Chapter XVI: The Story of One Returned From the Dead

“Is it wonderful that I should be immortal, as every one is immortal? I know it is wonderful, but my eye-sight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful.”--_Walt Whitman._

Thought in the mind hath made us.
What we are
By thought was wrought and built.
If a man’s mind
Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes
The wheel the ox behind.

All that we are is what we thought and willed;
Our thoughts shape us and frame.
If one endure
In purity of thought joy follows him
As his own shadow sure.--_Sir Edwin Arnold._

Mrs. Doring had read that the people of the unseen world, or other invisible intelligent beings, sometimes condescended to write on slates under certain conditions. As she now believed that Chrissalyn possessed all the psychic gifts, she bought a slate and used her most artful eloquence to persuade her friend to experiment. The capricious creature consented after fishing up objections enough to make her acquiescence received with great gratitude. This was her innocent way of making her services valuable and herself important. But for love of her friend, and also no doubt for love of Prescott, who was the only person on the other side of silence that she cared to hear from, apparently, or at least was not afraid of, she finally consented.

Not knowing the correct manner of procedure they could do no more than experiment blindly, till they learned something about it. They held the slate under the table till their arms were all tired out and got nothing. Then they laid it on the table, and becoming interested in talking, forgot all about it and their experiment, till they heard a soft, rapid scratching.

Looking down simultaneously, they saw an incredible thing. The tiny pencil, no bigger than a grain of rice, was writing, though no visible hand guided it, and this was its message:

“_Each soul is its own redeemer, here, hereafter and forever._”

The two spectators looked at each other in awe-struck silence. From whom this came they knew not, for the one that wrote it wrote nothing more. But for their familiarity with communications from the silent majority they would have been sore afraid. As it was they were awed by this extraordinary evidence of the nearness of unseen beings presumably like themselves.

Talking about it they sat there till the evening was nearly spent. At last, Chrissalyn idly laid her hand on the slate, and almost immediately it began to throb or vibrate curiously, like a living thing. Startled, she removed her hand, and instantly the throbbing ceased. Turning the slate over they found the under side written full in a feminine hand of exquisite daintiness, and signed with the name of one of our most eminent women, one who has been dead nearly a century.

The message had not been written after the manner of the previous one, for there was no scratching or sound of the movement of the pencil. In fact, as they soon discovered, the pencil was not there at all. The method, whatever it may have been, was instantaneous, like telegraphy. A few seconds of vibration in the slate and lo! it was there. If thought could be photographed the process might be like this. It was as though some one had thought the message, and the mere act of thinking had made it visible on the slate.

“Chriss, you are the most wonderful being in the world,” said Cartice, reverently, “and you don’t know it. You have all the occult gifts, yet value none of them.”

The Butterfly flushed with gratification at the generous praise of her friend who usually praised or blamed with miserly care. Beyond the fact that they made her important in Cartice’s eyes she cared nothing for the mysteries revealed through her. Being a butterfly, she was not afflicted with any particular craving for knowledge. The world and the things of the world satisfied her.

This was what the slate contained:

“To you, Cartice Hill Doring, I bring this message. Remember it well, for I may never come again: Till the soil, and you will be prosperous. Till what you have. Make more of your talents. Concentrate all your thoughts and devote more time to your special one. If you are really anxious to make a success of yourself, you must use every moment. You not only owe it to yourself, but to the whole world, and God, who has endowed you with this wonderful gift. You are a woman among a million. It is certainly a wonderful gift you possess, and it is sad that you have not already made more of it. So try now. Wait not for some one to open the way. Make your own way. You can do it better than any one else. Work in order to be great; then you can rest, and it will be so delightful to rest with sweet laurels.”

Mrs. Doring read this aloud, astonished at its flattering import and amazed that so many words, all as legible as the clearest typography, could be put upon the tiny slate. The writing was a work of the most exquisite art.

“What does she mean by your special talent?” asked Chrissalyn.

“A bit of my brain garden which I have scarcely cultivated at all, and would rather not name, for I never have been sure of my title to it. In my early dreams it figured conspicuously; but of late years I have almost dropped it from my thoughts. The business of bread-winning pushes many a fair dream out of its sacred niche. In spite of the encouraging words of this message I doubt if I shall ever till that soil. I begin to feel too tired to make new departures. The torpor of indifference and weariness is creeping over me. The old spirit of action walks with a halting step, and turns its eyes longingly to the meadows of ease and indolence. I think I understand how car-horses feel. They know perfectly well that, whatever may happen to the rest of the world, for them there is only a steady, day-after-day pull till the end comes. Prescott used to say I wanted to eat my cake and have it too; but he didn’t know how feeble and weary I often was.”

