PDF version - Geae

CHAPTER XI
LIFE IN THE BEYOND
We have said that the human being pertains to two worlds. By his physical body, he is tied to the
visible world; by his etheric body, to the invisible. Sleep is the temporary separation of the two bodies; Death,
the separation definite. In both cases the soul detaches itself from the physical body, and with it life
concentrates itself in the etheric body. Life beyond the tomb is but the liberation and the persistence of the
invisible part of our beings.
This mystery was understood in ancient eras; but for a long period of time, men have possessed only
hypothetical and vague notions regarding the future life. Religions and philosophies transmit to us only
uncertain ideas on these problems; ides absolutely unprovable, and in most points in disaccord with modern
ideas of evolution. Science, meanwhile, has not until recently studied and known man, save on his earthly
surface, his body. But that is to the entire being only what the bark is to the tree. The etheric man, of whom our
physical brain has little consciousness, has been wholly ignored until of late; and that is why science has been
powerless to solve the problem of survival after death, since it is the etheric man only who survives. Science
has comprehended nothing of the manifestations which are produced in sleep and in trance, when the freed
soul soars into the higher life. But it is solely by observation of these facts that we can acquire in this life a
positive knowledge of the nature of the ME, and its conditions of life beyond the tomb. Thus experimentation
alone can solve the question. It is necessary to study in the actual man now what will give us light on the man
to be. Modern philosophy, traditional religion, and physical science have succeeded only by their insufficiency
in driving human thought toward materialism, and materialism leads to anarchy.
It is only since the arrival of psychical research and experimentation that the problem of ‘survival’ has
entered the domain of vigorous scientific observation. The invisible world has been studied by the aid of
processes and methods conforming to those which contemporaneous science adopts in other domains of
research. And already we can prove this. In place of diving into a void to establish a solution of continuity
between the two modes of life, terrestrial and celestial, visible and invisible, as do the different religious
doctrines, these spiritual studies have shown us in the life Beyond the natural prolongation and the continuity
of what we possess here. Persistence of consciousness, with all its attributes of memory, intelligence, and
effective faculties, has been established by the innumerable proofs of personal identity gathered in the course
of experiences and researches directed by psychic societies all over the world. The spirits of the dead have
manifested themselves by the thousand, not only with all their traits of character and accumulation of
memories which constituted their moral personalities, but they have revealed their physical features through
the forms of the etheric body which exists after death.
That etheric body is the mould of the physical; that is why the human faces and forms can be shown in
materializations. Information of the conditions of life Beyond has been given by spirits themselves, through
the aid of communications at their disposal. There are entire volumes of their communications received under
test conditions, which serve as a foundation for a precise conception of the laws governing the future life.
Aside from these facts, the experiences of the dual personality of living beings furnishes with
important knowledge of the existence of the soul in realms of the invisible. Birth is a death to the soul. It is
imprisoned with its etheric body in the tomb of flesh. What we call death is simply the return of the soul to
liberty, enriched by the acquisitions it has been able to make during the course of its earth life. We have seen
that the different states of sleep are just so many moments of return to life in space. The more profound is the
sleep the more the soul is emancipated, and the higher its flight. The deepest sleep borders on the first state of
life invisible. In reality, the words sleep and death are inappropriate; when we sleep on earth, we awake in the
spiritual life. The same phenomenon is produced by death; it differs only in duration.
Carl du Prel cites the two following significant examples: - A somnambulist spoke with regret of not
recalling her experiences when awake. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I will see them all after death.’ She considered he state
of trance identical with death. Prevorst, the medium, asked two spirits she saw why they had come to her. ‘But
it is you who have come to us,’ they said. Numerous facts of a similar nature demonstrate that our world is not
separated from the spiritual; they are within each other, closely interlaced. Men and spirits mingle; invisible
56