To the majority of people on Earth the psychic or spiritual plane of existence is a puzzle. The result is that everything that lies beyond so-called death, that is, the process through which the physical body becomes a corpse, is a mystery. The way people relate to this is the cause of immeasurable sorrow and suffering and it would be a great help and consolation to people if they could finally learn to understand what the process that we call "death", actually is.

The dark clouds of sorrow are definitely at their blackest and most intense when death happens as a result of an accident, a killing or sudden illness, and where the person that departs is still comparatively young. Where death takes place as a result of old age it does not usually evoke nearly so much pain and sorrow, even though we of course also miss the old people we were fond of once they have departed. After all, in such a situation, the person who is about to die and the people who are going to lose that person are all more prepared for it. The person who is about to die has often come to the end of their days, as we say, and he or she is by now weak and frail from a purely physical point of view and harbours a more or less unspoken wish to be free from that state in which the body no longer functions properly and in which a great tiredness takes the place of the previous vital energy. The old person has no young or immature beings to look after and be concerned about. Many, in fact, probably most, of their best friends have departed, and because they no longer live in the younger beings' world from a purely mental point of view, but almost feel that they are guests among them, there will not be so much to break with in this kind of a departure. If for no other reason than their tiredness death assumes for many old people the quality of a liberation. Perhaps they also feel that they are a burden on the people around them, which they do not want to be, so that because of this they long for liberation. But because a colossal number of people die what we call an unnatural death, a premature death – not only when there are wars on the Earth, but also due to the steady increase in traffic and the large number of illnesses, strong spiritual ties are often brutally severed, and everyday contact with beings that we felt deeply connected to come to an abrupt halt because these beings' organisms have become corpses. That is the reason why the dark clouds of sorrow and loss hover over the Earth.

If we were to make a serious study of Nature in order to form a comprehensive view of its cycles and various stages of evolution, we would experience, in the cases where we are able to follow an evolution to its culmination or its completed outcome of creation, seeing these processes of Nature unfolding to be a joy, benefit and blessing to their surroundings. These processes of Nature, where an evolution reaches its culmination or its completed stage, do not result in a culmination of sorrow and suffering, but absolutely the opposite. You may perhaps ask, "Has this anything to do with the death of a human being?" It certainly does, considering that the life and death of human beings in this physical world is also a part of a process of Nature that has to do with cycles and evolution. And when one sees that the apparent final outcome of a human being's life is that this human being dies even in its early childhood or in the first blossoming of its youth causing sorrow and pain to its surroundings, this is directly contrary to the laws that apply in which we are generally able to see Nature's cycles and stages of evolution reaching their final outcome as a joy and a blessing for the surroundings. Purely theoretically or as a result of thinking, we have no logical basis whatsoever for accepting the state of sorrow as an end result or as something completed and final. The processes of Nature, which in reality are divine processes, point towards something complete or perfect, even though this takes place over a series of incomplete stages. And the completeness or perfection, the final result, has nothing to do with pain, sorrow or suffering. What can possibly be more natural than to realise that the state of suffering is merely a passing stage that has to make way for a stage of joy and blessing, as Nature's completion of the situation and the process advances?

