Paschal Beverly Randolph

“ Story of a Monad.
"Up, up, up, there in the steep and silent heaven there shines a radiant sun, more glorious than even a seraph might tell. Its essence is not matter, but spirit; and from its surface there go forth three kinds of light; the one in rays, another in waves. Condensed, the former becomes matter, and the latter is the ocean in which it is upborne,—in which the worlds are floating, and in which all things have a being. Aye! all things ride upon the billows of this infinite sea, even as a shallop or an egg-shell sails upon the tiny wavelets of a lake. ”

“ Some thoughts are light and fantastic, like bubbles on the sea; they are beautiful while the sun shines, but the very ray that reveals their beauty also seals their doom—for the heat kills them; they burst, and forever disappear, being hollow and of but little substance: other thoughts are round, heavy, and solid as a cannon-ball, and like them, too, their mission is to batter down the mounds erected by unwise men. Words are but the garments of thought. Geometry is the Soul of all Sciences—order, symmetry, and form! ”

“ Make the trial to ascertain what lies on the thither side; seek to fathom the soul within you, and what results? Why the wall is reached, nothing more; you strike it, think it, feel of it, but cannot recede from nor look behind yourself. But that there is a greater mystery behind than the one before you is proved by the fact that your entire being is but the result of an infinite, propulsive power, which whirled you into being, but will never hurl you out. There is a point reachable, quite beyond that of outer consciousness. ”

“ Spiritualism—true Spiritualism—is one expression and element of the soul of the age-an age whose body is exceedingly corrupt; and it so quickens the intuitions of some of the watchers on the tower, that they can already see the glimmer of the rising sun of gladness—a sun too, whose glorious beams will dissipate all the fogs and mists now bending over human heads, and shutting out the light of higher heavens than optician's glass can ever reveal. ”

“ Nothing is lost,—not even the myriad images floating off from all things about us, day after day. The amazing beauties of a snow storm, a sleet shower, an autumn forest, a rich garden, the countless flowers on which man's material eye never rested, are all safely cared for by Nature's Daguerrian Artist, and they float about the material worlds until sometimes the frost will pin a few of them to the window-panes in winter, or they are breathed through the spiritual atmosphere into some poetic soul, who incarnates them in canvass, marble, or deathless verse. ”

“ And yet, even that, grand as it is—for all the material globes of space, chained together, are, after all, but a mere little island floating, like a bottle, upon the crest of a single wavelet of the Infinite Sea!—yet, even that Spiritual Universe itself, with its amazing soul realms, made up of countless Soul-systems, each of which latter is composed of the blended spheres of innumerable millions of separate dualities—even all this—all these, I say, are but the result of a single effort of another distinct faculty-organ of the great brain ”

“ I rejoice in the presence of such a fact, and fold her as a sister folds another to her soul. People are false to the light within them. It is a great thing to be true to self—to stand forth the champion of your noblest thought, when all fingers point at at you with scorn, all heels are upraised to crush the sweet life out of you, and when only God and your own stout heart are on your side. ”

“ Remember that spirit is not soul; forget not that the latter is the Winged Globe, of Which I have spoken, and the former is a projection, an out-creation from it. This out-projection or spirit is, of course, perfectly atomless and unparticled. We gaze into a mirror, and behold a semblance of ourselves; and the same figure may be gazed at by a hundred thousand eyes; everybody will at once acknowledge that the likeness is perfect and real, yet every one knows that not one single atom of any sort of matter enters into its composition. ”

“ Millions of beings there are who, although disrobed of fleshly garments, are yet pilgrims in search of the soul-world. The latter is divine and interior, the former natural and merely Spiritual. A man on earth may gaze on the surface of a picture, or mechanically read a book, and yet find nothing therein; whereas either of these may lead another person not only into their own beauty-depths, and into the soul of the painter or the author; but they may serve as clues which his soul may seize on and follow into realms never even imagined to exist by the poet-painter, or the painter-poet. ”

“ I sustained the precise relation to time, and space, and matter, that heat does to cold, light to shadow, shape to essence, phantasmata to reality, bulk to number, number to mass, or any two antithetical things whereof men may have ideas. I had become a resident of a new universe, differing as greatly from that upon which man's vision rests, as that itself is different from dreamland. My glad soul had crossed the shores of time and distance, and the barque of its existence was fairly launched upon the vast ocean of a new eternity. ”

“ Spiritualism has not yet produced fruit in the souls of its believers, at all to be compared to those growing on the tree planted on the stony heights of Calvary nearly two thousand years ago! It is, in itself, powerless to supersede a system so infinitely grand and sublime as that founded by the twelve fishermen and their illustrious Lord. Nor is such its mission. Supply and demand wait ever upon each other. The sense of human immortality, in community, the wide world over, had grown dull, vague and indistinct, lulled by the droning music and somnifying humdrum of theology. ”

