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evident, and it is as easy to read distant thoughts as near.
We think of an absent friend as easily as we do of one
present. It is no more difficult to read the
absent mind than it is to read the present.
Chaucer wrote centuries ago, yet we still read his thought
in his verse. What is classic study, but discernment of
the minds of Homer and Virgil, of whose personal existence
we may be in doubt?
(Impossible intercommunion)
If spiritual life has been won by the departed, they
cannot return to material existence, because different
states of consciousness are involved, and one
person cannot exist in two different states of
consciousness at the same time. In sleep we
do not communicate with the dreamer by our side despite
his physical proximity, because both of us are either unconscious
or are wandering in our dreams through different
mazes of consciousness.
In like manner it would follow, even if our departed
friends were near us and were in as conscious a state of
existence as before the change we call death, that their
state of consciousness must be different from ours. We
are not in their state, nor are they in the mental realm
in which we dwell. Communion between them and
ourselves would be prevented by this difference. The
mental states are so unlike, that intercommunion is as
impossible as it would be between a mole and a human
being. Different dreams and different awakenings betoken
a differing consciousness. When wandering in
Australia, do we look for help to the Esquimaux in their
snow huts?
In a world of sin and sensuality hastening to a
greater development of power, it is wise earnestly to
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