Year 17 Number 102
2008



December 15th, 2008


"Unshakable faith is only that which can face reason face to face in every Humankind epoch." 
Allan Kardec







Spiritism and Science

"Spiritism, marching hand in hand with progress, will never be overthrown, because, if new discoveries should demonstrate that it is in error upon a point, it would modify itself in regard to it. If a new truth is revealed, it accepts it."

The Morality taught by the Spirits

"The spirits teach no other morality than that of Christ, for the reason that there is no better. But, then, of what good is this instructions, since it teaches that which we know? One could say the same of the ethical teachings of Christ, which were taught five hundred years before he lived by Socrates and Plato in almost identical words; also by all moralists who repeat the same thing under many forms and words. The spirits come simply to augment the number of moralists, with the difference, that, manifesting themselves everywhere, they are heard in the cottage as well as in the palace by the ignorant as well as the learned. That which the teaching of spirits adds to that of Christ is the knowledge of the laws which bind the living to the dead, which complete the vague ideas which he gave of the soul, its past and future, and which the laws of nature give as sanction to his doctrine."

Excerpts from Chapter I [Character of the Spiritist Revelation] of
 
GENESIS: The Miracles and the Predictions According to Spiritism

 

 °EDITORIAL


DUTY


 ° THE CODIFICATION


GENESIS: The Miracles and the Predictions According to Spiritism


 ° ELECTRONIC BOOKS


ON MIRACLES AND MODERN SPIRITUALISM by Alfred Russel Wallace

 ° SPIRIT MESSAGES


HEAVEN AND HELL - HEAVEN - Part One


PART SECOND - EXAMPLES [CHAPTER VI]

MESSAGE FROM ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE


 ° ARTICLES


OVER A CENTURY OF RESEARCH ON AFTER-DEATH COMMUNICATION


 ° NEWS, EVENTS AND MISCELLANEOUS


3rd U. S. SPIRITIST SYMPOSIUM





 
 ° EDITORIAL

DUTY

From Here and Hereafter by Leon Denis

    "He who has comprehended the higher ethics of spiritual philosophy has a still nobler conception of duty. He knows that responsibility is a corollary of knowledge and that the apprehension of the secrets of another world obliges him to work the harder towards his own improvement and that of his fellow-men. The voices from the unseen world awaken strange echoes within him and make forces to vibrate which are dormant in most men; these urge him strenuously onward in his ascending conquest. Thus is he both stimulated and tormented by his noble idealism; at which the obtuse sneer, but which he would not renounce for all the wealth of the Indies. The performance of charity has now become a lightsome task, for his generous and affectionate impulses have greatly expanded. Himself righteous and clement, he is moved by all the sorrows of humanity. To his companions in misfortune he would gladly impart the hopes that inspire him; he fain would shoulder their sorrows, heal their wounds, banish their pain.

    The constant observance of duty conduces to perfection; to speedily attain which one must first carefully study one’s own individuality, while keeping strict watch over every action; for it is impossible to cure an unknown evil.

    One can study oneself in others; should some vice or unfortunate defect in another shock us, let us ascertain with care if we have not in us a similar germ; if so we must spare no pains to eradicate it.

    Let us think of our soul as it really is, an admirable but most imperfect work, whose constant embellishment and adornment is our concern. The realization of our imperfection will render us more modest and will keep us free from presumption and foolish vanity.

    Let us submit ourselves to a rigorous discipline; as the growing shrub is trained to follow a given shape and direction, so may the tendencies of the moral being be regulated. The habit of righteousness renders its application easy. The first are the only painful efforts. We must above all acquire self-control; impressions are fleeting and fickle things and the will is the only solid reliance of the soul; we should then learn to control this will and to master our impressions, else they will master us.

    We should eschew idle and frivolous conversation, which ends ever in uncharitable conclusions. Come what may, we must always unflinchingly speak the truth. Let us often have recourse to study and meditation, for in them the soul gathers new strength and light. May we be able to end each day by saying: I have accomplished some useful thing – I have won some victory over myself; I have comforted or assisted some needy person; I have enlightened my brothers and laboured for their good; In fine, I have done my duty!

GEAE's Editorial Council

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 ° THE CODIFICATION

GENESIS: The Miracles and the Predictions According to Spiritism

BY Allan Kardec
Author of "The Spirits' Book," "The Mediums' Book," and "Heaven and Hell."

Translated By The Spirit-Guides of  W. J. Colville
[Colby & Rich, Publishers - 1883 - Boston - USA]

The spiritual doctrine is the result of the collective and concordant teachings of spirits.
Science is called in to make the statements in Genesis agree with the laws of nature.
God proves his greatness and power by the immutability of his laws, and not by their suspension.
For God the past and the future are the present.


CHAPTER I

CHARACTER OF THE SPIRITUAL REVELATION

Part Five

        By the aid of new lights carried by Spiritism and the spirits, man comprehends the solidarity which binds all beings together. Charity and fraternity become social necessities. Man does from conviction that which he did only for duty's sake; and this is better when men will practice the moral teachings of Christ. Then alone will they be able to say that they have no more need of embodied or disembodied moralists; then God will send them no more of them. The latter is one of the most important questions which is based upon the title of this chapter: What is the authority of spiritual revelation, since it emanates from beings whose light is limited, and who are not infallible? The objection would be serious if this revelation consisted only of the spirit instructions, - if we should hold it as from them exclusively, and accept it with closed eyes. It is without value until man carries to it the co-operation of his knowledge and judgment, as the spirits are constrained from putting it in the way of deductions which he can draw from observation of facts. Now, the manifestations in their innumerable variety are facts. Man studies them, and seeks in them the law. He is aided in this work by spirits of all orders, who are collaborators rather than revealers in the usual sense of the word. He submits their sayings to the control of logic and good sense. In this way he benefits by some special knowledge which is derived from their position, without abdicating the use of his own reason. The spirits being none other than the souls of men, in communicating with them we do not go away from humanity, which is a capital circumstance to consider. Men of genius who have been the beacon-lights of humanity have come to us from the spirit-world, as they have re-entered it on quitting the earth. Since spirits can communicate with men, these same geniuses can give us instructions under a spiritual form, as they have done in a corporal one. They can instruct us after death, as they did in life. They are invisible, instead of visible, which is all the difference.

    Their experience and knowledge ought not to be less; and if their word, like that of man's, had authority, it ought not to have less because that they are in the land of spirits. But there are not only superior spirits which manifest, there are also those of all orders; and that is necessary in order to initiate us into the true character of the spiritual world, by showing it to us in all its phases. By this means the relations between the visible and invisible world are intimate, the connection is more evident. We see more clearly whence we came, and whither we go. Such is the essential object of these manifestations. All spirits, in whatever degree to which they may attain, teach us something; but, as they are more or less enlightened, it is left to us to determine whether they are good or evil, and to profit by their teaching as it permits. Now all, whomsoever they may be, can teach and reveal to us facts of which we are ignorant, and which but for them we should never know. Wise, incarnated spirits are powerful individualities, - indisputably so; but their action is restrained and necessarily slow in propagating itself.

    Allowing that one among them should come alone, - be it even Elias, Moses, Socrates, or Plato, - to reveal to us in these latter days the state of the spiritual world, which one among them would have proved the truth of his assertions in this time of skepticism? Would not men have regarded him as a dreamer or utopist? And, admitting that his teachings were accepted as the absolute truth, centuries would pass away before they would be accepted by the masses. God in his wisdom has not ordained it thus; he has willed that the instruction be given by the spirits themselves, and not by the embodied ones, in order to convince men of their existence, and that it might take place simultaneously over all the earth, which may have been to propagate it the more rapidly, or that we might find in the coincidence of the teaching a proof of its truth, each one having thus the means of convincing himself. The spirits come not to free man from work, study, or research; they bring no ready-made science; they leave him to his own strength in that which he can discover for himself. The spirits know perfectly well today that for a long time experience has demonstrated the error of the opinion which attribute to spirits the possession of all knowledge and wisdom, and that it was sufficient to address one's self to the first spirit which came, in order to know all things. After leaving the earth, spirits occupy one out of many spiritual planes, as upon earth there are superior and vulgar persons. Many spirits then know scientifically and philosophically less than certain men; they all no more, and often less, than they know. As among men, the most advanced can teach us more, and give us more judicious advice, than those less advanced. To demand counsel of spirits is not to address supernatural powers, but persons like ourselves, - those to whom we would turn for counsel in their earthly life, as parents, friends, and individuals more enlightened than ourselves.

