Mary Alling Aber – Souls

 

Contents

I. How Souls are Educated
II. Where Souls Come From ; and What Determines the Frequency of Incarnations
III. Where Souls are between Incarnations ; and what becomes of souls who refuse to Develop and Purify Themselves
IV. The Relations of Souls to their Bodies
V. The Virtues of Souls
VI. Souls beyond our Planet
VII. Soul Consciousness and Freedom

APPENDICES
To Chapter.
I. Jesus of Nazareth; and the New Testament
II. Other Universes besides Our Own
III. Souls of Animals and of Savage Men
V. Sex on This Planet
VI. Earth under Trial
VII. Foods

Introduction

Every living thing has a soul: and each thing which develops normally, according to the laws which govern its type, has the power of separating soul from body at will; but men on this planet have so far lost this power that rarely can it be exercised when the body is awake and the mind conscious.

This book is a result of the recovery of that lost power; and it is a record of facts. The author knows that a conscientious student uses the word fact with care, and that all human effort is subject to limitation and error; and in these respects, she claims no exemption from the common lot.

CHAPTER I.

HOW SOULS ARE EDUCATED.

A human being, in passing from cradle to grave, doffs its old clothes and puts on new ones many times; so the soul of man with­draws from one body and enters another.

If the suits of clothing, from the garments put upon the new-born babe to the last worn by the old man at death, could be photo­graphed, the photographs would give a fair notion of the physical changes and outward circumstances of the man. If in addition to the suit of clothing, each act performed, each word uttered, and the thoughts and feelings which moved the mind of the man when wear­ing the suit could be photographed and phonographed along with it, and this be done for each suit, the series of pictures would give the hidden motives of the man, relations to his fellow men, and his dealings with them.

In the non-physical earth, is preserved such a record of the lives of the souls who have inhabited this planet; and this record shows how souls are educated on this planet.

Imagine a small globule poised over a mass of mineral matter. The globule is a luminous, mobile substance, but is not physi­cal matter. The globule descends into the mineral matter, moves about until it finds con­ditions suitable to its activity, and then builds about itself a body, that is, a crystal. When that body is destroyed, the globule seeks new conditions, and builds itself a new crystal body. This process goes on until the exper­iences of the crystal state are exhausted.

The globule then incarnates in a plant form. It passes rapidly from one form to another, higher and higher at each step, until it can get no more growth in the plant world. The globule throughout its career is a soul; and in the mineral and plant experiences, is gained the beginnings of every human attribute. The third phase is the human, that of pre-historic man.

The careers of two souls through the human phase will now be given.

A man has a house and a wife. He takes his wife with him into the forest to gather wood. She helps him. Unable to move the end of a heavy log as he bids her, he strides toward her and deals her a blow. She falls senseless. He turns the body over; the eyes open once, the body gives a convulsive shudder, and the soul inhabiting it is gone.        .

Passing the second incarnation, in the third these two are together again, and holding the same relation. The woman sits by the fire nursing a baby, a boy a few months old; and standing beside her is a girl of about two years. The father enters; his supper is not ready; this angers him; the mother calls atten­tion to the nursing of the baby. At this, the father seizes the infant by its legs and with one sweep of his arms flings its head against the wall of the house. The shock breaks the bones; and the brains fall upon the floor. Later, the winter comes on; there is scarcity of food; they must migrate. The girl is a hindrance,— one more mouth to feed, a burden to carry in addition to the, necessities for the journey. The father persuades; the mother is reluctant but yields. The two start on their journey, leaving the child in the house with the door open. She toddles out and moves about in the cold, crying for her mother until devoured by wild beasts.

These scenes are from the first and third of more than eight hundred incarnations in which this soul occupied the body of a civ­ilized man or of a barbarian in contact with civilization. These incarnations represent many, races and occupations, and all social ranks.

In the fourth century B. C. this soul is a Greek, Alexander the Great; and in the first a Jew, an adept and hermit [see Appendix I]. In the second century A. D. he is a Roman and a priest of Apollo, who is converted to the Christian faith, and martyred in the first persecution under Marcus Aurelius: in the fifth he is Alaric, in the eighth Charlemagne, in the twelfth Abelard, in the fourteenth the Black Prince, and in the sixteenth Henry the VIII.

Between Alexander the Great and Henry the VIII, there are twenty-two incarnations; and in each of them this soul was a warrior, priest, or king. In these twenty-four incarna­tions, this soul experienced, many times over, all that the world afforded of physical devel­opment and action, of material pomp and glory, of learning and intellectual delights, of arduous labors and responsibilities.

Up to a certain point, souls develop as wild vegetation does, by the action of laws external and internal, and their own inherent instincts. Then, as a gardener takes a wild-crab tree prunes, cultivates, trains, nourishes, plants its seed in different soils until he has a fine fruit good for human use; so the gods (see Chap­ter VI) take a soul, train and prune it, until it is fit to nourish by example and precept the souls of other men, and to pass beyond earth.

The soul of Alexander the Great, on leaving the body of Henry the VIII, passed under the immediate care of the gods; and the fourth phase of its existence began,—the phase of purification; for as a fruit may rot because of too much sunshine, so may a soul, and all rot must be purged away.

In the family of a poor fisherman on the west coast of England, this soul grows up as boys commonly do in such places. He shares his father’s occupations. Restless in so nar­row a field, he gets possession of a boat and starts northward on a voyage of discovery. His boat is crushed between ice floes, his crew and supplies lost. Another adventurer takes him from the ice floe and carries him down through the North Sea to London. After a time, he owns another boat, and this time he sails southward. His boat is wrecked on an island in mid ocean; and again he escapes death through being picked up by a wandering skipper and returned to London. Trouble follows him. No sooner is his hand on one thing, and some of the possessions which he covets within sight of his hopes, than the thing in his hand and the hope in his heart are dashed to pieces.

Disgusted with the fortunes of a sailor, he joins an army. In the first skirmish, he is wounded, captured, and thrown into prison. In a dark, foul cell nine years pass. The bit­terness abates; the soul ceases to chafe. Death approaches; he longs to look once more at the sun. The iron door of his cell opens; his keepers tell him to go; he cannot lift his head. The men are moved; they take him up, carry him out, and lay him down on the green sward outside the prison-gate. The soldier draws a few breaths of clean air, looks at the sky and sun, and dies; and the soul escaping from that body has lost its craving for phys­ical luxury and its dependence on physical comfort for contentment.

Soon after, this soul finds shelter in Africa. His father rules a small but happy kingdom. The boy grows rapidly in the equatorial heat. One day, a gang of slave-hunters put heavy chains on his free limbs. He is taken to the coast, put into the hold of a small vessel, brought to America, and sold to a Virginia planter. His training begins; the process is difficult; no punishments can force this “sullen nigger.” He is too valuable to be maimed or starved for long; but so intractable that he is sold from master to master, bringing a high price because of his build and health. On a plantation farther south, his overseer has more fiendish devices for torturing him than any before encountered; but still he will not do what is required of him. A wandering preacher comes along and tells the story of the crucified with a rough eloquence that touches him. He believes the preacher; and bows his proud, sore, angry mind in meekness to his lot. More than thirty years has he been a slave; but now, for the first time, he works willingly and serves humbly. His fellow-slaves, the overseer, and his master are surprised at the gentle faithful­ness with which he bears his daily burdens for a few months.

One morning in early spring, as the sun rose, this negro came out of his cabin, sat down upon the ground behind it, leaned his back up against it, picked a little wild blossom growing close to the cabin-wall, smiled, and stuck the flower in his coarse shirt. Then, drawing up his long legs, he clasped his arms around his knees, bent his head upon his chest, and fell asleep. Gently, the soul within was
disengaged from the sleeper; and, leaving this life of slavery, this soul left its pride, arro­gance, scorn, and sensuality.

The next incarnation was in the family of a farmer in the southern part of New York State. He became a carpenter, lived a chaste bache­lor forty years, and died. This incarnation was a rest to the soul.

Later this soul is a boy in Boston. His father is a merchant, trading with the West Indies, amassing property. The boy graduates at Harvard, travels a little, and then comes home. His father is counting on adding his son’s ener­gies to his own, and offers him a generous share in the business. His sister counts on him, too. She is two years younger, and dreams of social triumphs. To the anger of the father and the chagrin and many tears of the sister, he refuses to share their plans. He owns a little property, received from a relative a few years before; and the income from this is enough for him. His sister calls it a pittance; and his father is ashamed that any child of his is so devoid of decent ambitions as to be con­tent with it. The details of business, dinners, parties,—these bore him. To yield to the wishes of father and sister will but add to their pride and greed of money and social position; and chain him in perpetual boredom. These, he thinks he sees plainly, and he sees nothing more; so he leaves home.

An unpretentious person, whom few notice, he travels from land to land, seeking what he calls truth — in reality following the craving of his soul to know the meaning of life. When nearly fifty, he meets, in Persia, a man of twice his years, who comes nearer to giving what he seeks than any schools’ or men found elsewhere; but it does not satisfy. He returns to America. While he has been gone, his country has been through the Revolution, his father and sister have died. He builds a small hermitage on the southern edge of the Adirondack forests, spends a few years in study and meditation, and dies.

Homeless, enduring exposure and fatigue, he had sought in many lands what was at his own father’s door; and the stirring times of the Revolutionary War. had been the opportun­ity to find all of truth he was capable of receiv­ing.

At the opening of this century, an Indian lad plays on the slopes of the Rockies, and listens to the tales of his race. It is the soul of Alexander the Great who listens. When this lad has reached twenty, his tribe, in its wanderings, comes in contact with the remnant of another tribe. In this, is a girl about six­teen whom he loves the moment he sees her. Another eye has seen, too; and, seeing, deter­mined to possess,—the eye of his chief. The chief spends no time in wooing, but demands the girl of her mother, the father being dead. The girl is much beloved by her people; and when she shrinks from the suit of the chief, no one is disposed to force her. The chief, with presents and many fair speeches, is dismissed. On the following night, with a company of his braves, the chief steals upon the smaller en­campment and carries off the girl.

The girl has a cousin, a boy of fourteen, who cannot brook this treachery; our Indian, too, thinks it intolerable. These two meet and arrange a plan to release the girl. So well does the plan succeed that, before the chief has had opportunity to enjoy his prize, she is freed and hid in a rocky cave known to her people only. In returning for some supplies for the girl, the older of these youths is captured.

So enamored of the girl is the chief, that he sets aside Indian usages, and offers life and freedom to this one who has so openly dared to defy him, if he will but disclose the girl’s hiding-place. Well does this young Indian know the results of refusal; for, as a lad, he had seen white men put to death by these same braves. But he refuses. He is bound to a stake; a fire is kindled in front of it; gashes are made in his flesh and filled with hot coals; sharpened sticks are burned to redness and thrust into his eyes; and, when cruelty can devise no more, the burning fagots are piled about his feet, and the soul escapes.

What is the meaning of this ? Go back to the first human incarnation. The debt to that woman’s soul is paid; for the Indian girl is her incarnation, and that of Katharine of Aragon also.

After a few years this soul incarnates in one of the eastern states, and is still undergoing purification. In its present incarnation, it has paid the debts it owed for the crimes of its third. One more necessary human experience awaits this soul,—womanhood.

In a stony field, a man turns the soil with a rude plow. The plow is drawn by a woman whose soul’s career the reader is now asked to follow. She is heavy and stolid; and unwil­lingly draws the plow under the lash of the man who is the father of her child, which lies at the edge of the field.

In the second incarnation, these two are together again; and they have a large family. The mother and children are indoors; the father enters, cuffs the children about, and begins his meal. A man enters; this man and the father quarrel and come to blows; the mother starts to part them just as a blow from the man kills the father. The mother goes off with the man, leaving the children to shift for themselves; two only get care from others and grow up.

In the third incarnation, from a respectable home, she drifts into becoming a woman of infamous life and occupations.

In the fourth incarnation, her father is a gardener who supplies flowers to noble houses. Her mother dies; she remains single, keeps house for her father, and helps him in his labors, devotedly attached to both father and flowers. At the death of her father, she enters a convent, and dies beloved by all.

In the fifth, she is among the Waldenses. Barely eighteen, naked, feet chained to the floor and hands to the wall, she stands in a dark, stone cell. After several days without food, drink, or the possibility of lying down, she is taken out and burned at the stake. ,

A few months afterward, she enters upon her sixth incarnation. Born in a noble house, at thirteen she becomes the wife of a feudal baron. Beautiful, rich, petted, she passes a few bright years; and is killed in trying to part her lord from another who has insulted him at his own board.

Immediately reborn, she is Elizabeth of Hungary, whom Gregory XII. canonized as a saint.   •

The eighth incarnation follows soon. She is again born to great station; but the people are poor, the duties heavy, and the place lonely. She meets a cavalier who is richer and more dashing in manner than her lord. She has two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five. Her lord is killed. While his corse still lies in the castle, the cavalier comes for her. The rear walls of her castle are washed by a stream that, in a rocky channel, hidden by dense growths of shrubbery, runs to the sea. She takes the children to the second story, opens a casement, grasps the boy and throws him out. The unsuspecting child turns, grasps a point of rock and looks up, only to see his sister follow him. Her head strikes upon a rock, killing her instantly. The boy knows how to swim; getting one arm around his sister, he struggles manfully; but the current is heavy and swift, and his small strength is soon exhausted. The mother leans far out of the casement and watches this strug­gle in the stream. Satisfied that the struggle is ended, she gathers her jewels, and rides away with the gay, plumed cavalier.

In the next or ninth incarnation, she is Milton’s daughter Dorothy. The tenth is in the United States, and is not yet finished.

In the same period of time in which the soul of Alexander the Great has had more than eight hundred incarnations, this one of St. Elizabeth has had but ten.

Thus far, the soul of Alexander the Great has occupied the bodies of men; the soul of St. Elizabeth, those of women. A soul who started at the same time as these two and has had nearly seven hundred incarnations, has occu­pied both kinds of bodies; and in some periods alternated quite regularly between them; and this soul is incarnate in the United States today.

The following are some of the conclusions which the author has reached in examining the non-physical records on our planet:—

A globule in building a crystal body works with conscious intelligence, as does a soul in building its body of flesh. The mineral world is alive; wherever is life is consciousness; and everything from a crystal to a purified soul has intelligence after its kind.

The soul is of no time, country, race, sex, creed, nor family ties. The parents of Alex­ander the Great in this incarnation have never been his parents before; and in this last incar­nation, St. Elizabeth has borne some children whose souls have been through hundreds of incarnations, and her husband had had more than five hundred, in contrast to her ten. When souls just beginning development, and souls in the phase of purification are put together in families, there must needs be friction; but let not the soul undergoing purification shrink from the contact—he is their means of devel­opment; they his means of purification.

The soul is not only developed and purified, it pays the debts which it contracts with other souls on its journey: but not every soul is so fortunate as was that of Alexander the Great, when he died to save from harm the same soul whom he had so grievously wronged; for souls pass beyond earthly incarnations, and the debtors left behind pay to some other soul, as a man pays the son a debt he could not or did not pay the father.

The conditions of development, purification, and payment are sufficient, suit themselves to every soul wherever on its journey it may be’ and are not cruel. The prison door is opened, the slave set free, the Indian dies, when the purpose of the incarnation is fulfilled. And the payments are willingly made; the Indian has ample opportunity to refuse to die.

Every soul is where it needs to be; and if it turn aside from the duties and relations of the station to which it is born, to follow its own desires, whether to dispense charities as did St. Elizabeth, or to seek truth in Persia as did the Boston incarnation of Alexander the Great, it retards its welfare.

No soul is forced. Opportunity is given: the soul uses or abuses that opportunity as it pleases. For three successive incarnations, the soul of St. Elizabeth was given to learn the duties of high birth. In the first, she gave Herself up to the delights of luxury and flat­tery; in the second, she refused her duties as queen to dispense charities, although all the virtues and strength which she could command were needed on the throne which she first neg­lected and then vacated; and in the third, she committed crimes to give herself variety.

In each incarnation, the soul is set a special task, and all the conditions necessary for that task are provided for it. The soul is free to refuse to make use of those conditions, and it may reject altogether the task assigned; but in another incarnation it meets that same task, amid new conditions and a different company of souls. The soul may continue to refuse, setting its will persistently through successive incarnations against the conditions which would otherwise develop, purify, and free it from debt.

CHAPTER II.

WHERE SOULS COME FROM; AND WHAT DETER­MINES THE FREQUENCY OF INCARNATIONS.

As a man may take off his coat and put it on again, so may a soul lay aside its body and resume it. When a soul leaves its body, it finds itself surrounded by a substance which is to the non-physical realm what water is to the physical; and this substance will be called non­physical water. This non-physical water per­meates the physical air and penetrates and passes through all physical objects. As light passes through glass, so may this water and all objects which float in it pass through any physical solid.

In this non-physical water, a soul free from its body may float and direct its motion. Without physical exertion it may rise, descend, poise for rest, or move swiftly forward as it pleases. The soul does this by a power within; and to use that power requires effort, and wearies the soul as effort wearies the body in the physical world.

Will the reader follow a soul who has laid aside its body ? This soul, rising, reaches the limits of the physical air, and finds that the non-physical water fills the spaces between the worlds. Passing beyond the limits of our solar system, innumerable systems are seen. They are above, below, around; some systems have one sun, some have two; and these suns draw after them planets, as our earth draws the moon; and the suns whirl on their axes and move through the non-phys­ical water as animated balls of fire might move through physical water.

The spaces grow wider, the suns larger and their motions more terribly swift. Then ap­pears a space so wide that the spaces already passed are less than a mountain brook to the Amazon River; and the substance which fills that space is to the non-physical water what air is to the physical water; and as a man walking over solid earth stops before a chasm, so halted this soul at the edge of that space.

Beyond this space, was a mass of moving cloud: the cloud looked thin, but was impen­etrable. The cloud parted, and there was seen within it a small section of what seemed to be a sphere, but different from all the worlds and suns seen on the journey. From this section projected a narrow shelf; and, see­ing this, the attempt was made to cross the space. As a bird, after a long flight over the sea, falls exhausted upon the shore, so fell this soul upon the edge of that shelf.

