What happens immediately after you die?

With spirit, the purely physical is past, but the old habits remain and the newborn soul finds it difficult to exercise his new powers.

Only by degrees, quicker or slower, according to past life and present powers, is he able to work and act with the soul instead of with the body. 

Instead of the hands building their houses, the trained will builds them. If you need anything, and will it, it stands complete before you. 

This power is not attained all at once—it is gradual. The desires, the reason, the affections must be in harmony and then they can do their work.

Imagine yourself then here on the spirit side with your first psychic sleep over, the early stages of repentance and faith past, and you now ready to be a citizen of the New Jerusalem.

Hitherto your wants have been supplied by others, now let us say you wish to make for yourself a home where you may wait for your loved ones to join you. 

If this is best for you, you can then think out what you want. 

Perhaps your thought will be broken and incomplete—what rises before your psychic vision may be faulty and incongruous. 

You will then dissolve it again into the unseen, but real elements (to use an old word), and try again. 

You have no money, of course, to buy from others what they may possess, but if you need anything, it will be gladly and freely given to you, only in return you must give something—gratitude, sympathy or some other soul gift.

Having got rid of so much that is physical, you have lost two things that make much of the discomfort of this world—dirt and decay.

On this side, the repulsive form, which decay takes is owing to the very slow way in which dead or dying matter disintegrates, but with spirit, all change of that sort is more rapid—

The life escapes easily from its psychic form to reappear in others—you have dissolution, but not decay.

At first, you will need food more or less frequently, but as time goes on, this food will be less and less necessary, and the senses will be satisfied in other ways—

The perfume and the beauty of the fruit will be sufficient. 

This food has a close relationship to ours, but is strictly vegetable and simple, that is, you eat the seed or the fruit as it grows—

You can cultivate for yourself or receive from others if you should be engaged in other forms of work.

The clothing or outward form in which you appear to others grows on you, so to speak, and is the outcome of your true state, more or less affording pleasure to those who see you, as it is more or less harmonious and the reflex of a true and earnest spirit.

Sleep falls upon you, as the mind needs rest.

If your new powers are overtaxed, then a period of rest, longer or shorter, comes upon you, for the psyche can tire, as the mind or brain tires upon earth.

As to occupation, the soul naturally turns to some occupation most closely resembling that to which it has been accustomed, but it is not permitted to remain in it too long.

The nature all round has to be cultivated, and as no wisdom is gained apart from learning and experience, so it is necessary that the spirit who in his past life has yielded to others and been ruled by them should learn to advise, control and help, that the man who has lived apart from Nature in the world of books or of the imagination should now sow, reap and understand the beauty of the new earth into which he has passed. 

Or again, the one who has lived entirely in the outward must learn to withdraw into himself—or to study the wisdom of those who have climbed the steps of knowledge before him.

The great, the unspeakable difference, however, between the old and the new is the absolute freedom of the new.

No one can either hinder or compel another in any way, and no one wishes to do so. Faults there are and imperfections, mistakes and weaknesses, but a great spirit of love and unselfishness is the very atmosphere of the place and none would cast the smallest stumbling block in the way of his brother.

Now does this absence of the physical seem to make the spirit world shadowy and unreal to you? If so, get rid of the idea immediately.

The spirit feel that iron fetters have dropped from them, and that now for the first time they know what real living means—life so full, so deep and satisfying, that the past is only as the shadow of a dream that passes away in the light of a new day.

As to language, you do not speak another language from those of earth—spirit language is a universal, primaeval instinct (so-to-speak).

Spirits impress their thoughts on one another by, and through willpower, and their language is limited, not by words, but by their own power of feeling and the hearer’s power of sympathy. 

This language is only the perfection of those powers, which are in every human being, though nearly dormant, and which have been weakened through long ages of disuse and by a more artificial speech. 

There are many things, such as the universal needs of the body or the simple passions, which can be expressed and understood by all independently of mere words.

Joy, fear, grief, hunger and love need no words and can be expressed by and through the eye. Even the outward is not always necessary, for one can influence and control the thoughts and feelings of others even without the bodily presence.

So spirits impress their thoughts on others in the spirit world first in a weak and broken manner, like a child learning to talk, and then more and more fully, as their soul expands and they gain more experience.

As they gain more experience in this new life, their vocabulary increases.