    Here is an important fact for those who are ignorant of Spiritism, and have formed a false idea of the nature of the world of spirits and of the condition of affairs beyond the tomb. What is then the utility of these manifestations, or, as we may say, this revelation, if the spirits know no more than ourselves, or if they do not tell us all they know? Firstly, as we have said, they abstain from giving us that which we can acquire by labor. Secondly, there are facts which they are not permitted to reveal, because we are not sufficiently advanced to receive them. But, aside from this, the conditions of their new existence extend the circle of their perceptions. They see that which they saw not upon earth, freed from the trammels of matter. Delivered from the cares of the corporeal life, they judge things from a more elevated point, from a healthier one; their perspicuity embraces a broader horizon; they perceive their errors, and disembarass themselves of human prejudices. It is in this that the superiority of spirits over embodied humanity consists; therefore their counsel will be, according to their degree of advancement, more judicious and disinterested than that of the embodied. Conditions are found by which they can instruct us in principles of which we are ignorant. Until now men had created only suppositions in regard to the future. That is why beliefs upon this point have been divided into systems so numerous and so divergent, - from a belief in nothing to fantastic ideas of hell-fire and paradise. Today we have ocular demonstration; the actors themselves from the life beyond the tomb, who alone can give us knowledge of it, come to tell us what it is. These manifestations serve, then, to give us knowledge of the invisible world which surrounds us, of which, without them, we should not be aware of the existence. This knowledge alone should be considered of the highest importance, even supposing that the spirits were incapable of teaching us any thing more. If you should go into a strange country by yourself, would you reject the teachings of the most humble peasant whom you chanced to encounter? Would you refuse to interrogate him about the state of the land because that he was only a peasant? You would not expect from him, certainly, intelligence of a very high character; but such as it is, and in his sphere, he will be able, upon certain points, to give you better than a wise man who does not know the country. You will draw from his indications sequences which you could not do of yourself. He will have been at least a useful instrument for your observations, had he served only to make known to you the customs of the peasants. It is the same in connection with the spirits, where the lowest can teach us something.

    A common incident will explain the matter better. A ship loaded with emigrants departs for a far-distant locality. It carries men of all conditions, the relatives and friends of whom remain at home. One learns that this ship has been wrecked. No trace remains of it; no news is obtained in regard to its fate. It is thought that all the passengers have perished; and mourning is in all the families. However, the entire company, without the loss of a single soul, has landed upon an unknown soil, which is abundant and fertile, where all live happily under favoring skies; but their friends are ignorant of their fate. Now, one happy another ship reaches their shore; it finds all the shipwrecked ones safe and well. The happy news spreads with lightning-like rapidity. Each one says, "Our friends are not lost;" and they give thanks to God. They cannot see each other; but they correspond, exchange testimonies of affection, and joy succeeds to sadness. Such is terrestrial life and life beyond the grave before and after modern revelation. The latter, like the second ship, carries to us the good news of the survival of those who are dear to us, and the certitude of one day rejoining them. Doubt in regard to their fate and our own exists no more; discouragement is effaced by hope.

    But other results are added to enrich this revelation. God, judging humanity ripe enough to penetrate the mystery of its destiny, and to contemplate with composure new marvels, has permitted the veil between the known and unknown worlds to be raise. The fact of the manifestations has nothing supernatural about it; it is spiritual humanity come to talk to humanity in the flesh, and to say to it, "We exist: nothingness exists not. Behold that which we are, and that which you will be; the future is the same for you as to us. You walk in darkness; we come to through light upon your way, and to prepare it before you. Terrestrial life was all you could comprehend, because you saw nothing beyond. We come to say to you, in showing the spiritual life to you, the earthly life is as nothing. Your sight was arrested at the tomb; we come to show you the splendid horizon beyond it. You knew not why you suffer upon earth; now, in suffering, you see the justice of God. Goodness was unfruitful for the future; it will have henceforth an object, and will be a necessity. Fraternity was only a beautiful theory; it is now firmly established as a law of nature. Under the empire of the belief that death ends all, immensity is void, egotism reigns master among you, and your watchword is, 'Each one for himself.'" With a certitude of the future, infinite space is peopled with infinitude. Emptiness and solitude do not exist; solidarity joins all beings both this side and beyond the tomb together. It is the reign of charity with the device, "Each one for all, and all for every one." Instead of bidding an eternal adieu to dear friends at the close of life, you will now say, "Good-by till I see you again." Such are the results of the new revelation. It has come to fill the void which incredulity has deepened, to revive hope where it is withering into doubt and a perspective of nonentity, to give to every thing a reason for existing. Is this result, then, without importance because the spirits come no to solve scientific problems, and to give to the indolent the means of enriching themselves without trouble? However, the fruits which man ought to gather from it are not only those for a future life; he will extract good from the transformation that these new beliefs ought to work in his character, his tastes, his tendencies, and, in pursuance of which, upon his habits and social relations. In putting an end to egotism, pride, and incredulity, the way is paved for the blessing, which is the reign of God. Revelation has then for its object the giving to man certain truths which he is unable to acquire by himself alone, by which he may accelerate his progress in knowledge. These truths are generally kept within the limits of fundamental principles destined to put him in the way of research, and not to guide him by a leading-string. There are landmarks to show him the end in view. To him is allotted the task of studying and deducing from them their applications. Far from freeing him from labor, these are but new elements furnished for his activity.



Note from the Editor: Parts One, Two, Three, and Four of this Chapter I of Genesis was published on the issues # 97, # 98 , # 99 and # 100
of the Spiritist Messenger.

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 ° ELECTRONIC BOOKS

ON MIRACLES AND MODERN SPIRITUALISM

BY

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE,

D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.


REVISED EDITION, WITH CHAPTERS ON
APPARITIONS AND PHANTASMS


LONDON
GEORGE REDWAY
1896

Digitized for Microsoft Corporation by the Internet Archive in 2007.
From University of California Libraries.
May be used for non-commercial, personal, research, or educational purposes, or any fair use.
May not be indexed in a commercial service.

   
MIRACLES

AN ANSWER TO THE ARGUMENTS OF HUME,
LECKY, AND OTHERS, AGAINST MIRACLES


(
A Paper read before the Dialectical Society in 1871.)


MODERN OBJECTIONS TO MIRACLES.

    We will now proceed to some of the more modern arguments against miracles. One of the most popular modern objections consists of making what is supposed to be an impossible supposition, and drawing an inference from it which looks like a dilemma, but which is really none at all.

    This argument has been put in several forms. One is, "If a man tells me he came from York by the telegraphwire, I do not believe him. If fifty men tell me they came from York by telegraph wires, I do not believe them. If any number of men tell me the same, I do not believe them. Therefore, Mr. Home did not float in the air, notwithstanding any amount of testimony you may bring to prove it."

    Another is, "If a man tells me that he saw the statue of Nelson descend from his column into Trafalgar Square and drink water from the fountains, I should not believe him. If fifty men, or any number of men, informed me of the same thing, I should still not believe them."

    Hence it is inferred that there are certain things so absurd and so incredible, that no amount of testimony could possibly make a sane man believe them. These illustrations look like arguments, and at first sight it is not easy to see the proper way to answer them; but the fact is that they are utter fallacies, because their whole force depends upon an assumed proposition which has never been proved, and which I venture to assert never can be proved. The proposition is, that a large number of independent, honest, sane, and sensible witnesses, can separately and repeatedly testify to a plain matter of fact which never happened at all.

    Now, no evidence has been adduced to show that this ever has occurred or ever could occur. But the assumption is rendered still more monstrous when we consider the circumstances attending such cases as those of the cures at the tomb of the Abbe Paris, and the cases of living
scientific men being converted to a belief in the reality of the phenomena of modern Spiritualism; for we must assume that, being fully warned that the alleged facts are held to be impossible and are therefore delusions, and having the source of the supposed delusion pointed out, and all the prejudices of the age and the whole tone of educated thought being against the reality of such facts, yet numbers of educated men, including physicians and men of science, remain convinced of the reality of such facts after the most searching personal investigation. Yet the assumption
that such an amount and quality of independent converging evidence can be all false, must be proved, if the argument is to have the slightest value, otherwise it is merely begging the question. It must be remembered that we have to consider, not absurd beliefs or false inferences, but plain matters of fact; and it never has been proved, and cannot be proved, that any large amount of cumulative evidence of disinterested and sensible men was ever obtained for an absolute and entire delusion. To put the matter in a simple form, the asserted fact is either possible, or not
possible. If possible, such evidence as we have been considering would prove it; if not possible, such evidence could not exist. The argument is, therefore, an absolute fallacy, since its fundamental assumption cannot be proved. If it is intended merely to enunciate the proposition that the more strange and unusual a thing is the more and better evidence we require for it, that we all admit; but I maintain that human testimony increases in value in such an enormous ratio with each additional independent and honest witness, that no fact ought to be rejected when attested by such a body of evidence as exists for many of the events termed miraculous or supernatural, and which occur now daily among us. The burden of proof lies on those who maintain that such evidence can possibly be fallacious; let them point out one case in which such cumulative evidence existed, and which yet proved to be false. Let them give not supposition, but proof. And it must be remembered that no proof is complete which does not explain the exact source of the fallacy in all its details. It will not do, for instance, to say, that there was this cumulative evidence
for witchcraft, and that witchcraft is absurd and impossible. That is begging the question. The diabolic theories of the witch mania may be absurd and false; but the facts of witchcraft as proved, not by the tortured witches, but by independent witnesses, so far from being disproved, are
supported by a whole body of analogous facts occurring at the present day.

THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE ASSERTED PHENOMENA OF MODERN SPIRITUALISM.

    Another modern argument is used more especially against the reality of the so-called Spiritual phenomena. It is said, "These phenomena are so uncertain; you have no control over them; they follow no law. Prove to us that they follow definite laws like all other groups of natural phenomena, and we will believe them." This argument appears to have weight with some persons, and yet it is really an absurdity. The essence of the alleged phenomena (whether they be true or not is of no importance) is, that they seem to be the result of the action of independent intelligences, and are therefore deemed to be Spiritual or superhuman. If they had been found to follow strict law and not independent will, no one would have ever supposed them to be spiritual. The argument, therefore, is merely the statement of a foregone conclusion, namely, "As long as your facts go to prove the existence of distinct intelligences, we will not believe them; demonstrate that they follow fixed law, and not intelligence, and then we will believe them." This argument appears to me to be childish, and yet it is used by some persons who claim to be philosophical.

THE NECESSITY OF SCIENTIFIC TESTIMONY.

    Another objection which I have heard stated in public, and received with applause, is, that it requires immense scientific knowledge to decide on the reality of any uncommon or incredible facts, and that till scientific men investigate and prove them they are not worthy of credit. Now I venture to say that a greater fallacy than this was never put forth. The subject is very important, and the error is very common, but the fact is the exact opposite of what is stated; for I assert, without fear of contradiction, that whenever the scientific men of any age have denied the facts of investigators on à priori grounds, they have always been wrong.

    It is not necessary to do more than refer to the world known names of Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey. The great discoveries they made were, as we know, violently opposed by all their scientific contemporaries, to whom they appeared absurd and incredible; but we have equally striking
examples much nearer to our own day. When Benjamin Franklin brought the subject of lightning-conductors before the Royal Society, he was laughed at as a dreamer, and his paper was not admitted to the Philosophical Transactions. When Young put forth his wonderful proofs of the undulatory theory of light, he was equally hooted at as absurd by the popular scientific writers of the day. ¹ The Edinburgh Review called upon the public to put Thomas Gray into a strait jacket for maintaining the practicability of railroads. Sir Humphrey Davy laughed at the idea of London ever being lighted with gas. When Stephenson proposed to use locomotives on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, learned men gave evidence that
it was impossible that they could go even twelve miles an hour. Another great scientific authority declared it to be equally impossible for ocean steamers ever to cross the Atlantic. The French Academy of Sciences ridiculed the great astronomer Arago when he wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph. Medical men ridiculed the stethoscope when it was first discovered. Painless operations during the mesmeric coma were pronounced impossible, and therefore impostures.

    But one of the most striking, because one of the most recent cases of this opposition to, or rather disbelief in, facts opposed to the current belief of the day, among men who are generally charged with going too far in the other direction, is that of the doctrine of the "Antiquity of Man."
Boué, an experienced French geologist, in 1823 discovered a human skeleton eighty feet deep in the loess or hardened mud of the Rhine. It was sent to the great anatomist Cuvier, who so utterly discredited the fact that he threw aside this invaluable fossil as worthless, and it was lost. Sir 0. Lyell, from personal investigation on the spot, now believes that the statements of the original observer were quite accurate. So early as 1715 flint weapons were found with the skeleton of an elephant in an excavation in Gray's Inn Lane, in the presence of Mr. Conyers, who placed them in the British Museum, where they remained utterly unnoticed till quite recently. In 1800 Mr. Frere found flint weapons along with the remains of extinct animals at Hoxne, in Suffolk. From 1841 to 1846, the celebrated French geologist, Bouches de Perthes, discovered great quantities of flint weapons in the drift gravels of the North of France; but for many years he could convince none of his fellow scientific men that they were works of art, or worthy of the slightest attention. At length, however, in 1853, he began to make converts. In 1859-60, some of our own most eminent geologists visited the spot, and fully confirmed the truth of his observations and deductions.

    Another branch of the subject was, if possible, still worse treated. In 1825, Mr. McEnery, of Torquay, discovered worked flints along with the remains of extinct animals in the celebrated King's Hole Cavern; but his account of his discoveries was simply laughed at. In 1840, one of our first geologists, the late Mr. Godwin Austen, brought this matter before the Geological Society, and Mr. Vivian, of Torquay, sent in a paper fully confirming Mr. McEnery's discoveries; but it was thought too improbable to be published. Fourteen years later, the Torquay Natural History Society made further observations, entirely confirming the previous ones, and sent an account of them to the Geological Society of London; but the paper was rejected as too improbable for publication. Now, however, the cave has been systematically explored under the superintendence of a Committee of the British Association, and all the previous reports for forty years have been confirmed, and have been shown to be even less wonderful than the reality. It may be said that "this was proper scientific caution." Perhaps it was; but at all events, it proves this important
fact that in this, as in every other case, the humble and often unknown observers have been right; the men of science who rejected their observations have been wrong.

    Now, are the modern observers of some phenomena, usually termed supernatural and incredible, less worthy of attention than those already quoted? Let us take, first, the reality of what is called clairvoyance. The men who have observed this phenomenon, who have carefully tested it through long years or through their whole lives, will rank in scientific knowledge and in intellectual ability as quite equal to the observers in any other branch of discovery. We have no less than seven competent medical men Drs. Elliotson, Gregory, Ashburner, Lee, Herbert Mayo, Esdaile, and Haddock, besides persons of such high ability as Miss Martineau, Mr. H. G. Atkinson, Mr. Charles Bray, and Baron Reichenbach. With the history of previous discoverers before us, is it more likely that these eleven educated persons, knowing all the arguments against the facts, and investigating them carefully, should be all wrong, and those who say
à priori that the thing is impossible should be all right, or the contrary? If we are to learn anything by history and experience, then we may safely prognosticate that in this case, as in so many others, those who disbelieve other men's observations without inquiry will be found to be in the wrong.

1 The following are choice specimens from Edinburgh Review articles in 1803 and 1804:
    "Another Bakerian lecture, containing more fancies, more blunders, more unfounded hypotheses, more gratuitous fictions, all upon the same field, and from the fertile yet fruitless brain of the same eternal Dr. Young."
    And again
    "It teaches no truths, reconciles no contradictions, arranges no anomalous facts, suggests no new experiments, and leads to no new inquiries."
    One might almost suppose it to be a modern scientific writer hurling scorn at Spiritualism!



Next: AN ANSWER TO THE ARGUMENTS OF HUME, LECKY, AND OTHERS AGAINST MIRACLES
[REVIEW OF MR. LECKY'S ASSERTIONS ABOUT MIRACLES]


Note from the Editor: The second Essay comprised in this book, The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, was translated into Portuguese by Jáder dos Reis Sampaio and published by Publicações Lachâtre, under the title of O Aspecto Científico do Sobrenatural.

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 ° SPIRIT MESSAGES

HEAVEN AND HELL
Or
The Divine Justice Vindicated in the Plurality of Existence

Concerning

The passage from the earthly life to spirit-life,
future rewards and punishments,
angels and devils, etc.

Followed by numerous examples of the state of the soul,
during and after death.

BEING THE PRACTICAL CONFIRMATION OF "THE SPIRITS' BOOK"

BY Allan Kardec

Translated from the Sixtieth Thousand - By Anna Blackwell
[London: Trubner & Co., Ludgate Hill - 1878]

Part First - Doctrine

CHAPTER III

  HEAVEN

Part One

    1. The term heaven is employed, in a general sense, to designate the boundless expanse of space which surrounds the earth, and, more especially, the part of that expanse which is above our horizon. The Latin name for that space, cœlum (derived from the Greek coilos, hollow, concave), was given to it by the Ancients, because
heaven, or the sky, appeared to them to be an immense concavity. The Ancients believed in the existence of several "heavens," placed one above the other, composed of a solid, transparent matter, and forming a succession of hollow, concentric spheres, in the center of which, immovable, stood the earth. These spheres, turning round the earth, carried with them the stars which were placed within their several circuits.

    This belief, due to the paucity of astronomic knowledge, was the basis of the various theogonies which represented those concentric "
heavens," thus superposed on one another, as localizations of progressively increasing degrees of beatitude, the topmost one being the region of supreme felicity. According to the general opinion, there were seven of these "heavens"; hence the saying, "To be in the seventh heaven," as the expression of the most perfect happiness. The Mohammedans admit nine "heavens," in each of which the happiness of the true believer is successively increased. The astronomer Ptolemy (who lived in Alexandria, in the second century of the Christian era), counted eleven of these "heavens"; the uppermost being syled "The Empyrean" (from the Greek word, pur, or pyr, fire), on account of the brilliant light with which it was supposed to be filled; and the term is still employed as the poetic designation of the realm of eternal glory. Christian Theology assumes the existence of three "heavens"; the first is the region of the terrestrial atmosphere and the clouds; the second is the space in which the stars perform their revolutions; the third, above the region occupied by the stars, is the dwelling-place of the Most High, the abode of the elect, who behold the Almighty "face to face." It is in accordance with this classification that St. Paul is said to have been "caught up into the third heaven."