An opening is seen; passing that opening, this soul is within a hollow sphere whose size makes the largest sun seen on the journey seem but a toy. Within this sphere is another, and it has openings. Passing through one of these, this sphere too is seen to be hollow and to contain another sphere. In this manner, are passed nine hollow spheres, one sphere within another. In the center of the ninth, is the frame of a cube. The frame is made of slender bars—two bars joined at a right angle passing along each of the twelve edges of the cube. This cubical frame is small compared with the space in which it rests. Within this cube, is a sphere which is somewhat smaller than the cube could have contained had its sides been completed. This sphere is suspended within the cubical frame but does not touch it. At the topmost point of this sphere issues a flame. It was not physical fire, but looked more like the flame from burning hydrogen than any other thing seen upon earth.

This soul advanced, stood near the cube, and drew a breath of what came from the flame, as a man may draw in the hot air which vibrates from a flame of physical fire. That breath renewed the strength, and cleared and in­creased the power of vision.

The nine spheres were separated by spaces; and all the nine were divided by a plane, which extended a little beyond the outermost and made the shelf upon which this soul had alighted. This plane did not cut the spheres at the center; for the part of the spheres above the plane was much greater than the part below. Above the plane, at the center, and resting on the plane, was the cubical frame which enclosed the sphere from which issued the flame; and this was surrounded by the nine hollow spheres. The nine spheres in­creased in thickness and density from the inner to the outer, and decreased in transpar­ency and beauty; but of density and decrease there it is hardly becoming to speak, since the mind of man cannot conceive of the outermost of the nine.

These great spheres were composed of small spheres suspended side by side. These small spheres will be called ‘globes to distinguish them from the nine great spheres. These globes seemed to be of a substance similar to that of the globules which were seen floating over the mineral matter on earth, but were of much greater size.

This soul then passed to the shelf on which it had alighted. A great space, like a great gulf, divided these nine spheres from the worlds beyond. Those worlds moved in a flowing sub­stance,—the non-physical water, which like a belt surrounded the gulf. The worlds were gathered into systems similar to our own; these smaller systems revolved about greater suns; and the greater suns moved in the arc of the great belt. The belt was divided into zones; and the whole was to the central spheres as the rings of Saturn to that planet. Of these zones in the belt, ten were counted. What was beyond was not known. [See Appendix II.] There was a limit to vision, and that limit was as the haze which hides the landscape from physical sight. Our solar sys­tem was in the fifth of these zones, counting from the gulf; and, amid that throng of mov­ing suns, our sun was in size but as a bubble of air in a river, and our planet earth less than a grain of dust.

Returning to the innermost of the nine spheres, it was seen that from the flame issue rays. These rays may be compared to the waves of heat which pass from an open physi­cal fire, but with this difference,—the rays were collected into bundles, and these bundles separated one from another. These rays moved upward and outward; and, touching globes in any one of the nine spheres, the globes were projected before them. To reach globes in the outer spheres, these rays passed through the openings between the globes in the inner spheres; and no globes were affected but the ones whom the rays directly touched. The globes that were so selected were pro­jected in pairs, and the members of the pairs were not from the same sphere.

From the shelf-projection of the plane, one of these pairs of globes was watched. The rays lengthened, going farther and farther, and ever supporting and projecting before them the two globes. The farther they went, the smaller grew the globes, the rays con­stantly withdrawing into themselves some of the substance of the globes; until, when pro­jection ceased, the globes had become globules like those which were seen upon earth.

The projection of these two ended, the rays disengaged themselves, and left the globules suspended in the non-physical water; and the globules seemed troubled and at a loss what to do for want, each of its sustaining ray.

But the rays were not withdrawn; they descended, bending so as to form the opposite side of an immense ellipse, the other side of which they had traversed in projection. In this descent, the rays entered a physical mass such as the mineral of our earth; and the farther ends of the rays remained stationary until the globules felt their presence, and seek­ing them entered that mineral matter.

Watching various rays, it was seen that it is these rays who, each ever hovering in front, first of the globule and then of the soul, like a magnet, draws it back over its long and weary way. Projected swiftly, it returns slowly through mineral, vegetable, human, and other forms, while ages and ages pass away.

This visitor from earth must return. Hav­ing reached earth, this soul paused beside its physical body. As a coarse, ugly block of wood to the purest mountain air was that body to the objects recently seen: and as a man puts on a heavy and ill-fitting garment, and takes up for use a poor and a dull tool; so this soul put on that garment of flesh, and began once more to use a physical brain.

The consciousness of this human being is two-fold,—the consciousness of the body, including the, physical brain with what it has gathered of knowledge and experience in the present incarnation, and the consciousness of the soul. This being may pass from the one consciousness to the other, as a man may step from one room of his house into another. As a child is conscious of its physical senses and takes pleasure in using them, but knows noth­ing of the powers and capacities of the brain lying behind these senses, which powers and capacities it takes years of training and exper­ience to develop, so is this being in soul con­sciousness—conscious of the soul’s senses and of the possibility of using them, but as yet of barely anything more.

Each globule on earth has a ray, the ray who projected it; and each ray leads the globule until it becomes a soul, and leads the soul until it is developed, purified, and its debts paid; and, evermore, the ray gives of itself all which the globule or soul can receive.

These rays take note of the prayers of men —each ray of the prayers of the soul whom it attends—; and prayers are answered, not always on the same day or in the same incarnation, but finally answered. The prayers of men have no necessary connection with the words which fall from the lips of their bodies. The words of men are, for the most part, like the phantoms of their imaginations,—there are no realities behind them; and the rays, who guide men take note of realities only. The realities of a man’s prayer are the desires in his soul, and these desires are shown by what he does. If those desires ask for material good, that material good is given just as soon, and in as great fullness as the welfare of the soul, and of other souls connected with it, will allow; if those desires ask for intellectual stores or fame, they too are granted under the same conditions as the material; but when a soul asks for strength to do its duties, courage to meet its difficulties, wisdom to bear its respon­sibilities, or more love and tenderness for other souls, or for gifts like these, the response is immediate—the ray gives of itself and the praying soul is enlarged and strengthened thereby to the measure and the quality of its need.

When a man prays in church, at his table, or in the privacy of his own room for the spread of good; and then goes out and forecloses the mortgage on his struggling neighbor’s prop­erty, uses the ignorance or carelessness of another man to increase his own gains, puts the wages of his employees at the lowest figure, takes the shelter from the widow and the opportunity from the orphan because they are weak and he is strong, or uses of another’s goods for his own advancement or comfort and does not return the same,—his prayer also is answered; and that which he has created for others, and spread abroad by his example will he himself enjoy at some future time.

Deeds like these often come from ignorance; and so long as a soul is ignorant, it must be educated, and most souls seem unable to learn anything but by experience. So, what a man does to his neighbors in one incarnation, that will his neighbors do to him in another; until souls are less ignorant, are able to dwell to­gether in peace, and to make efforts to mutu­ally help and sustain one another. The soul who does such evil deeds, not ignorantly, but knowing the pain which they cause, by such act puts itself into the class of those who refuse to develop and purify themselves.

We have seen that the globules from the seven spheres were projected in pairs. The members of these pairs keep quite close together through the first two stages,— the mineral and vegetable. Entering upon the third stage—the human—the will of the globule or soul and its passions become more pro­nounced: and these passions separate the mem­bers of each pair, more or less, depending upon the nature of the passions; and sometimes they are apart for thousands of years.

The companion-soul who started with the soul of Alexander the Great, and was his wife in the first three incarnations, has had between six and seven hundred incarnations; and, in four-fifths of these, the two have met. This companion-soul has often occupied the bodies of men. In these incarnations, when the two men have met, they have been friends; and, in some cases, that friendship has been of much value to one or the other of them. In two incarnations, they met for a short time only— in one for a few hours, in the other for a few days; but these meetings neither of the men ever forgot. In some cases, the two have been born far apart, and yet have met — once when half the circumference of the earth divided their birthplaces.

The companion-soul to that of St. Elizabeth was the husband of her first two incarnations, in the latter of which she abandoned his chil­dren before his body was cold. In the third, she did not meet this soul until after she had begun her infamous life. When they did meet, his efforts to save her were pathetic, but una­vailing. In the fourth, he was her father, the gardener; and it was his love for her which drew her to his house — a better place than she deserved or could have entered but for his love. In the fifth, he was the pastor of the church to which she belonged; and it was his teachings which gave her courage to die. In the sixth, he was the baron; in the seventh, the king; in the eighth, the lord to whose death she was a party, and whose children she threw into the stream; and, in the present, her husband again. Thus far, this soul, although it has had hundreds of incarnations, and a wide range of expe­riences, has watched over the soul of St. Eliza­beth and tried to help her in nine of her ten incarnations.

Sometimes a soul who needs not to come voluntarily enters into the limitations of a poor incarnation for the purpose of protecting its companion-soul who desires to incarnate.

The members of these pairs, when originally started, are selected from different spheres; and, at starting, are not of the same size, for the globes that make up the nine hollow spheres decrease in size from the outer to the inner sphere; but the projecting ray absorbs from each, so that when the two globes end in globules and begin their earth-journey, they are of about the same size.

The globes that make up the nine spheres vary greatly. All in the same sphere have the same dominant quality, which may be called the core of the sphere. About this core, in each, are grouped other qualities in such variety and degree as to make its individuality, and differ­entiate it from the other globes in the same sphere. In the process of projection, this core is not absorbed by the ray, but all else is; so that each globule, at starting, is a mass of sub­stance in which inheres a single tendency. In the long journey back, the globule or soul re­ceives from the ray what is lost in projection. On entering the third stage, the will of the soul begins to modify what is received back by what is gained of earthly experience, in such a man­ner that the original combination of qualities is gradually changed, and the dominant quality itself may give place to another which has become more powerful.

These changes which are produced by the freewill of a soul determine that soul’s place when, through all of its journeyings, it returns to the central spheres. A globe who started from the innermost may be obliged to take a place in the outermost; from one place in a sphere find its place on returning in another; and from a portion of the spheres above the plane may take a place on return below the plane. The reverse is true also; globes from the outer are advanced to the inner, and from places below to places above — each soul’s place depending on the amount and quality of what it brings from its career.

The companions, starting together with un­like tendencies, may be of great help to each other in gathering, about the dominant tenden­cy in each, the qualities necessary to complete itself as a many-sided being, or to so trans­form the being that this dominant tendency gives place to a higher one; but as the com­panion has power to help, so has he to hinder, and to lead to the exchange of a higher for a lower dominant tendency. What is true of these companions is true in a less degree of all souls,—each helps or hinders all whom it meets or passes in each incarnation of the long journey.

These dominant tendencies largely deter­mine the frequency of incarnations, and the length of time it takes a soul to finish its earthly career.

Of these tendencies, the most unresting is the passion to know. Souls who are domi­nated by this passion pass from one incarna­tion to another rapidly, seek a wide variety of experience, shrink from attempting nothing which opportunities allow, and finish their incarnations soon.

The next in order of frequency are the souls whose dominant passion is to help. The incar­nations of these do not follow one another so rapidly as those of the first class; but they accomplish more for the soul’s welfare in a given incarnation, and get through as soon. In number of incarnations, souls of these two classes may be as eight to six and yet finish in the same period. This class of souls has the least number of incarnations.

These two are the only dominant tendencies which carry souls through the earth journey quickly. The time is long, as men think of time; but short in comparison with the time which it takes souls of other classes to finish.

Of the other classes, the slowest of all is that of souls whose dominant passion is to enjoy. The period taken by these may be hundreds of times as long as that of the first two classes; and the number of incarnations that are required may extend into the thou­sands.

Souls of the first class generally seek the bodies of men; souls of the second class seem to be indifferent of sex; souls of the last class are found in both kinds of bodies; and souls of all classes change, more or less, from one kind of body to another in successive incarna­tions. Souls of the first two classes seem indifferent to the quality of the incarnation, caring mainly for places which promise oppor­tunities for the exercise of their dominant pas­sions; while souls of the last class seek — but by no means always get — the cradles of the rich.

Throughout the third stage — the stage of human development — souls are largely free to choose their places of birth: the ray indeed draws, but every soul is free to resist. In the fourth stage also, the soul is free, but more sensitive and more likely to obey the guiding influence of the ray. Souls are influenced, in this matter, a good deal by the loves of other souls, as is shown in the case of St. Elizabeth. This does not mean previous family relations; because, aside from the tie of companion souls, most family loves die with the incarnation which gave them birth. When two souls who did not start as companions live a happy wedded life in one incarnation, that love may appear in another as a friendship, or even draw them into the same family as brother and sis­ter; and a strong friendship will act in the same way. As helpful associations in one incarnation draw people to meet in a subse­quent one, so do hurtful.

Souls of the first class more easily cast off vices which they contract on their journey than those of any other class. In two incar­nations, the soul of Alexander the Great cast off all of its flagrant vices; while it would have taken a soul of the last class many incarna­tions of imprisonment, slavery, or similar dis­cipline to cast off those same vices. This is partly owing to the fact that a soul of the first class is more likely to gratify its cravings openly on the physical plane; while those of the last class secrete them, sometimes to the extent of no expression on the physical plane. As an ulcer on an internal, vital organ will more quickly destroy the body than the same ulcer on the external flesh; so these secret vices make more permanent impression on the soul itself, and are more difficult to cast off in subsequent incarnations.

To souls of the first class, the world is in­debted for most of its original research in science and history, its explorations and in­ventions; to those of the second class, its best literature, art, and religious inspiration; and to the last, its luxurious material comforts, for it is this class who creates the demand which applies the products of the first two classes to the enjoyments and amusements of life.

Of souls of the first two classes, there are never many on earth at any one time; while the other classes make up the masses of men in all countries.

CHAPTER III.

WHERE SOULS ARE BETWEEN INCARNATIONS J AND WHAT BECOMES OF SOULS WHO REFUSE TO DEVELOP AND PURIFY THEMSELVES.

As night to day, so is the period between two incarnations to an incarnation; and the effect which night has upon the physical body, has this period upon the soul. As the proper use of the hours of night is sleep, so the proper use of the time between two incarna­tions is rest, in preparation for the activities of the next day, that is, the next incarnation. As men turn night into day in study, in wake­ful anxiety about affairs, in watching by the sick and the troubled, in social amusements and revelries, and in the pursuit of vice and crime—each snatching but a few fitful hours of sleep before dawn—; so may souls spend the time between incarnations. As men enter upon the labors of a day which follows a wake­ful night heavy, stupid and sleepy; so do souls enter upon incarnations which follow such misused rest periods.

When a globule or soul incarnates it forms for itself two bodies, a physical and a non-physical. This is true of the globule or soul throughout the mineral and vegetable stages, as well as throughout the human career; and no globule or soul can reincarnate until divested of both of these bodies. What the physical body is to the physical world, the non-physi­cal body is to that part of the non-physical world which is in close contact with the sur­face of our planet.

An object in the non-physical world may exist in the same space as an object in the physical world, and neither be affected by the other; and a person who can command the use of both the physical and non-physical sight may see both objects at the same time, and be at no loss to distinguish them.

During incarnation, the non-physical body is inside the physical, and more or less closely coincides with it. What men know as death is the withdrawal of this non-physical body; for rarely does a soul divest itself of both bodies at once. A soul encased in its non­physical body emerges into the non-physical world, and for the first time becomes con­scious of that world. This is true of all who have not developed the non-physical senses during life in the outer body. By this laying off the physical body, a soul changes itself in no particular, any more than a man changes himself in removing his outer garments. The soul still possesses the knowledges, affections, opinions, and desires which it had at the time of physical death; and nothing more, save as it is gained through means similar to those used during life in the physical body,—by use of the non-physical senses, either independ­ently or through the experiences of others in the same realm.

The souls of men are a part of the planet until all of their incarnations on earth are ended; and the time which passes between in­carnations is spent on earth as truly as the time of incarnations.

What is true of the death of men, is true of the death of plants and minerals,—death is the withdrawal from the physical of the non-phy­sical bodies. The non-physical bodies of minerals and plants make up the landscape of that part of the non-physical world into which man emerges at death; and all of these ob­jects bear to him the same relations in his non-physical body, as do the physical objects to his physical body before death.

The formation of the non-physical body, in all phases of the soul’s life, is alike in essen­tial features, the difference being in degree— the non-physical bodies in each stage of growth following closely the analogies hinted by the physical forms of that stage.

At birth, a baby has both kinds of bodies; and if the baby dies, the non-physical is drawn free from the physical, as a surgeon may peel the delicate, connective tissue from a bundle of muscular fiber. Both bodies are at birth the product of the parent life, and repre­sent the matrix from which they came; and both bodies grow according to the conditions of their environment. Whatever be the soul attached to these bodies, it cannot entirely overcome the conditions of birth and early opportunity. A strong soul, fully awake, makes efforts to shape and develop the grow­ing bodies to serve its needs; but the results of these efforts are largely dependent on the amount and quality of the materials furnished. Undeveloped souls, and souls half or wholly asleep are at the mercy of the conditions of birth and of such opportunities for the growth and development of both bodies as are pro­vided by the parents and environment.

Each of the two bodies is an aggregate of particles which are held together by the bind­ing power of the soul, who is the source of the cohesion and unification of these particles into one vitalized whole. The particles of the phys­ical are grosser than those of the non-physical, and are replenished by different forces.

The physical body grows by means of food and motion; the non-physical, by means of ideas and mental activity. Thought draws from the non-physical world the particles needed to replenish the non-physical body, as physical substances are taken to replace the waste of physical particles. As the growth of the physical body depends first on the body of the mother, and later on the amount and qual­ity of the food and exercise taken; so the growth of the non-physical body depends first on the thoughts of the parents, and later on those which the soul itself encourages and in­dulges.

As the physical body may become diseased, deformed, prematurely old, or stiff and rigid by improper food and physical habits; so the non-physical body is in all particulars an effect of the thoughts and mental sensations habitually pursued by the soul. As the time comes when the physical body may be healed, changed, or restored to suppleness and strength with difficulty and by prolonged efforts only; so the non-physical body may become diffi­cult to change or restore. Both bodies may pass beyond the control of the soul; and as the physical body by over-indulgence becomes a tyrant, so does the non-physical. The two bodies do not necessarily follow one another in development and condition. A man may be an ascetic in the physical body, and a glutton in the non-physical; healthy, sound, and clean in the former, and diseased, broken, and foul in the latter. Moreover, a man may have a large and fine physical frame, and a small and deformed non-physical -frame.

These two bodies make up the personality of a soul in any given incarnation; and are, for the most part, all that men know of one another. Rarely does a man show his soul, even to his friends; and human beings may pass long lives in one another’s company with­out penetrating in each beyond the non-phys­ical body or mind. This is why so many doubt the existence of anything more than mind; and the materialist says truly that mind perishes, for one of these bodies is as perish­able as the other.

