Paschal Beverly Randolph

“ Soul does, therefore Soul is one thing, matter quite another, requiring a bridge to span the gulf between them, and that bridge is some subtle form of magnetism; nor can Soul be evolved from it by any process of rarefaction or refinement; for Soul it was from all past Eternity; soul it is, and such it will remain to all possible eternities to come; while matter, either in its solidified or condensed, or in its far-particled or fluid states, will remain matter until all its life is exhausted, and Deity shall have become senile and decrepit from the weight of Time and lapse of hoary centuries! ”

“ On the other hand there are those exactly opposite; whose every step is a triumph, and whose touch transforms everything to gold, money, fame; success flows in upon them like a rolling tide, and they revel in delight without a shadow, till life on earth closes on them in a blaze of wealth and glory; yet these people are not half as able, good, noble, true, as the other class. ”

“ And first let me define what the world and myself understand as the true definition of the term Immortality:—
The body is supposed to contain within itself an electrical form just like itself—head, eyes, brain, tongue, arms, legs, sex-organs; that at death this Æreal form escapes the body, and goes to spend its eternal years in heaven or in hell; that it can die no more, but lives, loves, suffers, thinks, enjoys, in that other life; and that it is in all respects a human being still. ”

“ Many and many a full-grown man or woman, stepping into the grave at ripeness of years, only step out of it again as dwindled monads; and when reborn they too have vague, shadowy reminiscences of the, to them, foretime. They who are loveless are no more immortal than the ox which falls beneath the butcher's axe; while, per contra, myriads of savages, Indians, blacks, and the uncouth of all races, ages, and climes, attain to immortality, because of the love and love-generating power within them; for that alone lies at the foundation, and is the sole process of its attainment or Immortalization. ”

“ These principles alone can redeem the world, and clinch the rivets of Immortality. Nature makes many attempts, but only few successes, and as it is with trees and grasses, shrubs and flowers, so also is it with mankind. She tries, and tries hard, to immortalize a species, but only succeeds in doing it for individuals; and it is as easy to pass along the streets and pick out those of Perduring souls from those whose future is nihility, as it is to select a negro, Indian, Hottentot, or John Chinaman from a crowd of Digger Indians. ”

“ Soul is an Empire, or rather a Republic of States with a central, controlling, governing power. So is Deity—a sun radiant through all space, yet central at Home, just as man lives all over his body, but mostly in a tiny point at the centre of his brain. Deity is conscious at all points ”

“ Beasts, apes, Low-grade people, have instincts, attachments, magnetic attractions, and affection:—Man,—true men—alone have love! Beasts die. Immortal man lives on; but if man be more beast than human he must share their fate and lot, and as that specific individual dies out, and the divine spark, losing its consciousness, escapes, and once more floats freely i' th' air, until God once more breathes into some man's nostrils, and it again becomes not a quiescent, but a living, active human soul! ”

“ Now let it be distinctly understood that we of Eulis hold that the general purpose of the material universe, the end for which it exists, is the crystallization of mind,—the immortalization of Soul; but it does not follow that all human beings are death-proof, any more than that all the countless myriads of seeds produced every year in the floral departments of nature are endowed with reproductive vitality; for by far the greater number is wholly inert, while others possess but weakling life, and even if they do germinate soon perish and decay. ”

“ But there is, and men are cast to a certain lot and career as positively as that they are born, and are compelled by a resistless power to move in given lines and grooves, hopelessly, and are as certainly and solidly bound to the wheel of a peculiar fortune, for good or ill, as was the fabled Ixion. Some are doomed to perpetual strife, struggle, poverty, hopeless effort, from the nipple to the grave; they fail in all things, and disappointment, disaster, ruin, and defeat stalk by their sides, turn whithersoever they will or may. ”

“ Now it is easy to see that this great end and aim of Nature may be, and is, defeated in a variety of ways, some of which I will point out, and thus this monograph may be the means of saving many a being from ruin, utter, total, eternal, and complete. And first: It is clear that all diseases, injuries, disorders, or misuse of the sexual apparatus have a direct injurious effect upon the soul, and may, and do, often bar it from building the silver-hued body intended for eternity, and may thus doom one to Nonenity—the equivalent of complete Annihilation! ”

“ Just so far do we go with the cold, hard, dry, materialistic, uncheering Darwinism—a system which lands us in the grave, there to stay until we turn to grass, trees, beans, pineapples, or bananas—according to the locality where death overtakes and trips us up; but at that point we separate from Darwin completely,—because the system ignores Soul altogether. ”

