In this issue we continue the study of the book Posthumous Works, published after Allan Kardec disembodied and containing texts written by him. The present work is based on the translation made by Dr. Guillon Ribeiro, published by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation.
Questions for discussion
78. Can an obsession, in certain circumstances, present an epidemic character?
79. Is there plentiful proof that a Spirit, when free from the body, can appear in another place?
80. What is the limit in the Spiritist or somnambulistic phenomena? When is it
the action of the human soul and when does the action of the Spirits begin?
81. How can the sleepwalker see people and things?
82. Is the so-called second sight related to sleepwalking?
83. Can we say that some fortunetellers have, in fact, the gift of second sight?
84. Can a blind man have the second sight?
85. How can we understand the gift of the foresight given to seers?
86. Can the perispiritual fluid be seen by man?
Answers to the proposed questions
78. Can an obsession, in certain circumstances, present an epidemic character?
Yes, what a Spirit can do on an individual, various other Spirits can also do the same on several individuals simultaneously and give the obsession an epidemic character. A cloud of evil Spirits can invade a town, and there manifest itself in various ways. It was an epidemic of this kind that mistreated Judea at the time of Christ, but He, due to His immense moral superiority, He had over the demons or evil Spirits a moral strength that He had just to order them to leave, and they obeyed Him, and He had no need to use signals or formulas to do this. (Posthumous Works, Obsession and Possession).
79. Is there plentiful proof that a Spirit, when free from the body, can appear in another place?
Yes, in this work one can find several facts extracted from the German work Mystics Phenomena of Human Life, by Maximilien Perty, a professor at the University of Bern, published in 1861, on which Kardec added the following comment: There are facts that logic and known laws demonstrate the physical impossibility. This is, for example, what is narrated in the Spiritist Magazine of February 1859, page 41, under the title My friend Hermann. This is a young high society German, sweet, benevolent, and the most honorable character, that every evening at sunset, fell into a state of apparent death. During this time, his Spirit aroused in Australia, in the body of a villain, who was eventually hanged. The simple common sense shows that, assuming the possibility of that body duality, the same Spirit cannot be alternatively during the day an honest man and at night a villain in another body. To say that Spiritism believes in such stories is to prove that we do not know it, since it gives the means to prove them absurd. But at the same time it shows the error of a belief, it also proves that often it rests on a true unnatural principle or exaggerated by superstition. Its purpose is to strip the fruit off the shell. (Posthumous Works, Proof of the Apparition of People Alive).
80. What is the limit in the Spiritist or somnambulistic phenomena? When is it the action of the human soul and when does the action of the Spirits begin?
This division does not exist, or rather, it has nothing of absolute. From the moment they are in no way distinct species, and that the soul is nothing but an incarnate Spirit, and the Spirit is a soul free from earthly ties, and it is the same being in two different environments, the faculties and skills should be the same. Sleepwalking is a transitional state between the embodiment and disembodiment, a partial shutdown, one foot placed in advance in the spiritual world.
The embodied soul, the somnambulist's own Spirit, or the Medium can, therefore, do with little difference what the disembodied soul will do, and even more if it is more advanced, with the difference that due to its complete liberation, and therefore being freer, the disembodied has special insights inherent to his condition. To know if a given effect is a direct product of the soul of the Medium, or if it comes from a strange source, is sometimes very difficult to say, because often these two actions are mixed and both confirm the facts. This is what we can see regarding the healing by laying on of hands, the Spirit of the Medium can act alone or with the assistance of another Spirit, and that poetic or artistic inspiration may have a dual origin. But the difficulty in seeing the difference does not mean that this is impossible. The duality is often evident, and, in every case, it almost always points out based on a careful observation. (Posthumous Works, somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
81. How can the sleepwalker see people and things?
Here's something that he himself cannot define. We can see, however, that the in the state of somnambulism the phenomena of sight and feelings that accompany it are essentially different from those in the normal state. The sight of the somnambulist does not distinguish an object in the distance as we could do it through binoculars. It is not, in any way, this object that approaches him through an optical illusion. It is he who approaches the object.
He sees it just as if it were next to him. He finds himself in the place that he observes. In a word, he carries himself to that place. His body, then, seems annihilated, his speech is more muffled, and the sound of his voice has something strange in it. The animal life seems to extinguish. His Spiritual life is all whole in the place to where his thoughts take him. Only the matter stays in the same place. Therefore, there is a part of our being that separates from our body to transport itself instantly through space, driven by thought and will.
