CHAPTER III.
Source of Spiritual Knowledge.
The critically thinking public today might be said to have long ago relinquished the hope of obtaining a sure and decisive answer to the question, whether there is an existence beyond the grave. Some people confine themselves to a faith founded on a smaller or greater probability for either conception. We want palpable evidence. To many it even appears necessary to have a look behind the veil of visible matter in order to satisfy themselves as to whether anything exists within the void. “Nobody has returned to tell us how it is,” we are often reminded, and this expression clearly means that complete certainty requires the testimony of eye-witnesses.
Such a procedure would be at least radical if it were possible. But even if it were, should we then be nearer the goal? The whole mode of thinking is naïve, but merits attention especially because it demonstrates how uncertain the information would be that we would obtain through this channel. If somebody returned, little or nothing would, in all probability, be gained.
In the first place how could we know that it was the same person that returned? It would, perhaps, be best if the soul took possession of the same body. The absence would then be comparable to, or essentially analogous with, the condition of the apparently dead. But to begin with, we could, for good reasons, only ascribe a small value to experience gained under such conditions, and, further, such an absence would evidently mean no real separation of soul and body, no real death, and therefore no real experience of the very thing under consideration.
But how, and under what conditions, would an event of this kind be conceivable?
Should the person in question suddenly disappear from our sight and then just as suddenly reappear among us? Endowed with his present organs and senses, which are closely adapted to earthly conditions, such a person could see and comprehend only such objects as differed little or non-essentially from those in the world where we now live. He would possibly be able to observe conditions on other planets in the universe, but he would be utterly unable to comprehend the things of a world abstracted from the limitations of planetary life. If such a world exists, and some one of us were suddenly removed to it, such a one, amidst all glories with seeing eyes, would yet see nothing; with hearing ears, hear nothing; and with feeling senses, feel nothing. In order to see and grasp what may exist and happen, the observer himself must have gone through a corresponding radical change. The conditions for the functioning of bodily organs do not exist there. He must develop new and more perfect senses; higher, spiritual and bodily faculties which differ from his present ones as much as the objects of this higher world differ from the things of earth.
A direct transposition would therefore be without value. In order to make investigations, a radical metamorphosis is an indispensable condition. The soul must be separated from its earthly clothing and pass through all the transformations which commence with natural death. In order to return here, this person must again go through the same processes in reverse order. At his re-birth upon earth he would not, in all probability, differ from other people. He would know as much or as little as we do.
But even if we assume the improbable and imagine that this person returned to us with the memory of all he had lived through and that he tried to relate his impressions and experiences, such a report would be of no use because it would deal with ideas and conceptions entirely incomprehensible to us. The explanation of this is that man is unable to comprehend things and phenomena which have not acted upon his present organs. If we take pains to analyze our boldest and most unrealistic fancies, we will find that their substance and ingredients are only greatly enlarged or reduced images of an already experienced reality. We have never possessed that man’s higher senses, never experienced the things which those higher faculties are able to grasp, and we are therefore not in a position to form any idea whatever about such a world. His speech would sound like a foreign language that we could not possibly ever learn to understand.
Only in case the person in question could adapt himself to our present way of thinking and understanding, would such a revelation be of any importance. But then again the question arises, what confidence could we have in this man who pretended to possess knowledge about things entirely concealed from us? We have no means of verifying the information thus received. It must be taken in good faith, and so the gates to doubt would again be thrown open. If someone returned, then, little or nothing would be gained. In this, as in other cases, there is no royal road to truth. Only a painstaking research will lead to the goal, if indeed it can ever be attained.