- 27 - It is the spiritual guide of the participants, whom it admonishes, warns, criticizes and instructs. In particular, both during the medium’s development and afterwards, it emphasizes the need for an ever greater belief and trust in God. • The closer a person inwardly comes to God, the greater is his share in the power that emanates from God. And the greater and more wonderful the gifts that God bestows upon him for the benefit of his fellowmen. Thus, the aim of every séance in which God’s spirits are active is: “Nearer my God to Thee!” In the early stages of the mediums’ education, when the first written messages from the Beyond are received, it is usually your departed kin and friends who obtain permission to communicate with you, provided that they themselves are on the road to God in the Beyond and are not among the evil spirits. They too will earnestly exhort you to believe in God, and will not weary of telling you that in communicating with the good spirits, you have chosen the right path. They also often express their regret that this path was not pointed out to them while they were living on earth. As the development makes further progress, the messages from departed relatives and friends cease entirely, and high spirit beings make themselves manifest. • This, however, presupposes that the participants work at improving themselves inwardly and that they are of good will. If a participant is lacking in good will or loses it, and if he fails to heed repeated admonitions addressed to him by the good spirits, he will be excluded from future gatherings by order of the ‘controlling spirit’. This is necessary, not only because he himself is making no progress, but because he is an obstacle for the rest, forming, as he does, a rallying point for the evil spirits. They follow him to the séance and exert their bad influence also upon the others present in the most various ways. Furthermore, the odic force is adversely affected by the discord that he introduces into the assembly as a result of his inner attitude. Gatherings held for the purpose of communicating with the spirit world that do not take place under the supervision of one of God’s spirits do not enjoy His blessing. Even if they have all the external features of a ‘Divine service’, the direction spirit communication takes under these conditions is not toward God. They contribute nothing toward the purification and upliftment of the soul. • Wherever the Divinely appointed ‘control’ is lacking, that is not the place for the spirits assigned to the service of those who seek salvation. Salvation of the souls of the participants is the only purpose of spiritistic meetings. Therefore, although in many of the so-called ‘spiritist churches’ of today the meetings take place within a framework of prayer and hymns, the real object of what takes place there is far removed from serving any Divine ends. Those acting as leaders or co-workers in these churches are generally gifted with clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience, and through these gifts they are able to communicate with the spirits that accompany the participants at the gatherings. The odic radiation of these spirits establishes contact with that of the mediums, male and female, serving these churches. It not only communicates to them a personality profile of the spirits present and of their relationships to the people they are accompanying, but enables them to receive the messages brought by the spirits in
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