View Related
Conclusion of the Sussex Cottage Story
Nan the old servant tells the Lady that she does not have to stay stuck in Limbo, but can move on, as she did, after remaining earthbound for so long. But her former Mistress, although able to see and talk with her servant, can not yet see her son, who is standing in the corner of the room in the cottage. Nan says that she must think differently about her son, who now is no longer retarded.
Lady - My son? That poor fool?
Nan - 'E ain't a poor fool, Madam. That Boy's an angel. He's beautiful an' he loves you.
Lady - Loves me? After...
Nan - He does, Madam, an' he wants to 'elp you, to take you out of...of...
Lady - Of Hell? My son does? How can you know this?
Nan - Because I see him, Madam. I see 'im many times, an' he told me so.
Lady - You have seen my son?
Nan - I have.
Lady - And is he...?
Nan - I tell you, 'e's an angel, an' right as you an' me.
Lady - My demented son "right"? Is it possible?
Nan - See for yourself, Madam. He's 'ere. Your son's 'ere. He's 'ere. now. (She points in his direction. The Mistress turns and stared at the direction in which her maidservant pointed. For some minutes she gazed, terrified.)
Lady - Here? Here...now? That's my son? But that is an angel, an angel of Light.
With an overwhelming expression of love and compassion on his face, the Boy cried out "Mother!" He stretched out his hands, and light enveloped them both, as the Lady gazed at him in awe and remorse. There was absolute silence and stillness, and power filled the cottage room, the power of the Spirit. Slowly, the woman slipped to her knees before the light bearer who had been her earthly son, despised and rejected. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands, in the fervour of the first prayer she had ever purposefully uttered. She recited the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father...." by the end of which she was weeping openly.
The room was so still it seemed filled with a translucent light. The Boy stepped forward and took the clasped hands between his own, as the old servant with a loving gesture, gently touched the bowed shulders. Then she moved to the door and somehow she was gone. Helen, who was watching all this, now closed her eyes, feeling and living herself the Lady's agony of repentance. She found herself reciting her own version of the twenty-third Psalm, "The Lord is {her}Shepherd, Therefore shall (she) lack nothing...He restoreth her soul..." When she had finished and opened her eyes, she found the room empty. Her visitors from beyond death had gone. The cottage felt strangely empty.
The next day, the Brother of Light returned, dressed as a Franciscan Friar, and spoke to Helen.
Friar - My friend. You have witnessed the miracle of the power of Love, the cleansing and purging of the lower emotions by the force which is the creative power by which and in which we are all One.
But you have been witness to much more, and this we wish you to stress in your recordings, for it is of great moment and may bring much understanding to those who read with the "open eye". Heaven and hell are states of consciousness here as much as they are on your earthly planet; and each entity, after he (or she) has passed through the experience of death of the physical body, brings with him here that state of consciousness which he had attained for himself whilst in incarnation in matter and here he will dwell in that consciousness for as long as such level persists.
However, evolution is still a law here, as it is in your world. The soul is continually evolving. In your material, limited consciousness, evolution proceeds by the creating thought-forms sometimes for upliftment of the individual or the race, sometimes for the recording of beauty, sometimes for the development of compassion for one's fellows; but, sometimes, alas, force is given to forms of destruction by employing the negative use of emotions. Thought brings energy, which builds form. Evolution uses the from, works for it, lives in it, and manifests through it until its precepts are established. Then the form must be broken. This is essential, for its service is finished, and a new form has to be evolved. "Break down and rebuild" has ever been a law in evolution, as you will realise as you look back and search the history records of your planet. Break the worn-out form to create the new.
In this drama, you have been shown how two entities after their souls had left their physical bodies, remained closed in the thought-forms they had created. And for as long as they persisted in holding to these forms of thought, so were they aliens to the new state of consciousness required for true living HERE; and thus they were unable to progess onward.
Witness your "lodger" in your cottage, a poor soul completely shut away in materialism, and even that materialism only of the lowest aspiration to receive the "crumbs" from the rich woman's table. She was a creature eager only for physical well-being which her life had denied her, and she had spoilt the precious gift of thought in envying and hating the Mistress she served. Whether this slavery was karmic in her case, is beyond the point; definite energy spent in envy and hatred held her prisoner and chained her to the very person she was forced to serve.
After the death of her body in old age, the form she had created still clung so close about her soul that she continued to dwell in it, shut away from everything but her own limited imagination. The pathetic tumble-down cottage, as it then was (now modernised and "gentrified"), was all she knew, or WANTED TO KNOW. And this level of aspiration had persisted for many of your earth years.
Yet it was essential to break that form and release her, that she might learn a new state of awareness and take her first tentative steps into this new world to which she had been introduced by the disintegration of the physical form which housed her soul. So limited, we knew, was her thought and experience, that "awakening" would be painful. Confidence and love, so necessary for her soul-health, must come to her through those she trusted...the Boy, her earthly father and her mother, and through converse with a stranger (yourself) who had developed the faculty of contact out of the three dimensions of time and space.
This indeed has now been accomplished, as you know, and a "lamb" who was lost now brought again to the Way.
In like manner, the Mistress had imprisoned herself by arrogance, hatred and cruelty, wasting the precious substance of mind to fashion a concrete form that imprisoned her soul. Here let me stress that the soul of this creature is fine and sensitive to beauty, ready to accept the divine as beauty. Yet, with this dark shadow of a shell she had created, she entered her new existence. She brought her hell with her, a hell so potent with evil that escape seemed impossible; and there she remained to wither in misery.
But love, in the soul of her son whom she had despised, sought to break the shell about her and after much endeavour he has succeeded. At last, this form of negation has been destroyed, as it needed to be, and the hurts will be dissolved by love. The entity can now enter this new thought-world, and create, by love, that beauty which still lives in her soul.
It is a moving story and, alas, so unnecessary and yet so often repeated, "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred in their bones," as your poet writes, has some meaning here, for the evil carries on until its form is smashed, whilst the good, often deeply ingrained, creates in itself a more glorious form.
If readers apprehend the lessons to be gathered from these examples of thought-form prisoners, this story will not have been in vain. Man is body, soul and spirit. Body, with all its selfish emotions, cannot exist here, where progress is carried on in the mind towards re-union with the soul. The time to shatter those illusions of earth-life, of separativeness, to overcome disharmony of thought and emotion, IS DURING THE SOJOURN ON THE PLANET EARTH, NOT AFTER THE TRANSITION to the Astral and Spiritual worlds brought about by what you call death.
So saying, the Friar vanished.
One afternoon late in May, 1973, Helen was aware of the Mistress again, standing quietly by the window, and beside her the son she had rejected on earth. "Somehow I felt an intruder, for such was the deep peace about them that my presence as a recorder was now unnecessary and entirely out of place. There would be no more to write. The story was done. The prisoner from the Shadows was free. All was in order, as it was meant to be. From now on, my visitors were to pass out of my life, except as memories and characters in a book. But as I stood bidding them God-speed in their progress into light, I was glad and thankful for all that had been accomplished, and for the glimpes I had been given of the working of love in the life beyond death. Slowly a ray of sunshine crept across the window, with a quiver in the beams, and as I watched, the figures faded into the light, and I was alone.
Although that is the end of the story of soul-rescue in the Sussex cottage, it is not the last we hear from Helen Greaves. Her friend Frances Banks had died six or seven years before the events in the cottage, and she had come back to tell of the soul rescue work SHE had witnessed and taken part in on the other side.
For the full account of the Sussex story, read "The Wheel of Eternity" by Helen Greaves. C.W. Daniel. 197
Post Article:
Submit Your Own Article