Lightly, as floats the atom on a sunbeam, swiftly as the bird flies, gayly as a laughing child, a spiritual form sailed stilly through the Space. Beneath it rolled the globe, its black mountains, deep valleys, and all its silvery seas; above it twinkled the starry shield of heaven; and afar off, on either hand, great suns looked out to see the moving panoply.

And still the Soul sped on, until, at last, its earthly home was in the distance, and all around the mighty Silence reigned. And still the soul swept onward! No dizziness, no faltering, from the awful sense of height, alarmed it, no fear beset its bounding, joyous, happy heart. That Soul was not my own, for the reason that no man can possibly predicate ownership of a Soul - the thinking-principle - Mind; for Soul is himself. He can speak of, and say, "my body, limbs, faculties, qualities," and so forth, with correctness and propriety; for these are his incidents, but Soul is himself - that of which these incidents obtain. They are, to coin a word, the out-sphering of the inner being: the Soul was me.

In a little while the question, "What and why is this, and whither am I going? Rose in my mind. A silvery voice breathed silently into my spirit this response: "Whoso truly willeth to know, shall know, by reason of the relationship between himself and the other two members of the great Eternal Trine, provided always that the wish is good, and its realization would be productive of Excellence and Use.

"No bad man con earnestly wish and will good, while he is bad; if he does, his failure is certain: not so with the good and lofty Soul! It is always welcome to the banquet of knowledge, nor is the gate of Wisdom ever closed to it. The good man can solve all mysteries, the good woman sound the depths of all Music, Love, and Beauty. Thus the saying is literally, perfectly, absolutely true, which affirms that if ye ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all things else shall be added unto you!'"

The voice was that of the fair being whom Thotmor called his own. Previously intent upon observing the rapid changes about me, I did not, until that moment, realize that both these auroral spirits attended on this, my third flight.

"Brother," continued the sweet being, "forget not the first lesson; the second, thou art now receiving."

For a little while, still pondering upon what I had been taught, and still moving forward and upward, I made no mental response or observation. Soon recurred to me the phrase used by the female teacher a little time before: "And the two other members of the great Eternal Trine." I longed to know the meaning, and at that instant a clearness of perception, power of conception, and ability of comprehension were given to me, such as I never knew before. I asked mentally, how this came about, and the answer came to my understanding, through the channel of a clear intuition, and shaped itself in the following form as nearly as words will hold it:

The earth is coarse, yet imprisons the refined. It is a dense, gross substance, a heavy, rough body, but it has a Soul. The Soul of the world is spirit. Every atom of matter has a moving, living, active, spiritual center. The matter enchains the spirit, and the spirit, the principles of Beauty, Use, Goodness, Music, Odor, Tone, Sound, Rhythm, shape, Sympathy, and Coherence, constitute the World-Soul or spirit - and the spirit ever struggles to free itself from its unwilling thraldom. It can only do so by working up the material of its prison-house into forms of Excellence, Use, Beauty, sound, Tone, Shape, and Rhythm. When it does so, it escapes its jail, and goes back to god whence it originally came, through the human organization, and others less perfect, in the form of Odors, Music, Tone, Sound, Beauty (flowers, forests, etc.), Art, Color, and their cognates. A rose is that success in its struggle, which attends that amount and phase of spirit, working out its liberation, from and through matter, by means of its inherent self - the principles named.

There are two Realms: Matter, filled with spirit, and Spirit (above, beyond), free of material encumbrance - the great Spiritual Ocean, in which al the worlds are floating. I realized this tremendous truth. The links of the chain are: Granite, Rock, Water, Atmosphere, extending about on hundred miles; Magnetic Ocean, one hundred more; above that, each remove being as great as between the first two, the ocean of Electrime, one hundred miles (the figures are approximative only). Next an ocean of Magnetime, then Ether, then Ethyle, and then the great Ocean of Spirit, positive. In it floats, rained down from the Infinite, myriads of existences, in the form of Monads - each one a particle of Soul given of, so to speak, from the great Eternal Brain.

These monads are not spirit negative, such as is contained in and constitutes the soul of the world, of matter in all its million forms of beasts, birds, reptiles, and vegetation; nor spirit positive, such as constitutes the Sea whereon the world do float, and whose finer breath is the sphere of disembodied Souls; but they are the original soul-germs of Immortal beings; they are the sparks which fell, and fall from God Himself - particles of the Deific brain, unique, sui generis, unparticled, homogeneous, old as Deity, young as the new-born infant; always existed, ever will exist. They are Pha-Souls (Fay-Souls), or Monads.

