Read Ebook: Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul by Ammyeetis

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longing for enlightenment, his long-sustained and vigorous efforts to surprise the hidden things of God and Nature. Livingston and Stanley wrought in the jungles of Africa, Audubon and Agassiz in the fastnesses of tropical America. These in the material world, the world of effects. Gessner and Varley, Darwin and Spencer, together with a long list of other inspired minds, have given their best thoughts, devoted their noblest energies to the explorations of the world of causes, the occult and invisible realms of pure principles in God and Nature. Back of all these there lies the richest bequest ever made to humanity in the discoveries and revelations of the most ancient "adepts," the fathers of mystical lore, in the light of modern discoveries and inventions, mystical no longer; but practical and full of earnest meaning in their adaptation and adjustment to the needs and wants of the citizens of the world today.

EVANESCENCE OF MERE BELIEFS.

Proclaim not mere beliefs today, and be not labelled and pigeon-holed and held to account on any special line of thought or action lest the individual soul be barred out from a conception and knowledge of some far grander truth. At best our view is narrow and contracted, else were we gods, and as we grow we discover our little, vaunted beliefs to be but as tiny shreds of color in God's great mosaic, our song of triumph and discovery but as the buzzing of the insect to the chorals of the chanting hosts of heaven. So, then, an eternal negation is the safest attitude of the unfolding soul. Mere beliefs, unproven by facts, are so many barriers set up for the soul to overleap and leave behind on its onward march.

THE FOUNT OF INSPIRATION FOR ALL.

"The righteous shall inherit the earth." Just so far as we are able to prove our rightness, the world--nay the whole universe of God--is ours. Our Heavenly Father has never said: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, upon the road to knowledge." Everything invites us; get wisdom, get understanding, and to thy knowledge add virtue are the recommendations from inspired sources, and to the soul that fears not, revelations upon every line stand invitingly open.

MAN VERSUS DEATH.

In all the domain of organized being, it is only man, who, in his crude egotisms, and defiant resistance to nature's laws, makes ado with death. The dainty denizen of the air, and the things that creep over the earth, the leviathan in his nature element, and his warmer-blooded brother whose passage causes the earth to tremble beneath his tread, all the multitudinous expressions of the animal kingdom, that disport themselves in fur, or feather, in filament of scales, or covering of hair, each and all recognize the approach of their final experience on earth, and hie themselves to their appointed coverts, to keep their tryst with their old mother in utter privacy. How well she loves her children! She sheds over them her varied mantle of leaf, and piney bloom, or scented brake, and soothes them with softly falling rain, or tender dew, and woos their elements back into her bosom from which they sprang. All this is in consonance with nature's arrangement for caring for her own. There is no such thing known among these as a vulgar display, or a flaunting of the deposed forces in the faces of the creatures left behind.

In man's treatment of his kind, there is everywhere betokened his unfaith and fear. His undeveloped spirituality leaves him without even so much power to adjust himself to the divine order of progress, by way of the gates of death--rebirth--as have his humble progenitors, his representatives in the animal kingdom; and so he plants himself upon his fancied prerogatives, and turns his dulled senses away from the God-call: "Come up higher," and moans and raves, and howls his despair in sounds and terms indicative of his tribal, or racial environment and relationship.

A voice of love has sounded down throughout the ages in unmistakable terms to the children of men. "My father has many mansions, invisible to your seared, earthly vision, but beautifully furnished forth for all your needs; nor hath eye seen or ear of yours heard the wonderfulness of the great preparation He hath made to receive you into his kingdom." And seer and sage have reiterated this in unmistakable language, and the enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and in a large percentage of them their whole lives are given over to their effort of resistance to the divine ordering which speaks ever to the soul of man in unmistakable terms of tender consideration, saying: "Thy poor days here are full of pain and sorrow, because of necessary crudities. So live that when thy summons comes to join the everlasting cavalcade which sweeps across the world, thou shalt apprehend thy high emprise, and go forth exultingly to claim thine own meed of further existence in spheres yet undiscovered to thy longing ken."

