Mediumship and inspiration

Under its infinitely varied forms, mediumship encompasses all of mankind, like a net from which no one can escape. Each one being in daily contact, whether he knows it or not, whether he wills it or rebels against it, with free intelligences, there is not a man who can say: I was not, I am not, or I will not be a medium. Under the intuitive form, the mode of communication to which the name voice of conscience has commonly been given, each one is in relation with various spiritual influences, which advise in one direction or another and, often, simultaneously, the pure, absolute good; accommodations with interest; evil in all its nakedness. – Man evokes these voices; they answer his call, and he chooses; but he chooses between these diverse inspirations and his own sentiment. – The inspirers are invisible friends; like the friends of Earth, they are serious or casual, self-interested or truly guided by affection.

They are consulted, or they advise spontaneously, but, like the counsels of the friends of Earth, their counsels are heeded or rejected; sometimes they provoke a result contrary to what is expected; often they produce no effect at all. – What is to be concluded from this? Not that man is under the action of an incessant mediumship, but that he freely obeys his own will, modified by warnings which, in the normal state, can never be imperative.

When man does more than occupy himself with the smallest details of his existence, and when it is a matter of works that he has come more especially to accomplish, of decisive trials that he must endure, or of works destined for general instruction and elevation, the voices of conscience no longer make themselves merely and only counselors, but draw the Spirit toward certain subjects, provoke certain studies, and collaborate in the work, making certain cerebral compartments resound through inspiration. Here is a work of two, of three, of ten, of a hundred, if you will; but, if a hundred took part in it, only one can and must sign it, because only one made it and is its responsible author!

After all, what is a work, whatever it may be? It is never a creation; it is always a discovery. Man makes nothing, he discovers everything. These two terms must not be confused. To invent, in its true sense, is to make evident an existing law, a knowledge until then unknown, but placed in germ in the cradle of the Universe. He who invents lifts one of the corners of the veil that hides the truth, but he does not create the truth. To invent, one must search, and search much; one must consult the books, search in the depths of intelligences, ask of one mechanics, of another geometry, of a third the knowledge of musical relations, of yet another the historical laws, and, from the whole, make something new, interesting, unimaginable.

He who went to explore the recesses of the libraries, who heard the masters speak, who scrutinized Science, Philosophy, Art, Religion, from the most remote antiquity down to our own days, is he the medium of Art, of History, of Philosophy, and of Religion? Is he the medium of past times, when in his turn he writes? No, because he does not recount on behalf of others, but has taught others to recount and enriches his accounts with all that is personal to him. – For a long time the musician listened to the warbler and the nightingale, before inventing music; Rossini listened to Nature before translating it for the civilized world. Is he the medium of the nightingale and the warbler? No: he composes and writes; he listened to the Spirit who came to sing to him the melodies of heaven; he heard the Spirit who cried passion in his ear; he heard the virgin and the mother moan, letting fall, in harmonious pearls, their prayer upon the head of the son. Love and poetry, liberty, hatred, vengeance, and numerous Spirits who possess these diverse sentiments, each in turn sang their score at his side. He listened to them, studied them, in the world and in inspiration, and from the one and the other he made his works. But he was not a medium, just as the physician is not a medium who hears the sick recount what they suffer, and who gives a name to their illnesses. – Mediumship had its hours in the one as in the other; but outside of those moments too brief for his glory, what he did, he did only at the cost of the studies gathered from men and from Spirits. Such being the case, one is the medium of all; one is the medium of Nature, the medium of truth, and a very imperfect medium, because often mediumship appears so disfigured by the translation that it is unrecognizable and unknown.

Halévy. n [1]

[v. Jacques Fromental Halevy.]