Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PART I
Beyond This Life
I. MY EARTH LIFE
WHO I am really matters not. Who I was matters still less. We do not carry our
earthly positions with us into the spirit world. My earthly importance I left
behind me. My spiritual worth is what counts now, and that, my good friend, is far
below what it should be and what it can be. Thus much as to who I am. As to who I
was, I should like to give some details concerning my mental attitude prior to my
passing here into the world of spirit.
My earth life was not a hard one in the sense that I never underwent physical
privations, but it was certainly a life of hard mental work. In my early years I
was drawn towards the Church because the mysticism of the Church attracted my own
mystical sense. The mysteries of religion, through their outward expression of
lights and vestments and ceremonies, seemed to satisfy my spiritual appetite in a
way that nothing else could. There was much, of course, that I did not understand,
and since coming into spirit I have found that those things do not matter. They
were religious problems raised by the minds of men, and they have no significance
whatever in the great scheme of life. But at the time, like so many others, I
believed in a wholesale fashion, without a glimmering of understanding, or very
little. I taught and preached according to the orthodox text-books, and so I
established a reputation for myself. When I contemplated a future state of
existence I thought—and that vaguely—of what the Church had taught me on the
subject, which was infinitesimally small and most incorrect. I did not realize the
closeness of the two worlds—ours and yours—although I had ample demonstration of
it. What occult experiences I had were brought about, so I thought, by some
extension of natural laws, and they were rather to be considered as incidental
than of regular occurrence, given to the few rather than to the many.
The fact that I was a priest did not preclude me from visitations of what the
Church preferred to look upon as devils, although I never once, I must confess,
saw anything remotely resembling what I could consider as such. I did not grasp
the fact that I was what is called, on the earth-plane, a sensitive, a psychic—one
gifted with the power of 'seeing’, though in limited degree.