Seed
has begun to grow because we have watered it.

If the natural man were asked, "What is life? what is it to live?" he
would reply, "It is to eat, drink, laugh, love, and have pleasure or
pain: to hear, see, touch, taste and smell, and to be conscious that I
do all these things." Yet this consciousness is but a tiny speck of
consciousness, and some mysterious voice within the deeply-thinking
man tells him that this is so. But how uncover a further
consciousness? This is the secret of the soul.

To pass from one form of consciousness to another--this is to
increase life fifty, a hundred, a thousand times according to the
degrees of consciousness we can attain. These degrees would seem
to be irrevocably limited because of the mechanical actions of heart
and breathing, which automatic actions become suspended or
seriously interfered with in very high states of consciousness. When
first these very great expansions of consciousness take place, the
creature is under strong conviction that the soul has left the
body--that it has gone upon some mysterious journey--this because of
several reasons. The first is because of a certain persistent sound of
rushing; the second is because of the sense of living at tremendous
speed, in a manner previously altogether unknown and totally
undreamed of, in which the senses of the body have no concern
whatever and are completely closed down; thirdly, on returning
from this "journey" we are not immediately able to exact obedience
from the body, which remains inert and stiffly cold and suffers
distress with too slow breathing. But reason demands, "How is it
possible that the soul should leave the body and the body not die?
and also we perceive this, that, though the consciousness is
projected to an infinite distance, or includes that infinite distance
within itself, it yet remains aware of the existence of the body,
though very dimly."

The method employed, then, for administering these experiences to
the soul and the creature is not by means of drawing the soul out of
the body, but by a withdrawal of the condition of insulation from
Divine Life or great magnetic emanation, in which insulation all
creatures have their normal existence, living in a condition which
may be termed a state of total Unawareness. By Will of God this
condition of insulation is removed, the soul enters Connection and
becomes instantly and vividly aware of Spiritual Life and of that
which Is, at an infinite dista