And yet there are no signs in the normal life of this world. The present has to build the heavenly body only for the future, not yet to see and hear with the eye and ear that are to be. The blossom does not thrive that is prematurely broken off. And even if one can assist his faith in the future life by belief in these traces of its shining into the present life, yet one should not build upon it. Healthy faith is based upon fundamentals and limits itself to the highest point of view of normal life, of which it forms a part.
You have hitherto believed that the light form in which a dead person appears to you in remembrance is merely your own interior illusion. You are mistaken; it is itself a reality, which, with conscious step, not only comes to you but enters into you. The earlier form is still its spiritual raiment; only, no longer fettered with its former dense body and wandering inactive in its company, but transparent, light, divested of its earthly burden, for the moment it is now here, now there, following the voice of each one who calls to the dead, or of itself appearing to you, to suggest the thought of the dead. Indeed the common conception of the appearance of souls in the future life has always been of light, immaterial forms, independent of the limits of space, and so, though unintentionally, the truth has been reached.
You have also heard ghosts spoken of. Doctors call them phantasms, hallucinations. So they are for the living, yet, at the same time, they are actual apparitions of the dead, as we call them. For though they be the weaker forms of memory in us, how should they not also be the more pronounced corresponding apparitions. Therefore, why still dispute whether they are the one or the other when they are at once both. And why be afraid of ghosts, when you do not fear the remembered forms within you which they already are.
And yet the reason for this is not wanting. Unlike the forms you have yourself summoned or which of themselves steal gently and peacefully into the fabric of your inner life, mingling helpfully with it, they advance, and surprise you, with overpowering force, apparently coming before you, really entering into you and bringing into your mind far more dismay than comfort. To live at once in the two worlds makes a morbid existence. The dead and the living should not communicate. To approach the dead so nearly as to see them as clearly and objectively as they are able to see each other means for the living already a partial death; hence the terror of the living before such apparitions of the dead; it is also a partial backsliding of the dead away from the realm beyond death into that this side of it; from this comes the saying—and perhaps more than saying—that only those spirits wander about which are not quite released, which still by heavy fetters are earth-bound. To drive away the unblest, call for the help of a better and stronger spirit; but the best and the strongest is the Spirit of all spirits. Who can harm you under His protection? And so is verified the saying that before the voice of God every evil spirit vanishes.
Meanwhile in this sphere of spiritual sickness faith itself is threatened with the contagion of superstition. The simplest way to guard oneself against the coming of ghosts is not to believe in their coming; for to believe that they come is to meet them halfway.
As they are able to appear to each other, I said. For the same apparition which is against the order of this world is but taken prematurely from the order of the other. The dwellers in the other world will appear to each other in a luminous, clear, full, and objective form, of which we in our memory of them have but a weak echo, a dim outline drawing, because they pervade each other with their full and complete being, only a little part of which reaches each of us through memory of them. Only there as well as here attention needs to be focussed upon the appearance in order to behold it.
Now, it may still be asked: how is it possible that they so unite and appear so objectively and definitely to each other? But ask first, how is it possible that what is received by you as the semblance of a living person, and what is conveyed to your brain by the memory of a dead one—and there is nothing else before you to base it upon—appears in the one case as an objective perception, but in the other as a circumscribed memory? The no longer exact impression which underlies the mental picture deludes you as to the outline of the form from which it proceeded in the beginning. You cannot know why from the plane of this world; how can you expect to know from that of the other?
And so I repeat: do not conclude from arguments of this world which you do not know, nor from suppositions which you make, but from facts clear to you here as to the greater and higher facts of the life to come. Any single conclusion may be erroneous; even that one which we have just reached; therefore, do not be satisfied with any isolated proof: the final conviction in regard to them, which we have to demand before and beyond every conclusion, will be the best support of our faith below, and our best guide on the upward path.
But once lay hold upon faith directly from above, and the whole path of belief which will lead us upwards opens easily before us here.