I know I have failed to give a true idea of what I saw and felt. As a boy, I was for a short time fascinated by the study of astronomy, and I remember being made afraid by the thought of the distances between the worlds. Now all that was changed; I was floating, it appeared to me, between unnumbered worlds, but in a way they were near to me, so near that I could see what was happening on them.
How long I was alone I do not know, for, as I have said, time had no meaning. In a sense I felt as though I wandered through the silences for æons, although scenes flashed before me with the speed of light. My experiences make me think of the words of the old Hebrew poet:
"A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday,
when it is passed, and as a watch in the night."
I have said that the worlds I saw were near me, so near that I could see their inhabitants and watch their movements and activities. But even in this I convey a wrong impression, for while I had this sense of nearness, I had also the consciousness that they were separated by vast distances. It was just as though I had a glimpse of the Universe. There were millions of worlds around me, and all were inhabited; everywhere was life, life that expressed itself in thought and action. On every hand were sentient thinking beings who played their part and did their work in the world from which they drew their life.
A sense of unutterable awe possessed me. I was between the worlds. I could watch what was being done on those worlds, and I felt myself to be the merest speck in infinity.
As I have stated, the thought which possessed me was that I was utterly alone, and that while I suffered no pain, and while I had a consciousness of freedom which made me exultant, my loneliness was beyond all thought....
I felt a presence; at least that is the only word I can think of to express my thought. I had no consciousness of a person being near me, and yet that Something was all around me, an Intelligence, a Will, a Power. What it was I could not tell, but that Something answered the questions which came to me....
The one predominating thought or consciousness which flooded and overwhelmed everything was the consciousness of God. While I had been in the body, something hid from me the reality of God; now everything was God. I lived in God; everything was submerged in this one great Fact of Facts, and I wondered at my blindness when I was alive. And yet I was overwhelmed by what, for want of a better word, I call the immensity of everything. I remember asking myself how God could care for such a life as mine; how He could take an interest in the myriads of beings who inhabited the worlds; how He, Who controlled planets and suns, could care for the little lives of men. For I seemed so infinitely little; I was but a speck in infinite space, less to the Universe than the tiniest insect which crawled upon the face of the globe on which I had lived.
But even as the thought came to me came also the answer: because God was infinite in thought, in love, in power, so His Being enveloped all; that because He governed the infinitely Great, so He cared for the tiniest speck of life He had created....
I saw the world from which I had come; I was able to locate my own country. Europe stretched out before me like a plain, and there I saw the nations at war. At first the war appeared only like the struggle of ants upon their little hills, and it seemed of no more importance as to which army should conquer the other than if they had been so many insects at war.