Although equally perishable, both bodies do not often die at the same time. Many a man dies to the physical world while his thoughts and mental sensations about all mat­ters connected with that world are as vigorous as ever, and capable of going on for many years; and such do go on. The conditions of activity in the non-physical world are such that a vigorous non-physical body may con­tinue to exist hundreds of years after the death of the physical body; and, for a portion of that time, the soul is fastened to that non­physical body as truly as to the physical before physical death; and no soul can enter upon the legitimate sleep of its night until freed from that non-physical body. The non-phys­ical, as the physical, dies only when the forces within it are exhausted or withdrawn; for every cause proceeds to its proper and ultimate effect.

As a tree, cut down in spring, when full of sap, will, if not otherwise mutilated, go on growing and giving forth some leaves during the summer; so the body of a man may, after being abandoned by a soul, go on for some time by means of the vitality which is stored up within its cells. Such cases of abandon­ment in the physical world are not common, but they occur; and, in some cases, the body so abandoned goes on performing the common functions of physical and non-physical life for several years. Death to such an one is the withdrawal of the non-physical body; and that soulless non-physical body continues to exist in the non-physical world until its stored vitality is exhausted. In the non-physical world cases of abandonment are common; and the greater power of the non-physical body to store vitality makes these soulless non-phys­ical bodies go on, often for long periods.

There are many reasons why a soul may de­sire to abandon its bodies. Egotism and dogmatism in thought harden the non-phys­ical body rapidly; and such hardening, espe­cially if it take place early, makes an abode which may be as suffocating to a soul as tight clothing is to the physical body. Vice, cruelty, and hypocrisy make conditions in the non­physical body which may be as offensive to a soul’s senses as is putrefaction to the physical senses. But a soul may not always leave when it desires to; and, during the later years of an incarnation, a soul may find itself as a man would be if chained to an automaton, and forced to keep it going, no matter how intol­erable its conduct. Souls, or the parents of their bodies, are responsible for the commence­ment of such conditions; but a soul is some­times as blind to the tendencies it encourages as are the mere personalities of men. A per­sonality that at first may have been mobile and responsive to each movement of the soul may become the master, and rush headlong into conditions which the soul never dreamed of The object of an incarnation is not the development of a personality, nor its enjoy­ments, but the growth of a soul; and a soul wakes up to this fact sometimes too late to make amends for its lost opportunities. Also, a soul may continue to be blind or indolent to its own needs, and the personality go on growing and fattening on the vitality of the soul until physical death releases the strong mind into the non-physical world; and when the soul finally escapes from that mind, it may have lost all, or nearly all, it had gained in many incarnations, and be obliged at the next incarnation to begin again at a lower stage of development. Sometimes this retrogression goes on through successive incarnations, until the soul has lost the attributes which gave it human rights; and while still capable of return to human bodies, is forced temporarily to incarnate in the body of a beast; and there may be several such incarnations before the soul is able to incarnate again in the upward current of development.

The non-physical portion of our planet extends from the outer layers of the air to a considerable depth within the earth. In this region, the non-physical world is modified in such a manner that it is to the physical earth and atmosphere what the non-physical body of man is to the physical. This region is divided into zones, some of which are sharply defined.

That portion of this region which is in the atmosphere is divided into four zones of about equal depth. The lowest of these zones is largely a reproduction, in non-physical parti­cles, of the physical conditions which exist in the same space, with some of the same sorts of differences in all phases as are found between the physical and non-physical bodies of men. In the second zone, there is nothing but a few objects on its lower surface, where it rests upon the upper layers of the first zone. The third zone is different. It is a sphere which encloses the earth at one-half the depth of the air from its surface, is about one-fourth of the air in thickness, and separated from the first zone by a space as wide as itself, mostly empty of objects, and filled with a medium rarer than that of the first zone.

The third zone is—to eyes fresh from the sights on the physical earth and in the first zone of the non-physical—a land of surprises. There are mountains and valleys, forests and meadows, flowers and fruits, and a sky and clouds of changing tints and forms; for there are the souls of minerals, plants, and all things upon the surface of the physical earth which have cast both bodies, and been able to rise to that height. There is soul only; but soul is substance, and all objects there are as substan­tial and real to the soul, as is the physical world to the man in a physical body.

Passing from the surface of the earth down­wards, in the second zone of that part of the non-physical world which is within the body of the earth, is a series of caverns. These caverns are connected by winding passages, and descend ever deeper and deeper. In these caverns and passages are objects and conditions for which the author’s experiences on the physical plane furnish but few and poor analogies.

When a soul has used an incarnation for soul purposes mainly, it feels, as death approaches, the ray drawing it upward; and obeying an impulse from within—of which it is often unconscious—it gradually loosens its affections from material objects and from per­sons. By this process, the soul draws, little by little, the vitality from both of its bodies. When the vitality is all withdrawn from the physical body, the soul leaves that; and, entering the first zone of the non-physical, a few hours, days, or weeks later it withdraws from the non-physical body, and rises through the . first two zones to the third, where it re­mains until ready for another incarnation. The non-physical body which is left by such a soul may continue to move about stupidly for a few days, or it may not. In either case, it soon falls and begins to decay. These non­physical bodies may be seen on the floor of the first zone in all stages of decay, as are the bodies of marine animals on the ocean floor, and the process of their decay is similar.

Souls of such as have lived a fairly good life, but whose desires cling strongly to material possessions or family loves take a much longer time to free themselves from the second body; and it often requires much faith and courage to make the effort. The time depends a good deal upon the conditions of thought and feeling of those persons, still alive in physical bodies, in whom the given soul is most interested. These souls make efforts to assist one another, to make whole­some and comfortable conditions for one another, in all sorts of ways, similar to those used in the physical world. Not finding, on leaving the physical body, any such conditions as the heaven. which they have heard of and perhaps believed in; but, on the contrary, what seems more like a hell; and being met by relatives or friends who had died, perhaps many years before, and who assure them there is nothing better, for having wandered about a good deal worse places only have been seen,—these often settle down to their fate, and make the best of it. But the con­viction usually remains that there ought to be something better; and when the forces in the non-physical body are at such a point that it may be cast off, and the soul within is sufficiently purified from grossness to be able to rise, there is sure to be someone to show how to cast the second body — sometimes a painful process — and to lead the way to the third zone.

With those who, during incarnation, have ignored the existence or needs of the soul, or committed gross crimes, or lived a life of studied hypocrisy, the experiences and results are different. If the personality of one of these be weak, the non-physical body is soon cast; but the soul, incapable of rising because of its grossness, and finding the presence of souls unlike itself disagreeable, descends to the caverns, seeks its own kind, and among them, at whatever depth, it stays until the time for reincarnation comes. If the person­ality be strong, the soul remains in the first zone, tries by every means in its power to prolong the life of its non-physical body, and spends the time in ways agreeable to itself. These ways might astonish men if the forces at work within these souls and their personali­ties were not known.

Men and women who have persisted in believing that there is’ no such things as soul, that the physical brain is all, and the physical molecule the beginning and end of existence are likely, on withdrawing from the physical body, to be at first much astonished. Then, finding no heaven and no angels, such as they had ignored and scoffed at while alive in the physical body; and reasoning as they did before physical death that what they see is all, —these frequently exhibit what seems a trans­formation of character. The respectable savant of the physical world may give himself in the non-physical world to the grossest crimes against those in the same zone with himself: and seek by malicious, mischievous, and cruel trickery to annoy and hinder men still living in bodies of flesh; and to dissuade them, not only from holy aspirations and deeds of good­ness, but from efforts of any sort beyond the enjoyment of sensual, material passions. The first zone of the non-physical earth rests on the physical surface of the planet; and beings like these are, in the streets of cities, about as common as men. Many a good resolution, many a kindly impulse, many a noble purpose is set aside or thwarted by the influence of these beings; and the stronger the personal­ity before physical death, the longer they live, and the more harm they do in the non-physi­cal realm. The end of each one of them is to part at last from the non-physical body, and descend to the caverns.

What is true of the materialistic savant is true of the religious and charitable hypocrite; and, in varying degrees, of all misguided, sel­fish, cruel, and criminal men, women, and chil­dren. Children do not all go to the third zone any more than do adults. If a soul came from the caverns below into incarnation, the fact of having passed a few years attached to a grow­ing child neither fits the soul, nor gives it the right to go to the third zone. The souls of young children, for the most part, return to the places whence they came. The variations from this are occasioned by the strong love of a good soul who may have become interested in the child; but such love can give only, to the child’s soul, a more comfortable place, or a shorter stay in the caverns, or a better oppor­tunity at the next rebirth.

The time passes with these souls in the cav­erns much as it might to a sleeping man hav­ing a more or less vivid and continuous night­mare; and this condition lasts from a few months to thousands of years—the time in each case depending on the desires and conditions of the soul. Above, in the third zone, the time passes either in dreamless sleep or in activities devised to pass the time until suitable places of rebirth can be obtained. In the third zone and in the caverns, are souls only, and to all in both is the end the same,—a return to incarna­tion in physical bodies. These days of incar­nation will follow these nights in the non-phy­sical realms until developed, purified, and its debts paid, a soul may go beyond our planet; or having refused to develop, purify, or pay debts a soul has entered that company whose characteristics must now be given.

A soul who refuses opportunity and follows its own selfish devices is led by its ray from place to place, and incarnation to incarnation with care to give it fresh impulses toward good —led as much as is possible to the freedom of the soul itself; and when that freedom over­powers the drawing influence, good associa­tions are led to the soul by other rays. Over and over and over again the soul is tried, until it has thrust out of itself all that it has received from its ray, including the dominant passion with which the globule started. These por­tions of the original globe from the nine spheres, as the man thrusts them from him in successive incarnations, are gathered up and absorbed by the ray. When a man has expelled the last part of that original globe, he is no longer conscious of the ray. But the man has still a soul; for this loss cannot occur in the early stages of human development. At each incar­nation, the soul adds to itself and to what is received from the ray something gathered from its experiences. These additions remain and constitute a soul; and the farther along in its career the final loss occurs, and the greater the number of incarnations which the soul has had, the stronger is this soul who no longer pos­sesses anything of the ray. Because such a soul is its own and only guide, it is called a lost soul. As a strong non-physical body has more power of vitality stored up within it than has a strong physical body; so a lost soul has much more power of vitality and of prolonging its existence than has a strong non-physical body. Moreover, a lost soul can reincarnate.

By means of its developed will and its associa­tion with the ray, it has gained some of the power of the ray itself.

Lost souls, in the time between incarnations, for the most part, constitute themselves the rulers and guardians of the caverns, not because any higher power gives them such positions, but because they are the strongest souls there. A soul however evil, who still pos­sesses portions of its ray, is no match for one of these; for in the caverns, character is reversed,—good qualities are weak, and bad ones strong. No soul is detained in the caverns beyond the time when it begins to desire help from its ray. Such desire makes its presence intolerable to the lost souls; so it is thrust out, and is free to in­carnate again.

For a time, the length of which depends on the strength and qualities of the lost soul, it may incarnate in human bodies. Compared to the whole number of souls incarnate upon earth at any one time, lost souls incarnate in human bodies are few; but they exist, and the fact ex­plains some of the phenomenal monsters and atrocities of history; for these lost souls force themselves into great places whenever they can. This depends on parents themselves; lust and cruelty open the door to their own kind in every social rank. When no longer able to incarnate in human bodies, these lost souls resort to beasts: at each step something is lost, and the end is utter extinction.

As these lost souls go downward, they mod­ify the forms and natures of men and animals to accord with their own attributes. Thus have they done from the beginning: and men who live on earth today are harassed and hindered by their products; for it is these lost souls who have produced all types of savage men and the whole monstrous progeny of the animal world. [See Appendix III.]

The upward current alone is the creation of the globules and the rays: the downward is the product of men; and when men shall cease to produce the objects in the downward current, it will cease to exist.

The ray who belonged to a lost soul fol­lows it through its downward career. If at any point in that career, even when in the body of the most loathsome creature, the lost soul feels a movement of desire to become true to the laws of that phase of life where it is, that desire opens again the possibility of receiving from the ray. The ray responds, gives of itself; and if the desire continue, the lost soul may return once more into the upward current. Not until a lost soul is utterly extinct does the ray return to its source.

THE RELATIONS OF SOULS TO THEIR BODIES.

That relation which the physical body bears to the mind, the mind or non-physical body bears to the soul. As there is a limit to phys­ical growth, so is there to non-physical; but the limit to the non-physical varies within much wider degrees than does that of physical growth. When physical growth is attained, effort is no longer directed to increase of size, but to such training as gives skill and power of endurance; so in the development of mind as an instrument for the soul, when the limit of capacity is reached, its training should fol­low the analogy set by the physical body.

As the physical body need kernels and not husks for its nourishment, so does the mind need realities and not symbols; and as bread eaten today may not be re-eaten tomorrow, so a reality which set vital forces building the non-physical body this week cannot set those forces at work next week. New realities are as essential to the growth and development of the mind as fresh food to those of the body.

As the body needs more food and more activity during the process of growth, and thereafter only what is needed to replenish waste and keep it supple; so the mind needs more realities and more incessant activities during the period of growth than afterward. As all physical activities are kept up only by a constant breaking down and elimination of old molecules, and a constant ingestion and build­ing up of new, so are all non-physical activi­ties; and as in all physical foods there is waste, so is there in all forms of learning. As the body throws out those portions of the ingested food which it cannot digest and assimilate, and all those dead portions whose vitality has been exhausted by use; so should the mind expel the waste in its food, and the dead mat­ter accruing from its activities. The mind or non-physical body should be allowed to do this throwing out as freely and spontaneously as does the physical body; and it would do it if our methods of education were wholesome and natural.

As different physical bodies vary in regard to kinds of food most nourishing and kinds most nauseating, so do minds; and as the same physical body varies in this matter from youth to age, so does the same mind. To force upon all minds the same education, or to force the same mind to be consistent with itself from youth to age is to force deformity, disease, atrophy, and death upon the mind.

To repress elimination of waste physical matter is to bring disease and speedy death to the physical body; to repress the same process in the mind is to force upon it congestion, hardening, and practical death. When the mind ceases to be a responsive instrument for soul activities, it ceases to be useful, and life is a burden to the soul. Instead of being forced to remember and to repeat over and over to fasten in memory, a child should be allowed to forget. When a child’s slate is full, he can write no more on it without erasure. If he attempts to write over what has already filled it, and then to read both, his sight is strained. A child’s mind is such a slate; and when a par­ent or teacher forces the writing over, he does as much harm to the child’s mental sight as the other process would to his physical. The child’s mind develops until its limit of capac­ity is reached; but only the child himself knows its capacity at any given stage of growth. The child’s mind should be left free to keep or to reject any fact, as it pleases; trusting his mind just as his body is trusted to digest and retain what is nourishing, and to retain such facts so long only as the mind has use for them.

As the body needs-to be kept vigorous by food and exercise, so should the mind be renewed and kept vigorous by study and men­tal activity. Provisions for systematic study should be as carefully provided, and as regu­larly taken, as the materials for the daily meals of the physical body. No human being is exempt from the need of the one sort of provision any more than of the other, nor at any age.

As the development and subsequent care of both bodies is meaningless unless the soul grows thereby, it is desirable to try to get a clear idea of the soul’s relations to these phys­ical and non-physical activities.

The will of a man is to his soul what the heart is to the physical body. Whatever weakens and exhausts the will of a man tends to the destruction of his soul; and through such indulgences as weaken the will, a man often loses in one incarnation what he has gained in another. If this weakening or exhausting of the will force goes on through successive incarnations, the soul may go to pieces altogether, becoming extinct through failure of will power. Herein is one meaning of suffering,—the power which it has to stim­ulate and discipline the will. When one per­son takes from another the legitimate labors and responsibilities to which that other was born, or has brought upon himself, he does that other irreparable harm; and if he forces upon another such labors and responsibilities as legitimately belong to himself, he does his own soul that harm.

A soul knows and remembers its past. As a man may possess a large circle of cultivated land but live on the extreme limit of its cir­cumference, and there content himself without ever going either around his land or across it; so a soul may become so absorbed in its pres­ent personality as to pass an incarnation with­out taking any note of its past attainments. Also, it may plant and nourish in that new field what already grows luxuriantly in some other; and knowledge which it craves and cannot obtain in its age or environment may be stored away in its own interior.

The sudden waking up of a man to the com­prehension of some new body of knowledge is often but the penetration of consciousness to some interior soul memory; and the exterior contact with that body of knowledge has been the stimulus which has awakened that mem­ory. The thread of that soul memory may, if followed, lead the man to much more than any of his generation have yet gained in that line; and applying that gain to the affairs or con­ditions of the age in which he lives, he may be able to carry that line of knowledge a little farther than it has ever been carried in any previous age. Unless rediscoveries are so car­ried forward to new acquisitions they are, however useful to the generation which redis­covers them, no actual gain to humanity as a whole, nor to the soul who contents itself with rediscovery.

In the activities of these soul memories, largely lies the power of quick or slow appre­ciation of new truths or new reforms. A man who is slow to grasp a new idea is either shut from his own soul’s past, or never before, in any incarnation, has his soul come in contact with that idea. In the former case, a man’s waking up to the new idea is apt to be sudden; in the latter, a slow and laborious process. No man or generation of men creates a new body of knowledge; to increase a little what souls bring with them from past incarnations is all that any age accomplishes.

As every soul brings to each incarnation all of its past, one object of education should be the unlocking of those possessions to con­sciousness; and for this purpose, the wider the variety of studies and experiences, the more complete the unlocking may be. Espec­ially, should a child be tried with one subject after another until one is found which he takes to with avidity, and remembers the details of without effort. This study or occupation should be made the center around which his others revolve until he is ready to attempt new fields; and these he should have full opportu­nities to attempt at any step, and urging if need be to make him begin the attempt.

That a youth takes easily to any given line of study or occupation may be the strongest reason why he should not follow that line through life. Success, ease, competence,— these are of no value to the soul, and no test of a soul’s greatness. Let a man try to do what is difficult, and keep at it through any amount of disappointment; and whether he finally succeed before men or not, to his soul his life will not have been thrown away, as it may be if he follow the line of least resistance.

Opportunity is given to the soul and for the soul; and to hand that opportunity over to the exclusive use of its bodies—physical body and mind—is as great a proof of soul insanity as it would be of mental insanity, for a man to spend all of his opportunity on changes of raiment for the physical body, without provid­ing for it food or any other necessity.

