Your Forces and How to Use Them · 55 of 74

Volume V: V. Healthy and Unhealthy Spirit Communion

The word “Spiritualism” has clustered about it some disagreeable associations. With many people it is suggestive of delusion, fraud and trickery, of insanity resulting from dealing with it, of immoral tendencies, of people duped, and of people ever running after the “dear spirits” evoked through the agency of some medium. All this and more attaches itself, and with cause, to “Modern Spiritualism.” Yet below all this froth and scum lies an ocean of truth as the material ocean underlies the foam of its billows.

When some people ask me, “Are you a Spiritualist?” I prefer to say “No.” This saves a great deal of trouble in the endeavor to explain what I do believe and what I do not believe as regards communication between the seen and physically unseen domains of existence. The writings of Moses and others in the Bible, we hold as a true historical record. In that history there is mention after mention of beings from the other side of life, who communicated in various ways with man. That history covers a period of several thousand years. If such communication was possible then, why not now?

If the same forces or elements are in Nature now, which existed then to bring about such results, why should they not operate to‑day?

Every person with a physical body has associated with him or her minds without physical bodies (or spirits). The liar attracts lying spirits. The gambler attracts gambling spirits. The woman fretting herself to death with household cares has an unseen company ever about her of like mind who are miserable with her. The drunkard has with him spirits, who feed on the current of intoxicated thought he throws off and get stimulation from it. The man devoted entirely to business has in the unseen the same order of mind about him. The artist has his unseen following of like taste. Those who desire the highest wisdom and would live the most perfect and best rounded out lives will attract an order of mind like in motive to themselves. To this order we assume that you belong.

To ignore these things because of a fear of being called a “Spiritualist” is something like ignoring the existence of gunpowder, because some people have done foolish things with gunpowder.

To those who are entirely incredulous and skeptical regarding spirit communion, because that communion does not bear such tests as they would subject it to, or because some of the phenomena seems trivial, or because defect, imperfection and trickery are mixed up with it, we say that in so doing you are demanding the perfect development of a science before it has passed through its earlier and immature stages of growth. You are like one demanding at once the perfected steam engine without the preceding experience of trial, experiment and failure of the last eighty years out of which has come the locomotive of to‑day. You allow also nothing for the defect, immaturity, misconception and ignorance existing in your own mind when you deal and judge of these things.

The material mind demands proof of spirit existence and spirit power through material evidences. But give such order of mind all it desires, yet it is never satisfied. It is ever calling for more proof. It calls and receives and goes away from the seance wonder struck and then doubts. It is the nature of the material to doubt everything not of the material. It is impossible for it to prevent accounting for spirit manifestations on some material basis. There are people alive to‑day who have seen all manner of mediumship for the last thirty or forty years, who are no nearer conviction of spirit reality than they were at the start. Their spirituality means a chronic and consuming demand for new tests. They will never get the “tests” their souls demand, save through themselves. When they reach out to the Supreme Power, that power will in time fill their minds with a new light, and make of them new beings with power to see sense and feel what they are not now capable of seeing, sensing and feeling. The material mind must be gotten rid of before the spiritual mind can make us see the things of spiritual or finer element.

As mind not of the body is such a powerful factor in our lives for good or evil, I deem it well to know something about its workings. I consider it, for instance, useful and profitable to know that if I frequent a low saloon or any other low place, I shall attract to myself low degraded spirits, that they will fasten on me, that I shall carry them home with me, that I shall to greater or lesser extent be influenced by them, think their thoughts and have a tendency to act out with my body what they would act out had they (what they much want) material bodies.

And again, if I frequent gossiping or grumbling or despondent groups of people, no matter what may be their social status, and I enter into sympathy with their gossip or grumbling, I am fastening on myself the same order of mind from the unseen side, making those individuals without bodies literally a part of myself, tying them to me, having my thoughts colored by the hue of theirs, and from such thoughts and minds getting inertia instead of vigor, sickness instead of health, weakness instead of strength.

This is a very, very small part of the profit coming of some knowledge of Spiritual Laws. We cannot get Spiritual Laws and ignore the existence of individual spirits.