Then with regard to others’ powers of understanding, this, too, does not depend on any artificial acquirement of mere words, nor yet on what would answer to the power of the intellect, but the power of comprehension equals the power of sympathy. 

Again, this is only the natural human method enlarged and rectified, for the knowledge of words alone does not enable you to enter into the heart and mind of the speaker.

Linnaeus, kneeling before the glorious works of God with hands folded and eyes upraised in worship, would be to some a true child of Nature, acting in the most natural and simple manner—to another, he might be only a fool or a drunkard. These men are filled with new wine, some say, while others, they do hear in their own language the wonderful works of God, and yet again to others, it might be merely a pleasant sound, as of one playing on an instrument.

Still, you are not in the spirit world without that joy, which arises from musical sounds—only such sounds are not caused by vibrations of the atmosphere, but by vibrations of the soul currents, which are heard inwardly by those whose souls are attuned to the same key.

You will say perhaps why should I need a house now I have got rid of my more material body?

It is true that a house is not essential any more than it is essential on earth, but the instincts underneath—the desire for shelter, safety, privacy—the closer companionship of some than of all—these feelings still exist, especially at first.

Until the psyche becomes perfect in strength and beauty, there will be a sense of discord with your surroundings, which will be as a cold or wet day to your body. Then again, the timid or suffering soul may shrink from the presence and inspection of those to whom it feels as you do to strangers who may be unsympathetic to you. All such feelings or many of them remain when the soul is parted from the body and it is some time before they modify or disappear.

Because there is no real cause for such fear is no reason why it should not exist, for the spirit has not changed in any essential point and will only pass from the lower to the higher by slow and patient striving.

After a time, you find that there is no need for you to shrink from any—you learn that the power to read another’s thoughts or to enter into his feelings depends first on the will of the person observed, and secondly, on the sympathetic insight in the observer. Therefore, you are an impenetrable enigma to all unless you wish to unfold yourself to them, and even if the wish first exists in you, there must be a response in them. 

There may be many here—a world within a world, of whom you have no knowledge, simply because you do not hold the key of sympathy, which would unlock their gates.

In this world, you are at once eternally separated from every other being and yet open to the cold, curious gaze of the crowd. With spirit, you can have the deepest and truest union, and you can also be truly and really withdrawn if you wish.

Now with regard to such possessions as houses, food, land and books—spirits have possessions—things outside of themselves that can take shape, be, dissolve again, houses and lands and goods that no moth, nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through to steal, but yet which if not rightly used will vanish away.

The true and inner law of possession is well understood by you. You know well what it means by the meek inheriting the earth and that the mere fact of a thing legally or physically belonging to you does not make it truly yours—

This inner law is more binding and you can have nothing unless you need it for yourself or for another—

You must use it or it will leave you, as unused mental powers would leave you, vanishing away as though they had not been.

Spirit have the outward, as well as the inward, but they are always intimately related—the strength that is not used in highest service vanishes away and the outward beauty, which typifies that strength vanishes likewise.

In trying to describe different phases of spirit life to you, you must be careful not to lay too much stress on any one phase, and you must guard against letting any one view occupy too large a part of your mental horizon.

Life here is so full and so varied that it is impossible to give you more than a few hints as to its character. 

Spirits themselves only know in part and can only understand the lives of others as they pass through somewhat of their experience.

There is one important raison d'etre for those possessions and that is that you may use them in guarding and teaching the suffering and the ignorant.

The gulf that lies between Paradise and Hell is not one of physical distance—no such barrier as that exists—the two may lie closer together than two who are living in the same house—as close as grief and joy sometimes lie in the same heart. 

Wherever suffering is needed, not as a punishment for past misdeeds, but as fire to burn away the dross, there it will be found. Naturally, this pain comes generally when you first pass over, and then when the anguish of the soul is great, much may be done to teach and support it by those who have already emerged from the furnace.

In the homes of all the saints may be found such sufferers, tenderly watched over, helped and guarded while the hard lessons are being learnt. 

Such learners have cast off but few of the old instincts and need to be fed and protected until they learn to exercise those new powers, which can provide them with all they need as simply as a flower grows. 

There is always the care of those less advanced—those who may have grown more than you have in some ways, but less in at least one direction, so that you can say, This is the way—walk ye in it.

Remember that your life, however full, is necessarily incomplete and still far from that divine ideal, which lies ever before your vision.