The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies in Psychology
FOREWORD
The reader who is willing to give the following pages a careful reading, and a courteous hearing, is entitled to know the basis of study, observation or experience from which the suggestions, inferences and conclusions proceed, in order that he may fairly estimate their value.
At the age of seventy-two, my egotism is at least softened by the discovery of the many things I do not know; and my dogmatism, so far as it ever existed, is equally relaxed by the realization that it is a bar to light and knowledge, which rest so largely on demonstration.
For more than forty-five years I have been engaged in the active practice of medicine with consultations extending over three States.
For an equal length of time I have lectured in Medical Colleges, fifteen years on the subject of Physiology, an equal number on Therapeutics (including Pathology and Histology), and for the last fifteen years on Psychology, Mental and Nervous Diseases, and all this time with a large College Clinic from the poorer classes.
From first to last, my “Study of Medicine” has been generically and specifically a “Study of Man,” physical, mental, ethical, and psychical.
Outside of Medicine as a “Calling” or a “Profession” my real interest has been to unravel the nature of man, grasp the problem of human life, and to apprehend the nature, laws, and destiny of the human soul. My library covers a rather continuous thread from 1543, and the time of Paracelsus, to Profs. James, Ladd, Lombroso, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Münsterberg.
My reading dips into the Sacred Books of the East, the records of the Past, and particularly the psychic phenomena of different ages, finding at last the Constructive Theorem clearer than anywhere else in the “School of Natural Science,” from the fact that it is demonstrably cognizant of all preceding work, and definitely conforms to the strict demands of Science – Physical, Mental, Ethical, Psychical and Spiritual, and proves to be the very thing for which I have searched for nearly half a century.
The foregoing statements are not made to force credulity nor to assume authority. They simply mean – This is how, and where, and how long, I have been searching, largely, also at the bedside of the sick, the deranged and the dying; from the first breath of the little one that comes —
“Out from the shore of the Great Unknown
Weeping and wailing and all alone,”
to the death-damp and the last sigh of the aged; in one case at nearly one hundred and four years.
Once I found an old lady of eighty, dying. The “death-damp” on her brow; the “death-rattle” in her throat; the chin dropped, and no pulse at the wrist. She had a wayward son who had been promised due notice of any change, and he had been sent for. Speaking distinctly in her ear I called her back; the motive being the grief of her son at not bidding each other good-bye. The response was immediate. The “rattle” in her throat ceased. The pulse promptly returned. The mouth closed. Then I said – “open your eyes,” which she promptly did with a gentle smile. “You are not going to do it,” I said. “No,” she replied. The son soon came in and received his mother’s caress and blessing. At the same hour on the following day, she passed peacefully to the beyond, dying of old age. Had it been a “crisis” in disease, she might have recovered.
As a psychic phenomenon I never saw anything just like it. Had I before doubted the existence of a “separable soul,” it would have ended all doubt. From the magnetic border of the “Great Divide” with a sufficient motive, I literally “called her back.”
The evidence of the concreteness, and wholeness and self-awareness of the Individual Intelligence, functioning in and through, and separable from the physical body, was complete. No other explanation or conclusion would fit or cover the case at all. Had I been clairvoyant and able to see the entity, it would have been another link in a chain whose sequence pointed all one way. But even here I was not without a witness.
In another case, an old lady was dying. A “Platform Lecturer” (Mediumistic) was present and described, incidentally, what she saw. She was a good, clean, ignorant woman and only “controlled” on the Platform.
She described a vapor emanating from the body, as the “death-damp” increased, and outer “awareness” failed. This vapor seemed to adhere together until it stood near the head, rounded and nearly reaching the ceiling. Then the “spirit form” passed out from the top of the head, was inclosed in the ball of “vapor,” and together they “floated away.”
I found that she had never heard of the “Auric-egg” nor read a page of the old Eastern philosophy, and yet she had accurately described, step by step, what the Masters for ages declare occurs at death.
Science is the careful observation, demonstration and record of Facts, their orderly grouping or classification, and the logical and sequential conclusions resulting therefrom.
It is not a matter of opinion and belief, nor dogma and denial, no matter how large, respectable, and sincere may be the army of the dogmatists.
Take these suggestions and conclusions – my friend – for what you think them worth, since now you know how far they have grown from experience and the love and search for the simple Truth.
The temptation to quote and annotate from many authors is very great, but the material is so abundant that one scarcely knows where to begin, where to end; and as the address is solely to the reader of “average intelligence,” and argument is eliminated as far as possible, many quotations could do little more than confirm opinions, and would extend beyond the limits designed by the author, or the brief space and popular form more desirable for the average reader.
Repetitions in the text seemed unavoidable for the reason, that at every phase of the subject I have continually to regard the Individual, and that aggregate called Society; the inner conscious life of one, and the associate elements and conditions regarding the many, and from different viewpoints.
Man, the Individual, is like a “wheel within a wheel,” the larger circle being Humanity as a whole.
Nor does the thought or concept stop here. There is the relation of the Individual Intelligence we call MAN to the Universal Intelligence we call GOD, which as related to Nature is “In All, Through All, Over All, and Above All.”
Not an “Absentee God,” but Illuminant within and without revealing itself in what we call Love and Law.
Here “in brief” I rest the case and proceed to the evidence.
INTRODUCTION
In “A Study of Man, and the Way of Health,” first published twenty-one years ago, as a general outline for my classes of Medical Students, to enable them to grasp the real problem of life, and to emphasize the Study of Man, as basic in the Study of Medicine, the following epitome was placed in the Preface.
“The cosmic form in which all things are created and in which all things exist is a Universal Duality.
Involution and Evolution express the two-fold process of the One Law of Development, corresponding to the two planes of being, the Subjective and the Objective.
Consciousness is the central Fact of Being.
Experience is the only method of knowing.
Therefore, to Know, is to Become.
The Modulus of Nature, that is, the Pattern, after which she everywhere builds, and the Method to which she continually conforms is an Ideal, or Archetypical Man.
The Perfect Man is the anthropomorphic God. A living, potential Christ in every human soul.
Two natures meet on the human plane, and focalize in man.
These are the Animal Ego and the Higher Self. The one, an inheritance from lower life. The other, an overshadowing from the next higher plane.
The Animal Principle is Selfishness. The Divine Principle is Altruism.
However defective in other respects human nature may be, all human endeavor must finally be measured