Dick's experience with Miss Manning (episode 17) did not put him off spiritualism. He had always been searching for some kind of belief system that he could truly get behind. Even in his earliest diaries, he expresses a wish to believe in a religion, but he is unable to believe in a god.
This journal entry from 1971 records his response to reading The Edge of the Etheric, by Arthur Findley, and it is typical of many of the journal entries in which he reflects on spiritual or religious matters. I sense that he really wants to believe it - he just wishes that there could be a more satisfactory means of communication.
July 4 1971
I have just finished reading a book on spiritualism called “On The Edge of the Etheric”. I must say it has made a deep impression on me, mainly because of the writer’s approach to the problem, which is much more scientific than that of anybody else whose writings on the subject I have read before, not that I have read much about it. It really is a most remarkable book and it appears to provide convincing proof of an afterlife, which on the whole, would appear to be a good deal more pleasant and beautiful than our life on this earth.
I never had any doubt that I would like to believe in such an afterlife and, indeed, I think we all would. This fact in itself makes me cautious of wishful thinking. The theory is that we all have an etherical body and mind which survives in an etherical world. The personality, or individuality as such, survives and is incorporated in an etherical body in almost every respect, although it is void of the deformation of age and any other physical handicaps acquired during the physical life. In some curious way, people in the etherical world seem to live in houses, to pick flowers in the garden and to go for walks in much the same way as we do. The main difference, I gather, is that they have finer vibrations than we do. Those who died childhood go to schools and grow to maturity.
All this information, which tallies well with all previous accounts I have ever read on the subject, is as usual obtained in the course of séances. But, unlike most of the others, he asks a lot of intelligent questions of his communicants from the other world. The information he receives is highly interesting but, as always, it is the means by which such information is received that tends to put one off. The séances themselves, the mediums who go into a trance, trumpets buzzing around the darkened room and all the messing about with ectoplasm. Why cannot there be a more decent and natural form of communication?
Nevertheless, this book is given me a great deal to think about. If this is, indeed, a true picture of the afterlife, I can think of no one who would fit into it more readily and more happily then Sorina.
Download a free copy of The Edge of the Etheric at ghostcircle.com - well worth a visit!!
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