"Earth loses thy pattern forever and aye" that thou mayst be renewed and set up in the finer mould of thy most excellent Karma, which is thy hidden reality of character. Rejoice then, O mortal! in the beneficence of nature and of thy Parents, God, for surely it is well that they call a halt for thee and thine beside the river of death, and loosen thy burthens of pain and heart-breaking sorrow, and let loose from thy soul that raven, "Never more," which has preyed long upon thy soul and held thee in the grip of unspoken despair and anguish. This is of all demons the blackest and most subtle. In tones of love it has been proclaimed by the divine mind that nought is ever taken away that shall not be restored to thee. Not as thou, in thy small, limited way, wouldst hold it back from its own high place, and mission in the universe and bend it to thy purpose; but according to the wisdom of its Creator and thine, shalt thou see and know and claim all that belongs to thee, be it the inspiration of thy nature, unexpressed here amid the din and rush of this chaotic existence; or power to carry forth thy grandly bold designs in conjunction with nature's illimitable chemistry; or to perfect within thy mind a knowledge of her laws; or to fold to thy bereaved heart thy lover, friend, or child, so lost to thee now in the great unexplored silences, that thou wilt not even try to see their way of life, but art ever persistent in saying they are dead. Whatever thy soul shalt cherish as highest and best good to be longed for, that shall be given to thee, in its new and resurrected form, over which has passed the chrism of the immortal and everlasting life. We need a new perception of that great law of the "survival of the fittest." Who are the "fit"? The nomadic tramp who yields no meed of use to his fellows? The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his surrounding atmosphere with the noxious exhalations from his decaying organism? He who hoards and locks away from his fellows his treasures of gold or precious knowledge, and he, who having in his hands the powers of wealth and influence, never deigns to stretch forth his hand to relieve the cruel stress of the needy or to protect the helpless, or to sustain and strengthen the weaker ones of earth?

Nay! The true "survival" is not here on this underdone sphere, but outside, beyond, above, in the realms of the spiritual where our burdens are loosed and the souls of men are set free, and true liberty is accorded to each and everyone to be, and to do, all that in him lies toward the upbuilding of the great sum of the soul life we call God.

Once this perception of the soul and even some slight degree of knowledge concerning the laws which hold over the destiny of each individual being becomes, through a familiarity with phenomena now everywhere common, understood and accepted, the entire life on this planet will be changed, elevated and happified. Fancy living day after day under the bondage of the fear and dread of what everyone knows to be as inevitable as is the experience of each, of physical dissolution; and yet multitudes of people do so live. It is debasing, and disennobling in every way. It robs the soul of all its natural dignity and sends it through the world orphaned, and mourning, where it might and should recognize its divine relationship, and rejoice in its unfolding powers; and so you who may be giving a moment to the reading of this brief testimony to the great truth of immortality, consider, and realize thy divine paternity and demand what is, and has always been thine own by right of interblending of thy own inner nature with that of thy soul's origin, the heart of Him who hath made us.

The bond is eternal and indestructible. God in all humanity and we in Him, and the sooner we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, not like "dumb driven cattle" but as self-respecting, self-asserting mortals--within the law of accord with the highest--the sooner shall we enter into that "Nirvana" which is "peace."

FEAR OF DEATH.

In the childhood of the race, the time of its exclusively animal life, it was necessary for its protection that there should exist in the slowly unfolding human mind a great, overwhelming terror of death. In fact at that time indifference to death would have involved the entire race of man in utter extinction. From that time have come down to us superstitions and fears which, while acting still in the minds of the ignorant as a preservative of human life even under most terrible conditions, have at the same time shrouded countless numbers of good and useful lives with gloom, overshadowing them with a horror from which they could not escape. It has been less the actual fear of death, but of what might be in store for them after they should have passed through this experience which is so inevitable to us all. Jesus prophesied of a time to come wherein death should lose its sting, and thus be swallowed up in the victory of the spirit over matter.

The enjoyment of this life demands that, right here and now, we should begin to know and understand how we are to establish our individual relationship to the invisible, the real world--the world of causes, the world of law--so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the hidden mysteries of the future life to give us some certain grounds for faith in the unseen. This can only be accomplished by the development of our own occult powers, or by learning of the psychic experiences of others which serve to point the way to what we may come to know for ourselves.

It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the web of life, there is no escape from its demands upon the individual soul. Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate. Upward and onward, or down into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things. It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and toilsome path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop around through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to the Christ.

It is the fear of death, of physical dissolution, that is to be individually conquered. This can only come as a result of a perception of spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spiritual nature.

The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, has been nature's safeguard against a universal stampede out of this life when the miseries of existence on this earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne; when the tortures of the soul in the tortured body drives out all reason and all philosophy, and the consciousness senses only the demand for surcease of agony. But when the "golden bowl" is broken--the silver cord of human life is severed--by suicide--nothing has been gained by a changed environment. There are the same responsibilities and soul needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied desires of their minds are exactly the same. Nothing has been gained, but much has been lost. Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the call to march over the "border land" into nature's invisible realms; they cannot help themselves, no one can. On they go, an endless caravan into the land of revelations, the place of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched up with a "round turn," and made to realize that a real godliness is the only thing that can "pass muster," that mere beliefs do not count, and only character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are filled; nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the gods--the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled. Life here is just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of individual existence.

Most fortunate is the soul that is started out to make the journey of life without being handicapped by some narrowing religious superstition or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, preventing all unfoldment of originality.

TEST OF CHARACTER.

