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04 September 2014

Life on the Other Side

My Dearest Friend, Julia dictates, I wish to write with you quite a long letter this morning.

I will postpone anything I may have to say about personal things, in order to tell you the message with which I am charged.

It is a message not personal to yourself, but general, and one which I wish you to publish in Borderland. We do not often have so good an opportunity of addressing those who are still in their bodies, so I beg you to allow me the full use of your hand and pen for an hour at least.

You may remember that in my last I told you how we travelled to the land where I met my beloved friends. The meeting was very pleasant, but also in some way strange. There was a sense of difference. Those whom I met were still as loving as when I had bidden them adieu, but they were also somewhat different. There was nothing that reminded me of the pain and sorrow in which I had last seen them. They had grown spiritually. I felt myself a poor child beside them. Yet they were not haughty, only they knew more and loved more. They were very tender and kind to me. My Angel Guide handed me over to them. She* said, "She needs what you can give her."

*Julia speaks of this Guide indifferently as s/he explaining, when Stead asked, that in our sense angels are neither male nor female.

The first thing they were to teach me was to see those whom I knew on this side. That is almost always the way. I was no exception. When the soul wakes up on this side it is often encompassed about by those whom it has loved and served in life. But sometimes a little space intervenes, as was my case. Why, I shall tell you hereafter. But the space is small. We talk of space to you because you are still dominated by earth conditions, and when you come over here you find it difficult at first to escape from the old conceptions. They gradually fall off you as the chrysalis drops from the butterfly. But you will find that the Guide and the loving Father are wonderfully accommodating to your weakness and ignorance and prejudice.

When I came here I had not lived long on earth. When I passed over I was still in the full energy of my prime. Among those who were here before were none who had been so close to me on earth as to make me long for them more than for all else. If Ellen, for example, had been on this side, my first thought would have been for her, and she would have been with the Angel. But as it was, all the longings of my heart were for those still on your side. My affections were set on the world and the souls still in the body. With regard to the New World, what I felt was more curiosity and wonder than the immediate passionate longing of the heart to meet those who had gone before. Hence, the Angel met me alone. Hence, the apparently long journey through space.

What about space?

My dearest friend, it is impossible for me to answer all your questions. When you can understand what I might call the other side of everything, and can realise that the things seen are temporal, but the things unseen are eternal, you will be better able to understand what I am now trying to tell you as to the semblance of space.

When I found my friends, there were about five or six of those relatives and near friends who had been on this side for some time. My dear little sister was the most loving and dearest of all. I saw before me the semblance of her childhood. But she was only assuming the child form to gain recognition. After a time, when I learned more about the life here, she revealed herself to me as we see her now, as a spirit who is a woman grown. There is no difficulty in our assuming whatever form we need for the purpose of the moment. No, I do not mean to say that I could assume permanently any disguise, but you can make yourself appear for the time what you think you wish to be. For the subtle thought is as an artist not merely in colour or marble, but to all apparent semblance in the actual person. We have no need to do so for our own purpose, but when a newcomer arrives, or when we have to manifest ourselves to you who are still in the body, then we need to use this thought creation, and body forth the visual tangible appearance with which you are familiar.

Can you tell me how to do this?

No, I will not enter upon that subject, there is much more important matter to write about than these induced materialisations.

My little sister having embraced me, and welcomed me to the sphere where the loved and the lost are united, took me by the hand and brought me to the friends who were close by waiting for me. They were all very kind and loving, and they told me many things. The chief surprise that I found was in the fact that we were all so very much the same. We did not seem to have become angels or saints. For my part I was, I fear, by no means saintly. There was at first a certain awe that numbed me, but as that numbing sensation wore off, my old natural self asserted itself, and I really felt that I was as I had been, only with a much greater sense of power and of freedom. There was the increased sense of vitality—doubly and trebly delightful after my illness—and a great feeling of restful absence of fret.

But don't imagine that I felt myself a saint or an angel; I did not, and I fear that I do not now. The sense of imperfection is still with us. Oh, my friend, my friend, there are heights to scale which you have not dreamed of; there are depths of infinite love which we have not even attempted to fathom. And the more we see, and know, and understand of the Divine love, the more we feel lost in the contrast between the immensity of His love and the infinitesimal meagerness of our own souls. But the difference between what we feel here and on earth is that here the consciousness of love is everywhere. We see what we are, and we often regret it, and mourn for our shortcomings. But we know that we live in the very love of God, and that our very stumbling tend upwards. But we do stumble and fall short of the glory of God.

Even here! oh, my friend, my friend, do you think that if that bundle of passionate and eager forces which make up what you call your Ego were to come here, if the earthly house of your tabernacle were to be dissolved, that you would, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, be quite other than you are? Would that spirit of yours be freed from the characteristics which make you really you? No, I tell you no. Individuality is not eliminated, but rather accentuated in its essence, and harmonised in its accidents. The trouble in the world is that there it is the other way. There is so much friction in the horns and hoofs and armour of individuality that the real individuality often perishes.