As the more sensitive and responsive to all stimulus the body and mind are the more advantage to the soul; so repression of thought and emotion are as baleful as repression of physical activity. Self control may produce callousness, and independence of thought atro­phy. Much that passes for self control is lack of soul, that is of sensitiveness on a high plane; and much that passes for independence is the obstinate resistance of the personality of a man to the monitions of his soul.

If, in a man’s education, thirty years could be given to the physical body — the first twenty to growth and the other ten to training—; if another thirty to the mind — from ten to thirty to growth, and from thirty to forty to train­ing—; and another thirty to the soul — from twenty to forty to unlocking its past, and from forty to fifty to the application of that past to the knowledges and affairs of the pres­ent generation,—a man at fifty would be ready to enter into public life with some assurance of being valuable to his own soul and to other men.

At fifty, a man should have fifty years of active life left; and he would have if his life were simple and natural from the beginning. Trained in the manner indicated above, a man at fifty might select that field of activity which promises to give his mind and body as great a strain as they can bear; and there concentrate his powers until, in that field, his soul can get no more power, and no new growth in quali­ties. When that field is exhausted, he might try another and another, until body and mind fail in vigor, and the soul desires rest.

When that time comes, the man should obey the call of his soul to cease work and get ready to depart. The getting ready is important. His public labors and responsibilities, and his private cares should be transferred to others. Then, he should concentrate the time and strength remaining to him on an effort to with­draw thought and feeling from all phases of material life, and to focus them on the im­material. By such effort, he might withdraw the vitality from both of his bodies; so that the death of the physical body would be soon followed by the death of the non­physical; and neither his soul nor that of any other man suffer by his detention in the first zone of the non-physical realm of earth. Passing to the third zone, such a soul would be ready at once to enter upon that sleep and rest which are necessary to begin with advantage a new incarnation.

As to spend a day with special reference to a night, and to direct all of its activities to a preparation for sleep is unnecessary to a man in fair health; so is it unnecessary to spend an incarnation in preparation for the third zone, or in dread of the caverns. The hope of reward and the fear of punishment are as per­nicious to the healthy growth of a man’s soul as they are ignoble and unsafe motives for the regulation of his conduct in dealing with his fellow men. And as to keep waking up loved ones to ask them questions about their dreams, to be assured of their continued love, or to try to get advice from them as to one’s own affairs or conduct, would be hurtful to them; so is it hurtful to the physically dead to try to com­municate with them.

How far the education of youth, and the subsequent lives of men differ from what is suggested above, most men can judge; but he only who has penetrated the non-physical and soul realms can know the extent and quality of the results which are produced by the pres­ent modes of educating and living.

All forms of physical filth have their non­physical representatives. Unclean and gross foods, and filthy physical appetites of all sorts make conditions on the lower surface of the first zone of the non-physical, which may be compared to the mud and slime which gather in stagnant ponds. Every city is, non-physi­cally, such a pond; and no dweller in a city, however clean and wholesome his own physi­cal life, can escape contact with this non-physi­cal mud and slime. The amount of this non­physical filth which a person produces is in inverse ratio to the purity, simplicity and temperance with which he satisfies his own physical appetites. In a similar manner, the thoughts of men affect the non-physical realm; but the effects from them are less ponderable and form clouds which float in the first zone as physical clouds do in the atmosphere.

These clouds — their formation, condensa­tion, precipitation, and dispersion—offer a study as painful as it is curious and interesting. The greater the power of thought and action which a man has, and the wider the field of his activities, the larger the clouds which he pro­duces, and the farther they spread. Some of these clouds are as lovely in form and color, and as cleansing and refreshing when precipi­tated as are the physical clouds which float in June skies. The first non-physical zone of this planet has, at present, few of that sort. Most of the clouds are dark and murky, and precipitate sleet, and hail which is hard and cuts like steel, and acid rain which eats away the lives of men. As the physical body Walks through mud, is drenched by rain, buffetted by winds, and chapped and cut by cold and sleet: so the precipitations of non-physi­cal clouds fall upon the non-physical bodies of men; and no living man, woman, or child on the surface of the physical earth or on the floor of the first zone of the non-physical earth can escape them. As physical clouds are formed over oceans, carried by winds over the earth, and beat in fierce storms against such mountain ranges as oppose their progress; so the present dark non-physical clouds are formed over cities, distributed over the earth, and strive with greatest fierceness to overcome the few currents and clouds which the good in thought produce.

The activities of minds produce vapors, gases, and smoke in the non-physical realm; but those of souls produce the heat and cold, light and darkness of that realm. The heat which some souls send forth is enervating and destructive, while that of others is as refresh­ing and vitalizing as the spring sunlight.

There are few souls on earth today in phys­ical bodies who shine. In regions where men congregate in appreciable numbers, the dark­ness is so great that one who sees by the non­physical sight alone must grope his way about. A few souls shine in this darkness as stars in the depths of night. Many a soul who is capable of shining is, today, covering and hiding its light; and the longer a soul light is hidden, the smaller it grows. Going from city to city in the non-physical realm of earth, the darkness became painfully oppressive. There were so few souls shining that they made scarely any impression; but if each hid­den light were uncovered, the darkness would be less and life become easier to all men. The power of any soul to shine depends upon the amount of ray it has conscious possession of.

The power of a clean, sincere soul to do good by its presence is great. In an obscure street in Philadelphia is a poor woman, who toils for her daily bread, whose soul is so radi­ant that its light extends beyond her physical body and makes a large ellipsoid about that body, narrowest at her feet, widest about her head. A few years ago, there walked the streets of Boston a clergyman whose soul shone in the same way. When that soul bade farewell to its friends in the flesh, it left at once both of its bodies; and, without so much delay as to know that there is a non-physical body or a first zone in the non-physical earth, this soul, while asleep, was carried to the third zone in the arms of those who loved it.

The physical world is the world of illusions; the non-physical is the world of realities in matter. In the physical, forms are fixed ac­cording to certain types, and the variations in those types are slight in comparison to the variations in the non-physical. In the first zone of the non-physical earth, objects are mobile and responsive to thought. In that zone, thought and combinations of thought take such forms as are the inevitable expression of the thought.

When a man at physical death emerges into the non-physical realm, he may, for a short time, preserve in his non-physical body the shape of the physical which he has left, be­cause he thinks of himself as having that form; but, try as hard as he may, that non­physical body soon takes on the form and conditions which express the dominant quali­ties of his thought during life in the physical body. A few instances will illustrate what actually occurs.

A man six feet tall and fairly proportioned, who during life in the physical body claimed the friendship of a few of the world-famed great, when seen a few months after death had a tall frame. About a year later, he had arms and legs shrunken to about the size of a dog’s legs; and the body, shrunken but still large, was carried on all fours; and the head had become of the shape one might imagine a cross between a dog and an alligator to produce; and the huge jaws were stretched in vain to make a sound of any sort. The soul of the man was encased in this hideous non-physical body, and readily recognized the writer. Two years later, this soul was seen near the fifth descent in the caverns; and the non-physical body which it had lately left was roaming about the first zone, a huge, lean, hungry alligator-dog, which preyed like a vampire on the vitality of any man to whom it could get access.

Another, a woman of wealth, social position, and much pride, about three months after death, was seen in a dreary place, carrying a wrinkled, shriveled body of the size of a child two years old. She was accom­panied by a daughter whose form had changed but slightly, and who looked at her mother sorrowfully; and by a cousin who had the form of a small, ugly cat with ragged fur. These three non-physical bodies contained the souls of their owners.

A child of fourteen, who had been much in­dulged by her mother, had a badly misshapen body and the face of an idiot. A year later, the author saw the soul of this girl soon after it had escaped from that non-physical body and entered the third zone. The soul was sym­metrical, lovely, clean; and the mother was largely responsible for the encasing of that soul in such a deformed non-physical body, and entailing on it the misery of remaining in the first zone almost three years before it could get rid of that body and rise to the third zone.

The disillusions which await men at physi­cal death seem to the author utterly beyond the power of belief or of the imaginations of men while still alive in physical bodies. Not all are so grossly deformed, but many are worse,, and few entirely escape. On the other hand, a very few have more beautiful and sym­metrical non-physical bodies than physical; and this may be true as a whole when some member of the body is deformed or even wanting.

Souls too are deformed. Life in the third zone is like a pleasant dream compared to our physical life, but no perfection is there. Souls are stunted, misshapen, deformed, blind, and deaf who still have been capable of rising to the third zone; and the forms of souls in the caverns may be left to the imagination of the reader.

As there is no perfection of form in the third zone, so is there none of knowledge or emotion. A soul knows what it has gathered in its incarnations, and very little or nothing more; and since its business in the third zone is to sleep, it is rarely conscious of anything beyond its last incarnation. The time between incarnations, however long it be, is spent, either in sleep and recreation, or in such activ­ities as purify; and not in new growth in any direction.

The mind and physical body of man are his channels of soul growth; and the soul has no power to seek other channels, or these chan­nels on other planets, or any channels beyond our earth until he has exhausted the capacities of those provided here. Hence, the soul is sent to school in one sort of body and envi­ronment in one incarnation, and in another sort in another incarnation; and all sorts are of equal value to any soul who sets itself patiently and honestly to learning the lessons that sort has to teach. To look enviously or disdainfully at his fellow man is to imagine that he himself ought to have or that his fel­low man does not deserve the same kind of lessons which he has himself.

CHAPTER V.

THE VIRTUES OF SOULS.

The weaknesses of men have produced most of the conditions against which they chafe. Apart from human governments, the checks on the wills of men are few and slight. These checks aside, each may do whatever he has the energy and capacity to do; and the quantity and quality of the energy and capacity which any one possesses are the result of the use his soul has made of its own past.

Each man is a part of the whole body of men on earth; and it is the collective wills of the whole which have made the environments in which each lives today. Each soul, in its past incarnations, has had a share in making these environments what they are today; and each soul, today, is helping to make the envir­onments in which itself and other souls will be born in subsequent incarnations. When a man sinks in weakness of will or despair under his present environment, let him remember that the difficulties which he has failed to overcome are what he himself probably made strong efforts to force on men when, in a former incarnation, he was at the top. When a man glories in his strength today, and des­pises the weaknesses of other men, let him ask himself if there is an environment on earth which would crush his will or destroy his vir­tue.

The physical and non-physical portions of our planet act and react on each other, and whatever exists in the non-physical realm ulti­mately finds expression on the physical plane. This is true of soul also. Every soul receives from and is modified by both of its bodies; and also does every soul affect both of its bodies. Many of the physical and mental defects and deformities, and some of the diseases of men are the exterior expression of defects in their souls.

As each soul individually affects and modi­fies its own bodies, so does soul collectively affect and modify the non-physical and phys­ical conditions of the planet, even to electric and climatic changes. The changes in nature which depend upon men are necessarily slow because they are made by man as a whole; and each man helps or hinders any given change in exact proportion to the strength of his soul and the purity of his motives. Every good man lifts and helps all conditions in nature and all phases of life which are below him, and every evil man repels and hinders them.

What is true of the physical environments and conditions which a man can see is true also of the non-physical environments and conditions which a man cannot cognize with his physical senses. Each soul is, today, mak­ing a personality the vitality of which it may quickly absorb and carry with itself to the third zone or to the caverns; or a personality that will exist in the first zone to the deten­tion and hurt of itself and to the harm of other souls.

Men and women physically alive today are not beset nor victimized by the evil personali­ties in the first zone, nor by the lost souls from the caverns, save by their own permission. As a man’s inclinations lead Him to good or evil influences in the physical realm, so do his thoughts draw to him good or evil influences from the non-physical realm. To a foul soul the presence of purity is as irritating as foul­ness is to the clean: but none are wholly clean; there are all grades of foulness; and each does what it can to sap the strength and foul the purity of every man, woman, and child to whom it can get access. The things which men do which seem slight in their eyes are often the opening of the door to these sap­pers; and the door, if not shut, is sure to grow wider, and sappers of worse degree to take the places of the earlier ones. In allowing a child evil associates, he is put in danger of worse influences than his physical companions exert; because the non-physical companions whom he may pick up, and through his thoughts allow to follow him, may enter the recesses of his own home, particularly if that home be not over strong in good influences.

As men have made and are making their environments, so they have made and are making their joys and sorrows. Two-thirds of all the babies that are born in civilized lands today have no souls attached to them. These babies are emanations from their par­ents, not true entities; and, unless a soul at­taches itself, no ordinary efforts can carry one of them to the twentieth year. [See Appen­dix V’.] Souls do attach themselves to babies after birth, sometimes so late as the third year. On the other hand, babies who have souls at birth, sometimes lose them be­cause the soul finds a better place or is drawn away by a stronger influence; but such leav­ing rarely occurs after the third year. Souls who attach themselves late and who leave a baby after birth are usually old, conscious souls who are trying to get the best opportun­ities for their own special needs.

Souls in the stage of purification who re­member neglect or worse crimes toward their children in former incarnations have strong desire to give birth to the same souls again, in order to atone by the greatest possible care for them under the new conditions. If pos­sible, this desire is gratified. Such babies are usually greatly loved, the soul of the father or mother knowing the soul of the child, al­though unable to impress that knowledge on the personality. But the soul of the child has its own needs, and tarries so long only as is necessary to satisfy the parent soul’s desire to pay the debt. The death of these babies usually causes great grief to one or both par­ents; for, although the debt is amply paid by the motive in the parent’s soul and by the effort made, it is hard for the parent soul to accept the fact, and still harder for the personality to give up the hopes which had centered in the child. The soul who comes in this manner, turning aside from its own path, or breaking ‘its rest in the third zone to satisfy the parent’s desire, is more than recompensed by the love which it receives, and which follows it after it has withdrawn from the short incarnation; for a sincere love is the most powerful aid one soul can receive from another.

Souls who have finished their education on this planet; and have, among the souls who are obliged to incarnate, no friends who need them, sometimes incarnate with the hope of helping men at large. The soul of William of Orange has recently returned in this manner, and is now in the body of a boy, four years old, in the State of Connecticut. Other such souls will come as soon as they/can find favorable places of birth. The impure habits of men, their diseased bodies, and the small likelihood of such life and training through childhood as will insure a strong physique are the barriers which keep these great souls waiting in the third zone.

Souls who do not need to incarnate may’ come when they please and go when they choose to go; but all others have the length of their stay defined within certain limits, and no influence within a man or without him can extend that limit. No man or woman need grieve or feel remorse for the time of another’s death; but every man and woman should feel remorse and shame at the manner of death which the present habits of living force upon all men. The deaths of children and youths should be as painless as the withering of flowers on their stalks; and all death, in young and old, should be gradual, free from suffer­ing, and free from all that is loathsome. And such death will be when men have risen above being cannibals in their food, and lovers of night in their pleasures; ceased to breathe the hot, foul air of dwellings; and have decided to entertain the notions that activity is better than idleness, and that activity which minis­ters to mind and soul is more noble than activ­ity which ministers t6 the physical body. When all are sufficiently active to insure health, none will be overworked; when the mind is rated above physical luxury, there will be room in commercial circles for every man to earn all he needs for the sustenance of himself and his family; when soul is recog­nized as possessing nothing but what it can carry from one incarnation to another, men will cease to care to pile up great properties and put their powers to nobler uses; when souls get old enough so that each, whatever the present sex of its physical body, appreciates the honor and dignity of personal, independent support, and not only sustains itself but earns the right to share in great public enterprises, then will souls begin to uplift and to advance, and not to abase and to hinder one another.

All of this is afar off: what each man and woman needs today is not to dream of Uto­pias, not to be concerned about the saving of a soul, but to get possession of a soul who is worth the saving.

The first need of every soul is strength — soul strength. Most souls today are giving up what strength they possess to their person­alities— physical body and mind — and souls pass from the personalities of today, weaker, and not stronger, for all the wear and tear of this nineteenth-century life.

Soul-strength comes from the free exercise of one’s own will, and not from the following of the will of some other soul. When a soul allows another to dominate its life in private or public, and to decide its conduct, it gives up its own will and begins the process of soul-sui­cide. When a soul looks to its neighbor or to a member of its own family for a standard of conduct, it is more liable to seize upon a meas­ure set by some child of a dozen incarnations than one set by some old soul wise through the experiences of hundreds of incarnations; for at present these old souls are a minority. To measure one’s self by a child, hundreds of incarnations behind one, is certainly folly which degrades the soul: on the other hand, to set an old soul, hundreds of incarnations ahead, as one’s model may bring failure, despair, and a waste of the possibilities of what one’s self can do honorably and well. Yet to look at ‘an old soul and desire to emulate it, at least in moral excellence, is one of the noblest in­centives a soul can have.

Not in conduct alone, but in thought should the freewill be exercised. Men carry about ready-made opinions as jauntily as ready-made fashions; and the former are often as senseless and silly as the latter. It is the sophistries of life, and the unthinking manner in which they are accepted, which hurt souls. While old souls are a minority, a goodly number are in their prime, and many are just entering man­hood. It is time that these roused themselves; shook off the slumber of idleness, dreams and sophistries; and began to show what stuff they are made of.

As soul-strength comes by the free exercise of the will, the more exercise the better. Desire is passive; it has not and cannot do anything for a soul but to deceive it into the notion that intention can take the place of action. No intention, no emotion, no move­ment of feeling or desire of any sort has one feather’s weight in the balance in which souls are weighed. By action does the soul grow, by action is gained the strength which holds it together.

Let each soul do its own work, in its own way, and refrain from other work; although all the world should clamor and call hard names. The souls which a man elbows today in his own family or in his social circle are few, and he may never again come in contact with them. While he should treat them all cour­teously, why should he care for their good or ill opinion to the extent of turning out of his path or lowering his standard of conduct ? Every soul may be sure that its real friends — the friends of the soul — will come to it, either in this or in another incarnation: for loves which are of the soul perpetuate themselves past a thousand incarnations; and fortunate above common men and women are those whose souls are sensitive to these loves, and faithful to them across any barriers of society, and in their own family circles.

To do, to do with the whole might, is the need of men today; but the average man and woman seems incapable of desire to do, and in doing anything to do it perfectly, and to be moved by aversion to labor and insensibility to slovenliness. The first step to a soul’s nobility is to seek willingly a hard place where strength is necessary, and to shun rewards which have not been won by. honest toil. Idleness and half-doing are ulcers which eat away a soul, weaken the will, and lead to soul-suicide; but doing which begins and ends in the care of the physical body is poor doing, however vigor­ously pursued; and when men begin to recog­nize this no man, woman, or child will do or be obliged to do more of this sort of labor than is needful to wholesome, beautiful living.

