LETTER XV
A ROMAN TOGA

 

ONE thing which makes this country so interesting to me is its lack of conventionality. No two persons are dressed in the same way—or no, I do not mean that exactly, but many are so eccentrically dressed that their appearance gives variety to the whole.

 

My own clothes are, as a rule, similar to those I wore on earth, though I have as an experiment, when dwelling in thought on one of my long-past lives, put on the garments of the period.

 

It is easy to get the clothes one wants here. I do not know how I became possessed of the garments which I wore on coming out; but when I began to take notice of such things, I found myself dressed about as usual. I am not yet sure whether I brought my clothes with me.

 

There are many people here in costumes of the ancient days. I do not infer from this fact that they have been here all those ages. I think they wear such clothes because they like them.

 

As a rule, most persons stay near the place where they lived on earth; but I have been a wanderer from the first. I go rapidly from one country to another. One night (or day with you) I may take my rest in America; the next night I may rest in Paris. I have spent hours of repose on the divan in your sitting-room, and you did not know that I was there. I doubt, though, if I could stay for hours in your house when I was myself awake without your sensing my presence.

 

Do not think, however, from what I have just said, that it is necessary for me to rest on the solid matter of your world. Not at all. We can rest on the tenuous substance of our own world.

 

One day, when I had been here only a short time, I saw a woman dressed in a Greek costume, and asked her where she got her clothes. She replied that she had made them. I asked her how, and she said:

 

"Why, first I made a pattern in my mind, and then the thing became a garment."

 

"Did you take every stitch?"

 

"Not as I should have done on earth."

 

I looked closer and saw that the whole garment seemed to be in one piece, and that it was caught on the shoulders by jewelled pins. I asked where she got the jewelled pins, and she said that a friend had given them to her. Then I asked where the friend had got them. She told me that she did not know, but that she would ask him. Soon after that she left me, and I have not seen her since, so the question is still unanswered.

 

I began to experiment to see if I also could make things, It was then that I conceived the idea of wearing a Roman toga, but for the life of me I could not remember what a Roman toga looked like.

 

When next I met the Teacher I told him of my wish to wear a toga of my own making, and he carefully showed me how to create garments such as I desired: To fix the pattern and shape clearly in my mind, to visualise it, and then by power to desire to draw the subtle matter of the thought-world round the pattern, so as actually to form the garment.

 

"Then," I said, "the matter of the thought-world, as you call it, is not the same kind of matter as that of my body, for instance?"

 

"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."

 

Now the thought-substance of which our garments are formed seems to be an extremely tenuous form of matter, while our bodies seem to be pretty solid. We do not feel at all like transparent angels sitting on damp clouds. Were it not for the quickness with which I get over space, I should think sometimes that my body was as solid as ever.

 

I can often see you, and to me you seem tenuous. It is all, I suppose, the old question of adjusting to environment. At first I could not do it, and had some trouble in learning to adjust the amount of energy necessary for each particular action. So little energy is required here to move myself about that at first when I started to go a short distance—say, a few yards—I would find myself a mile away. But I am now pretty well adjusted.

 

I must be storing up energy here for a good hard life when I return to the earth again. The hardest work I do now is to come and write through your hand, but you offer less and less resistance as time goes on. In the beginning it took all my strength; now it takes only a comparatively small effort. Yet I could not do it long at a time without using your own vitality, and that I will not do.

 

You may have noticed that you are no longer fatigued after the writing, though you used to be at first.

 

But I was speaking of the lack of conventionality out here. Souls hail each other when they want to, without much ceremony. I have seen a few old women who were afraid to talk to a stranger, but probably they had not been here long and the earth habits still clung to them.

 

Do not think, however, that society here is too free and easy. It is not that, but men and women do not seem to be so afraid of each other as they were on earth.

LETTER XVI
A THING TO BE FORGOTTEN

 

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. With some it is a morbid obsession, and many cannot get free from it while there remains a shred of flesh on the bones which they once leaned upon.

