Seen and UnseenBates, E. Katherine (Emily Katherine)
Religion
Seen and Unseen
Bates, E. Katherine (Emily Katherine)
Bates, E. Katherine (Emily Katherine); Parapsychology; Psychics -- Biography; Spiritualism
You can take my words so easily that we must guard against wasting time
in mere verbosity. I must teach you to condense more. We must strike
some sort of balance between my brevity and your amplification. At
present it is as well to get the instrument into proper working order
before worrying too much over these details.
(He then resumed.)
It is as if you turned the old earth garment inside out, and saw the
very fabric of it, which the earth looms have hitherto concealed by the
warp and woof of the manufactured article.
For instance, you are told on earth that you are making your own future
conditions by right or wrong thinking. _Here_ you see the absolute,
_material_ results of right and wrong thinking, just as if you were
looking at two different patterns, woven by two different workers. I
said material results, because matter here is just as real as it was on
earth, and just as illusory, in one sense, in both spheres. Your matter
is unreal to us. Our matter is unreal to you. The truth is, both are
shadows cast by an antecedent reality on the Screens of the Universe.
The screens are the school-houses through which humanity learns its
lessons.
Don't be worried! There is no real difficulty in using your hand; it is
only trying to compromise between your redundancy and my brevity.
Earth is like a gallery of sculpture. (Note by E. K. B.--This simile had
flashed through my brain, and H. D. at once said: "Yes, that is very
good; you started it, and I pick it up and apply it.") All the figures
and groups are perfected and complete in their marble or bronze or
terra-cotta, as the case may be.
Some groups or figures are noble, others mediocre, others again may be
sensual and degrading, but they have one quality in common--for good or
bad, they are _ready made_.
Now go into the sculptor's studio, having studied well in the great
sculpture galleries of the world. You go to the studio, we will suppose,
as a pupil. He puts a lump of clay into your hands, and for the first
time you are invited to model your own statues and figures, to embody
your own ideas in this clay, which corresponds to thought stuff _here_.
You are even made to understand that your houses will only be worthily
furnished by the work of your own hands. _Here_ it is the work of your
own hearts, of your loving or unloving thoughts.
So the first lesson we learn over here is that THOUGHT is not only
Creative Power, as you are often told on earth, but it is also the very
stuff out of which the creation must be moulded. It is, in very truth,
the clay of the modeller.
Shakespeare said truly enough "We are such stuff as dreams are made of,"
but he was referring to our embodied selves.
The difference between the two worlds seems to me, so far as I have
arrived, as the difference between the pupil in the sculpture gallery
and in the experimental studio. The chief part of the earth modelling is
ready made--made by the racial thought stuff and the racial manipulation
of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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