If a person desires to know of the unseen world only what comes of raps and table tippings or other phenomena, or of what is given him from time to time through mediums, clairvoyant, clairaudient, trance or otherwise; if it is curiosity and desire of seeing the marvelous that chiefly impels him instead of the desire of knowing the truth; if spirit intercourse is sought as an aid to money making; if year after year he visits this or that real or pretended spirit show as he would a dime museum; if even it is only sought with the desire of communicating with the loved ones on that side of life—the chances are that very little good will come of such dealing with spiritualism.

I will not say that no good whatever comes of such dealing. Thousands of people, who have dealt in spirit intercourse with all its present crudity and mingling of true and false on both sides of life, are obliged to own to themselves that the death of the body does not end all. That is one step ahead, and a profitable conviction for any mind.

Some spirits without bodies will lie as fast as some spirits with bodies commonly called men and women. The loss of a physical body does not change a scamp into a saint, no more than does the loss of the thief’s overcoat change him into an honest man. The spirits you may deal with through the generality of mediums have the current virtues and weakness of humanity. Some are pompously wise, and rather than call themselves Smith or Jones will give the names of Plato or Pythagoras, or Shakespeare or Queen this or that. Some mean well in giving advice, but make grievous mistakes. None are infallible.

People who are made crazy through Spiritualism belong to that class of mind which is quite ready to go into some degree of craziness over any exciting or engrossing subject. I believe, however, that dealing with Spiritualism does have a special danger for this class. Because seances and circles made up of people who are much nearer some form of insanity than they realize, tend to attract half insane spirits, and these can fasten on a very sensitive person, blend disordered minds with theirs, and craze them in time.

I have in past years seen a good deal of various forms of mediumship both in public and private life. I have no interest now in seances or any form of physical phenomena. Indeed, so far as my personal taste and comfort is concerned I know of no better place to keep away from than a seance at a dollar a head, with its usual audience of the ultra credulous who come prepared to believe everything, and the ultra skeptics who came prepared to disbelieve everything.

I see no greater marvel in the materialization of flowers than in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I know, however, that certain powers do exist and are worked through the physical organizations of certain people. I know, also, that at times such powers are counterfeited as everything genuine has been counterfeited. I believe the development known as “Modern Spiritualism,” commencing publicly in this country with the Rochester knockings, years ago, came in that crude way, because the increasing quickness of mind and intelligence of people demanded investigation and inquiry into these phenomena, which had been apparent ages before. But superstition and fear had shut immediately down on such phenomena. Superstition is either blindly fearful or blindly credulous.

Spiritualism in its present form is an abnormal and unhealthy development, but none the less true for that. It came of the premature ripening of the spiritual senses and functions in certain individuals. In other words, certain powers in them burst forth before the others bad attained a proportionate growth. As people’s spirits are immature, so their spiritual power has partaken of the same immaturity. The continued exercise of any one of our powers to the exclusion of the exercise of the rest, results ultimately in great injury to the individual. Such power may be one of physical mediumship or mental mediumship. It may be clairvoyance or the writer’s power to call to him or her a current of thought teeming with mind‑pictures which are transferred to paper, as with the genuine poet or novelist. One involves “mediumship” as much as the other.

Besides “mediums” who “sit” for pay there are a great many more than is generally imagined in private life. Their capacity to be “controlled” or other exercise of the spiritual senses may be known but to a few intimate friends. Their gift is a most dangerous one.

A spirit takes temporary possession of a trance medium’s mind by the same law that the mesmerist controls the mind of the person he operates on. If you control a person’s mind it follows, of course, you can control the body that mind uses.

Any mind, be it of spirit or mortal, so acting on yours from time to time, will leave with yours the seeds or thoughts of its own errors, especially when it can control your body. When your body is thus used by another mind your own spirit is forced out willingly or unwillingly, and if this continues to go on for any time your own mind or spirit will have greater and greater difficulty in getting control and acting thoroughly on your own body. Two minds have no business using one body. It is unnatural and unhealthful.