No, I don't mean that we never get into a temper, but we are in what you might call a moral and spiritual sanitarium. We have brought with us all our diseases. We get cured. You can understand that by analogy with the effect of certain climates on earth on physical maladies. The ozone of our life here is love. And, my dear friend, if you had but love enough you would have heaven where you are. Believe me, that there is no truth greater than this. God is Love! God is Love!

And heaven differs from earth most of all in this. There is more love in it, and every love that throbs in the human heart makes earth more like heaven. No, I will not be led into a discussion about different loves. I have written about that before. All that I need say now is that the love which takes you out of yourself, and makes the happiness of another so important to you as to make even pain and trouble joyous, and more to be desired than the greatest pleasures, if they are for the welfare of the beloved, that love is the love that overcometh the world. Sin is only the absence of love. Sorrow would be turned into joy if only you loved. I know what you mean. But the sorrow that comes from loving one too much—no, you can never love anyone too much. You often love others too little, and the misery you feel because, as you say, you love one too much, is really because you love the other too little.

You have, for instance, lost, by parting or by misunderstanding, someone whom you idolise. You are wretched, and life seems dark, and there is no object worth living for. This darkness and misery are not because you love, but because you don't love. For that which troubles you is the void, the blank left in your life. You will never master the secret of true life until you learn that love is the magic wand that can transform the world, and that wherever it is not transformed it is because you do not love. No, my dearest friend, believe me when I say, whatever else I may have to teach you, there is nothing that for a moment is comparable in importance to this—the open secret of heaven's love. He who dwells in perfect love is in heaven. Hatred is hell, and God is with all who love. God is love. Those who do not love are without God.

But your questions and objections take me away from what I was saying. When I came to talk with my friends; they told me many things that at first startled me. They said, for instance, that I should be able to go among all those whom I had left, and that I should feel no sense of separation. For the spirits of our friends are open to us on this side. Then I said, "There is no death," and they laughed merrily. "Of course not," they said, "not to us who are 'dead.' Death is only a sense of deprivation and separation which the so-called living feel—an incident of limitation of 'life.' Death only exists for the 'living,' not for us." And I wished at once to go and see if it were so, and immediately as I thought, I was back among those whom I loved. I saw Minerva, and tried to make her see me. I saw Ellen, and she would not listen to me; and so I came back and said: "No, there is death." They cannot hear, or see, or speak, or feel my touch. And my friends said, "There is death for the body, and those who are in the body feel death even when in life, but when they sleep, and some when they wake, they can hold converse with the spirit before death." And, as you know, I have found it so. But sometimes the soul is so immersed in matter, it is so preoccupied with the affairs of the world, that even when sleep liberates the higher soul it sees nothing of us. Mostly, however, we can see, and speak, and communicate freely with the spirits of our living friends. But they can seldom communicate their impressions to the physical consciousness, which is to us almost as inert and unimpressionable as the body of a man asleep is to the living men around.

When I had tried in vain to communicate with Minerva and with Ellen, I began to be a little sad. It seemed to me as if I were away from the real interests which bound me to life. It was, no doubt, very pleasant to be well, and delightful to move about as freely as you think, but still the people I loved most, and the work I was most wrapped up in, were there, and I was rather sad. Then it was that the Good Angel who had welcomed me into this world took me to see my Lord. I have nothing to add to what I wrote before.

It was beautiful and glorious, exceeding all my powers of description. There was no expectation of the meeting, nor was I even able to realise the fact that I had met Him until I saw the whole landscape flame and glow as with the radiance of opened heaven when He spoke to me. The cause for this difficulty was, I suppose, the extreme naturalness of all that I saw and heard. There is such a difficulty in realising that today, as yesterday, is the same. When there is something of what we used to call the supernatural order coming in the midst of what seems so very natural, it is difficult to realise it. But, oh, my friend, when it is realised, what a change occurs! The whole world was transfigured in the realisation of the intensity and constancy of His love. And from that moment I have never been sad, save for my own shortcomings and my own lack of love. Oh, my dearest friend, if only we could live more in the realised sense of His love.

What about the Divinity of our Lord?

Oh, why do you trouble yourselves about these scholasticisms? The thing that matters to you is surely what is—not what may have been defined centuries since. My dearest friend, when you come to this side and have a more vivid sense of the majesty and marvel of the universe; when you see, as we do every day, the great unfolding of the infinite glory of the Infinite Father; and when you see also, as we do, that the whole secret of all things is Love, and that there was never so much Love revealed to us as in Him, you can understand how it is true that there dwelt in Him the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

My Dearest Friend—That is right being quite passive; ask no questions, but allow me to write as if I were using my own hand. What I want to say to you, and, through you, to the world of men and women among whom I once lived as an embodied spirit, is not a message which you can help out by eager questionings. Ask me what you please after I have done; but, meanwhile, make your mind as passive as possible, I will do the writing.

