Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1866

One of our correspondents from Lyon writes the following to us:

“I was surprised with the fact that the Spirit of Dr. Cailleux was taken into a magnetic state to see his several past existences unfolding before him (Spiritist Review, June 1866). This seems to indicate that the Spirit in question did not know them, because in The Spirits’ Book, I read that “after death, the soul sees and embraces in a glance the picture of his past existences (item 243). Doesn’t this fact seem to indicate a contradiction?”

There isn’t any contradiction there, on the contrary, the fact comes to confirm the possibility for the Spirit to get to know their past existences. The Spirits’ Book is not a complete treaty of Spiritism; it presents the foundations and the fundamental points that must be successively developed by the study and observation. It says that, in principle, the soul sees, after death, its past migrations, but it does not say when and how that takes place. Here the details of application that must be subordinated to the circumstances. It is known that in delayed Spirits the vision is limited to the present, or a bit more, like on Earth. It develops with intelligence and as they acquire conscience of their condition. Moreover, we should not believe that, even when considering advanced Spirits, like Dr. Cailleux, for example, as soon as they enter the spiritual world everything is clearly shown to them, as if in a live change of decoration; that would not be the case even if they constantly had the panorama of space and time before their eyes. As for their previous existences, they see them as a memory, as we see through our thoughts what we did in previous years: the scenes of our infancy, the social positions that we had. That memory is more or less accurate and confusing, sometimes null, according to the state of the Spirit, and according to the judgement of the Providence, if it is convenient to fade or revive it, as a reward, punishment or lesson. It is a big mistake to believe that the aptitudes, the faculties, and perceptions are the same to all Spirits. As with the incarnation, they have moral and what we can call material perceptions, that vary according to the individuals.

If Dr. Cailleux had said that the Spirits cannot know their past existences, this would be a contradiction, for it would be the denial of an admitted principle. Far from that, he affirms the fact; it is only that for him things happened in a different way compared to others, undoubtedly by motives of utility to him, and to us it is a motive of teaching, since it shows us one side of the spiritual world. Mr. Cailleux had died recently; his past existences, therefore, could not be pictured clearly yet in his memory. Let us observe, furthermore, that it was not a simple recollection; it was the actual vision of the individualities that he had animated; the image of his former perispiritual forms presented to him. Now, the magnetic state that he found himself in was probably necessary to produce the phenomenon.

The Spirits’ Book was written in the origin of Spiritism, in a time when we were far from having done all the practical studies that were done later. The posterior observations came to develop and complement the principles, whose germs where cast by that book, and it is worth noticing that even today they have only been confirmed, without ever being contradicted in the fundamental points.