How to explain the spiritual world?

The spirit world is a vast place and you may conclude that it possesses an administrative organisation in all respects proportionate to its demands. 

You would be right, for it does. 

But our needs are not as yours. 

With you in your corruptible world it is constant war with material decay and degeneration. 

With us in our incorruptible world we have neither the one nor the other. 

Ours is a state far beyond Utopian in quality. 

But it is a state where thought is its basic element.

The united thoughts of the inhabitants of the whole realm will sustain all that grows within it, the flowers and trees and grass and water, too, whether of lake, river or sea, for water is fully alive in the spirit world. It is when we come into the city and travel through the halls of learning that the organisation becomes outwardly more observable.

In the hall of music, for example, we find many students busy at work upon their lessons and studies. We find others engaged upon musical research and delving into ancient music books—others will be arranging the music for some concert, consulting the shelves for suitable works and discussing those works with their composers. There are many teachers, many able people ready to assist us in our enquiries or our difficulties, and they are all able to provide a solution to our problems because the staff of this hall are themselves experts.

Nominally, the ruler of the realm is the principal of all the halls, and all major decisions would of course be referred to him. But he appoints competent people to the staffs of the halls and extends to them a free hand in all their undertakings.

Many of the people attached to the halls of learning have been there a great number of years as you reckon time. They will retire from time to time to their own realm and then return to take up their labours anew. The moment will eventually arrive when they will relinquish their position altogether to reside permanently in their own sphere, and then others equally capable will take their place. 

The work of the spirit world functions unceasingly—the workers rest and change about, but the work never stops. 

In the halls of rest, however, the doctors and nurses are always in attendance whatever else may be taking place in other parts of the sphere. 

All this administration belongs to the spirit world proper and concerns the spirit world alone. 

In the city there is an immense building which exercises the function of an office of records and enquiries. Here a great host of people is available to answer all manner of questions that are likely to arise both from the newly arrived and from those of longer residence. 

Among its many important duties is that of keeping a register of people newly arrived in this particular realm. But a still more important service is that of knowing beforehand of those who are about to come into this realm. This information is accurate and infallibly reliable. It is collected through a varied process of thought transmission, of which the enquirer sees little or nothing. He is merely presented with the required information. The value of this service can be readily imagined.

Among the first to receive prior knowledge of an impending war are the different homes of rest. The office of inquiry will be similarly informed.

All the great scientists and engineers are carrying on their investigations and researches in this world of spirit, assisted by scores of enthusiastic helpers from every walk of earthly life, as well as by those whose work lay along those lines when they were incarnate.

And each and every form of work has its separate organisation. 

There are no such things as haphazard methods. 

Every type of pursuit has those in charge of it who are experts and the administration admits of no muddle or fuss. There is no mismanagement, for everything runs with the smoothness of perfectly-constructed machinery under the operation of efficient hands.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of life in the spirit world is that the organisation of living generally works so perfectly and yet so unobtrusively.

They are like nothing upon the earth plane.