Communication Spirits
It is quite in accordance with the dogma that death frustrates Divine power in any after method of saving, that we should, as virtually we do—Roman Catholics excepted—no longer attempt to give any succour to the dead. What Omnipotent Love cannot do, it seems, of course, idle mockery for any man to pray for; and hence, as I believe, we act with most unreasonable inhumanity. On what grounds? Apparently on the strength of these words in Holy Scripture, “No repentance in the grave,” “After death the judgment,” and our interpretation of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus—concluding that when the immortal part of man is severed from the corruptible, we have no further duty to discharge towards him or her, no scope left for the efforts of still hopeful love and still effective pity.
Alas! we use the biblical image of death, speaking of it as “the land where all things are forgotten,” and I think it might be almost as appositely applied by the dead to our hurrying ever-occupying life in which they have not only been put to silence, but too often gradually effaced from thought. The earnest entreaties of unhappy Spirits for intercessory prayer are eloquent on this point: ought they not to have weight with us? We might need them ourselves—where we cannot transmit the request. And if we reflect on our omissions in this particular, I believe we shall find them due to the difficulty of ardently desiring anything that imagination cannot lay hold of, or experience draw results from, rather than to any sort of belief for which we can pretend to have a warrant.
Now as to self-interest; I can imagine some may say, who have spared me a little time and more patience, finding as usual that the attempt to discover a gleam of light in thick darkness only wearies the mental eye,—“But after all what is the use of trying to find out before the time what we shall all know sooner or later by experience?” My thought is that we shall only then discover how much we have lost for want of some conceivable notions of the after life; for unquestionably a state that can never be imagined is sure to be habitually absent from remembrance. No doubt we shall find out all that now baffles curiosity as regards the rapports of the disembodied with the living; but if we go even to a distant hotel or lodging-house and find a book or a desk on which our work or enjoyment partly depends left behind, we regret it with some pungency of chagrin and self-reproach. Let us for a moment try to imagine what it would be to find ourselves in the close by, ever imminent “other world,” with the wrath of God—i.e., the original root fire of our own souls—still unappeased, with a will no longer able to direct or control spiritual force by the help of our present bodily organisation (which gives the contracting limits needful for all expansive impetus); out of sympathy with Divine meekness because of our pride; incredulous of Divine love because of our hate; and longing vainly for poor sensuous enjoyments then beyond our reach. I feel sure that such imaginings would effect present conduct more than all the crude, positive teaching about death which is so common, and, as I believe, so fearfully delusive; assuring people of perfect bliss all at once secured by the faithful after death, or the hopeless, interminable torments they are threatened with as the only alternative—teaching which assumes that dissolution can remove us not only from the embrace of Divine love and pity, but from the action of every known law of human nature!
Ah! who that believes this human nature to be something more awful than a breathing, eating and drinking, and digesting machine, crowned with a brain for its guidance during a short term of years, can think it will be time to understand something of the condition of departed Spirits when among them! I can well see that to inquire “What becomes of the dead?” may be as foolish as if an unborn embryo were to ask, “What happens after birth?” Yet to the unborn life we might truly answer: Concealment of spiritual sensations under many a fold of mortal flesh and conventional usage. So, truly, can we now answer the first question so far: All those modes of concealment from self-consciousness and self-betrayal must end with death. Is it wise to wait till then to prepare for the inexorable laws of the unseen life, where all the seemings of this world are to be destroyed as surely as the structure left behind in the grave?
“Men,” says Mr. T. Lake Harris, "are accustomed to expect Divine possessions not in the sequences of law but by the overruling of law." That expectation ends with death; and what I therefore fear is, no punishment from any other being, but the sequences of the law of my own. I desire the godlike possessions of love, peace, and joy; and not Omnipotent Mercy can bestow them if I leave my mortal body with an unloving, vindictive, disquieting habit of nature. “The planes formed in the mind on earth determine for cycles the conditions of eternity.”* This makes for me the terror of death, for surely to be powerless to form the indispensable conditions of bliss, when every lower degree of comfort or illusory pleasure is beyond reach, must be supreme misery, even were there no fellow contributors of woe.
But I suppose few thoughtful people can doubt that powers hostile to man—call them by what name we will—have a subordinated dominion in the world unseen as well as in this: if, therefore, I am severed from material defences while my will and imagination work in accordance with their malignant desires, it is certain that I must in some degree become their victim. I greatly fear that: not for a minute doubting the love and providence of the Father of Spirits after death, but what my spiritual insanities may bring upon me: for when they are, so to speak, fortified by the sympathy† of more powerful alienated Spirits, that merciful love must bring me to reason by severer treatment than any previously undergone. And this I imagine is what constitutes purgatory.
The habit of concluding that after death we shall be under quite a different dispensation, and in all respects unlike what we were in the flesh, necessarily fosters incredulity as to the dead still interesting themselves in the life left behind—a habit which must dull the action of conscience; for if death is to alter every usual turn of thought and force of affection, there will be a tacitly accepted theory that ideas of right and wrong may then be comfortably altered also. Any way, for such a totally transformed individuality who will care to forego much of present enjoyment? And this habit, while robbing us of strong incentives to goodness, and great consolation and hope, has also led us to entertain most unworthy notions of God’s wisdom and economy of forces. There seems something preposterous in the thought that He permits all the various and exquisite powers of the human spirit, enriched by daily increments of knowledge, to be suddenly thrown into disuse; inaction being not only a torment, but sure to deteriorate every power. Such a doom amounts to immense loss to the whole universe. A man dies in whose brain may have been forged influences that alter the fate of nations; and, in the wide blank that spreads through his former sphere of action, we feel as if all his plans had been annihilated. He no longer speaks, or counsels, or commands; audibly and visibly, no; but are we so unreasonable as to think his absorbing anxieties at an end because a flesh heart no longer beats in his mortal body? If the distinguishing characteristics of human nature were flesh and blood we might suffer such a thought. But we know better.
Now if the interests and affections of this life are carried through the crisis of dissolution, and I can no longer doubt it myself, it is very possible that the influence is extended by release from his material burden. He has entered, if Swedenborg does not mislead, into conscious association with the Spirits of whose society he has been in this life a member, and can probably act in concert with them (though weakened as an individual) more effectually than he did with embodied instruments of his will in the seen world. The course of modern history after the deaths of Cavour, John Brown in America, and Thiers, for instance, impressed me strongly with this conclusion: they were withdrawn from life with hopes unfulfilled and aspirations unsatisfied, but how soon after the death of each did their principles triumph, gaining permanent success!
My rambling, and I fear somewhat inconsequent considerations, must not be allowed to run on. In conclusion I would bring them to a point thus: If there is solidarity in the human race, which is, I suppose, an undisputed tenet of philosophers (Materialists excepted), there must be constant interaction; were this suspended by death it would amount to what in the individual body is paralysis. The steady advance of the present human generation as to knowledge and power sufficiently disproves anything like that. Now granting interaction of the living and the dead in the mass, we must admit its certain <... continues on page 12-154 >
* T. Lake Harris’s “Arcana of Christianity,” p. 394.
† “They know only of what they here conceived or took in, and the souls sink down in that opinion into the deepest ground, much deeper than they have here conceived, for that which was known in many of them of the same opinion, what any or all of them know in the same opinion, that one soul alone knoweth: for it is one body with all those that are of the same opinion, and they have one heart in many members.”—J. Böhme’s “Threefold Life,” chap. 12., par. 23.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Communication Spirits by Penny, A.J., Light, v. 2, No. 59, February 18, 1882, pp. 75-6
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 59, February 18, 1882, pp. 75-6