    2. These different doctrines, respecting the abode of the Blessed, are based on two erroneous assumptions, viz.: - 1, that the earth is the center of the universe; and 2, that the region of stars is limited. And it is beyond the imaginary limit thus assigned to the starry region, that all those doctrines have placed the blissful realm which is supposed to be the dwelling-place of the Almighty. But what a strange anomaly is that which relegates to the outskirts of creation the Author and Ruler of all that is, instead of assigning to Him, at least, a position in the center of the universe, whence His thought might radiate in all directions!

    3. Physical science, with the inexorable logic of facts and observation, has carried its torch into the depths of the expanse of space around us, and has shown the emptiness of all these theories. The earth has been proved to be, not the pivot of the universe, but one of the smallest of the bodies that circle through immensity, and our sun itself is not known to be only the center of our planetary system; every star that shines in the boundless expanse of the sky is ascertained to be itself a sun, the center of a system of dependent worlds; and the innumerable system thus revealed to us as moving in an orderly inter-dependence throughout the boundless regions of infinity, are found to be separated by distances incommensurable by our thought, though, to our eye, they seem almost to touch one another. In this view of the universe, governed by eternal laws which proclaim the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator, the earth is seen to be only an almost imperceptible speck, a mere member of one of the pettiest of the solar systems yet known to science, and one of the least favored - as regards its physical characteristics and its adaptation to human life - of the planets of the minute system to which it belongs. Such being the case, the question naturally arises as to why the Almighty should have made it the sole seat of life, the sole habitation of the most favored of His creatures? Everything, on the contrary, tends to show that life is everywhere, and that the human family is as infinite as the universe. Science has proved the existence of worlds similar to ours; and as God cannot be supposed to have made anything without a purpose, He must necessarily have peopled those worlds with beings capable of administering them.

    4. Man's opinions are always proportioned to his knowledge; and the discovery of the constitution of the world around him, like all the other great discoveries of the human mind, has necessarily given a new direction to his ideas. It was inevitable that, his primitive creeds should undergo considerable modification; "heaven" has been ousted from its former place, for the region of stars, being boundless, can no longer be assigned as its locality. Where, then, is "heaven"? To this question, none of the religions of the world can furnish an answer.

    This problem, of which all other theories are unable to supply the solution, is solved by Spiritism, which shows us the true nature and destiny of man.

    5. With the aid of the knowledge thus derived, we have ascertained that man is a compound being, consisting of a body and a spirit; that the spirit is the principal element of this compound existence, its reasoning and intelligent element; and that the body is merely a material envelope which is temporarily assumed by the spirit for the accomplishment of his mission upon the earth and the execution of the labors that are necessary for his advancement. The body, worn out, is destroyed, and the spirit outlives its destruction. Without the spirit, the body is only a mass of inert matter, like an instrument deprived of the arm which made it act. Without the body, the spirit is still itself; that is to say, the essential element of the compound being called man, viz., life and intelligence. On quitting his material envelope, the spirits returns to the spirit-world, which he had quited in order to incarnate himself in a corporeal body.

    There is, then, the corporeal world, composed of spirits incarnated in corporeal bodies, and the spirit-world, composed of spirits who have put off their corporeal body. The beings of the corporeal world, in virtue of their material envelope, are attached to the earth or to some similar globe; the spirit-world is everywhere, around us and in space, and has no boundaries or limits of any kind. In virtue of the fluidic nature of their body envelope, the beings who compose that world, instead of creeping laboriously upon the ground, transport themselves through space with the rapidity of thought. The death of the body is the rupture of the bonds which held them captive.

    6. Spirits are created simple and ignorant, but with the aptitude of acquiring all knowledge, and for progressing in every direction, through the exercise of their free will. Through the progress achieved by them, they acquire new knowledge, new faculties, new perceptions, and, as a consequence of these, new enjoyments unknown to spirits of less advancement; they see, hear, feel, and comprehend, what more backward spirits can neither see, hear, feel, nor comprehend. The happiness of each spirit is in proportion to the amount of progress accomplished by him; so that, of two spirits, one may be more or less happy than the other, simply as a consequence of his greater or less degree of moral and intellectual advancement, and this, without their being in two different places. They may be close to one another, and yet one of them may be in utter darkness, while the other is in the midst of resplendent light; just as a blind man and one who sees may be in the same place, and yet the former will be unconscious of the splendors seen by the latter, who perceives the objects which are invisible for the former. The happiness and unhappiness of spirits being inherent in the qualities possessed by them, they find that happiness or unhappiness wherever they may be, on the surface of the earth, in the midst of incarnates, or in space.

   
A common-place comparison will render this difference of situation more comprehensible. If, of two men who are at a concert, one is a trained musician possessing a good ear for music, while the other knows nothing of music and has only a defective ear, the first will derive enjoyment from the concert, while the other will remain unmoved, simply because one of them perceives and understands what makes no impression upon the perceptions of the other. It is thus with all the enjoyments experienced by spirits, those enjoyments being proportioned to their aptitude for perceiving them.The spirit-world is full of splendors, harmonies, and sensations that spirits of low degree, who are still under the influence of materiality, do not perceive, and which are only perceptible, and accessible, to spirits of greater purity.

    7. Progress, among spirits, is only achieved as the fruit of their own labor; but, as they have their free will, they labor more or less actively for their own advancement, according to their will; they thus hasten or retard their own progress, and, consequently, their own happiness. While some of them advance quickly, others stagnate for long ages in the lower ranks. Thus, spirits are always the artisans of their own situation, whether happy or unhappy, conformable with the words of Christ, "each according to his works." A spirit who remains behind has, therefore, only himself to thank for his backwardness; in the same way, he who advances has all the merit of his advancement, and the happiness he has conquered appears to him all the greater in consequence.

    Perfect felicity is the lot only of the spirits who have attained to perfect purity, in other words, of those whom we designate as Pure Spirits. ¹ Happiness is only obtained by spirits in proportion as they progress in intelligence and morality. Intellectual progress and moral progress are rarely achieved together, and at the same time; but what a spirit fails to accomplish in one lifetime he accomplishes in another, so that his advancement in each of those two branches of progress is equalized in the long run. It is for this reason that we so often find highly intelligent men who are but slightly advanced in morality, and vice versa.

¹ Vide "The Spirits' Book," p. 38, et seq.

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Part Second - Examples

CHAPTER VI

[Repentant Criminals]

VERGER
    The assassin of the Archbishop of Paris.
   
    The 3rd of January 1857, Msgr. Sibour, Archbishop of Paris, on coming out of the church of St. Stephen-of the- Mount, in Paris, was stabbed by a young priest named Verger, who was sentenced to death, and executed, on the 30th January. Up to the moment of his death, Verger showed neither regret nor repentance for his crime. Evoked on the day of his execution, he gave the following replies:

    Q. (Evocation.) - A. I am still retained in my body.
    Q. Is not your soul entirely free from your body?
    A. No... I am afraid... I don't know... Wait until I can see myself... I am not dead, am I?
    Q. Do you repent of what you have done?
    A. I did wrong to kill; but I was driven to it by my temper; which cannot put up with humiliations... you will evoke me another time.
    Q. Why do you want to go away?
    A. I should be too much frightened if I saw him; I should fear he would do as much to me!
    Q. But you have nothing to fear, since your soul is separated from your body; banish all uneasiness; it is unreasonable.
    A. One can't help one's impressions! I don't know where I am... I am mad.
    Q. Try to be more self-possessed.
    A. I cannot be so, since I am mad... Wait... I will try to recall my lucidity.
    Q. If you prayed, it would help you to recover your self-command.
    A. I am afraid... I dare not pray.
    Q. Pray! The mercy of God is great. We will pray with you.
    A. Yes; the mercy of God is infinite; I always believed it to be so.
    Q. Now, do you understand your position more clearly?
    A. It is so extraordinary! I cannot yet make it out.
    Q. Do you see your victim?
    A. I seem to hear a voice, like his, that says, "I am not angry with you"... but that is a freak of my imagination! ... I tell you,I am mad; for I see my own body on one side and my head on the other; and yet I seem to be alive, but in space, between the earth and what you call the sky. I feel the chill of the knife falling on my neck, but that is the fear I have of dying. It seems to me that I see a number of spirits about me, looking at me with compassion; they talk to me; but I don't understand them.
    Q. Is there, among those spirits, one whose presence humiliates you on account of your crime?
    A. There is only one of them whom I am afraid of, it is he whom I struck.
    Q. Do you remember your past lives?
    A No; I am in a state of vagueness; I seem to be dreaming... another time... I must recover myself.
    Q. (Thee days later.) - Do you understand your position more clearly?
    A. I know that I no longer belong to your world, and I am not sorry for it. I am sorry for what I did; but my spirit is now freer; I see more clearly that there is a succession of existences which give us the knowledge we need in order to become, at length, as perfect as the nature of created beings permits.
    Q. Are you being punished for your crime?
    A. Yes, I regret what I did, and I suffer for it.
    Q. In what way are you punished?
    A. I am punished by perceiving the true nature of my act, for which I beg of God to grant me forgiveness; I am punished by the consciousness of my lack of faith in God, and because I now know that we ought not to cur short the life of our brethren; I am punished by remorse for having delayed my advancement through taking the wrong road and through not having hearkened to the voice of my conscience, which told me that it was not by killing that I should attain my end; but I allowed myself to be mastered by envy and jealousy; I made a mistake, and I am sorry for it; for a man should always do his utmost to master his bad passions, and I did not do so.
    Q. What do you feel when we evoke you?
    A. Pleasure and fear, for I am not malicious.
    Q. In what do this pleasure and fear consist?
    A. The pleasure is to talk with men, and to partly atone for my fault by confessing it. The fear is something I cannot define... a sort of shame at having been a murder.
    Q. Would you like to be reincarnated upon the earth?
    A. Yes; I beg to be allowed to do so; and I desire to be always exposed to the danger of being killed and to be afraid of it.

