Punishment by light.

Note. – In one of the sessions of the Spiritist Society of Paris, in which the question of the perturbation that generally follows death had been discussed, a Spirit manifested itself spontaneously to Mrs. Costel, giving the communication that follows, and which does not bear its signature:

“What do you speak of perturbation? Why these vain words? You are dreamers and utopians. You are perfectly ignorant of the things with which you claim to occupy yourselves. No, gentlemen, perturbation does not exist, except, perhaps, in your brains. I am as recently dead as possible, and I see clearly within me, around me, everywhere… Life is a lugubrious comedy! Wretched are those who withdraw from the scene before the curtain falls… Death is a terror, a punishment, a desire, according to the weakness or the strength of those who fear it, confront it, or implore it. For all it is a bitter mockery!… The light dazzles me and penetrates, like a sharp arrow, the subtlety of my being… They punished me with the darkness of the prison and thought to punish me with the darkness of the tomb, or those dreamed of by superstitious Catholics. Well then! it is you, gentlemen, who suffer the darkness, and I, the socially degraded one, hover above you… I wish to continue being myself!… Strong in thought, I disdain the warnings that resound around me… I see clearly… A crime! is a word! Crime exists everywhere. When practiced by masses of men, they glorify it; in private, it is cursed. Absurd! “I do not wish to be pitied… I ask for nothing… I am sufficient unto myself and shall well know how to struggle against this odious light.”

He who yesterday was a man.

— This communication having been analyzed at the following session, there was recognized, even in the cynicism of the language, a grave teaching, and in the situation of this unfortunate one was seen a new phase of the punishment that awaits the guilty. Indeed, while some are plunged into darkness or into absolute isolation, others endure for long years the anguish of their last hour, or still believe themselves to be in this world; the light shines for this one; his Spirit enjoys the fullness of its faculties; he knows perfectly well that he is dead and complains of nothing; he asks for no assistance and still defies the divine and human laws. Will he escape punishment? No, but divine justice is realized under all forms, and what constitutes the joy of some is for others a torment; this light is his torment, against which he persists and, in spite of his pride, he confesses it when he says: “I am sufficient unto myself and shall well know how to struggle against this odious light”; and in this other sentence: “The light dazzles me and penetrates, like a sharp arrow, the subtlety of my being.” These words: subtlety of my being are characteristic; he recognizes that his body is fluidic and penetrable by light, from which he cannot escape, and this light pierces him like a sharp arrow. Requested to give their appreciation on the subject, our spiritual guides dictated the three following communications, which deserve serious attention:

(Medium: Mr. A. Didier.)

— There are trials without expiation, as there are expiations without trial [see Observation below]. Evidently, in erraticity, from the point of view of existences, the Spirits are inactive and waiting. Nevertheless, they can expiate, provided that pride, the formidable tenacity, and the rebelliousness of their errors do not hold them back at the moment of their progressive ascension. You have a terrible example in the last communication, regarding the criminal who struggles against the divine justice that pursues him, after that of men. In this case, then, the expiation, or rather, the fatal suffering that oppresses them, instead of profiting them and making them feel the profound significance of their penalties, exalts them in revolt and makes them utter those murmurs that the Scriptures, in their poetic eloquence, call gnashing of teeth. Image par excellence! sign of suffering cast down, but unsubmitted! lost in pain, but whose revolt is still great enough to refuse to recognize the truth of the penalty and the truth of the reward! Often great errors are prolonged almost always in the world of the Spirits; in the same way, the great criminal consciences. To be master of oneself, in spite of everything, and to strut before the infinite, resembles that blindness of the man who contemplates the stars and takes them for arabesques of a ceiling, as imagined by the Gauls in the time of Alexander.

There exists the moral infinite! Miserable is he, infinitesimal is he who, under pretext of continuing the struggles and abject bravados of the Earth, sees no farther in the other world than here below! To him belong blindness, the contempt of others, the egoistic and petty personality, and the interruption of progress! It is most certain, O men, that there is a secret accord between the immortality of a pure name, left on Earth, and the immortality that the Spirits truly keep in their successive trials.

Lamennais.

Observation. – To understand the sense of this sentence: “There are trials without expiation and expiations without trial,” it is necessary to understand by expiation the suffering that purifies and washes away the stains of the past; after the expiation, the Spirit is rehabilitated. Lamennais’s thought is this: According as the vicissitudes of life are or are not accompanied by repentance for the faults that occasioned them, by the desire to make them profitable for one’s own improvement, there will or will not be expiation, that is, rehabilitation. Thus, the greatest sufferings may be of no profit to the one who endures them, if they do not make him better, if they do not raise him above matter, if they do not make him see the hand of God, in short, if they do not make him take a step forward, since he will have to begin again under conditions still more painful. From this point of view, the same happens with the penalties suffered after death; the hardened Spirit suffers them without being touched by repentance. This is why he can prolong them indefinitely by his own will; he is punished, but he does not repair his faults. (Medium: Mr. d’Ambel.)

