This self-mastery and higher evolution also includes another element beside strength of character, and that is, Refinement.
In other words; it is, from first to last, a journey from the gross and sensuous physical plane, toward the refined and spiritual plane, involving all the faculties, capacities, and powers, feelings, sensations, emotions, intuitions, and aspirations of man. It is, in short, a normal, higher evolution.
All the elements of this higher evolution are basic and innate in the original endowment of man. By exercise, the latent faculties, capacities and powers grow, expand, and develop. Self-control, rational volition, and the sense of personal responsibility, (conscience) make the evolution conformatory to the Modulus—the Perfect Man.
As this human being, dwelling on the physical plane, evolves, the spiritual faculties of the Divine Man are involved from the spiritual plane. When this simultaneous and co-ordinate development is complete, the Human and the Divine are at-one in the Individual.
This at-one-ment is the exact opposite of “vicarious.” It is the result of personal effort and self-mastery.
The dogma of the church has so completely sophisticated it as to turn normal evolution into devolution; and, so far as it has any effect, or is operative at all, to turn man backward toward the animal, instead of upward toward the Divine.
Seership and Spiritual powers, therefore, as the result of “Living the Life,” are Evolutionary. Mediumship, subjective control, and obsession in any form, or in whatsoever degree, are Devolutionary.
Progress along either line may be very slow, but the trend is as opposite as is the East from the West, as Light from Darkness, as Good from Evil.
By classifying these powers of man and psychical phenomena to which they give rise, whether in the conscious, inner realm, in functions of the bodily organism, or observable to others, we are able to assign each to its proper class with considerable accuracy.
Both evolutionary and devolutionary progress, with the ordinary individual, are slow processes. Seldom is either process a designed and straightforward climbing, or a quick descent “into the dark abyss.”