Kindle Notes & Highlights
There is much moisture in our bodies over here. Perhaps that is one reason why contact with a so-called spirit sometimes gives warm-blooded persons a sense of cold, and they shiver.
signs of contact - cold spots
This is not a place where everyone knows everything—far from it. Most souls are nearly as blind as they were in life.
Perhaps we ought to say last night, for your day is our night when we are on your side of this great hollow sphere.
“Why, this must be the place my grandmother used to tell me about. But where is God?” That I could not tell him; but, on looking again, we saw that nearly everybody was gazing in one direction. We also gazed with the others, and saw a great light, like a sun, only it was softer and less dazzling than the material sun. “That,” I said to the boy, “is what they see who see God.”
If I can talk to a seeming entity, and if it can answer me, I am justified in considering it as a reality. A character in fiction, or any other mental creation, however vivid as a picture, would have no soul, no unit of force, no real self.
It is undoubtedly true that there is no spirit without substance, no substance without spirit,
latent or expressed; but a painting of a man may seem at a distance to be a man.
The book which I had opened was a treatise on spirits, human, angelic, and elemental. It began with the definition of a human spirit as a spirit which had had the experience of life in human form; and it defined an elemental spirit as a spirit of more or less developed self-consciousness which had not yet had that experience.
“In the last analysis,” he answered, “there is only one kind of matter in both worlds; but there is a great difference in vibration and tenuity.”
I want to say a word to those who are about to die. I want to beg them to forget their bodies as soon as possible after the change which they call death. Oh, the terrible curiosity to go back and look upon that thing which we once believed to be ourselves! The thought comes to us now and then so powerfully that it acts in a way against our will and draws us back to it.
Those people who think of their departed friends as being all-wise, how disappointed they would be if they could know that the life on this side is only an extension of the life on earth!
In our world a man is held only by his thoughts. If they are free, he is free.
Some of our artists try to impress their pictures upon the mental eyes of the artists of earth, and they often succeed in doing so.
With poets it is the same. There are lovely lyrics composed out here and impressed upon the receptive minds of earthly poets.
Whenever you go to a concert where beautiful music is being played, there is probably all round you a crowd of music-loving spirits, drinking in the harmonies. Music on earth is much enjoyed on this side. It can be heard. But no sensitive spirit likes to go near a place where bad strumming is going on. We prefer the music of stringed instruments. Of all earthly things, sound reaches most directly into this plane of life. Tell that to the musicians.
That is why we travel in the dark part of the twenty-four hours, for in the bright sunlight we cannot see at all. Our light is put out by the cruder light of the sun.
Did you suppose that no one quarreled here? Many do. There are even long-standing feuds among them.
The holders of different opinions on religion are often hot in their arguments. Coming here with the same beliefs they had on earth, and being able to visualize their ideals and actually to experience the things they are expecting, two men who hold opposite creeds forcibly are each more intolerant than ever before. Each is certain that he is right and that the other is wrong. This stubbornness of belief is strongest with those who have been here only a short time. After a while they fall into a larger tolerance, living their own lives more and more, and enjoying the world of proofs and
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This is a great place in which to grow, if one really
wants to grow; though few persons take advantage of its possibilities.
We draw to ourselves the experiences which we are ready for and which we demand, and most souls do not demand enough here, any more than they did in life. Tell them to demand more, and the demand will be answered.
Each man who is not content with the orthodox hell of fire and brimstone builds one out of mind-stuff suited to his imaginative need. I believe that men place themselves in hell, that no God puts them there. I began looking for a hell of fire and brimstone, and found it. Dante must have seen the same things I saw.
Do not disregard your dreams about the dead. They always mean something. They do not always mean what the dream would seem to signify; for the door between the two worlds is very narrow, and thoughts are often shaken out of place in passing through. But dreams about the dead mean something. We can reach you in that way.
“Theretofore I had been so absorbed in God, in trying to find God, that I had not given much thought to my fellow beings, and had even neglected those nearest me; but from that day I began to mingle with my human brethren. I found that as more and more I sought God in them, more and more God responded to me through them. And life became still more wonderful.
