I do not want to shock or pain you--only to warn you. It is sad to see the sight which inevitably meets one in the grave. That may be the reason why many souls who have not been here long are so melancholy. They return again and again to the place which they should not visit. You know that out here if we think intently of a place we are apt to find ourselves there. The body which we use is so light that it can follow thought almost without effort. Tell them not to do it. One day while walking down an avenue of trees--for we have trees here--I met a tall woman in a long black garment. She was weeping--for we have tears here also. I asked her why she wept, and she turned to me eyes of unutterable sadness. “I have been back to _it_,” she said. My heart ached for her, because I knew how she felt. The shock of the first visit is repeated each time, as the thing one sees is less and less what we like to think of ourselves as being. Often I remember that tall woman in black, walking down the avenue of trees and weeping. It is partly curiosity that draws one back, partly magnetic attraction; but it can do no good. It is better to forget it. I have sometimes longed, from sheer scientific interest, to ask my boy Lionel if he had been back to his body; but I have not asked him for fear of putting the idea into his mind. He has such a restless curiosity. Perhaps those who go out as children have less of that morbid instinct than we have. If we could only remember in life that the form which we call ourselves is not our real immortal self at all, we would not give it such an exaggerated importance, though we would nevertheless take needful care of it. As a rule, those who say that they have been long here do not seem old. I asked the Teacher why, and he said that after a time an old person forgets that he is old, that the tendency is to grow young in thought and therefore young in appearance, that the body tends to take the form which we hold of it in our minds, that the law of rhythm works here as elsewhere. Children grow up out here, and they may even go on to a sort of old age if that is the expectation of the mind; but the tendency is to keep the prime, to go forward or back towards the best period, and then to hold that until the irresistible attraction of the earth asserts itself again. Most of the men and women here do not know that they have lived many times in flesh. They remember their latest life more or less vividly, but all before that seems like a dream. One should always keep the memory of the past as clear as possible. It helps one to construct the future.