When a living being, through the process that is mistakenly called death, separates itself from its physical body, which it can no longer use, this phenomenon is really a birth. It is a birth in precisely the same way that entering physical existence from conception and through the embryonic state in the womb is a birth. Whereas the latter process is a birth into the physical world, the former is a birth into the spiritual or psychic world. The reason that so many terrestrial human beings cannot understand this is because they are enveloped in a state of materialistic superstition. They believe that a being "comes into being" at birth. They believe that there is no other reality than the one they can perceive with their physical senses. They do not take into account the fact that the connection there can be for example between two physical human beings is not constantly physical in nature; one actually has to maintain that such a connection is primarily psychic or spiritual in character and also exists in periods in which the two physical beings do not have physical contact with each other. Are there not many examples of a mother suddenly becoming aware of the fact that her son, who is a long way away, is in danger? And one has been able to check later that the exact time the mother experienced this coincided with the son's experience of a dangerous situation in which he instinctively thought of his mother. It is called telepathy or thought transference, and there is much evidence that such a thing does take place even over long distances. But what if the son's dangerous situation results in his so-called death? Will he no longer be able to be in telepathic contact with his mother or to other living beings who are still physical with whom he has had contact based on love, friendship or common interest? The answer is that he definitely will. Just as the electricity still exists even though a lamp breaks, the living, thinking being (whose thought power incidentally is a form of electricity) also still exists even though its physical apparatus, its organism, has "broken". And it does not forget its friends and relatives even though it is now undergoing a birth process to another world that one cannot experience with physical senses. The being is not separated from its psyche even though it is separated from its physical body, and it does not suddenly get another kind of consciousness because it leaves the physical plane. If the intention was that the being should totally forget its friends and experiences from the physical plane on being born into the spiritual world, what would have been the use of these friends and these physical experiences? If the being really were to forget this existence, what would its consciousness then be made up of? The physical body was a tool, a bridge for the being's psyche over to physical matter, to the world of solid, liquid and gaseous substances. The physical body was itself made up of these substances, but it was an organ for contacting physical matter and absolutely nothing other than that. Through this body, the living being could contact physical nature, that is to say minerals, plants, animals and human beings all of which are, however, also in differing degrees of development, the contacting organs or "bridges" to the physical world of living psychic beings. Behind them all, behind the whole of Nature there exists something spiritual, something psychic, and if there did not, Nature would not appear as logically built up organs and organisms, as physical functions that fit together with each other and make up a whole, a logical structure that human beings can study and whose laws they can little by little discover and understand.

But with what do human beings study Nature? With what do they begin to understand its functions and laws? With what do they get to know each other and gradually understand and tolerate each other's behaviour? With their psyche, which is neither something physical nor, as is claimed by those enmeshed in the superstition of materialism, an effect of the physical-chemical processes in the organism. On the contrary, living beings keep the chemical and other processes in their organism going with their psyche, which by nature is ray-formed and electrical, and which is able to bring life to the physical organism, through which it can come onto the wavelength of the radiation emitted by other living organisms. The psychic forces are the primary ones while the physical processes are secondary. Therefore, one should actually not call any being at all a physical being, because all living beings are spiritual beings. One should differentiate – and one will do this in the future – between spiritual beings that are incarnated in physical material, and spiritual beings that are not.

Terrestrial human beings are, as mentioned earlier, not "physical beings" but spiritual beings that are for a time in possession of a physical body. This physical body is an organ of contact or a kind of bridge over to the physical plane. The difference between what we call a "deceased person" and a human being that is still in possession of its physical body is that the "deceased" is no longer, through its spirit or consciousness, able to experience the physical landscape with its solid, liquid and gaseous matter, whereas the incarnated human being usually experiences so many physical impressions that it is apt to forget that it is a spiritual being.

But why do feelings of loss and sorrow exist when the two beings still have a world of thoughts and feelings in common? Why is it that the one that has been left behind on the physical plane does not experience that the "deceased" person is still living and that they still have a sense of being together? There are many reasons for this, but it can happen that someone, either through a spiritualist medium or through their own experience without the help of a medium, can be permitted to experience that the one that has gone away is still living and is well, and they can get to know that he or she should not grieve but should instead send loving thoughts to the other party. It is certainly exceptional when this sort of thing happens and many people think it is something sinister and wrong. Either they think it is a trick, wishful thinking or suggestion, or they say that it is sinful to seek a connection with the dead. Unfortunately, in certain cases it can be a trick and wishful thinking and suggestion can also come into play. And the fact that it has become so widespread to think that it is wrong to seek a connection with the dead is not accidental either. This attitude has been, and to some extent still is, significant as a form of protection of the beings both on the physical and the psychic plane, which we shall discuss shortly. But at the same time it has to be emphasised absolutely that it is possible, and that there is not necessarily anything wrong, for a person who is grieving over the loss of someone who has departed, to make contact with that person through a medium here on the physical plane, and thereby achieve a more positive state of mind that will help him or her out of the negativity caused by the sorrow and the feelings of loss. But it is not a form of contact one should turn into a habitual correspondence. That would create a constraint and dependency that is neither natural nor right.

