Picture of the spirit life.

— All of us, without exception, sooner or later will reach the fatal term of life; no force can exempt us from this necessity; that is what is certain. The preoccupations of the world often divert our thought from what takes place beyond the grave; but when the supreme moment arrives, few are those who do not ask themselves what they will become, for the idea of leaving existence without the possibility of return has something that wrenches the heart. Indeed, who could face with indifference the hypothesis of an absolute and eternal separation from all that he loved? Who could see without dread the immense abyss of nothingness opening before him, into which all our faculties, all our hopes, would disappear forever? “What! after me nothingness; nothing more than the void; everything ended and without return; a few more days and my remembrance will be erased from the memory of those who survive me; soon there will remain no trace of my passage on Earth; the very good I did will be forgotten by the ingrates I favored; and nothing will compensate for all this, no other prospect than my body being gnawed by worms.” Does this picture of the end of a materialist, traced by a Spirit who had lived by such thoughts, not have something horrible, something glacial about it? Religion teaches us that it cannot be so, and reason confirms it for us. But this future existence, vague and indefinite, has nothing that satisfies our love of what is positive. That is what gives rise to doubt in many people. Let us grant that we have a soul. But what is our soul? Does it have a form, some appearance? Is it a limited being or an indefinite one? Some say it is a breath of God; others that it is a spark; others, that it is a part of the great whole, the principle of life and intelligence. But what does all that mean? It is further said that it is immaterial. But an immaterial thing could not have definite properties; for us this represents nothing. Religion further teaches us that we shall be happy or unhappy, according to the good or evil we have done. But what is this happiness that awaits us in the bosom of God? Will it be a beatitude, an eternal contemplation, with no other object than to sing praises to the Creator? Are the flames of hell a reality or a fiction? The Church itself understands it in this latter sense, but what are these sufferings? Where is the place of torment? In short, what does one do and what does one see in that world that awaits us all? It is said that no one has come back until now to give us information. Here is an error, and the mission of Spiritism is precisely to enlighten us about that future, making us, to a certain extent, touch it and see it, no longer through reasoning, but through facts. Thanks to spirit communications this is no longer a presumption, a probability, about which everyone imagines at will, which the poets embellish with their fictions or sow with allegorical and deceptive images; it is reality itself that appears to us, for it is the very beings from beyond the grave who come to describe their situation to us and tell us what they do, allowing us, so to speak, to witness all the vicissitudes of their new life and thus showing us the inevitable fate that awaits us, according to our merits and demerits. Will there be anything anti-religious in this? Quite the contrary, for the unbelievers find faith in it and the lukewarm a renewal of fervor and confidence. Spiritism is, then, the most powerful auxiliary of religion. If it exists, it is because God permits it, to revive our wavering hopes and to lead us back to the path of good, through the prospect of the future that awaits us. The familiar conversations from beyond the grave that we publish, relating the situation of the Spirits who speak to us, give us an account of their pains, their joys, and their occupations; they are the living picture of the spirit life, and in them we can find the analogies that interest us through the very variety of the subjects treated. We shall try to summarize their whole.

— Let us first consider the soul as it leaves this world, and let us see what takes place in this transmigration. As the vital forces are extinguished, the Spirit detaches itself from the body at the moment when organic life ceases; but the separation is not abrupt or instantaneous, sometimes beginning before the complete cessation of life; it is not always complete at the instant of death. We already know that between the Spirit and the body there is a semimaterial bond which constitutes a first envelope: it is this bond that does not break suddenly and, as long as it lasts, the Spirit remains in a state of disturbance comparable to that which accompanies awakening. It often doubts its death; it feels that it exists, it sees itself, and does not understand that it can live without the body, from which it perceives itself to be separated; the bonds that still bind it to matter make it accessible to certain sensations, which it takes for physical sensations. It is only when it finds itself completely free that the Spirit recognizes itself: until then it does not perceive its situation. As we have said on other occasions, the duration of this state of disturbance is highly variable: it may be of a few hours as of several months, but it is rare that after a few days the Spirit does not recognize itself more or less well. However, since everything is strange and unknown to it, it needs a certain time to familiarize itself with its new manner of perceiving things. Solemn is the instant in which one of them sees its enslavement cease through the rupture of the bonds that bound it to the body; at its entrance into the world of the Spirits it is welcomed by the friends who come to receive it, as if it were returning from a painful journey. If the passage was a happy one, that is, if the time of exile was employed in a manner profitable to itself and elevated it in the hierarchy of the world of the Spirits, they congratulate it. There it meets again those it knew, mingles with those who love it and sympathize with it, and then truly begins, for it, its new existence.

