The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul Part 3

It all goes deeper than the _Mind_; the Soul, the Individual Intelligence is dethroned in his own Kingdom; Body, Mind, and Soul are out of joint.

Not only does this condition exist without being recognized; not only just here lies the whole secret and field of _Education_ in child, woman and man, but so ignorant are thousands as to these patent facts and basic principles, that they covet and strive after this confusion, this devolution, in the vain search for knowledge, light, and truth.

These are the office, the function and the result to the subject (or victim) of Mediums.h.i.+p and Hypnotism. They yield the Will, the mastery of their own house, to another.

The servants may be tractable for a while, but an _alien_ is seated upon the throne, and the Master is no longer King in his own realm.

Others may indeed learn something from his undoing, from the crimes committed upon him, just as we learn from criminals how we _ought not_ to live.

Whether ignorantly, voluntarily, by persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of design, to their own undoing.

These psychical experiences have been found in all ages and among every people of whom we have any valid history, from the red Indians of the North to the Voodoos of Africa, and from the Hill Tribes of India to the earliest Scandinavian Tribes and the islands of the sea.

As civilizations advanced, the more intelligent and unscrupulous individuals, ambitious of knowledge or power, regardless of the rights or well-being of others, and discovering these powers, exercised them for their own aggrandizement. This has been known through the ages as _Black Magic_, and is laughed at to-day by so-called "Scientists" as "nothing but the fears, credulity, and superst.i.tions of the ignorant mult.i.tude." This was the core of Egyptian Paganism, and is the very genius of Clericalism to-day--the domination of the Individual Will, through superst.i.tion and fear.

Owing to seismic and cataclysmic shocks, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and great epidemics of disease, whole peoples have been dominated by fear or frenzied by superst.i.tious dread, so that whole villages and cities became literally "mad-houses," and were often depopulated.

Read the story of "Peter, the Hermit," and "The Crusades," the "Black Death," the "Great Plague" that swept over Europe in the Thirteenth century; or that of the "Flagellants," and the "Dancing Mania," where whole villages became "Dancing Dervishes," samples of which may occasionally be found to-day in the cities of America, the "Yogis" that are "Buddhas" or "Christs" in New York, and the Dowies that were "Elijahs"

in Chicago, the Genius of Point Loma, Obispo, Santa Rosa, "Oahspe,"

"Solar-Biology," and again, _et hoc genus omne_! Verily! "there is nothing new under the sun."

Contrast these individuals with an individual of sound mind, good judgment, and a well-ordered life, and see how and where and why the wreck inevitably follows.

The pressure outside changes continually, and these things spread and grow like all contagions. Nature at times seems wrathful and destructive, and there are, no doubt, deep-seated conditions and changes in the magnetism of the earth and air, not yet comprehended by modern science.

In stamping out contagious and epidemic disease, simple cleanliness has been like a revelation from the G.o.ds, and modern surgery has only stopped short of the miraculous.

Society is but the aggregation of individuals, and on the one principle of _Self-Control_ every individual is related to the negative or the positive side of psychical and physical epidemics.

There is scarcely an avenue along these lines that has not been more or less explored by modern science.

That knowledge is still incomplete; that mistakes have been made; that matters have been contemptuously set aside, belittled, or declared to be not worth investigation, was to have been expected. But the progress has been immense, and the light s.h.i.+nes on many obscure and difficult problems, where before was the utter darkness of superst.i.tion and fear, dirt, degradation, and death.

These phenomena manifest on the physical plane, disturb the social state, and the relations of individuals to each other. They concern the environment of man in a world of matter, sense, and time.

But the Individual Intelligence, which is Man, lives also in another world, related to, but within, around, and beyond the physical.

Man senses or feels it as anterior to birth and extending beyond death. He calls it the subjective or Spiritual World.

The realm of his consciousness is related to it, as the body is related to the physical plane and the things of sense and time. His consciousness seems _aware_ of both planes or both worlds, though ignorant of the real nature and meaning of both, and capable of interpreting neither correctly.

Man feels his way through the life on the outer plane guided by his experience of weight, measure, distance, resistance, and the like.