    Archbishop Sibour, having been evoked, assured us that he forgave his murderer and prayed for his return to rectitude. He added that, although he had been present, he had abstained from showing himself to Verger, in order not to add to his suffering; and that his fear of seeing him, which was a sign of remorse, was, in itself, a chastisement.
   
    Q. Does the man who will commit murder know, on choosing his existence, that he will become an assassin?
    A. No; he knows that, by choosing a life of struggle, he incurs the chance of killing a fellow-creature; but he does not know whether he will do so or not, for there is almost always hesitation in the murderer's mind before committing the crime.

    The situation of Verger, immediately after his execution, is that of almost all of those who die a violent death. The separation of body and soul being a process that cannot be accomplished suddenly, they are stunned, so to say, and do not know whether they are dead or alive. Verger was spared the sight of the Archbishop, because it was not needed to excite his remorse; in contrary cases, murderers are incessantly haunted by the sight of their victims.

    To the enormity of his crime, Verger had added the absence of repentance up to his last moment; he was consequently in the best possible state for incurring, according to the Church, the penalty of eternal damnation. And yet, no sooner has he quited the earth, than repentance awakens in his soul; he repudiates hes past and sincerely demands to be allowed to make reparation for his offense. He is not driven to repentance by the force of suffering, for he has not, as yet, had time to suffer, the change is due, solely, to the voice of his conscience, which he failed to heed during his life, but which he heeds now. Why should no account be taken of his change of feeling? Why should this change, which the Church says would have saved him from hell a few days previously, be unable to save him now? Why should God, who would have taken pity on his repentance before death, be without pity for the same repentance a few hours afterwards?

    Surprise may be felt at the rapidity with with which this change sometimes occurs in the mind of a criminal who has remained hardened up to his last moment, and for whom the mere passage into the other life suffices to show him the iniquity of his course. But this sudden enlightenment is far from being general; if it were, there would be no bad spirits. Repentance is usually slow; and it is for this reason that punishment is usually long.

    Obstinacy in evil, during life, is often caused by pride, which refuses to yield and to avow mistake; moreover, man is under the influence of matter, which throws a veil over his spiritual perceptions and fascinates him with false seemings. When this veil drops away from him, his mind is suddenly flooded with light, and he is sobered from the intoxication of sense. A prompt return to better sentiments is always evidence of a certain amount of moral progress previously made by the spirit and awaiting only favorable conditions for asserting itself; as, on the other hand, a spirit's persistence in evil, after death, is always a sign of backwardness on his part and shows that, in him, the material instincts are still stifling the germ of goodness, and that he will have to undergo new trails that will force him, at length, into the path of amendment.


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  MESSAGE FROM ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

 
[Extracted from the homepage of the Mercian Order of St. Georges]

In my time on the Earth Plane, I was very well thought of in many respects. When I became involved with Spiritualism, I believed in it explicitly, and I hope my words, writings and publications were of some avail, and have served to help those who need to understand the reality of the After Life. I made some mistakes, but on the other hand, I consider my life was fruitful in spreading the Truth of Spiritualism.

I had the splendid opportunity of being with some fine mediums, and working with many wonderful people, who helped to establish Spiritualism in the early part of this century. I paid a price, and lost friends for my interest and involvement in this Great Truth, but as time went by, I did feel that this Truth needed to be known, in the way that so many souls required this help. I was very fortunate to receive some wonderful proof, and felt in my heart, that we had a Great Truth to present to the world, and I played my role, and was encouraged by many of my colleagues in the medical profession, particularly my dear friend, Doctor Crawford, one who, like myself, believed in this Spiritualism and the After Life. I had a very close compatriot in the spiritual work, a man called Billy Budd, who incidentally I based some of my written works around.

I had the support of some of the people in Parliament, and different ones like that. Lord Lindsey was another one who was a great supporter of our work, and there were many other fine people, like Professor Richet, and another dear friend, Sir William Crookes. We were working very hard on behalf of humanity, to bring about the conditions that were necessary so that we could help people to understand this Great Reality that we so dearly love. It was most reassuring that we still have these contacts and links in Our World, even now.

I traveled consistently and regularly, and imparted what I could of my knowledge of the Truths that were known to me. I was familiar with mediumship, and practiced, to a degree, some form of trance mediumship myself, although I was not as proficient as Douglas and some of the other mediums that I am familiar with throughout the world. I can say that I was indeed privileged, on one or two occasions, to come under the power of the Spirit, and to be entranced by different personalities from This Side of Life.

I was often challenged by those who thought that Spiritualism was a load of bunkum. I recall having a great debate in San Francisco, with a man called McCabe. He was antagonistic of my ideas, and we found great delight in challenging each other’s beliefs and ideas on Spiritualism. There was a very rousing ovation at the end of this debate, one of the many I attended over the years I campaigned for this work. No doubt my literary mind helped me in these circumstances, to avoid the semantics of the folk who saw themselves as intellectuals. I feel that my abilities in that way are just a memory, but it does give some mirth, on reflection, as well as a bit of a niggle of discomfort at some of the opportunities I missed, to do better.

Being a medical person in my life in your World, I am greatly indebted to the training I received, and still maintain links with some of the current projects that are being expressed there. We have many splendid facilities for the development of medicine, and medical knowledge, and our profession, here on This Side of Life. I can assure you, all is working extremely well on behalf of all Mankind.

Since my return to the World of Spirit, I have passed through many levels of Light and Learning, and have risen to a more refined spiritual area than when I was on the Earth Plane. It gives me great joy to be able to maintain my links with many of you, and I enjoy making contact with several groups throughout the world, and endeavor to do my best to pass on to others my thoughts and hopes for your World.

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 ° ARTICLES

OVER A CENTURY OF RESEARCH ON AFTER-DEATH COMMUNICATION

 
by Sylvia Hart Wright, M.S., M.A.

Introduction

       In virtually every culture, people tell stories about surviving spirits, benevolent or hostile. Some years ago, in a cross-cultural study of grief and mourning, a team at the University of Minnesota evaluated the "ghost beliefs" of 66 societies including our own. (Rosenblatt, Walsh and Jackson 1976, 51)  Only one, the Masai—about which only limited data were available—didn't believe in the existence of spirits as manifestations of specific dead persons.  Almost every faith tradition takes a position on what becomes of humans after death, and how the living should relate to their disembodied essences.  Mediums arise in virtually every society, no matter how primitive or isolated.  But in our Western tradition, serious, scholarly research on spontaneous communications from the dead, received by the living without the help of a medium, probably dates back to the groundbreaking work of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain in the late 19th century.  In this paper I will try to touch on the salient contributors to knowledge in this field.

Nineteenth Century Research

         In 1850, Catherine Crowe, a Scotswoman who had lived in Germany and had been impressed by publications there on the paranormal, pointed the way for those who would come after.   She was a novelist who specialized in books for children but in her 473-page volume, The Night-Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers, (Crowe 1850) she laid aside fiction to collect what she presented as accurate reports gathered "from friends, from newspaper accounts, other books, letters, and diary excerpts." (Blum 2006, 15)  Her chapter headings referred to "wraiths," doppelgangers, troubled spirits, haunted houses, spectral lights, apparitions, poltergeists and possession.  In her discussion of wraiths—her catchall term for many kinds of spirit manifestations—she wrestled with the basic elements of what we have come to call the mind-body problem, touching on biblical references to souls and spirits, moving on to cite a 19th century Parisian magazine article about a child who saw the soul of a woman depart from her body, then offering stories of what we would now call out-of-body experiences and death coincidences. "Science," she lamented in her preface, "has put aside  [phenomena of this sort] as beneath her notice, because new facts that do not fit into old theories are troublesome….  If I could only induce a few capable persons, instead of laughing at these things, to look at them, my object would be attained."  When in the 1880s, a hardy band of outstanding English intellectuals came together to establish the Society for Psychical Research, they made heroic efforts to do just that.

