The Vital Message
By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

CHAPTER  IV
THE COMING WORLD

  
We come first to the messages which tell us of the life
beyond the grave, sent by those who are actually living it.  I
have already insisted upon the fact that they have three weighty
claims to our belief.  The one is, that they are accompanied by
"signs," in the Biblical sense, in the shape of "miracles" or
phenomena.  The second is, that in many cases they are
accompanied by assertions about this life of ours which prove to
be correct, and which are beyond the possible knowledge of the
medium after every deduction has been made for telepathy or for
unconscious memory.  The third is, that they have a remarkable,
though not a complete, similarity from whatever source they come.

It may be noted that the differences of opinion become most
marked when they deal with their own future, which may well be a
matter of speculation to them as to us.  Thus, upon the
question of reincarnation there is a distinct cleavage, and
though I am myself of opinion that the general evidence is
against this oriental doctrine, it is none the less an undeniable
fact that it has been maintained by some messages which appear in
other ways to be authentic, and, therefore, it is necessary to
keep one's mind open on the subject.
  
Before entering upon the substance of the messages I should
wish to emphasize the second of these two points, so as to
reinforce the reader's confidence in the authenticity of these
assertions.  To this end I will give a detailed example, with
names almost exact.  The medium was Mr. Phoenix, of Glasgow, with
whom I have myself had some remarkable experiences.  The sitter
was Mr. Ernest Oaten, the President of the Northern Spiritual
Union, a man of the utmost veracity and precision of statement.
The dialogue, which came by the direct voice, a trumpet acting as
megaphone, ran like this:--


   The Voice:  Good evening, Mr. Oaten.
      Mr. O.:  Good evening.  Who are you?
   The Voice:  My name is Mill.  You know my father.
      Mr. O.:  No, I don't remember anyone of the name.
   The Voice:  Yes, you were speaking to him the other day.
      Mr. O.:  To be sure.  I remember now.  I only met him
casually.
   The Voice:  I want you to give him a message from me.
      Mr. O.:  What is it?
   The Voice:  Tell him that he was not mistaken at midnight on
Tuesday last.
      Mr. O.:  Very good.  I will say so.  Have you passed long?
   The Voice:  Some time.  But our time is different from yours.
      Mr. O.:  What were you?
   The Voice:  A Surgeon.
      Mr. O.:  How did you pass?
   The Voice:  Blown up in a battleship during the war.
      Mr. O.:  Anything more?
  
The answer was the Gipsy song from "Il Trovatore," very
accurately whistled, and then a quick-step.  After the latter,
the voice said:  "That is a test for father."
  
This reproduction of conversation is not quite verbatim, but
gives the condensed essence.  Mr. Oaten at once visited Mr. Mill,
who was not a Spiritualist, and found that every detail was
correct.  Young Mill had lost his life as narrated.  Mr. Mill,
senior, explained that while sitting in his study at midnight on
the date named he had heard the Gipsy song from "Il Trovatore,"
which had been a favourite of his boy's, and being unable to
trace the origin of the music, had finally thought that it was a
freak of his imagination.  The test connected with the quick-step
had reference to a tune which the young man used to play upon the
piccolo, but which was so rapid that he never could get it right,
for which he was chaffed by the family.
  
I tell this story at length to make the reader realise that
when young Mill, and others like him, give such proofs of
accuracy, which we can test for ourselves, we are bound to take
their assertions very seriously when they deal with the life
they are actually leading, though in their very nature we can
only check their accounts by comparison with others.
  
Now let me epitomise what these assertions are.  They say
that they are exceedingly happy, and that they do not wish to
return.  They are among the friends whom they had loved and lost,
who meet them when they die and continue their careers together.
They are very busy on all forms of congenial work.  The world in
which they find themselves is very much like that which they have
quitted, but everything keyed to a higher octave.  As in a higher
octave the rhythm is the same, and the relation of notes to each
other the same, but the total effect different, so it is here.
Every earthly thing has its equivalent.  Scoffers have guffawed
over alcohol and tobacco, but if all things are reproduced it
would be a flaw if these were not reproduced also.  That they
should be abused, as they are here, would, indeed, be evil
tidings, but nothing of the sort has been said, and in the much
discussed passage in "Raymond," their production was alluded to
as though it were an unusual, and in a way a humorous,
instance of the resources of the beyond.  I wonder how many of
the preachers, who have taken advantage of this passage in order
to attack the whole new revelation, have remembered that the only
other message which ever associated alcohol with the life beyond
is that of Christ Himself, when He said:  "I will not drink
henceforth of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink
it new with you in my Father's kingdom."
  