This portion, of course, is immaterial. Otherwise, it would produce some effects of the substance. It is that part that we call soul. Yes, it is the soul that gives the somnambulist the wonderful faculties of which he enjoys. It is the soul that, in given circumstances, manifests by isolating itself partially and momentarily from its body wrap. Clairvoyance resides necessarily in the soul and not in this or that limited part of our body. (Posthumous Works, somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
82. Is the so-called second sight related to sleepwalking?
The somnambulistic state is not an essential condition for the second sight to occur. The second sight is almost never permanent. In general, this phenomenon spontaneously occurs, at certain times, without being an effect of the will, and causes a kind of crisis that changes sometimes significantly the physical state: the eye has some vague thing about it. It seems to look without seeing. All the face reflects a kind of exaltation. It is noticed that the people, who are under the state of somnambulism do not suspect it. That possibility seems natural to them as that of seeing through the eyes. For them, it is an attribute of their being. There are infinite degrees in the power of second sight, from a confused feeling, to the perception as clear and as clean as in somnambulism. We lack a word for this special status and, above all, for the individuals who are susceptible of it. The word clairvoyant has been used in this case, and although it is not precise, we shall adopt it until further notice, due to the lack of a better word. It is this gift of a second sight that in the rudimentary state gives certain people the touch, perspicacity, a sort of security in their actions, and what you might call the fairness of the coup moral view. It is more developed, and so it awakens the premonitions, even more developed, and it shows the events carried out, or at the point of happening. Finally, it reaches its apogee: ecstasy awaked. Although it is almost always natural and spontaneous, the second sight phenomenon seems to occur more often according to certain circumstances. It is develop on times of crisis, calamity, of great emotions, all the causes, in short, that over excite the moral. It seems that Providence, in face of the most imminent dangers, multiplies around us, the power to prevent them. (Posthumous Works, Somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
83. Can we say that some fortunetellers have, in fact, the gift of second sight?
Often we speak of fortune tellers, who really do amazing things. We are far from making the defense of fortune-tellers, who exploit the credulity of weak Spirits, and whose ambiguous language lends itself to all combinations of a wounded imagination. But, there is nothing impossible that in certain people, who make this their profession, have the gift of second sight, even with their lack of knowledge. The cards would be in their hands, only a means, a pretext, a base for conversation. They speak according to what they see, and not according to what the letters indicate. It is the same with other divination media, such as the lines of the hands, the coffee residue, the white of the eggs and other mystical symbols. The hand signs, perhaps, have more value than all the other means, in no way just by themselves, but because the supposed diviner, taking and touching the hand of the inquirer, if he is endowed with second sight, he becomes into a closer contact with the latter, as occurs in the somnambulistic consultations. (Posthumous Works, somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
84. Can a blind man have the second sight?
Yes, the clairvoyant mediums, which we can include in the category of people who enjoy the dual view, believe to see through their eyes, but in reality it is the soul that sees, and this is why they see so well with their eyes closed or opened. It follows necessarily that a blind man could be a clairvoyant psychic as well as the one whose vision is intact. (Posthumous Works, somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
85. How can we understand the gift of the foresight given to seers?
Man has always wanted to know the future, but Nature was very wise in hiding it. If we knew in advance the end of each thing, no one doubts that the overall harmony would suffer by this. With the certainty of a happy future, men would stop their activity, as they would not need to make any effort to reach the goal they set for themselves. The certainty of unhappiness would have the same consequences for the effect of discouragement. Man would renounce to fight the final decree of fate. Absolute knowledge of the future would therefore be an ominous gift that would lead us to the dogma of fatality, the most dangerous of all, and the most harmful to the development of ideas. It is the uncertainty of the time of our end in this world that makes us work until the last beat of our hearts.
In the phenomena of second sight, being the soul in part disconnected from the material envelope that limits our faculties, there is more to it, or duration, or distances; spanning time and space, everything is confusing in the present. Free of its barriers, it judges the effects and causes better than we can. It sees the consequences of these things and can make us sense it. It is in this sense that one must understand the gift of the foresight given to seers.
Their predictions are nothing but the result of a clearer awareness of what exists, not a prediction at random without a connection with the present. It is a logical deduction from the known to reach the unknown, which depends very often of the way we do it.
Therefore, the seer is not in any way a fortuneteller. He is a being, who sees what we cannot see. It is like the dog of a blind. (Posthumous Works, Somnambulistic Clairvoyance and Second Sight).
86. Can the perispiritual fluid be seen by man?
It cannot be seen under normal conditions, because it is weightless, as light, electricity and heat. It is therefore invisible to us, in the normal state, and does not reveal itself only by its effects. However, it becomes visible in the state of lucid somnambulism and even in the waking state for people endowed with the second sight. In the state of issuing it presents itself in the form of luminous sparks, quite similar to diffuse electric light in vacuum. In the ordinary state, it has different colors according to the individual from which it emanates. Sometimes it is like a faint red, sometimes blue or gray, like a light mist, and more often, it spreads on neighboring bodies a yellowish cloud, more or less pronounced.
The narratives of sleepwalkers and seers are identical on this issue. Moreover, we shall have occasion to return to the subject speaking of the qualities printed to the fluid to put it in motion, and for the furtherance of the individual issuing it. No body whatsoever is an obstacle. It penetrates them and goes through all of them. Up to today, we have no knowledge of any known body that is able to isolate it. Only the will can extend it or restrict its action. The will, in fact, is its most powerful principle. Through the will, it leads the effluvia through space, or accumulates them, to its satisfaction, on a given point, or saturate up certain objects, or are well removed from the places where they are superabundant.
Let us say that it is on this principle that the magnetic force is founded. It seems, finally, to be the vehicle of psychic vision, as the luminous fluid is the vehicle of ordinary vision. (Posthumous Works, perispiritual Fluid and Fluidic Atmosphere).
