What is real, tangible and exquisitely fine?

Dear readers―whoever you may be―we [spirit-lives] would like to make you―All―thoroughly understand just how it is here in this world [in the world of spirits], and we cannot think of a better comparison than the art of weaving cloth. 

There is a kind of woven cloth almost as coarse as rope yarn can make. 

Now, there is woven material on earth all the way up from this coarsest to that as fine as a spider's web―in fact, so fine that it requires passably good eyesight to see it at all, and yet it is real, tangible stuff, woven from threads of exquisite fineness―even wire is made into screen of such fineness that one looking through them quite forgets they are there, yet a mosquito―or a fly finds them quite tangible, and so does a man when he inadvertently tries to run his head through them. 

Now the spiritual world may be compared to this very fine material. 

It is real and tangible, but exquisitely fine. 

A lady looks through a very fine veil and forgets that she wears it, but the veil is as real as the lady. 

The quintessence of fineness is more beautiful than coarseness, and our spiritual world is more beautiful than the earthly world, for it is composed of the quintessence of all that belongs to earth.

Now I would like to tell you how all these things get here. 

They are brought here, mostly, on the wings of heat.

How is that? you ask, and I ask―

How does water rise from the earth into the atmosphere―billions upon billions of tons of it? 

Why there are oceans of water floating in the atmosphere at all times, enough to drown out every living thing—enough to destroy your cities and towns. 

If it were precipitated at once, there would be another deluge equal to the reputed one in the days of Noah―

All this water is carried up from the earth by heat―every schoolboy understands this very well.

Water is not the only thing that heat carries upward―or outward away from this earth―it is carrying everything that belongs to the earth in the same way. 

On a bright sunny day, especially if it is very hot, your flowers―many of them―wither and die. 

Why? Because heat is bearing them away to the spiritual realm. 

Much of the water that is carried up returns to earth, but not all―a portion becomes too rare and never returns, and this forms the rare and expanded waters of the spiritual spheres. 

All this water rises and no one is conscious of its going—no one can see it as it ascends—for the greater part of it is carried up on the brightest and sunniest days―no more can one see the essence―or spirit of all that appears to die on earth, as it is carried by heat outward―or upward into the spirit realms. 

The spiritual-earth―or ground is the aggregation of chemical vapours that arise from material earths, and through the great law of chemical affinity coalesce into shining and ethereal spirit-lands―or spiritual ground. 

Nothing here grows from seeds. 

Seeds do not germinate anywhere, but on the material earths, and earths nourish the spiritual upon their bosoms.

Letters from the spirit world