Example 9 - CLAIRE.

The Spirit who furnished the following dictations belonged to a lady whom the medium had known when on Earth. Her conduct, like her character, fully justify the torments that befell her.

Moreover, she was dominated by an exaggerated feeling of personal pride and selfishness, a feeling that becomes evident in the third of the messages, when she demands that the medium occupy himself with her alone.

The communications were obtained at different times, the last three already showing appreciable progress in the Spirit's dispositions, thanks to the care of the medium, who had undertaken her moral education.

I. Here I am, I, the unhappy Claire. What do you wish me to tell you?

Resignation, hope are but words, for those who know that, innumerable as the stones of a hailstorm, sufferings will endure for them through the endless succession of the centuries.

I can soften them, you say… what a vague word! Where am I to find courage and hope for so much?

Try, then, dull intelligence, to understand what an eternal day may be. A day, a year, a century… what do I know? if the hours do not divide it, the seasons do not vary; eternal and slow as the water that seeps over the rock, this execrable, accursed day weighs upon me like an avalanche of lead…

I suffer!… Around me, only silent and indifferent shadows… I suffer!

Yet I know that above this misery reigns God the Father, toward whom all things move. I want to think of him, I want to implore his mercy. I struggle and I live crawling like the cripple who drags himself along the road.

I do not know what power draws me to you; perhaps you are salvation. I leave you calmer, more revived, like a frozen old woman warming herself in a ray of sunlight. Icy, my soul revives at your approach.

II. My misfortune increases day by day, in proportion to my knowledge of eternity.

O misery! Cursed be the hours of selfishness and inertia, in which, forgetful of all charity, of all affection, I thought only of my own well-being!

Cursed human interests, material preoccupations that blinded and ruined me! Now the remorse of time lost.

What shall I say to you, who hear me? See, watch constantly, love others more than yourself, do not slow your march nor fatten the body to the detriment of the soul. Watch, as the Savior preached to his disciples.

Do not thank me for this counsel, for though my Spirit conceives it, my heart has never heard it.

Like the driven-off dog crawling in fear, so do I humble myself, not yet knowing voluntary love. How long its divine dawn delays in breaking! Pray for my parched and so wretched soul! III. Why do you forget me? I come even here to seek you. Do you believe that isolated prayers and the mere pronouncing of my name will suffice to appease my pains? No, a hundred times no.

I howl with pain, wandering, without rest, without refuge, without hope, feeling the eternal goad of punishment burying itself in my rebellious soul.

When I hear your laments, I laugh, just as I do when I see you dejected. Your ephemeral miseries, your tears, torments that sleep halts, what are they?

Do I sleep here? I want (do you hear?) I want you, leaving aside your philosophical lucubrations, to occupy yourself with me, and also to make others occupy themselves with me as well.

I have no words to define this time that flows on, without the hours marking out periods within it.

I see only a faint ray of hope; it was you who gave it to me: do not abandon me, then. IV. The Spirit Saint Louis. — This picture is wholly true and in no way exaggerated.

It may perhaps be asked what this woman did to be so wretched. Did she commit some horrible crime? did she steal? did she murder? No; she did nothing that offended the justice of men.

On the contrary, she amused herself with what you call earthly happiness; beauty, pleasures, flatteries, everything smiled upon her, nothing was lacking to her, to the point that those who saw her said: What a happy woman! And they envied her lot.

But, would you know the truth? She was selfish; she possessed everything except a good heart.

She did not violate the law of men, but that of God, since she forgot the first of the virtues — charity.

Having loved none but herself, she now finds no one to love her, and she sees herself isolated, abandoned, helpless in Space, where no one thinks of her nor occupies themselves with her. Such is what constitutes her torment.

Having sought only the worldly pleasures that today no longer exist, the void formed around her, and as she sees only nothingness, this seems to her eternal.

She does not suffer physical tortures; the demons do not come to torment her, which is in any case unnecessary, since she torments herself, and that is more painful to her, for, if such a thing were to happen, the demons would be beings occupying themselves with her.

Selfishness was her joy on Earth; well then, it is still selfishness that pursues her, a worm gnawing at her heart, her true demon. Saint Louis.

V. I will speak to you of the important difference existing between divine morality and human morality.

The former assists the adulterous woman in her abandonment and says to sinners: “Repent, and the kingdom of Heaven shall be opened to you.”

In short, divine morality accepts all repentance, all confessed faults, whereas human morality rejects the former and smiles upon hidden sins which, it says, are in part forgiven.

To the one belongs the grace of pardon, and to the other hypocrisy.

Choose, Spirits avid for the truth! Choose between the Heavens opened to repentance and the tolerance that admits evil, repelling the sobs of repentance frankly displayed, only so as not to wound its selfishness and prejudices.

Repent, all you who sin; renounce evil and above all hypocrisy, that veil of vileness, the smiling mask of mutual conveniences. VI. I am calmer and more resigned to the expiation of my faults.

Evil is not outside me, it resides within me, and it must be I who transform myself, not external things.

Within us and with us we carry Heaven and hell; our faults, engraved on our conscience, are read fluently on the day of resurrection. And since the state of the soul casts us down or raises us up, we are the judges of ourselves.

