Read Ebook: The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies in Psychology by Buck J D Jirah Dewey

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These are the office, the function and the result to the subject of Mediumship and Hypnotism. They yield the Will, the mastery of their own house, to another.

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.

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 superstitious dread, so that whole villages and cities became literally "mad-houses," and were often depopulated.

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 gods, and modern surgery has only stopped short of the miraculous.

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 shines on many obscure and difficult problems, where before was the utter darkness of superstition 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.

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 superstition.

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?

Passing 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 grass, 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.

MEDIUMSHIP, SEERSHIP, 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.

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 classification 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, Mediumship, or subjective control, of exceeding importance.

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

The Medium is invariably subjective and controlled. He has no choice of controls, and often no knowledge as to who or what controls him. He is sometimes informed by his "guide" as to the control's identity, and learns, often, that he and his circle have been deceived by ignorant or "lying spirits."

The whole process reverses our Modulus and Theorem of Constructive Psychology, the building of character and normal evolution.

The most important consideration at this point is its relation to the sanity of individuals.

This subjective control without the knowledge or consent of the victim, and unrecognized and generally called "absurd" by "Alienists" and "experts," constitutes a very large per cent, of the insane to-day, and because ignored or unrecognized, these cases are classed as "Incurable."

In other words, he is prejudiced; and his bias and incredulity blind him to the facts and to the real causes.

This question leads us to another phase of psychology and the records of the past. There have been Seers, Clairvoyants, and Clairaudiants in all ages.

Unlike the psychical phenomena already referred to,--and belonging to the positive and initiative, rather than the negative and subjective side of the psychical equation,--these seers have been fewer in number, and are always individuals showing a high degree of self-control, and of intellectual and moral evolution.

Admitting the general propositions involved, it can readily be seen that this must be so from the very nature of the case. The Masters of mankind, in any and all directions have been few. The slaves, through ignorance, superstition and fear, have been legions. Those who have gained habitual self-control, and finally self-mastery, knowledge and power, have been few; while the majority have been controlled by their own appetites and passions, and by other individuals.

This self-mastery and higher evolution also includes another element beside strength of character, and that is, Refinement.

In other words; it is, from first to last, a journey from the gross and sensuous physical plane, toward the refined and spiritual plane, involving all the faculties, capacities, and powers, feelings, sensations, emotions, intuitions, and aspirations of man. It is, in short, a normal, higher evolution.

This at-one-ment is the exact opposite of "vicarious." It is the result of personal effort and self-mastery.

Progress along either line may be very slow, but the trend is as opposite as is the East from the West, as Light from Darkness, as Good from Evil.

Both evolutionary and devolutionary progress, with the ordinary individual, are slow processes. Seldom is either process a designed and straightforward climbing, or a quick descent "into the dark abyss."

Consequently, as the human race evolves as a whole, relatively more and more individuals are found who "get flashes" of sight or sound, more or less from the subjective or spiritual plane of being. There are intuitions, "warnings," and premonitions of coming events. Some seek and cultivate, others fear and avoid them.

They are mostly on the "border-land," if not on the "ragged-edge" of insanity. It is only necessary to further weaken the will, or to indulge the passions and emotions, in order to decide the matter, derange the mind, and send the individual to an asylum.

The average popular cult to-day, as often in the past, where psychical phenomena are involved, results in converting the normal mental realm, the realm of normal self-consciousness, into a vaudeville performance; a mere "Variety Show," where all due sense of proportion and relation is lost.

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