Preconceived ideas

We have told you many times that you should investigate the communications that are given to you, submitting them to the analysis of reason, and that you should not take without examination the inspirations that come to stir your Spirit, under the influence of causes sometimes very difficult for the incarnate to ascertain, given over as they are to countless distractions.

The pure ideas which, so to speak, float in space (according to the Platonic notion), carried by the Spirits, cannot always lodge themselves alone and isolated in the brains of your mediums. Often they find the place occupied by preconceived ideas, which spread out with the jet of inspiration, disturbing it and transforming it in an unconscious manner, it is true, but sometimes in a manner profound enough that the spiritual idea finds itself thus entirely denatured.

Inspiration contains two elements: the thought and the fluidic warmth destined to excite the Spirit of the medium, giving him what you call the verve of composition. If the inspiration finds the place occupied by a preconceived idea, from which the medium cannot or will not detach himself, our thought remains without an interpreter and the fluidic warmth is spent in stimulating an idea that is not ours. How many times in your egotistical and impassioned world have we brought the warmth and the idea! You disdain the idea, which your conscience should make you recognize, and you seize the warmth, for the benefit of your earthly passions, sometimes squandering the good of God to the profit of evil. Thus, how many accounts will one day have to be rendered by all the advocates of mistaken causes! No doubt it would be desirable that good inspirations could always dominate preconceived ideas. But then we would hinder the free will of man's volition and, in this way, the latter would escape the responsibility that belongs to him. But if we are only the auxiliary counselors of Humanity, how many times must we congratulate ourselves, when our idea, knocking at the door of a narrow conscience, triumphs over the preconceived idea and modifies the conviction of the inspired one! However, one should not believe that our ill-used aid does not betray somewhat the bad use that may be made of it. Sincere conviction finds accents which, departing from the heart, reach the heart; simulated conviction can satisfy impassioned convictions, vibrating in unison with the former, but it brings a particular coldness that leaves the conscience ill-satisfied and reveals a doubtful origin. Do you wish to know whence come the two elements of mediumistic inspiration? The answer is easy: the idea comes from the extraterrestrial world – it is the inspiration proper to the Spirit. As for the fluidic warmth of inspiration, we find it and take it within yourselves; it is the quintessenced part of the vital fluid in emanation; sometimes we take it from the inspired one himself, when he is endowed with a certain fluidic, or mediumistic, power, as you say; most often we take it from his environment, from the emanation of benevolence, with which he is more or less surrounded. This is why it can with reason be said that sympathy renders one eloquent. If you reflect attentively on these causes, you will find the explanation of many facts that at first cause astonishment, but of which each one possesses a certain intuition. The idea alone would not suffice for man, if the power to express it were not given to him. The warmth is to the idea what the perispirit is to the Spirit, what your body is to the soul. Without the body the soul would be powerless to move matter; without the warmth [empathy], the idea would be powerless to move hearts.

The conclusion of this communication is that you must never abdicate your reason, in examining the inspirations that are submitted to you. The more the medium has acquired ideas, the more he is susceptible to preconceived ideas, the more he must make a clean slate of his own thoughts, abandon the influences that stir him, and give his conscience the abnegation necessary to a good communication.

Pascal. n [1]

[v. Pascal.]