Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/262

 capacity, either for change, or for appreciation for the bliss thence derived, or of trouble encountered. So we have no need of legs in the spirit-world, because our movements are not with reference to space—we have done with roads and distances there; but our changes are of state or condition. Illustration: Anna is a beautiful girl—pious, good, pure, excellent; sits beside her lover, John—a polished scoundrel in every sense. One bullet kills both, instantly. They die on the spot. Both awake in the other life—in the same room, yet are a million miles apart, because their respective mental states determine their relation to each other there, albeit other things determine it here. They may never not only not meet again, but never know aught of each other, so vast is the real distance (condition) between the twain. The spiritual world of the one will abound with forms of beauty, use, goodness: that of the other will abound with toads, swamps, snakes, bugs and unseemly things. Why?—because each is surrounded with his or her personal out-creations. Each communicating back to earth, will tell what each beholds; both will be true, yet both fail to give even the ghost of a real notion about the absolute supernal world. Whatever we are, we see; whatever we want, is there before us—we have. Thus we can ascend in goodness, or sink away to the very depths of hell—both our own, however. * * * * * And, all these things came to me there, as I floated on a wave of the sea of knowledge.

Self-induced psycho-vision often passes as the product of spirits. The line is yet to be drawn between the seeming and the real in this respect. Spirits first are monads—spiritual (psychal) atoms—God-existent from