 

Tell them to forget it altogether, to force the thought away, to go out into the other life free. Looking back upon the past is sometimes good, but not upon this relic of the past.

 

It is so easy to look into the coffin, because the body which we wear now is itself a light in a dark place, and it can penetrate grosser matter. I have been back myself a few times, but am determined to go back no more. Yet some day the thought may come to me again with compelling insistence to see how it is getting on.

 

I do not want to shock or pain you—only to warn you. It is sad to see the sight which inevitably meets one in the grave. That may be the reason why many souls who have not been here long are so melancholy. They return again and again to the place which they should not visit.

 

You know that out here if we think intently of a place we are apt to find ourselves there. The body which we use is so light that it can follow thought almost without effort. Tell them not to do it.

 

One day while walking down an avenue of trees—for we have trees here—I met a tall woman in a long black garment. She was weeping—for we have tears here also. I asked her why she wept, and she turned to me eyes of unutterable sadness.

 

"I have been back to it," she said.

 

My heart ached for her, because I knew how she felt. The shock of the first visit is repeated each time, as the thing one sees is less and less what we like to think of ourselves as being.

 

Often I remember that tall woman in black, walking down the avenue of trees and weeping. It is partly curiosity that draws one back, partly magnetic attraction; but if can do no good. It is better to forget it.

 

I have sometimes longed, from sheer scientific interest, to ask my boy Lionel if he had been back to his body; but I have not asked him for fear of putting the idea into his mind. He has such a restless curiosity. Perhaps those who go out as children have less of that morbid instinct than we have.

 

If we could only remember in life that the form which we call ourselves is not our real immortal self at all, we would not give it such an exaggerated importance, though we would nevertheless take needful care of it.

 

As a rule, those who say that they have been long here do not seem old. I asked the Teacher why, and he said that after a time an old person forgets that he is old, that the tendency is to grow young in thought and therefore young in appearance, that the body tends to take the form which we hold of it in our minds, that the law of rhythm works here as elsewhere.

 

Children grow up out here, and they may even go on to a sort of old age if that is the expectation of the mind; but the tendency is to keep the prime, to go forward or back towards the best period, and then to hold that until the irresistible attraction of the earth asserts itself again.

 

Most of the men and women here do not know that they have lived many times in flesh. They remember their latest life more or less vividly, but all before that seems like a dream. One should always keep the memory of the past as clear as possible. It helps one to construct the future.

 

Those people who think of their departed friends as being all­wise, how disappointed they would be if they could know that the life on this side is only an extension of the life on earth! If the thoughts and desires there have been only for material pleasures, the thoughts and desires here are likely to be the same. I have met veritable saints since coming out; but they have been men and women who held in earth life the saintly ideal, and who now are free to live it.

 

Life can be so free here! There is none of that machinery of living which makes people on earth such slaves. In our world a man is held only by his thoughts. If they are free, he is free.

 

Few, though, are of my philosophic spirit. There are more saints here than philosophers, as the highest ideal of most persons, when intensely active, has been towards the religious rather than the philosophic life.

 

I think the happiest people I have met on this side have been the painters. Our matter is so light and subtle, and so easily handled, that it falls readily into the forms of the imagination. There are beautiful pictures here. 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.

 

There is joy in the heart of one of our real artists when a fellow craftsman on your side catches an idea from him and puts it into execution. He may not always be able to see clearly how well the second man works out the idea, for it requires a special gift or a special training to see from one form of matter into the other; but the inspiring spirit catches the thought in the inspired one's mind, and knows that a conception of his own is being executed upon the earth.

 

With poets it is the same. There are lovely lyrics composed out here and impressed upon the receptive minds of earthly poets. A poet told me that it was easier to do that with a short lyric than with an epic or a drama, where a long-continued effort was necessary.

 

It is much the same with musicians. 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.

