THE CONCEPT OF THE AFTERLIFE AS AN IMPERATIVE

Argument for the Life Hereafter ~ 236 ~ consists of the communications given by the persons called automatists. There are men or women, whose organs of expression – their hand, holding a pencil, or their vocal organs – function at times automatically; that is, write or speak words that are not the expression of thoughts present to their consciousness at that time or of knowledge they possess, but appear to be as independent of the thoughts of, and of the stock of knowledge possessed by another person who happens to read them. The automatist is usually in a trance at such times, but there are many cases where he is not, and where, for example, he will be engaged in conversation, with someone present, and yet his hand will at the same time be writing, on some totally different subject, a lengthy communication of whose content he knows nothing until he reads it afterwards. The communications so obtained generally purport to come —either directly or through some invisible intermediary referred to as the automatist’s “control”—from a person who has died and whose spirit has survived death. Such communications, in