O. J. L. —Yes, I know, Lionel told us; that you wanted something more like your old clothes at first, and that they didn't force you into new ones, but let you begin with the old kind, until you got accustomed to the place (p. [189]).
Yes, he says, they didn't force me, but most of the people here wear white robes.
O. J. L.—Then, can you tell any difference between men and women?
There are men here, and there are women here. I don't think that they stand to each other quite the same as they did on the earth plane, but they seem to have the same feeling to each other, with a different expression of it. There don't seem to be any children born here. People are sent into the physical body to have children on the earth plane; they don't have them here. But there's a feeling of love between men and women here which is of a different quality to that between two men or two women; and husband and wife seem to meet differently from mother and son, or father and daughter. He says he doesn't want to eat now. But he sees some who do; he says they have to be given something which has all the appearance of an earth food. People here try to provide everything that is wanted. A chap came over the other day, would would have a cigar. "That's finished them," he thought. He means he thought they would never be able to provide that. But there are laboratories over here, and they manufacture all sorts of things in them. Not like you do, out of solid matter, but out of essences, and ethers, and gases. It's not the same as on the earth plane, but they were able to manufacture what looked like a cigar. He didn't try one himself, because he didn't care to; you know he wouldn't want to. But the other chap jumped at it. But when he began to smoke it, he didn't think so much of it; he had four altogether, and now he doesn't look at one.[24] They don't seem to get the same satisfaction out of it, so gradually it seems to drop from them. But when they first come they do want things. Some want meat, and some strong drink; they call for whisky sodas. Don't think I'm stretching it, when I tell you that they can manufacture even that. But when they have had one or two, they don't seem to want it so much—not those that are near here. He has heard of drunkards who want it for months and years over here, but he hasn't seen any. Those I have seen, he says, don't want it any more—like himself with his suit, he could dispense with it under the new conditions.
He wants people to realise that it's just as natural as on the earth plane.
O. J. L.—Raymond, you said your house was made of bricks. How can that be? What are the bricks made of?
That's what he hasn't found out yet. He is told by some, who he doesn't think would lead him astray, that they are made from sort of emanations from the earth. He says there's something rising, like atoms rising, and consolidating after they come; they are not solid when they come, but we can collect and concentrate them—I mean those that are with me. They appear to be bricks, and when I touch them, they feel like bricks; and I have seen granite too.
There's something perpetually rising from your plane; practically invisible—in atoms when it leaves your plane—but when it comes to the ether, it gains certain other qualities round each atom, and by the time it reaches us, certain people take it in hand, and manufacture solid things from it. Just as you can manufacture solid things.
All the decay that goes on on the earth plane is not lost. It doesn't just form manure or dust. Certain vegetable and decayed tissue does form manure for a time, but it gives off an essence or a gas, which ascends, and which becomes what you call a 'smell.' Everything dead has a smell, if you notice; and I know now that the smell is of actual use, because it is from that smell that we are able to produce duplicates of whatever form it had before it became a smell. Even old wood has a smell different from new wood; you may have to have a keen nose to detect these things on the earth plane.