he marvellous life beyond, when our friends
pass from us within the veil, and our hearts follow them with eager
questioning--"What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are
they knowing now?"

Section 2

More and more of late years I keep asking those questions at
death-beds. I seem to myself constantly as if trying to hold back the
curtain and look through. But the look through is all blurred and
indistinct.

It must always be so while we are here, with our limited faculties,
shut up in this little earth body. I know certain facts about the "I,"
the "self" in the Unseen Life, but I have no knowledge and no
experience that would help me to picture his surroundings. I cannot
form any image, any, even the vaguest, conception of what that life
appears like. That is why my outlook is so blurred and indistinct.

And this brings me to point out WHAT SORT OF KNOWLEDGE WE CAN HAVE AND
WHAT SORT OF KNOWLEDGE WE CANNOT HAVE about that life. It may help you
not to expect the impossible.

You desire to know two things about the Unseen World.

1st. You desire to know the real life of the "I"
himself--consciousness, thought, memory, love, happiness, penitence and
such like.

2nd. You desire to know his outward surrounding, so that you can
picture to yourself his life in that world. That is what gives the
interesting touch to your knowledge of your friend's life in a foreign
land on earth.

Now the first of these is the really important knowledge, and such
knowledge you can have and you can understand because it is of the same
kind as the knowledge you already have of him on earth.

The second would be an interesting knowledge, but this knowledge you
cannot have, because you have no faculties for it and no similar
experience to help you to realize it. It is a law of all human
knowledge that you cannot know and cannot depict to yourself anything
of which you have had no corresponding experience before.

"I," "myself" which goes into the Unseen is the really important
matter, not my surroundings. And the essential knowledge, I say, about
that self, about his inner real life in the Unseen you can have and you
can understand because the inner life there is of the very same kind as
the inner life here. If I am told of full consciousness there, of
memory there, of love or hatred there, of happiness or pain there, of
joy or sorrow there, I can easily understand it. I have had experience
of the like here.