But far worse is it for the “medium” who gives communications from day to day for several on the unseen side, even though this is done by the agency of one spirit controlling him or her. Such medium may absorb the mental conditions of those who came for sittings and of the minds on the other side who desire to communicate. They are visited by grief‑stricken people who want to communicate with their friends. These friends are grieving also, and the medium stands between the embodied and disembodied as a strainer through which is passed the dark and gloomy thought from both sides, and as thoughts are things, and grieving and regretful thoughts are very harmful things, the medium’s mind absorbs a great deal of this element. The result to the body is destructive. The premature deaths of so many known mediums within the last twenty years is due, in a measure, to this cause. Grief is not the only mood brought and absorbed by a public medium. Greed, selfishness, irritability, anger and animality, are likewise brought them in thought by both mortal and spirit. Through their minds as through a channel, such moods are ever flowing in their daily sittings. Did they realize the harm they were doing themselves in this business they would be justified in charging fifty dollars a sitting, and hold themselves as poorly paid at that.

The mediumship that is known is small compared to that which is unknown and all about us. Legions of people are more or less controlled by minds about them in the unseen realm of life. Of this the insane furnish the most marked instance. The victim of insanity may have his or her spirit quite crowded out and forced from the body by the gradual encroachment and action on it of an insane spirit. In other words, the body of an insane patient may be to‑day a body which twenty years ago was used by another mind, gradually driven from it by another spirit. The cause and cure of insanity will never be known until people deem spiritual laws worthy of more attention.

Spiritualism with its accompanying evil has served a purpose. It has woke up a portion of the race to the fact that the death or loss of the body is only an episode in the real life—the life of the spirit.

Having served its purpose, Spiritualism in its present form will pass away. The time will come when people will not need any form of physical phenomena to convince them of the reality of another life. There will be people who will have perfect faith in their mental communion or impressions received from those nearest them on the unseen side. There will be the most perfect blending of minds of those with the material body and those without. This blending will result in a ripening of spirit which will bridge for some the present chasm between the two worlds or conditions of existence. This is a healthy spirit communion. The people who realize this will care little whether the outside world of material mind knows they possess it or not, no more than you may care to reveal your power as a merchant, financier or politician to a group of five year old children.

There is every grade and quality of mind on the unseen side of life. There is as much error in that mind which comes nearest the world’s atmosphere of thought as there is with us. If we pin our faith to any individual spirit and accept its utterances as infallible, no matter who it may be or pretend to be, then we are in danger of falling into error. There is but one spirit that can be safely trusted. That is the Supreme Power and Wisdom which rules all things. To it the wisest on the other side go for power and wisdom. They would not allow one of us to depend solely on them for wisdom. They would not allow one of us to blindly idolize them, no matter how much their power might astonish us. They would say to us: “Go for help, consolation, power and wisdom where we have gone and are ever going to the Supreme and Infinite mind. It is your privilege to draw ever from this mind as much as ours. That mind is no myth, but the greatest of realities.”

Dependence on that power, and that only, can give us a healthy spiritual growth. Any other dependence will give us an unhealthy and one‑sided growth. In the healthy spiritual growth the spiritual senses will in time ripen, so that we may communicate with those on the other side who are nearest us and whom we most need.

Dependence and an ever‑growing faith in the reality of the Supreme Power brings increasing serenity and repose to the mind. By this serenity and freedom from fear and disturbance are our spiritual powers increased. It becomes then more and more easy for the higher unseen intelligences to impress their thought upon us. When we are very desirous of such communion they can gradually lead us to that knowledge by which the last barrier betwixt you and them may be broken down, and you may see, meet and mingle with them as with people here.

But such meeting, mingling and communion may not come entirely of our physical senses. It will be realized at first during periods when physical senses are partly suppressed, as sometimes happens when you are in deep reverie.

When it is our aim to realize a symmetrical rounded out life and being, we attract to us a like order of spirit. They can live much in our thought atmosphere. That atmosphere makes for them what many of them desire—a home on earth—a place on their old stratum of life to which they can again come and to which they may be most desirous to come.

Because although such beings may have most beautiful homes and surroundings, they are not so wedded to them as to care nothing for their old abodes on earth. You may first have seen the light and passed the days of your childhood in a very humble dwelling, yet though now you live in one far superior, is there not a lively pleasure in revisiting the old home and living awhile in pleasant past remembrances? It is so with spirits. They are human like ourselves. They are not dead to old associations. They are even more alive to them than we. Far beyond this cause of attraction is the fact that they may desire to come near someone most dear to them on earth, either in this or a previous existence. They watch eagerly the growth of such a spirit in the flesh as each successive gradation in fineness and purity of thought enables them to come nearer and nearer the one they love.

