Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul
A >> Anna Bishop Scofield >> Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the SoulINSIGHTS AND HERESIES PERTAINING TO THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL
by
AMMYEETIS (Persian)
Second Edition 1916
Christopher Publishing House
Boston
Copyright 1913
by the Christopher Press
Copyright 1916
by the Christopher Publishing House
DEDICATION.
To those heroic minds who can truly say: "My soul is my own," and
bravely maintain it through everything--in spite of Church or State--I
do offer with earnest congratulations and my loving greetings, these
fragmentary thoughts of
AMMYEETIS.
Our revered Emerson loaned his Plato to a neighbor. Meeting him some
time afterward he said to him: "How did you like Plato?" "Very much,"
the farmer answered, "very much indeed. I see he has a great many of
my idees." And so, my readers--if there be such--there may be herein
set forth some of your own familiar thoughts which you may not have
found opportunity to express in such guise as appears in this small
book.
CONTENTS.
No New Thing
Evolution
Slowness of Evolution
The Work of Nature
A New Science
World Making
Imperfections Revealed
World Origin
Spirit Individualized through Matter
World Signs
World Growth
Death a Benefactor
World Progress
The Origin of Evil
Vibration
Life
Churches Money Makers
Life in Nature
Heaven
Nature Spirits
Experience
Spiritualism
Phenomena
Mediumship
The Migrations of our Race
The Discipline of Life
Homogeneity of the Race
Of God
Of Jesus
The Gods
Knowledge of Occult Law
Evanescence of Mere Beliefs
The Fount of Inspiration for All
Man versus Death
Fear of Death
Test of Character
Character Forming
Man the Final Earth Product
Superstitions
Self-Justice
Symbolism
Love
Ideals of Love
The Needs of Woman
Man versus Woman
Natural Cruelty of the Undeveloped
The Worst Sin
Reincarnation
Processes of Reincarnation
Education of Children
Egotism
Responsiveness
Hell
The Commonplace
Petroleum
Law
Communism
Happiness
Pain
Foes in the Household
The Inner Life
Root of Evils
Rest in Change
Miserliness
Special Providence
Human Destiny
Ethical Law
Human Life
Animal Likeness
Natural Superstition
Adaptiveness of Man
Devil Worship
Fanaticism
Truth
Christs
Hero Worship
Reason
Sympathy
New Religions
The Growth Processes of the Human Soul
Necessity for Phenomena
Will
Change of Atoms
Our Limitations
Final Race Experience
Religious Performances
Of Teachers
Wise Use of Money
Genius
Thoughts Are Things
Unfoldment
Inventions
Divine Healing
Surplus
Analysis of the Lord's Prayer
Absurd Beliefs
The Resurrection
The Creator
Retributive Justice
The Soul
Woman
Insights and Heresies
Pertaining to
The Evolution of The Soul
NO NEW THING.
There is no new revelation to be given to man; there is no need of it.
Those who have labored most strenuously to evolve from their inner
consciousness a new, a better religion, have found themselves bogged in
the mire of their egotism which has landed them in a police court, or
they have been confronted by exactly the same problems as those from
which they have sought to escape. Few, indeed, have survived the test
of time. There is an ancient promise that stands yet for man's use:
"To him that hath (improved) shall more be given, and from him that
hath not (improved) shall be taken away that which he already has."
This was never meant to apply to material things--it could not--it was
spoken in reference to the gift of understanding, and of using the
occult, the psychic law. Many psychics have lost their spiritual gifts
through failing to understand that endless progress is the law that
forces souls along the way of life. No stopping by the way to gather
shells upon the shore, no aimless looking back; but work with stout
heart and resolute will. It all means work, overmastering habits of
thought and action, lifting the soul from the grooves of heredity, and
in all ways making aspiration attract the inspiration that sustains the
soul.
EVOLUTION.
All subjects pertaining to our knowledge of the soul are too subtle to
be weighed and proved by external intellect alone. Our lives are ruled
by such a hotch-potch of inherited beliefs and tendencies, that it is
almost impossible for us to use any discrimination concerning them; or
to arraign ourselves before the tribunal of our own better judgment in
such manner as to enable us to separate the false and effete ethical
and religious influences, from the wise and true, which alone are
abiding and permanent.
