What is the change between physical and spiritual life?

Great Scot! You do not mean I am dead!

You are alive, and are starting the fuller, and more beautiful life.

Spirit Claude joined the army, immediately war began in August 1914.

Three months after he went to the front, his machine came down on the enemy lines.

As Claude recounts his individual experience in the spirit world, the reader is helped to systematise the conditions that his communicating intelligence wishes to explain about the nature of posthumous existence.

As Claude makes up his mind to be happy, he asks one of his guides if it is a thought-world they are in—though the ground feels quite substantial to his feet.

His guide replies that it is more real and permanent than the one he has left behind.

Claude bends down, and pokes his finger in the soil—

He finds it leaves a hole, and the soil sticks under his nail.

As Claude settles down in his new surroundings, he finds his innumerable friends—both new and old—ready and anxious to help him in every way.

He learns that he has earned his environment by his conduct.

You gravitate to the place, for which you are suited by the working of natural laws—

What is within you draws you automatically.

Death, he learns, is only an incident, though a very important one, in continuous life.

Your feelings, your memory, your love, your interests, and ambitions remain—

All you have left behind is the physical body, which proves to be merely the covering of the spiritual to enable it to function in a material world.

You truly are spirit, and have a body—not vice versa.

Death works no miracle, and you wake up in the spirit world with the same personality exactly that left the earth plane.

Your individuality is intact, and your spirit body, a replica of the one you have left, down to small details—

Even deformities remain, though they lessen and disappear in time.

This, explains Claude, is what makes it so difficult to realise one has crossed the great divide.

If—when I woke to life here—I had found myself floating about the clouds, clad in muslin, and with a pair of wings, I should have realised the fact sooner.

Claude explains that it is our narrow, set and orthodox beliefs that are puzzled by the reality—

The ordinaryliness (as he coins it) of the spirit world.

I feel quite tired sometimes of explaining to men that they are dead!

They wake up feeling so much the same—

Some go about for days—and even months—believing they are dreaming.

What they find difficult to understand apparently is the very little change between life in the physical body, and in the spiritual.

I often laugh when I hear them complain they cannot believe in solid things, like houses and gardens, in the spirit world.