.Next to the free exercise of the will in worthy activities, sincerity is of most value to a soul. The grossest forms of insincerity are practiced in the names of love and religion. In one city in our land, is a soul whose fame in the physical world is rivaled in extent by a black cloud in the non-physical world, which cloud is the effect of the pursuit of power and praise in the name of love to mankind. In another, is a soul who is black with the indulg­ence of greed—the greed of reward in heaven. Thousands call this person blessed for piety and deeds of kindness but of those deeds of kindness the number is kept in memory, and counted and re-counted with a gloating which is paralleled only in the miser’s counting the coins in his money-bags, and everyone is thought -to lay up store in heaven. Both of these persons started out with desire to do good; but, finding the associations offensive, both continued at the work of charity —the one for love of praise and power, the other for greed of heavenly reward. ,

Better let the hungry starve, the naked freeze, the invalid suffer, and the child grow up in ignorance and filth than to give food, clothing, care, training, or a single dollar in money with an unloving hand. Suffering, ignorance, filth, and death are small matters compared to the degradation of love and truth in each insincere gift. In proportion to the value of a quality, is the harm wrought by the hypocrisy which simulates it.

To exercise the will, to be active, to be sin­cere,—these are the first three needs of men; and the fourth is obedience.

The voice which speaks in each personality is the voice of its own soul; and that voice should be obeyed. That voice is far from being infallible; but it is^ to the average man a better guide than any voice outside of himself.

Moreover, by seeking that voice and following it, a man gets acquainted with his own soul and its needs; and the sooner any man knows the faults, weaknesses, and limitations of his own soul, the sooner he may set about doing him­self. some permanent good.

Every soul in the upward current receives influence from its ray; but, until a soul becomes very sensitive to the presence of its ray, that influence is felt rather than heard. When a man has a vague, undefined feeling that his conduct or something which he proposes to do or not to do is wrong, he should pause. If that feeling remain, he should obey it, whether his reason sanction the obedience or not; for although there are other influences about men, they are not likely to urge an excess of virtue.

Men know not what they do when they neg­lect or allow worldly or selfish scruples to over­ride an inward urging to some act. In the second century of our era, a physician in Rome committed a deliberate, premeditated crime against his daughter, who was a priestess in one of the pagan temples. The day following the crime, the priestess threw herself into the Tiber. In the seventeen hundred years since, although the souls of both father and daughter have had several incarnations, they have met but once, and that recently. At this meeting, the soul of the father was that of an old man who had considerable property, the soul of the daughter that of a young woman struggling under the double burden of disease and a large family to support. The old man was strongly moved to help the woman, and went so far as to suggest’ giving her ten thousand dollars. That sum would have been riches to her, and have made her life easy and safe; but he died without hav­ing given her a dollar. Today, the soul of that old man is in the third zone and blind; and blind that soul has been since the day of that far-off crime.

When a soul is moved to do a deed of kind­ness or sacrifice, even to the risk of life, for another soul, let it hasten to do it; for these precious opportunities are few and far apart.

Does any soul wish not to receive from one who has wronged it ? By that wish it would deny the possibility of repairing its own wrongs to others. Does the reader ask why men are left in so much doubt about these matters ? Full memories and consciousness of past in­carnations would make life intolerable and this debt-paying impossible.

Near the Atlantic coast, the soul of Charlotte Corday lives today in a woman’s body. For twelve years that woman has served another woman, and served willingly, for there has been much love between the two women; and the woman whom she has served is a reincarna­tion of the soul of Marat. Of the two women, the soul of Marat is the stronger; but the soul of Charlotte Corday is the cleaner, and the more sensitive to the influence of its ray. But the debt to Marat’s soul is paid, and the soul of Charlotte Corday should withdraw from the influence of the stronger soul and think its own thoughts. As for the soul of Marat, it has been in its present incarnation almost as much be­loved as in the preceding it was execrated; but neither the love, nor the execration have been wholly deserved. The soul of Marat loves power, and is insensible to the cruelties which it perpetrates in the pursuit and exercise of power. This insensibility has loaded it with heavy debts; but when it wakes up to the fact, the strength it has gathered may enable it to endure the terrible strain of paying them all. It behooves each man and woman to stop and ask, Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I do it? These questions asked sincerely of the ray will bring some sort of answer— sufficient to guide the soul to commit no more gross blunders.

Much that men call evil is superficial, dies with the personality, and does not affect the soul; and small matters such as personal van­ities and peculiarities, and the common small relations with other men need not give a soul much concern. In relations to other souls, such matters as affect the progress of a soul, especially its opportunities to develop and to take care of itself, are of most importance.

Great and strong qualities belong to souls, petty and weak ones which are attached to old souls belong to personalities mainly; and in the writing of biography and history it would be well to remember this. Such qual­ities as enabled a soul to make its mark on history should be remembered for the emula­tion or avoidance of men, and all else pass into oblivion. The belittling of great charac­ters by details of the offensive peculiarities of their personalities does but destroy the effect of the strong points, and allows the flippant reader to excuse his own pettiness and to scorn a character which he can neither understand nor emulate. Old and great souls are lonely, necessarily so, and yet they are more sensitive than other men to every human relation. This loneliness, and the craving which it en­genders, together with the sensitiveness often leads to reckless follies or to such bursts of irritation as half developed souls cannot com­prehend. This is not meant to excuse either the folly or the irritation; and none know bet­ter than these souls themselves, in their sane moments, how degrading both are. Next to a sincere love, the greatest good one soul can render another is a sincere forgetting of that other’s weaknesses, by dwelling upon and help­ing to increase his strength, until he is strong enough to throw off the weakness altogether.

To be strong-willed, active, sincere and obedient; to avoid weakness, idleness, shams and indifference,—these are the first needs of all souls, for on these depend the permanent existence or the destruction of all souls. As man desires something more than existence in his body and mind, is unsatisfied without stature, beauty and the like; so he should desire something more than existence as soul.

The powers which confer most stature and beauty on souls are understanding and love; and of these understanding is the greater. Understanding is not knowledge, but it is gained through the pursuit of knowledge. To pursue knowledge is not to pursue learning, as men commonly use that term, learning. No man can have too much learning; all kinds of learning are valuable to the soul; and the higher kinds are so valuable that no soul can afford to let slip any fair and honorable oppor­tunities to get them.

Knowledge comes by experience; but ex­perience often fails to teach a man anything because his mind is not stored with the learn­ing which would enable him to interpret the experience, and make the best use of it in get­ting more experience. Learning is the re­corded experiences of man’s past to which each soul has contributed something, and each soul should take delight in fostering and increasing these records; but the recorded experience of one man is not knowledge to another until his own experience in the same line has en­abled him to comprehend it. An intellectual perception or assent is not comprehension; and a man may be learned and yet possess little knowledge. A love of learning is not a love of knowledge; and the way in which some men pursue learning but keeps them from getting any knowledge at all.

Knowledge, rightly used, leads to under­standing, which is the power of intuitively perceiving, discriminating, and penetrating to the real core or substance of any matter. Understanding never has, and never can come to any soul save through its own efforts. The originality which any soul shows is the meas­ure of its understanding; and all originality is the result of knowledge gained through ex­perience in past incarnations.

The personalities of men often obscure the understanding of their souls in such a manner as to make the soul utterly helpless and use­less to, itself and to other souls. The person­alities of today most frequently blind the under­standing of their souls by what they call love.

There are thousands incarnate on earth to­day who would willingly exchange all the love they receive for the better boon of being understood. If the members of families would put aside the glamour which they call love and look at one another with sincere effort to get acquainted with one another’s souls, they would soon discover the real reasons for their being together; and then they could adjust their relations to the greatest help each could give the others with some surety of not blun­dering. This effort to get acquainted with the souls of other men, through each one’s re­moving the bandage over the understanding of his own soul, would lead to some interesting revelations in regard to the relations of men in domestic, social, commercial, and political life.

Understanding leads to truth. Truth is the center and circumference of all things; and by means of it all things in nature and in man exist. As to deal truly in conduct and speech is the highest compliment a man can pay to his friend; so is integrity, or dealing truly with one’s own soul, the highest homage a soul can give to its ray. A truthful word or deed is the noblest prayer any man, woman, or child can utter.

The integrity of a man is the measure of the stature of his soul — of its stature and freedom from deformities. Sincerity is not integrity; for a man may be sincere in wrong conduct, and in holding false ideas. Integrity is devo­tion, in thought and conduct, to truth which has been reached through such understanding as is the outgrowth of knowledge which has been gained by experience. It is the obedience of a man to the highest monitions of his soul; and it is usually the last achievement of a soul in its earthly career. It is wisdom.

As truth gives stature and perfection, so love gives grace and beauty to a soul. The word love is, today, made to cover so much that it fails to convey the meaning here in­tended. There are few people who have much integrity; and fewer still who have much love, even for themselves. The chief characteristic of love is desire to help — to help one’s self and to help others. Not to lean, but to stand upright; not to be served, but to serve; not to hoard, but to give; not to enslave, but to leave free; not to contract, but to expand; not to diminish, but to increase; not to enjoy, but to make enjoyment for another,— these are the deeds of love; and every soul who loves reaches out in deeds like these to all living things. The amount of such doing which any soul does is a measure of the love which it possesses — a measure of its own grace and

Love unregulated by understanding wastes itself foolishly, and does harm to other men. Every soul’s environment, and the responsibil­ities and limitations to which a soul is. born are its means of development and purification; and when the loving soul takes these away and bears the burdens which another soul ought to bear, it does harm and not good. Beyond the faithful discharge of honorable obligations, the greatest service one soul can render another is to get out of its way, or to make for it an opportunity to serve itself.

Add love and truth to those qualities which are necessary to the existence of a soul, and
the soul is complete, so far as life on this planet can complete it. All other qualities of the souls and of the personalities of men are but phases of the craving to enjoy. The crav­ing for possessions, for power, for fame, for religious emotion, for beauty in person or sur­roundings— every craving which centers in self and feeds the flame of vanity, even to the craving for what is called human rights, are but phases of that craving to enjoy. To crave to help another, to crave to know the truth — to have and to follow these cravings, regardless of the consequences of such fol­lowing to one’s own mental or material enjoy­ments—is to begin to be a grown-up soul.

Outside of human thought, there is neither right nor wrong, reward nor punishment, jus­tice nor injustice. There are cause and effect only, and the two are inseparable. Each soul creates causes in each incarnation, and each cause brings its effect. No man can change an effect by a hair’s breadth, and no soul can lay on any other soul a single iota of an effect of one of its own causes. Each soul influences all other souls whom it meets and passes, and the soul who makes these influences receives the ultimate effects .of them.

As souls are neither rewarded nor punished, they may cease to propitiate or fear. The idea of propitiation is a drugged cup which debases every soul who drinks it, and fear is a cloak which shrivels every soul who wraps itself in its folds.

To an old soul, fully conscious, the idea that any other soul can receive the effects of its own causes is unthinkable: but if it were thinkable, such a soul would desire not to avail itself of it; and would pray to be punished as hard as men now pray not to be punished: but there is no punishment; there is, only, receiving the effects of one’s own causes. Not to be saved from the consequences of sin, but to be saved from sin, is what men should seek— saved from creating any more evil causes to return their evil effects at some future time.

Sometimes the cause and effect are ages apart, but they do not fail to meet and to ex­actly coincide. When a soul reaches a reali­zation of this great fact, it will no longer desire ease, nor power, nor fame, nor any other thing which men deem so good. It will desire to receive, as rapidly as it can endure them, the effects of all the weak and vicious causes which it has set going; and to pay its debts in full, in order that, as far as possible, the earth and it­self may be rid of the blemishes it has made.

While the checks on the wills of men are few and slight, freewill is in motive and not in action. In the non-physical world law rules as inexorably and as universally as in the phys­ical world. On the physical plane each thing develops under and through use of unchanging laws, according to its type. Mind and soul do the same. Not what a man does, but the motive which he cherishes in the secret re­cesses of his soul, is the expression of his free­will, and determines his growth Or decay. To do with willing cheerfulness whatever one’s condition in life demands, to follow one’s im­pulses without fear,— these are at once the highest expression of faith and of freewill; and the quickest and surest means of arriving at the real condition of one’s soul.

All conduct has meaning, and the ulti­mate effect of conduct is never the opposite of the motive of the one who acts. The actor reaps the effect of his motive, no more, how­ever much he seems to reap more; for the material world passeth away and is forgotten, while the immaterial remaineth forever. Also, the one who receives the act is benefited or harmed in exact pro­portion to the motive; for to receiver as well as to actor the material world passeth away.

SOULS BEYOND OUR PLANET.

Our solar system revolves around a great sun. This great sun moves, at present, in about the center of the fifth zone of the great belt. [See Chapter II.] Our solar system occupies to that great sun the position which a planet beyond Neptune would occupy to our sun,—it is the outermost system which that great sun draws after it through the belt. Our solar system, in revolving around this great sun, passes from one side of the fifth zone of the belt to the other. At present, our system is on the inner side of the fifth zone, near the border of the fourth zone. This position is now to our sun what the summer solstice is to our earth, and our sun has recently passed the point of its summer solstice.

As the greatest heat and luxuriance of physical life in our year comes a few weeks after the solstice; so the wave which is pro­duced by the present position of our solar sys­tem has not yet reached its crest, but it will in about two thousand years. As the earth’s summer brings luxuriance of physical life, so our sun’s summer brings luxuriance of intel­lectual life; and all planets in our solar sys­tem partake of that luxuriance. Our great sun gives off forces which stimulate the growth, development, and fruitage of thought; as our sun gives off forces which stimulate the growth, development, and fruitage of physical nature.

Our sun in revolving about its great sun reaches its solstice at different points of its orbit; that is, at different points in the width of the fifth zone of the belt. If the great sun were stationary, the solstices might always occur at the same points; but our sun being obliged to go forward through the belt, at the same time that it passes around the great sun, reaches its summer solstice at different points in the width of the fifth zone.

As our great sun radiates intellectual force; so do the suns which revolve in the four inner zones of the belt radiate soul force, and the great nine spheres, spirit force. As our sun is now on the inner side of the fifth zone, it is at the point of its orbit of greatest nearness to those suns and spheres who radiate soul and spirit force. The rays from the flame go everywhere without diminution; but the forces which are sent off by the suns in the belt, and by the globes which compose the seven spheres, diminish, and are felt in proportion to near­ness to the sources of those forces.

This conjunction of the intellectual, soul, and spirit forces which influence men on our planet has occurred but once before in the existence of our sun; and that was before there were any men on this earth; and, when it will occur again, the author does not know. In the next three thousand years, man on this planet might have passed through the greatest oppor­tunity for soul and spirit advancement that he had ever yet had. [See Appendix VI.]

As man individually often neglects his opportunities, so may man collectively on this planet miss this great opportunity. As man collective makes environments which hinder individuals from taking full advantage of opportunities; so will the collective mass of men, if indifferent to this opportunity, make it difficult for any individual man to fully avail himself of it. Not only will such an influx of soul and spirit force not come again for many of the great solar years—times of revolution around the great sun—but the present influx of intellectual force will not return again until the next summer of our solar system; and from one of these great summers to another is a period of hundreds of thousands of our years.

Soul and spirit growth tend to regulate intellectual growth, turn it into more useful channels, and lift it to a higher plane than it can reach alone; and the intellectual growth of the present would be enhanced if men would take advantage of the higher influences which are flooding the earth today. If men incarnate on earth during the next three hun­dred years do take advantage of this wonder­ful summer—this conjunction of intellectual, soul, and spirit forces — the intellectual, soul, and spirit life on our planet may go on to a fruitage in subsequent hundreds of years such as man on this planet has never yet even dreamed of.

To give this great opportunity solely to the intellect, as many men are now doing, is as unwise, and as wasteful of opportunity as it is for a youth who is born to great wealth and station to use them for the pleasures of the body only. Opportunities for material com­forts come in all men’s earthly incarnations; opportunities for great intellectual achieve­ments come in every summer of our solar system; but extraordinary opportunities for soul and spirit growth come at periods so far apart that mortal mind cannot grasp the pas­sage of time between those periods. The physical body and the intellect, and all oppor­tunities which minister to them perish; and all which is saved from such opportunities is saved by souls, and souls cannot save what is beyond their power to appreciate. If a man would take such advantage of an intellectual opportunity as to make that opportunity a permanent good to him, he must rouse and waken his soul, make its life and needs pre­eminent, and gather learning and take intel­lectual pleasures as a soul and for the sake of soul.

A greater force than mind force floods our planet today; and souls will do ill to lose this chance to bask and grow in soul. Higher than soul is spirit; and the present solar sum­mer is the first so great opportunity to receive spirit life that man on our planet has had.

Each man stands between two channels of growth and influx of life, — the outer, which comes through its two bodies; and the inner, which comes through the ray and whatever soul and spirit forces are within reach. Man on our planet is a fourfold being; he has a physical body, a non-physical body or mind, a soul, and spirit. The two former perish at each incarnation and are renewed at each, but the two latter migrate. Ray is spirit. In the third chapter, it is said that when a soul has thrust from it all of its ray, it becomes a lost soul and goes down to extinction. A soul without spirit is perishable; and the more spirit a soul has the greater its chances for continued existence.

The spirit which a soul gets becomes a vital part of itself; for spirit in man is not a separa­ble entity to which soul is a body. There are beings who are nearly pure spirit. The globes in the nine spheres are such beings—the pro­portions of soul substance to spirit substance in these beings decreasing from the globes in the outer sphere to the globes in the inner sphere. The more a soul approaches in com­position one of these beings the more perfect it becomes; but it reaches this perfection, not by casting off soul, but by transforming or transmuting soul into spirit, or by the blend­ing of soul and spirit into one inseparable substance.

Passing this summer, our solar system goes forward to its winter; and that winter will bring, as past solar winters have, a new glacial epoch to our earth. Since the birth of our planet earth, the solar system has passed through six and a half of its great years. During the first two of. these solar years, our planet bore no men; but the mineral and vegetable phases of soul growth progressed far enough for the human to appear at the beginning of the third year; and man is now in the middle of the fifth solar year of his existence, which is the seventh solar year of the planet’s existence as a planet. The souls of men who are on earth today have, most of them, come through the four preceding solar years as men.

At each glacial epoch, our earth has passed through great physical changes: old continents have been sunk, and new ones lifted, and the mineral and vegetable life has changed also. Each glacial epoch, so far, has been harder than its preceding; because of changes in the interior condition of the earth.

