that point where we may even feel that we are
listening to, or having divulged to us, some of what may be called the
very thoughts of the Great Reality?

VIEW FIVE

THE PHYSICAL FILM

We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as
perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts
based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows;
they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be
likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like
a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality. We thus seemed to
grasp that all phenomena, including our Physical Egos, are but the
shadows or outline of the Reality, as depicted on our limited plane of
consciousness; but these phenomena, having Motion for their basis, are
none the less real to us under our present outlook, limited as it is
by conditioning in Time and Space, and we have to deal with them as
realities in our everyday life. I want to make this distinction clear
in the present View.

Those of us who were youngsters in the 'sixties, and were fortunate
enough to be taken to that land of wonders for children, the London
Polytechnic, will remember seeing what were called Professor Pepper's
Ghosts. By means of a large sheet of glass on the stage, the
_reflection_ of a human being (otherwise invisible), which we will
call the "_unreal_," was, by the audience, seen walking alongside the
people on the stage, and it was impossible to say which was the real
and which the unreal. When the unreal was made to appear further back
on the stage, it was apparently seen through the real figures and they
appeared as ghosts, for they were seen to be transparent. If now we
fix, perpendicularly on a table, a small pane of glass, and place,
say, an orange in front and another orange behind it, we can arrange
so that an observer, looking through the glass, sees two oranges
alongside each other, one being the real and the other the unreal,
and, with proper lighting and dark background, it is impossible to
determine which is which, as they are both apparently real oranges. We
will call the real, A, and the unreal, B; we now also introduce a
human hand on both sides of the glass, and again we have apparently
two real hands close to the oranges; if the real hand is now seen to
try to touch the B orange, it passes through it, but it can take up
the A; and the same result is seen when the unreal hand tr