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the companions of God in their journey toward ecstatic and conscious union with one another and all that is. It is the difference between being a plant and being Rembrandt. The plant has a certain fragment of self-awareness, but Rembrandt is vastly complex, a being rich with fully realized talents and self-awareness that makes him a worthy companion in higher form.
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    Rembrandt was a saint?
    Rembrandt was conscious. As far as his being a saint is concerned, though—forget it. Radiant being and sainthood are not the same thing, believe me.
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    So he persisted as a radiant being? Where is he now?
    That’s his business.
    What about those who don’t acquire this ethereal independence? After death you cannot be blind and therefore you cannot change. There, you wait.
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    Wait for what?
    To understand that, you must first understand that the living and the dead share the same world. Your dead are not off somewhere in space. Their lives and beings are intertwined with yours. They see all that passes here, but can only affect it indirectly, if they can make themselves heard in the minds of the living. However, you the living are changing now. As this change proceeds, you are better and better able to feel the presence of your dead. You will find your dead in the immediate surroundings of their lives, for the most part, clinging to what they can of their memories, attempting to preserve their selves despite the magnetic attraction of what would envelop them.
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    So the light is not our friend?
    The light is the fate of sleeping man. Awakened man makes his own light, as part of the radiant choir who sing forever the song of God, which is the word.
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    But what about people from the distant past? Surely they don’t linger here.
    There is no other place for you to linger. If you are not an independent being after death, you remain engaged in the life of the earth, awaiting your chance to recur and increase your being. Lives in elemental form change the patterns of the electrons that form the soul and intensify their spin. The great dead have lived lives consciously devoted to the evolution and growth of the radiant body. But most of you, in the state of death, bear only fragmentary bits of what you were in life. Simple patterns, weak spin, no clear form to the radiant body and no ability to maintain it. You are subject to a process of recurrence so powerful that there are none from the distant past, except the radiant.
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    How do we access past lives?
    All may remember all. You do not realize what you are.
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    And what of death itself? What should we expect?
    A death is as unique as a face. You die into your expectations. But you generally survive them.
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    Somebody who doesn’t believe in the soul?
    They make a great discovery.
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    So some become radiant bodies, some linger and try again, and some enter the memory of God? Who enters the memory of God? Those who have no further potential and have not grown into anything. But recall that their experience does not go anywhere. It dies with the elemental body because it is insufficiently potent to survive. What survives is generally nothing but a tiny essence, a spark that would be barely recognizable as the person who had previously existed.
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    What is essence?
    Taste. The way a certain specific being tastes. Essence is foundation.
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    So the bad essences go back to God. God gets the dregs? Every life is an experiment. Not all succeed. But most do, to enough of a degree that the being-body will remain coherent, clinging to the earth in the region of its memories. When a body is created that fits its essential attachments, it will be drawn to that body by a magnetism that it cannot resist. Birth to this world is death to the other, and vice versa. The recurrence is a great breathing.
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    What do these souls do while waiting?
    They experience peace, some of them, only coming slowly into an awareness of what they need to continue on.