Communicating Spirits
“In Genesis 2, ver. 7, we read that when man was formed, Jehovah ‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives.’ It was not life but lives—natural and spiritual. When we remember that breath is both spiritual and natural, we understand these expressions. While the bodily lungs breathe the natural air, the spiritual lungs inhale the aura which is the outer sphere of God Himself. And in this sphere all Spirits must live, whether embodied in nature oi- freed from matter. We may cease to breathe the outer air, and our bodies die. But we still breathe the more vital air of the inner life and hence we merely leave the body, and our life is essentially unchanged. The medium of communication then, between Spirit and Spirit, whether- the Spirits be in the flesh or out of the flesh, is this subtle spiritual air or ether which is as substantial to the Spirit as our air is to the body. It has its own laws and properties, the counterparts of the laws and properties of the natural air.”.... “We can thus understand the intimate connection which must necessarily exist between men still in the flesh and Spirits now disembodied. Existing together with us in the same spiritual atmosphere, which is the soul of the natural atmosphere, they have everything in common with us except the matter in which, for the time, we are enshrined.”—No. 3 of Libra’s papers on “Spiritual Spheres and Atmospheres” in Spiritual Magazine 1864.
When I chanced to light upon this passage, looking a few days ago into a number of the Spiritual Magazine for 1864, its simplicity and clearness of thought as to the condition of those who have undergone dissolution, roused in my mind a great wish to have the question of the identity of Spirits with the people they profess to be, reconsidered.
Often as it has been discussed by persons most able to give an opinion worth heeding, it seems to me that something more of proximate truth might be gained by approaching the subject from an opposite side; asking ourselves not, Can those who claim to be the Spirits of departed men and women be indeed what they say they are?—but, What is the supposition that we accept as an-alternative? What theory have we so adequate for disposing of the so-called dead as to justify our very strong disinclination to believe that they are close at hand, and under certain conditions able to manifest their presence? Reasons for feeling slow to credit the statements of communicating Spirits are too many and too notorious to be worth dwelling upon: the mendacity of a very large class of Spirits, and the apparent weak-mindedness of others, as well as the occasional merging of individual Spirits into a society of which all the members call themselves by one name, tend to baffle attempts at identification in nine cases out of ten. I speak from hearsay, having never wished to be present at any seance, but of secondhand evidence I have had an abundant supply, and for some years past my thoughts have been swaying to and for on this theme under influence of opposing testimony.
Such authorities as Dr. G. Wyld (in some of his arguments), Colonel Olcott, and Madame Blavatsky would have brought my indecision to rest on the negative side if ingenious theory and very powerful argument could overbalance a mass of evidence all pointing the other way; and my object now is to confront the question, “Where do we suppose the dead to be and in what circumstances?” with such witness as I can collect from the few writers whom I believe qualified to answer—writers, I mean, not accredited as inspired in the religious world, and therefore only considered to be authorities by those, fully as devout, to my thinking, who look for inspired teaching, i.e., influx of eternal truth, from mediums who have lived since the first century after Christ. And I subject myself to suspicion and ridicule for referring to them as authorities all the more willingly that, less than thirty years ago, I should have thought any one who did so surprisingly credulous and unorthodox. To the inspired writers of our Bible, I do of course primarily refer in my own mind, but so various is the interpretation put on those passages which bear on the subject, that I could not be at all sure of their meaning the same to other students as they do to myself. For instance, the usual deduction from the text, “In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall lie,” I could not for one moment accept, in all its everlasting despair; nor could I share the doubt many say they feel as to whether the Spirit of Samuel was evoked by Saul, or only a delusive representation. It seems to me one of the most unquestionable cases of a “revenant.”
