A Wanderer in The Spirit Lands: Best Excerpts
Review: This work achieves a very moving voice concerning various aspects of spiritualism and its operations
At every sentence, I am struck by the author's compassion and dedication.
from Chapter I: Overcoming Sin
A message would be sent to the Brotherhood that help was required to assist some struggling mortal or unhappy spirit, and such one of the brothers as was thought to be most fit would be sent to help. Such a one of us would be sent as had in his own earth life yielded to a similar temptation, and had suffered all the bitter consequences and remorse for his sin. Often the man or woman to be helped had
unconsciously sent out an aspiration for help and strength to resist temptation, and that of itself was a prayer, which would be heard in the spirit world as a cry from earth’s children that appealed to all in the spirit world who had been themselves earth’s sons and daughters; or it might be that some spirit to whom the struggling one was very dear would seek for help on their behalf and would thus appeal to us to come to their aid. Our task would be to follow and control the mortal we desired to help till the temptation had been overcome. We would identify ourselves so closely with the mortal that for a time we actually shared his life, his thoughts, everything, and during this dual state of existence we ourselves often suffered most keenly, both from our anxiety for the man whose thoughts became almost as our own, and from the fact that his anxieties were as ours, while in thus going over again a chapter in our past lives we endured all sorrow,
remorse and bitterness of the past time. He on his side felt, though not in so keen a degree, the sorrowful state of our mind, and where the control was very complete and the mortal highly sensitive, he would often fancy that things which we had done must have been done by himself, either in some former forgotten stage of existence, or else seen in some vivid dream they could scarcely recall. from Chapter II: Freedom and Prayer
All are free in the spirit world. All must follow only where their own wishes and desires lead them. If you study to cultivate the higher desires, means will be given you to attain them, and you will be strengthened with such help and strength as you may need. Learn the power of prayer, now, for all things come by earnest prayer, whether you are conscious that you pray or not. For good or for evil, your desires are as prayers and call around you good or evil powers to answer them for you. Knowledge, guidance and help will always be given, but only in such a manner as will not interfere with man’s free will, and only such knowledge as he himself desires; nothing will ever be forced upon him by the spirit world. Life is in all things, and God is the central Life of All.
from Chapter III: Spirit Guides
Spirit guides constitute one of the grandest orders in the whole organization and administration of the spirit world. They inhabit a realm of their own, and they’ have all lived for many centuries in the spirit world. They are drawn from every nationality that exists upon the earth-plane, and they function regardless of nationality. A great many of them are drawn from eastern countries, and from North American Indians, too, because it has always been the case that dwellers in those regions of the earth world were, and are,
already possessed of psychic gifts themselves, and were therefore aware of the inter-relationship of our two worlds. The principal guide is chosen for each individual on the earth-plane in conformity with a fixed plan. Most guides are temperamentally similar to their charges in the latters’ finer natures, but what is most important is that the guides understand and are in sympathy with their charges’ failings. Many of them, indeed, had the same failings when they were incarnate, and among other useful services they try to help their charges overcome those failings and weaknesses. A great number of those who practice communication with the spirit world have already met their spirit guides and are in close touch with them. And fortunate, indeed, they are. The guides, too, are never happier than when they have established a direct link with those whose lives they are helping to direct. It would be safe to say that by far the
greater number of spirit guides carry on their work all but unknown to those whom they serve, and their task is so much the heavier and more difficult. But there are still others whose lives upon earth render it practically impossible for their guides to approach within any reasonable distance of them. It naturally saddens them to see the mistakes and follies into which their charges are plunging themselves, and to be obliged to stand aloof because of the thick wall of material impenetrability which they have built up round themselves.
Such souls, when they at last arrive in the spirit world, awake to a full realization of what they have thus missed during their earth lives. In such cases the guides’ work will not be entirely in vain, for even in the worst souls there comes an occasion, however transient, when the conscience speaks, and it is usually the spirit guide who has implanted the better thought within the brain.
Few people yet in their earthly envelopes understand that spirits can, and very often do, take such complete possession of the bodies of mortal men and women that, for the time, it is as though that earth body belonged to the disembodied and not the embodied spirit. Many cases of so-called temporary madness are due to the controlling power of very low spirits of evil desires or frivolous minds, who are, through the weakness of will or other causes, put into complete rapport with the embodied spirit whose body they seek to use.
Amongst many ancient races this fact was acknowledged and studied as well as many branches of occult sciences which we of the nineteenth century have grown too wise, forsooth, to look into, even to discover, if we can, those germs of truth with which all ages have been blessed and which are worth disinterring from the mass of rubbish in
which succeeding generations of men have buried them. from Chapter
IV: Spirit Circles
Ah! How many, many poor spirits would in crowds to those meetings (séances), hoping for the chance that they, too, might be able to show themselves and win some recognition see again someone who was glad to know that they still lived and could return; and how many were always certain to go away sad and disappointed because there were so many and only a certain amount of power, and those who were nearest and dearest were naturally granted a preference. The spirit world is full of lonely souls, all eager to return and show that they still live, still think of those whom they have left, still feel an interest in their struggles, and are as ready and often more able to advise and help than when they were on earth, were they not shut out by the barriers of the flesh. I have seen so many, so very many spirits hanging about the earth plane when they might have gone to some bright sphere, but would not, because of their affection for some beloved ones left to struggle with the trials of earth, and
grieving hang about them, hoping for some chance which would make the mortal conscious of their presence and their constant love.
