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Chapter XIV: Astral Companionship2243
love, relationship, and friendship—providing that there really is a bond
of attachment of any degree between them—have full opportunity to
manifest their mutual affection and harmonic attraction on the higher Astral
Plane. The highest that the human imagination can picture as possible in
such companionship, is but as a faint shadow to the actual reality of the
experience. It is useless to attempt to paint a picture of these scenes and
relationships, for there are no words with which to express the truth. The
answer to the inquiry must necessarily be: that each soul that asks the
question turn its mental gaze inward, and find the picture, painted in the
imagination, of the highest possible bliss that would be possible in such a
state and condition, and then consider that even this imaginary picture falls
a thousand times short of the reality.
It is only in the harmony of music, or the rhythmic cadences of the best
poetry, or the lines of some great work of art, that the earth-dwelling soul
may catch a glimpse of the truth of Love on the higher Astral Plane. These
things at times cause to rise in the soul faint hints of what the soul actually
experiences on those higher planes of being. This is one of the reasons
why music, art, and poetry are able at times to lift us above the material
environment in which we are dwelling. In the flashes of Cosmic Conscience
which occasionally come to souls of spiritual enlightenment, there is included
a realization of this feature of the association of souls on the higher planes.
Well has the Western poet expressed the difficulty of stating, in ordinary
words, the truth of this realization of the truth—in broken measures and
stammering tongue:
“As in a swoon, one instant,
Another sun, ineffable, full dazzles me,
And all the orbs I knew, and brighter, unknown orbs,
One instant of the future land, Heaven’s land.
I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before,