And it is here that music plays its part in that wonder-world. For as ideas have each their appropriate form, so every emotion has a musical strain peculiar to it.
And who can describe the healing power of music under a master's hand? Reading the mind and soul as an open book, and informing every tone with the vibrations of a perfect sympathy born of knowledge, he administers to the soul whose life has been a tragedy long-drawn-out, such throbbing waves of strength and consolation, himself remaining hidden, as seem to issue from the very stars, and drown the memory of that age-long pain in an ocean of oblivion.
Ah! believe me, it is another world, where the powers of this one do not rule.
CHAPTER XXVI.
And yet, as I have indicated, it is possible to live so far below one's moral and spiritual possibilities, that the loss of life will seem the loss of heaven, and the men of power on earth whom one has envied will come to seem very gods, worthy of being worshipped. Such a delusion as this is in part due to the absence of a common time-element.
Duration is measured only by the succession of various states of consciousness, and these change so rapidly under the influence of the vibratory intensity of the new life, that the events of a day lengthen it out until it seems like a year upon earth; and day and night being one in the Beyond, so far as activity is concerned, although they differ somewhat in magnetic conditions, when one of these year-long days is past, the spirit, glancing across into earth-life, at some money king, with thirty years of active life before him, can scarcely avoid endowing him with a kind of immortality, and may devote the fiery energies of the soul to building up the fortunes of such a one, with no higher object than that of keeping the mental balance and avoiding reflection.
This necessity for keeping the balance supplies motive for a great deal that is done by spirits in the lower strata of life in the Beyond. It is not, strictly speaking, mental balance, but organic, affecting the whole being. A spirit possessed of any conscious individuality whatever must generate a certain interior force to maintain it. This keeps his body in a state of equilibrium between the inner and outer pressure, and the body of a spirit is naturally as valuable to him as ours is to us. It protects him against currents of thought and emotion that are not adapted to his needs, and when evenly balanced he is able to put forth effective will-power along the plane of his development and below.
Any one who has not learned what soul-action is will have it to learn soon after the exchange of worlds. No other form of activity is possible there. No spirit strikes another with his hand, nor presents him with a visible token of wealth, yet battles are fought and presents given. As a suggestion: when you say to your friend, "Good-bye and good-luck to you," you are making him a spiritual present, although you may not be aware of it.