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The Life Beyond Death2238
dream, a phantasm. They consider nothing “real” unless it is on the material
plane. Poor mortals, they do not realize that, at the last, there can be nothing
more unreal, more dreamlike, more transitory, more phantasmal, than
this very world of material substance. They are not aware that in it there
is absolutely no permanence—that the mind itself is not quick enough to
catch a glimpse of material reality, for, before the mind can grasp a material
fact, the fact has merged into something else.
The world of mind, and still more true, the world of spirit, is far more
real than is the world of materiality. From the spiritual viewpoint there is
nothing at all real but Spirit; and matter is regarded as the most fleeting
and unreal of all illusory appearances. From the same viewpoint, the higher
in the scale one rises above the material plane, the more real becomes the
phenomena experienced. Therefore, it follows, that the experiences of the
soul on the higher Astral Plane are not only not unreal in nature, but, by
comparison, are far more real than the experiences of life on the material
plans. As the writers just quoted have well said, Nature is not cheated on
the Astral Plane—but Nature herself manifests with more real effect on that
plane than on the material plane. This is a hard saying for the uninitiated—
but the advanced soul becomes more and more convinced of its truth every
succeeding hour of its experience.
It is a grievous error to regard the experiences of the soul in the heavenworld
as little more than a “playing at reality,” as some materialistic critics has
termed it. One has but to turn to the experiences even of the earth-life to
see that some of the world’s best work is performed in the hours other than
those employed in the actual fashioning of the things. There are times in the
everyday life of the most active workers of the world which may be called
“the ideal period”—that is, the time in which the mind creates and forms
that which is afterward manifested in material form. There has never been a
building, nor a bridge, nor any other great work of human hands, erected,
unless first it has been created in the mind of some man or men. It has had
its first existence in the creative faculties of the mind—the material building