         The results of their early research come down to us primarily in two massive works, Phantasms of the Living, (Gurney, Myers and Podmore 1886) first published in two volumes in 1886, and the Report on the Census of Hallucinations, whose almost 400 pages were included in the Society's Proceedings for 1894. (Sidgwick, Johnson, Myers, Podmore and Sidgwick 1894) For Phantasms of the Living, over 5700 people were asked the question, "Since January 1, 1874, [10-12 years before the question was posed] have you—when in good health, free from anxiety, and completely awake—had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there?  Yes or no?" A slightly smaller number were asked, "Since January 1st, 1874, have you ever had a dream of the death of some person known to you, which dream you marked as an exceptionally vivid one…?" (p. 210-211)  If the answer was yes, respondents were invited to tell their stories.

         When this study began, one of its primary goals was to find evidence regarding telepathy, but a remarkable percentage of the stories soon turned out to relate to death. Edmund Gurney, its author, writing about what he called "true dreams," reported that "by very far the largest class is the class where the truth is death."  Out of 149 dreams collected which represented or coincided with a real event, over half (79) represented or suggested death.  In a high proportion of cases, "the coincident dream was marked as exceptional in character—at the time, and before the real event was known—by being immediately narrated as such to someone else … or by being noted in writing." (p. 214)  SPR volunteers went to great lengths to verify their informants' stories by soliciting letters from other parties in whom these informants had confided, reading diary entries, checking death notices in newspapers, and the like. 

         Reading Phantasms of the Living and its companion work, The Census of Hallucinations, you are transported to a Victorian world of large families that live in fine houses staffed with maids, cooks and sometimes footmen.  Starring in these period dramas are members of Britain's privileged classes. Honorific titles abound:  Captain, Major, Doctor, Reverend, Lady and the occasional foreign prince.  They all seem to write—and save—lots of letters, often to far-flung parts of the British Empire.  Many find time to keep diaries or memo books.  Yet their lives are often touched by sorrow.  Many of their loved ones die young: as children, young mothers or bold young men.  They are thrown from horses while riding to hounds; they die of consumption or in sailing accidents or in military attacks while posted to the Sudan.  For agonizing weeks or months, kinfolk or friends wait for letters from India to bring them either good news or confirmation of some cause for grief first hinted at by a paranormal event.

         In Phantasms, although there are numerous crisis apparitions, many occurring at a time of death at a distance, there are few stories of after-death communication more than a few weeks after death. The same is true for the Census of Hallucinations, for which 17,000 people were asked: "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external cause?" (p. 33) Unlike Phantasms, the Census disregarded reports of vivid dreams. It acknowledged "sense of presence" experiences but didn't tabulate them. Like its predecessor, this huge research study reported a remarkable number of death coincidences—far beyond chance—but was short on stories of after-death communication some time after the death of the apparent communicator from beyond the grave.  A few stand out.  A Brazilian man and his wife-to-be both see his fiancee's mother, dead 7 years, visible only down to her waist.  His fiancée collapses in a faint. (p. 309-310) Miss G. visits a cemetery to check whether the graves of two children of Mrs. V., her former lady's companion—herself dead nearly three years—have been well maintained.  When she comes home, she sees Mrs. V., dressed in a familiar outfit, standing against a wall of her dining room and hears, "Thank you for going to see my babies." (p. 88-89)

Early Twentieth Century Studies

         These strenuous undertakings by the Society for Psychical Research soon inspired a Frenchman to launch a comparable research project of his own. Camille Flammarion, a man of enormous energy, curiosity and invention, joined the staff of the Paris Observatory as an apprentice astronomer in 1858, while still in his teens.  A decade later he started making balloon ascents to study the upper atmosphere. Meanwhile, back in the observatory, he made significant observations of single and double stars as well as of the moon and Mars.  A founding member of the French Astronomical Society, he established a new observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge and served as its director until his death in 1925.

         In his younger years he was drawn into the circle of the Spiritist, Allen Kardec, but as he grew older he drew a clear distinction between what he sensed was true about psi and what was yet to be scientifically proven.  In 1899, Flammarion initiated an inquiry of his own that would, in effect, replicate the SPR's research into contact with the dead and the dying by paranormal means.  He arranged for three journals to publish a request for personal accounts to be sent to him of "cases of apparitions and manifestations on the part of the dying and the dead, and of well-defined presentiments…." (Flammarion 2001, 65-69) Unlike the SPR, he welcomed accounts of phenomena involving dreams and other sources of psi communication aside from sight, hearing and touch.  The breadth of his inquiry may have been inspired by the wide range of stories he'd already collected informally from friends and acquaintances.  In response to the journal notices, Flammarion received 1824 positive responses, selected 786 which he deemed to be especially informative, detailed and reliable, and grouped together stories of similar phenomena independently reported by people in varied circumstances.  These included telepathic messages and doppelganger events as well as manifestations from the dying and the dead.  He published these in his first major work on the paranormal, published in English in 1901 as The Unknown.

         In the years that followed, Flammarion continued to receive letters from people recounting their paranormal experiences and turning to him for reassurance that the spirit survived after death.  He drew on stories he'd received from thousands of correspondents to create his crowning three-volume work, Death and Its Mystery. (Flammarion 1922-1923)  The first volume focused on premonitions and other kinds of clairvoyance; the second, subtitled At the Moment of Death, dealt not only with what the SPR labeled death coincidences—manifestations of someone dying at a distance perceived within 12 hours before or after death—but also with manifestations that had appeared  as much as several days earlier; the third of the trilogy, After Death, covered manifestations experienced anywhere from a few minutes to 30 years after the death of the apparent communicator.  In closing, Flammarion, a man not given to false modesty, proclaimed, "The object of this work has been attained.  The evidence embodied in it is based on accounts which I have been amassing for more than half a century….  [They] prove that there is no death….  An intelligent force rules all.  The soul cannot be destroyed…. These conclusions are in conformity with … the esoteric traditions common to India, to Egypt, to Persia, to Greece, to the Hebrews, to the Essenes, to Cabalism, and to the alchemists of the middles ages…. Present scientific methods have brought practical confirmation and the beginning of an explanation." (Flammarion 1923, 346)

            Here we have probably the high water mark for confident assertion that psi phenomena prove both the existence and the survival of the soul—or "the spirit" or "consciousness" or whatever those of us more given to tentative expression may choose to call it.  Researchers in the years that followed tended to back off from Flammarion's bold conclusions.  Nonetheless, these early studies by Flammarion and the SPR provide a baseline for all that has come since.  In this talk I'll try to touch on some of the most important ADC research that has been reported since Flammarion declared the whole question of survival settled.

The Nineteen Twenties through the Nineteen Sixties

            Back at the Society for Psychical Research, spontaneous experiences of apparent contact with the dead have never ceased to be a matter of interest, and accounts of them have  continued to appear in its publications. In 1923, dozens of such stories, along with stories of telepathy not related to death, were published in the SPR's Proceedings.  In 1962 they were reprinted and, for the first time, issued as a book under the lengthy title, Phantasms of the Living: Cases of Telepathy Printed in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research during Thirty-Five Years.  Bound together with this work was an abridged, but still bulky version of Edmund Gurney's original 2-volume study, Phantasms of the Living. (Sidgwick 1962) A brilliant woman, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, had both prepared the abridgment of the Gurney magnum opus, first published as a book in 1918, and had brought together the later accounts for publication in the SPR's Proceedings, along with her comments and analysis.  Mrs. Sidgwick, informally known as Nora, had taken primary responsibility for writing the text of the Census of Hallucinations, though her name came last on its list of authors, which was headed by her husband, Professor Henry Sidgwick.  Mrs. Sidgwick, also the SPR's best statistician, later became principal of the first women's college established at Cambridge. (Blum 2006, 177)

            In the mid-1930s, J. B. Rhine started making parapsychology respectable by focusing on extrasensory perception and studying it under controlled conditions.  I mention him primarily because of his wife, Dr. Louisa Rhine, who for many years was his colleague at the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory.  Publicly, the Rhines disavowed any interest in issues of survival or — Heaven forbid! — contact with the dead.  On the side, rumor has it, they dabbled in séances with at least one medium.  In 1948, they started collecting accounts of spontaneous events — things that "just happened" — which seemed to involve the paranormal.  Ordinary people who had heard of the lab sent them letters describing unusual experiences they'd had. During the early Sixties, Louisa reported on the 178 cases in the Duke collection which involved spontaneous psychokinesis. (Rhine, L.E. 1963) Many of these were classic examples of death coincidences.  Often they involved clocks that stopped or pictures that fell at the time a loved one died at a distance.  And toward the end of her book, Hidden Channels of the Mind, (Rhine, L.E. 1961) she ventured to describe what she called "puzzling physical effects" from the dying and the dead.  She recounts the extraordinary story of a young American tail gunner during World War II who was flying back from a bombing mission.  He and all the rest of the crew aside from the pilots were asleep.  In his sleep, this young airman saw his long dead mother standing on a wingtip; she was calling his name and alerting him to danger.  He woke, startled, to find a German fighter plane flying directly above his bomber, not visible to the men who were flying the plane.  Thanks to the gunner's warning from his mother, the crew managed to elude the German's attack.