This matter is a detail, however, and it is always dangerous
to discuss details in a subject which is so enormous, so dimly
seen.  As the wisest woman I have known remarked to me:  "Things
may well be surprising over there, for if we had been told the
facts of this life before we entered it, we should never have
believed it."  In its larger issues this happy life to come
consists in the development of those gifts which we possess.
There is action for the man of action, intellectual work for the
thinker, artistic, literary, dramatic and religious for those
whose God-given powers lie that way.  What we have both in brain
and character we carry over with us.  No man is too old to learn,
for what he learns he keeps.  There is no physical side to
love and no child-birth, though there is close union between
those married people who really love each other, and, generally,
there is deep sympathetic friendship and comradeship between the
sexes.  Every man or woman finds a soul mate sooner or later.
The child grows up to the normal, so that the mother who lost a
babe of two years old, and dies herself twenty years later finds
a grown-up daughter of twenty-two awaiting her coming.  Age,
which is produced chiefly by the mechanical presence of lime in
our arteries, disappears, and the individual reverts to the full
normal growth and appearance of completed man--or womanhood.  Let
no woman mourn her lost beauty, and no man his lost strength or
weakening brain.  It all awaits them once more upon the other
side.  Nor is any deformity or bodily weakness there, for all is
normal and at its best.
  
Before leaving this section of the subject, I should say a
few more words upon the evidence as it affects the etheric body.
This body is a perfect thing.  This is a matter of consequence in
these days when so many of our heroes have been mutilated in
the wars.  One cannot mutilate the etheric body, and it remains
always intact.  The first words uttered by a returning spirit in
the recent experience of Dr. Abraham Wallace were "I have got my
left arm again."  The same applies to all birth marks,
deformities, blindness, and other imperfections.  None of them
are permanent, and all will vanish in that happier life that
awaits us.  Such is the teaching from the beyond--that a perfect
body waits for each.
  
"But," says the critic, "what then of the clairvoyant
descriptions, or the visions where the aged father is seen, clad
in the old-fashioned garments of another age, or the grandmother
with crinoline and chignon?  Are these the habiliments of
heaven?"  Such visions are not spirits, but they are pictures
which are built up before us or shot by spirits into our brains
or those of the seer for the purposes of recognition.  Hence the
grey hair and hence the ancient garb.  When a real spirit is
indeed seen it comes in another form to this, where the flowing
robe, such as has always been traditionally ascribed to the
angels, is a vital thing which, by its very colour and
texture, proclaims the spiritual condition of the wearer, and is
probably a condensation of that aura which surrounds us upon
earth.
  
It is a world of sympathy.  Only those who have this tie
foregather.  The sullen husband, the flighty wife, is no longer
there to plague the innocent spouse.  All is sweet and peaceful.
It is the long rest cure after the nerve strain of life, and
before new experiences in the future.  The circumstances are
homely and familiar.  Happy circles live in pleasant homesteads
with every amenity of beauty and of music.  Beautiful gardens,
lovely flowers, green woods, pleasant lakes, domestic pets--all
of these things are fully described in the messages of the
pioneer travellers who have at last got news back to those who
loiter in the old dingy home.  There are no poor and no rich.
The craftsman may still pursue his craft, but he does it for the
joy of his work.  Each serves the community as best he can, while
from above come higher ministers of grace, the "Angels" of holy
writ, to direct and help.  Above all, shedding down His
atmosphere upon all, broods that great Christ spirit, the
very soul of reason, of justice, and of sympathetic
understanding, who has the earth sphere, with all its circles,
under His very special care.  It is a place of joy and laughter.
There are games and sports of all sorts, though none which cause
pain to lower life.  Food and drink in the grosser sense do not
exist, but there seem to be pleasures of taste, and this
distinction causes some confusion in the messages upon the point.

But above all, brain, energy, character, driving power, if
exerted for good, makes a man a leader there as here, while
unselfishness, patience and spirituality there, as here, qualify
the soul for the higher places, which have often been won by
those very tribulations down here which seem so purposeless and
so cruel, and are in truth our chances of spiritual quickening
and promotion, without which life would have been barren and
without profit.
  
The revelation abolishes the idea of a grotesque hell and of
a fantastic heaven, while it substitutes the conception of a
gradual rise in the scale of existence without any monstrous
change which would turn us in an instant from man to angel or
devil.  The system, though different from previous ideas,
does not, as it seems to me, run counter in any radical fashion
to the old beliefs.  In ancient maps it was usual for the
cartographer to mark blank spaces for the unexplored regions,
with some such legend as "here are anthropophagi," or "here are
mandrakes," scrawled across them.  So in our theology there have
been ill-defined areas which have admittedly been left unfilled,
for what sane man has ever believed in such a heaven as is
depicted in our hymn books, a land of musical idleness and barren
monotonous adoration!  Thus in furnishing a clearer conception
this new system has nothing to supplant.  It paints upon a blank
sheet.
  
