Incredulous and materialist Spirits.

— Question – In the evocation of Mr. Viennois, made in the last session, this phrase is found: “Your prayer moved many frivolous and incredulous Spirits.” How can Spirits be incredulous? Is not the environment in which they find themselves, for them, the negation of incredulity?

We ask the Spirits who may wish to communicate to deal with this question, if they judge it fitting.

Answer – (Medium: Mr. d’Ambel). Is the explanation you ask of me not written in minute detail in your works? You ask why the incredulous Spirits were moved. But have you yourselves not said that the Spirits who find themselves in erraticity had entered it with their past aptitudes, knowledge, and manner of seeing? My God! I am still too much a beginner to resolve satisfactorily the thorny questions of the doctrine. Nevertheless I can, from experience, indeed quite recently acquired, answer questions of fact. In the world you inhabit, it was generally believed that death comes suddenly to modify the opinion of those who have departed, and that the blindfold of incredulity is violently torn away from those who on Earth denied God. Therein lies the error, for, for these, the punishment begins precisely in their remaining in the same uncertainty with regard to the Lord of all things and in their keeping the same doubt of the Earth. No, believe me; the obscured sight of human intelligence does not instantly perceive the light. One proceeds in erraticity with at least as much prudence as on Earth; thus, one must not project the rays of electric light upon the eyes of the sick whom one wishes to cure. The passage from terrestrial life to spiritual life offers, it is true, a period of confusion, of perturbation for the majority of those who disincarnate. There are some, however, who, detached from earthly goods while still in life, accomplish this transition as easily as a dove that rises into the air. It is easy for you to perceive this difference by examining the habits of travelers who embark to cross the oceans. For some the voyage is a pleasure; for the majority a suffering, an affliction that will last until disembarkation. Well then! The same occurs with one who travels from the Earth to the world of Spirits. Some detach themselves rapidly, without suffering and without perturbation, while others are subjected to the sickness of the ethereal crossing. But this happens: just as the travelers who touch land, on leaving the ship, recover their balance and their health, so too the Spirit who crosses the obstacles of death ends by finding itself, as at the point of departure, with the clean and clear consciousness of its individuality. It is therefore certain, my dear Mr. Kardec, that the incredulous and the absolute materialists keep their opinion beyond the tomb, until the hour when reason or grace shall have awakened in their heart the true thought, hidden there. Hence this diffusion of ideas in the manifestations and this divergence in the communications of the Spirits from beyond the tomb; hence some dictations impregnated with atheism or with pantheism.

Permit me, in concluding, to return to the questions that are personal to me. I thank you because you evoked me; this helped me to recognize myself. I also thank you for the consolations you addressed to my wife, and I ask you to continue your good exhortations, in order to sustain her in the trials that await her. As for me, I shall always be near her and shall inspire her.

Viennois.

Question. – One understands incredulity in certain Spirits, but one would not understand materialism, since their state is a protest against the absolute reign of matter and the nothingness after death.

Answer. – (Medium: Mr. d’Ambel). Only a word: all bodies, solid or fluidic, belong to material substance; this is well demonstrated. Now, those who in life admitted only one principle in Nature – matter – often still perceive, after death, only that single, absolute principle. If you were to reflect on the thoughts that dominated you all your life, you would find them, even today, under the entire subjugation of those same thoughts. Formerly they considered themselves as solid bodies; today they regard themselves as fluidic bodies: that is all. Note well that they perceive themselves under a clearly circumscribed form, though vaporous, identical to that which they had on Earth, in the solid or human state, in such a way that they see in their new state only a transformation of their being, of which they had not thought. But they remain convinced that it is a course toward the end to which they will arrive, when they are sufficiently detached, to dissolve into the universal whole. Nothing is more obstinate than a learned man; and they persist in thinking that, even though it be delayed, this end is no less inevitable. One of the conditions of their moral blindness is to imprison them more violently in the bonds of materiality and, consequently, to prevent them from withdrawing from the terrestrial regions or those similar to the Earth. And, just as the majority of the disincarnate, captive in the flesh, cannot perceive the vaporous forms of the Spirits that surround them, so too the opacity of the envelope of the materialists prevents them from contemplating the spiritual entities that move, so beautiful and so radiant, in the high spheres of the celestial empire.

Erastus. n

Another. – (Medium: Mr. A. Didier). Doubt is the cause of the pains and, often, of the errors of this world. On the contrary, the knowledge of Spiritualism causes the pains and the errors of the Spirits.

Where would the chastisement be if the Spirits recognized their errors only as a consequence of the penitentiary reality of the other life? Where would their chastisement be if their soul and their heart did not feel all the error of terrestrial scepticism and the nothingness of matter? The Spirit sees the Spirit as the flesh sees the flesh; the error of the Spirit is not the error of the flesh, and the materialist man who doubted here doubts no more up above.

The torment of the materialists is to lament the terrestrial joys and satisfactions, they who cannot yet understand nor feel the joys and the perfections of the soul. And behold the moral debasement of those Spirits who live completely in moral and physical sterility, lamenting those goods which, momentarily, constituted their joy and presently constitute their torment.

Now, it is true that, without being a materialist through the satisfaction of one's earthly passions, one may be one more in the field of ideas and of the spirit than in the acts of life. It is what are called free-thinkers, and those who do not dare to probe the causes of their existence. In the other world these too will be punished; they swim in the truth, but are not penetrated by it; their humbled pride makes them suffer, and they lament those earthly days when, at least, they had the liberty to doubt.

Lamennais. n Observation. – At first sight this appraisal seems in contradiction with that of Erastus. The latter admits that certain Spirits may keep materialist ideas, whereas Lamennais thinks that these ideas are only the regret of material pleasures, but that such Spirits are perfectly enlightened as to their spiritual state. The facts seem to come in support of the opinion of Erastus. Since we see Spirits who, even a long time after death, still believe themselves alive, devote themselves or believe they devote themselves to earthly occupations, it is that they have a complete illusion as to their position and do not realize at all their spiritual state. Since they do not believe themselves dead, it would not be surprising that they had kept the idea of nothingness after death, which for them has not yet come. It was no doubt in this sense that Erastus meant to speak. Answer. – Evidently they have the idea of nothingness; but it is a question of time. The moment comes when on high the veil is rent and the materialist ideas become unacceptable. The answer of Erastus rests upon particular and momentary facts; I was speaking only of general and definitive facts.

Lamennais.

Observation. – The divergence was only apparent and resulted solely from the point of view under which each one regarded the question. It is quite evident that a Spirit cannot remain perpetually a materialist. The question was only whether this idea would necessarily be destroyed immediately after death. Now, both Spirits are in agreement on this point and pronounce themselves in the negative. Let us add that the persistence of doubt about the future is a chastisement for the incredulous Spirit; it is for him a torture all the more poignant because he does not have earthly preoccupations to distract him.

[1]

[see Erastus.]

[2] [see Lamennais.]