Epes Sargent via the mediumship of Cora L. V. Richmond
1,505 words, 8 minutes read time.
I cannot think what death would be to him who has never thought a truth or dreamed a noble thing for humanity, or loved any one. I am told there are barren wastes in human souls devoid of love. I am told there are wildernesses in spirit-life devoid of flowers and children’s faces and sweet smiles, of grateful acknowledgment from those whom one tried to succor and redeem in outward life. I am told this, but I cannot think what the spirit would be without the peopled cities of the imagination; I cannot think what it would be without the created images of thought. Mine, crude as they were, unbeautiful as they seemed in the dear light of the spirit, dimmed somewhat by the faults and failings and fallacies of my material nature, seemed very dear to me; and this city is awake; its peopled habitation is my new world. I did not pass through space to find them; I did go to a distant planet. Space came to me, and was at once inhabited.
I saw all friends of the earthly life as really as I saw them before passing away, but from a different vision. I saw them afar off, on the line of light of memory. I saw them more clearly because I saw their spirits—this friendship that I had valued too little, another that I had valued too much; this mind that seemed a brilliant and shining light through the human lens grew, perhaps, less brilliant, while another that I had scarcely recognised suddenly loomed up before me as a burning, shining planet.
In the spirit all things become real. We are no longer masked by selfish desires and impulses; we see things without the tinge of the external body. Even the material brain loses its power to delude us; we are no longer sophists. There is nothing upon which sophism can weave its web or tissue of falsities. All things are made clear. We are spontaneous; we grew to become what our thought is, and our life and light are made beautiful by the grandeur of the image that we have builded for humanity. Upon a thin and slender foundation of goodness we rear the matchless fabric of immortality, and eliminate all faults, of which we instantly become more aware than in material life.
I can not veil from you the fact that it must be to him who has no conception of the immortal state a disappointment. The realistic mind of earth will find things so much more real in the spiritual state that his shadows will vanish, and then for the time he is lost. I was grateful for that birth out of materialism that gave me consciousness of spiritual life. I was grateful for that slight touch of fancy that could weave around human things the splendour of great thought for humanity. I know now why I have ineffable hope for every race beneath the sun, because all races are peopled from the skies. I now know why I had every hope for the uplifting of every child of earth to the highest splendour. I now know why womankind forever appealed to me with mute lips and longing eyes to be released and redeemed from the thraldom of the subtle chain that ages have woven around her—because out of the spiritual firmament the angel of life is dual, and man and woman are fashioned in the image of God. I now know why every secret hope, whether veiled within the skin of the African, or bound down by the narrow limits of Oriental custom, or veiled in the red man, appeal to me as belonging to somewhat beyond what matter and man had bestowed—because of the spiritual life that foretells everything, makes speechless the wrongs of the nations—that they may rise one day in magnificence and be redressed through the power of the spirit. I now know why the world of politics, of struggles for Mammon, of all things that men pursue for gain, had no allurements for me, not because I was wiser or better, but because I was chosen to do some other thing, and that other thing was to hope always ineffably and sublimely that out of the darkness light would come, and out of the seeming evils and intricate threads of human existence there would rise the blessed humanity of the future.
Coming toward me, space seemed filled with all I had hoped and prophesied of, and in the very antechamber which I entered immediately after death I could see so much of eternity that it would take mortal breath away, as it almost did the breath of the spirit. There was no low, dim twilight. There was no simple fading of existence and inanition. There was no uncertainty; there was no bewilderment; there was no pausing, as if in sleep, upon the threshold of that immortal state, while tender hands would prepare, as they sometimes do, the immortal state. Suddenly, and with full power, I sprang upright, and was aware immediately of being a form, a being whose intensity pervaded and thrilled me, until I seemed a part of all the universe around, a form that was so like the form that lay at my feet that I was startled at the resemblance, save that one was shadowy, pale, and wan with disease, and suffering, and labour, and the other was more than crowned with the rigor of youth and manhood, so like myself that I was fain to put away one form, so distressing is it to see one’s own very resemblance so near; and as one has sometimes seen oneself in a mirror and wondered who it could be, so I gazed upon the form and I considered the reality and wondered for an instant which would endure; but as that was already the shadow, as no part of the individual me remained; as there was not even breath, nor warmth, nor coloring; as it was really but the shadow, I was glad when it was laid away out of earthly and human sight, since it could no longer mock the eyes of the loved ones; and all the while I was there with the great longing of my heart, with the enfolding arms and the love that spoke audibly to the spiritual ear, yet they did not hear. To talk forever to one’s loved ones and not be heard were insufferable. To think forever in spirit toward those who are left behind and find no response would drive me mad. I do not know what those spirits do whose friends put them away in the tomb or in heaven and never let them talk to them. If I were such a spirit, day and night I would haunt the chambers of their souls; I would speak out from the silence of the air and compel them to hear. But my friends do not do this. Already I have spoken elsewhere; already reported myself, but my word must here be received. I must speak until the ears of the spirit shall hear, until the quickened understanding of the human brain shall know what a measureless thing is death, Until you shall know that enfolds you, encompasses you, girds you round about, encircles you with its life-giving arms, for the very thing that men call death is that which makes life endurable, and fills you with the possibilities of being. But for those who were dead to outward life, who existed in the air above me and in my consciousness, I had no peopled fancies of brain, no thought of philosophy, no aspiring hope; but for those whom you call dead your days and nights would be void of ambition; you would have no mental air to breathe; the higher strata of existence would be cut off; the supersensuous nature would be starved; you would be stifled and famished in the prison-house, and the little feeble spark of life would die out, leaving the bodies shriven, shrunken, lifeless automatons. But for that which you call death, that vital breath, that living instance of being, that sheltering and protecting power, that harmony and splendor of all things, you were not here this night; there would be nothing to move you here; the spiritual impulses of the universe would be forgotten; there would be no fountains of inspiration, no thought of religion, no touchstone to Immortality. Men are played upon by spiritual beings as harps by the wind. They hear the sound but they do not know the source, and as the red man turns his ear toward the pine trees, listening to the solemn music, and thinking it the voice of the Infinite, or of those who have gone to the hunting-ground afar off, so when you hear this solemn music in the air above you, you wonder what it is and turn away to your daily task, forgetting that without it you were lifeless, cold, and dumb.
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