— The semimaterial envelope of the Spirit constitutes a kind of body of definite, limited form, analogous to ours. But this body does not have our organs and cannot feel all our impressions. Nevertheless, it perceives all that we perceive: light, sounds, odors, etc. Having nothing material about them, these sensations are no less real for that; they have, indeed, something more clear, more precise, more subtle, because they reach it without an intermediary, without passing through the channel of the organs that weaken them. The faculty of perceiving is inherent in the Spirit: it is an attribute of its whole being; sensations reach it from all sides, and not through circumscribed channels. One of them said to us, speaking of vision: “It is a faculty of the Spirit and not of the body; you see through the eyes, but it is not the eye that sees, it is the Spirit.”

Because of the conformation of our organs, we have need of certain vehicles for sensations; thus light is necessary to us in order to reflect objects, and air to transmit sound. These vehicles become useless, since we no longer have the intermediaries that made them necessary. The Spirit, then, sees without the aid of our light, hears without need of the vibrations of the air; this is why, for it, there is no darkness. But perpetual and indefinite sensations, however agreeable they may be, would become wearisome in time, if it were not possible for it to withdraw from them. Thus the Spirit has the faculty of suspending them; it can cease at will to see, to hear, or to feel such things, and consequently not to see, not to hear, and not to feel what it does not wish. This faculty is in proportion to its superiority, since there are things that inferior Spirits cannot avoid, whereby their situation becomes painful.

It is this new manner of feeling that the Spirit does not understand at first, of which it becomes aware only little by little. Those whose intelligence is still very backward do not understand it at all and would feel great difficulty in describing it: absolutely as among us the ignorant see and move about, without knowing how and why.

This impossibility of understanding what is above their reach, joined to boastfulness, the ordinary companion of ignorance, is the source of the absurd theories given by certain Spirits, which would lead us into error were we to accept them without control and not assure ourselves of the degree of confidence they merit, through the means afforded by experience and by the habit of conversing with them.

There are sensations that have their source in the very state of our organs. Now, the needs inherent in our body cannot occur, since the body no longer exists. The Spirit, therefore, experiences neither fatigue nor need of rest or of nourishment, because it has no loss to repair, just as it is afflicted by none of our infirmities. The needs of the body determine the social needs which, for the Spirits, no longer exist, such as the preoccupations of business, discords, the thousand and one tribulations of the world, and the torments to which we give ourselves over in order to secure the necessities or the superfluous things of life. They feel pity for the efforts we expend on account of futilities; the happier the elevated Spirits are, the greater the suffering experienced by the inferior ones. However, these sufferings are expressed as anguishes which, although having nothing physical about them, are no less poignant for that; they have all the passions and all the desires they had in life – we speak of the inferior Spirits – and their punishment is not being able to satisfy them. This represents a true torture, which they judge to be perpetual, because their very inferiority does not allow them to see its end, which, for them, is also a punishment. Articulated speech is also a need of our organization. Not needing sound vibrations to strike their ears, the Spirits understand one another by the simple transmission of thought, just as we often understand one another by means of a simple glance. Nonetheless, the Spirits make noise. We know that they can act upon matter, and matter transmits the sound to us. It is thus that they make themselves understood, whether by means of raps, or by cries that vibrate in the air; but then it is for us that they do it, and not for themselves. We shall return to the subject in a special article, where we shall treat of the faculty of auditive mediums.

While we drag our heavy and material body across the earth, like the convict his chain, that of the Spirits, vaporous and ethereal, transports itself without fatigue from one place to another, traversing space with the rapidity of thought and penetrating everything, since matter offers it no obstacle.

The Spirit sees all that we see, and more clearly than we do. Moreover, it sees that which our limited senses do not permit us to see; penetrating matter itself, it discovers what matter withholds from our sight.

The Spirits are not, then, vague, indefinite beings, according to the abstract definitions of the soul to which we referred a little earlier. They are real, determinate, circumscribed beings, enjoying all our faculties and many others that are unknown to us, because inherent in their nature; they have the qualities of the matter peculiar to them and constitute the invisible world that peoples space, surrounding us and jostling us incessantly. Let us suppose, for an instant, that the material veil that hides them from our sight were torn away: we would see ourselves surrounded by a multitude of beings coming and going, stirring about us and observing us, as we would do if we found ourselves in an assembly of the blind. For the Spirits we are the blind and they are the seeing.

— We said that upon entering its new life the Spirit needs some time to recognize itself, that everything is strange and unknown to it. No doubt one will ask how this can be, since it has had other corporeal existences. These existences were separated by intervals, during which it inhabited the world of the Spirits; that world, therefore, ought not to be unknown to it, considering that it does not see it for the first time.

