“This is more nearly the truth than anything you ever heard before. That’s why.... Truth in your life is comparative. Here it is absolute, but not dogmatic.”
He said that she had not been given to the use of a philosophic vocabulary in this life, and must have acquired it there, to which, at the moment, she made no response.
Some time after Cass rejoined us Mr. Kendal asked how much farther, or how much more clearly, they could see about purely business or political matters than we.
“We can see much farther, but we are not permitted to tell you, except by ethical suggestion. Part of your development comes through your struggle to decide, and while we see your struggle, we can help only by giving you as much of our strength and light as you can take. It is a moral universe, Manzie.” The underscoring is hers.
Out of his wide experience with psychic phenomena, he gave me much comfort regarding the inaccuracies and misleading statements that had so greatly disquieted me. He argued that these discrepancies might easily be caused by some factor or factors unknown to us, operating on another plane, and was entirely untroubled by them. In this connection, Mary K. said to me the next day: “We regard things successfully started as accomplished.”
[Some weeks later Mr. Kendal suggested another possible reason for these apparent inaccuracies, using as a comparison a familiar experiment in physics. He reminded us that if a rod be projected in a straight line between the eye and a coin at the bottom of a bowl of water, its tip will miss the coin by a distance varying with the angle of vision and the depth of the water. Assuming that the difference between this plane and the next must be vastly greater than that between air and water, he argued that there might be a factor comparable to this deflection of ray influencing their perception of material, specific details of this plane—a simile which Mary K. subsequently characterized as “almost perfect.”]
It was three o’clock in the morning when Mr. Kendal left us to return to his club—but he went convinced. Like Mrs. Gaylord, his confidence was inspired not only by the temper and tenor of the messages he had received, but by the accompanying consciousness of a familiar personality, akin to the certainty of identity one feels in talking to a friend by telephone or in reading a characteristic letter. Like her, too, he said that in several instances his unspoken thought had been directly answered.
The next day we resumed our conversation—for it amounted to that—with Mary.