“ And God is not good, but beyond it; is not truth, but its foundation; is not power, nor Life, nor Think, but beyond, beneath, above all these! Spirit may be represented as the soul of matter: Soul as the inmost of Spirit; Monad as the base of Soul; Think, as the essence of Monad; God as the Soul of Think. Here, let no man smile at these uncouth expressions; they stand as symbols of mighty truths. I have said that Monads were scintillations from God's brain: They are: That Matter was the proceeding from his body Monads are forms of thought, and are the bubbles on His ever-rising tide of Soul. ”

“ This sort of thing it is that freezes up the spirit, and makes man and woman lonely hermits in the very midst of the teeming hives of human life, society and effort.
It is a terrible thing to be compelled to eat your own heart—to be forced to consume oneself—to hear the harsh, brutal and unfeeling tone, when one should listen to the dulcet notes of generous affections; for they freeze and chill the spirit, and warp the very ligaments of Soul. ”

“ To thee, and in thy light, an oak tree is but an assemblage of material atoms: a rose, its thorns, leaves and moss, are only such: the wild tiger of the jungle, the humped-back camel of Zahara's sands, the sportive lamb, unsightly toad, the serpent in the grass, the dove in its cote; the flitting bat, and the flap-winged night-owl, the majestic giraffe, and the beauty-plumed warbler of the forest, are to thee but mere forms of exuberant life; mere natural products, the spontaneous gifts of an all-bounteous, but unintelligent, non-conscious natural force. ”

“ Our principal life—for we lead several at the same time, is the life of Imagination. We form, in fact create, by a mystic power not yet understood, whole galleries of paintings, figures, adventures and circumstances, 'houses in Spain' 'castles in the air.' These are our in-creations, because, while yet in the body, they loom up in the deep, distant depths of the mind, as images more or less vague and shadowy. ”

“ Sometimes the lightning will pass over a body or object; and in passing will fix and bring out into visibility the images of things already there. Nature is full of mirrors. This is the memory of Matter—the Photography of the substantial universe. Memory is but the photography of soul Everything that strikes the eye, or the senses in anyway, leaves an exact image of itself upon the cylinder of Retention, which cylinder winds and unwinds, according as it takes on or gives off the impression, whatever it may be. ”

“ Human beings, male and female, talk much of virtue, which means strength, and loudly boast its possession; yet how very few there are who will stand up and face the music which their very talk may have evoked? How they shrink when the storm comes down; how they cower when bitter denunciation and abuse pours in upon them from the ramparts of the world! All hail the glad and coming day, when we shall be what we ought! When he who wears the garb shall in very deed prove himself a man, the most glorious title on earth save one, and that one is—woman! ”

“ At such times we prophecy and become familiar with events, persons, principles, and things yet unborn in time and space;—we have receded behind the wall of consciousness, and bathed for a time in the sea of mystery, every billow and wavelet of which constitutes a destiny. For that all things that are yet to be, at this moment exist as monads and uncarnated thoughts in the Mind of Minds, there cannot be a shadow of doubt; nether can there be one that man has been, still is, and hereafter will be, intromitted to this sacred labyrinth of knowledge, under certain conditions yet unknown to us. ”

“ All living things are but developing monads, at whose bottom slumbers what will one day be an imperial human soul! And these monads develope off their surfaces continually; the longer and more varied the process, the more beautiful the grand result at each successive stage. Thus the monad whose highest manifestation ten thousand years ago, may have been a thistle, perchance looks up to heaven this day from the glorious eyes of a rose-bush, or a dove. ”

“ I knew that I stood upon the borders of the Middle State. Believing that more is to be gained by descriptions of the good and excellent than by exciting the horror of deformity, I forbear, in this introductory volume, to recount the terrors of the awful Hell of the vicious and the self-damned soul.
Suffice it that I beheld scenes of lust, insanity, debauchery, and all vileness, sufficiently dreadful to appal the stoutest heart of any sane one who dwells in the same awful phantasies, insanities and evils. ”

“ God, who made us, well knows that there is more of good than evil in our hearts, by virtue of our ancestry—Nature and Himself; yet, for His own grandly-purposed end, He permits us all to wade to Heaven through the malarious swamps of hell!—permits us all to experiment and suffer, in order that we may grow powerful and strong, and thus be fitted for the tremendous destiny that awaits all who wear the human form on the thither side of Time. People feel before they think, and the act of one single impulsive moment not seldom enshrouds an entire life in gloom. ”

“ I am Socrates and not Thotmor; and still am Thotmor and not Socrates. Here is another enigma. Do you comprehend? Try; for remember the human soul is infinite in its nature! Its capacities are boundless. You aspire to comprehend the mighty secret of the Trine. You seek to become an acolyte of the imperial order of the Rosy Cross, and to re-establish it upon the earth; and no True Rosicrucian dares shrink from attempting the solution of the mysteries and problems that human minds in heaven or on earth may conceive or propound. ”