“Instinctively I grasped my left arm with my right hand. Lo! the hand passed through it. No bones were there.
“Can you imagine one already dead fainting from fear? The sensation I experienced was more startling, more fearful than anything I had conceived of before. I sank down, down into immeasurable depths.
“A feeling of shame at my cowardice took possession of me. Why was I afraid? I had died, to be sure; my condition was changed; but the experience was something millions and millions of other souls had undergone. Gentle, timid, delicate women had trodden that solemn path before me. Little children, too, had traveled it. Why should I, a man, vain of my strength and courage, be affrighted? A vast compassion for all humankind in this trying moment welled up in my heart, and instantly I was lifted into light, and beheld about me loving and familiar faces, beautiful vistas, and heard melodious sounds. The loving thought I held had borne me upward; but I did not then know it.
“Many times I sank into a dark, bottomless void, and as often by some mysterious power rose into ineffable light. I encountered massive walls from time to time, before which my feet were stayed. Impassable and impregnable, they seemed to bar my way, I knew not why. Eventually I learned that the sinking and the rising, and the barriers I met, were not external experiences, but all took place within my own consciousness, and were but the picturing or appearances of my inner condition. They were my own thoughts externalized, for thought is the only thing in the Universe. We think, therefore we are. Existence is thought. Man is thought made objective. Thought is the creative principle: it is creation.
“‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,’ describes life both here and in the visible form, if you but understand its true significance. Here every sensation is intensified a thousand times. I thrill with joy and the universe vibrates in harmonious response. I suffer, and it trembles in reciprocal anguish. And this is true of every soul in whatever part of the universe it may dwell; but here our capacity to feel is keener and greater than with you, and here we learn to understand. Every sensation is intensified, because we enter into closer relations with the One Life, the One Spirit that fills all space. Everything is within our consciousness, and outside of that there is nothing. Within us is all that ever was or shall be.
“For a time I was often wretched. The interests of earth attracted me, I thought of them wistfully, and wished I were in my old place doing the work in which I had found something akin to pleasure. The wish held me there, and I was miserable, because the old methods of action were lost to me. Often when you sat at your desk in the Register office I was near, suffering keen torment, because I could not make my presence known. It took me a long time to see that we were not really separated. It was only the veil of your ignorance that shut me away from you. I was near you, but you did not know it, that was all. The veil that hides our world from yours is ignorance—a veil it is possible to lift.
“Still, I suffered until I found a means of enlightening you. I saw the peculiar power the Butterfly possesses, and endeavored to arouse in her a wish to investigate which would enable me to bridge the gulf between us—a gulf that existed only in your thought.
“I caused her to see me in what she believed a dream, and I held a planchette that she might try to operate with it. To my unbounded delight I was successful. I assure you that, although you were grateful for the knowledge the little tripod brought you, I was a thousand times more so, since to me it meant deliverance from darkness and misery.
“I could not rise into higher conditions—conditions being internal—until I had established communication with you. The moment you recognized me and believed in me, darkness and discontent began to fall away from me. You made heaven for me on earth, inasmuch as I loved you, and that love has made heaven for me here—both heaven and hell being states of consciousness, though none the less real for all that.
“My burden was lifted, when you fully understood that I still lived. Not till then was I willing to accept my changed condition and seek knowledge in new paths.