Thus we grope and stumble along through our earthly lives, burdened
with ideas which were set in motion far back in a crude age, and which
were so well adapted to their time that they still vibrate to the
tendencies of our own day. This applies to every department of human
experience, and were it not that we are, as a huge family, better than
our cherished beliefs, higher in the scale of development than these
would seem to indicate, we should still be under the dominion of the
so-called "Dark Ages." The most important and the dearest phase of
human experience must come, of course, through its religious beliefs,
and as they are narrow and superstitious, on the one hand, or grand
with faith and understanding of law, on the other, do we judge of the
status of the individual, the community, and the race; and the advances
made upon this line mark the progress of what we term civilization on
this planet.
There is no time so trying, so full of agony to the soul, as is that
hour when it first begins to doubt the absolute, unquestionable truth
of the creeds it has hitherto blindly accepted, and in which it has
fully believed. Creeds are the swaddling clothes of the soul, and must
inevitably be outgrown and laid aside as the mind of man grows more and
more capable of comprehending the truth which is to set it free from
the trammels of mere blind belief.
It is so comfortable to have our spiritual faith ready made for us, our
paths all mapped out, and our final destiny made plain and sure,
provided only that we remain faithful in our adherence to them as they
are set forth by our parents and spiritual guardians, that when the
great, ever-surging, resistless tidal wave of progress first reaches
the soul, it can only stand in dumb agony, like one upon the seashore
watching its last hope go down beneath the waste of mighty waters.
Torn from its anchorage of inherited beliefs, it is sure to be
tempest-tossed, rent and torn, buffeted by conflicting tendencies, cast
upon many a desert island of unfaith, and haunted by miserable doubts
and black despair, ere it hears and heeds the pilot of truth, the only
guide to the peaceful haven of eternal life. Happy, indeed, are they
who tarry not upon the weary way; but who have within them that
aspiration, that endless cry for light, which shall always, in God's
providence, compel the needed response and guidance; for many honest,
earnest men and women, lacking this attribute of the soul, fail all
through life to reach this only true solution of the riddle of human
existence. Kind and sincere friends say of them: "Oh! if they had only
remained faithful to the religion of their fathers, they would have
found happiness and peace." But the law of evolution brings each and
every soul to the point where it must stand alone with God, there to
discover and establish its relationship to the Divine, irrespective of
all preconceived ideas and notions, superstitions, and ignorance. This
is exactly what every soul must come to--the aggregation of powers and
forces of body and soul resulting in the fully developed and
rounded-out individuality of any given personality. These are the rare
and unusual men and women, the fully flowered out, the richest fruitage
of any and all races, and it is to these that we must look for that
union of sympathy with and comprehension of the needs and requirements
of all which is to usher in the reign of peace, and universal good will
on earth.
Jesus of Nazareth went before us on the path, the only way cast up for
earnest souls to walk in. There has never been given to the world any
system of ethics superior to his. He recognized the homogeneity of the
race--"Each for all, all for each," was the whole import of his
teachings. In him was epitomized the experience of the race. Each and
every soul must wear its crown of thorns, and bear its cross and suffer
crucifixion, ere the soul astray from God, immersed in, and overwhelmed
by matter, can be forced to relinquish its hold on, its love for the
external, material things pertaining to this world. But it has to be,
it certainly must be, the experience of every creature born of woman.
Be sure, O soul! if none of these experiences have ever been realized
by you, that you are but just now entering upon the inevitable rounds
which must attend your connection with, and relationship to this
earthly sphere of being. Such are as the insensate clod, having as yet
neither spiritual sense, nor moral responsibility. Nature's processes
are slow; but be sure that the goal is appointed, and that God will be
there and will wait till we come.
When Jesus said: "The poor ye have always with you," he did not refer
to dollars and cents only, but to that poverty of intellect, that
barrenness of the moral nature which makes a human being a reproach and
a terror to his kind. These we shall always have to deal with, to
educate if we can, to constrain from overt acts of evil, and to protect
ourselves from in all the works and ways of life.
