I was able to give him a little aid, though he has a friend here--an old man who is nearer to him than I could ever be. He will gradually adjust himself to the new conditions. You had better not try to speak with him. He is on a different path, and is being looked after, for he has friends. The little help I was able to give was in the nature of information. He needed diversion from a too-pressing thought, and I suggested one or two ways of passing time which are both agreeable and instructive. You wonder at the expression “passing time”? But time exists out here. Wherever there is sequence, there is time. There may come a “time” when all things will exist simultaneously, past, present and--shall we say future? But so long as past, present and future are more or less distinct, so long time is. It is nothing but the principle of sequence. Did you fancy it was anything else? Interiorly, that is, deep within the self, one may find a silent place where all things _seem_ to exist in unison; but as soon as the soul even there attempts to examine things separately, then sequence begins. The union with the All is another matter. That is, or seems to be, timeless; but as soon as one attempts to unite with or to be conscious of things, time is manifest. LETTER XXV A SHADOWLESS WORLD I HAD been here some time before I noticed one of the most marked peculiarities of this world. One night as I was passing slowly along, I saw a group of persons approaching me. It was very light where they were, because there were so many of them. Suddenly, as I saw this light, a thought came to my mind, a saying from one of the Hermetic books: “Where the light is strongest, there are the shadows deepest.” But on looking at these men and women, I saw that _they cast no shadows_. I hailed the nearest man--you must remember that this was soon after I came out, and when I was still more ignorant than I am now--and I called his attention to this peculiar phenomenon of a shadowless yet brilliantly lighted world. He smiled at my surprise, and said: “You have not been here long, have you?” “No.” “Then you are not aware that we light our own place? The substance of which our bodies are composed is radiant. How could our forms cast shadows, when light radiates from them in all directions?” “And in the sunlight?” I asked. “Oh,” he answered, “you know that in the sunlight we cannot be seen at all! The light of the sun is coarse and crude, and it puts out the light of the spirits.”