Modern Spiritualism itself testifies to something of the same sort.
Thus we are told by one of its most gifted and experienced champions,
"Sometimes the evidence will come from an impersonal source, from some
instructor who has passed through the plane on which individuality is
demonstrable." (M.A. (Oxon.), "Spirit Identity," p. 7.) Again, "And if
he" (the investigator) "penetrates far enough, he will find himself in a
region for which his present embodied state unfits him: a region in
which the very individuality is merged, and the highest and subtlest
truths are not locked within one breast, but emanate from representative
companies whose spheres of life are interblended." (Id., p. 15.) By
this "interblending" is of course meant only a perfect sympathy and
community of thought; and I should doubtless misrepresent the author
quoted were I to claim an entire identity of the idea he wishes to
convey, and that now under consideration. Yet what, after all, is
sympathy but the loosening of that hard "astringent" quality (to use
Bohme's phrase) wherein individualism consists? And just as in true
sympathy, the partial suppression of individualism and of what is
distinctive, we experience a superior delight and intensity of being, so
it may be that in parting with all that shuts us up in the spiritual
penthouse of an Ego--all, without exception or reserve--we may for the
first time know what true life is, and what are its ineffable
privileges.
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