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What is Spiritism? > Chapter II—Elementary notions of Spiritism > Communications with the Invisible World > 23
23. In many people's minds, what sheds doubt on the possibility of communicating with the dead is the mistaken idea regarding the state of the soul after death. The soul is usually imagined to be a breath, a vaporous being, or something vague that can only be understood by means of thought; or something that evaporates and goes off to who knows where, to such a far away place that it is hard to understand how it could return to the earth. If, to the contrary, we consider its union with a fluidic, semi-material body, with which it forms a physical, individual being, its communications with the living hold nothing incompatible with reason.