 

If they could only hear our music! I did not understand music on earth, but now my ears are becoming adjusted. It seems sometimes as if you must hear our music over there, as we hear yours.

 

You may have wondered how I spend my time and where I go. There is a lovely spot in the country which I never tire of visiting. It is on the side of a mountain, not far from my own city. There is a little road winding round a hill, and just above the road is a hut, a roofed enclosure with the lower side open. Sometimes I stay there for hours and listen to the rippling of the brook which runs beside the road. The tall slender trees have become like brothers to me. At first I cannot see the material trees very clearly; but I go into the little hut which is made of fresh clean boards with a sweet smell, and I lie down on the shelf or bunk along the wall; then I close my eyes and by an effort—or no, it is not what I would call an effort, but by a sort of drifting—I can see the beautiful place. But you must know that this is in the night time there, and I see it by the light of myself. 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.

 

One night I took the boy Lionel there with me, leaving him in the hut while I went a little distance away. Looking back, I saw the whole hut illuminated by a lovely radiance—the radiance of Lionel himself. The little building, which has a peaked roof, looked like a pearl lighted from within. It was a beautiful experience.

 

I then went to Lionel and told him to go in his turn a little distance away, while I took his place in the hut. I was curious to know if he would see the same phenomenon when I lay there, if I could shed such a light through dense matter—the boards of the building. When I called him to me afterwards and asked if he had seen anything strange, he said:

 

"What a wonderful man you are, Father! How did you make that hut seem to be on fire?"

Then I knew that he had seen the same thing I had seen.

 

But I am tired now and can write no more. Good night, and may you have pleasant dreams.

LETTER XVII
THE SECOND WIFE OVER THERE

 

I AM often called upon here to decide matters for others. Many people call me simply "the judge"; but we bear, as a rule, the name that we last bore on earth.

 

Men and women come to me to settle all sorts of questions for them, questions of ethics, questions of expediency, even quarrels. Did you suppose that no one quarrelled 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 visualise 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 realisations which each soul builds for itself.

 

But I want to give you an illustration of the sort of questions on which I am asked to pass judgment.

 

There are two women here who in life were both married to one man, though not at the same time. The first woman died, then the man married again, and soon—not more than a year or two after— the man and his second wife both came out. The first wife considers herself the man's only wife, and she follows him about everywhere. She says that he promised to meet her in heaven. He is more inclined to the second wife, though he still feels affection for Wife No. I. He is rather impatient at what he calls her unreasonableness. He told me one day that he would gladly give them both up, if he could be left in peace to carry out certain studies in which he is interested. These were among the people I met soon after I began to be strong myself here—it was not so very long ago; and the man has sought my society so much that the women, in order to be near him, have come along too.

 

One day they all three came to me and propounded their question—or, rather, Wife No. I propounded it. She said:

 

"This man is my husband. Should not, therefore, this other woman go far away and leave him altogether to me?"

 

I asked Wife No. 2 what she had to say. Her answer was that she would be all alone here but for her husband, and that as she had had him last, he now belonged more to her than to the other.

 

In a flash the memory came to me of those Sadducees who propounded a similar question to Christ, and I quoted His answer as nearly as I could remember it: that "when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven."

 

My answer was as much a staggerer for them as their question had been for me, and they went away to think about it.

 

When they were gone I began myself to ponder the question. I had already observed that, whether or not all here are as the angels in heaven, there does seem to be a good deal of mating and rejoining of former mates. The sex distinction is as real here as on the earth, though, of course, its expression is not exactly the same. I asked myself a good many questions which perhaps would never have occurred to me but for the troubles of this interesting triad, and I thought of the man I had somewhere read about, who said that he never knew his own opinion of anything until he tried to express it to somebody.

 

After a while the three came to me again and said that they had been talking things over, perhaps after the manner of angels in heaven; for Wife No. I told me that she had decided to "let" her husband spend a part of his time with the other woman, if he wanted to.

