The Life Everlasting | Page 8

of the Seeming
Real. I did not then know why I was selected for such an
'initiation'--and I do not know even now. It arose quite naturally out of
a series of ordinary events which might happen to anyone. I was not
compelled or persuaded into it, for, being alone in the world and more
or less friendless, I had no opportunity to seek advice or assistance
from any person as to the course of life or learning I should pursue.
And I learned what I did learn because of my own unwavering
intention and WILL to be instructed.
I should here perhaps explain the tenor of the instruction which was
gradually imparted to me in just such measures of proportion as I was
found to be receptive. The first thing I was taught was how to bring
every feeling and sense into close union with the spirit of Nature.
Nature, I was told, is the reflection of the working-mind of the
Creator--and any opposition to that working-mind on the part of any
living organism It has created cannot but result in disaster. Pursuing
this line of study, a wonderful vista of perpetual revealment was
opened to me. I saw how humanity, moved by gross egoism, has in
every age of the world ordained laws and morals for itself which are the
very reverse of Nature's teaching--I saw how, instead of helping the
wheel of progress and wisdom onward, man reverses it by his obstinacy
and turns it backward even on the very point of great attainment--and I

was able to perceive how the sorrows and despairs of the world are
caused by this one simple fact--Man working AGAINST Nature--while
Nature, ever divine and invincible, pursues her God-appointed course,
sweeping her puny opponents aside and inflexibly carrying out her will
to the end. And I learned how true it is that if Man went WITH her
instead of AGAINST her, there would be no more misunderstanding of
the laws of the Universe, and that where there is now nothing but
discord, all would be divinest harmony.
My first book, "A Romance of Two Worlds," was an eager, though
crude, attempt to explain and express something of what I myself had
studied on some of these subjects, though, as I have already said, my
mind was unformed and immature, and, therefore, I was not permitted
to disclose more than a glimmering of the light I was beginning to
perceive. My own probation--destined to be a severe one--had only just
been entered upon; and hard and fast limits were imposed on me for a
certain time. I was forbidden, for example, to write of radium, that
wonderful 'discovery' of the immediate hour, though it was then, and
had been for a long period, perfectly well known to my instructors, who
possessed all the means of extracting it from substances as yet
undreamed of by latter-day scientists. I was only permitted to hint at it
under the guise of the word 'Electricity'--which, after all, was not so
much of a misnomer, seeing that electric force displays itself in
countless millions of forms. My "Electric Theory of the Universe" in
the "Romance of Two Worlds" foreran the utterance of the scientist
who in the "Hibbert Journal" for January, 1905, wrote as
follows:--"The last years have seen the dawn of a revolution in science
as great as that which in the sphere of religion overthrew the many gods
and crowned the One. Matter, as we have understood it, there is none,
nor probably anywhere the individual atom. The so-called atoms are
systems of ELECTRONIC corpuscles, bound together by their mutual
forces too firmly for any human contrivance completely to sunder
them,--alike in their electric composition, differing only in the rhythms
of their motion. ELECTRICITY is all things, and all things are
ELECTRIC."
THIS WAS PRECISELY MY TEACHING IN THE FIRST BOOK I

EVER WROTE. I was ridiculed for it, of course,--and I was told that
there was no 'spiritual' force in electricity. I differ from this view; but
'radio-activity' is perhaps the better, because the truer term to employ in
seeking to describe the Germ or Embryo of the Soul, for-- as scientists
have proved--"Radium is capable of absorbing from surrounding bodies
SOME UNKNOWN FORM OF ENERGY which it can render evident
as heat and light." This is precisely what the radio- activity in each
individual soul of each individual human being is ordained to do,--to
absorb an 'unknown form of energy which it can render evident as heat
and light.' Heat and Light are the composition of Life;--and the Life
which this radio-activity of Soul generates IN itself and OF itself, can
never die. Or, as I wrote in "A Romance of Two Worlds "--"Like all
flames, this electric (or radiant) spark can either be fanned