As much life perishes in our earth winters, as much is torpid, as much withdraws into the ground to shelter itself; so in these great, solar winters life perishes, becomes torpid, and withdraws to the few narrow zones of life which are left. This is true of all forms of life. After the winter, comes the spring: after the glacial epoch, the periods of great floods. Some of the life which survives the great winter perishes in these spring floods. What survives the floods, recovers and re-­peoples the earth.

And thus will it be until the end of our earth comes; or it has left the solar system alto­gether; or our system has left the great sun, and itself moves in the arc of the great belt. Such changes as these planets and suns do make — a stronger force gradually overcoming a weaker. The process of loosing from or over­coming a central force is gradual: but once overcome, the planet or system hurtles through the great belt at enormous speed; and the mo­mentum of that motion usually carries it beyond the newly attracting body far enough to pro­duce a new orbit around that new center. Into this new orbit, the planet or system set­tles, until a greater force draws it elsewhere. In this process of change, much dross in the planet or system is burned away in the fire engendered by the speed: but no good form of life is hurt; for all forms of soul which have rays are safe in any physical fire, and all these soul forms can build for themselves new bodies.

Worlds in the great belt vary as much as men on earth do; but they may be divided into four classes,—great suns moving in the arc of the belt, smaller suns moving around the greater suns, planets moving around the smaller suns, and moons moving around the planets. These four classes may be divided into two,—sun worlds and planet worlds. The planet worlds are inhabited: and although life on them varies in innumerable ways from life on this planet, there is on each mineral, vegetable, and human life; and on each do globules develop into human souls, and these develop, purify, and pay debts as on our own earth. Planet worlds are of all sizes from such small moons and asteroids as are in our solar system to worlds as large as our sun.

Moons may become planets; planets, suns; small suns, great suns; and great suns may pass from the outermost zone of the great belt to the innermost. Each moon, planet, and small sun who develops normally according to the privileges of its rank has two periods,— one in which it moves in a narrowing orbit, ever nearer and nearer to its center; and one in which this movement is reversed, and it gradually withdraws from that center. In the former period, life as a whole on the world de­velops; in the latter, it is purified, its debts paid, and it becomes ready for the new and higher stage of existence to which it is lifted on changing its center.

Each world in the great belt has a soul; and, between the smallest moon and the greatest sun, these world souls vary as do the souls of men. World souls differ from men souls in having powers developed which are so latent in men that few on our earth today are con­scious even of the possibility of possessing them; but each has a form and an individual­ity which is preserved under ordinary circum­stances, as among men. Among themselves, these world souls differ in stature, grace, beauty, power, knowledge, and character, quite as much as men do. j

World souls form two bodies, as do the souls of men,—a physical planet or sun, and a non­physical planet or sun; and these are to the world soul what the physical body and mind are to the man soul. A world soul may with­draw its non-physical body from its physical, as a man soul does at physical death. The physi­cal planet so abandoned may go on revolving around its central orb for long periods, until it gradually breaks to pieces. Our moon is such an abandoned planet.

The world soul in its non-physical body may go on, as a man soul in its non-phys­ical body does in the first zone on the surface of our planet. Also, when that non-physical body of a world soul is abandoned by the soul, it may continue to revolve about its original center and exert influence; as the soulless, non-physical bodies in our first zone influence men. Whatever influence the moon exerts on our earth today is due to the non-physical body of the moon, which follows our earth in an orbit which varies little from that of the physical moon. These non-physical planets are as invisible to the eyes and through the instruments of men as are the non-physical bodies of men.

The soul of our moon is at present an un­happy wanderer; dwelling, for the most part, on the body of our sun; and regretting the cir­cumstances which made her so soon come to physical and non-physical death. A world soul may do what a man soul ordinarily cannot do,—it may return to bodies so abandoned, restore, and regenerate them. This takes great strength, but it is the best thing which a world soul can do to retrieve its follies. The soul of our moon has long desired to try this feat; but she has been deterred because the soul of our earth, her own father, has thus far refused to assist her.

World souls may give up their energies to their personalities, and live for exterior show as men souls do. In our region of the great belt is a small sun whose soul’s history illus­trates this. This soul developed on a planet, in an age so far away that a thousand million repeated ten times would not give the time in our years. Passing from that planet, after a long line of incarnations, this soul rested mill­ions of years: and then was given the work of incarnating as a sun; creating a solar system; caring for that system; and leading it safely through its various phases of development, and its mighty journeyings around the great star Aldebaran. This was its first experience as a world, and starting as a sun, it became ambi­tious to outdo and outshine all other suns of its size in our portion of the belt. This ambi­tion it has achieved; but at great cost to itself, and great harm to its family of planets.

A planet much larger than ours, on the side of the great belt farthest from us, in the outer zone of the belt, has today less soul than is possessed by some men on our earth. This planet soul has grown small through pride and weakness of will; and unless some great soul incarnates there and helps the planet, its soul will become extinct — gone to pieces through weak dissipation of its energies, and all for love of approbation.

Next to that unfortunate planet, our own earth is the darkest world in the great belt. Proud, weak, neglectful of its own highest needs, the soul of our earth has grown smaller and smaller, and is now near extinction. [See Appendix VI.]

Souls who can love, souls who are sensitive to soul influences, should at once drop their playthings — their social dolls, commercial carts, political engines, intellectual puppets, and religious hobby-horses—; lay aside pride and the follies and weaknesses which follow pride; and turn their faces upward and outward to the great beyond. Let them withdraw from the din of the world, seek the solitudes of ocean, and the upper air of mountains; and commune, each with its own ray, until the voices of the world without are silenced. Then they may hear and see those who wait to be heard and seen, — messengers from plan­ets beyond our solar system, and beings from suns afar who now walk the earth seeking to teach whoever will be taught. Having gained this blessedness, let these souls of men return to men; and, in the din of cities, and the strife of our evil, artificial life, keep one hand in touch with beings from beyond earth, and with the other reach out to help men.

As the soul of a planet or sun may grow dark, break to pieces, and become extinct through weakness and the indulgence of debas­ing passions; so may sun or planet soul become rebellious, thrust its guiding ray from it, seek to live by its own strength, and to go where it will, defying the laws which regulate life in the great belt. The bodies of such lost sun souls as men have seen they have called comets; those of lost planet souls are never visible; and all lost worlds wander in erratic orbits. Such lost worlds as visit our solar system are drawn hither by the weakness or evil of the souls of the worlds who compose the system. The cry of one of these lost sun souls is the most terrible sound which ever rings through the great belt. Even the flame flickers and wavers in pain at that cry.

The flame is at the center, but its rays are at the circumference, and everywhere between center and circumference: so that in that flame is felt the pain of each living thing; and is heard the cry which rises from each oppressed, suffering, struggling, and lost being from the smallest crystal on a planet to the greatest sun in the great belt: for that flame is the father of worlds and men, and of all things, which exist in our universe; and the suffering and pain in the heart of that flame will not cease until the brotherhood of all living things from world to man, from man to crystal, is recognized and respected. As that flame feels pain, and hears the cry of suffering; so it feels the joy of healthful activities, and hears the cry of noble achievement and of difficulties overcome; and every man may give the flame such joy if he will.

All world souls start on a higher level than do the souls of men on planets; for every world soul was once a man soul. When a man soul leaves a planet, it must incarnate on another planet, or go to school amid the throngs of souls who live on suns, beneath their photospheres of fire; until the man soul is strong enough and great enough to be a planet or a sun soul, and has knowledge enough to manage the affairs of a world or of a system of worlds.

The ranks and hierarchies of planets and suns are many; and the days and years’ of the lives of souls in these ranks begin where those of men leave off, and increase to the days of the greatest sun, and to the years of one revo­lution around the great belt. From the lowest rung of this great ladder of achievement and experience to the highest, the soul of each man on earth today may climb, if it have the strength to will that it shall. Beyond and above the worlds in the great belt, are beings to whose life and duties the greatest suns in the belt aspire. To these may man also as­pire, as a crystal in the depths of ocean may aspire to reach the top of Mt. Everest. This the crystal may do, not as a crystal, but as a man. The soul of the crystal grows to the soul of a man; the soul of a man, to the soul of a world; the soul of a world, to a great angel; and a great angel, to the center of an universe. The soul of man is a complex being, made up of many entities. In the process of growth and development, souls unite to form larger wholes. This does not involve the destruction of the individual consciousness, but of separ­ate material existence only.

The soul of a planet or sun will hereafter, in these pages, be called a god; not only to dis­tinguish it from the soul of a man, but because these world souls have been called gods by all the races of men who have inhabited our plan­et from the first great solar year of man’s existence to the present time.

As the wills of men determine their own lives and yet must submit to the wills of men collectively; so do the wills of the gods deter­mine their lives, and yet are under allegiance to the wills of all the gods. The wills of the gods in one rank submit to the wills of the gods in a higher rank; the wills of the highest gods submit to the wills of the angels; and the wills of the angels is the will of the flame. In proportion to the power which any soul, from the humblest crystal to the greatest sun, has of making its will coincide or move in har­mony with the will of the flame, is the rapidity of growth, and the ultimate usefulness of that soul to itself, to other souls, and to the flame.

A god develops as does a soul; and to soul and god alike, “The night of the body is the day of the spirit.” In winter, men as a whole instinctively leave material occupations for study, social and domestic life, and such med­itation as brings spirit growth. It would be better if this instinct were more respected and followed, and trade and manufacture were allowed the lull which agriculture has.

Each winter is to our planet god what the night of a man is to his day; and the great winter corresponds to the time which a man spends between incarnations. It has occurred, thus far in the history of our planet, that its soul — our planet god — has reached his great­est heights of soul and spirit appreciation just before the great glacial winter, when the body of the earth was growing torpid.

Waking from the sleep of the depths of that glacial winter, the earth god has tried to im­press on his refreshed and teeming body fairer forms, and on the souls of men nobler and more generous impulses. These efforts have produced the conditions in external nature and in men which tradition has handed down as gardens of Eden, a golden age, days when the gods walked among men and taught them. These stories, as a sparkling mountain brook, have become fouled in flowing down the ages: and unless a man can go back to the source of the brook, and drink at the original fountain, he better drop his volumes of stories; let all religions of the past and of the present die; and seek in the opportunities of today to cre­ate a new garden of Eden, a new golden age, and to write fresh oracles from the gods.

Let him seek to know the god whose oracles he writes for the obedience and wor­ship of men, and to bind as fetters on coming generations. A god who stands beside a man and speaks, or does marvels before his eyes may possess less character than the man him­self. Power over nature is no evidence of char­acter; nor fair sounding phrases, nor anathe­mas, nor asseverations of greatness, evidences of worth; and when a god asks a man to do what he as a man would blush to do, let him refrain from doing, whatever the god may threaten.

A man’s soul is tried by many powers before it may take a seat among the lower gods; and the higher will not come near him until he needs what the lower gods cannot give. All the gods respect courage; and a god who can blow out the life of a man with a puff of his breath, as a man may blow out a little candle-flame, will respect that man if he dare think his own thoughts, and go his own way, even against the teaching and advice of the god. The god may be sorry if the man’s thoughts are false and his choice of way foolish or dan­gerous; but so long as the man is strong and honorable, he will not be molested, but trusted to find his own way out of both error and dan­ger. It is the weak, false, proud, egotistic soul who is helped by neither gods nor men.

The gods like obedience and worship; and the lower they are in rank, the more desir­ous they are of fastening these upon men, and the more jealous they are of other influences.

The flame desires neither obedience nor worship nor prostration nor ceremonies nor love nor anything of any globule, soul, god, or angel in the universe, but integrity. That a man shall stand on his own feet, speak the truth, and dare to be himself,—this is what the flame asks of every soul; and in proportion as a soul has reached this integrity does it seek to give opportunity for integrity to every other soul.

Does the reader wish to know how the gods look? Each world soul or god in the great belt, and each globe or great angel in the nine central spheres takes the human form at will; and in changing from rest to activity, these beings change from a sphere to a man or woman in form; and it is in the human form that they usually visit men. When a human soul has seen the^# faces of the gods of our solar system, he will have a new conception of the power of the human face to express nobility; when he has seen the face of a great god, he will not again look willingly at statue or paint­ing, on our planet, which represents a god; and when he has seen the face of a great angel, he will close his eyes in pain at the imperfec­tions in the face of the greatest man or woman whom he has known or loved. This pain will pass: but the picture which he carries in his heart will have killed covetousness of earthly goods and the products of men; and any pride which he, in his ignorance, may have felt at any achievement of his own.

This blessedness of seeing the gods and of talking with them will come to every man on earth whose soul is clean enough and brave enough to use to the full the present great opportunity for soul and spirit growth: and as a man works for his children and would fain leave them better off than he was at starting, so should men today garner stores of knowl­edge and soul and spirit qualities to hand down to peoples yet unborn; and each soul who works in this harvest will itself, in coming in­carnations, eat the bread of this harvest until ready to pass beyond earth.

As parents hold the threads of the lives of their children during youth, so the rays which guide men are given to the keeping of the gods. The rays which belong to men on earth pass through the great sun around which our solar system revolves, from that great sun to our sun, from our sun to our planet, and from our planet to each individual entity from crystal to man. As children develop, they often grow away from parental influence, and seek higher ideals of conduct and wisdom: so may a soul detach its ray from planet, sun, and great sun; and have the line of its ray direct to the flame.

The rays of most men on earth today pass to the god of our planet. He is their god, he who hears and answers their prayers, and whose character is their conception of deity. The rays of other men pass to the sun god, and his character is their conception of deity. A few men have rays detached from our solar system entirely.

Each man’s ray is held by a lower god until the man rises to the consciousness of some­thing higher in god-head; his ray is then dropped by the lower god, and a higher at­tends to his needs. Each man’s prayer goes to the god who can, with the least pain, watch his character and ‘needs. Often the ray of a man is taken by some other planetary god, or by some other sun god in our great system; but no ray is held by any god beyond the time when a soul conceives of something different to worship. As a man rises in the god he worships, the lower gods cease to be his rulers, and may become his friends. In this manner, a man may take a place among the gods while still a man.

As a man forms a friendship today which he is sure is the noblest privilege which he will ever have, and circles closer and closer around that friend; and months or years afterward wakes up to a feeling that the friendship is not so great a privilege, begins gradually to with­draw, and to let the friendship die: so is man in his worship of the gods. The probabilities are that neither the friend nor the god has changed or become less worthy, but that the man himself has grown; and the association with the friend or god may have been the means of that growth.

When a man is tempted to despise or say ill things of a god, let him reflect on that god’s responsibilities and the limitations of that god’s powers. Could the man do that god’s tasks? To work with patience and power through a year, as a man through a day; to love and take an interest in nations and millions, as a man does in the members of his family,— these are among the smaller differences be­tween the duties of our planet god and the duties of a man; and the duties of a great god no man can comprehend.

The souls of men as the souls of worlds, have two movements about any center to which they choose to give allegiance, and both movements are a spiral—the first an inward to­ward the center, and the second an outward away from the center. For each soul on our planet there are six great centers,—self, family, nation, earth god, sun god, and great sun god. About each of these, there are two motions, twelve motions in all. The first of these move­ments, in each case, is an effort to attain some­thing, a process of development; the second, an effort to overcome something, a process of puri­fication. This flow and ebb, development and purification, go on through every phase and stage of life on planets from a crystal to a puri­fied soul, and in the great belt from a moon to the greatest sun. From the lowliest man to the greatest sun there are innumerable small centers to be attained and overcome; but of great centers for men on this earth, six only; and the attainment and overcoming of these are indispensable to the development, purifi­cation and completion of each soul. These twelve labors a man soul may complete on a planet, so far as planet life allows them to be completed; but most souls pass from our earth after having completed from five to nine of them.

When a man soul has performed these twelve labors he has detached his ray from our great sun; but his labors are not ended. Before his great night of rest can come, he must conceive of the character of the flame and live in accordance with that conception. A labor is action, and tested by action. When a soul has performed this labor, whether it be the soul of a man or of a planet or of a sun, that soul may leave its labors on a world or in the great belt and go home for rest. When the soul has crossed the belt and reached the edge of the great gulf the last ordeal awaits it. Poising on the outer border of the great gulf, the soul of the author saw souls of men and worlds come to this ordeal.

The great nine spheres were no more spheres, nor was the flame a flame, nor were there any clouds. There was a light only, a light intol­erable to look upon; and in that light, the globes of the nine spheres lost their forms, and were blended into one homogeneous blaze. A band of that light crossed the gulf, folded a world in its embrace, and the world was no more. A band crossed the gulf, paused at the feet of a man, and the man shrank and turned away. The greatest fear that a soul ever knows was upon the man, the fear of extinc­tion. He had met this fear in a small way at the end of every incarnation; but nothing like this, for the light halting at his feet was not physical fire, and of its touch he knew nothing. The longing to come home had been in his soul for ages: and the hope and joy of that home-coming had kept his feet steadfast in the hard upward way, through the long, long journey behind him; had enabled him at last to live in accordance with the character of the flame; and had given him courage to cross the great belt.

He may have come here as a visitor, found the great light withdrawn into itself, the globes of the great spheres in their places, crossed the gulf, and visited the interior of those spheres; for a soul who carries love and truth in its breast, and goes on quests with a pure desire for knowledge, may go alone wherever it has the strength and the courage to go, and none will say it nay. Now, the man soul finds no shelf on which it may alight after the long flight over the gulf, but this radiant fire bridge only; and no other soul may cross with him on the bridge which halts at his feet, for “Every soul goes alone to the bosom of the father.”

The man soul looked back over the way it had come, and turned back; for behind was nothing to satisfy. At last, the soul summons courage to brave extinction and moves toward the bridge; and that hand of blinding light folds it, lifts it, and carries it to the center. As the great light withdraws into itself, the nine spheres resume their forms, and each globe is in its place as perfect and as separate as before; but the man soul has been indrawn with the light and is—if it exist anywhere— inside the sphere which rests in the cubical frame in the center of the great nine spheres. After a time, a band of light emerges from the flame, and gently sets the man soul on its feet. It is the same soul, but changed. That rest in the heart of the flame has burned away all the dross and all the weariness and every evil, hateful memory of the long pilgrimages; still the soul is but a child in development and attainment, and ages and ages of effort lie be­fore it. After rest and pleasures which in length and quality no other place in our uni­verse affords, work will be given to this soul. The work will not be the same as before; but according to the power and capacity of the soul will be the tasks assigned it; and the higher the rank, the longer, the greater, and the more arduous are the tasks.

