If a man understands that his recent sojourn on earth was merely the latest of a long series of lives, and if he concentrates his mind towards recovering the memories of the distant past, he can recover them. Some persons may think that the mere dropping of the veil of matter should free the soul from all obscuration; but, as on earth so out here, “things are not thus and so because they ought to be, but because they are.” We draw to ourselves the experiences which we are ready for and which we demand, and most souls do not demand enough here, any more than they did in life. Tell them to demand more, and the demand will be answered. LETTER XVIII INDIVIDUAL HELLS SOME time ago I told you of my intention to visit hell; but when I began investigations on that line there proved to be many hells. Each man who is not content with the orthodox hell of fire and brimstone builds one out of mind-stuff suited to his imaginative need. I believe that men place themselves in hell, that no God puts them there. I began looking for a hell of fire and brimstone, and found it. Dante must have seen the same things I saw. But there are other and individual hells---- (_The writing suddenly stopped, for no apparent reason, and was not continued that night._) LETTER XIX A LITTLE HOME IN HEAVEN I HAVE met a very interesting man since last I wrote to you. He is a lover who for ten years waited here for his love to come to him. They said on earth that he was dead, and they urged her to love another; but she could not forget him, for every night he met her soul in dreams, every night she came out to him here, and sometimes she could recall on waking all that he had said to her in sleep. She had told him that she would not delay long in the sunshine world, but would come out to him in the self-lighted world. Only a little while ago she came. He had been long getting ready for her coming, and had built in the substance of this world the little home he had planned to build for her in the outer world. He told me how one night when she came to him in dream, she said that she would rejoin him on the morrow, never to leave him again. He was startled, and would almost have stayed her; because he had died a sudden and painful death, and he dreaded pain for her. Always he had watched over her, warning her of danger; but this time he felt, after the first shock of the message was over, that she was really coming. And he was very happy. He had found no other love out here; for when one leaves the earth full of a great affection, and when the earthly loved one does not forget, the tie can hold for many years unweakened. You on the earth have forgotten so much of what you learned here that you do not realise how your thought of us can make us happy, do not realise how your forgetfulness of us can throw us back entirely upon ourselves.