When I asked Mary K. for a message for a mother bereaved by war, she said: “Tell her we will send for her when he has grown accustomed enough to talk to her. Tell her that he is cared for tenderly and guided, and that she must not grieve. She hurts him and herself. Make her understand that she can help him by knowing that he lives and loves her and is near her, and that it is part of her work as a mother to help him in this ... to find his purpose more quickly through her love.”
We were afterward told that he had not yet learned the “free communion,” but that from the moment his mother began to “lift her spirit to meet his,” this young man’s development was hastened.
Frequently, when telling about these revelations, I have been asked: “What do they say about reincarnation?”
“There is no possible reincarnation,” Mary K. said, when I referred the question to her. “That is a dream of the Orient. The idea of reincarnation is regressive. Not destructive, but deterrent. Not progressive. It is born of bodily desire.”
“Is it like the desire of old men for youth?”
“More. It is a mask, covering material desire with spiritual semblance. It is taught from this plane by deterrent or partly deterrent forces, lacking free vision.”
In another connection, but with similar meaning, David Bruce said: “Some persons hide their love of the flesh by an exaggerated expression of spirituality, and then think of ways of insisting on the flesh.”
Similarly, writing through her husband’s pencil, Mary Kendal said, when he asked her what had become of persons like Cæsar, Luther, Cobden, Archimedes, and others in general: “There is a great difference in the length of time people stay in this plane nearest to that of the earth, which depends not only on the stage of development which they have attained when they come here, but also on the character of work they are best fitted to do. If they can be of more use in direct or indirect contact with your plane, they stay here sometimes many years, as you measure time; but if they are retarded in their development when they arrive here, they have a long road to travel before they can go on to any other plane. There is no such thing as transmigration of souls as you understand it, but that idea is akin to what actually does happen, in the sense that such individualities have to pass through stages of development which are relatively inferior in status to those that they might enter into, coming from your plane, if they had made greater progress there, or had fought a better fight on that plane.”
When he said that his idea in asking about specific individuals was to get concrete instances by which to check up the general law, she returned: “The danger in that is that your idea of what those individuals really were is very apt to be wrong, and starting from wrong premises you could hardly avoid reaching wrong conclusions.... Martin Luther was a mixture of purposes. He did great work for progress in fighting the conventions and binding tendency of ecclesiasticism in his times, but he had personal motives which were deterrent, and which he spent a long time in working out when he left that plane.” Of Napoleon she said: “There have been few instances of greater prostitution of great talents and great opportunity in history, and he paid—and is paying—the penalty, or the consequence.”