 

Now, the man had a sweetheart, a girl sweetheart, before he had either of his wives. The girl is out here somewhere, and the man often has a strong desire to try to find her. What opportunity he will now have to do so, I cannot say. The situation is rather depressing for the poor fellow. It is bad enough to have one person who insists on every minute of your society, without having two. And I think his case is not unusual. Perhaps the only way in which he can get free from his two insistent companions is by going back to the earth.

 

There is a way, however, by which he could secure solitude; but he does not know of it. A man who knows how can isolate himself here as well as he could on earth; he can build round himself a wall which only the eyes of a great initiate can pierce. I have not told this secret to my friend; but perhaps I shall some day, if it seems necessary for his development that he have a little solitude. At present it seems to me that he will learn more from adjusting to this double claim and trying to find the truth that lies in it. Perhaps he may learn that really, essentially, fundamentally, he does not "belong" to either of these women. The souls out here seem to belong to themselves, and after the first few years they get to love liberty so much that they are ready to yield a little of their claim upon others.

 

This is a great place in which to grow, if one really wants to grow; though few persons take advantage of its possibilities. Most are content to assimilate the experiences they had on earth. It would be depressing to one who did not realise that will is free, to see how souls let slip their opportunities here, even as they did on the moon-guarded planet.

 

There are teachers here who stand ready to help anyone who wishes their help in making real and deep studies in the mysteries of life—the life here, the life there, and in the remote past.

 

If a man understands that his recent sojourn on earth was merely the latest of a long series of lives, and if he concentrates his mind towards recovering the memories of the distant past, he can recover them. Some persons may think that the mere dropping of the veil of matter should free the soul from all obscuration; but, as on earth so out here, "things are not thus and so because they ought to be, but because they are."

 

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.

LETTER XVIII
INDIVIDUAL HELLS

 

SOME time ago I told you of my intention to visit hell; but when I began investigations on that line there proved to be many hells.

 

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.

 

But there are other and individual hells—

 

(The writing suddenly stopped, for no apparent reason, and was not continued that night.)

LETTER XIX
A LITTLE HOME IN HEAVEN

 

I HAVE met a very interesting man since last I wrote to you. He is a lover who for ten years waited here for his love to come to him.

 

They said on earth that he was dead, and they urged her to love another; but she could not forget him, for every night he met her soul in dreams, every night she came out to him here, and sometimes she could recall on waking all that he had said to her in sleep. She had told him that she would not delay long in the sunshine world, but would come out to him in the self-lighted world.

 

Only a little while ago she came. He had been long getting ready for her coming, and had built in the substance of this world the little home he had planned to build for her in the outer world.

 

He told me how one night when she came to him in dream, she said that she would rejoin him on the morrow, never to leave him again. He was startled, and would almost have stayed her; because he had died a sudden and painful death, and he dreaded pain for her. Always he had watched over her, warning her of danger; but this time he felt, after the first shock of the message was over, that she was really coming. And he was very happy.

 

He had found no other love out here; for when one leaves the earth full of a great affection, and when the earthly loved one does not forget, the tie can hold for many years unweakened. You on the earth have forgotten so much of what you learned here that you do not realise how your thought of us can make us happy, do not realise how your forgetfulness of us can throw us back entirely upon ourselves.

 

Often those who go farthest here, who really grow in spirituality, are those whose loves have forgotten them on earth; but it is sad to be forgotten, nevertheless.

 

It is a bitter power you make possible to us when you thus throw us back upon ourselves; and not all souls are strong enough or aspiring enough to make use of the lonely impetus that might help them to scale the ladder of spiritual knowledge.

 

But to return to my lovers. All that day he remained near her. He would not rest; for, as I have told you, we generally rest a little when the sun shines on the earth. All that day he remained near her. He could not see her body, for the rays of sunlight were too strong for him. But, after hours of waiting, suddenly he felt a hand in his, and though she was invisible to him, yet he knew that she was here. And he spoke to her, using such words as he would have used on earth. She did not seem to understand. He spoke again, and still she did not answer; but he knew from the pressure of her hand that she realised his presence. So hand in hand they stood there in the darkness of the sunlight, the man able to speak because of his long experience in this world of subtle sounds, the woman speechless and bewildered, but still clinging to his hand.

