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.
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 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.
Revelation begs the question; dogma forces the conclusion; and both dominate the soul without convincing and without knowledge.
CHAPTER III
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.
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 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 (never reliable 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.
There are thousands of individuals to-day, who, failing in rational volition, or self-control, are controlled by entities on the subjective plane. They are obsessed.
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.”
It should be remembered that the annals of Spiritualism, and the records of scientific Psychical Research, have demonstrated the possibility and the fact of such control. It should also be remembered that the average “expert alienist” is guided solely by results of such obsession, where it occurs; that he is blind to causes, liable to exclude or taboo obsession, and therefore largely liable to err.
In other words, he is prejudiced; and his bias and incredulity blind him to the facts and to the real causes.
He could hardly be expected to make the obsession let go, while denying that it exists. But he might