the conditions in the room are suitable to the 'beings' on the other side of life, they may give us some sign of recognition." Then he said to me, "Mark, if your sleep talking is actually caused by discarnate personalities, it is likely they will try to entrance you."
The idea of suddenly losing consciousness was a little unnerving and I was about to express my feelings of uneasiness when I was struck with a wave of dizziness that nearly rolled me off my chair. Then the dizzy spell passed, followed by what I can only describe as elation. But what tremendous elation it was! Undulating waves of chills ran up my body from ankle to solar plexus to head. But they were not the kind of chills one experiences from being cold but rather like those we get when listening to exceptionally beautiful music or while observing an unusual sunset or sunrise.
How long I stayed in this state of ecstasy I do not know, but when it left me and I was awake again, Mr. Layne and Irene told me I had been in what seemed to be a deep state of trance for approximately forty-five minutes and that a voice, quite unlike my own, had spoken to them.
The voice had introduced itself by the name of Martin Latamore Lingford. He said he had been a showman and that he had lived in New York some forty years ago. Then he went on to say that there were fifteen others beside himself who had formed a band around me on the inner planes and that each one of them in turn would come and introduce himself as time went on. He said that they had spent many years conditioning my brain and body so they could use me to communicate through with the least possible harm to my physical and mental self.
It seems then that Irene asked the personality called "Lingford" if my sleep talking (always in foreign tongues) was part of the "conditioning" program, to which he replied that it was. "However," he continued, "none of the members of the group to which I belong have spoken through him during his hours of sleep but we have caused others to work through his brain and body as experimental units, while we stood by making careful observation on the effects they made on your husband's general physical and mental make-up."
When Irene asked why they had let only foreign speaking persons use me, Lingford said, "We were not ready for you to know what was going on, and the only way we could avoid your knowing and still continue the experiments was to use those who had no knowledge of the English language, and as neither you nor Mark comprehend any of the foreign tongues it made the situation, while baffling to you, truly ideal for us!" After this statement, Lingford said good night and left, and I became awake.
For almost three years thereafter, we held private seances once a week with Mr. Layne and occasionally a few of our close friends were invited in. By the end of the first year, almost all of the members of the group on the "Inner Planes" that Lingford had mentioned at the opening session had come through and introduced themselves, giving brief accounts as to who and what they had been on earth, but most important of all, they gave us some detailed information regarding the nature of the work which they hoped to do through me during the coming years.
They had not only chosen Irene to be my wife but to be their personal guide and assistant in the work. (And I'd like to say here that she has been much more than that, both to the wonderful beings we have learned to call our "teachers" and to myself through the fifteen years that this work has been in progress.)
They also instructed us that the work was to be almost entirely of an educational nature and that we must not expect much from them in the way of personal matters.
Not having a tape recorder in the early years of the work, a good friend of ours by the name of Mrs. Harriet Foster who was an expert stenographer attended the seances and recorded verbatim the talks given by the "Teachers" in shorthand. Later, Mr. Layne published these in a little booklet he called the "Round Robin," and then, at a later time they were printed up in separate booklets and called "The Mark Probert Seance Reports." These writings went out to hundreds and thousands of people in the United States and many other parts of the world.
In order to further the work, the teachers suggested that the time had come to open the meetings to all those who desired to attend. Observing the growing interest in the type of work they were endeavoring to do, the members of the Inner Circle (the new name the Teachers chose for their group) also suggested we start taking the work to the people in the form of lecture tours. It was at this time that they decided to dictate a book to me clairaudiently. They entitled the book The Magic Bag. This title is explained elsewhere in these pages by the Teacher Lao-Tse.
It took five years for the Inner Circle to dictate the contents of The Magic Bag to me, but in actual writing time I am sure it was much less than that, for the dictation was given periodically.
Then one night in 1947, the year they started to dictate the book to me, five of my Teachers suddenly appeared in the living room of my apartment. That I was "seeing" them clairvoyantly did nothing to lessen my sense of fright, and had they not somehow taken a hold on me mentally I would have bolted out my front door and perhaps without opening it! Anyway they quieted me down by assuring me that they were some of the members of the Inner Circle and so had no reason to fear them. Then they said that their only purpose in showing themselves to me was to have me paint portraits of them.
I made pencil sketches of the five and they left, saying they would return as time permitted to have me finish the portraits in oils. Some of these portraits have been photographed and incorporated in The Magic Bag along with some others that I painted at a later date.
In order to publish and disseminate the teachings of the Inner Circle, we formed an organization called the "Kethra E'Da Foundation." Kethra E'Da means "Teachers of Light." The organization was founded July 6, 1956, and is a non-profit educational foundation.
