10. The Spiritist Doctrine changes entirely our views of the future. The life to come is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact. The state of the soul after death is no longer a matter of theory, but a result of observation. The veil is lifted, and the spirit-world appears to us in all its activity and reality. It is not men who have discovered that world, through some ingenious conception of their imagination; it is the inhabitants of that world who come in person to describe to us the state of being in which they find themselves! We see them at every degree of spirit-life, in every phase of happiness or of unhappiness. We contemplate all the incidents of the life beyond the grave. It is this knowledge of the nature and details of life in the spirit-world that enables Spiritists to see death with calmness and gives serenity to his last moments upon the Earth. What sustains him is not a mere hope, but a certainty; he knows that the future life is only a continuation of his present life, but under more favorable conditions. And he looks forward to it with as much confidence as that with which he looks forward to a new sunrise after a dark and stormy night. This confidence of Spiritist is a result of the facts that he has witnessed, and of the accordance of those facts with reason, with the justice and goodness of God, and with the deepest inspirations of the human mind.
For Spiritists the soul is not an abstraction for they know that it possesses an ethereal body which makes of it a real and definite being, susceptible of being conceived of as such by our thought. This knowledge suffices to correct our ideas in regard to its individuality, aptitudes and perceptions. Our remembrance of those who are dear to us repose, henceforth, on something real. We no longer represent them to ourselves as so many flickering flames offering nothing of their former personality to our thought. On the contrary, we see them under a concrete form which shows them to belong to the category of living beings. Moreover instead of regarding them as being lost to view, as formerly, in the depths of space, a Spiritist knows that they are beside us and around us; for he has learned that the corporeal world and the spiritual world are in close and perpetual connection. Doubt in relation to the future life being no longer possible to him, he has no longer any reason to be afraid of death. He beholds its approach with perfect equanimity; for he knows that the dissolution of his fleshly body will be for him a deliverance, the opening of a door through which he will pass, not into the yawning abyss of annihilation, but into a higher and happier state of existence.
Heaven Hell - Chapter II - Fear of Death - Why spirits are not afraid of death