Now, my dear friend, I wish to go on from where I left off, telling you, as far as I can, consecutively what my experiences were when I first found myself on this side. When I had seen the splendour of the love light that flooded the world, I was beside myself with joy. All the many loves which I had known on your side faded into insignificance beside the great glowing radiance of that love which swathed me about as with a garment and enabled me to see what marvellous possibilities, what undreamed-of powers were all the while in the heart of each of us. For there is no other word for it but love. God is Love, and Love is God, and the mystic power of God is Love. We may become as God so far as we enter into His divine nature, which is love. We may be God as we love, and we remove ourselves from God as we don't love. When you feel as if you were unable to sympathise with any person, by so much as you are unable to sympathise even with his sins, you are out of God. He is
all in all, and all His all is Love, and you cannot work out His purposes in hate and unkindness. Oh, if only I could make you see as we see it here, how true it is that they only live who love; that all that is not love is as death; that the soul that does not love is without God in outer darkness; and the only way to save the world is to drench it with love; yes, love even for the worst. It is not by disliking men, even for their sins, that you will save them from their sins. Pardon me, but this is the truth; all else that I can tell you is but as the fringe; this is the central essence of all.

When I had, as it were, recovered from the delighted amazement of the new light, I felt overpowered by a sense of the marvellous condescension of my Lord — for there was about Him nothing, of the majesty that terrifies and repels. The one supreme idea which He left on my mind was that of the infinite attraction of love, and a love, too, that was personal to myself. There was no jealousy in my love, but I felt that He loved me as much personally as He loved anyone, and He wished for my love, and that without it neither he nor I could be complete. (I know you think this is a blasphemy; I should
have thought so once). But there is the incompleteness of the not yet realised ideal, and the thought of God will not be completely embodied until every heart throbs in responsive love without one jarring note to the All Lover, in whom we live and move, and have our being.

And with the great new joy in my heart I talked with Him. What I meant and what He understood was very simple. I longed, simply longed, with an all-constraining desire to make known this love that passeth all understanding to those I loved, and He smiled with loving satisfaction at me as I spoke, and I knew that I was not denied.

But I was not then allowed to begin my work. What I had to do was the beginning of preparation for my work. I had to learn so much, and among the lessons I had to learn, this above all was enforced upon me, to apprehend the patience that waits. He waits; for with Him time is not, and He sees the end from the beginning. And when we, in our impulsive eagerness, would rush in and change, forgetting that time is but a mode of thought, He restrains us, and I was restrained. But it seemed hard; I wanted to go at once and tell you what the truth of the world is. But I must wait. Wait and learn. And I was prepared to execute my mission.

The worth of character, which you sometimes ignore and never rightly recognise, must be seen as we see it here to be appreciated. We have wonderful surprises here. We see men as they are. Not, of course, all men always. But when the wrappings are off, we see the nature of the soul, and the factor that decides is the character. I know this sounds like a commonplace. But it does not seem a commonplace when it is applied as we see it applied here. No. You can hardly, by any stretch of the imagination, realise what a change it is to live in a place where the only test is character, where property, station, and work do not count—no, nor religious profession. The idea that you so often have in the world, that the words which you say with your lips have a magic influence on your hearts, must be seen in all its hollow absurdity to be understood.

We see things as they are, not as they are labelled. We have such surprises to encounter; such amazing upturns and revolutions of the estimate in which men and women are held. Oh, my friend, my friend, if the first word of my message is, God is Love, and those who love are living in God, my second word surely must be — Judge not. Judge not. For you cannot see, you cannot understand. You are all as children in the dark making guesses at the colours of shadows thrown upon a screen. You do not see the colour, and yet you pronounce confident judgment. Judge not until at least you see the man as he is. Often what seems to you the worst things are the best. Sometimes the apparent best are among the worst. Motive is not everything, but it is a great deal—so much that those from whom motive is hidden cannot judge fully. My own experience of all this was very varied, and I soon became accustomed to disregard all the distinctions I had made so much of when in life. Then I used to ask if So-and-so were religious, whether he belonged to this or that or the other church; now these things do not interest me anymore than the new frills and facings of fashion. We don't ask what church. Here let me say that you may misunderstand what I have written. It is not that I think being religious is of no importance. It is of all importance.

What I meant was the asking of anyone of his church connection as a way of knowing whether or not he was religious. That is the absurdity we never practice. We never ask about these things except so far as they stand in the way of the real religion. We lament, and have continually to deplore, the fact that they are substituted for the love which is the fulfilling of the law. The degree of love with which anyone loves measures his religion.

The degree of hatred, or indifference which paralyses love in the soul, is the test of irreligion. Love eats into selfishness as the sun's rays eat into the black and dark night. That is God in life. That is what we see. Light that shines in the darkness. Love is that light. We don't care for the shape of the shutters that shut it out. Nor for the endless discussions, as to the windows that let it in. These questions are so simply answered.

The best window, what is that? It is the window that lets in most light. Where, then, is the light that is the test of the window? And the light of life is Love, and Love is God and God is Love, and those who do not love are those who sit in outer darkness, and in the valley of the shadow of death. Sin consists in the living without God; that is to say, without love. But the more you think the more you see that love that is selfish is not love, and love that injures its object is not love but cruelty. The love that sacrifices the permanent welfare of the loved one, to the immediate gratification of the pleasure of the moment, is not real love. All love supposes some degree of restraint, and this is true of the Highest as well as of men and women. Restraint that is born of the intelligence that foresees. And real love is the keenest-sighted of all things.

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