So painful and slow is the process of character-forming that millions
of souls pass on from this sphere of life to the spirit world so
lacking in individuality that they have no more power for any
expression of themselves upon that plane of being than they had when
they were living here. Not as much, in fact, for the physical body and
brain have always some possible function and use while they hold their
relationship to the world of material life, which function and use are
laid aside when they are put through the sifting process of physical
death, and in all cases, unless the powers of the ego as exercised here
are supplanted by a sufficient growth of the spiritual nature to
sustain the ego in its new relationship, and give to it the impetus
needed to start it forward upon lines of usefulness and growth, it
naturally fails to waken to any sort of realization of itself and its
possible career in its new life. This is specially true of those
persons who have been psychologized by those teachings which relegate
the souls of human beings to the cold clasp of the ground, until the
expected day of judgment; or of those poor, overworked men and women to
whom heaven seems only a place to sleep and rest in; or again, of still
another class of minds that has brought itself to a belief in utter
extinction after the close of this external life. These are the
"shades," the "shells" we hear of, for there are times when the subtle
inner sense of these sleeping ones is stirred to action by the wails of
the loving, longing ones left on earth to mourn; and, as is the case
with one in somnambulic sleep, the spirit walks and talks, in response
to the demands of friends, through those persons who are gifted with
the aura necessary for the medial agency. These excursions of the soul
into the realm of matter, thus made by and through the offices of
clairvoyants and seers, the repeated arousings of the ego from its
contented sleep are finally highly educational, and result in
resurrecting the forces of the enfranchised being, and setting them in
motion on the lines of useful work for humanity. For this medial
service which is thus being rendered to the spirit world by such gifted
persons still living here in the body, multitudes are daily and hourly
expressing their gratitude and appreciation.
We have somewhat abolished our old, long-established Hell, and now, to
be consistent, we must also do away with our preconceived ideas of a
Heaven of eternal rest; for why should the souls of men be wrapped in
useless slumbers, until the strong overwhelming influence of the law of
progress sweeps them up like dry leaves before a whirlwind, and rushes
them along to the gates of a conscious life, through a new relationship
upon the physical plane? The spirit does not weary, and when the
exhausted body is laid aside, why not enlist the services of all to
whom any appeal can be made? Thus shall we all be growing together,
and Death shall be forced to cast aside its grim and dreadful seeming
and show for the angel it is. Ah! how could we go on and on in the
narrow limitations of this small beginning of a life, if Nature did not
kindly call a halt somewhere on the road, while we, taking fresh
courage, start out in our new career with our entire being adjusted to
laws which are working in harmony with the divine will.
SLOWNESS OF EVOLUTION
There have been times in the lives of all soul-grown people when the
inner consciousness has clearly perceived that some given experience
may mean an important crisis in the expression of their individual
character. But not frequently, in the ordinary lives of human beings,
do they meet up with really great events, or personal experiences that
create for them special overturnings of their ideas, or any change of
personal habits. To the mind of youth, life seems a plainly simple,
straight-forward way; but when overtaken by results of unconsidered
actions, for which there has been no preparation, there dawns upon it
the consciousness of appalling vistas, and visions of future
possibilities that are overpowering.
As we journey forward on the path of existence, life becomes ever more
and more complicated, and the need, the overwhelming demand for an
understanding of the ever-varying problems presented to the mind for
consideration, and the constantly urgent necessity for wise decisions
must call into action all our highest powers of the intellect and
reason, in order to secure to us the best results from the
opportunities given us to acquire knowledge. Every one of our
experiences are bits in the mosaic of our lives, and without them the
picture would be incomplete.
But with all, we are forced to realize how unfinished and
unsatisfactory are nearly all of our experiences of earthly existence.
It is, indeed, "a thing of shreds and patches." But we are caught in
the web of material existence from which there can be no lawful escape,
save by unpremeditated physical death. We are thrust into the seething
cauldron of formative life. The entire race of man, forced forward by
the resistless power of the law of progress, is on the everlasting
journey to the heights of perfected being. To us, enmeshed in the ties
of interest and affection, the various heredities and the worldly
Karmas which hold us fast, the slow, unnumbered processes of evolution
on this, our home world, as recorded in history seem unendurably long.