SOUL CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREEDOM.

Imagine a section of earth suffused with a faint light, encircling that a broad band of darkness, and beyond the darkness a brilliant, white light. Let the faint light represent the intellect, and the brilliant light the soul. No man leaves the light of the intellect or earthly, perishable mind, and comes to see by the light of the soul without crossing the band of darkness; and the ways across the darkness are as many as there are souls on earth.

One man enters the darkness, wanders about awhile, comes out into the earthly light at a point distant from that at which he entered the darkness, loudly proclaims that he has crossed the dark band, and calls upon all men to follow him. Another enters the darkness, gropes about, returns to the earthly light, declares that there is no light beyond, and calls upon men to accept his statement as fact, and cease to try to reach or to investigate what does not exist. Another gropes his way so far across the darkness as to discern the light beyond; and, elated with having seen it, hastens back to tell the fact, but can give no intelligible account of the light. Another crosses, stands in the full blaze, returns, and is silent; what has been seen is too sacred to tell, lest it suffer distortion or desecration in the minds of the ignorant and the irreverent. Another crosses, penetrates the great light, gathers a bundle of valuable knowledges, and returns with intent to put them forth; on entering the earthly light, the power of the intellect seizes him and forces him to justify and to test all which he has brought by his own reason, and to the reasons of other men. Another, returning, pours his precious new wine into old bottles which are rotten and musty with age—the bottles of common religious expression.

What this age needs are souls who can, not only cross the band of darkness and intelli­gently investigate the light beyond, but who are not in bondage to the intellectual force, nor in love with the old bottles.

Imagine a range of mountains having a suc­cession of peaks which lift themselves far above the line of continual snow. At the base of this mountain range, put the valleys and cities of men. Let the snow represent the knowledge which comes from beyond our planet; and the climbing necessary to reach it, the effort which a soul must make to get such knowledge. The paths up the mountains are as many as men choose to make, some easier, some harder. The highest peaks cannot be seen from the valleys below, much less can an idea be formed of how the earth and the affairs of men look from the top of one of them. Sometimes the whole range is so hid­den by fogs and clouds — all of which rise from the valleys — that it is hard for men to believe that the peaks exist.

One man begins to climb, comes to the first snow; and his feet, being muddy with earth, he fouls the snow at every step. Contented, the man returns to the valleys, tells men he knows all about the snow, and describes it; and what he describes is that pure snow fouled by the mud of his thoughts treading it over and over. Another man climbs farther, even so far that the mud has been all rubbed away from his feet and garments; but his body and breath are so hot that any attempt to examine the snow at close range results in the destruc­tion of it. This man returns and describes, not the snow, but the melted product of the fires of his own passions.

What is needed today are men brave enough to climb to the upper heights; and so free from prejudice and passion as to be able to reproduce what is seen, in pictures and words which are intelligible to all men.

Whatever path is taken across the darkness, or up the mountain range, three things are essential for success in the journey,—honor­able motives for the journey and for every step of the way, a teachable mind, and an obedient body.

An obedient body is one which has no will of its own, but cheerfully submits to the com­mands of the soul — not a body which lacks sensitiveness, but one whose sensations do not rule mind or soul. Whether a given soul pos­sesses such a body, no other soul can tell, and probably not its possessor without prolonged trial of it. The nature and extent of the trial each soul must determine for itself; for the fet­ters which bind soul in bondage to the mate­rial world are not the same for any two souls. The following are some of the means by which the author found out the nature and extent of the power of her physical body over her soul,

In October, 1880, meat foods were dis­carded. From May, 1881, to October, 1884, the diet consisted almost exclusively of breads and fruits, sometimes of uncooked grains and fruits. From February 4, 1889, to November 17, 1891, the body was nourished on uncooked products. During that period of two years and nine months, a record was kept of all food and drink which had touched fire; and the whole would barely suffice for the meals for forty days. During that period, no animal product but milk was tasted, and that for less than four weeks only. Twice in that period, for six weeks, but one meal of food was taken in twenty-four hours. In one of these six-weeks’ periods, that one meal consisted, each day, often ounces of raw oat meal, soaked in cold water, a few sprigs of parsley, and a small handful of dried fruits; in the other, for four weeks the one meal consisted of tree fruits and nuts, and during the other two weeks of tree fruits alone. Once no food or drink was tasted for seven days.

As conduct has, in itself, no value in releas­ing soul from the power of the body, and motive alone determines the result to the soul, it is fitting to give the motives for these efforts. Meat was discarded for the sole purpose of ceasing to be a party to the cruelties which attend the breeding and slaughter of cattle, and to the debasement of the mind and heart of the butcher. Cooked food was given up in hopes of finding a way to release woman from bondage to the kitchen stove; and from giv­ing much precious time and energy to the ma­terial life, to the neglect or complete exclusion of the mental and psychic needs of a house­hold. These two steps were begun long be­fore any book treating of occult matters had been read, and without the knowledge that anybody of men on earth holds that there is a relation between physical habits connected with food, and spiritual growth. The third experiment — living on one meal a day of a small amount and poor quality of food—was made out of sympathy with the very poor; with desire, through sharing some of their experi­ences, to better understand their privations, and especially the moral effects of those pri­vations. The seven days fast alone is the only asceticism or ordeal ever undertaken by the author for which she had no exterior reason.

In childhood, the author was conscious of a world which her senses did not penetrate. Sometimes she was so near penetrating it that the ear caught indistinct tones, and the eye saw what seemed a veil of black air which shut her in. Through that enveloping veil, ideas came, in every passing year; until scientific studies bade her discredit such sources of information. Still the veil was there; and through it unseen presences spoke, sometimes with startling distinctness . During the past ten years that veil has thinned, until the world which it once hid is as real, and parts of it as familiar, as the world which the physical senses recognize.

This thinning of the veil is due, not to the physical habits, nor to any experi­ments on the physical plane; but to the con­tinued motive in the soul to find or to make a way of life more beautiful and satisfying for herself, and as she hoped for other men; as a scientist tries, now this way, now that, to wrest from nature some precious secret which, when known, will ease the burden of life for all men. Although none of the author’s experiments on the physical plane were for the purpose of sub­duing the body, she did find through them how much power her body had to hinder her soul, and how heavy a burden its desires were.

A man may easily deceive himself in regard to the obedience of his body, and the power of his soul to resist its entreaties. For a week or two the limitations imposed may be easy; beyond that, struggle begins; and when the time extends into the months, he will begin to know of what stuff he is really made; espec­ially if, in the case of food, he lives where the smell of forbidden foods is under his nostrils, and he partakes of his fare at ordinary tables.

The time which it takes to bring a physical body into obedience depends a good deal on the attitude of the mind. The mind must drop all notions of a return to the former modes of life; and must so acquiesce in the soul’s desire to be free as to cheerfully and firmly meet both remonstrance and ridicule.

As for the mind itself, it must drop its toys, and its cherished privilege of tyrannizing over both body and soul; its prejudices and pas­sions must die, its foulness be cleansed, or ever the soul may use it to report accurately what is beyond the darkness, or is seen on the mountain height. The mind must become willing to look at unfamiliar bodies of knowledge impartially; to cast off all fear of the consequences of such examination; and to be ready, at any hour, to throw away its most cherished convictions and to take cheerfully other and different ones in their places. The mind’s horizon must en­large: self, family, church, nation, country, race, sex,—these circles are too narrow to be drawn about a soul who aims to see wholes in regard to our planet life, not to speak of the beyond.

As the body grows cleaner, its senses become more acute and trustworthy, and its sensations more delicate and pleasurable; as the mind grows cleaner, its impulses become more generous, its powers more sure and cap­able in action, and its activities produce more keen delights; as the soul grows more free, and realizes the willing, cheerful obedience of body and mind, life is lifted to a higher plane. The man is a child again, but a child on a higher level; and all life and opportunity lie before him as if starting on a new incarnation; and every human affection and relation are more dear than before.

The rapidity and thoroughness with which body and mind may be cleansed are depend­ent upon the motive in the soul. No asceti­cism in body and mind will free a soul from grossness; and the power to leave its bodies is to a gross soul a curse and not a blessing. A soul weighted with foul motives cannot rise, even to the third zone in the atmosphere of our planet; and to investigate the first zone and the caverns is neither pleasurable, nor very profitable.

The non-physical gallery from which the events in the careers of souls, which have been used for illustration in this book, were obtained is one portion of the mind of our planet god— a part of the non-physical body which that god soul possesses, as a man possesses a mind₂ and a part of that mind is memory—the plan­et’s memory. The door of that memory is open to any soul who seeks such knowledge as it contains from a motive which an honor­able man would not blush to own. Ignoble motives do not open the recesses of the plan­et’s mind, nor the door of the great beyond, any more than they open doors to charmed interiors among men. Men may deceive one another in such a matter; but they do not often deceive the gods, nor those who guard the doors of the gods.

As the first essential to open these doors is honor, the second is teachableness. A dog­matic man who already knows everything need not think that any god will take the trouble to try to teach him; or that by himself, he can get much that is of value. The mental attitude which draws the secrets of nature into the hands of a man is indispensable in quests into non-physical realms. The more learning which a mind has with which to interpret what is seen, the more interesting and fruitful will these studies be; but that learning must be held lightly, subject to correction.

If a great person of antiquity could take form and enter a man’s door as a guest, would the man immediately ply him with questions about personal affairs, and try to degrade his guest to the level of a juggler and a fortune­teller ? Would the man deem it courteous to his guest to set aside his own mind, and to ask his guest whether he should do this or that petty thing? In proportion as a guest from the non-physical realms satisfies any such personal curiosity, or makes itself the guide of the every-day affairs of a man, should be a man’s suspicions of the desirableness of that guest’s presence, and of the value and truthfulness of that guest’s statements.

Each soul grows by doing its own thinking, and bearing the burdens of its own responsi­bilities; and no being from the non-physical realms whose friendship is worth having will forget that fact. Gods are no more likely than men to subject themselves to ignoble treat­ment. While they are tender, patient, and divinely compassionate at the limitations and blunders of men; and will not forsake any soul so long as it desires good, but will respond to every sincere prayer for light and knowledge, —their duties, in their own realms, are suffi­ciently arduous; and their presence beside a soul on earth or when visiting the beyond should call forth all the modesty and courtesy of the soul so visited.

A soul will do best to get what it can alone, and to ask questions of other beings only when such beings volunteer help; and to be shy of accepting help until the rank and character of the being who volunteers the help is known: for all are not gods who claim to be; and many are the deceitful snares which are laid for the feet of such souls as, neglecting their own earthly affairs and moved by petty desires, seek to invade the unknown.

A soul with honorable motives, and served by a teachable mind, need fear neither drag­ons, chimeras, nor any evil whatsoever; but in the process of the development of a soul’s senses, a weak or an impure soul would often be in danger of being led into error, through lack of the power to discriminate.

The senses may develop unequally. A soul who hears, but does not see, on the non-phys­ical plane is at the mercy of any being who may care to whisper in its ear. In proportion to its own strength and purity, is the safety of any soul during the transition period when hearing is fitful, indistinct, and often wanting; and the sight wanting, dim, or fleeting. Dur­ing that period, a soul should be wary; should hold fast to the judgment, reason, and discretion of its own mind; and not allow itself to be led into thought or conduct which its common sense cannot approve. Until a man can see non-physical objects and beings as plainly as he sees physical ones, be at no loss to dis­tinguish between the two kinds, and to distin­guish one non-physical being from another, let him not dare trust his impressions, or report what he hears. The first zone of our non­physical planet is full of idle, mischievous, and malicious beings who like no better sport than to play with, deceive, and mystify — if they do nothing worse — each person whose develop­ing non-physical senses gives them a chance to make their presence known or felt. Courage, patience, levelheadedness, and loyalty to one’s own common sense are as neces­sary in these explorations as in penetrating an Africa. When a soul has displayed these qualities sufficiently, and for so long a time as to prove its sincerity and strength, it will be helped by higher beings. Let a soul wait for that help to try its first venture beyond its own body walls. After a few journeys apart from the body, under the care of a trustworthy guide, the soul may dare go when or where it desires.

The reader may be interested to know what sensations attend the withdrawal of soul from body. The author can give her own experi­ences only. At the first time, there was much pain, and a feeling that the body was being torn asunder: at the second, there was no pain, but a whirling, buzzing sensation in the brain, as if a spring tightly coiled had been loosened]; and this produced dizziness against which it was necessary to brace one’s self, so as not to lose consciousness: at the third time, the same whirling sensation was felt, but it was less violent: after that, sensation and effort gradually lessened, until now the process is as easy and as free from sensation as the laying off a garment. In no case, was there difficulty or painful sensation on returning into the body.

At first, all consciousness went with the soul; and it was necessary to leave the body in bed and properly protected as for sleep. After a time, the power to divide the consciousness was gained; until now the soul can leave the body awake, active, and able to attend to ordi­nary affairs as if the soul were present. This dividing of the consciousness gives at first curious experiences: what consciousness re­mains with the body has a strange, forlorn, lonely feeling; and the body seems to it like an empty shell. At such times, if persons are present, or it is necessary for the mind to en­gage in conversation, it can readily do so. The soul, returning, impresses on the physical brain what it has seen or heard, as a man writes what he knows on paper; or the soul, standing outside of the two bodies — body and mind — the two, the soul and the mind encased in the physical body, talk with each other, as two persons do.

Journeys and investigations in the non-phys­ical realms take time, strength of body and mind, and power of soul to resist the excitements of unusual and unheard of experiences. A person who would successfully pursue such investigations must give himself up to them as faithfully, conscientiously, and laboriously, as a scientist does to his experiments and an explorer to his travels. Knowledge worth having is not won without effort and toil, and often the toil is proportioned to the value of the knowledge sought.

The freewill of each soul so far determines its path, and so far changes its progress and modes of development, that no soul can mark out a line of action or thought which will free another soul from its chains of bondage. Even if the whole line of a soul’s past incarnations were inspected, the inspector could not be sure of what the soul most needed; because the secret recesses of all souls are inviolate and unknown, even to the gods. The gods see with far greater clearness than men do; but they, in exerting influence, fail in measures which they thought were sure to bring the desired result, while some small event of which they took no account, as of no importance, exerts the very influence which they had de­sired to avoid or to produce for the soul whom they were watching and trying to help. Seeing farther than men, the gods can see the proba­bilities before a given soul; but to tell surely what will occur no god can; and gods are mistaken in their prophesies as well as men. The inviolate recesses of every soul of man and world, and the free wills of souls contin­ually vary the threads of life in individuals, nations, and worlds.

Every failure which a man meets is due, primarily, to some imperfection in his own soul, no matter how plainly he thinks he sees the causes of failure outside of himself; but events which men call failures may be the noblest successes, for all real successes are moral. The body and mind are mere chan­nels; and while every soul has need of a strong body, and a sane mind, and may be thankful to possess them, they are but tools which like a carpenter a soul picks up, fashions, sharpens, uses for a time, and then throws aside for rust and decay to devour.

The author, from her own experiences, can offer no promises of easy paths across the darkness or up the mountain range; and she leaves each reader to judge for himself, from the contents of this book, whether the results are worth the cost. She thinks they are: and that thought has bred the hope that some, by read­ing this book, may be induced to try the same lines of investigation; so that errors in it may be corrected, and the knowledges which it con­tains may be increased by the labors of others.

JESUS OF NAZARETH; AND THE NEW TESTAMENT.

There never was any Jesus of Nazareth and disciples, such as have been handed down in the New Testament. The New Testament was composed in the first century A. D., by adepts, who hoped by means of it to help men. The original manuscripts were different from the present copies, for later adepts made both omissions and additions.

The adepts who did this work were men of strong religious convictions, who had been educated in the religious monasteries of those days — secret orders, corresponding to orders out of and in the Catholic church—; and who sought, through these writings, to give to men at large some of the knowledge which they had gained, as -adepts in this age have done through the theosophical movement.

For the purpose of firing men’s minds and of giving them something tangible to fix upon, these adepts combined in consenting to use certain names and phrases, which in their secret sanctuaries had spiritual meaning or were purely 150 symbolic, to definite persons and events; and thus grew up the personal Jesus, his body of teachings, and his twelve disciples and their teachings. The names and characters of some of these disciples were fictitious, others were those of some of the bolder of the first com­pany of adepts who instituted the movement.

Judas was, himself, an adept of more learn­ing than Jesus, who, not liking the manner in which this colleague used occult powers, nor the form which his teaching tended to assume, informed against him; and the rabble put him to death. The man thus betrayed and handed down to posterity as a god was ambitious of power, and craved adulation; and, through these qualities, was seduced into ways which were repulsive to men who were more noble than himself.

This man’s name was used by those who made the first gospels, because his death had made an impression on the imaginations of the populace at the time; and so the fact of the crucifixion was reported and the death made vicarious, in order to appeal to the imagina­tions of men whom these learned adepts regarded as too vulgar, stupid, and ignorant to receive more spiritual ideas. Moreover, they thought that the idea of vicarious atonement would help to start fresh impulses toward good in men who were so heavily weighted with foulness and sin that only by such freedom from their own past as this idea promised could they be roused to make any effort at all. They had wrought bet­ter for mankind, if they had had sufficient faith in the possibilities of growth in subse­quent incarnations, for such weak and erring ones, as to have told the truth. How well they gauged the possibilities of man to seize upon some idea which promises immunity from the consequences of sin, the history of Christianity shows; and how baleful such an idea is, let all the persecutions and teachings of separation because of dogma, and all the cruel supersti­tions and religious wars of the past eighteen centuries demonstrate.

Judas did not hang himself, did not receive ^ money for the betrayal; and it was by his arts that the body of Jesus was restored to life. After the restoration, Judas said, that as he had restored Jesus, so he would destroy him, if he did not hide himself and trouble man no more. .

After a secret farewell to his closest follow­ers, Jesus retired to the desert wilderness near Palestine, and there lived a hermit to old age.

He spent the time in study, and in the prac­tice of various forms of asceticism by which he sought to win such occult powers as had been denied to him in the secret brotherhood to which he had belonged. Among these asceticisms was living on uncooked food, which he did for more than thirty years.