I now realized this strange truth: that the Conscious Soul which constituted me was now beyond, as it were, all the circumvolving material atmospheres surrounding earth, and that it was rapidly approaching the awful and vast Spiritual Ocean. Presently it ceased its flight, turned earthward, and made the following discovery: first, the Spiritual pervaded the Ethylic Sea; this, in turn, the Ethereal; that, the Electric; and that, in turn, the Earth Sphere, or Odylic emanation, which in turn pervades the atmospheric or Oxygenic; so that man really breathes several atmospheres instead of a single atmosphere, (59) the highest of which quickens the spirit, as the lower does the body.
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(59) Refer to the Convocation Series of instructions issued by the Secret Schools.
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Turning the gaze outward, a fine, glorious, soft, silvery sea was seen spreading away in all directions and the eye had no difficulty, as on earth it has, in traversing space through the corporeal structure and the several earth-airs. In this clear expanse of Spirit float uncounted globular monads, infinite in number, infinitesimal in volume; they are each enveloped in a fine electric substance, which surrounds them perfectly. The spiritual waves bear them on its bosom to the earth, and, by a mysterious power, they are drawn to the human male brain, through the lungs; they enter it, become lodged, remain till a certain physical work is completed, and then descend and effect their mission through the aid of the prostate gland. At certain times they leave this gland, pass into the uterus, enveloped in the prostatic mulse, are caught up - are carried to the womb, and- the work of Incarnation is effected. My business is with facts here; therefore, I shall briefly state what I beheld, and leave others to theorize - satisfied, as I am, that I have penetrated the Grand Secret.

Here, in these aerial Kingdoms, beyond the domain of matter and the sphere of what we call Nature, or Natural Law, which of course does not govern Spirit, it having a mode of its own, I found two sorts of monads - the one perfectly globular, which constitutes the germ of the man; the other ovoidal, which constitutes the germ of the female. There are always two together, in couples they come from the Eternal God, in couples they return.

Placed in the uterus, these come in loving relations with a subtile spirit originally in the female monad, subsequently energized in the woman, condensed in the ova, and there is a blending of elements - the external of the monad and the internal of the ova; and from this blending springs a third something, which is the nucleus of the nervous body, so to speak. This nucleus robs all earthly things of their vital life - plants, flowers, food, drink, and so on, - through the instrumentality of all the bodily organs. This union produces an improvement in both; together they attract the great spiritual substance or atmosphere pervading our air, and then the child is quickened, and rises in the pelvis. The very instant that the first spark of this great spiritual atmosphere passes into the babe, the monad increases in bulk, bursts its bonds or envelopes, passes from the fœtal lungs to the brain, locates in the pineal gland, radiates through the corpus callossum, energizes its body, and, lo! A Soul has entered upon a new career.

As said before, the Soul grows - grows in two ways: first, by development - unfolding and awakening; second by acquired knowledge and experience. The latter is of and for the earth, the former is of and for the Soul itself. The one depends on circumstance and accident, the other is above and beyond both. There may never be much of the latter, but the former will, must, go on to Infinity. Both may go on to a great extent on earth; one certainly will in the hereafter.

All these things I felt, I saw, and knew, as I floated there on the shores of the Spiritual Kingdoms.

Have you ever beheld the golden rain of a rocket, on a stilly summer night? You have! Well, just so God rains monads for Himself! Spirit is the emanation from God's body! Monads are corruscations from His Soul! These truths can never be demonstrated; all spiritual truth is real, and demonstration is effective only in reference to fleeting appearances. The logical faculty deals with what pertains to us on earth; that which pertains to the Spiritual requires some higher power of the Soul It has it - in the Intuitions. The logical faculty deals with Progress; Intuition with Development - unfolding; organic the one - Central Soul the other. Intuition will one day substantiate my discoveries - when I am dead, and this writing is a century old.

At present there is really no Spiritual Philosophy at all, scarcely an approximation thereto. We have not even a spiritual nomenclature, and it is exceedingly difficult to convey spiritual facts or ides in terms notoriously adapted only to the expression of transitory earthly knowledge.

