What happens when you depart the psychic-world?

Spirit-lives see through a glass darkly, and not face-to-face.

This is the experience of the spirit-life before it enters the third life—

You do not really enter the next state until you leave the psychic world behind you forever. 

Your psychic body is no more suited to live there than your body was for the last state.

When you have gone, it has been that your spirit-life might be strengthened or enlightened in ways that were not possible before, or that you might get insight into some duty not intelligible otherwise.

Now, what happens when your time comes to depart the psychic world? 

It is this—

Your psychic form dissolves—fades away—is folded up—is dissipated into the sphere from which it was taken, leaving your spirit free to pass beyond into purer and rarer air more fitted for it. 

There is no pain or struggle in such a dissolution, nor any break in consciousness. 

You bid your friends farewell for a time, but you need not say farewell to them, for you will see and know them more intimately even than before.

Their eyes may not perceive you, but your clearer vision will embrace the past, as well as the present—the old, as well as the new.

You are now pneuma or spirit—not that pure, invisible, immortal essence, but approaching more closely to it. 

The true—the real—self yet remains hidden from comprehension—

The final—

The deepest mystery of all.

It is not simply that you have taken off two coverings—the physical and the psychical—and are now yourself—unclothed upon. 

Rather you manifest yourself in three ways at different times and in different degrees—in body, soul and spirit. 

The physical and the psychical bodies have been cast off and left in the spheres to which they belonged—

You have now a spiritual body—

You are now clothed upon with the body of the spirit.

The Higher Life

On the earth the broken arcs,

In the heaven a perfect round.

The new sphere in which you manifest is not one and single, as the intermediate, but is seven spheres closely connected together.

Perhaps a diagram will make this clearer. 

The three central are the Unity Spheres—

The side ones are the Duality Spheres. 

The Diagram

I. First Unity Sphere—Introductory, for strengthening and improving the character and the new powers.

III. Second Unity Sphere—For action and exercise of powers.

V. Third Unity Sphere—Peace—rest—the equipoise of the perfectly manifested being.

2. First Duality Sphere—Discipline—the growth, guidance and strengthening of such parts of the being as are still weak and imperfect.

4. Second Duality Sphere—Discipline on a higher plane—the completion of the work. 

You now pass into the last Unity Sphere—the sphere of perfection.

The Duality Spheres are so-called because the old double-consciousness, which is almost dormant in the Unity Spheres, is again in force. 

In force, that is, in the sense of conflict of one part of your nature with another—

Not merely in the ability to think of yourself, as if you were two beings. 

This double-consciousness is revived in the dual spheres because it is then easier for the ego to see its own weaknesses—to condemn and struggle against them.

Thus, these spheres are dual as being in pairs—dual in the divided experience—dual as to the double-consciousness.

The unity of the whole seven-in-one is shown in the oneness of the self’s manifestation—

You dwell in your spirit-body through all—

You are a being of seven dimensions until you come to the perfection of your being.

No spirit ever passes through more than one of each of the two spheres marked 2 and 4—that is, you go to the right, or the left, but not to both. (The words right and left are used only in reference to the diagram).

What, then, causes you to enter one of these spheres rather than the other? 

It is the bent of your deep soul-character. 

There is no uniformity in humanity—rather, there is infinite diversity. 

Yet it divides, broadly speaking, into two classes, call them by what name you please, say—

The religious, and the scientific—

The imaginative, and the practical—

The introspective, and the outlooking.

Now, the soul that has the one bent passes into the opposite sphere that his nature may be so cultivated and disciplined that he will be a perfect, and not a one-sided being.

Sin is left behind finally in the psychic. 

By perfect is meant that only the essential being is fully manifested—by imperfect that which is not fully manifested. 

You, then, are not perfect until you reach the seventh sphere—

The Unity in Peace. 

You thus pass through only five of the seven spheres, but the seven are so closely connected by a constant stream of life circling through all that you may be said to inhabit them all.

Finally, the three unity spheres are specialised thus—

I—Is that state where all the qualities developed in physical life reach their highest stage.

