Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
One man's authority here is by no means final. F.W.H. Myers has taken
into consideration many of the facts upon which Boirac dwells and on the
whole has reached a different conclusion. But, in general, the more
deeply we advance into the region of abnormal personality and the
phenomena of hypnotic and related states, the more reason there seems to
be for believing that there are resident in human personality powers
which, if at once evoked and released, are sufficient to account for all
mediumistic revelations without assuming that they come from the
discarnate.
_Geley's Conclusions_
Geley has gone much farther in some directions here than any one else.
He is more concerned with the physical phenomena. He has a striking
series of photographs of materialization, the authenticity of which it
is difficult to doubt. He finds an ascending series in abnormal
psychology from neuropathic states to mediumship with gradations which
intensify the abnormal or the supernormal, but in which the continuity
of development is never broken. His analyses here are both keen and
suggestive and tend to confirm the conclusions of other students that we
have resident in human personality elements which are adequate to the
explanation of any phenomena which have been as yet presented.
As far as the physical phenomena go, he cites experiments which seem to
reveal "threads of substance and rigid rods, sometimes visible,
sometimes invisible, proceeding from the fingers of the medium" and
serving as a real mechanism for the movement of distant and sometimes
quite heavy articles. He argues from this that there is a possible
exteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas and
believes also that such facts as this will eventually compel us to
recast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biology
and all evolutionary theories. The whole matter is necessarily obscure,
but such studies do give a new direction and a larger significance to
our whole subject matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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