Swedenborg's ideas are worth all others on the great subject, yet he even must be read in Latin or German to be correctly understood. The English is the tongue of commerce - has too much ring of the dollar in it to be used to express spiritual things. I shall try to convey my experiences of as to be understood; yet how can I hope to be? How make the fact known, that one human Soul is actually larger, deeper greater, than this whole material globe? That it has a sun within the cerebrum; a moon, the solar plexus; that its sun rises, when we wake, and sets, retires to the vertebral column, sinks within the great ganglion behind the stomach, when we sleep; that it has stars, the nerve-villi; planets, the ganglia; it has a milky way, the great nervous cord; comets, and in short, everything that the outer world has, and much beside. How shall I express these facts so as to be understood? For the terms I use do not convey the exact meaning. Who can understand that the Soul has hills, mountains, valleys, and so fourth? Yet it hath all these things in a higher and heavenly sense. Still more difficult will it be to prove or show that the Bible saying, "the kingdom of heaven is within: everyone, is a literal truth. The Soul, per se, contains within itself the sum total of a dozen universes, each differing from the other, each one overlying that beneath it; and just as fast as the Soul outgrows, unfolds from, or "vastates" either of these, new and higher one become apparent, just as there dwells and appreciation of the refined and beautiful in every coarse man or woman, but, in order that this æsthetic sense shall come out and be active, a certain discipline is essential, the result of which is a vastation and throwing off of what impeded and obstructed this beauty-sense. This if the end and mission of education or discipline. Our principle life - for we lead several lives at the same time - is the life of Imagination. We form, in fact create, by a mystic power not yet understood, whole galleries of paintings, figures, adventures, and circumstances, "houses in Spain," "castles in the air,"these are our in-creations, because, while yet in the body, they loom up in the deep, distant depths of the mind as images more or less vague and shadowy. They are as yet within us, pictured, as they are, upon the outer surfaces of the Soul, yet within the radius of the spirit.

After death these become the realities of our then existence, are the spontaneous out-births or out-creations of our Souls, and in them we live, move, and have our being - happy, joyous, pleasant, provided our Souls are beautiful, calm, and serene; but if they be not so, then those out-creations are full of horrors - serpents, noisome things, reptiles, and dead men's bones.

Few, very few clairvoyants have ever beheld the realities of the spiritual world. I know of but few, contemporaneous or historical, whom I believe ever to have beheld the mysteries of the other life. Among the few, Behmen, Swedenborg, and Harris, stand pre-eminent. The others - some of them honest, doubtless, but often deluded - have beheld their own out-creations, or the spiritual photographs on the sky-surfaces of things and events pertaining to the earth. Every out-creation differs from all others; hence arise the annoying discrepancies and diverse accounts of the same things which we are constantly receiving, as for instance, the spirit-land, the sun moon, planets, and their occupants, as given by various so-called modern seers. The memory of man is internal to himself while here, but after death it is, as it were, the furniture of the parlor wherein he lives on the other side of time; and those tableau-vivants, or living pictures, when seen by clairvoyants, are passed off upon men as the revelations of reality, when they are but the ephemera of existence. Spirits tell us of their legs, lungs, bodies, lands, parks, and so forth, because the Soul is Mind, and can have no possible use for these things; yet, for a long period, these very things are realities to the spirit and to clairvoyants.

The fact is, good spirits do not appear one-tenth as often as imagined; the majority of spiritual appearances are but out-creations subjective images of the seer, objectified; or are psychological projections of other minds, images impressed upon the susceptible person's brain.

The spiritual world, as it is generally mapped out to us, appears but a few degrees in advance of this one, on the same general plane, if we are to believe the tales told us concerning it, while the fact is, that world is not like this in any respect. It is not a place, literally speaking, but is a condition - a single one of countless that have been - of millions yet to be. Dream-life is a good illustration of my meaning. It is a condition of the Soul. In it we have a life actual, real, absolute, not in far-off regions, because we are sill, so to speak, in our bedrooms, but in the midst of our private domain, our own out-creations, our personal universe.

The human Soul, as said before, is a divine kaleidoscope, which forever changes, yet never exhausts its capacity, either for change, or for appreciation of the bliss thence derived, or of trouble encountered. So we have no need of legs in the spirit-world, because our movements are not with reference to space - we have done with roads and distances there; our changes are of state or condition. Illustration: Anna is a beautiful girl - pious, good, pure, excellent; sits besides her lover, John - a polished scoundrel in every sense. One bullet kills both instantly. They die on the spot. Both awake in the other life - in the same room, yet are a million miles apart, because their respective mental states determine their relation to each other there, albeit other things determine it here. (60) The May never not only not meet again, but never know aught of each other, so vast is the real distance (condition) between the twain. The spiritual world of the one will abound with forms of beauty, use, goodness; that of the other will abound with toads, swamps, snakes, bug, and unseemly things. They? Because each is surrounded with his or her personal out-creations. Each, communicating back to earth, will tell what each beholds; both will be true, yet both fail to give even the ghost of a real notion about the absolute supernal world. Whatever we are, we see; whatever we want, is there before us - we have. Thus we can ascend in goodness, or sink away to the very depths of hell - both our own, however.
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(60) Illustrated by the Biblical Story of Lazarus and the rich man who thirsted and begged for a drop of water.
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All these things came to me there, as I floated on a wave of the sea of knowledge.