One may well ask, however, granting that there is evidence
for such a life and such a world as has been described, what
about those who have not merited such a destination?  What do the
messages from beyond say about these?  And here one cannot be too
definite, for there is no use exchanging one dogma for another.
One can but give the general purport of such information as has
been vouchsafed to us.  It is natural that those with whom we
come in contact are those whom we may truly call the blessed, for
if the thing be approached in a reverent and religious spirit it
is those whom we should naturally attract.  That there are many
less fortunate than themselves is evident from their own constant
allusions to that regenerating and elevating missionary work
which is among their own functions.  They descend apparently and
help others to gain that degree of spirituality which fits them
for this upper sphere, as a higher student might descend to a
lower class in order to bring forward a backward pupil.  Such a
conception gives point to Christ's remark that there was more joy
in heaven over saving one sinner than over ninety-nine just, for
if He had spoken of an earthly sinner he would surely have had to
become just in this life and so ceased to be a sinner before he
had reached Paradise.  It would apply very exactly, however, to a
sinner rescued from a lower sphere and brought to a higher one.
  
When we view sin in the light of modern science, with the
tenderness of the modern conscience and with a sense of justice
and proportion, it ceases to be that monstrous cloud which
darkened the whole vision of the mediaeval theologian.  Man has
been more harsh with himself than an all-merciful God will ever
be.  It is true that with all deductions there remains a great
residuum which means want of individual effort, conscious
weakness of will, and culpable failure of character when the
sinner, like Horace, sees and applauds the higher while he
follows the lower.  But when, on the other hand, one has made
allowances--and can our human allowance be as generous as
God's?--for the sins which are the inevitable product of early
environment, for the sins which are due to hereditary and inborn
taint, and to the sins which are due to clear physical causes,
then the total of active sin is greatly reduced.  Could one, for
example, imagine that Providence, all-wise and all-merciful, as
every creed proclaims, could punish the unfortunate wretch who
hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a criminal
head?  A doctor has but to glance at the cranium to predicate the
crime.  In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the
Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross
national sins to which allusion has been made seem to point to
collective national insanity.  Surely, then, there is hope that
no very terrible inferno is needed to further punish those who
have been so afflicted upon earth.  Some of our dead have
remarked that nothing has surprised them so much as to find who
have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in any way
condoning sin, one could well imagine that the man whose organic
makeup predisposed him with irresistible force in that direction
should, in justice, receive condolence and sympathy.  Possibly
such a sinner, if he had not sinned so deeply as he might have
done, stands higher than the man who was born good, and remained
so, but was no better at the end of his life.  The one has made
some progress and the other has not.  But the commonest failing,
the one which fills the spiritual hospitals of the other world,
and is a temporary bar to the normal happiness of the after-life,
is the sin of Tomlinson in Kipling's poem, the commonest of all
sins in respectable British circles, the sin of conventionality,
of want of conscious effort and development, of a sluggish
spirituality, fatted over by a complacent mind and by the
comforts of life.  It is the man who is satisfied, the man who
refers his salvation to some church or higher power without
steady travail of his own soul, who is in deadly danger.  All
churches are good, Christian or non-Christian, so long as they
promote the actual spirit life of the individual, but all are
noxious the instant that they allow him to think that by any form
of ceremony, or by any fashion of creed, he obtains the least
advantage over his neighbour, or can in any way dispense with
that personal effort which is the only road to the higher places.

This is, of course, as applicable to believers in Spiritualism as
to any other belief.  If it does not show in practice then it is
vain.  One can get through this life very comfortably following
without question in some procession with a venerable leader.  But
one does not die in a procession.  One dies alone.  And it is
then that one has alone to accept the level gained by the work of
life.
  
