Here was the first actual statement, however brief and incomplete, of
that theory of life which seems—to us who received it first, at least—so
rational, and so full of inspiration and hope.
Referring to her phrase, “all of us here,” he asked: “Is ‘here’ a place,
or a state, or both?”
“Both,” she answered, quickly. “It is the beginning of eternal life.”
After a moment, she added: “The state is fluid; the place is ephemeral.”
“I believe it!” he exclaimed. “That’s more nearly an explanation than
anything I ever heard before.”
“This is more nearly the truth than anything you ever heard before.
That’s why.... Truth in your life is comparative. Here it is absolute,
but not dogmatic.”
He said that she had not been given to the use of a philosophic
vocabulary in this life, and must have acquired it there, to which, at
the moment, she made no response.
Some time after Cass rejoined us Mr. Kendal asked how much farther, or
how much more clearly, they could see about purely business or political
matters than we.
“We can see much farther, but we are not permitted to tell you, except by
ethical suggestion. Part of your development comes through your struggle
to decide, and while we see your struggle, we can help only by giving
you as much of our strength and light as you can take. It _is_ a moral
universe, Manzie.” The underscoring is hers.
Out of his wide experience with psychic phenomena, he gave me much
comfort regarding the inaccuracies and misleading statements that had so
greatly disquieted me. He argued that these discrepancies might easily
be caused by some factor or factors unknown to us, operating on another
plane, and was entirely untroubled by them. In this connection, Mary
K. said to me the next day: “We regard things successfully started as
accomplished.”
[Some weeks later Mr. Kendal suggested another possible reason for these
apparent inaccuracies, using as a comparison a familiar experiment in
physics. He reminded us that if a rod be projected in a straight line
between the eye and a coin at the bottom of a bowl of water, its tip
will miss the coin by a distance varying with the angle of vision and
the depth of the water. Assuming that the difference between this plane
and the next must be vastly greater than that between air and water,
he argued that there might be a factor comparable to this deflection
of ray influencing their perception of material, specific details of
this plane—a simile which Mary K. subsequently characterized as “almost
perfect.”]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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