Let me explain: a Spirit impure and laden with guilt can neither conceive nor long for an elevation that would be unbearable to it.

Believe it well: just as the different species of beings each live in the sphere proper to them, so Spirits, according to their degree of advancement, move in the milieu suited to their faculties and conceive of no other except when progress, the instrument of the slow transformation of souls, removes their base tendencies, stripping them of the chrysalis of sin, so that they may flutter before launching themselves, swift as arrows, toward the one and longed-for end — God!

Ah! I still crawl, but I no longer hate, and I conceive the unspeakable happiness of divine love. Pray, therefore, always for me, who hope and wait.”

In the following communication, Claire speaks of her husband, who had greatly tormented her, and of the position in which he finds himself in the spiritual world. This picture, which she could not herself complete, was finished by the spiritual guide of the medium.

VII. I come to seek you, you who for so long leave me in oblivion. I have, however, acquired patience and no longer despair.

Do you wish to know the situation of poor Félix? He wanders in the darkness, given over to the profound nakedness of his soul. Superficial and frivolous, debased by sensualism, he never knew what love and friendship were. Not even passion clarified his somber lights.

His present state is comparable to that of the child unfit for the functions of life and deprived of all support. Félix wanders, terrified, in that strange world where everything shines with the brilliance of that God whom he denied.

VIII. The guide of the medium. — I am going to speak for Claire, since she cannot continue the analysis of her husband's sufferings without sharing them:

Félix, superficial in his ideas as in his sentiments; violent through weakness; dissolute through frivolity, entered the spiritual world as naked morally as physically.

In reincarnating he acquired nothing and, consequently, must begin the whole work anew.

Like a man waking from a prolonged dream, recognizing the deep agitation of his nerves, this poor being, emerging from his disturbance, will recognize that he lived on chimeras, which corrupted his existence. Then he will curse the materialism that had given him the void for reality; he will inveigh against the positivism that had made him take for delusions his ideas about the future life, for madness his aspiration, for weakness his belief in God.

The unhappy one, upon awakening, will see that those names he had mocked are the formula of truth, and that, contrary to the fable, the chase after the prey was less profitable than that after the shadow. Georges.

IX.

— Study on the communications of Claire.

These communications are instructive in showing us above all one of the most common features of life — that of selfishness.

From it do not result those great crimes that stun even the most perverse, but the condition of an enormous throng who live in this world, honored and venerated, only for having a certain veneer and for being exempt from the opprobrium of the repression of social laws.

Such people will not find exceptional punishments in the spiritual world, but a situation simple, natural, and consonant with the state of their soul and their manner of living; isolation, abandonment, helplessness — such is the punishment of the one who lived only for himself.

Claire was, as we have seen, a Spirit quite intelligent, but of an arid heart. The social position, the fortune, the physical gifts she had possessed on Earth drew to her homages pleasing to her vanity, which was enough for her; 5 today, where she finds herself, she sees only indifference and vacuity around her: a punishment that is not only more mortifying than the pain that inspires pity and compassion, but is also a means of compelling her to awaken in others an interest in her, in her fate.

The sixth message contains an idea perfectly true concerning the obstinacy of certain Spirits in the practice of evil.

We are astonished to see how some of them are insensible to the idea and even to the spectacle of the happiness of good Spirits.

It is exactly the situation of degraded men who delight in depravity as in grossly sensual practices. These men are, so to speak, in their element: they do not conceive of delicate pleasures, preferring ragged tatters to clean and brilliant garments, because they find themselves more at ease in the former. Hence the neglect of good company in favor of bacchic orgies and debauchery.

And these Spirits so identify themselves with this mode of life that it comes to constitute for them a second nature, and they believe themselves incapable even of rising above their sphere. And thus they remain until a radical transformation of the being revives their intelligence, develops their moral sense, and renders them accessible to subtler sensations.

These Spirits, when disincarnated, cannot promptly acquire delicacy of sentiments, and, for a longer or shorter time, will occupy the lower layers of the spiritual world, just as happens on Earth; 11 thus they will remain while rebellious to progress, but, with time, experience, the tribulations and miseries of successive incarnations, the moment will come for them to conceive of something better than what they had hitherto possessed; their aspirations at last rise, they begin to understand what they lack, and they begin the efforts of regeneration.

Once on this path, the march is rapid, since they have understood a higher good, compared to which the others, being but gross sensations, end by inspiring repugnance in them.

Q. (To Saint Louis.) What are we to understand by the darkness in which certain suffering souls find themselves plunged? Is it that referred to so many times in Scripture? — A. Yes, indeed, that designated by Jesus and the prophets in references to the punishment of the wicked.

But this was nothing but an allegory intended to strike the materialized senses of their contemporaries, who could never have understood punishment in a spiritual manner.

Certain Spirits are immersed in darkness, but one must understand from this a true night of the soul comparable to the intellectual obscurity of the idiot.

It is not a madness of the soul, but rather an unconsciousness of it and of what surrounds it, which occurs whether in the presence or in the absence of material light.