Several causes contribute to making these perceptions seem new to it, although it has already experienced them. We said that death is always followed by an instant of disturbance, which may be of short duration. In this state, its ideas are always vague and confused; in some way the corporeal life is confounded with the spirit life, and it cannot yet separate them in its thought. The first impression dissipated, the ideas little by little become clear and, with them, the remembrance of the past, which returns to the memory only gradually, since this memory never bursts forth abruptly. Only when it finds itself completely dematerialized does the past unfold before it, like something indistinct emerging from a fog. Only then does it recall all the acts of its last existence, followed by the acts of the previous existences and of its various passages through the world of the Spirits. It is understandable, then, that for a certain time this world must seem new to it, until it has recognized itself completely and the remembrance of the sensations experienced there has returned to it in a precise manner. But to this cause must be joined another, no less preponderant. The state of the Spirit, as Spirit, varies extraordinarily, in proportion to the degree of its elevation and purity. As it rises and is purified, its perceptions and sensations become less gross, acquiring more refinement, more subtlety, and more delicacy; it sees, feels, and understands things that it could neither see, nor feel, nor understand in an inferior condition. Now, each corporeal existence, being for it an opportunity for progress, leads it into a new milieu, because it finds itself, if it has progressed, among Spirits of another order, whose ideas, thoughts, and habits are different. Add that such purification permits it to penetrate, always as Spirit, into worlds inaccessible to inferior Spirits, just as among us the salons of high society are forbidden to ill-bred persons. The less enlightened it is, the more limited is its horizon; as it rises and is purified, this horizon widens and, with it, the circle of its ideas and perceptions. The following comparison enables us to understand it. Let us suppose a coarse and ignorant peasant, coming to Paris for the first time. Will he know and understand the Paris of the learned and elegant world? No, because he will frequent only the people of his own class and the quarters they inhabit. But if, in the interval before a second journey, this peasant has developed himself, having acquired instruction and good manners, his habits and his relations will be other. He will then see a world new to him, which in no way will resemble the Paris of former times. The same happens with the Spirits; not all of them, however, experience this same degree of uncertainty. As they progress, their ideas develop and the memory perfects itself: they familiarize themselves beforehand with their new situation; their return among the other Spirits has nothing more to surprise them; they find themselves in their normal milieu and, the first moment of disturbance having passed, they recognize themselves almost immediately.

— Such is the general situation of the Spirits, in the so-called state of erraticity. But what do they do in this state? How do they pass the time? For us these questions are of capital interest, and they themselves are going to answer them, just as it was they who gave us the explanations we have just furnished, for none of this is the product of our imagination; it is not a system issued from our brain: we judge according to what we see and hear. Setting aside any opinion about Spiritism, we shall have to agree that this theory of the life beyond the grave has nothing irrational about it; it presents a perfectly logical sequence and connection, which would do honor to more than one philosopher.

It would be an error to think that the spirit life is an idle life. It is, on the contrary, essentially active, and all of them speak to us of their occupations; such occupations necessarily differ, according to whether the Spirit is wandering or incarnate. In the state of incarnation, they are relative to the nature of the globes inhabited by them, to the needs that depend on the physical and moral state of those worlds, as well as on the organization of living beings. It is not this that we are going to treat here; we shall speak only of the wandering Spirits. Among those who have attained a certain degree of elevation, some watch over the realization of God's designs in the great destinies of the Universe; they direct the march of events and contribute to the progress of each world; others take individuals under their protection, constituting themselves their tutelary geniuses and guardian angels, accompanying them from birth to death, seeking to guide them on the path of good: it is a happiness for them when their efforts are crowned with success. Some incarnate in inferior worlds, in order to carry out missions of progress there; through their works, examples, counsels, and teachings they seek to make some advance in the sciences or the arts, others in morality. They submit, then, voluntarily to the vicissitudes of a corporeal life often painful, with a view to doing good, and the good they do is credited to them. Others, finally, have no special attributions: they go everywhere their presence can be useful, give counsel, inspire good ideas, sustain the courage of those who waver, fortify the weak, and chastise the presumptuous. If we consider the infinite number of worlds that people the Universe and the incalculable number of beings that inhabit it, we shall understand that the Spirits have much to occupy them; such occupations, however, have nothing painful about them; they carry them out with joy, voluntarily, without constraint, and their happiness is to triumph in what they undertake; no one thinks of an eternal idleness, which would be a true torment. When circumstances require it, they assemble in council, deliberate on the course to follow, according to events, give orders to the Spirits subordinate to them, and go where duty calls them. These assemblies are more or less general or particular, according to the importance of the matter; no special and circumscribed place is destined for these gatherings: space is the domain of the Spirits. Nevertheless, they take place preferably on the globes where their objectives are. The incarnate Spirits who are on a mission there take part in them according to their elevation; while the body rests, they go to draw counsel from the other Spirits and, often, to receive orders concerning the conduct they should adopt as men. It is true that upon awakening they do not retain a precise remembrance of what took place, keeping of it the intuition, which leads them to act as if they were doing so of their own accord. Descending in the hierarchy, we find Spirits less elevated, less purified and, consequently, less enlightened; they do not for that cease to be good, fulfilling analogous functions in spheres of more restricted activity. Their action, instead of extending to the different worlds, is exercised more especially upon a particular globe and is related to its degree of development; their influence is more individual and has as its object things of lesser importance.