One evening when they called their unseen friends new wonders were shown them--wonders which took place under laws beyond their penetration. The Butterfly wore a fresh white rose on her breast. When Prescott announced himself, his first words were of its beauty and fragrance.

“Can you see it?” Cartice asked.

“Certainly.”

“And smell it?”

“Of course. Give it to me, Butterfly! Give it to me,” he wrote, with eager energy.

“Well, take it,” said Chrissalyn, smiling at the impossible request.

“I am in earnest. I really want it. Hold it in your hand directly in front of you, and see me take it.”

Laughing at what she believed to be a bit of pleasantry, she took the rose from her breast, and held it between her thumb and finger, saying, in mimicry of the old-time heroine of novels, “Please accept this token of my esteem.”

Instantly, quicker than a flash, with a suddenness indescribable, it disappeared, vanished completely, in the sight of both pairs of eyes. Whither? Could vacant space swallow a tangible object? Impossible. Yet this impossibility was accomplished.

The fact stunned them. Each looked in the face of the other, and clasped the other’s hand to make sure they were not dreaming.

“I should be frightened speechless if any one else than Prescott had done that,” said the Butterfly, pallid and trembling.

“Let us ask him about it,” said Cartice, who was shaken, too.

With some reluctance, Chrissalyn asked Prescott how he had taken the rose.

“By means of what some of your scientific people call the Fourth Dimension of Space,” he replied.

“Can you explain it more clearly?”

“No; I have no terms in which to make it plain to you. It is all natural enough, however, and comes under a law as yet not known to your world. Now wait a moment and I will bring you a flower by means of the same law.”

Silent and expectant they sat for three or four minutes. Then, apparently out of the air above their heads, two large fresh, red roses fell on the table before them. Examination proved that they were real and not illusory.

“Where did you get them?” Cartice asked.

“I went what you would call a long distance for them,--about two hundred miles; but it is nothing to me, for I know no distance outside of my own thought.”

Unsolicited, one evening Prescott volunteered to tell his two faithful friends some of his experiences since passing out of their sight. He wrote with a rapidity and energy even greater than in life, though he had ever a nervous, hasty manner of writing, which was his true form of expression. In conversation he had little ability. He consumed three evenings in the task he had set himself, and this was his story, which was addressed to Cartice:

* * * * *

“There was the accident at the elevator. It occurred in a few seconds of time, but I did not realize what was taking place. A thought that something was going wrong flashed through my mind, but it conveyed no sense of danger. I was like a spectator who sees disaster overtake another, yet has no clear idea what that disaster is. From this and what I have learned here, I am inclined to the belief that victims of accidents which result in sudden death have no painful experiences--do not even suffer from fear.

“As you know, I was killed instantly--that is pushed out of life as you understand life, without warning. When I awoke, or regained consciousness, on this side of death--which I believe was soon after the accident, though I am not sure on this point--I found myself groping blindly, staggering weakly in the dark and reaching about me with my hands to find something that would help me to a knowledge of my whereabouts.

“I was never distinguished for patience. Now I began to feel impatient and cross at finding myself in such an unaccountable situation. Then the darkness got thicker, more depressing, and at last terrible, until my spirit quailed before it, and the thought came to me that I was indeed, in a place and condition strange and fearful.

“Then I thought of you, Cartice, and of how devotedly I loved you. With that thought came light, such radiant, phenomenal, overpowering light that it dazzled me. I shuddered before its awful effulgence, and put my hands over my eyes that it might not blind me. My love for you seemed to fill all space and include all things. While enjoying it, drinking it in, floating in it, I moved on, for I was walking,--or so it seemed--until I met my dear old friend William Bissell.

“That astonished me, for I instantly remembered that he had died five years before, and I had been one of those selected for the solemn honor of carrying his body to the grave. Was I dreaming?

“He came toward me smiling. I thought I had never seen him look so well, so handsome, so young or so benignant. He was ever the soul of kindness, not only ready but always anxious to serve others; and he had a particular fondness for meeting friends at the railroad station when they came back to the city after an absence--especially those who had no near kindred to welcome them.

“‘I’m glad to see you, Gordon,’ he said; but I thought I saw something in his face more than the words implied, and a foreboding of unwelcome news came to me.

“‘How is this, William?’ I asked. ‘Am I dreaming? I thought I helped to bury you five years ago.’

“He smiled significantly and said, ‘Has it not occurred to you that somebody may be arranging to do the same service for you?’

“‘What do you mean, William?’ I asked, calling upon my soul to sustain me against the shock of the reply.