When a human being dies it is separated from its physical body, but not from its psyche. It lives in its world of thought, which is not suddenly changed just because the human being leaves the physical plane. When it lived here it expressed its thoughts to other human beings through talking and writing, which are both physical and for which a physical body is needed. But just as a physically incarnated human being can dream that it is talking or writing (which means that in a certain way it can think it), the discarnated being can, because of its deep-rooted thought patterns, also still think that it is talking and writing, but in so doing it does not connect with human beings on the physical plane. Its "writing" and "speech" are thought pictures, because in the psychic or spiritual world matter obeys and forms itself according to will and thought. One of the first things that an artist for example has to learn on the spiritual plane is that he does not need to imagine brushes, canvasses and tubes of colour, he only needs to think of the pictures he wants to paint and there they are, as large as life in front of him in spiritual or ray-formed matter. The same applies to speech and writing, which in the history of mankind are even older forms of expression than painting and therefore even more ingrained in habit for all human beings. I have said that what we call "death" has to be treated as a birth into the spiritual plane. And one can say that, in just the same way as the embryonic stage in the mother's womb before birth into the physical plane is an isolated and enclosed state of preparation for life in the physical world, so is also the intermediate state, or the first state the terrestrial human goes through after having left its physical body, an "enclosed", preparatory or embryonic state before the being is ready to "be born" into the life of the spiritual worlds, where it has many wonderful experiences before it is once more born onto the physical plane in order to go on in its evolution. But what is the being "enclosed within" during the intermediate or embryonic psychic state? It is enclosed within its physical habitual consciousness, which of course is not physical in the sense that it is made up of physical matter, but in that it is made up of thought pictures that are directly derived from experiences in the physical world. These thought pictures are effects of experiences both "good" and "evil", both pleasant and unpleasant, and they naturally bear the stamp of the evolutionary step that this particular being's physical sensory apparatus possessed and the brain capacity that it had. So the "deceased" being lives in a thought world that is strongly physical in character and which is based on habits of thought and feeling that characterised the being's physical existence.

Because this psychic embryonic being's thought pictures bear so strongly the stamp of its recently concluded physical incarnation, it is natural for it still to be, with its thoughts, on the same wavelength as the beings it has known in its physical existence. But it can neither talk nor write to them. So how is a contact possible? As previously mentioned, there are two possibilities; the first is the contact which is made through a physical medium and the second one is a direct spiritual connection between the discarnated and the incarnated being. The first possibility we can refer to as "the half-psychic correspondence" and the second one, "the completely psychic correspondence". The reason I call the correspondence through a medium "half-psychic" is because it is also half-physical. In this case a corresponding intermediary is needed, namely the physical medium. The medium is a kind of psychic interpreter because the discarnated, that is the psychic being's thoughts, are transformed into sound or speech with the help of the medium's organism. In by far the majority of cases not only a physical, but also a psychic medium or intermediary will be necessary, that is to say a spiritual being that is accustomed to corresponding with a physical medium which the recently "deceased" person is not. It goes without saying that a correspondence that has to pass through two – in certain cases even more – intermediaries and be dependent on the abilities and development of these intermediaries, cannot be a perfect one. But then it is not the half-psychic correspondence that is the goal concerning a greater contact between the physical and the psychic world. It has played a significant role, especially in the past, but it is now strongly in decline. On the other hand, the completely psychic contact, direct telepathy or thought transference, is a natural stage in the further evolution of the whole of mankind. It will appear gradually as each individual gains the necessary faculty to concentrate thought and – especially – gains the moral capacity that will cause it to not misuse its faculty to concentrate thought and its telepathy. It is not life's intention that the beings on the physical plane should go on living in superstition – not in a naive religious and sectarian superstition nor in a just as naive and sectarian materialistic superstition either. It is not the intention that they should go on living in a kind of isolation, believing that the psychic or spiritual world does not exist, or naively believing that it is an eternal hell or paradise that takes in respectively lost sinners for eternal suffering or saved believers for eternal salvation. Both these views are temporary "sour stages" in mankind's evolution towards spiritual "ripeness" or maturity. Evolution takes place, however, through the individual human being taking a step forward. And what can the individual do that would be beneficial to itself and others in order to promote the correspondence between the psychic and the physical plane?