And what is the punishment of the undeveloped soul?  It is
that it should be placed where it WILL develop, and sorrow
would seem always to be the forcing ground of souls.  That
surely is our own experience in life where the insufferably
complacent and unsympathetic person softens and mellows into
beauty of character and charity of thought, when tried long
enough and high enough in the fires of life.  The Bible has
talked about the "Outer darkness where there is weeping and
gnashing of teeth."  The influence of the Bible has sometimes
been an evil one through our own habit of reading a book of
Oriental poetry and treating it as literally as if it were
Occidental prose.  When an Eastern describes a herd of a thousand
camels he talks of camels which are more numerous than the hairs
of your head or the stars in the sky.  In this spirit of
allowance for Eastern expression, one must approach those lurid
and terrible descriptions which have darkened the lives of so
many imaginative children and sent so many earnest adults into
asylums.  From all that we learn there are indeed places of outer
darkness, but dim as these uncomfortable waiting-rooms may be,
they all admit to heaven in the end.  That is the final
destination of the human race, and it would indeed be a
reproach to the Almighty if it were not so.  We cannot dogmatise
upon this subject of the penal spheres, and yet we have very
clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land
which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to
which St. Paul seems to have been wafted in one short strange
experience of his lifetime, is a place which corresponds with the
Astral plane of the mystics and with the "outer darkness" of the
Bible.  Here linger those earth-bound spirits whose worldly
interests have clogged them and weighed them down, until every
spiritual impulse had vanished; the man whose life has been
centred on money, on worldly ambition, or on sensual indulgence.
The one-idea'd man will surely be there, if his one idea was not
a spiritual one.  Nor is it necessary that he should be an evil
man, if dear old brother John of Glastonbury, who loved the great
Abbey so that he could never detach himself from it, is to be
classed among earth-bound spirits.  In the most material and
pronounced classes of these are the ghosts who impinge very
closely upon matter and have been seen so often by those who
have no strong psychic sense.  It is probable, from what we
know of the material laws which govern such matters, that a ghost
could never manifest itself if it were alone, that the substance
for the manifestation is drawn from the spectator, and that the
coldness, raising of hair, and other symptoms of which he
complains are caused largely by the sudden drain upon his own
vitality.  This, however, is to wander into speculation, and far
from that correlation of psychic knowledge with religion, which
has been the aim of these chapters.
  
By one of those strange coincidences, which seem to me
sometimes to be more than coincidences, I had reached this point
in my explanation of the difficult question of the intermediate
state, and was myself desiring further enlightenment, when an old
book reached me through the post, sent by someone whom I have
never met, and in it is the following passage, written by an
automatic writer, and in existence since 1880.  It makes the
matter plain, endorsing what has been said and adding new points.

"Some cannot advance further than the borderland--such as never
thought of spirit life and have lived entirely for the
earth, its cares and  pleasures--even clever men and women, who
have lived simply intellectual lives without spirituality.  There
are many who have misused their opportunities, and are now
longing for the time misspent and wishing to recall the earth-
life.  They will learn that on this side the time can be
redeemed, though at much cost.  The borderland has many among the
restless money-getters of earth, who still haunt the places where
they had their hopes and joys.  These are often the longest to
remain . . . many are not unhappy.  They feel the relief to be
sufficient to be without their earth bodies.  All pass through
the borderland, but some hardly perceive it.  It is so immediate,
and there is no resting there for them.  They pass on at once to
the refreshment place of which we tell you."  The anonymous
author, after recording this spirit message, mentions the
interesting fact that there is a Christian inscription in the
Catacombs which runs:  NICEFORUS ANIMA DULCIS IN REFRIGERIO,
"Nicephorus, a sweet soul in the refreshment place."  One more
scrap of evidence that the early Christian scheme of things
was very like that of the modern psychic.
  
So much for the borderland, the intermediate condition.  The
present Christian dogma has no name for it, unless it be that
nebulous limbo which is occasionally mentioned, and is usually
defined as the place where the souls of the just who died before
Christ were detained.  The idea of crossing a space before
reaching a permanent state on the other side is common to many
religions, and took the allegorical form of a river with a ferry-
boat among the Romans and Greeks.  Continually, one comes on
points which make one realise that far back in the world's
history there has been a true revelation, which has been blurred
and twisted in time.  Thus in Dr. Muir's summary of the RIG.
VEDA, he says, epitomising the beliefs of the first Aryan
conquerors of India:  "Before, however, the unborn part" (that
is, the etheric body) "can complete its course to the third
heaven it has to traverse a vast gulf of darkness, leaving behind
on earth all that is evil, and proceeding by the paths the
fathers trod, the spirit soars to the realms of eternal light,
recovers there his body in a glorified form, and obtains
from God a delectable abode and enters upon a more perfect life,
which is crowned with the fulfilment of all desires, is
passed in the presence of the Gods and employed in the fulfilment
of their pleasure."  If we substitute "angels" for "Gods" we must
admit that the new revelation from modern spirit sources has much
in common with the belief of our Aryan fathers.
  
