Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
The men who are working along this line, particularly Geley and Emile
Boirac, by no means deny the phenomena, but they offer another solution.
Boirac, particularly, finds his point of departure in hypnotism and
suggestibility. Now here is a continuation of the line of approach and
interpretation which cleared up the whole confused matter of mesmerism.
We have already seen how the French investigators found the explanation
of what Mesmer and those who followed him have been able to accomplish,
not in magnetic influence or any such thing, but in the remarkable
changes produced in personality by exterior or autosuggestion, and just
as this was the key to the phenomena of mesmerism, it is more likely
than anything else to prove the key to the explanation of the phenomena
of spiritualism, for these are really nothing more than simply aspects
of the trance state, however induced.
It is not necessary to follow, in this connection, Boirac's analysis of
the phenomena attendant upon the trance state, or to consider his
theories as to hypnosis itself. He believes that there are in our
personalities hidden forces which, in the normal conduct of life, are
not brought into action. They are no necessary part of our adjustment to
our working environment; on the whole they complicate rather than
simplify the business of living and they are best--though this is not
his statement but the writer's conclusion from the whole matter--they
are best left unawakened. What we are normally is the outcome of the
adjustment of personality to those creative and shaping forces in
response to which life is most happily and usefully carried on. But when
the waking self and normal self is for the moment put in abeyance and
new forces are evoked from the "vasty deep" of our souls, we are capable
of an entirely different set of manifestations. First of all, those
usually associated with the hypnotic state which do not need to be
further considered here--a great docility to suggestion, unconsciousness
to pain and the like. We have also the possibility of powers which
Boirac calls magnetoidal. "These appear to involve the intervention of
forces still unknown, distinct from those that science has so far
discovered and studied, but of a physical nature and more or less
analogous to the radiating forces of physics: light, heat, electricity,
magnetism, etc."[81]
[Footnote 81: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 24. Some recent
French investigations seem to indicate that this force--Myers'
Telekinesis--operating through barriers, changes the magnetic properties
of that through which it passes. Carrington, the most skeptical student
in this region, is inclined to admit its existence. See "The Physical
Phenomena of Spiritualism," p. 359.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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