 

When the sunshine went away he was able to see her face, and her eyes were wide and frightened; but still she seemed held to the room in which lay the body which had been she. It was summer, and the windows were open. He sought to draw her away into the perfumed night which to them was day; but she held his hand and would not let him go.

 

At last he drew her away a short distance and spoke to her again. Now she heard and answered him.

 

"Beloved," she said, "which is I? For I see myself—I feel myself—back there also. I seem to be in two places. Which I is really I?"

 

He comforted her with loving words. He was still afraid to caress her, for the touch of souls is very keen, and he feared lest she should go back into the form which seemed to be so near them, and thus be lost to him again. But though she had often come to him in dreams, it had not been so vividly as this time, and he felt that she had really passed through the great change.

 

She still clung to his hand, yet seemed afraid to go out with him—out and away from it. He stayed there with her all that night and all the next day, when the darkening sun came again, and again he could not see her.

 

Once the well-meaning friends of his beloved disturbed her body, doing those sacred offices which seem so necessary to the living, but which may sorely disturb the dead.

 

He stayed with her the second night and all the second day. He could hear the sobs of her grieving parents, though they could not see either him or their daughter; but on the second night the little dog of his love came into the room where it lay, the room in which their two souls still stood, and the little dog saw them and whined piteously. The man could hear it, and she also could hear it. I And now she could hear him more plainly when he spoke to her. "Where will they take it?" she asked him.

 

He recalled the time when he had been held spellbound near his own lifeless form, over which his loved one had shed bitter tears. And he asked her if it would not be better to come away altogether; but she could not, or thought she could not.

 

On the third day he knew from the agitation of his love that they were placing her body in the coffin. After a while he felt, though he could not see, that many other persons were in the room, and he heard mournful music. Music can reach from one world to another, can be heard far more plainly than human voices, which generally cannot be heard at all except by the trained listener.

 

By and by his love was sorely agitated, and he also, through sympathy with her; and they felt themselves going slowly—oh, so slowly!—along. And he said to her:

 

"Do not be grieved. They are taking it to the burial; but you are safe with me." He knew that she was much troubled.

 

It is not for nothing that over the house of death there always hangs a strange hush, not to be explained by the mere losing of the loved one. Those who remain behind feel, though they cannot see, the soul of the one who has gone out. Their souls are full of sympathy for him in his bewilderment.

 

The change need not be painful if one would only remember that it has been passed through before; but one so easily forgets. We sometimes call the earth the Valley of Forgetfulness.

 

During the days and weeks that followed this lover remained with his loved one, ever trying to draw her away from the earth and from it, which had for her, as for so many, a fearsome fascination.

 

It is said that the souls of those who have lived long on earth more easily detach themselves; but this woman was still young, only about thirty, and even with the help of her lover it was a little time before she could get free.

 

But one day (or night, as you would say) he showed her the home which he had built for her, and it was literally a mansion in the sky. She entered with him, and it became their home.

 

Sometimes he leaves her for a little while, or she leaves him; for the joy of being together is heightened here, as on the earth, by an occasional separation; but not until she was content and accustomed to the new life did he leave her at all.

 

During the first days the habit of earthly hunger often held her, and he tried to appease it by giving her the softer substance which we know here. Gradually she became weaned altogether from the earth and the habits of the earth, only going back occasionally in a dream to her father and mother.

 

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.

 

I came to you in a dream the other night, standing behind and outside the gate of a walled garden in which you were enclosed. I smiled and beckoned you to come out to me; but I did not wish you to come out to stay. I only meant that you should come out in spirit; for if you come out occasionally it is easier for me to go into your world.