III—The same, only psychical.

V—The perfection of the pneumatic.

The spirit-body is unlike the physical or the psychical. 

It is not an etherealised earthly body, yet it resembles it at one point—it manifests the real self in various ways. 

You manifest yourself by speech and look and perceive others by the touch and the ear. 

So, the spirit-life has its spirit-vision, hearing, speech, and so on.

Vision

This is that true, deep, spirit intuition into the realities of things—that piercing eye of the sou,l which lays bare the roots—the deep foundations of things.

Peter had this for a moment when he saw Christ and exclaimed Thou art the Son of God. 

Spirit-vision always looks to the roots of things—below the righteous action it looks for truth—below the generous, for justice—below all for love, which is life in its highest manifestation.

The physical sees the sun and stars and perceives that the sun gives heat and life, day and night, and so on.

The psychic sees the laws, which govern these suns, and knows that they are good.

The spirit-vision sees the life, which produces the laws, and causes them all to be—to be perfect.

Again—

The physical sees the rich man pulling down his barns and building larger ones, and perceives that it is that he may have room where to bestow his goods.

The psychic sees why he does this—that he may say to his soul—eat, drink and be satisfied.

The pneuma perceives that the spring of these actions is injustice—

The man, not being perfectly just (or rather justice not being perfectly manifested in him) fears to trust himself to nature—fears that he will suffer real loss in the stress of life or in the pangs of death, and hopes that he may by his own lower powers get to himself more than others, a shelter from the forces he fears instead of trusts. 

He does not know that he is endowed with a birthright—as son of God, of which nothing can possibly deprive him.

Psychic vision is strictly limited to such objects—to such perceptions as would be helpful to you, or present to you some quality of the soul with which you were in harmony and which you could, therefore, see. 

Also, the limitations of time and space still fettering you to some extent, you could only see things apart from your surroundings by having them impressed on you by a power outside yourself. 

With spirit-vision, these limitations do not exist, or not to the same degree. 

The vision, like a circle, holds all things within itself, and its gaze pierces equally to the distant, or the near—to the past or the present. 

You remember the past, and memory and imagination can reproduce it in a more or less broken manner, but the spirit sees the past, as you do the present—as really, and as truly. 

All things are within its range, that is, the whole of the psychic life of the ego. 

The future is still a sealed book, though greater powers of intuition enable it to read even that more clearly than before. 

Elisha must have had the psychic vision when he saw Gehazi on his deceitful errand, but Christ had spirit-vision when from his intimate knowledge of the character of Judas he said—This is he who shall betray me.

The physical sees the besieged city with the prophet within its walls—

The psychic sees the chariots and horses of the Lord, encircling it in the hour of danger, to leave it when that special need is past—

The spirit sees the love and pity—the just and abiding care that is forever around—not only that city, but the army of the besiegers, and the whole world.

The spirit-eyes, then, see the spirit-forms, and the world in which they dwell, but it sees far more than this—

It sees reality under appearance, and truth beneath any veil.

Nor is there any confusion, arising from this vast field of vision, for the harmony of the spheres is so great that the eye takes in all, or a part, as easily as your eyes take in an extended landscape or a minute object.

Hearing

Hearing is vision looked at from a slightly different point of view. 

When any faculty is in motion—is being exercised—the spirit hears it, and it is to him, the highest and truest form of music when the faculty is at rest, then the eye sees it, and it is to him the highest form of art—true painting and true sculpture.

Hearing is also not confined to the present—the past, back to the soul’s first dwelling in physicality is audible to the spirit-ear. 

Further back than that in the soul’s history remains to be unfolded in the higher spheres—the seventh chiefly.

Speech

Speech is constant, or at least tends towards continuity. 

It is the outward expression of the spirit, therefore, it is constant, like the expression on a man’s face, which is the outcome of his constant character. 

When a spirit is purified, and becomes holy, that is, one united in himself—he does not cease to cry day and night, Holy, holy, holy. 

Not holy am I, but holy art thou, O Lord, towards whom my being ever tends.

“I AWOKE!” Conditions of Life on the other Side