Such, in very condensed form, is the world which is revealed
to us by these wonderful messages from the beyond.  Is it an
unreasonable vision?  Is it in any way opposed to just
principles?  Is it not rather so reasonable that having got the
clue we could now see that, given any life at all, this is
exactly the line upon which we should expect to move?  Nature and
evolution are averse from sudden disconnected developments.  If a
human being has technical, literary, musical, or other
tendencies, they are an essential part of his character, and to
survive without them would be to lose his identity and to become
an entirely different man.  They must therefore survive death if
personality is to be maintained.  But it is no use their
surviving unless they can find means of expression, and means of
expression seem to require certain material agents, and also a
discriminating audience.  So also the sense of modesty among
civilised races has become part of our very selves, and implies
some covering of our forms if personality is to continue.  Our
desires and sympathies would prompt us to live with those we
love, which implies something in the nature of a house, while the
human need for mental rest and privacy would predicate the
existence of separate rooms.  Thus, merely starting from the
basis of the continuity of personality one might, even without
the revelation from the beyond, have built up some such
system by the use of pure reason and deduction.
  
So far as the existence of this land of happiness goes, it
would seem to have been more fully proved than any other
religious conception within our knowledge.
  
It may very reasonably be asked, how far this precise
description of life beyond the grave is my own conception, and
how far it has been accepted by the greater minds who have
studied this subject?  I would answer, that it is my own
conclusion as gathered from a very large amount of existing
testimony, and that in its main lines it has for many years been
accepted by those great numbers of silent active workers all over
the world, who look upon this matter from a strictly religious
point of view.  I think that the evidence amply justifies us in
this belief.  On the other hand, those who have approached this
subject with cold and cautious scientific brains, endowed, in
many cases, with the strongest prejudices against dogmatic creeds
and with very natural fears about the possible re-growth of
theological quarrels, have in most cases stopped short of a
complete acceptance, declaring that there can be no positive
proof upon such matters, and that we may deceive ourselves either
by a reflection of our own thoughts or by receiving the
impressions of the medium.  Professor Zollner, for example, says:

"Science can make no use of the substance of intellectual
revelations, but must be guided by observed facts and by the
conclusions logically and mathematically uniting them"--a passage
which is quoted with approval by Professor Reichel, and would
seem to be endorsed by the silence concerning the religious
side of the question which is observed by most of our great
scientific supporters.  It is a point of view which can well be
understood, and yet, closely examined, it would appear to be a
species of enlarged materialism.  To admit, as these observers
do, that spirits do return, that they give every proof of being
the actual friends whom we have lost, and yet to turn a deaf ear
to the messages which they send would seem to be pushing caution
to the verge of unreason.  To get so far, and yet not to go
further, is impossible as a permanent position.  If, for example,
in Raymond's case we find so many allusions to the small details
of his home upon earth, which prove to be surprisingly correct,
is it reasonable to put a blue pencil through all he says of the
home which he actually inhabits?  Long before I had convinced my
mind of the truth of things which appeared so grotesque and
incredible, I had a long account sent by table tilting about the
conditions of life beyond.  The details seemed to me impossible
and I set them aside, and yet they harmonise, as I now discover,
with other revelations.  So, too, with the automatic script
of Mr. Hubert Wales, which has been described in my previous
book.  He had tossed it aside into a drawer as being unworthy of
serious consideration, and yet it also proved to be in harmony.
In neither of these cases was telepathy or the prepossession of
the medium a possible explanation.  On the whole, I am inclined
to think that these doubtful or dissentient scientific men,
having their own weighty studies to attend to, have confined
their reading and thought to the more objective side of the
question, and are not aware of the vast amount of concurrent
evidence which appears to give us an exact picture of the life
beyond.  They despise documents which cannot be proved, and they
do not, in my opinion, sufficiently realise that a general
agreement of testimony, and the already established character of
a witness, are themselves arguments for truth.  Some complicate
the question by predicating the existence of a fourth dimension
in that world, but the term is an absurdity, as are all terms
which find no corresponding impression in the human brain.  We
have mysteries enough to solve without gratuitously
introducing fresh ones.  When solid passes through solid, it
is, surely, simpler to assume that it is done by a
dematerialisation, and subsequent reassembly--a process which
can, at least, be imagined by the human mind--than to invoke an
explanation which itself needs to be explained.
  
In the next and final chapter I will ask the reader to
accompany me in an examination of the New Testament by the light
of this psychic knowledge, and to judge how far it makes clear
and reasonable much which was obscure and confused.

 

Home | Alternative Medicine | Astrology | Channeling | Divination | Esoteric & Occult | Food |
Life After Death | Michael Teachings | Mind & Body | Paranormal | Philosophy & Religion | Relationships | Spiritual Growth | World Issues

05.09.03 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent vestibulum molestie lacus. Aenean nonummy hendrerit mauris.                               read more...