But time is naught--eternity is unending--and "ten thousand years are
but as a day with God," the great Maker and Moulder of our immortal
souls.
THE WORK OF NATURE.
The planet itself is stirred to its very centre. On one side, the
earth opens its horrible maw and swallows up uncounted numbers of her
children, or spews out her molten interior in vast lava tides,
overwhelming and destroying all within their reach. At the opposite
side, great floods of gas and rock oil, set free by the operation of
the drill, shoot up in the air and fall back upon the soil in a
luminous spray, as like to liquid gold as aught not filled with the
beloved auriferous metal could be. The waters loosed from their
fastnesses over-reach their accustomed bounds, and great tidal waves
are encountered in unexpected latitudes. Nature is rounding up her
great circle, and making conditions for a new era.
A NEW SCIENCE.
A science of Spiritual evolution could be erected, based upon the
teachings and ethics of Jesus Christ, that would put souls consciously
in their true rank and grade, and make them known just as people are
recognized by the college curriculums from which they have graduated.
WORLD MAKING.
The "fire-mist" and the mephitic vapors were finally swept away;
another era was preparing. Incorporate in the world substance of which
the planet was made were the seeds and germs of all life. Its crude
material was made manifest in the prodigious vegetable growths, and the
awful corresponding animal life. Birds and beasts and reptiles, each
one more hideously terrible than the others, filled the air, the earth
and the waters of the earth with the abounding life of these horrible
creatures. Into this unaccountable menagerie came also the
foreshadowing of man--a huge hairy creature possessing size and power
to do battle with his animal compeers for supremacy in the seething,
upgrowing land.
This was only the differentiation of the animal-man from the animal per
se--the beginning of the form which stood upon its hind legs. From
such rudimentary forms was evolved intelligence which finally begot the
human soul. This, after vast ages, grew into a state and condition
through which spirit could manifest, and the human race was finally
started on its endless earthly career.
With the birth of the soul came what we call the religious instinct,
and man began to worship natural objects; animals and reptiles, the sun
and finally, superior personalities were thought to be gods. The
"phallic worship," worship of the human organs of creative power, gave
the males great prominence. The female, woman, the mere matrix was
considered, from the first, of far less importance. No one stopped to
think, what is one without the other in the great world processes.
Nature, ever on the alert so as not to lose any and every possible
representation of her power, buried here and there specimens of her
handiwork, and the exhumed remains of prehistoric monsters are even now
being restored and labelled with such titles as our modern scientists
have been able to invent to somewhat describe the size, the form, and
the habits of these long extinct manifestations of the beginnings of
life on this earth.
Among these, too, have also been found the bones of huge human-like
beings whose decadent progeny are still alive in limited number.
The gorilla is still the terror of some of the wild places of the
earth; as he booms his way through the impenetrable forests, he sends
forth his note of warning, beating his great hairy breast, and all
living things flee before him. Fancy what the awful first man--his
progenitor--must have been! Science has never yet been able to
discover the probable length of time it required for this crude age to
endure in order to lay the foundation of the world; for time was not,
and existence was recorded only by ages and aeons. But seven times
their infernal progeny were nearly all swept off the planet by awful
cataclysms and the whole affair had to be begun over again.
IMPERFECTIONS REVEALED.
The soul digs deep into the age-long deposits of knowledge, the results
of countless experiences, and brings up the Real.
This has to be, the most successful egotist, the most deluded hypocrite
must inevitably meet up with himself some day and begin to know the
truth versus make-believe.
All souls are so veiled in the flesh, and held by the crowding
necessities of their lives, that it is only on rare, unexpected
occasions that the individual soul can throw down the barriers and show
of what it is capable.
WORLD ORIGIN.