Sooner or later everyone who has character enough to make any sort of a test worth while, has to have a regular bout with his "evil genius." Christ said: "The devil hath desired thee that he may sift thee as wheat." The form which the test takes depends entirely upon the organization of the individual. But it is in every case the same thing. The thorough arousal of the latent powers of the nature, and the suffering which ensues from the results of its unbalanced actions, constitute the discipline of this life. We can no more escape it, or subvert the action of this law of evolution than we can put a stop to any of the upheavals of nature. The volcano and the earthquake are but the expressions of power in the globe which we inhabit to throw off her old, and ascend through violent agitation to higher conditions. There is a natural correspondence in the experience of her inhabitants and that of our old, old mother!

Back of protoplasm, back of organic human form is the soul--a thought of God, a spark of divine, eternal life; imperishable, immutable as God himself.

CHARACTER FORMING.

All animals, the human creature included, are born blind and this physical condition of man absolutely typifies his life-long state, owing either to his environment, his heredity, or his false education. The great mass of humanity come into the world unmarked by any specially-developed individuality. These are the legitimate prey of priests and teachers who have their place, or use in the evolution of the lower grades of life on this planet.

The smaller number of advanced souls that are "cast upon the shoals of time," the evolved thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more trying, and difficult life; for the highly individualized man or woman cannot belong to any set school of ethics; there are no fixed landmarks, religious or otherwise. Blinded by inherited prejudices, if not by destructive tendencies, with ideals for which there is no seeming avenue in this commonplace, workaday world; the life of such an one is ever a grope toward the light of truth.

Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of self-protection in common with the nature children of the wilds, he plunges forward on his unlit way, and has many a fall into the bogs and morasses of life until he finally sees that only from the higher, the spiritual side of existence can come to humanity redemption from the errors, wrong thinking and action that is the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world. Blessed, indeed, are those to whom this understanding comes in time to harmonize conflicting beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of rounding out the life, and perfecting that most potent and powerful of all things, a noble human character.

MAN THE FINAL EARTH PRODUCT.

In man Nature has reached her highest evolution. His life and being are the topmost rung of the ladder, but she has not finished with him. It is universally believed that physical death severs everlastingly her dominion over him, and thus ends all her service to him. This is by no means true. Man is her offspring, her child, and to her he returns again and again, drawing from her complex, multitudinous, many-chambered heart such forces as shall bring to him the experiences he requires to further unfold his nature and bring forth all his possibilities.

Not man alone but the planet itself is in the mills of the gods. The seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified degree and the misunderstood phases of nature's ministry are the results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.

Nature wields her powers of fire and flood and devastating epidemics mercilessly; she constantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring, and forces them to a new environment in her invisible realms, through which they pass, gaining more or less by the experience and from which each must emerge, and continue to evolve and grow according to the law of his own being.

SUPERSTITIONS.

Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the superstitions that have afflicted the minds of ignorant and unthinking people. Few people escape some form of superstition. For instance, the silly sayings, anent the moon, "Fair Priestess of the Night." It is unlucky to see it in its newness--so and so--when the real fact is, it is a merciful Providence that permits us to see it in any of its phases, over the left shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, or in any way at all. There is nothing more "lucky" or glorious than to have good eyesight of one's own, with which to behold this and all the other beauties of nature. The man who chanced to be passing under a ladder just at the moment when a workman half-way up let fall a bucket of paint which struck and deluged him, had some reason for thinking it "unlucky" to go under instead of around such an impediment to travel. But not once in a lifetime would such a thing happen to any one, and it is impossible to imagine what going under ladders or meeting loads of barrels, or funerals, or opening umbrellas in the house, instead of outside of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, puerile, fool superstitions that have sprung from no one knows where, and that have no scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon the realities of any life have "to do with the case." These are all the offsprings of minds tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them to the great living fact of God's providence which is and has ever been ruling the lives of his earthly children.

SELF-JUSTICE.

While self-abnegation is a valued experience in the spiritual discipline which goes to the formation of a perfect character, the reaction where the ego posits itself upon the law of justice to self, is in reality the beginning of salvation to the individual. But preachment from any source cannot avail with any soul deeply immersed in work for others. There is too much in array against it. The established heredity concerning the first duty of woman is of itself alone a formidable influence to be overcome; then either the real needs, or the selfishness of others, present obstacles beyond the power of loving, sensitive souls to resist. The change must come from the consciousness of the individual of her own needs along these lines, which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and purpose to be true to one's self if the heavens fall. This is first, and above all other considerations.

SYMBOLISM.

A crude and inartistic symbolism is revolting to a spiritually-unfolded consciousness. True mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the finer law of correspondences or they fail to appeal to such as these, and become to the occult a mild form of blasphemy.

LOVE.

No phase of human character--of mental or spiritual philosophy--has engrossed so much attention or received such a variety of treatment as has human love. Nearly everyone who thinks at all, has been brought, at some stage of experience, to an attempt at analyzing the emotional, sentimental nature, asking: "What is Love?"

