ANY QUESTIONS?

　To the questions: "Is vivisection right or wrong? Can humanity benefit from this practice?” he answered: “I am opposed to the whole practice of experiments on animals. I see no justification for it whatsoever. Animals are placed in your guardianship and your care, and to some extent yours is the responsibility of helping their growth and their evolution. It is a poor recompense for love, devotion and fidelity to inflict pain upon a helpless creature.

　"The healing power in many forms of nature is there waiting for you to find it. The Great Spirit has provided all that is necessary without this interference with the animal creation. Those who work from my world, who are now regarded as having some skill in the alleviation of your diseases, and even curing when others have said that recovery is impossible, do not resort to vivisection. They use herbs of the fields; they use the rays of the spirit. These do not involve any cruelty to anybody. The universe is filled with a moral purpose. Immoral purpose is contrary to the law."

　"Is it ever permissible for a person to pass on by his own actーsuch as the one who is left of a devoted companionship?" To this, there came the uncompromi-sing reply:

　"No. You must live your lives according to the law, for the law is always perfect in its operation. It is con-trolled by perfect love and by the Great Spirit, Who is in all things and Who works through all things. You have no right to interfere with the operation of the law, and if you do you must pay the price for cutting yourself off.

　"If you force the apple to drop from the tree before it is ripe, then the apple has no sweetness. If you force yourself to go into the next stage of life before your spirit is ready, then you will have to pay the price in the long adjustment that you will have to make. It will also have the effect of causing you to be separated from the ones you love, for you will have made a gulf."

　Another interesting question was, "At what time does the spirit enter the body?"

　"As a spirit, you have always existed," he explained, "because spirit is part of life and life is part of spirit. You have always existed.

　"Because you are part of the Great Spirit," he continued, "you have never had a beginning, but you as an individual, as a separate, conscious individuality, must begin some-where even in the stream of life. When conception takes place, the cells of the male and female meet and provide a vehicle for a particle of the life-force to begin to express itself through a physical body. The life-force is unexpressed until there is a vehicle through which it can manifest. That is what the earth parents provide. From the time the cells have coalesced and formed their union, the tiny particle of spirit has naturally attached itself and begins its expression in your world of matter. And I hold that that is the dawn of consciousness. From that moment it begins its conscious individual life. Thereafter it will always be an individual entity of its own."

　Another tricky question began: "Through no fault of their own, innocent babies are born into the world vic-tims of hereditary, venereal and other diseases. This does not seem quite fair, as it is not the fault of the child that it has inherited such a disease. Can you say something about that?"

　The guide answered: "Those who talk of unfairness are still thinking in terms of bodies, of a world of matter, and not of an infinite life. The spirit does not suffer from venereal disease. The spirit is not crippled or misshapen or bent. The spirit is not suffering from any hereditary traits or any of the acquired characteristics of the parents. These do not change the individual, although they do affect the body through which the spirit manifests on earth.

　"Whilst you can quite possibly argue that, from the earthly point of view, looking at life solely from a material standpoint, the one who is born into a diseased body has a much worse time physically than the one born into a healthy body, those opinions do not hold in regard to the spirit which is behind the body. You will not automatically be poorer in spirit because your body is diseased, and richer in spirit because your body is healthier. Indeed, it can be argued that your spirit will be richer because you will have learned the many lessons of pain and suffering which are all part of the equipment of the spirit in its essential evolution."

　Silver Birch seldom discusses astrology, but once, a member of the circle said to him: "I have noticed some Spiritualists get astrology and Spiritualism confused in their minds. They think their life on this world is some-what predetermined and controlled by the stars."

　"What is true," said the guide, "is that the whole of life is a series of vibrations, radiations and emanations, and that you are influenced by every part of the natural order or being. All these cause some influence on you, but none of them is so potent that it exercises a power which you cannot alter.

　"It is not true that your life is predestined because at the moment of physical birth some star was in the ascendant. All planets, all nature, everything in the universe, all beings have some effect on you. But you are the master of your soul; you have personal responsibility, and you fix your own destiny according to your spiritual progress. That is as I see it."

　"You do not think the star under which you were born affects your personality?" he was asked. The guide answered: "I think all of these planets have radiations which affect the physical body, and things which affect the physical body have some effect on the spirit; but the spirit is supreme; the spirit is pre-eminent, and there is no star or planet or constellation or galaxy which can prevent you from mastering all the physical influences which affect your body.