            Another important mid-Twentieth Century investigator whose work has bearing on ADCs is Karlis Osis.  In 1961, the Parapsychology Foundation published his monograph, Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses. His work is almost unique in that its focus is on dying people who perceived what seemed to be the spirits of relatives and friends who already were dead. What is more, his informants—understandably—were not the targets of communication, in this case, the dying, but doctors and nurses who had observed them in their final moments.  In 1959, Osis's team mailed a questionnaire to a stratified random sample of 5,000 physicians and 5,000 nurses practicing in the United States; 640 questionnaires were returned, reporting a total of over 35,000 observations of dying patients.   Of these patients, 1,318 saw apparitions and 884 reported visions.  Follow-up research was done on 190 cases of particular interest and the data were analyzed statistically from many points of view.  In time Dr. Osis would come to call this ambitious effort "the pilot study."  During 1961-64, he conducted a further American study in five Eastern states. Then he took on a younger colleague, Erlendur Haraldsson, who already had traveled extensively in western Asia and India; together they conducted a third survey, this time in India.  In summarizing their scrupulously analyzed findings about deathbed experiences in their 1977 book, At the Hour of Death, Osis and Haralddson observed that although "the finer details of otherworldly imagery seem to vary with the patient's background [,] such major features as bright, saturated colors, peace, harmony, and extraordinary beauty seem … to prevail regardless of whether the patient is a Christian, Hindu, Jew, or Muslim." (Osis and Haraldsson 1977, 39)

Valuable but less well known than the Osis-Haraldsson deathbed studies is a slim volume called Apparitions and Precognition: A Study from the Point of View of C.G. Jung's Analytical Psychology, (Jaffé 1963) which apparently was first published in German in the late Fifties. It's based on letters that were written to a Swiss magazine in response to a request from its editor.  (Shades of Camille Flammarion's first requests in France half a century earlier!)  In 1954-1955, the Schweizerischer Beobachter ran a  series of articles on prophetic dreams, coincidences, premonitions, apparitions and the like.  The editor invited readers to report similar experiences of their own.  To his amazement, the magazine was deluged with over 1200 letters, containing about 1500 accounts.  The editor finessed his way out of the avalanche by turning it over to the distinguished Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung.  Jung, in turn, pleading advanced age and other preoccupations, passed the letters on to Aniela Jaffé, a Jungian scholar with an interest in the field.

            Again and again, the stories recounted here recall stories told earlier in the monumental works of the SPR and Flammarion.  Jaffé herself remarks on this, while drawing on folk motifs and Jung's own teachings regarding archetypes to find underlying meanings in sets of parallel stories.  To her credit, she chooses to discard a small number of the accounts submitted as less than authentic.  "After reading more than a thousand letters," she writes, "and comparing them with verified reports from other sources, a criterion forced itself upon my mind: fictions and fabrications are never typical, nor are they simple. On the contrary, most of them are atypical, complicated and exaggerated."  Good Jungian that she is, she goes on to say that "the lack of archetypal features seems to be a criterion of the improbability of the 'experience.'" (Jaffé 1963, 181-183) Her comments underline the universality of after-death communication, described no matter the time or place, in very similar ways.

The Nineteen Seventies through the Early Nineties

            In 1971, a five page article (Rees 1971) appeared in the British Medical Journal which broke new ground in the study of after-death communication. Perhaps its author, W. Dewi Rees, had himself been inspired by an article on "Mourning in Japan" (Yamamoto, Okonogi, Iwasaki and Yoshimura 1969) that had appeared two years earlier in the American Journal of Psychiatry.  This earlier article, written by a Japanese-American psychiatrist, reported on the experiences of 30 Tokyo widows whose husbands had recently died in car accidents; an impressive 90% of them had sensed the presence of their late partners afterwards.  However, as Dr. Yamamoto pointed out, Japan's two religions, Buddhism and Shinto, both assume the presence of the deceased, at least some of the time.  The strong implication of this study was that, when bereaved people, especially widows, were "given permission" to admit they had sensed contact with the dead, they were very likely to do so.

            Rees was a general practitioner working in Wales.  He set out to interview virtually all the widows and widowers in his district—all those healthy enough to be interviewed—and found that half the widowers and 46% of the widows had sensed some kind of after-death communication from their departed mate.  But he didn't stop there, he asked lots more questions and reported their answers in a dozen statistical tables and charts. Contact experiences, he found, were usually perceived as helpful and pleasant.  Those who had them were not particularly depressed or socially isolated.  Instead, they were more likely to have had longer marriages, happier marriages, and marriages with children.  Furthermore, though ADCs were most likely to occur within the first year after a partner's passing, sometimes they recurred for years, even decades, and even after the widowed spouse remarried.

            Rees's work seems to have inspired physicians and social scientists scattered around the Western world to follow his lead.  In the years that followed, articles appeared reporting similar studies in the United States in California (Kalish and Reynolds 1973) Arizona (Balk 1983) North Carolina (Olson, Suddeth, Peterson and Egelhoff 1985) and at an unnamed "Midwestern university," probably in Ohio (Meshot and Leitner 1993).  While two of these related to people who had lost a life partner, the other two dealt with young people who had lost a parent or sibling.  Andrew Greeley, the distinguished sociologist, novelist and Catholic priest, used data from a poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to document that 42% of Americans at least once had felt that they "were really in touch with someone who had died," while the proportion of widows reporting contact with the dead "at least once or twice" was 64%,  (Greeley 1989, 59) very nearly two-thirds. Studies done in Iceland (Haraldsson 1988) Sweden (Grimby 1993) and Norway (Lindstrom 1995) revealed comparable patterns of contact experiences among the bereaved. The SPR and Flammarion had led the way in describing the nature of after-death communication, but Rees and the many who followed in his footsteps moved on to document how remarkably common such experiences are.  Indeed, Rees' brief article went still further.  It documented that people who experience ADCs should not be judged out of hand to be unhealthy.  It is people who have bonded deeply with a loved one who are most likely to sense contact with that spirit after death.

            Which brings us, believe it or not, to the subject of Elvis Presley.  Sometimes people bond emotionally to a public figure they've never known personally. I once interviewed a very psychic woman whom I'd known for years and discovered that she'd found herself depressed and unaccountably weepy for three days before the sudden deaths of two public figures—in her case, before the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Anwar Saddat. Elvis Presley's appeal touched millions deeply; he was beloved not just for his talents as a performer but for his spontaneous warmth and generosity to ordinary people. In 1987, Raymond Moody wrote Elvis after Life: Unusual Psychic Experiences Surrounding the Death of a Superstar. In it he reported that folks that Elvis had never known, had dreams or visions that predicted his death; others, on the day he died, sensed his presence before they learned of his passing.  Still others told Moody about experiences they'd had years after Elvis' death in which this hero of theirs came to them to give them guidance or support. In one vivid story, Moody tells about what happened to a young woman who had dated the singer and had sometimes talked with him about death.  One rainy day he'd impulsively given her a jacket of his.  After Elvis died, his jacket started acting up, often falling to the floor of the closet where she'd hung it—once when she was looking straight at it.  A couple months later, she saw one sleeve move up and down slowly by itself, every now and then for at least 10 minutes.  Finally she had a dream that she felt explained what Elvis had been trying to tell her.  "Remember how we used to talk about death?" he asked her in the dream. "We wanted to know whether we would live after we die.  I've been trying to get through to you through the jacket….  I want to let you know that we do live after we die." (Moody 1987, 74-81)

The Guggenheims and What Has Come After

            In 1996, a book appeared that ignited new interest in experiences of apparent contact with the dead.  Its title was Hello from Heaven! In it, Bill and Judy Guggenheim reported on an ambitious seven year project in which interviewers collected over 3,300 accounts of such experiences from 2,000 informants from all 50 American states and 10 Canadian provinces. (Guggenheim and Guggenheim 1996, 19)  Most if not all of these interviews were conducted over the phone.  It was Judy Guggenheim who coined the term "after-death communication," first used in Hello from Heaven!, and now widely used to describe these phenomena.  Though the book alludes to near-death experiences and the contributions of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, it mentions virtually none of the prior research I've been discussing here.  Instead, it supplies thumbnail descriptions of 353 ADCs sorted into categories like Hearing a Voice, Feeling a Touch, More Than a Dream, and Symbolic ADCs, and it devotes one chapter to evidential ADCs, typically cases where the perceiver learned in a vivid dream where valuables left behind by a loved one could be found.

