What is the Psyche?

The Psyche

Before proceeding to describe life in the world of spirits more fully, it may be well to say something about the human ego itself, and the reason why its surroundings and destiny are so varied.

Why hast thou made us to differ? Why do some suffer the anguish of the body and misery of the soul, while others have no cross in their lot? Is this not a common cry?

But it arises simply from your short-sightedness—from the small, the very small portion of your life, which alone is open to spiritual gaze, but which self-love and self-pity magnify until it fills not only your earthly but also your heavenly horizon. 

You must take large views of life if you would understand it all clearly. 

You must think of the human ego as passing from eternity to eternity across the narrow bridge of time—as coming from the invisible All-Father—made manifest for a brief day, and then returning to the bosom of the Infinite. Incarnated first in the lowest phenomena; rising through the dead stone, the living plant, the animal, to the human ego—then disappearing to the eye of sense and living purely in the spirit.

Now as each human ego differs in manifested life from every other, it needs a different experience, and each is given the material (so to speak) from which it can derive the food best suited to its special needs. 

Some can only grow when their roots have struck deep in the black earth of sin; others require the knife of the pruner freely applied to them; while to others only sunshine and the dews of heaven seem necessary—to each the best and most suitable surroundings are given.

As souls pass over in all stages of their development, their life has to be very varied. On the other hand, the difference between one man’s destiny and another’s is not as great as it appears, especially if you could take the sum of their experiences. 

If your eyes could see the heart, as well as the life, understand the deepest springs of motive, and know fully all the powers of inherited evil, of susceptibility to influence, then many of the good and evil would stand on a greater equality in your estimation. 

Those crimes that shock you most are often small things in spiritual eyes, for much belongs to the physical and will drop off from the psyche at death, as the outer covering of the leaf-bud when it comes forth in its perfection. 

It is that spirit which says to its brother—Am I thy keeper? which is most hurtful to the soul, but whatever it may be, sin or suffering, good or evil, joy or misery, all shall have the appointed end in nursing the infant soul.

I used these well-known words as a heading because it seems as if the Father said to Nature, with reference to the soul—Take this child and nurse it for me, and the physical proves the best nurse that you can have. Then when you have grown to adulthood you are passed on to the care of those in the psychic world, and they watch over you and help you until the wounds are all healed, and your strength restored so that you can begin a new and worthy life.

The state of the human ego when it casts off its physical body depends on the degree of development that it has already attained.

The ego is now the psyche and spirit. Its psychical body is the image of its physical one; not inferior, but superior; the blossom of the seed, yet still the blossom of that particular seed, and not of another. 

Now it has to go through varied experiences until instead of the psychic dominating the spirit, or the two being evenly balanced, the spirit becomes entirely the master, and the psyche, the servant. Then the ego is ready to depart into the heavens, having finished the task that was given it to do.

 

At first, the psyche is generally supreme. Life then is much like the earthly one; food is necessary, spirits live in houses, they work, they rest, but yet with a difference. You need food and rest at stated intervals, but here they are only needed when the spirit is not strong enough to supply the body. 

With spirits, the will is strong enough to control the body. The body only needs refreshment when the faith fails, or is too weak. Gradually, and with many failures and retrogressive steps, the soul and spirit become first equal, then the spirit is master, and finally, the psychic envelope is burst, and the spirit rises free and untrammelled. 

The pneuma, when it is strong enough, goes to its home for a time, and then returns. This it may do often and over a long period before it finally leaves. Generally, however, about half a century is the limit of its stay in Hades or an intermediate state.

And then the Ship

Complete at last—loosed from its earthly bonds,

Glides from its birthplace to the sea—

Which yielding, yet supporting, bears it on.

Out from the land-locked harbour to the deep.

Cumbrous before, it lay upon the stocks

Like some dead thing, neither of earth nor air—

But now it lives and guided by the winds

Leaves earth behind it, and sails onward to the sun.

Communicated by automatic writing; “I AWOKE!” Conditions of Life on the Other Side, 1895, David Stott, London, Part I, The Psyche, The Psyche, 54-59