It is, above all, the punishment of those who doubted their destiny. For since they believed in nothingness, the appearances of that nothingness torment them, until the soul, coming to itself, breaks the meshes of enervation that prostrated and enveloped it, just as the man oppressed by a painful dream struggles, at a given moment, with all the vigor of his faculties, against the terrors that at first dominated him.

This momentary reduction of the soul to a fictitious nothingness while conscious of its existence is a feeling more cruel than can be imagined, by reason of the appearance of repose that comes over it: — it is this forced repose, this nullity of being, this uncertainty that constitute its torment; 19 the weariness that invades it is the most terrible of punishments, since it perceives nothing around it, neither things nor beings; only darkness, in truth, is what all this represents for it. Saint Louis.

(Claire.) Here I am. I too can answer the question concerning the darkness, for I wandered and suffered for a long time in those limbos where all is sobbing and miseries.

Yes, there exists the visible darkness of which Scripture speaks, and the unhappy ones who leave life, ignorant or guilty, after the earthly trials are driven into that cold region, unconscious of themselves and of their destiny.

Believing in the perpetuity of that situation, their language is still that of the life that seduced them, and they marvel and are astonished at the profound solitude:

darkness, then, are those places peopled and at the same time deserted, spaces in which obscure, pitiable Spirits wander, without consolation, without affections, without aid of any kind.

To whom shall they turn… if they feel eternity, crushing, upon them?…

They tremble and lament the petty interests that measured out their hours;

they deplore the absence of nights that often brought them, in a happy dream, the forgetting of their griefs.

Darkness, for the Spirit, is: ignorance, the void, the horror of the unknown…

I cannot continue…

Claire.

On this point we further obtained the following explanation:

“By its nature, the Spirit possesses a luminous property that develops under the influence of the activity and the qualities of the soul. One might say that these qualities are to the perispiritual fluid as friction is to the match.

The intensity of the light is in proportion to the purity of the Spirit: the slightest moral imperfections attenuate and weaken it.

The light radiated by a Spirit will be all the more vivid, the greater its advancement.

Thus, the Spirit being, in a way, its own beacon, it will see in proportion to the intensity of the light it produces, from which it results that the Spirits who do not produce it find themselves in obscurity.”

This theory is perfectly exact as regards the radiation of luminous fluids by superior Spirits, and is confirmed by observation, although one cannot infer that this is the true cause, or, at least, the sole cause of the phenomenon; 30 first, because not all inferior Spirits are in darkness; second, because one and the same Spirit can find itself alternately in light and in obscurity; third, finally, because light is also a punishment for very imperfect Spirits.

If the obscurity in which certain Spirits lie were inherent to their personality, that obscurity would be permanent and general for all evil Spirits, which, moreover, is not the case; 32 sometimes the most refined perverse ones see perfectly, whereas others, who cannot be so qualified, lie, temporarily, in deep darkness.

Thus, everything indicates that, independently of the light that is proper to them, Spirits receive an exterior light that is lacking to them according to circumstances, 34 whence one must conclude that the obscurity depends on a cause or on a foreign will, constituting a special punishment of the sovereign justice, for determined cases.

Q. (to Saint Louis). What is the cause of the moral education of the disincarnated being easier than that of the incarnate? The relations established by Spiritism between men and Spirits give rise to the latter correcting themselves more rapidly under the influence of salutary counsels, more so than happens in regard to the incarnate, as is seen in the cure of obsessions.

A. (PARIS SOCIETY): — The incarnate, by virtue of his very nature, is in incessant struggle owing to the contrary elements of which he is composed and which must lead him to his providential end, reacting one upon the other.

Matter easily undergoes the predominance of an exterior fluid; if the soul, with all the moral power of which it is capable, does not react, it will let itself be dominated through the intermediary of its body, following the impulse of the perverse influences that surround it, 38 and this with the more ease as the invisibles, who subjugated it, attack by preference the most vulnerable points, the tendencies toward the dominant passion.

The same does not occur with the disincarnated being, who, placed under semi-material influence, does not compare in his state to the incarnate. Human respect, so preponderant in man, does not exist for the former, and this thought alone is enough to compel him not to resist for long the reasons that his own interest points out to him as good.

He can struggle, and indeed generally does so with more violence than the incarnate, being freer. No consideration of material interest, of social position, stands in the way of his reasoning.

He struggles out of love of evil, but soon acquires the conviction of his impotence, in the face of the moral superiority that dominates him; the prospect of a better future is more accessible to him, because he recognizes himself in the very life in which that future is to be completed; and that vision is not clouded by the whirlwind of human pleasures; 42 in a word, it is the independence from the flesh that facilitates the conversion, especially when one has acquired a certain degree of development through the trials accomplished.

A Spirit entirely primitive would be little accessible to reasoning, which, however, is not the case with one who already has experience of life.

Moreover, in the incarnate as in the disincarnated, it is upon the soul, it is upon the sentiment, that one must act.

Every material action can momentarily halt the sufferings of the vicious man, but what it cannot do is destroy the morbid principle residing in the soul; 46 any act whatsoever that does not aim at perfecting the soul cannot turn it away from evil. Saint Louis.