[G.E. writes:] “Do you remember me well?… I had a sad life in many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what real happiness was until I came here…. I was an unbeliever, in fact almost an agnostic when I left my [pg 171]body, but when I awoke and found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is, my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no struggling to hold on to the material body, I found it had all been a dream….” R.H.: “That was your first experience?” G.E.: “… The moment I had been removed from my body I found at once I had been thoroughly mistaken in my conjectures. I looked back upon my whole life in one instant. Every thought, word, or action which I had ever experienced passed through my mind like a wonderful panorama as it were before my vision. You cannot begin to imagine anything so real and extraordinary as this first awakening…. I awoke in a realm of golden light. I heard the voices of friends who had gone before calling to me to follow them. At the moment the thrill of joy was so intense I was like one standing spellbound before a beautiful panorama. The music which filled my soul was like a tremendous symphony. I had never heard nor dreamed of anything half so beautiful….
“Another thing which seemed to me beautiful was the tranquillity of everyone. You will perhaps remember that I had left a state where no one ever knew what tranquillity meant.”
March 13, 1807: “I was speaking about the songs of our birds. Then the birds seemed to pass beyond my vision, and I longed for music of other kinds…. When, to my surprise, my desires were filled…. Just before me sat the most beautiful bevy of young girls that eyes ever rested upon. Some playing stringed instruments, others that sounded and looked like silver bugles, but they were all in harmony, and I must truly confess that I never heard such strains of music before. No mortal mind can possibly realize anything like it. It was not only in this one thing that my desires were filled, but in all things accordingly. I had not one desire, but that it was filled without any apparent act of myself.
“I longed to see gardens and trees, flowers, etc. I no sooner had the desire than they appeared…. Such beautiful flowers no human eye ever gazed upon. It was simply indescribable, yet everything was real…. I walked and moved along as easily as a fly would pass through a ray of sunlight in your world. I had no weight, nothing cumbersome, nothing…. I passed along through this garden, meeting millions of friends. As they were all friendly to me, each and every one seemed to be my friend…. I then thought of different friends I had once known, and my desire was to meet some one of them, when like [pg 172]every other thought or desire that I had expressed, the friend of whom I thought instantly appeared.”
How much all this is like dreams!
March 27, 1897. (A good deal of confusion, out of which appears) “He will insist upon calling me Miss, but let him if he wishes. I am very much Mrs. Never mind so long as it suits him….
“I have a desire for reading, when instantly my whole surrounding is literally filled with books of all kinds and by many different authors…. When I touched a book and desired to meet its author, if he or she were in our world, he or she would instantly appear. [Is this purely incidental reiterated claim for female authors, by one of them, ‘evidential,’ or was Mrs. Piper ingenious enough to invent it? Ed.]….”
The change of the instrument below is a specially dreamlike touch.
March 30, 1897. “I wished to see and realize that some of the mortal world’s great musicians really existed, and asked to be visited by some one or more of them. When this was expressed, instantly several appeared before me, and Rubinstein stood before me playing upon an instrument like a harp at first. Then the instrument was changed and a piano appeared and he played upon it with the most delightful ease and grace of manner. While he was playing the whole atmosphere was filled with his strains of music.”
She wanted to see Rembrandt, and he came, with a quantity of pictures. She wanted a symphony, and an orchestra “of some thirty musicians” at once appeared and gave her several, which she enjoyed to the full.