Perhaps on earth you work too much--more than is really necessary. The mass of needless things that you accumulate round you, the artificial wants that you create, the break-neck pace of your lives to provide all these things, seem to us absurd and rather pitiful. Your political economy is mere child’s play, your governments are cumbrous machines for doing the unnecessary, most of your work is useless, and your lives would be nearly futile if you did not suffer so much that your souls learn, though unwillingly, that most of their strivings are vain. How I used to sweat and groan in the early days to make my little circle in the sand! And now I see that if I had taken more time to think, I might have recovered something of my past knowledge, gained in other lives; and though I still had felt obliged to draw my circle in the sand, I might have done it with less difficulty and in half the time. Here, if I choose, I can spend hours in watching the changing colours of a cloud. Or, better still, I can lie on my back and remember. It is wonderful to remember, to let the mind go back year after year, life after life, century after century, back and back till one finds oneself--a turtle! But one can also look ahead, forward and forward, life after life, century after century, æon after æon, till one finds oneself an archangel. The looking back is memory; the looking forward is creation. Of course we create our own future. Who else could do it? We are influenced and moved and shifted and helped or retarded by others; but it is we ourselves who forge the chains every time. We tie knots that we shall have to untie, often with labour and perplexity. In going back over my past lives I realise the why and the wherefore of my last one. It was, in a way, the least satisfactory of many lives--save one; but now I see its purpose, and that I laid the plans for it when I was last out here. I even arranged to go back to earth at a definite time, in order to be with certain friends who met me there. But I have turned the corner now, and have begun the upward march again. Already I am laying the lines for my next coming, though there is no hurry. Bless you! I am not going back until I have had my fill of the freedom and enjoyment of this existence here. Also I have much studying to do. I want to review what I learned in those hitherto forgotten but now remembered lives.