　"I mean that you are part of the Great Spirit, and because you are divine, because the power of creative life is within you, because you are a portion of that power which fashioned all life, you can rise triumphant over all that might hold your body in subjection. I am an influence on you; the people you meet are influences on you; the books you read are influences on you; but they are influences, not overwhelming and overriding. Surely that is quite clear."

　Silver Birch asserts that reincarnation is a fact. He has seen individuals who have previously incarnated into matter. "It is done," he states, "by those who have specific missions to perform, a voluntary act in order to redeem a pledge.

　"What incarnates is another aspect of the same individuality, and I do not mean personality. If you visualise man as an individual, who in his earthly life is like an iceberg in which you have one small portion manifesting and the larger portion not manifesting, then that is the end of one incarnation. In a successive incarna-tion, a portion of the submerged self will come into the world of matter, two different personalities, but one individual. And in spirit life, as progression takes place, it is part of the submerged self that comes to the surface all the time."

　"I have been thinking very much about the prevalence of the rising crime wave amongst young people and the abolition of corporal punishment. What would be the appropriate way of treating these young people who seem to have nothing to which one can appeal, who are in themselves brutes? How can one cope with a brute? What sort of punishment can one devise?"

　To this perplexed sitter, the guide's answer was: "When you have war you release the worst forces in mankind in addition to the most noble surges of the human mind. You find there are deeds of heroism which show the apex of human attainment, but at the same time there are deeds of foul brutality."

　"The two extremes get released," said the ques-tioner.

　"Yes," was the answer, "and violence is encouraged as a necessary part of war. When it comes to an end, you cannot quickly end all the violence and brutality that have been unleashed. You have a condition where the brutal side has become uppermost in large numbers. You ask how this is to be treated. There are two ways, and they are clearly set out in a book which is reverenced in your world. There is the old way, which says, 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', and there is the newer way, which was the law to supersede the old maxim, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself.' That is the clear choice.

　"Yes I see that, but the difficulty is getting at these young thugs, how to get on the soft side," the questioner declared.

　"It is not a question of getting on the soft side," asserted the guide. "It is a question of giving them the kind of psychological and, if needs be, spiritual treatment that would subdue the brutality and allow what is in reality the soul to find some expression. It is just like one who is ill and there is not a true alignment of body and soul. There are various ways of curing illness. The most satisfactory method is to end the faulty alignment of body and spirit and allow a harmonious expression, and health automatically results. In the same way, if you could obtain the help of experts in psychology and allow even spiritual healers to work their will, you would get results. but unfortunately your world is not ready.''

　The discussion continued as a member of the circle said: "It is a most interesting question. When you give these young thugs a good hiding they appear to behave themselves.''

　"Yes, but you have not solved the problem of the individual," Silver Birch declared. "You are looking at it purely from a very limited period. It is like hanging a man; you say if you hang him you have solved the problem. Yes, you have partially, but the man is still there."

　"Is the welfare of one reprobate more than the welfare of society?" asked the same member of the circle.

　"Society is composed of individuals," said the guide. "All must receive attention. I am pointing to what I think is the better wayーnot to meet violence with violence, but with understanding and to transform what was violence into good citizenship."

　Here another member of the circle commented: "We are all responsible for the thug. It is our responsibility."

　"Flogging is nothing but a palliative, it merely frightens them into behaving properly," said the original questioner.

　"Your modern society has not yet attained the stage where it knows the appropriate remedies for the evils which afflict it," added Silver Birch. "This is a matter of evolution. You used to hang people for stealing sheep. It was argued with force that unless you hang them, what would happen to all the sheep that had to be protected?"

　"I suppose that in a half-evolved society it is correct to have a half-evolved treatment and punishment," said a member of the circle.

　"It is not correct as long as one soul understands the better way," Silver Birch insisted. "Which is the better, to fling men into horrible prisons or to work for the bet-terment of prison conditions, so that you transform the prisoner into a proper citizen? Better to have one success and ninety-nine failures than no attempt to raise them up at all."

　"Would you agree that capital punishment is right?" the guide was asked during the discussion. He responded: "No, I don't agree with that because it is not the lesser of two evils. In capital punishment, you are merely con-doning legal murder. You say it is wrong for the indivi-dual to murder but it is right for the state to murder. That is not logical."

　"Is your main objection because of the man shot out of life, or because it means a hangman is employed by the state to murder that man as an official act, and therefore, it is very bad indeed for the man who has to do the mur-der?" he was asked.

　"I would emphasise both those viewpoints and the fact that if you persist in hanging it means that you are not yet an evolved society or community, because you do not realise that you have not solved the problem. All you have done is to commit one more murder, for which you are all responsible. It is not punishment. All you have done is to precipitate a soul into another world."