Thought low, coarse, turbulent, envious, jealous and gloomy, is a barrier to the approach to us of the higher natures of the unseen world. They for a time and for a purpose can endure it. Live in it permanently they cannot. Thoughts to them are as real and tangible as wood and stone to us, and the coarser order of thought is to them as objectionable as would be any physical defilement to us.

The mind or spirit nearest related to you—nearest you in heart, motive, tastes and sympathies may be one who has had no physical existence contemporary with your own.

You long, possibly, for the gift of the clairvoyant—the ability to see spirits. But the clairvoyant’s is often a power disproportionately developed or brought out before its proper time, and not always bringing the satisfaction or pleasure imagined. The clairvoyant is sometimes lacking in faith, and even disposed to doubt the reality of his or her spiritual sight. Hence in mind he or she comes into no closer satisfactory relations with the world of spirits than do you—perhaps he lives in a lower realm.

The mind must be raised to a certain level of comprehension with the spiritual senses or it cannot fully profit by them. Clairvoyancy is sometimes to its possessor like an eye, able to get a glimpse of things in the world of spirit, joined to a mind which doubts what its spiritual eye sees. Mediums sometimes doubt the reality of their own spiritual powers. They may see or sense something of what lies beyond physical rapacity, yet are so influenced by the materiality of their own minds or the material judgment and opinion of those about them as to have little faith in these their higher senses.

This is another phase of this development adding to the difficulty of investigating the matter. Place some mediums among a group of positive, skeptical minds and there is a possibility that in a short time that medium, through the very laws of his or her own mediumship, would be mesmerized into total unbelief that his or her clairvoyant sight was a temporary hallucination, or that his or her phase of mediumship, whatever it might be, could be accounted for on a physical basis.

Merely to be able to see a spirit very dear to you might soon give you more pain than pleasure. You might see, yet neither hear, nor grasp, nor communicate in any way. What satisfaction would result to you after a short time, from seeing your dearest friend on earth under such circumstances, able only to see but not to communicate in any other way, able only to see but not touch. You could not escape the desire to have a fuller communion because it was a spirit. A spirit is but a being like yourself, only with a body of more rarified element than your own. As thought is an element, and the finer that element coming from you becomes, the more it assimilates with that of elevated spirits. The more you grow away from the cruder and cease to entertain errors of thought, the closer is the mingling of your thought and that of your exalted spirit friends. Such mingling nourishes the growth of all your spiritual senses, until at last they will ripen into that state when they will take complete hold of a spiritual existence. As your thought attracts wise and powerful spirits, so they are thereby enabled to work that which will the quickest make their life blend with yours in every way.

Any powerful spirit (that is, one with knowledge and power to control nature’s forces) could make certain forced or artificial conditions by which it could approach you and be tangible to your physical senses, providing that your thought in fineness of quality to some extent resembled and blended with theirs. But this, in the end, would not be well for the spirit or you. It would be an unwise expenditure of the spirit’s strength. It would be sort of hot‑house condition or growth for you. All artificial growths are unnatural. They are not self‑sustaining. The hot‑house flower is unable to sustain itself in natural conditions. It cannot, like the flower native to the forest and the climate, endure the changes of the weather. It is not self propagating, but is dependent on man’s care to increase of its peculiar species.

So it is with the growth of man’s spiritual powers. Let them grow naturally and in concert and balance, and the growth is solid. There will be no reaction. But no matter how great the power of the spirit, should it make certain forced conditions— analagous to those of the hot‑house for the plant in order to satisfy all your longings, there would come a time when again the severance would be total. The hot‑house condition and result cannot last forever. The plant so reared reaches at last, through its forced and artificial growth, a stage beyond which it cannot pass. When this stage is reached it can no longer maintain itself. Disease attacks it. An insect life peculiar to it is bred out of itself and feeds upon it. So in all vegetation artificially reared by man and dependent on his care do we find periods of blight and disease. The artificial conditions he has made fail to bring healthy natural growth.

