s and rivers, diffused through the spirit-world. A
still better comparison is that of the circulation of the blood in the
body; for whereas seas and rivers are seen to be irregularly distributed
in the physical world, a certain regularity in distribution of the flowing
life reigns in the spirit-world, as in the circulation of the blood. This
"flowing life" is simultaneously heard as spiritual sound.

The third region of the spirit-world is its "atmosphere." What is known in
the physical world as "feeling" is also present there, permeating
everything like the air on the earth. We must imagine a rushing sea of
feeling. Pain and sorrow, joy and rapture, flow through this region, like
wind and storms in the atmosphere of the physical world. Imagine a battle
fought on earth. There confront one another not merely human forms, as
seen by the physical eye, but feelings opposed to feelings, passions to
passions; pain fills the battlefield just as much as do the forms of men.
All that is seething there of passion, pain, and the joy of victory is not
only perceptible in its effects as revealed to the physical senses; it may
be seen with the spiritual senses as an atmospheric process in the
spirit-world. Such an event in the spiritual world is like a thunderstorm
in the physical, and the perception of these events may be compared to the
hearing of words in the physical world. For this reason it is said that as
the air envelops and permeates earthly things, so do "interweaving
spiritual words" pervade the beings and events of the spirit-world.

And still further observations are possible in this spirit-world. What may
be compared to light and heat in the physical world is there too. That
which permeates everything in the spirit-world, as earthly things and
beings are permeated by heat, is the world of thought itself. There,
however, thoughts must be regarded as living and independent beings. What
is understood by man in the manifested world as thought is but a shadow of
what lives as a thought-being in the spirit-world. Imagine thought, as it
now exists in man, raised out of him and as an active, energetic being,
endowed with an inner life of its own, and you have a feeble illustration
of that which fills the fourth region of the spirit-world. In the physical
world between birth and death what man understands as thought is but the
manifestation of the thought-world as it is able to mould itself by means
of the instruments afforded by