< Communicating Spirits (continued from page 12-57) >
A thought, a moment’s apprehension of disturbance, may displace that attitude of feeling which makes rapport with the communicating medium possible. This passage from Swedenborg’s treatise on the Last Judgment, gives, I think, some notion as to the cause of this: “Man’s spiritual things which pertain to his thought and will, inflow into his natural things which pertain to his sensations and actions, and in these they terminate and subsist; if a man were not in possession of them, that is, if he were without these boundings and ultimates, his spiritual things, which pertain to the thoughts and affections of his Spirit, would dissolve away, like things unbounded, or like those which have no foundation.”—“An Account of the Last Judgment,” p. 10.
Agreeing with J. Bohme* as to the comparative powerlessness of disembodied Spirits, Eliphaz Levi observes: “L’ame sans corps serait partout, mais partout si peu qu’elle ne pourrait agir nulle part.” (“Histoire de la Magic,” p. 111.) † I have myself a quite unsupported idea that in losing the mortal body, we lose not only the restraining enclosure which gives reactive force, but the combined co-operation of a multitude of subordinate Spirits necessarily disbanded at dissolution. But be this as it may, it is certain that the little we gather from communicating Spirits as to “fluidic life,” after death fully bears out the expression a Hebrew Prophet attributed to a speaker in Hades to a potentate newly arrived there: “Art thou also become weak as we?” (Isaiah xiv., ver. 10.)
Again, the tenor of the messages brought to the living from invisibles is often so pompously trivial that we think it impossible for our once sensible and keen-witted old friends to offer such truisms in weakly turgid phraseology. But let us imagine for a moment what we should find it possible to say if we could only speak with old friends on the other side of the world from time to time by telegram—letters impracticable, and the intervening history of both parties unknown to each other. I fancy the most seriously-minded, eager for edification, would be apt to say something of well-known warning, or some generality that had nothing novel but strengthened emphasis, while the less grave would content themselves with a merry common-place, and those who suffered more than they chose to avow, would exhibit that anxious averseness to giving any direct information which characterises so many an answer at seances.
One of the most common solvents for the hope that relations and friends recognise and communicate with inquirers is based upon a well ascertained fact duly announced by Swedenborg: “When Spirits come to man they enter into all his memory and excite thence what best suits themselves.” (“The Earths in the Universe,” par. 13). “This Spirits can do most dexterously, for when they come to any one they see in his memory every particular it contains.”—Ibid., par. 11.
But, while admitting this, let us also attend to what the same seer has to say about man’s own memory after death: “It is evident that man carries all his memory with him into the other world.” (“Heaven and Hell," par, 462.) “When man passes from one life into the other, or from one world into the other, it is like passing from one place to another; for he carries with him all things which he possessed in himself as a man, so that it cannot be said that death deprives man of anything truly constituent of humanity, since death is only the separation of the terrestrial body. The natural memory also remains, for Spirits retain everything which they had heard, seen, read, learned and thought in the world, from earliest infancy to the conclusion of life; but, since the natural objects, which are in the memory, cannot be reproduced in the Spiritual world, they are quiescent, as is the case with man in the world when he does not think from them: nevertheless, they are reproduced when the Lord pleases.” (“Heaven and Hell,” par 461.) “Everything which man thinks, wills, and speaks, or which he has done, heard, or seen, is inscribed on his internal or spiritual memory: but whatever is received into the spiritual memory is never blotted out, for it is inscribed at the same time on the Spirit itself, and on the members of its body, and thus the Spirit is formed according to the thoughts and acts of the will.”—Ibid, par 462.