— If we plunge a man into darkness or into waves of light, will the result not be the same? In one case and the other, he sees nothing of what surrounds him, and he will accustom himself much more rapidly to the shadow than to the triple electric brightness in which he may be submerged. Thus, the Spirit who communicated at the last session expresses well the truth of his situation when he exclaims: “Oh! I shall well know how to struggle against this odious light!” Indeed, this light is the more terrible, the more atrocious in that it pierces him completely, making visible and apparent his most secret thoughts. Here is one of the harshest aspects of his spiritual punishment. He finds himself, so to speak, confined in the house of glass that Socrates asked for, and there too is a teaching, because what would have been the joy and consolation of the sage becomes the infamous and continual punishment of the wicked one, of the criminal, of the parricide, terrified within his own personality. Do you understand, my children, the pain and the terror that must oppress the one who, during a sinister existence, took pleasure in architecting, in plotting the saddest perversities in the depths of his being, where he took refuge like a wild beast in its lair, and who today finds himself expelled from that intimate refuge, where he withdrew from the gaze and the investigation of his contemporaries? Now his mask of impassiveness is torn from him and each of his thoughts is reflected successively upon his brow!

Yes, henceforth no rest, no asylum for that formidable criminal! Each evil thought — and God knows whether his soul expresses them — betrays itself outside and within him, as in a superior electric shock. He wishes to hide himself from the multitude, and the odious light traverses him continually. He wishes to flee, he flees in a panting and desperate course, across the immeasurable spaces and, everywhere, the light! everywhere the gazes that plunge into him! and he hurls himself anew, in search of the shadow, of the night, and the shadow and the night for him do not exist. He calls death to his aid, but death is no more than a name empty of meaning. The unfortunate one flees always! He marches toward spiritual madness, terrible punishment! horrible pain! where he will struggle with himself in order to rid himself of his own self. Because such is the supreme law beyond the Earth: it is the guilty one who becomes, to himself, his most inexorable punishment. How long will this last? Until the hour when his will, at last vanquished, bends under the poignant pressure of remorse, and when his haughty brow humbles itself before his appeased victims and before the Spirits of justice. And note the high logic of the immutable laws; in this he will still fulfill what he wrote in that arrogant communication, so clear, so lucid, and so sadly full of itself, which he gave last Friday, discharging himself by an act of his own will.

The protecting Spirit of the medium.

(Medium: Mr. Costel.)

— Human justice makes no distinction of the individuality of the beings it punishes. Measuring the crime by the crime in itself, it strikes indistinctly those who committed them, and the same penalty reaches the guilty one without distinction of sex and whatever his education may be. Divine justice proceeds in another manner; the punishments correspond to the degree of advancement of the beings to whom they are applied. The equality of the crime does not constitute equality between the individuals; two men guilty in the same degree may be separated by the distance of trials, which plunge one into the intellectual opacity of the first initiatory circles, while the other, having surpassed them, possesses the lucidity that frees the Spirit from perturbation. Then it is no longer the darkness that punishes, but the acuteness of the spiritual light; it traverses the earthly intelligence and makes him experience the anguish of a wound reopened. The disincarnate beings pursued by the material representation of their crime suffer the shock of physical electricity: they suffer through the senses. Those who are already dematerialized by the Spirit feel a much superior pain, which annihilates in its bitter waves the recollection of the facts, to let subsist only the knowledge of their causes.

Man can, then, in spite of the criminality of his actions, possess an interior advancement, for while his passions make him act like a brute, his sharpened faculties raise him above the thick atmosphere of the lower strata. The absence of ponderation, of equilibrium between moral progress and intellectual progress, produces the anomalies very frequent in epochs of materialism and of transition.

The light that tortures the guilty Spirit is, then, the ray that floods with brightness the recesses of his pride and lays bare to him the inanity of his fragmentary being. Here are the first symptoms and the first anguishes of the spiritual agony, which announce the separation or the dissolution of the intellectual material elements that compose the primitive human duality, and which must disappear in the great unity of the finished being.

Jean Reynaud.

Observation. – Received simultaneously, these three communications complement one another, presenting the punishment under a new aspect, eminently philosophical, a little more rational than the flames of hell, with its caverns furnished with razors. (See Religion and progress, in this issue.) It is probable that the Spirits, wishing to treat the question by an example, provoked, with that object, the spontaneous communication of the guilty Spirit. [See Heaven and Hell. — 2nd Part: Lapommeray: Punishment by light.]

[1]

[see Lamennais.]

[2] [See the initial Note where Kardec makes reference to a Spirit that manifested itself spontaneously to Mrs. Costel and not to Mr.

Costel, unless both were mediums.]

[3] [see Jean Reynaud.]