Could these but communicate as do friends on earth when one has to go to a distant country and leave the other behind, there would not be such hopelessness of sorrow as I have often seen; and although years and the ministrations of the comforting angles will soften the grief of most mortals, yet would it not be a happier state for both mortals and spirits could they but still hold sweet communion together as of yore?
from Chapter IV: Drug Abuse
On my way back from the Frozen Land to the Land of Twilight, I passed a number of vast caverns called the “Caverns of Slumber,” wherein lay a great multitude of spirits in a state of complete stupor, unconscious of all around them. These, I learned, were the spirits of mortals who had
killed themselves with opium eating and smoking, and whose spirits had thus been deprived of all chance of development, and so had retrograded instead of advancing and growing just as a limb tied up and deprived of motion withers away and now they were feebler than an unborn infant, and as little able to possess conscious life. In many cases their sleep would last for centuries; in others, where the indulgence in the drug had been less, it might only last for twenty, fifty, or a hundred years. These spirits lived, and that was all, their senses being little more developed than those of some fungus growth which exists without one spark of intelligence; yet in them the soul germ had lingered, imprisoned like a tiny seed in the wrapping of some Egyptian mummy, which, long as it may lie thus, is yet alive, and will in a kindly soil sprout forth at last. These caverns, in which kind spirit hands had laid them, were full of life-giving magnetism, and a number of attendant spirits who
had themselves passed through a similar state from opium poisoning in their own earth lives, were engaged in giving what life they could pour into those comatose spirit bodies which lay like rows of dead people all over the floor. By slow degrees, according as the spirit had been more or less injured by the drug taken in the earthly life, these wretched beings would awake to consciousness and all the sufferings experienced by the opium eater when deprived of his deadly drug. By long and slow degrees the poor spirits would awaken, sense by sense, till at last like feeble suffering children they would become fit for instruction, when they would be sent to institutions like your idiot asylums, where the dawning intellect would be trained and helped to develop, and those faculties recovered which had been all but destroyed in the earth life. These poor souls would only learn very slowly, because they had to try to learn now, without the aids of the earthly life, those lessons which it had
been designed to teach. Like drunkards (only more completely) they had paralyzed brain and senses and had avoided, not learned, the lessons of the earthly life and its development of the spirit.
To me these Caves of Slumber were inexpressibly sad to behold — not less so that those wretched slumberers were unconscious for so long of the valuable time they lost in their dreamless, hopeless sleep of stagnation. Like the hare in the fable, while they slept others less swift won the race, and these poor souls might try in vain through countless ages to recover the time which they had lost.
When these slumberers shall at last awake, to what a fate do they not waken, through what an awful path must they not climb to reach again that point in the earth life from which they have fallen! Does it not fill our souls with horror to think that there are those on earth who live, and pile up
wealth through the profits made from that dreadful trade in opium, which not alone destroys the body, but would seem to destroy even more fatally the soul, till one would despondently ask if there be indeed hope for these its victims?
These awful caves — these terrible stupified spirits — can any words point a fate more fearful than theirs? To awaken at last with the intellects of idiots, to grow, through hundreds of years, back at last to the possession of the mental powers of children — not of grown men and women. Slow, slow, must be their development even then, for unlike ordinary children they have almost lost the power to grow, and take many generations of time to learn what one generation on earth could have taught them. I have heard it said that many of the unhappy beings when they have attained at last to the development of infants, are sent back to earth to be reincarnated in an earthly body, that they may enjoy again
the advantages they have misused before. But of this I only know by hearsay, and cannot give any opinion of my own upon its truth.
from Chapter V: Soul-Mate
My vision of the earth and its surroundings faded away, and in its stead I beheld one lone star shining above me with a pure silver light. And its ray fell like a thin thread of silver upon the earth and upon the spot where my beloved dwelt.
Ahrinziman said to me: Behold the star of her earthly destiny, how clear and pure it shines and know, oh! beloved pupil, that for each soul born upon earth there shines in the spiritual heavens such a star whose path is marked out when the soul is born; a path it must follow to the end, unless by an act of suicide it sever the thread of the earthly life and by thus transgressing a law of nature, plunge itself into great sorrow and suffering.
“Do you mean that the fate of every soul is fixed, and that we are but straws floating on the stream of our destiny?”
“Not quite. The great events of the earth life are fixed; they will inevitably be encountered at certain periods of the earthly existence, and they are such events as those wise guardians of the angelic spheres deem to be calculated to develop and educate that soul whether they shall be the turning point for good or ill, for happiness or for sorrow
rests with the soul itself, and this is the prerogative of our free will, without which we would be but puppets, irresponsible for our acts and worthy of neither reward nor punishment for them. But to return to that star note that while the mortal follows the destined path with earnest endeavor to do right in all things, while the soul is pure and the thoughts unselfish, then does that star shine with clear unsullied ray, and light that pathway of the soul. The light of this star comes from the soul and is the reflection of its purity. If, then, the soul cease to be pure, if it develop its lower instead of its higher attributes, the star of that soul’s destiny will grow pale and faint, the light flickering like some will-o’-the-wisp hovering over a dark morass; no longer will it shine as a clear beacon of the soul; and at last, if the soul become very evil, the light of the star will die out and expire, to shine no more upon its earthly path.”