Self-induced psycho-vision often passes as the product of spirits. The line is yet to be drawn between the seeming and the real in this respect. Spirits first are monads - spiritual (psychal) atoms - God-existent from all past eternity. Secondly, they are awakened beings, self-existent to all future states, not times merely. Thirdly, at physical birth they, as monads, cease to be; at physical death a change as complete and great as the last occurs. And now they have passed through and across three eternities: those of monads, matter, and spirit. Fourthly, they remain in not condition above a century, which accounts for the fact that no well-authenticated instance of intercourse with a spirit over a century dead has yet been recorded. Lastly, they ever pass onward, and each condition differs from the last, as does sleep from wakefulness. There are multitudes of these changes. It takes about a century to graduate and gravitate from one condition to another. When we pass from this world we take some things with us which we are obliged to unlearn there. Thus, some want drink, others rest, fruit, land, houses, money, and so forth; some want children and desire to cohabit as on earth. All have just what they want, only that the children begotten there are mere phasmas, just as by a powerful effort even here we can create a beautiful puppy dog, and hold it as an ideal before our eyes.

A crazy man's golden crown and throne, although to us nothing but straw and bits of stone, are to him gold and diamonds, and flash forth the riches scintillations of the most precious jewels. It is a state of the mind. Millions of crazy people inhabit both worlds, whence it follows that insanity is a disease of the mind as well as a result of organic and chemical change and disturbance in the body.

It is hard to describe spiritual things in material language. Amongst all the flood of Spiritual literature" I know of no single work that gives the faintest idea of spiritual actualities, If we except Swedenborg, and a fugitive lecture or two, By persons not necessary to be named herein. All that passes current as such is far more ideal and material than spiritual, and is referable, as to origin, to excited ideality, and other peculiar mental states, rather than to the Supernal world. Amidst the three million speeches a year, delivered under professed spirit influence, it is my deliberate conviction that not over ten in one thousand has its source in the pure Soul-realm; many originate in the Middle States of the spiritual world; very many of the vivid and beautiful descriptions of spirit life, scenery, and so forth, which so please us to hear, are transcripts from the individual's inner-self, or rather of the out-creations thereof. Of course, these are true to the individual, but to no one else. Let it but be remembered that the man was as immortal in the past as he is now and will be; and that during that state (as Monad or Pha-Soul) of pre-carnate being, he had an experience as real to him then as his present is to him now, and we shall no linger marvel at genius or at the stupendous powers of the human mind. During the sublime experiences of my Soul, which I am endeavoring to recount, I became thoroughly satisfied, not as the medium, not from the spiritual teaching, but from Soul-observation, that man, like God, had no beginning, as did matter as we know it; and that, like Him, he well never positively have an end; albeit the modes of God and those of man - for at bottom they are one - continually change conditions. This brings us to the question, "What is God?"

Up there, upon the beautiful ether, all was still and silent music, yet, moving in Beauty, Order, and Form - which were out-creations of one Eternal Monad, self-conscious and awful - shone a sun of ineffable glory and majesty – the Omnipotent God.

This sun shines in the heaven of spirit, just as the comparatively tiny and material suns illuminate the material universe. The spiritual does not glide into the material, but is from and above it, just in the sense that the meaning of a sentence is above the sounds or characters which convey it - and in no other. The grand procession of material universes constantly sweeps along the Eternities; receive Light, Life, and Love thence; fructify; incarnate the monad's Beauty, Consciousness, Form, Order, Law, Music, and Number in human Souls; and then exhaustion prepares the self-same material universes - or rather, their bases for a new infiltration - of God-Od, so to speak, differing from the last. And so on forever. One procession is one Eternity, or rather, cycle. Thus it will be seen, by those who can grasp this tremendous thought, that all matter, the amazing system of substance, is, after all, but a mere fleck, a mote in the sun-rays, a mere grain on the awful shores of the stupendous Spiritual Ocean. Not does all the matter existing bear a greater proportion to the spiritual than an arrange does in bulk to the Rocky Mountain Chain. The material systems move near its center, and the spiritual waves flow on all sides into the Ineffable Beyond.