“ A truly human nihility, rest, divine Narwana,—a state infinitely harder to reach than any phase of active immortality, whether transient or permanent!—the man dies with a celestial strain or note of divinest harmony and seraphic melody ringing sweetest music through every avenue, vault, and chamber of his being. ”

“ It may be well and truly said that there can be no peace in high places,—for storms, hail, and tempests, hurricanes, fierce lightnings and crashing thunders play and break around the mountain's brow; and he who would win the game of triumphant immortality must do so by loving well and much. ”

“ Now by soul is here meant the thinking, conscious, knowing, hating, loving, aspiring principle—that mysterious something about whose origin, nature, perdurability or co-perishability with the body, so much has been said, sung, and written, until philosophers generally have got by the ears, while waging the fiercest of all intellectual battles. ”

“ The others, the failers, have undergone prior existences on earth, and are either paying penalties for former transgressions, or are undergoing ripening disciplines preparatory to special sunbursts of usefulness, joy, and glory on the further shores of time. Weigh a soul of each class in the scale of actual worth, and the Failers touch ground while the victors on earth kick the beam; and one of the former is of more real value to earth, life, God, and the universe, than scores of the others. ”

“ Nothing organically imperfect can ever enter and remain in the superlative and ineffable land of pure Souls. The imperfect must go back to the domain of chemics and matter; nor can they, with hope, knock at the doors of the golden temples of Eternity, except they be full, fair, pure, free, and good, even though their discipline extends through a billion of ages; and the greater the gifts or talent, genius or innate power one has, the heavier shall be the price paid for all accorded unto him. ”

“ Let no one despair; for while there's life there's hope! and, however dark the outlook, don't for a moment forget that God still lives! that the darkest hour is just before day; that the densest clouds have silvery linings, and that, though love-lorn and wretched, friendless, isolate, and alone, still ”

“ Love, wealth, fame, comfort, rest, joy, happiness, success, all elude them, and if apparent triumphs come, defeat invariably ends the game. Other people do or say with impunity things that are sure to bring down storms of obloquy and pain upon their devoted heads, and sorrow and agony is their lot forever on the earth. ”

“ It is not race, nation, or complexion, that determines a title to supra-mortal existence; for there are people of all kinds there, even "Niggers" and Sangs Melees,—lots of them too, vivat!—and the dark-hued Southern and Oriental races and peoples outnumber the Northern and fair ones in the ratio of about twelve thousand to one hundred; besides excelling them in the same degree in mind, love, knowledge, force of character, and power of soul. ”

“ Soul is a radiant, invisible, crystallized globe of white Fire and Light located topographically, so to speak, in the middle of the head; and metaphysically, at the centre both of the conscious being, and that other existence of which we see the effects, but are not, and never will be, conscious.
All things whatever emit a sphere, aura, air, aroma, or atmosphere peculiar to themselves. So does man; so does Deity, and, as said before, His nervous fluid, or sphere, is Love, which, like all other fluids, is governed by Wave-motion, not linear. ”

“ Magnetism is the power of man. It is of two kinds, physical and mental, or of the body and the soul. One may abound in the first, and have nothing whatever of the other, else would we expect to see men of strong build, firm health, any amount of physical, magnetic plethora, capable of being fathers to the very finest specimens of the human race; but such is notoriously not the fact, but quite contrary; for they only who abound in mental, emotional, soul-magnetism, are capable of generating a superior breed of human beings. Again, Magnetic strength is one thing, magnetic unction quite another. ”

“ It is from the source named, alone, that the soul obtains the materials and elements whereof to construct an ethereal body—from the finest essences of matter held in absolute coalescence by the highest law, and, therefore, proof against death, division, decay, or dissolution—within its fleshly one, by processes analagous to that of gestation—and completes it as the vehicle whose true use only begins subsequent to the fact of physical death! ”

“ We, in our investigations of the recondite, occult and mystical;—ay, even in matters of mere finance, such as specution, buying, selling, contracting, or even in purchasing tickets in a lottery, prefer the better agency of a surer power—because it never lies, falters, prevaricates, and it ever tells the same story of the same thing, to all alike, no matter what the latitude or longitude may be! ”

“ Thus it is true that God breathed into his—her, its, their, nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living, conscious soul, which, being competent to evolve the finer essences, at once immortalized the being! ”

“ But, as I have already hinted, there is such a thing as being ultra-human, not only in the line of Narwana, but in quite another direction. If a man reaches that mystic plane, then he comes beneath the sway and rule of supra-human, and ultra Law, and attains a destiny better, greater, higher than is afforded by the ordinary immortality, which gives him so much care and trouble, and for which he so painfully yearns and sighs! ”