One need not pause to think if the love of parents for children, of wives and husbands, and brothers and sisters, or strong affection for any human being is inscribed on the spiritual memory: surely if anything is, that must be. But Swedenborg further explains: “The external or natural memory, so far as regards all ideas which are derived from materiality,- time, space, and all other things which are proper to nature, does not servo the Spirit for the same use which it had served man in the world; because when man in the world thinks from the internal, sensual, or intellectual principle, he thinks naturally and not spiritually, but hi the other world he is a Spirit in a spiritual world, and therefore he does not think naturally but spiritually. Hence it is that the external or natural memory, as to all material ideas, is quiescent after death, and that nothing which man imbibed in the world by means of material things is any longer active, except what he has made rational by reflective application to use. The external memory is quiescent as to everything material, because material ideas cannot be reproduced in the spiritual world.”—“Heaven and Hell,” par. 464.
Now when we find repeated well authenticated instances of unseen beings who claim relationship with present people, communicating facts to prove it which could not have been found either in the memory of the medium or the thoughts of any one present, is it not going out of our way in the search after truth to refuse such evidence and say, “Still it cannot be the one we have lost! it must be some deluding Spirit”? The delusion, as it appears to me, is effected by our own obstinate superstitious belief that death entirely changes character, and removes as much from presence as from sight.
The theory by which I reconcile the assertions of Swedenborg, quoted above, is this: for want of a plane suitable for the continuance of its earthly impressions, the memory of a departed Spirit is quiescent, closed up in his interior life; but the peculiar nature of a medium, re-intromitting the Spirit’s perceptions to an earthly plane, may restore consciousness of past conditions, and reopen the hidden store of material impressions by which alone he can communicate with beings still involved in matter; just as a forgotten dream is occasionally recovered by the chance mention in society of something which gives the clue to its effaced pictures.
This wonderful power of mediumistic men and women to serve as a channel for intercourse between the visible and invisible worlds has been simply and forcibly described by Swedenborg: “Neither Spirits nor Angels, by their own sight, can see anything that is in the world, for to them mundane or solar light is as thick as darkness. In like manner man by his bodily sight cannot see anything that is in the other life, for to it the light of heaven is as thick darkness. Still Spirits and Angels, when it pleases the Lord, can see things in the natural world through the eyes of men ; but this is not granted by the Lord, except to those whom Ho permits to speak with Spirits and Angels, and to be together with them. It has sometimes happened that through me they have soon their friends, with whom they had boon intimate when in the body, altogether present as before, at which they were amazed. Wives have seen in this manner their husbands and children, and have wished me to toll them they wore present and beholding them, and to inform them of their state in the other life. This, however, I was prohibited from doing, for the reason that they would have called me insane, or have thought my information a delirium of the imagination. I was well aware that, although they admitted with their lips, they yet denied in their hearts the existence of Spirits, the resurrection of the dead, and their living among Spirits, and those being able to see and hear by means of man.” —“On the Earths in the Universe,” p. 135.
There is another statement of Swedenborg’s which I cannot but think qualified his assertion as to the effaced memories of material life, or rather postpones its validity until some time after dissolution. He tells us that “man passes through three states after death before he enters either Heaven or Hell.”.... “The first state of man after death is like his state in the world because he is still in externals.”... “He knows no other than that he is still in the world, except when he adverts to the circumstances which occur to him, and remembers that at his resurrection” (from death) “the angels told him he was then a Spirit.” (‘Heaven and Hell," par. 493.) Tho context, interesting as it is, exceeds the limits of quotation, and concludes thus: “Tho first state of man after death continues with some for days, with others for months, and with others for a year; but it seldom endures with anyone more than a year, and the duration is determined in every case according to the agreement and disagreement of the interiors and exteriors.” (“Heaven and Hell,” p. 498, See also Swedenborg’s treatise “On the Last Judgment,” p. 17.)
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* “No Spirit can subsist in its perfectibility without the body, for as soon as it departeth from the body, it loseth its government, or dominion. For the body is the mother of the Spirit in which the Spirit is generated, and in which it receiveth its strength and powers; it is and remaineth a Spirit when it is separated and departed from the body, but it loseth its rule, dominion or government.”—“Aurora,” chap. 26, par 52.
† “The soul without the body would be everywhere, but everywhere so little that it could not act anywhere.”