In contradistinction to that which repels, and disintegrates, it is attraction. Love is God, it draws elements together, and holds them in proper spheres. It centralizes and builds up. It is controlled by fixed laws; it is only "blind" to those who have not investigated its nature, and office unshrinkingly, with an eye to a complete understanding of its true function. Devoted humanitarians have shown us how to feed, exercise, and rest the physical system, in order to produce health. Ministers of the Gospel have taught souls the way of life ever-lasting. Professors of the various sciences and arts, useful and ornamental, have instructed the intellects of men, and now and then a woman; but with all these, the affections--the crowning--rather the integral element of all life and being, have had few, or no exponents who have ever attempted to treat them from any basis which can be called philosophical, or which could ever serve as a guide to one uninitiated in their occult phases.

The ordinary expression of this part of the nature, is a vampyrism which is constantly on the alert to see what, and how much it can gobble up for its own delectation. This is the lowest grade. It begins with the selfism of the individual, its manifestations are named lust. It seeks expression through the sensuous nature, but extends to the spirit and will.

O Love! What crimes are committed in thy name! What laying waste of true and tender hearts, what defacing of sweet bodies, fashioned and set up as temples of the spirit!

This vampyrism extends through every department of the affectional nature. It exists not only among men and women recognized as lovers, married or otherwise, but parents are ghouls to their children, and friends devour each other without stint. Attraction is that law which draws together two opposite elements or forces, positive and negative, or male and female. As the nature and attributes of a human being are multiform, so are the attractions, or loves, numerous. Ignorance of the laws which ought to control and adjust these loves, is the prime cause of all the misery and crime with which the earth is flooded. Two people of the opposite sex are attracted through the intellect on this plane, and realizing the limit of the law which draws them together, they could be admiring friends forever; but ignorant of their needs outside of this, they attempt to force a conjugal relationship which too often ends in dislike. Every grade of lust and love finds representation in the so-called marriage relation, as it stands today. Intellects and spirits without any bodies--worth mentioning--and gross mortal remains unvitalized by souls. The former class ignore the claims of the physical, and gather their robes together sanctimoniously indicating: "Avaunt, lest my purity be contaminated"; while the latter laugh their spiritual pride and fastidiousness to scorn. The war goes on between good and evil, whereas there is really no just ground for difference. All that is needed for the attainment of harmony and peace is a wise adjustment of these forces in individuals and in society.

The growth of all true character must be slow and gradual. It is not enough that the soul perceives the beauty of a grand, moral life, it must also learn to live it humbly, earnestly and truly.

"IDEALS OF LOVE."

"Greater love hath no man than that he shall give his life for another," whether the scene be set upon the mimic stage, or on the broad theatre of the world. Heroic rescues, desperate efforts to save endangered lives, care of the battle-wounded or fatally diseased meet, from great and small, brutal and cultivated, deserved recognition, even to the extent of making the individual actors--so favored by the gods--famous, throughout the world.

The patient service of men and women to their families, of children to their parents, or of friends who rejoice in serving, that goes on all around us conforms so entirely with our established ideals of what is right and becoming, that it is unnoticed and wins no applause, but oftener only calls out from the recipient demands for further sacrifice.

In all such related service the real blessing comes to those who give far more than to those who receive. The operation of this law hallows all the relationships of this life, and must finally yield to the unselfish giver undreamed of compensations. Not here, perhaps, but in that sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfilling of the law, shall the patient givers, those who have served at love's altars, find themselves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who do his pleasure."

Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that wealth can bestow, enthroned in seats of honor, and social recognition is accepted as our ideal of what love should claim, and win from life; but I have looked into the faces of humble, patient toilers, and there I have seen that the sustaining influence with them was love, and have marvelled greatly over the compelling power of their ideals of love.

Remembering that foundations of love upon this earthly planet were, of necessity, laid in the selfish instincts of the race--a race as yet so undeveloped in all that "makes for righteousness"--we need not despair of the final outcome, and realization of its high behest to the children of men; for no expression of love, however mean in view of our own exalted ideals, but is, in reality, an effort towards something higher and better. The obdurate and selfish are unfolded, and taught by its painful misunderstandings, and awful tragedies.

Those poor souls who expect everything from this life, whose ideals are bounded by their own selfishness, who have never discovered that God is Love, and that only through love, purified, exalted and idealized can any of his earthly children ever reach to any conscious relationship with our Father in Heaven, and who, failing to realize even their low ideals, pass on from one experience to another vainly searching for the realization of what their dimly perceived intuitions of love constantly assure them should be theirs--for even such as these there must be a final redemption; for, like one of old, they have "loved much," and the sins of a vast ignorance are at last condoned by God's all pervading, untiring, illimitable law of love.

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