Punishment of the egoist

Note. – The Spirit who dictated the three following communications is that of a woman whom the medium knew in life, whose conduct and character well justify the torments she suffers. She was dominated principally by a sentiment of extreme egoism and a self-centeredness that is reflected in the last communication, by her pretension in wanting the medium to occupy herself only with her, and for her to renounce her ordinary studies.

Here I am, the unhappy Claire. What do you want me to teach you? Your resignation and your hope are nothing but words for one who knows that, innumerable as the pebbles of the shore, her sufferings shall endure in the interminable succession of the centuries. You say that you can soften them! What an empty word! Where to find the courage, the hope for so much? Try, then, limited brain, to comprehend what a day is that never ends. Will it be a day, a year, a century? What do I know? The hours are not marked; the seasons do not vary. Eternal and slow as the water that springs from the rock, that execrated day, that accursed day, weighs upon me like a reliquary of lead... I suffer!... I see nothing around me, save silent and indifferent shadows... I suffer! Meanwhile, I know that, above this misery reigns God, the Father, the Lord, the one toward whom all is directed. I want to think of this. I want to implore his succor.

I struggle and drag myself like a cripple, who painfully toils a long road. I do not know what power draws me to you; perhaps it is salvation. I withdraw from you a little calmed, a little renewed, like an old man shivering with cold, reanimated by a ray of sun. My frozen soul draws a new life upon approaching you.

Claire.

II.

My misfortune grows day by day, as the knowledge of eternity develops in me. O misery! How I curse you, guilty hours, hours of egoism and forgetfulness in which, ignoring all charity, all devotion, I thought only of my well-being! Human conventionalism, be accursed! Vain preoccupations of material interests! Be accursed, you who blinded and ruined me! I am corroded by the incessant regret of the time that has elapsed. What shall I say to you, who listen to me? Watch incessantly over yourself; love others more than yourself; do not linger on the paths of well-being; do not overburden your body at the expense of your soul. Watch, as the Savior said to his disciples. Do not thank me for this counsel: my spirit conceives it, but my heart never heard it. Like a whipped dog, fear makes me crawl, but I do not yet know true love! Its divine dawn is very slow to break. Pray for my parched and so wretched soul! Claire.

III.

Note. – The first two dictations were received at the medium's home. This one was given spontaneously at the Society, which explains the meaning of the first sentence:

I come to seek you here, since you forget me. Do you believe, then, that isolated prayers and my name pronounced will suffice to calm my suffering? No, a hundred times no. I have roared with pain; I wander without repose, without asylum, without hope, feeling the eternal goad of punishment driven into my revolted soul. I smile when I hear your laments, when I see you dejected. What are your insignificant miseries! What are your tears! What are your torments, that sleep interrupts! Do I sleep? I want, do you understand, I want that, leaving your philosophical dissertations, you occupy yourself with me; that the others also occupy themselves. I find no expression to describe the anguish of this time that flows by, without the hours marking its periods. I see only a faint ray of hope; and that hope it was you who gave me. Do not abandon me, then. Claire.

IV.

Note. – The following communication is not from the same Spirit;

it is from a superior Spirit, our spiritual guide, in answer to the request we addressed to him, to give us his opinion concerning the preceding communications:

This picture is very true, and is in no way exaggerated. Perhaps I shall be asked what this woman did to be so wretched! Did she commit some horrible crime? Did she steal, murder? No. She did nothing that had merited the justice of men. On the contrary, she amused herself with that which you call earthly happiness: beauty, fortune, pleasures, adulation, all smiled upon her, she lacked nothing and, on seeing her, people said: What a happy woman! And they envied her lot. What did she do? She was an egoist, she had everything, except a good heart. If she did not violate the law of men, she violated the law of God, since she ignored charity, the first of the virtues. She loved none but herself: now no one loves her. She gave nothing: nothing is given to her. She is isolated, forsaken, abandoned, lost in space, where no one thinks of her, no one occupies himself with her: this is her torment. As she sought only worldly pleasures, which today no longer exist, a void has formed around her. She sees only nothingness and nothingness seems to her eternity. She does not suffer physical tortures; the demons do not come to torment her, but this is not necessary. She torments herself and suffers much more, because those demons would still be beings who thought of her. Egoism made her joy on Earth: it pursues her, now, like a worm gnawing at her heart; it is her true demon. Ah! If men knew how much it costs them to be egoists! Yet, God teaches it to you every day, since, in sending so many egoistic Spirits to Earth he has in view that, from this very life, they punish one another and may better comprehend, by contrast, that charity is the only antidote to that leprosy of Humanity.