You are now using a very inferior set of senses. The eye of your body, compared with the eye of your spirit, is a mere peep-hole. The senses of the body are relatively coarse as compared with those of the spirit. They are for use in a relatively coarser stratum of life. You are better off in a coal-mine with a coarse miner’s suit than with one of silk or velvet. Your body with its coarser senses is for use in this, the coarser, level of life. Yet it may be for you a possibility to slip off this suit (the body), and go with your spirit (leaving for a time the coarse suit behind) to a higher and finer order of life.
You have now a clairvoyant eye and a clairaudient ear. But these are not opened. The clairvoyant eye is closed like those of some animals in very early infancy. In a few persons it is opened prematurely and in advance of the other spiritual senses. This is a premature ripening.
The clairvoyant eye is the spiritual eye. It is an eye put out at the end of a thought. Send your thought to London, and, if clairvoyant, you send that eye with it.
A clairaudient ear is an ear sent with a thought. Clairvoyance and clairaudience are not special gifts for particular people. They belong to all, and are in the germ in all.
Your spiritual senses have been so crippled from birth, through lack of exercise, that they are not in “working condition.” When you leave your body at night, you are as a person in a dazed or bewildered state. You see without seeing. You hear without hearing. You are as one stunned by a sudden shock or blow. Then the physical eye may see, but it leaves no distinct memory of what it sees. You may in such state have a remembrance of a crowd of faces about you—but that is all. In a condition somewhat resembling this does your spirit roam about on slipping away from its body. You are as an infant just let out of doors. You go where a vague whim or fancy carries you. You have left the physical senses of sight, hearing, and touch, in the body. You have now only a set of totally uneducated senses to guide you. You have been taught all your life to deny the very existence of these senses. To teach a child unbelief, say, in its hearing or eyesight, from its earliest consciousness, will result in injury to its sight. The child educates itself gradually to use the senses of its body correctly. An infant has no idea of distance. It reaches out for things far from it, imagining they are near enough to be touched. It will walk off a precipice if left to itself. It learns by painful experience not to touch hot coals or hot iron. It requires years to educate it to a proper use of the physical senses.
Your spirit has its own senses, which are not even recognized. They are left year after year without any exercise or training. You do not see, in what you call dreams, with the physical eye at all, or hear with the physical ear. You see with the spiritual eye; you hear with the spiritual ear.
You are literally lost on going to sleep, when you go into your spirit life. You then grope about like an infant with its untrained physical senses. What idea of the senses you do have, you estimate entirely by those of your body which you have left behind. You then carry your real selves about under the impression that you are still living in the mask you wear in the daytime (your body), and estimating and judging all you see or sense by a set of inferior senses (the physical), which you are not using at all.
You are nightly, on passing out of the body, really in a spirit life; yet you are dead to this fact, because you are using the spiritual senses as you use the physical in the daytime. You are as one using a crutch, when you have two sound legs which need only practice to make you a good walker. Many people who are completely severed from their bodies are in precisely the same condition. You may go mostly when away from the body among these people. You may be attracted to them, because your spirit has in its uneducated state been so long in the habit of blindly groping among them. Your spirit has fallen into this habit just as it, when using the body, falls into ruts of habit, which are often extremely difficult to break off. You see men daily drifting about without aim or purpose, waiting, hoping for something to “turn up” to amuse them. A man without aim or purpose in life soon becomes inferior in intellect. Your spiritual self is in the same condition, from a similar cause. It is often surrounded by others out of the body without aim or purpose, and who know not what to do with themselves.
Fiction has never devised the picture literally realized every night among you. These thousands on thousands of blind beings freed temporarily from their bodies are straying, wandering, groping everywhere—in your houses, your streets, your fields—some near, some far-away. They are neither asleep nor awake. They wander as if in a dream which is not a dream. Sometimes the spiritual eye opens, and they see acquaintance or stranger, scene familiar or unfamiliar. But the recognition is not always a satisfactory one. You have been unconsciously taught not to believe in the reality of what you see in this state. Therefore you do not accept it as a reality, and what the mind in any condition persistently refuses to accept as a reality will not frame itself to be held by memory as one.
It is a fact that some people on the death of the body still think they have their physical bodies. They may remain in this state for years. They go about, eat, sleep and live in every way in that grade of existence which, though unseen by us, is all about us. Because every thing we see, hear, touch, handle, smell or taste has on its grade its correspondent or spiritual counterpart, and can be used exactly as it is here. There are no sudden transitions of any sort in Nature. People on passing from the physical body do not enter on any glorified condition of existence, unless they in mind are living such existence on earth. They go where every thing is in strict correspondence with their daily thought. Friends in the unseen world may on their first arrival receive them as guests in their houses. But they are only guests, and cannot remain in those circles unless in spirit they belong to them. If their thought be lower, they must, after a time, return to the order or stratum of thought in which they lived on passing out of the body. They cannot commence building-upward on that. You must build your “mansion in the skies” yourself. You can commence consciously building it here in the body to greater advantage than to commence after you lose your body. That you must build it yourself is the law of nature. It is not because any individuality, however wise and powerful in any of the advanced stages of existence, says you must. All of these, up to orders of mind beyond our power to comprehend, have been and are now the builders of their temples (themselves). What most they want of us is to build in like manner our own and with the same blissful results. Because such building is simply the building of our own individual happiness into grander, broader and ever-broadening proportions.
Your first error on passing from the body in the state known as sleep lies in thinking that you are moving about your physical body. You must educate yourself out of that mistake. You must fix it in your mind before going to sleep that if you wake up in what you call a dream you are not then using your physical body. You will fix in your mind before going to sleep, so far as you can, your conception of yourself as a spirit—or, rather, as the unseen organization which during the day uses your body.
The last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain with you on leaving the body. If persisted in, you will find it mingling itself with what you call your dreams. That is, it will be the first clew towards the recognition of your real self when you are away from your body.
Keep this fact then, this recognition of yourself as a spirit, in your mind, and it will be a great help to your unseen friends in the other life to get near you and waken you to the knowledge of your real self.
The wiser and more powerful order of spirits, who may be able to give you much of their thought in the daytime, or while you are using the body, may not be able to give you so much of it during your escape from the body, owing to the condition above spoken of. Instead, therefore, of going into a higher region of thought at night, you descend, through blindness and mere force of habit, into a lower one. You may be, while using the body, educated up to and enter into their higher realm of thought by day. Yet at night, being so educated in part in the school of physical sense, you cannot carry that education with you. You walk with the spiritual eye and ear, thinking these the physical eye and ear. All this results in a confusion which no language can fully express, because no similar condition in this life can be clearly realized or illustrated.