“‘Well, Gordon,’ he said, gently, kindness making his face shine like a lamp, ‘tell me if a dead man’s arm has any bones in it?’

“Instinctively I grasped my left arm with my right hand. Lo! the hand passed through it. No bones were there.

“Can you imagine one already dead fainting from fear? The sensation I experienced was more startling, more fearful than anything I had conceived of before. I sank down, down into immeasurable depths.

“A feeling of shame at my cowardice took possession of me. Why was I afraid? I had died, to be sure; my condition was changed; but the experience was something millions and millions of other souls had undergone. Gentle, timid, delicate women had trodden that solemn path before me. Little children, too, had traveled it. Why should I, a man, vain of my strength and courage, be affrighted? A vast compassion for all humankind in this trying moment welled up in my heart, and instantly I was lifted into light, and beheld about me loving and familiar faces, beautiful vistas, and heard melodious sounds. The loving thought I held had borne me upward; but I did not then know it.

“Many times I sank into a dark, bottomless void, and as often by some mysterious power rose into ineffable light. I encountered massive walls from time to time, before which my feet were stayed. Impassable and impregnable, they seemed to bar my way, I knew not why. Eventually I learned that the sinking and the rising, and the barriers I met, were not external experiences, but all took place within my own consciousness, and were but the picturing or appearances of my inner condition. They were my own thoughts externalized, for _thought_ is the only _thing_ in the _Universe_. We think, therefore we are. Existence is thought. Man is thought made objective. Thought is the creative principle: it is creation.

“‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,’ describes life both here and in the visible form, if you but understand its true significance. Here every sensation is intensified a thousand times. I thrill with joy and the universe vibrates in harmonious response. I suffer, and it trembles in reciprocal anguish. And this is true of every soul in whatever part of the universe it may dwell; but here our capacity to feel is keener and greater than with you, and here we learn to understand. Every sensation is intensified, because we enter into closer relations with the One Life, the One Spirit that fills all space. Everything is within our consciousness, and outside of that there is nothing. Within us is all that ever was or shall be.

“For a time I was often wretched. The interests of earth attracted me, I thought of them wistfully, and wished I were in my old place doing the work in which I had found something akin to pleasure. The wish held me there, and I was miserable, because the old methods of action were lost to me. Often when you sat at your desk in the _Register_ office I was near, suffering keen torment, because I could not make my presence known. It took me a long time to see that we were not really separated. It was only the veil of your ignorance that shut me away from you. I was near you, but you did not know it, that was all. The veil that hides our world from yours is ignorance--a veil it is possible to lift.

“Still, I suffered until I found a means of enlightening you. I saw the peculiar power the Butterfly possesses, and endeavored to arouse in her a wish to investigate which would enable me to bridge the gulf between us--a gulf that existed only in your thought.

“I caused her to see me in what she believed a dream, and I held a planchette that she might try to operate with it. To my unbounded delight I was successful. I assure you that, although you were grateful for the knowledge the little tripod brought you, I was a thousand times more so, since to me it meant deliverance from darkness and misery.

“I could not rise into higher conditions--conditions being internal--until I had established communication with you. The moment you recognized me and believed in me, darkness and discontent began to fall away from me. You made heaven for me on earth, inasmuch as I loved you, and that love has made heaven for me here--both heaven and hell being states of consciousness, though none the less real for all that.

“My burden was lifted, when you fully understood that I still lived. Not till then was I willing to accept my changed condition and seek knowledge in new paths.

“How delightful it was to discover that I had power within myself to create conditions! Thoughts of love enveloped me in light, a light that had in it all beauty and all harmony. The character of my love for you changed. Desire for possession went out of it, and the wish to benefit and help you in every way, without regard to myself, took its place. I then learned that the more unselfish and universal our love, the deeper and fuller and sweeter our own being becomes. Love is the supreme power. Love is life. Love is light. Love is all there is, for love is God.

“This is a scientific truth and not merely a figure and phrase of religious philosophy.

“God is spirit and spirit is substance, the only substance in the universe. Men of science tell you that light is a mode of motion, and they speak truly, for it is the physical expression of pure spirit which is pure love. Spirit, which includes all worlds and all being is in perpetual motion; all that you see is but its different forms of manifestation.

“Your sun is not your source of light; it is but a reflector or transmitter of the one supreme light to the worlds of its system.

“The more we love the more of God do we become and express. Oh! if I could but tell you the joy that love brings. It can overcome all things. Where it dwells no evil can come; and it enters wherever the door is left open to receive it. It is everywhere, but, if your consciousness is unaware of it, for you it has no existence. Only recognize it and it is yours.