The fountain whence they flow is God! And this word "God"! Is a poor term. Men become "gods" in the great hereafter - gods for Good, Use, and Order, or the opposite of these;but this, of which I speak, the Eternal Secret, the awful, yet radiant Mystery, is as far beyond the Ideal Jehovah as is the human beyond the analid. Let us make a chain: Matter is the first link; Spirit is the second - I speak of Universes now, remember; Soul, that which constitutes the human Think-principle, is the third. This Over-Soul flows through all these, as man's spirit through his body. Now man is conscious only partly; he knows nothing just on the other side of himself, is ignorant of what life is, and of that august power which governs his involuntary self. The Over-Soul flows out into the All, into the universe of Think (I can use no other term), into that of Soul, Monads, Spirit, Matter, and while pervading and being imminent in All, is self-conscious at every point, in the Think, the Monad, the Soul, the Spirit, the Matter, in every particle that is, or can ever be. I hold this as the truest definition of the Deity yet given. In the radiant presence of such a thought, all human things must bow, all human pride stand back, all human ideas pale and fade....And these things came to me, and I believe them true.

And God is not good, but beyond goodness; is not truth, but its foundation; is not power, nor Life, nor Think, but beyond, beneath, above all these! Spirit may be represented as the Soul of matter; Soul as the inmost of Spirit; Monad as the base of Soul; Think as the essence of Monad; God as the Soul of Think. Let no man smile at these uncouth expressions; they stand as symbols of mighty truths. I have said that Monads were scintillations from God's brain. Matter was the Proceeding from His body. Monads are forms of thought, and are the bubbles on His ever-rising tide of Soul. Hence, these monads are, so to speak, the givings off of His spirit. God's Spirit is the element, Soul; but of this Soul none but Himself knoweth.

And as I floated there on the Sea of knowledge, an impulse sprung up to know more, and these questions were fashioned in my Soul, and that Soul derived from out the mystery the answers appended to each question.

"Is not man forever in the human form?" In human form, Yes; in human shape, No: Man was once the monad - a finite sun. He still is so as to himself, and the body which he uses is but an out-creation, as are his mental pictures, with the difference that the latter are volitional and circumstantial, while the former is constitutional. The shape - organic - is the very best adapted to the purposes it serves, and it is the effect of a force lying behind the personal consciousness. its use is for the material; it could have none in the spiritual world, save as the effect of Soul-habit, or as a means of discipline in the lesser or "lower" departments or conditions thereof.

"How of dead infants?" Infants have spiritual bodies, and retain them till discipline places them beyond the necessity. In all cases, the bodily forms are attachments to the human, so long as the human is in the sphere of discipline - hence moves within the possibilities of Good and Evil. When they leave this latter, and merge into the sphere of Uses, the external of the Soul corresponds to its new state. A Soul is immaterial, as of the nature of Think, hence needs no stomach to digest food, lungs to breathe air, legs for locomotion, and so forth, for all these are principles of the Soul, with mere out-created organs. When it needs the organs no longer, it dispenses therewith, but the principles underlying them still remain

A man sits in his study and thinks of his father's house many, many miles away. He sees it - well, brook, barn, trees, garden, flowers, all just as they really exist. Now, the man's body, being a mere thing of circumstance, still remains in the study, but the man himself is gone, his body and spirit are in the room, but himself is at the old homestead. Space, time, and flight are not to the Soul - only to forms and things of coarser nature and lesser majesty. The Soul thinks "I am there," and - there it is. Certainly persons, gifted, can see things spiritual; all persons can at times, and frequently are sensible of the presence of others, whose bodies are far away. They are made sensible of it by Soul-contact. It is possible for a man to project an image of himself to any distance, which image shall be mistaken for himself. These images, being such, of course, cannot speak when questioned by whoever sees them. Whoever can picture the exact simulacrum of himself can will this figure whithersoever he may choose, and, then persons who behold this declare they have seen his "specter," "Phantom," "Ghost," "wraith," or "double." Again, the man of strong will and pure desires may quit the body spiritually, actually, and be perceptible to others at a distance, may be spoken to, hold conversations, and move material objects, though his body lies scores of leagues away.

"Are there demons?" Yes, two kinds: forms of fear, corresponding to a man's bad moral state, projected out-creations from the wicked self. Such are the fiends, snakes, toads, devils, and horrid monsters seen by the victim of delirium tremens. Of the same order, but beautiful, are the angels, ghillim, houris, fairy-forms, peris, and naiads, seen by the rapt enthusiasts of all ages and climes, but especially of the Orient, when inspired by opium, love, and religion; out-creations of their inmost Souls - subjective images objectified. This species of out-projection pertains to all persons, while under the discipline of good and evil, virtue and vice, and all other material conditions and accidents. "What do you mean by virtue and vice as material incidents?" I mean that good and evil are but conditions environing man, while under the sway of his inevitable discipline.
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