THE DEAD.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 193, 21 July 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE DEAD.

CAN THEY SEND MESSAGES?

A few years ago there died a wellknown man who had been interested in psychism, and other people interested in it said at the time that it would not be long before his "spirit" would be heard from in the physt-hic circles. And a news dispatch states that learned investigators are actual, ly claiming to receive stsch communications. These men call themselves scientific; but the communications are of such triviality that we prefer to leave them to the imagination rather than quote them in these pages. A newspaper, in commenting on this psychic research, emphasises the curious materialism of the investigators, and also their lack of dignity for themselves and of reverence for subjects that are sacred to others; tbev are at the other pole from spirituality, and "would climb Mount Sinai to receive, not the Ten Commandments, but a tip on the stock market." NOT FROM THE DEAD.

It is clear that, whatever commumunications are obtained, they do not come from the deceased. They come from that confused and teeming atmosphere of thoughts which hangs like a damp fog over the purlieus of human society, and they are transmitted by latent faculties in the mediums and sitters. Such sitting is a well-known means of attracting to oneself certain most undesirable influences from the invisible regions—the astral and psychic remnants and effluvia cf deceased human beings, in process of natural disintgeratlon, but disturbed and galvanised into a semblance of life by the practices of these misguided experimenters. It is also recognised that indulgence in such practices is fraught with great ris'; to those engaged in t.iiem.

It sems a pity that this should bo associated with the honoured name of science. If this kind of thing is what is called "evidence." ve cannot entertain a very liign idea cf the judgment of those wlio are v.illing to accept it .is such. PICKED BRAINS. In most cases the ideas reproduced at the sittings are picked from the brains of those present; for the brain is known to psychologists to be a storehouse of memories, which will preserve indelible records of impressions we have received, including many impressions of which our mind was not conscious at the time we received them. The fact that tiie familiar say. ings of the deceased are reproduced is therefore no cause for wonder; ami even if some of tiie thirds are such as could not have been derived from the conscious or sub-conr.?ious memories of anyone present, still they could have been preserved in the astral light—that storehouse of all thought impressions. At the very most the only evidence or survival obtained is that of the survival of certain fragments of the deceased, and constitutes as good proof as would a lock of hair out of his coffin

Most ancient races, and a good many still living, have been or are fully aware of the reality of that which the ancient Egyptians called the Kha, an astral remnant of the deceased which survives for a time the disintegration of the body, and on account of which certain funerary rites were prescribed and observed. Rut no cne with any knowledge or discrimination would confuse this shade with the immortal reincarnating soul of the deceased. The nature attributed to the shade, or Kha, was exactly that which would correspond with and explain the phenomena obtained by the modern dabblers. —11. T. Edge, in the "Theosophical Path."