“I passed my life in combat. I attacked evil, fought it ruthlessly, and believed I was doing good. Yet I was only making evil important. You would laugh at the teacher who fought children in order to make them wise, wouldn’t you? Evil is only ignorance--otherwise spiritual darkness, and men and women are but children in knowledge. There is but one way to eradicate evil or ignorance, and that is to make more light. Open the understanding and let in the light. The darkness will flee before it. You remember Victor Hugo said: ‘Pay schoolmasters and not soldiers.’ I see now that the only way to make men better is to awaken the God or good in them; to put higher ideals before them, and not find fault with them because they don’t know all there is to know.

“Until I met you I lived a loveless life, therefore a pessimistic one. My sympathy with humankind had a narrow limit. A wrong aroused my wrath against the perpetrator of it, when it should have awakened my pity for the dark condition of his mind.

“I was conceited, intolerant, impatient, belligerent and often cruel. I went about with a lash in my hand, ready to administer upon all who did not live up to my standard. Now I see the simpler way of which we were long since told. It is to love our wayward brothers. When men learn that an injury done another injures themselves far more than the other, they will cease to be unkind.

“As a matter of course I could not give up my old ways of thinking at once. I still found myself quick to anger and ready to hate at the knowledge of offence or injury. These feelings instantly plunged me into darkness and the companionship of demons hideous to behold.

“It is so in your world also. Rage and hate darken your mind, and bring into it hideous demons of thought; but love fills you with light and beauty. Though your conception of love be crude and narrow, still the germ of divinity is in it, and it will brighten your way as far as its light extends. If you are faithful to truth as you see it, broader conceptions will come to you.

“I am not capable of instructing you on life here, only so far as it has revealed itself to me. Another may have different experiences and see a different outlook. Each soul is bounded by its own limitations, which expand as it advances. I am but a student, at the feet of wiser masters; but I must give you what I see, not what they see.

“I believe the universe is electric; that spirit operates through all nature by means of what you call electricity, in its different manifestations. The infinite mind, or what is called God, is the highest and most etherealized substance, including all else. It possesses the attributes of inherent motion and living power, and it has a centre like a great central sun, whose rays extend everywhere through a system of transmitters. We live and move and have our being in it, just as all physical life owes its existence to the sun of its system. Electricity is the servant of this central and all-inclusive mind, whose every thought is transmitted through creation by means of electrical and etheric vibration. Every thought of yours creates a flash of electricity in your brain, which becomes a transmitter, for thought is electric. Do not forget, however, that I give this only as what appears to me.

“Life is an endless chain. To me now the mere fact of living after death seems a very small thing--but one little link in the endless chain. Dazzling heights rise before us as the soul goes on up the steps of knowledge, where inexhaustible joys are laid up for us. Nothing counts but knowledge--knowledge of the law. Now I understand that eternal life is to know God. It takes eternal life to know him.

“When you act from the outlook of love, you will never go wrong; for truth is born of love.

“Weave well the fabric of your thought, for everything is made from it. The law of causation is inflexible. What you give you will get. Your thoughts will come back to you, bringing whatever freight of evil or good with which you sent them forth. Every time you think of a person you affect him for good or ill.

“If you sin, you will be the servant of sin. If you love good, you will be the instrument of good.

“‘God is spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’

“The whole law is there. If you live the life of the spirit, you worship God because you express truth. Each man on earth, as to his real self, is as true a spirit as he ever shall be. Only in most cases he is ignorant of that tremendous fact. Understand this and live it, and you worship God in spirit and in truth.

“Here imagination is reality. It is also the creative realm in your world. I think and will, and my thought takes form. I think of one I love, and instantly I am with that one, no matter in how remote a part of the universe he or she may be.

“I say remote, because you think of distance as real. To the soul it does not exist and never has existed. It is but the continuity of the mind--a mode of thought. I speak of minutes, yet for us there is no time. That too is but a mode of thought. I must, however, use terms comprehensible to you.

“Do I have the same form as in life? Yes.

“Do I wear clothes? I am clothed by my own thought, and so are you, but in a cruder way and by a slower process.

“Have I sight? Yes, but it is not the same as physical sight. That was for the objective life; this is for all that is related to my inner or true being and the true being of others.

“Have I the other senses as in the natural life? Yes; in a fulness and perfection undreamed of before. I have them and others unknown to you all blended in one vast consciousness which puts me in touch with all that relates to me in a manner impossible to describe.

“The senses are but avenues through which your spirit takes cognizance of its environment. Here the spirit learns that it is its own environment.

