Retrospective vision of the various incarnations of a Spirit

Your kind welcome and the good prayers you have offered on my behalf oblige me to thank you keenly and to assure you of my eternal devotion. Since my entry into the true life, very quickly I familiarized myself with all the novelties, with the gentle demands of my present situation. Today I am called from all sides, not as formerly, to tend to sick bodies, but to bring relief to the illnesses of the soul. The task to be performed is gentle and, more swiftly than I once reached the bedside of the sick, today I answer the call of suffering souls. I can even, and this has nothing strange about it for me, transport myself almost instantaneously from one point to another, with the same facility with which my thought goes from one subject to another. What is singular for me is that I can do it!… My good friends, I must speak to you of a spiritual fact that happens to me, and which I come to submit to your judgment, so that you may help me recognize my error, in case I have deceived myself in my appraisals in this regard. A physician in my last incarnation, as you know, I gave myself ardently to the studies of my profession. Everything that pertained to it was for me a subject of observation. I must say, without pride, that I had acquired some knowledge, perhaps by reason of not having always followed to the letter the path traced by routine. Often I sought in the moral that which might bring about a disturbance in the physical; perhaps it is for this reason that I knew my profession a little better than certain colleagues. In short, here is the fact: a few days ago I felt a kind of torpor take hold of my Spirit and, despite retaining consciousness of my self, I felt myself transported into space; arrived at a place that for you has no name, I found myself in a gathering of Spirits who, in life, had won some celebrity by the discoveries they had made. There, I was not a little surprised to recognize in those ancients of all ages, in those names of all epochs, a perispiritual resemblance to myself. I asked myself what all that meant; I addressed to them the questions that my position suggested to me, but my surprise was even greater on hearing myself answer myself. I then turned toward them and saw that I was alone.

Here are my deductions…

Dr. Cailleux.

Note. – Having stopped there, the Spirit continued in the following session.

The question of fluids, which constitutes the foundation of your studies, played a very great part in the fact I pointed out to you in the last session. Today I can explain better to you what took place and, instead of telling you what my conjectures were, I can tell you what the good friends who guide me in the world of the Spirits revealed to me.

When my Spirit underwent a kind of numbness, I was, so to speak, magnetized by the fluid of my spiritual friends; by a permission of God, there was to result from this a moral satisfaction which, they say, is my recompense and, moreover, an encouragement to march upon a path that my Spirit has followed for a good number of existences.

I was, then, asleep in a magnetic-spiritual sleep; I saw the past form itself into a fictitious present; I recognized individualities that had disappeared in the course of time, or rather, that had been but a single individual. I saw a being begin a medical work; another, later, continue the work sketched by the first, and so on. I came to see, in less time than I take to tell you, from age to age, form itself, grow, and become a science, that which, in the beginning, was nothing but the first attempts of a brain occupied with studies for the relief of suffering Humanity. I saw all this and recognized myself only when I arrived at the last of those beings who, successively, had brought a complement to the work. There everything vanishes and I become the still backward Spirit of your poor doctor. Now, here is the explanation. I do not give it to you to flatter myself; far from it; but, rather, to furnish you a subject of study, speaking to you of the spiritual sleep which, being elucidated by your guides, can only be useful to me, for I attend all your works. In that sleep I saw the different bodies that my Spirit animated through a certain number of incarnations, and all of them worked at medical science without ever departing from the principles that the first had elaborated. This last incarnation was not to increase my knowledge, but simply to practice what my theory taught.

With all this I remain ever your debtor; but, if you permit it, I shall come to ask you for lessons and, sometimes, to give my personal opinion on certain questions.

Dr. Cailleux.

STUDY.

There is here a twofold teaching: firstly there is the fact of the magnetization of a Spirit by other Spirits, and of the sleep resulting therefrom; and, secondly, of the retrospective vision of the different bodies that it animated.

There is, then, for the Spirits a kind of sleep, which is one more point of contact between the corporeal state and the spiritual state. It is a question here, it is true, of a magnetic sleep; but would there exist for them a natural sleep similar to ours? This would have nothing surprising about it, when one still sees Spirits so thoroughly identified with the corporeal state that they take their fluidic body for a material body, that they believe they work as they did on Earth and that they suffer fatigue. If they feel fatigue, they must experience the need of repose, and they may believe that they lie down and that they sleep, just as they believe that they work and travel by railroad. [see: Pierre Legay the Grand-Pierrot.] We say that they believe, in order to speak from our point of view; for everything is relative, and in relation to their fluidic nature the thing is as real as material things are for us. Only Spirits of an inferior order have such illusions; the less advanced they are, the more their state approaches the corporeal state. Now, this cannot be the case with Dr. Cailleux, an advanced Spirit, who is perfectly aware of his situation. But it is no less true that he had consciousness of a numbness analogous to sleep, during which he saw his diverse individualities.

A member of the Society explains the phenomenon in this manner: In human sleep, only the body reposes, but the Spirit does not sleep. The same must occur in the spiritual state; magnetic sleep, or other, must affect only the spiritual body or perispirit, and the Spirit must find itself in a state relatively analogous to that of the incarnate Spirit during the sleep of the body, that is, retaining the consciousness of its being. The different incarnations of Dr. Cailleux, which his spiritual guides wished to make him see for his instruction, could present themselves to him as a remembrance, in the same manner as images offer themselves in dreams.

This explanation is perfectly logical; it was confirmed by the Spirits who, provoking the account of Dr. Cailleux, wished to make known to us a new phase of the life beyond the tomb. [see Retrospective view of the existences of the Spirit apropos of Dr. Cailleux.]