A friend of Jesus, who has been handed down to posterity as St. John, spent a portion of those years with him; and, between them, they wrote parts of what are now the gospels, the letters of St. John, and the Apocalypse. These writings—the originals of which were destroyed when the Alexandrian library was burned—were made the nucleus of the New Testament writings: but the higher and holier parts of even those portions which were com­posed by Jesus and John were added by another adept, one who in a subsequent incarnation became the head of the order of adepts in Thibet; and who maintained by his arts that position and life in one body for almost one thousand years. At his death, the light of adeptship in Asia went out; for no suc­cessor of his, and no other of all the brother­hoods on earth, has possessed or possesses to­day the knowledge, power, skill, or the high and holy spiritual perceptions which he had.

The soul of the man whose life and death were fixed up to serve as the model called Jesus, was the soul of Alexander the Great, whose soul’s career is given in Chapter I. It is not strange that such a soul then thirsted for power, desired to be accepted as the Jew­ish messiah, and maneuvered for a temporal as well as for a spiritual kingdom.

Of the twelve disciples, those who were not fictitious are, with one exception, in the United States. One is a railroad magnate, another a college president, another a teacher who is widely known and loved, and two are women. The mother of Jesus lives near the upper head waters of the Hudson river; and John the Bap­tist is in Russia—a second time, “A voice cry­ing in the wilderness.” Many of the Christian fathers are also with us. The author hopes she offends none by telling that the Rev. Phillips Brooks was a reincarnation of the soul of St. Augustine.

Not church worthies alone are incarnate among men today; but many who have been eminent in history, literature, science, art, and music. Richard Wagner has a soul so unrest­ing that already has it reincarnated, in Ne­braska. Great souls are beginning to incar­nate in large numbers, in our land, because of the destiny which lies before us if our people can rouse themselves to the moral heroism which is needed, and prove worthy to be the leading nation of the earth; but our land must lead in mercy, humility, and righteousness if it would lead at all.

A good many who have known past great­ness are now in lowly circumstances. Rich­ard,, the Lion-Hearted, is a little boot-black in New York city. The little fellow has had the hardest sort of a time, even to keep alive. The first time the author saw him, he stood on the curbing, watching a passing show. A great lady in silks and furs, attracted by his bright eyes and scanty clothing, stooped and put a dollar into his hand. He looked up quickly, and then with an oath threw the coin into the gutter. The great lady flushed and passed on, her mind full of indignation at the insolence and ingratitude of the poor; while the boot-black, the show spoiled for him that day, took his quivering body down a side alley, his heart bursting with grief because he had no better opportunity than blacking boots to make use of the power and capacity he felt throbbing in his soul. In a former incarnation, that great lady would have been glad to have even washed the feet of that poor little boot-black.

The great and good are still on earth; some of them adding to the pride and enjoyments of men, but more passing through those pro­cesses which make them great and good in the eyes of the flame. Men in their blindness, ignorance, and folly make these processes needlessly hard for them; and it were well to remember that all souls have come up from lowly places, and that most souls go back to those places for the final baptism which washes away the last stains.

Does any soul wish to look at its own past ? Hardly may a soul withstand that sight: a single picture from one incarnation may give despair and a desire to flee forever from the eyes of men, but the soul may not flee; the despair and the desire must both be given up, for they too are a part of the pride of the world. The wish to know its own past is gratified for any soul as soon as its develop­ment and purification have gone far enough to insure it against desire to take revenge on other souls who have harmed it, or to make ill use of any knowledge about other souls which necessarily comes in looking over its own past. In mercy to a man, the gods may keep from him his own soul’s past, even while they show him the careers of other souls in order to teach him the meaning of life; but the time comes when this may be done no longer. Before a soul can pass to life beyond our planet, it must unroll the long coil of its earthly incarnations and look itself in the face. This is the judgment day, the judge is the soul itself, and every witness speaks the truth. The soul, hitherto so eager to be done with earth, so ready to pass beyond, after that judg­ment day, usually desires return, and like the soul of William of Orange — see page 87— voluntarily enters into the limitations of a poor environment with the hope of a little helping those who are not yet ready to come to judg­ment.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.

OTHER UNIVERSES BESIDES OUR OWN.

Some time after the first visit to the central spheres, the author, desiring to see farther into the haze which had limited her vision, started for the outer zone of the great belt of worlds. A messenger came to her side and said, “That way lies death.” She returned to earth; but nearly a year later she said, “ If to go is death, to death will I go,” and went.

She found the limits, as once she had found the limits of earth’s atmosphere. As a soul may poise on the limits of earth’s atmosphere, and look out into the great non-physical stream and see the worlds whirling in it, without dreaming of the possibility of leav­ing that safe shelter and trusting strength to cross to even the nearest world; so the soul of the author poised on the border of this universe, and looked out into a greater be­yond.

In that beyond, are spaces which are to this universe what the spaces in our great belt are to the suns in the belt; and in those spaces float universes, as clouds float in a clear sky. What filled those spaces was to all within this universe as hydrogen to air, and as sun­shine to twilight.

As the soul of the author turned to come back, she found one of the great angels beside her. “Wilt go?” he asked. “ Not now,” was replied. “Hast thou been?”— “Yes” She looked on the angel, but spoke not. After a moment he said, “ I have gone as far as I dared go; and reached no end, no limit of a belt like ours, no greater center. Each universe which I passed has its nucleus, as ours has its center of nine spheres, enclosing the cube with its sphere and flame, the home and the source of our life.” To look at the angel, to realize his might, to remember what it is to move beside such as he, — gave great signifi­cance to his words. What his strength and daring had not limited was present satisfac­tion to a child of earth.

Remembering that, in our universe, threads from the center go to each soul, the author looked to see if our center has its ray who holds it to some greater, far-off center. The thread was there—a thread so delicate, so subtle, it was barely visible—the thread from which the flame, the source of our life, draws his being.

SOULS OF ANIMALS AND OF SAVAGE MEN.

Every animal soul is a lost human soul, or a part of such a soul. Souls in going down­ward disintegrate, and their separate functions incarnate as individuals; and this process of disintegration continues — taking place more or less after each incarnation—until the life force is extinct.

Soul in the animal world, from highest to lowest, is prostrate, and unable to sustain the upright form. Form is everywhere expressive of condition and quality. Types fixed into set forms in the physical world change slowly, and but slightly in one lifetime; but soul is mobile and quickly responsive to thought and emotion. When a man begins to indulge cruel or shame­less thoughts and emotions his soul begins to change from the human type; and long before the death of the physical body, the man’s soul may have become a brute; and when such a soul leaves its human body at death, it is usually obliged to incarnate in a baby of that species in the animal world, which it most resembles.

Among civilized men, this downward career usually begins in horses, dogs, and swine. A soul which descends into the brute world may return to the human, but never through any brute type; the return must be made through the normal upward career, the vege­table kingdom.

One of the most painful sights on the earth is to see a man followed about by a dog which contains the soul of his own father; a woman driving a horse whose soul is that of her mother; and children tormenting animal pets whose souls have been human relatives, perhaps elder brothers and sisters.

All savage men are a result of the debase­ment of human souls; and all savage and infe­rior races will pass away as soon as there are no wretched, weak, and vicious souls to keep up their existence,

In the upward current are no prostrate forms. Soul, imbued with spirit or ray, has two forms,— a spherical and a human. In the mineral world, the spherical predominates; but, in the physical forms produced, a tendency is shown to approach the plant type and to dif­ferentiate in function. In the plant world, separation of functions, and the formation and isolation of organs go on until soul is capable of producing the human mechanism, and of sustaining its functions; and when that is reached, the vegetable soul may incarnate among men. Throughout the vegetable world, soul is upright and human in general outline; but in the higher and more, complex types only, is it capable of building the human body.

 

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V.

SEX ON THIS PLANET.

When the creative function on the physical plane is respected, no more soulless babies will be born. Sex on this planet is a thing so monstrous that no words can convey its hideous proportions. All use of the sexual func­tion which is not with direct intent to pro­duce children is adultery and prostitution, whatever the legal relations between the parties may be; and the ultimate end of all adulterers and harlots is utter extinction.

A sexually pure person cannot feel sexual desire, any more than an eye can desire to see, or an ear to hear; and all sexual demand is lust and not love. A pure man and woman may desire parentage: that desire is of the soul; and the body will respond to it, but with­out sensation, as the eye responds to the soul’s command to see.

On the planet Mercury, in our solar system, the reproductive act is a religious ceremony. The ceremony and its accompaniments are so pure, so delicate, so unlike anything on this planet, that the loveliest wedding on earth does not mate it in solemnity and beauty.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI.

EARTH UNDER TRIAL.

At present, the planet earth is under trial before the gods, as a man is tried in our human courts. If condemned, the soul of the earth • will be required to leave its body; this will destroy all physical life on the planet. If ac­quitted, the earth will be given another thous­and years of life in this body.

If the earth be condemned, all souls of men on earth who are strong and nearly through earthly development will be taken to other planets in our solar system—principally to Jupi­ter—to complete their planet education. The conditions on other planets are, in some res­pects, so unlike conditions here that these souls, having begun on earth, will suffer harm by be­ing thus transferred; and they would be ulti­mately stronger if allowed to go further on earth. If the earth be acquitted, in the remain­ing one thousand years, these strong souls will be able to complete their education to such a point that they can take hold of opportunities for development on other planets with more ease, and more surety of using them wisely. This trial may continue until 1901: that is the farthest limit which will be allowed before judgment will be passed. The attorney who will try the case for the “ State’s ” side—for the gov­ernment under which the gods live — is “The Terrible One”; and he will be assisted by two others like him. These three gods are the souls of three suns which are centers of sys­tems similar to our solar system, and revolve around the same great sun. The places which these systems occupy in the greater system may be compared to the places which in our solar system the planets Jupiter, Mars, and Venus occupy.

The earth has known this trial was pending; and has made desperate efforts to ward it off, and to get an indefinite extension of time. One of these efforts is the theosophical movement— a revival and spread of a body of influence, whose essential, spiritual essence has passed away. Theosophy is a dead issue, incapable of reviving, much less of regenerating, the con­science of earth’s millions. Another effort is the Esoteric Union, recently founded in Lon­don, England. Mrs. Kingsford’s soul is one whom the earth-god has favored through an hundred incarnations; and in its latest incarna­tion, as Mrs. Kingsford, the earth gave to this soul, through the noblest of his servants, all of religion he has—all about being, the meaning and object of existence, and the life beyond, which he remembered from the days of his own former experiences. From Mrs. Kingsford, he hid his weaknesses, save as she saw them in herself and in other men. Her works, “The Perfect Way; or The Finding of Christ,” and “Clothed with The Sun,” are a record of these instructions; and they do gather up and focus all the rays of religious intelligence which the earth-god has, or has himself spread among the peoples on his body.

The earth-god has many names, but the one which he has made most efforts to impress upon men is Jehovah; and he is the god of whom the souls of men on earth are a part, until they lift themselves in character above him.

This is the day of the strong; he who would help men today must show no weakness, and what he does must appeal to the strong to be of value.

The weak have had their day. The doc­trine of vicarious atonement appeals to the weak. The cross of Jesus has been elevated to cast a shadow over the whole earth; to en­courage the weak, erring, vicious man and woman to believe that in that shadow is release from the consequences of sin. That cross, with the meaning which is attached to it by most churches of Christendom, is the most gigantic error on earth. Those who lifted that cross at first had desire to help men; but the outcome of that lifting shows that a departure from integrity never bears any but baleful fruits. The men, who were thus willing to depart from integrity in order to ensnare men to good in a mesh of lies, have them­selves reaped the effects of their motives in much suffering, shame, sin, and weakness; for they, in subsequent incarnations, have been born under the shadow of the cross, and tasted to the full all the sinister effects of it. It has made brave men cowards, and pure men sen­sualists; because it has allowed a man to think that he could sin today, repent tomorrow, and pass in at the beautiful gates unchal­lenged.

Many a man on earth today feels in his secret soul the foolishness, senselessness, and dishonor of this monstrous lie; and it is time that all such men spoke the truth, and acted out their impulses.

Such as have too little moral energy to rouse themselves, and fully and willingly pay their own soul’s debts, and wash themselves free from foulness, will go on believing that they can get into heaven, with all their defile­ment and dishonor, by clinging to the skirts of some good soul or god. Does any good father or decent mother let a child come into the house after wallowing in the mire, without being washed ? If the child be grown and able to wash himself, will the father or mother do it for him, unless he be an idiot, in which case he would not be trusted in the street alone to get into mire ? When a soul has enough intelligence, energy, knowledge, and opportunity provided to enable it to purify itself and pay its debts — by atoning to every other soul for every wrong done — will any god care enough about that soul to do any­thing for it, so long as it refuses to try to do for itself ?

The gods who watch men are weary of their weaknesses and moral debasement; and weary of hearing prayers asking them, the gods, to do man’s own dirty work for him.

The gods have been divinely patient with men, waiting for them to rouse themselves, and dare to be strong. But for this patience, the earth would have been destroyed long ago; for its wickedness is a stench in the nostrils of the beings who make up the nine central spheres, and a loathing to many a lesser god.

The gods have now done with the weak. As a teacher, after being patient, and trying in every possible way to rouse, help, and carry along weak and idle pupils, near the close of the year drops them out of mind, and concen­trates attention on those who can pass the year’s work: so, now, the gods will cease to try to help the weak; and turn all of their influences to_> perfecting, so far as possible, such souls as are strong enough to wish to be helped in ways which are honorable to both gods and men.

Let no soul imagine that brutality is strength, nor that to kill a man’s body is the only form of murder. He who willingly, knowingly takes opportunity from another man is brutal; and he who crushes the hope in another man’s soul is a murderer.

Let every man, first of all, return his ill- gotten gains, not by building hospitals, asy­lums, and schools; but by returning those gains directly to those from whom they were taken, be it man or state. When a man has paid to the full all that he has stolen or taken by under­handed, unrighteous, cruel indifference to the needs and prosperity of other men, cities, or states, then, and not till then, may he try to wash his own soul free from foulness, or utter any sort of prayer to the gods; for the prayers of a man whose life is one long, brutal lie are, in the ears of the gods, the foulest blasphemy a soul can utter.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII.

FOODS.

If man were pure, he could draw his suste­nance from the mineral world, as plants do; and impure as he is, the only legitimate food there is for him, on this planet, is the fruits and seeds of plants.

Of the grains, Indian corn is, for the aver­age man, the best on our planet. It will make the strongest body and the toughest brain and nerve possible to a child of earth. It has in it the strength, tenacity, and filtering power against foulness, which truth has against error. It is the only perfect grain this planet has produced. This grain is capable of being per­fected,—purified from its wild qualities, and transformed by cultivation into a food which, unground and uncooked, will be as palatable and as digestible as beech nuts. In its present, crude state, mush made of yellow corn meal and cooked about four hours in an open ket­tle, over a slow fire—stirring the grain into cold water and heating slowly to the simmer­ing point—is one of the best methods of preparing it. Another, is the common pop-corn. The most delicate varieties of pop-corn, well popped, thoroughly chewed, and taken with copious draughts of pure spring water,—are the most perfect food man can now get on this planet.

Next to corn, barley is the best grain on our planet. Its original home is the star Aldebaran; where it grows in such perfection that beside it, the best on our planet is a poor, coarse weed. It is capable of great improve­ment by proper cultivation.

Wheat is not a native of this earth; but was brought here from the planet Jupiter, where it is indigenous. On Jupiter, it is not used for food, but is the grass principally used for turf; and that turf is so tough that roads pass over it without destroying it.

A grain resembling rye is used for the same purpose on the planet Saturn. On neither of these planets are there any dusty roads or paved streets: but beautiful, green, close, clean turf over which everything passes; and which, in the open country, extends often as far as the eye can see.

Rice is a poor food for men, not because of its physical, but because of its moral effects; for as all vegetables have souls, so do all foods produce moral effects on those who partake of them. Oats are unfit for human food, and any peo­ple who continually uses them must inevitably dwindle away, unless their numbers are kept up by incarnations among them of souls whose bodies had not previously fed on that grain.

The pulse family of vegetables—beans, peas, lentils, etc.—are the scavenger beetles, fleas, and carrion crows of the plant world. They all draw from the soil coarse, foul, parasitic qualities; and are no fit food for clean men.

Onions are the most wholesome of all veg­etables which grow in or on the soil. They give heat, energy, and moral fire, and cleanse the system. By proper cultivation, a variety might be produced which would be free from rankness, and so delicate as to be eaten raw with pleasure and without producing a vile breath.

Cabbage is the best vegetable which grows above the ground; but it needs purifying from its rank, crude qualities. It has excellent medicinal properties, and should always be eaten raw.

Onions, cabbage, and watercress are the only so-called vegetables, which men now use in civilized lands, which a man with the gift of non-physical sight would be willing to partake of as a food, or in any manner save as a neces­sary medicine.

All fruits and nuts which grow on trees, and the better sorts of wild berries are good food.

Meat foods of all sorts—the flesh of the bodies of lost human souls—are an abomina­tion to the gods, and to all purified men; and the milk of pregnant cows, one with developed interior senses would rather starve than par­take of.

A man or woman who desires to cleanse the body, and bring it into obedience in the shortest possible time, and with the least pain and friction to mind and soul, should try to live on popcorn and spring water: and should partake of nothing else whatever; until, day after day, week in and week out, he or she is contented with those, and feels no desire for other food or drink. When that time comes, and not sooner, can other foods—grains, fruits, nuts, vegetables — be tried with any surety that appetite will select what is good for the system, and properly regulate the quantity to be eaten.

Let no man judge of the effects—physical, mental or moral—of the corn grain until it has been properly purified by cultivation, and used by a superior race for a sufficient period of time to test its qualities, and their results upon the human system.

In the process of bringing the body to obedi­ence, no perfection can be expected, so long as one remains among people who live the ordinary lives. The smaller entities pass from one body to another; and especially are they attracted to a body whose tissues are clean. Each entity from an impure body is an ele­ment of discord in a pure body, until it, too, has been regenerated: this is one reason why common domestic and social life is so irritating and painful to clean men and women.

The beginnings of regenerating the body are best made in solitude, unless one is so fortunate as to be associated with those who share the efforts. Even when the process is complete, some discord is sure to be experi­enced after each prolonged contact with those who live in the ordinary manner; and to main­tain complete purity of body and mind while in daily contact with the common, human stream on this planet, is a labor which even the gods regard with compassion, and even they would reverence the soul who achieved it. It has never yet been achieved on this planet.

Nevertheless, the strong will undertake this labor, and to every such an one, the gods send this message: “Love is the only force which can cleanse impurities and adjust dis­cords, without and within; and in proportion to the power of a soul to love will be the rapidity and perfection with which it will achieve the great labor of regenerating its own material kingdom while performing the common duties of life among men.”

 

The End