“Is communion between this world and yours beneficial to either one? (Remember there is but one world. The division is all in your thought.) Is not association with high-minded, well-instructed persons always beneficial to you; and association with the evil-minded and untaught always hurtful?

“How are human beings to know they are deathless; if the fact be not proved to them by ways within their comprehension? Can there be anything but good in learning the law of your own being, by whatever means are open to you? Not only is it beneficial, but it is the most important branch of knowledge you can study.

“Even spirit phenomena of the most rudimentary order are useful and necessary to the awakening of minds incapable of understanding higher methods of instruction. There is a primer stage in all learning.

“The same law of attraction governs intercourse between us and you that reigns throughout nature. Like attracts like. You call to you the same order of mind from here that you attract there from among the living. (In reality there is neither a here nor a there, save in your mind. All is the same.) Your habitual quality of thought will attract its like. You will get what you give. Thus it happens that the foolish get foolish messages, and the earnest and intelligent generally receive sensible and instructive ones.

“As I divine the purposes of higher orders of beings here, they care relatively little for phenomena, and often lament much connected with phenomena; but they do care a great deal for whatever agency can reach human minds and cause them to think, even for ever so few minutes, of what is gentle, humane, kind, considerate, unselfish and affectional. These are the doors by which higher, gentler spirits reach human understandings, and by these means they exert a power far greater than is generally suspected.

“For the production of ordinary phenomena a high grade of intelligence is not necessary. You do not need a professor to teach a child its alphabet. The better developed spirits find more subtle ways of imparting knowledge, and select more advanced minds to receive it than those that are satisfied with rudimentary phenomena. But that is necessary to begin with.

“Here as on earth--remember I use a term implying locality for your better understanding, though the spirit knows no locality--all who enjoy a larger light than the multitude are anxious to share it with those less favored. By helping others into it they receive more of it themselves. This is a law. Selfish, indeed, would be the soul who had a faith that supported him through every trial, and yet did not want others to have it. The heart’s desire of every prophet, genius and savior, is to make others see as he sees that which illumines his own soul. For this cause the noblest and best have often perished--that is, given up their physical life--to perish in reality being impossible. Therefore, communion between spirits still in the body and those out of it is one of the most important means of education known--the chief occupation of some who are here.

“Toying with phenomena for the sole purpose of gratifying curiosity--mere wonder-mongering--is always to be deprecated.

“Often, as in my case, the opportunity of communicating with friends left behind sets a spirit free from his own unhappy thought-limitations. It lifts a burden from him. My desire to prove to you that I was not dead held me in bondage until I bridged the gulf. Intense love for one is always a kind of bondage. The perfect love we shall know, when the truth has freed us, is all-embracing, universal, like unto the love of God--it is the love of God.

“When I read these words of Condillac I laughed at them: ‘Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our thought that we perceive.’

“Now I can affirm their truth. We can never run away from ourselves. We take our own world with us wherever we go, for it is made of our thought--‘it is always our own thought that we perceive.’ We are our own thought--and the smallest insect or strongest and fiercest beast or greatest genius is no less and no more.

“In the life of the world I never knew happiness. Behind a cynical and reserved exterior I masked a restless, suffering spirit. Creation appeared a grim tragedy. This was because my inner eyes were closed, and I took the distorted shadow for the reality. I was looking at a fantastic mirror and saw only its exaggerated reflections. I ridiculed the idea of any one’s being happy in such a world. Now I know that man is destined to be happy, but his happiness is of the spirit, and can only come with spiritual development, when he knows that he is spirit, lives the life of the spirit, and so becomes free from the bonds of ignorance. This is what is meant by the truth making us free. Ignorance is the only evil there is--mere blindness to the light, though the light is always shining. When you know the truth, you become the truth, and are out of the darkness of ignorance, therefore free. This is, I am told, the ultimate destiny of the whole human race.

“Remember that God never punishes any one. He only teaches. This, the children of the world have to learn. They, too, must eliminate punishment from their methods of dealing with the wrongdoers, otherwise the ignorant.

“A wise friend told me to cease my self-questioning and striving, and let knowledge find me. He said we have only to _let_ good come to us and it will fill us. To do this we must make ourselves receptive--negative--and the spirit, the one spirit, which includes all wisdom, all love, all life, being positive, will flow into us. He said our continual striving and struggling made us positive, and therefore unreceptive. This enabled me to see a new meaning in the question, ‘Who, by searching can find out God?’

“The law is to be still--ready to receive--and let him enter.

“When I did this I emerged from suffering and darkness, and for the first time in the memory of my conscious existence felt my spirit at rest.”