Next comes the multitude of common Spirits, more or less good or bad, who swarm about us. They rise little by little above Humanity, of which they represent all the shades and reflect them, since they retain its vices and its virtues. In a great number of them we find the tastes, the ideas, and the inclinations they possessed in life. Their faculties are limited, their judgment fallible like that of men and, often, erroneous and imbued with prejudices.

In others the moral sense is more developed; without having great superiority or great profundity, they judge more accurately, often condemning what they did, said, or thought in life. Moreover, there is one notable thing: even among the most common Spirits, the majority have more purified sentiments as Spirits than as men, since the spirit life enlightens them about their defects; save for a few exceptions, they repent bitterly and lament the evil they did, because they suffer its consequences more or less cruelly. We have seen some of them who were no better than they had been in life; never, however, worse. Absolute hardening is very rare and only temporary, because, sooner or later, they end by suffering from their position, and one may even say that all aspire to improvement, because they understand that this is the only means of emerging from their inferiority. To instruct themselves, to enlighten themselves, that is their great preoccupation, and they feel happy when they can add to it small missions of trust that elevate them in their own eyes. They have, too, their assemblies, more or less serious, according to the nature of their thoughts. They speak to us, they see and observe what takes place; they mingle in our gatherings, in our games, in our festivities and spectacles, as well as in our serious occupations. They listen to our conversations: the more frivolous to amuse themselves, to laugh at our expense, or to play some trick on us, if they can; the others to instruct themselves. They observe men, analyze their character, and do what they call a study of customs, with a view to the choice of their future existence.

We have seen the Spirit at the moment when, leaving the body, it enters its new life. We have analyzed its sensations and followed the gradual development of its ideas. The first moments are employed in recognizing themselves and in becoming aware of what takes place with them. In short, they try out, so to speak, their faculties, like the child who, little by little, sees its strength and its thoughts grow. We speak of the common Spirits, for the others, as we have already said, are in some way previously identified with the spirit state, which causes them no surprise, except the joy of finding themselves free of the corporeal fetters and sufferings. Among the inferior Spirits many feel longing for the earthly life, because their situation as Spirits is a hundred times worse. This is why they seek a distraction in the sight of what formerly constituted their delights, although even this sight is a torment to them, since they feel desires but cannot satisfy them.

The need to progress is general among the Spirits; it is this that impels them to work for their improvement, because they understand that this is the price of their happiness. Not all of them, however, experience this need to the same degree, especially at the beginning; some even come to take pleasure in a sort of vagabondage, but one that does not last long; soon activity becomes for them an imperious need, to which, moreover, they are impelled by other Spirits, who stimulate in them the sentiments of good.

Next comes what may be called the dregs of the spirit world, made up of all the impure Spirits, whose sole preoccupation is evil. They suffer and would wish that all should suffer as they do. Envy renders all superiority odious to them; hatred is their essence. Not being able to take hold of the Spirits, they take hold of men, attacking those who seem to them the weakest. To excite the evil passions, to instill discord, to separate friends, to provoke quarrels, to feed the pride of the ambitious in order then to give themselves the pleasure of bringing them down, to spread error and falsehood – in a word, to turn away from good – such are their dominant thoughts.

But why does God permit it to be so? God does not have to render us an account. The superior Spirits tell us that the evil ones are trials for the good, and that there is no virtue where there is no victory to be won. Moreover, if these malevolent Spirits gather on the Earth, it is because they find there echo and sympathy. Let us console ourselves by imagining that, above this abjection that surrounds us, there are pure and benevolent beings who love us, sustain us, encourage us, and extend their arms to us to carry us up to them, leading us to better worlds where evil finds no access, provided we know how to do what is needful to merit it.

Note: Let us observe the great conceptual advance afforded to the Spiritists, by the revelations of the Spirits through the mediumship of Francisco Cândido Xavier, comparing the information gathered in his works with the article above, written by Allan Kardec in 1859, that is, right at the beginning of the establishment of the Spiritist Doctrine. — (Compiler's Note.)