Spiritual Inspirational Thoughts

Will parents and children who are unavoidably separated be united in that relation in the spirit-world? or will the children outgrow all recollection of and affection for their parents and not know they ever belonged to them?

The attraction or law that binds soul to soul is not dependent on the body or its experience. If a spiritual law of attraction binds a parent and child together, there is nothing that can sever it, no power that can separate them. The law of spiritual affinity stands above and apart from human life. There are many parents who have no spiritual love for their children (and vice versa). Such cannot hope to enjoy each other's society in the spirit-land, nor would they wish to.

Professor Edgar C. Dayton (Spirit)

If it is true that the soul has had a previous existence in some other form before its connection with the body, why is it that it has no distinctive recollection of that existence?

The soul existed in embryo before it was projected into the external world, before it was made apparent as an individual according to the laws of time. And yet the soul, through its human organism, has no memory of that prior existence. It can remember back to the days of childhood but it can go no farther. There seems to be a power governing the attribute of memory that is dependent on form and its conditions. Memory expresses itself through form. It turns to the past through form and it stretches its clairvoyant vision from the past to the future through form; it is dependent on the laws of form to a very great extent. Therefore, it is that you do not remember having had a prior existence to the one which is now your own, so-called, as an individual. I have no recollection of an existence prior to the existence of my earthly life, yet I have listened to many who declared that they have a distinct recollection of scenes far, far back in the past, dating long before their earth-lives.

Memory is eternal and the soul's remembrance of such a state of life before the present would be as indelibly impressed on the future of its existence as is its connection with the body.

A memory is, indeed, eternal and is dependent for expression on form. What is memory to one individual is not exactly memory to another. The attribute of memory differs according to the characteristics of the form through which it is expressed.

Some people believe in the transmigration of souls. Do we take some other form and so go on in a constant round of progression? Does the soul enter other bodies sometimes better and sometimes worse than its own?

In one sense, it does enter other bodies and acts through other bodies than the human and, in another sense, it does not. The soul expresses itself, I believe, through all that is beneath it. Everything becomes a medium for the soul. The granite rocks are the soul's mediums, the skies, the air, the water, the flowers, the beasts, the birds, the fishes – everything that is beneath the soul becomes the soul's agent and so far as the soul is able to find expression through these forms or by the agency of these forms, so far it becomes incorporated in the form allied to it. The ancients grappled with a very great truth in their theory of the transmigration of souls. They intuitively perceived the power of the soul over all matter and, perceiving its power, they were led to conclude that it would use the power and, therefore, become incarnated in other forms than the human.

Professor John Hubbard (Spirit)

If spirits do, as they say, visit other planets, I would ask if they are inhabited? and if so, do you learn anything of them – of their history, character and condition, as compared with the inhabitants of the earth?

Very many of the planets are inhabited by animal and intellectual life, while very many of them are uninhabited – they not having arrived at the stage where they can sustain animal and intellectual life combined. It is impossible to visit any such locality and not learn something in consequence of the visit. We find that all the planets that we have visited possess essentially the same life as the earth. The atoms are aggregated differently, to be sure, but the essence of the atoms is precisely the same and the same general law seems to govern them. There is a difference but it is in the external more than the internal. The great power that governs this earth governs all other planets and they all are subservient to this law; therefore, the method of unfoldment must be similar.

Thomas Paine (Spirit)