were
obliged to make of your credulity was one of these." We protested
against such tests, and I declared that I would not try to receive
communications if they practised deception. "Why do you protest," was
written, "when you already know you are but a tyro in this phase of
being? You don't now willingly do the work assigned you, and B. F. U.
is still harder to manage." Thereupon Mr. U. suggested "that without
sense organs and a material environment, conditions would be such,
perhaps, that they could not be expressed in terms known to us, nor be
even conceived by us." Immediately was written: "Many wish to answer
B. F. U.'s clear statement of the difficulties in the way of spirit
intercourse with those still in the flesh, but now comes the one soul
capable of clear answer. Blessed be they who question--gone." Next
came this--"Boehme wants to reply." Here I have to confess that never
having paid much attention to occult or mystical literature the name
Boehme was utterly unknown to me, and at this point I asked Mr. U.,
"Did you ever hear of anyone by the name of B-o-e-h-m-e?" spelling the
word. "Certainly," he replied, "Jacob Boehme, he was a German thinker
who died--" my hand began to move just then, and he paused, and while
the following was being written my mind reverted hazily to a German
philosophical writer, who had died within a few years, and of whose
life one of our friends had written a sketch. His name began with B,
and I thought he was the one Mr. U. referred to, as I had forgotten
what the full name was. I say this to explain that there could be no
thought-transference in this instance from Mr. U.'s mind to mine. This
was written rapidly. "Death and life are but two phases of one truth,
and when what mankind calls death comes, it is as we experience the
change that all our circumscribed relations to banded universalities
become clear; but when we try to explain to those not yet beyond man's
sphere we find ourselves at a loss because there is nothing parallel
in this state of existence with your knowledge." Afterwards Mr. U.
showed me in the encyclopaedia a sketch of him (the name spelled Bohme,
and in several other ways) in which it was stated "he had a very
fertile imagination, and a remarkable faculty of intuition, and
professed to be divinely inspired," and that he died in 1624. Since
then I have found another sketch of his life which says that "owing to
the fantastic terminology he thought fit to adopt, h