First and foremost it is important that the individual human being begins to understand and see quite naturally that it is primarily a spiritual being and the same holds for all other living beings. Next, it is extremely important that one realises what an immeasurable strength and power thought in itself is. One is so used to the idea that thought means nothing unless it is through speech or writing. One is not used to the idea that thought by concentration alone, and quite without the spoken or written word, can be transmitted to another being. There are, however, a good many examples of this, as previously mentioned, and more will appear once people, especially the researchers, are on the look out for it. But what do the examples that we already have demonstrate? They demonstrate that it is especially in dangerous situations that people can concentrate their thoughts strongly enough for them to be directly received by another person to whom they are connected with a strong spiritual bond. And it appears to be independent of distance. If a mother suddenly senses or sees in her mind's eye, whether it is in a dream or an awake state, that her son who lives in America is in grave danger, it is because the son in the dangerous situation has thought so strongly about his mother, that this concentration of thought just like radio waves comes into contact with the mother's "radio receiver", which because of her love for her son is highly receptive. But if one is able to do something in a dangerous situation, where the faculty to concentrate is strengthened, it clearly shows that the faculty exists, but is only used in exceptional circumstances because of lack of training. It is also quite common for a person in a dangerous situation - when they are, for example, being pursued or just feeling that they are being pursued – to be able to run much faster than they usually can, or perhaps also to be able to jump over an obstacle that in everyday circumstances they would not be able to push themselves to do. But if they feel that it is necessary and use enough concentration on it, it is nevertheless possible. The faculty is there. So it will also be possible with sufficient training and concentration to develop one's faculty to think so strongly that the thought will be able to be transmitted directly to the consciousness of the person one is thinking about, irrespective of distance, and also irrespective of whether the person one is thinking about is on the spiritual or the physical plane.

But would it be a good thing for it to be commonplace for people to possess the sort of faculty to concentrate that enabled them to transmit their thoughts to other living beings in the physical world or on the spiritual plane? No, not on terrestrial human beings' present step of moral evolution. In the first place there would be quite a few people who would think of exploiting this faculty to gain power over others, which would be black magic. And because that would sooner or later turn back on themselves, they would thereby create a terrible fate for themselves. Secondly, the people who have left the physical plane would be bound for a longer period of time to the intermediate or embryonic state they are in immediately after death, because of all the egoistic thoughts of sorrow and loss that would stream towards them from the surviving relatives and friends, so that out of compassion they would stay near to the physical beings and not have the heart to leave them. They would be "ghosts" of a sort, bound to the physical plane by the wishes of their relatives and friends, until with their own thoughts they freed themselves; so there would actually be a kind of war between physical and psychic beings. And, thirdly, all people who die are certainly not loving and good. In fact, many die in a state of hatred, jealousy, bitterness and vindictiveness. Just think if these spirits were able to inflict their negative concentrated thinking onto unsuspecting people and take revenge on them or make them into tools for their hateful thoughts. Something like this can take place, but it is not something that you need to be afraid of, because such primitive beings' magic is extremely limited, especially if you always try to be "master in your own house", that is to say master of your thoughts and feelings, and if you do feel tired, use a small amount of energy to pray for help and protection against negative thoughts. Then no negatively-minded being, neither on the physical nor on the spiritual plane can gain power over you through concentrating their thought.

How can a human being attempt to unite with another being through concentrating its thoughts, without it being connected with some form of negativity? By using the same method as the one it is natural to use in praying to the Godhead. And when it is a matter of connecting with beings on the psychic plane, the physically incarnated human beings are much more able to correspond with them at night when they are asleep. At that time they are free from all the physical impressions that can distract the concentrated thinking about the "deceased" person, and they are therefore also at that time more receptive to the concentration of thought of these beings. One can perhaps remember in the morning that one has "dreamt" about one or more people who have departed, but one has in reality been with them in the world of thought that one has in common. And one can quite easily also have been with them even though one cannot remember anything in the morning. Every single loving thought that is sent from one being to another, irrespective of where the two beings are, will enter the other being's aura, and when the being comes onto the same wavelength as the concentration of thought that has been transmitted, it will smoothly pass into the being's day-conscious experience. And the thinking about another being will always be strengthened if it is connected with a concentration of thought on the Godhead.