            This book has special significance for me because the year after it appeared, I met Judy at a meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration where she was a featured speaker.  I myself had been widowed 14 years before and soon after my husband's death, had started sensing my late husband's presence in a long list of ways.  What's more, three solid rational people that he'd known had confessed to me that since his death they, too, had sensed him.  I was no mystic.  I'd always thought of myself as an agnostic. Besides, by this time I was a published author and a college professor, so I started keeping a log of all the mysterious things I perceived and, eventually, started reading widely in the field. In 1996 I started drafting a book of my own on contact experiences.  But when I met Judy Guggenheim and learned about Hello from Heaven! briefly I wondered if the Guggenheims had said it all.

            Well, not exactly. The past decade has seen an upsurge of interest in the paranormal and particularly in contact with the dead.  The John Edward series and the current TV program Medium, the movies Ghost, What Dreams May Come and The Sixth Sense, have been among the best in the lot, more informative and convincing than the multitude of knockoffs  that clutter the media nowadays.

            Anyhow, after that SSE meeting, I took heart and soon two articles of mine on after-death communication (Wright 1998, Wright 1999) appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, followed by my book When Spirits Come Calling (Wright 2002)  I've been writing and giving talks on the subject ever since. My work in the field has had two salient features.  First, I've tried to remind my readers of the historical and cross-cultural context for study of contact with the dead.  Second, having had a variety of contact-with-the-dead experiences myself, I've done long, in-depth, tape recorded interviews with over a hundred people who've had ADCs of their own, interviews that explored the perceiver's own background as well as whatever he or she had perceived.  I've never delegated the task of interviewing to anyone else and I've avoided interviewing anyone with whom I hadn't already established some kind of connection that would engender trust.  Most commonly this has involved face-to-face contact.  What expertise I may have acquired in this field has been supplemented by hundreds of less structured talks with ADC experiencers who've sought me out informally to confide in me.  Lately, the data I've collected about the personal backgrounds of perceivers have led me to formulate theories about the kinds of family backgrounds that heighten receptivity to all kinds of paranormal messages. (Wright 2006)

            No review of recent work on paranormal messages from the afterlife would be complete without enthusiastic mention of our colleague in the Academy, Dr. Louis LaGrand.  Lou is an accomplished scholar and a certified grief counselor, a distinguished service professor emeritus from the State University of New York.  He's been teaching and writing about counseling the bereaved for over 25 years. Since 1998, he has authored four books: After Death Communication (LaGrand 1998), Messages and Miracles (LaGrand 1999), Gifts from the Unknown (LaGrand 2001), and Love Lives On (LaGrand 2006. His work has been translated into Spanish, Russian and Chinese.  Unlike some of us, Lou is not on a mission to prove the reality of survival.  Instead he views ADCs as part of a mystery to be honored and made use of in a different way. He guides the bereaved to find in their extraordinary experiences reassurance that love does indeed live on. Sensing the continuing presence of their loved ones can strengthen the living to move on in a healthy, optimistic way.

      Finally, it's a pleasure to note here the recent book by Dianne Arcangel, Afterlife Encounters. (Arcangel 2005) Given Dianne's long experience as a psychotherapist and hospital chaplain, her understanding of these phenomena and how they affect the people who perceive them is up close and personal; her scholarly background is equally impressive.  This book supplies many fresh accounts of personal experiences illuminated by her knowledgeable comments.  What's more, Dianne reports on a five-year international survey she conducted to study  the effects of ADCs on their perceivers with respect to their levels of comfort and grief.  Forms  containing 22 questions were distributed at public events as well as over the Internet. More than twice as many women as men responded.  Of the 596 respondents who reported having had "an apparitional encounter," 98% found them comforting. Dianne Arcangel's new book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the field.  Perhaps its title—Afterlife Encounters—will have the most lasting impact.  It's a fine new term to describe the common experience of spontaneously sensing contact with the dead.

Bibliography

Arcangel, D. (2005) Afterlife Encounters. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads.
Balk, D. (1983) "Adolescents' grief reactions and self-concept perceptions following sibling death: a study of 33 teenagers." Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 12 (2)   137-161.
Blum, D. (2006) Ghost Hunters: Willim James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life    after Death. NY: Penguin Press.
Crowe, C. (1850) The Night-Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers. London: George Routledge & Sons.
Flammarion, C. (1901) The Unknown. New York and London: Harper Brothers.
_____ (1922) Death and Its Mystery: Before Death; Proofs of the Existence of the Soul. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
_____ (1922) Death and Its Mystery: At the Moment of Death. Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dying; "Doubles;" Phenomena of Occultism. NY: Century.
_____ (1923) Death and Its Mystery: After Death. Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dead; The Soul after Death. NY and London: Century.
Greeley, A.M. (1989) Religious Change in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Grimby, A. (1983) "Bereavement among elderly people: grief reactions, post-bereavement hallucinations and quality of life." Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, 87   (1) 72-80.
Guggenheim, B. and Guggenheim, J. (1996) Hello from Heaven! A New Field of Research—After-Life Communication—Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal. NY: Bantam.
Gurney, E., Myers, F.W.H., and Podmore, F. Abridged and edited by E.M. Sidgwick. (1962) Phantasms of the Living. Reprint ed. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books. Bound with Sidgwick, E.M. Phantasms of the Living: Cases of Telepathy Printed in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research during Thirty-Five Years.
Haraldsson, E. (1988) "Survey of claimed encounters with the dead." Omega, 19 (2) 103- 113.
Jaffé, A. (1963) Apparitions and Precognition: A Study from the Point of View of C. G. Jung's Analytical Psychology. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books.
Kalish, R.A. and Reynolds, D.K. (1973) "Phenomenological reality and post-death contact." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 12 (2) 209-221.
LaGrand, L. (1998) After Death Communication: Final Farewells. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
_____ (1999) Messages and Miracles: Extraordinary Experiences of the Bereaved. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
_____ (2001) Gifts from the Unknown: Using Extraordinary Experiences to Cope with Loss and Change. Lincoln. NE: Authors Choice Press.
_____ (2006) Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Experiences of the Bereaved. NY: Berkley Books.
Lindstrom, T.C. (1995) "Experiencing the presence of the dead: discrepancies in the 'sensing experience' and their psychological concomitants." Omega, 31 (1) 11-21.
Meshot, C.M. and Leitner, L.M. (1993) "Adolescent mourning and parental death." Omega. 26 (4) 287-299.
Moody, R.A. (1987) Elvis after Life: Unusual Psychic Experiences Surrounding the Death of a Superstar. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers.
Olson, P.R., Suddeth, J.A., Peterson, P.J. and Egelhoff, C. "Hallucinations of widowhood." Journal of the American Geriatric Association, 33: 543-547.
Osis, K. (1961) Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses. New York: Parapsychology Association.
Osis, K. and Haraldsson, E. (1977) At the Hour of Death. NY: Avon Books.
Rhine, L.E. (1961) Hidden Channels of the Mind. NY: William Morrow.
Rhine, L.E. (1963) "Spontaneous physical effects and the psi process." Journal of Parapsychology, 27: 84-122.
Rees, W.D. (1971) "The hallucinations of widowhood." British Medical Journal, 4:37-41.
Rosenblatt, P.C., Walsh, R.P. and Jackson, D.A. (1976) Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective. n.p. :HRAF Press [Human Relations Area Files, Inc.]
Sidgwick, E.M. (1962) Phantasms of the Living: Cases of Telepathy Printed in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research during Thirty-Five Years. New Hyde     Park, NY: University Books.
Sidgwick, H., Johnson, A., Myers, A.T., Podmore, F. and Sidgwick, E. (1894) Report on the Census of Hallucinations. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. 26 (10) 25-422.
Wright, S.H. (1998) "Experiences of spontaneous psychokinesis after bereavement." journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 62(852) 385-395.
_____ (1999) "Paranormal contact with the dying: 14 contemporary death coincidences." Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 63 (857) 258-267.
_____ (2002) When Spirits Come Calling: The Open-Minded Skeptic's Guide to After-Death Contacts. Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin.
_____ (2006) "Childhood influences that heighten psychic powers." Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, 29 (4) 183-192.
      A bibliography listing other works by Wright can be found at her website <www.sylviahartwright.com>
Yamamoto, J., Okonogi, K., Iwasaki, T. and Yoshimura, S. (1969) "Mourning in Japan." American Journal of Psychiatry, 125: 1660-1665.


Note from the Editor:
This article was originally published on The Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Volume 31, Number 3
, July 2008, of The Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, of which the author is on the Board of Directors

SYLVIA HART WRIGHT [sylviah@efn.org] has master's degrees in Library Service (Columbia University) and Sociology (New York University) and holds the rank of Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York.  During the last 15 years of her career there, she headed the research center at the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies and authored two books on contemporary American architecture.  After she was widowed in 1983, she and others who had been close to her late husband sensed contact with him; this aroused her interest in the paranormal, especially in afterlife studies.  She writes and lectures widely in the field. 

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