To be able to understand, even to our limited degree, something of our
origin, and the purpose of our existence is most comforting and
sustaining. In the beginning, the Creator sent to this planet a given
number of beings intended for the exemplification of the law of
evolution and soul growth. In the everlasting rounds of human life, no
new souls are being created and sent here to work out their salvation
through their experiences incident to the life of this young planet,
earth. What appears to our limited perception to be the beginning of
new lives is so only in relation to their present embodiment. All new
souls now being born here are but returning from some other phase of
existence. The whole human race is one family. Bound to the wheel of
life, every individual soul must pass through all of the varied
experiences that are set for its evolution. What they are not today,
they have been, or must become. But not all people march over just the
same highway to reach the soul's status. Details of experience do not
count. It is the lesson learned, and practically applied that forwards
the unfoldment of the individual in a comprehension and understanding
of God's eternal truth. Only results in all things, temporal and
spiritual, attest the unfoldment and growth of each and every soul.
It is only when man has evolved to the point of being more than a man,
"a little lower than the angels," that the higher spheres of activity
are necessary for his further progress. To expect to develop in the
worlds of finer substance than that of earth before he has learned all
that earthly experiences can teach him, is like "placing a child in the
higher classes of a school before he has mastered the lessons of the
lower."
SPIRIT INDIVIDUALIZED THROUGH MATTER.
As spirit _per se_ has no entity, and only evolves individuality
through its relationship with matter; and has no other conscious
expression; the so long-talked-of "Fall of man" was not a fall
downward, but it was a process upward, necessary to his being, to his
existence as man.
WORLD SIGNS.
Our planet, true to her everlasting record, has put forth her potent
reorganizing power to celebrate the ushering in of the new era.
Not less marvelous are the signs and indications of great changes
taking place upon the visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in hand
march the visible and the imponderable forces of this earthly life.
Ignorance and vapid superstitions can no longer block the doorway of
the living Christ.
God wills to know, and be known of his own, and to hold his love a free
gift to all races of men.
The trump of recollection and of recognition has sounded. The dead
have already risen, all along the lines, and no power can hale them
back to their dreams.
Onward, ever upward points the finger of progress. Long hoarded wisdom
and knowledge of the forces of nature are pouring into the minds of
seers, and of wizards of science; and these long separated and divorced
streams are evoluting to the unison of material and occult sciences,
which is destined to bring in the reign of peace and prosperity to all
the peoples of the earth, and to bring to light the relics of past
ages, cunningly hidden away in the vast womb of nature that they might
be preserved and brought forth to our knowledge in these later days.
By the undeniable record yielded up from buried cities and storied
crypts, and in the skeletons of mummies of both animals and men of
those most ancient times, she is showing us where she began the present
cycle, now closing in about the race, with great clattering of forces
and profound portents in earth and sky.
The equilibrium of the universe is maintained by the transition of its
forces. Atlantis, matured and ripened, sinks beneath the sea, and her
accumulated wealth of wisdom and knowledge is transferred to other
continents to arise at the appointed time to enrich and bless the land
of their adoption; and all art and science is but shining today in the
reflected, reawakened light of past ages.
In view of the revelations being made on all sides, we may well
reiterate Solomon's wise saying: "There is nothing new under the sun."
There can be nothing absolutely new. There is only endless iteration
and readjustment of powers and forces to fit the need of the day and
generation.
Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human
life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect
and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an
overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in
inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and
determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them. But this
world was given to man to conquer and own and make much of; and the
glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely
canon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye
denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil--these, or any of the
thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is
destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of
intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors
until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of
all nature's forces on this planet.
All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the
world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and
mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the
king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he
enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts,
and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless
waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles--all, all he must
encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must
he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts "make glad
the waste places" of the earth. Wherever the foot of man has been set,
there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may have been his intent or
whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose
of that ever-ruling Power which led him. Everywhere along the way,
Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the
unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on
the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on
high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead
mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with
the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the
deadly "damps" from all visible connection with human life, or the
child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful
white girl sold into the harem of a barbarous sultan, or any or all
other of such expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of men are
but pioneering the way of the race to complete homogeneousness and
unquestioned ownership of the whole wide earth.