Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/430

426 work out our problems. We are spirits now even while in the flesh. In the spirit we do our real thinking, real living. Hence our real “future life” will have continuity with this life according to the persistence of our most interior identity.

To realize what the spirit is now we should lift our thoughts into spiritual light, bringing together the various items of inner experience to make vivid our conception of the self with all its real or spiritual senses. We do not need to “die” to apprehend these apart from matter, for there never was any matter in them. They are from God or Wisdom. They are what give us visions of objects at a distance, disclosing the inner states of the sick, acquainting us with interior thoughts, revealing “odors” or atmospheres, in short, the whole sphere of the inner life.

A mesmeriser or spiritist medium has, in Quimby's description, but one identity; while he, Quimby, when clairvoyant has two. To have but one is to yield one's selfhood to a mysterious power or “spirit” without awareness of what is taking place. But if one has learned, as Quimby knew from long experience, that the real identity, self or spirit possesses these inner powers as a completely equipped being of intelligence, made in the Divine image and likeness, endowed with Divine wisdom as guidance, then one also has a secondary consciousness or identity which is aware of what is going on in the natural world and in man's natural mind.

So acute was Quimby's own intuition that in two of his descriptive articles he tells what he saw as if beholding reality itself, when sitting by patients who thought they were dying, and who visualized death by peopling the supposed future world according to their own belief. So vivid was his experience in one instance that he refers to evil spirits almost as if he were afraid of them, though speaking of them as mere creations in the world of opinion. That is, he saw the alleged future life with the eyes of his patient, knew that it was an alleged world simply, and that the patient's real world was still an unknown quantity to the patient himself. So he was in the habit of entering the thought-world of all his patients, to see how the situation appeared to the patient. He was able to do this with remarkable sympathy. But thereupon he would make the sharpest sort of distinction between this world of seeming reality and the true spiritual world of the Divine wisdom. A spiritist's world may be as