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DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD
27

still, and necessarily so, yet my notions of the Soul's powers were then exceedingly vague, crude, and undefined. In other and succeeding states to which I subsequently attained, much of this ignorance was dispelled by new light which constantly broke in upon my being.

And we passed beyond the portal of the house, myself crossing at the same instant its threshold, and that of Time; nor did I once cast a glance toward the frail and decaying shell from which a joyous thrill of super-consciousness told me that I had forever escaped; indeed I had no disposition to do so, for the reason that new and strange emotions and sensations crowded so fast upon me, that my whole attention was absorbed thereby; for they swept like the billows of a wind troubled lake, across the entire sea of my new-born being. One thought, and one alone, connected with earth, assumed importance, and that was associated with the physical phenomenon of dissolution, and it shaped itself in a hundred ways with the rapidity of lightning—no, not lightning, but quicker, for that is very slow compared to the flashings and the rushings forth of thought, even in the earth-made brain; how much more rapid, then, from a source around which are no cerebral impediments to obstruct. "Death—this it is to be dead!" thought I. How blind, how deaf we are, not to see, and know, and hear, that all things tell of life, life, life—being, real and true; while nothing, nothing in the great domain of our God, speaks one word of absolute death, of a blotting out of Soul—Soul, which, while even cramped in coares bodies, sometimes mounts the Capitals of existence, and with far-penetrating vision pierces the profoundest depths of