n of the realms
traversed by the spirit in its cyclic path from the invisible world to
this plane of existence and back again.

Nevertheless, the student is warned that the writer may have misunderstood
some of the teachings and that despite the greatest care he may have taken
a wrong view of that which he believes to have seen in the invisible world
where the possibilities of making a mistake are legion. Here in the world
which we view about us the forms are stable and do not easily change, but
in the world around us which is perceptible only by the spiritual sight,
we may say that there is in reality no form, but that all is life. At
least the forms are so changeable that the metamorphosis recounted in
fairy stories is discounted there to an amazing degree, and therefore we
have the surprising revelations of mediums and other untrained
clairvoyants who, though they may be perfectly honest, are deceived by
illusions of _form_ which is evanescent, because they are incapable of
viewing the _life_ that is the permanent basis of that form.

We must learn to see in this world. The new-born babe has no conception of
distance and will reach for things far, far beyond its grasp until it has
learned to gauge its capacity. A blind man who acquires the faculty of
sight, or has it restored by an operation, will at first be inclined to
close his eyes when moving from place to place, and declare that it is
easier to walk by feeling than by sight; that is because he has not
learned to use his newly acquired faculty. Similarly the man whose
spiritual vision has been newly opened requires to be trained, in fact he
is in much greater need thereof than the babe and the blind man already
mentioned. Denied that training he would be like a new-born babe placed in
a nursery where the walls are lined with mirrors of different convex and
concave curvatures, which would distort its own shape and the forms of its
attendants. If allowed to grow up in such surroundings and unable to see
the real shapes of itself and its nurses it would naturally believe that
it saw many different and distorted shapes where in reality the mirrors
were responsible for the illusion. Were the persons concerned in such an
experiment and the child taken out of the illusory surroundings, it would
be incapable of recognizing them until the matter had been properly
explained. There are similar dangers of illusion to those who have
developed spiritual sight, until they have