It is not so with natural growths. The oak, the pine, the spruce, the wild vine and flower take care of themselves, and when the parent trunk or stem decays it is succeeded by a healthy growth of its own kind. The same law holds with all artificially raised animals. Through concentration of care, peculiar food and selection of peculiar and fine types in breeding, man raises a so‑called superior sheep, or cow, or horse, or dog. But these animals are relatively helpless. They cannot sustain themselves as in the wild or original state from which their ancestors were taken. Removed from man’s care and either they perish or revert to the wild type of their kind. We say then the species has “degenerated.” Could the species speak for themselves possibly they might say that their condition was improved. For they would then be independent of man, and subject neither to captivity nor the diseases generated, because of artificial conditions.

But our race ridicules the idea of bird or beast having rights of their own. We may not always do so.

The law and its results in the visible world is a sure and certain index to the correspondence in the invisible realms of Nature. All growth and development to produce the most lasting and happiest results must be natural. They must be in accordance with the laws of God, the Infinite all‑pervading spirit, and not to subordinate laws or imitations of the natural law made by man. The artificially raised plant or animal is in reality an inferior copy of the original. It may more please our eye or serve our comfort in some way than the original, but as an organization it is weaker. So would it be with us were our spiritual sight, bearing and other senses brought out before their due time (as they could be by spirit power). It would be an artificial spiritual condition. Such artificial condition cannot be maintained save at loss in some direction. Even the vegetation raised in the ground subject to continual artificial fertilization has neither the flavor nor nutritive properties of that raised on virgin soil.

Our nearest friends, on the other side, might, through certain artificial methods, cause themselves for a time to be physically tangible to us. But this, delightful as it might be, could not last.

Their supply of material necessary to effect such results would give out. Or the care and attention necessary to keep up such forced conditions would prove to them ultimately a burden.

A caged canary is a delight at times, but it is a care. Better far the free bird in the tree. In such artificial spiritual conditions you would be as the caged canary. You might too soon be associated with beings of a type finer far than any on earth and lose all relish for earth associations. You might so become entirely dependent on them for your comfort. You would be as the bird fed artificially, and through being so fed would lose all capacity for feeding yourself. Because in such condition your own spiritual senses would not be opened. You would only sense the beings apparent to you by your physical senses, because they had placed themselves in a state tangible only to those senses. These conditions could not be maintained. The time would come when you would be obliged to return to your original state—revert to the original type and commence where you left off in your natural state. You would so return weakened by an artificial life and training as a bird is really weakened by its artificial and caged life, and with your capacity for living and growing healthily retarded.

Perhaps you may say on reading this: “The hope here given of realizing this communion with our unseen friends is rather vague. And it may require eternities for such realization.”

Why should it require eternities when everything for the better is moving ahead at such rapid pace on this planet? You that have lived fifty years must look back with wonder at the progress made in the conveniences of life in art and material science since you were ten years old. When you were born, the railroad was in its infancy. The telegraph was hardly known. The ocean steamer was hardly accepted as safe. The electric light was undreamt of. The sewing machine was still in the brain of its inventor. In architecture the elegance of that time is now commonplace. The medical practice of that time would not now be tolerated. The current religion of that era was harsh, bitter and unmerciful. Sect was quarreling with sect. The drama of 1840 tolerated a coarseness of verbal expression which to‑day no respectable theatre would countenance. We have better houses. There is far greater personal cleanliness. We have three times the variety of vegetable foods. There is more time for rest. The hours for labor are being shortened. There is more temperance in all things. New ideas are more hospitably entertained. But detail of the changes for the better in the physical world within fifty years would fill a volume. Are these to stop here? No. Is it not the new and unexpected that is always coming? Is physical sense to be the limit of our powers? No. We are ever going ahead. We cannot stop going head. We are ever growing and advancing day by day toward the spiritual being and the spiritual life so far exceeding the material in beauty and happiness. Who shall set the time when this spiritual life is to burst from the material as the bud bursts from the tree? It is said that the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night. The Day of the Lord means for us the time when a grand spiritual life is to come to this planet—when all things shall be changed very quickly for the better—not through disturbance—not through bloodshed and revolution—not by man’s law and legislation, but by the mightier force of a great wave of spiritual element and spiritual impulse, which shall clear men’s eyes and quicken their understanding, so that all things shall regulate themselves even as in the heavens the myriads of planets are moved in the intricacies of their orbits without clash or disorder.