The Unknown Guest [76]
longer concerns them, but almost incapable of doing us a real service, so much so that, in short, they would end by persuading us that death serves no purpose, that it neither purifies nor exalts, that it brings no deliverance and that it is indeed a thing of terror and despair.
7
No, it is not the dead who thus speak and act. Besides, why bring them into the matter unnecessarily? I could understand that we should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they do not exist.
It is infinitely more likely that there is strange medley of heterogeneous forces in the uncertain regions into which we are venturing. The whole of this ambiguous drama, with its incoherent crowds, is probably enacted round about the dim estuary where our normal consciousness flows into our subconsciousness. The consciousness of the medium--for we must not forget that there is necessarily always a medium at the sources of these phenomena--the consciousness of the medium, obscured by the condition of trance but yet the only one that possesses our human speech and can make itself heard, takes in first and almost exclusively what it best understands and what most interests it in the stifled and mutilated revelations of our unknown guest, which for its part communicates with the dead and the living and everything that exists. The rest, which is the only thing that matters, but which is less clear and less vivid because it comes from afar, only very rarely makes its difficult way through a forest of insignificant talk. We may add that our subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley very rightly observes, is formed of superposed elements, beginning with the unconsciousness that governs the instinctive movements of the organic life of both the species and the individual and passing by imperceptible degrees till it rises to the superior psychism whose power and extent appear to have no bounds. The voice of the medium, or that which we hear within ourselves when, at certain moments of excitement or crisis in our lives, we become our own medium, has therefore to traverse three worlds or three provinces: that of the atavistic instincts which connect us with the animal; that of human or empirical consciousness; and lastly that of our unknown guest or our superior subconsciousness which links us to immense invisible realities and which we may, if we wish, call divine or superhuman. Hence it is not surprising that the intermediary, be he spiritualist, autonomist, palingenesist or what he will, should lose himself in those wild and troubled eddies and that the truth or message which he brings us, tossed and tumbled in every direction, should reach us broken, shattered and pulverized beyond recognition.
For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the absurd prominence given to our dead in the spiritualistic interpretation, this question of origin would have little importance, since both life and death are incessantly joining and uniting in all things. There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations, seeing that we are full of dead people and that the greater part of ourselves is at this moment steeped in death, that is to say, is already living the boundless life that awaits us on the farther side of the grave.
8
We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these extraordinary phenomena, either those with which we unduly connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we do not believe that they take part. They are evidently precious points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the extent, the forms and the habits of our mystery. But it is within ourselves,
7
No, it is not the dead who thus speak and act. Besides, why bring them into the matter unnecessarily? I could understand that we should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they do not exist.
It is infinitely more likely that there is strange medley of heterogeneous forces in the uncertain regions into which we are venturing. The whole of this ambiguous drama, with its incoherent crowds, is probably enacted round about the dim estuary where our normal consciousness flows into our subconsciousness. The consciousness of the medium--for we must not forget that there is necessarily always a medium at the sources of these phenomena--the consciousness of the medium, obscured by the condition of trance but yet the only one that possesses our human speech and can make itself heard, takes in first and almost exclusively what it best understands and what most interests it in the stifled and mutilated revelations of our unknown guest, which for its part communicates with the dead and the living and everything that exists. The rest, which is the only thing that matters, but which is less clear and less vivid because it comes from afar, only very rarely makes its difficult way through a forest of insignificant talk. We may add that our subconsciousness, as Dr. Geley very rightly observes, is formed of superposed elements, beginning with the unconsciousness that governs the instinctive movements of the organic life of both the species and the individual and passing by imperceptible degrees till it rises to the superior psychism whose power and extent appear to have no bounds. The voice of the medium, or that which we hear within ourselves when, at certain moments of excitement or crisis in our lives, we become our own medium, has therefore to traverse three worlds or three provinces: that of the atavistic instincts which connect us with the animal; that of human or empirical consciousness; and lastly that of our unknown guest or our superior subconsciousness which links us to immense invisible realities and which we may, if we wish, call divine or superhuman. Hence it is not surprising that the intermediary, be he spiritualist, autonomist, palingenesist or what he will, should lose himself in those wild and troubled eddies and that the truth or message which he brings us, tossed and tumbled in every direction, should reach us broken, shattered and pulverized beyond recognition.
For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the absurd prominence given to our dead in the spiritualistic interpretation, this question of origin would have little importance, since both life and death are incessantly joining and uniting in all things. There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations, seeing that we are full of dead people and that the greater part of ourselves is at this moment steeped in death, that is to say, is already living the boundless life that awaits us on the farther side of the grave.
8
We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these extraordinary phenomena, either those with which we unduly connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we do not believe that they take part. They are evidently precious points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the extent, the forms and the habits of our mystery. But it is within ourselves,