“Sometimes I tried to tell others what I felt, but they did not always understand me. It was thus I began to realize that God had purposely, for some reason of His own, covered Himself in veils.
It is easy to come out here, but it requires some effort to go from this world into yours.
It is when you are passive that we can reach you. When your mind and body are always occupied, it is difficult to impress you with any message of the soul.
Eternity is long enough for the full development of the ego of man. Eternity seems to have been designed for that end. That was a sound statement which was given at one time: “The object of life is life.”
Life everlasting is possible to all souls—yes; but it is not possible to go on forever in one direction. Evolution is a curve. Eternity is a circle, a serpent that swallows its own tail. Until you are willing to go in and out of dense matter, you will never learn to transcend matter.
I have not changed my character merely by changing my clothes and putting on a lighter suit.
Sit sometimes in the evening with no light but that of a solitary candle, and see what visions will come from the “Void.”
Perhaps on earth you work too much—more than is really necessary. The mass of needless things that you accumulate round you, the artificial wants that you create, the breakneck pace of your lives to provide all these things, seem to us absurd and rather pitiful. Your political economy is mere child’s play, your governments are cumbrous machines for doing the unnecessary, most of your work is useless, and your lives would be nearly futile if you did not suffer so much that your souls learn, though unwillingly, that most of their strivings are vain.
But one can also look ahead, forward and forward, life after life, century after century, eon after eon, till one finds oneself an archangel. The looking back is memory; the looking forward is creation.
Of course you understand that not all spirits are highly developed. In fact, very few are far progressed; but the dullest man out here has something which most of you have lost—the faith in his own thought-creations.
Of course there are “dreamers” like me, who are not satisfied with one world, and who like to have their fingers in both; but they are rather rare, as poets are rare on earth.
Most spirit communications, even when genuine, have little value, for the reason that they are nearly always colored by the mind of the person through whom they pass.
You know, perhaps, that while on earth I investigated spiritualism, as I investigated many things of an occult nature, looking always for the truth that was behind them; but I was convinced then, and I am now more than ever convinced, that, except for the scientific demonstration that such things can be—which, of course, has value as a demonstration only—most spirit-hunting is not only a waste of time, but an absolute detriment to those who engage in it.
So do not be too sure that the entity which raps on your table or your cupboard is the spirit of your deceased grandfather. It may be merely a blind and very desirous entity, an eager consciousness, trying to use you to hasten its own evolution, trying to get into you or through you, so as to enjoy the earth and the coarser vibrations of the earth. It may not be able to harm you; but, on the other hand, it may do you a great deal of harm. You had better discourage such attempts to break through the veil which separates you from them; for the veil
is thinner than you think, and though you cannot see through it, you can feel through it.
Had you been afraid of me, though, I should have been ashamed of you; for you know better. Most persons do not.
I have only slightly to change my focus at any time, to find myself in your world. That I cannot be seen there with the naked eye is no proof that I am not there.
you must know that what are called astral records lie layer against layer everywhere. We read one layer instead of another, either by affinity or by will.
The most marvelous things are always simple of explanation if one has the key to unlock their secret.
You who can see into the invisible world by changing your focus can easily understand how I, by a reverse process, can see into the world of dense matter. Yes, it is the same thing, only turned the other way.
The only really sad thing about death is that the average man learns so little from it.
You must know that there are many hells, and they are mostly of our own making.
Verily, earth and hell are neighboring states, and the frontier has never been charted.
I have seen hells of lust and hells of hatred; hells of untruthfulness, where every object which the wretched dweller tried to grasp turned into something else which was a denial of the thing desired, where truth was mocked eternally and nothing was real, but everything—changing and uncertain as untruthfulness—became its own antithesis.
Beware of deathbed repentance and its after-harvest of morbid memories. It is better to go into eternity with one’s karmic burdens bravely carried upon the back, rather than to slink through the back door of hell in the stockinged-feet of a sorry cowardice. If you have sinned, accept the fact with courage and resolve to sin no more; but he who dwells upon his sins in his last hour will live them over and over again in the state beyond the tomb.
You can find me and lose me again, for mortal cannot hold me.