The other world--the inner, or subjective--seems distant, evasive, and unreal, and in contemplating it he is filled with uncertainty, dread, fear, and superst.i.tion.

Our friends die and disappear; we miss them, and mourn for them. Where are they? What will become of us when we die? Shall we ever meet them again?

Pa.s.sing by religion and revelation, as we are dealing with facts and phenomena in the natural life of man, rather than with creeds and dogmas that undertake to cut the "Gordian Knot," these questions stare everyone in the face, and in every age man has tried to solve them by actual knowledge.

Belief in ghosts, angels and demons is practically universal; and just here comes in the whole range of psychical phenomena, facts and fantasies, illusions, hallucinations and delusions, rational volition, reason dethroned, and the Will in Subjection, already referred to.

As individual experiences, subjective or objective, all are real. The fear incited by illusions and hallucination, or by "seeing a ghost," regardless of the fact of its actual existence, is as real to the individual as that of meeting a serpent in the gra.s.s, or a tiger in the jungle.

Soothsayers, diviners, prophets, mediums, conjurers, and seers consequently have been found in every age and among every people.

Ignorance, fear, dread of death, desire to know, have always provided them with patrons, followers, or disciples.

They have often reaped a rich harvest, and not unfrequently dominated a race or a people, as the Papacy does to-day.

Where they have failed to create belief, they have often triumphed through fear and anathema, and often supplemented these weapons by persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death, and so held sway.

Revelation begs the question; dogma forces the conclusion; and both dominate the soul without convincing and without _knowledge_.

CHAPTER III

MEDIUMs.h.i.+P, SEERs.h.i.+P, AND HYPNOSIS

Into this arena of the inquiring soul of man, came Modern Spiritualism.

It contained little or nothing new, as to methods, aims, or results.

The Church, Protestant and Catholic alike, uttered their warnings, called it "dealings with the devil," but divested of political authority and without power to arrest or persecute, as in the past, were unable to stay the tide. It swept the country like a whirlwind. The average individual, desiring to know and to get tidings from departed friends, was unrestrained and unterrified.

He could not see why, if the gates were really ajar, angels might not communicate, no less than devils.

Then came the cry of "fraud," often amply justified, and a cloud of uncertainty and unreliability settled over the phenomena generally.

Unscrupulous men and women seeing their opportunity, sophisticated and exploited it, and "exposures" of these became common.

But in spite of all this, there remained facts, and groups of phenomena impossible to explain away.

Finally, men like Crookes and Wallace took up the subject and investigated the phenomena, not from the emotional, expectant, or fraternal aspect, but from the purely scientific, and rendered their verdict, which, though frequently ignored or treated with contempt, remains practically unaltered.

Thousands became convinced of the _fact_ of life beyond the grave, and at the same time of the unreliability of many so-called "communications."

Finally the "Society for Psychical Research" was formed; phenomena were searchingly examined, verified, and recorded as a basis for further research.

The posthumous work of F. W. H. Myers, "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death," added to the Society's records and many other publications a record of verified facts in psychic phenomena such as never before existed, and which nothing short of a cataclysm can destroy.

In the meantime, the "dark circle" went into desuetude, and Spiritualism, as a cult, declined. Accepting the broad conclusion of a life after death, and with no very clear demonstration as to exactly where, or how, the case rested largely.

The reason for this obscurity was to be found in the absence of clear conceptions as to the nature of the human soul, and what life on the spiritual plane really signifies.

In other words, the foundation was laid empirically to await cla.s.sification and conclusions in a comprehensive Philosophy of Psychology, consistent with a science of the soul; and there it remains to-day with the average individual, and the average man of physical or psychical science.

Returning now from this brief excursion into the social status, to the problem as related to the mental, moral, and physical health of individuals, and bearing in mind our Modulus of Man, and Theorem of Constructive Psychology, we find the annals of Spiritualism, Mediums.h.i.+p, or subjective control, of exceeding importance.

Another plane of life exists. Individuals on either plane communicate with the controlling ent.i.ty on the supra-physical plane.