It may, I suppose, be assumed that every thoughtful mind has outgrown the extremely childish notion of there being one place for good Spirits and one place for evil,—gradations of each unaccounted for, either sort being removed at death as if to a separate box; yet this, I am persuaded, lies at the root of much popular incredulity as to communication with the departed. And probably even more deeply rooted than this is the obscure scepticism as to what we call individuality of character surviving so great a catastrophe as death. Swedenborg, to whom I refer fully convinced of the veracity of his transmundane report, gives a tolerably accurate account of current opinion among ourselves when he says: “Philosophers who wish to have the credit of possessing more discernment then the rest of mankind, generally speak of the spirit, in terms which they do not understand, for they dispute about them, contending that not a single expression is applicable to spirit, which is derived from what is material, organic, or has extension. Thus, abstracting from spirit every conceivable quality, it vanishes from their ideas and becomes to them as nothing.”—“Arcana Celestia,” chap. 3, par. 196.
And again: “In the case of one person not long after his decease, I perceived, what he indeed confessed, that although he had believed in the existence of the spirit, yet he imagined that it could only live an indistinct life; for he had regarded the life as being in the body, so that on the life of the body being withdrawn, there would remain scarcely any perception of individuality.” Another Spirit after death “acknowledged that in the life of the body he had been perplexed with this phantasy, that the spirit was a mere thinking principle, without organization or extension.”—Ibid, chap. 4, pars. 443, 444,
And in his “Heaven and Hell” he tells us that Spirits and Angels indignantly “charged him to declare that they were not minds without force or ethereal spectres, but that they are men in form, and see, hear, and feel as perfectly as men in the world.”— “Heaven and Hell,” par. 77.
Throughout this most interesting book Swedenborg repeatedly asserts that the Spirits of the departed are still in the human form, and from thence concludes that no future resurrection is to be looked for; yet incidentally mentions in another of his works, “On the Last Judgment,” that the Lord alone arose as to his body “as well as to his Spirit,” ignoring, as it would appear, the Christian’s belief that he was the forerunner of redeemed humanity and that in the resurrection of his body we have a pledge of man’s ultimate resurrection in the body.
J. Bohme makes us to understand very clearly that no Spirit can be altogether bodiless; the soul can be, not the Spirit proceeding from the soul, and by soul I mean here of course the first emanation of the human being, which, originating in eternal nature, cannot pass away with time—not what so many writers seem to mean by the words, the animal soul, a very other and more recent contingent of humanity. But it is evident alike from Scripture, and all we gather from the testimony and habits of unquiet Spirits, that whatever kind of body they still act and feel by, it is a very unsatisfactory tenement; that they long for the coarse old sheath, having failed to attain to the new life of a perfect and imperishable body. For surely it is not uncharitable to conclude that those who have won to a better organisation are unlikely to cling to the worse, reproducing it as vividly as they can in the old haunts of past existence. As to the nature of those uneasy bodies, I attempt to allay my own curiosity by accepting what Bohme tells of the astral body, and modern writers of the nerve-spirit. May not the nervous system be the body left to us when cumbrous flesh and bones are done with I If it be so, its defencelessness from external influences for want of the protective, pain-dulling, enclosure of a less sensitive organisation is terribly imaginable. And no one who sees or reads much of Spiritists’ researches can fail to have observed the seeming weakness of individual Spirits as to maintaining their line of thought or of communication, uninterrupted by aggressive or impertinent intruders. An acute witness of many a seance says: “We have felt amazed, too, at the mercuriality of spirit nature passing from one feeling to another under the slightest provocation, with a rapidity inconceivable to us phlegmatic and skin-coated mortals.”—J. I. Emmet’s “Spirit Dialogues,” p. 42.
And this is one of the common experiences that shakes faith in Spirit identity. A friend or relation may be giving a solemn admonition, and all of a sudden some nonsense is abruptly jumbled in by another Spirit; and the thought is natural that no Spirit worth heeding could be subject to suppression by immeasurably inferior beings; but till we know more of that strange existence where the inner state alone forms circumstance and body, place and outlook, are we justified in that decision? <... continues on page 12-58 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Communicating Spirits by Penny, A. J., Light, v. 2, No. 55, January 21, 1882, pp. 27-9
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 55, January 21, 1882, pp. 27-9