ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

138 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
those who do not know them as well. I do not believe that spirits
are always better situated to give us advice on any matter. They
may perhaps be better qualified in some cases; even then their
counsel must be verified by our own knowledge of the facts before
we are justified in accepting and following it implicitly.
The vice of the interested person is that he or she assumes spirits
to have special fitness for knowing more than the living. This
is an illusion of the older religious view. It assumed that escape
from the body entailed infinite knowledge at once. There is no
ground whatever for any such assumption. The contrary might
be true, for all we know. So far from knowing more after
death, a man might even know less or he might simply live on
the capital of his past experience. This latter view is certainly
supported by the earthbound condition. The man or woman so
affected lives a dream life based upon the contents of his sensuous
memory and· these memories appear, as they do in our
dreams, as hallucinations which the subject of them takes for
reality, and in that condition he or she is not in any respect
qualified to give advice, especially spiritual advice. I do not
believe that all the discarnate live in this manner to the same
degree and it is not requisite for us to solve that problem in
order to realize what caution we should exercise in accepting
and acting ripon the advice of spirits, especially those recently
passed. It would be like following the advice of insane people
instead of the rational.
There was no lofty point of view, no ethical insight or spiritual
appreciation, on the part of the communicator in this instance,
who was planning a marriage of his living wife. He was
ready with a fixed idea to reduce her distress by any device
that hit upon his fancy and he did not reckon with risks which
were fundamental and less did he reckon with the need of a
spiritual point of view for his wife. He did not get above material
pleasures and advantages in anything that he said or did.
Consequently I do not know a better illustration in my experience
with mediums, except one other much like it, to enforce
the lesson of letting the advice of spirits alone in this subject.
unless we can prove it wise on our own knowledge. We are
ultimately responsible for action on our own judgment and we
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