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DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD
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where the disturbance of the crystalline barrier was greatest; and while wondering if it could withstand the effort made by some power on its exterior to breach it, or whether it would remain intact until my wished-for friends arrived, I began to study its composition. It was evidently not material, and yet it was something quite as substantial. Among men the surrounding envelope of the body is called the 'odylic sphere;' yet odyle is material, therefore this could not be formed of that. It was not soul-substance, because it was far grosser, and served a greatly inferior purpose. It was not spirit, either. Here then was a demand for useful knowledge; nor was it long ere that demand was fully supplied; for it came to me that embodied man represented God in his threefold nature, Body, Spirit, conscious Soul or Thinking Principle: that each of these must essentially differ from the others, and in a scientific sense be high, higher, and most high; and that too, not by reason of continuity or rarefaction, but by disparates, and insulations. Now all three exist in, of, and constitute the same individual; wherefore there must be at least two substances, differing in toto from the three primaries, yet of a nature enabling them to cling to and connect the principals. What were these two substances? At a glance I saw that the materials of a human body gave forth an atmosphere which serves to connect it with the life, or materio-spiritual part of man, and ties each by soluble links to both the material and spiritual worlds. This is the odylic sphere. What connects soul with spirit? The second glance revealed to me the fact that every monad, carnate and conscious alike, embodied or free, mere monad or

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