No, the terrestrial world is this. See, the world does not cease to exist at the point where our senses cease to register it. We think because I can’t touch him or hear him or see him, well then, he has ceased to exist. It’s like passing through a city. When I pass through the city, I think it ceases to exist because I’ve gone beyond it. No, the city remains for others to occupy it or to pass through it. And all of these are states, infinite states of consciousness through which man passes. And a state does not cease to exist because the man who occupied it has departed from it. So the whole vast world is real, solidly real. I go into these worlds and they are real, they’re solid. You are not made of gossamer and you grow old there too and die there, to find yourself restored and continuing the journey, maturing and dying and continuing the journey. Not being born again through the womb of a woman, no. I do not get that at all. I can’t go along with that, because it’s not my experience. I just find them simply restored. My mother, the day she died, the very hour she died, appeared to me and she’s this beautiful woman twenty years old, unusually pretty, blonde, blue-eyed, brushing her hair…just altogether lovely. She couldn’t be sweeter and lovelier. Mother died…she was only sixty-one but she looked ninety…she was so, well, painfully thin and in such pain for two years before she died. But the very moment that she died I saw her, and I sat down and wrote her…and that was the hour that she was gone. No such thing as going to any little cemetery…that’s all big business. Cemetery, nothing! Someone conceived that idea to make money and playing upon the minds of people. So, who goes to any cemetery…outside of the stockholders! I’m told that if anyone had the foresight and you bought a nice block of stock in Forest Lawn, you could sit back and just clip coupons today. A friend of mine used to say to me the first time he took me over—he departed by the way about the 11th of November he made his departure—when he first came out here he wanted to show me the place. Why he would take me to Forest Lawn to show me things? But he took me to Forest Lawn. He was a very humorous, wonderful fellow and he pointed out all the places and all the little actors who were buried here, and the wise men and the so-and-so there. Then he said quite casually, “Course the lots on the top of the hill are more expensive because the view is more beautiful when you come out at night, much more expensive up there.” Well, that impressed me. That is big business. I’m not saying that if you want to do it, don’t do it, no, do what you want to do. If you want a $10,000 funeral, have it. My friend, John Van Bruton, we were dining together just about three weeks before he died. And then his friends who inherited his estate had to take care of the body, so they went over to the place to pick out the coffin. Well, I could hardly believe my ears when my friend told me the story. I said, “You’re lying!” He said, “No, I’m not lying…this is exactly what I heard.” He turns to his friend Dick, “Ask Dick if this did not take place.” This is his friend, Carter Lodge, who was his right hand through all the years that he was in this country. “Well, as you know he left a fortune, and so they knew he had this fortune so they wanted to get as much as they could out of the estate to bury him. They showed these coffins and they said, ‘See this, it’s all springs to cushion the body.’ Well, Carter said he could almost feel John behind him stamping as if ‘You dare do that, I’ll haunt you!’ Then I thought that was the limit of one’s credibility. That was not it. They had a mirror on the top of the coffin so when it was closed he could see himself. Believe it or not!” I said, “Now you’re lying.” He said, “No I’m not lying…this is exactly what I heard.” They tried to get something like $15,000 out of Carter, and Carter came out with, I think, a pine box. Then he and Dick took all the money that John left, got it very well invested, and now they’re thoroughly enjoying life, traveling all over the world, exactly what John would want them to do. But of all the nonsense in the world, a mirror! Well, they’ll soon have other things in them, like a pipe, well stuffed for him to smoke. Well, you catch some lovely lady who has just lost her husband and that was the pillar; or reverse it, a man who has lost his wife, who he depends on for everything that happens in his world, and he’s a soft touch. These ghouls come in, they don’t wait, not twenty-four hours because twenty four hours then you can think…but right away they get you. First thing they ask you, “Are you insured? Well, how much? You tell me first how much you’re insured for before I name the price of the coffin, of the funeral.” All you need to say, “No, I’m not insured.” “I’m awfully sorry,” and then they fall this way. I don’t want to be ghoulish about it, but I mean this is stupid. We’re living in a fabulous world and you don’t die. You’re restored to life instantly, and you’re renewed, you’re new. You don’t pick it up at ninety years and go on ninety, you’re back to twenty. Why, I do not know, but that’s the age. When my friend told me in her letter yesterday, that here she takes this little child, he was five years old, and as she’s suddenly pointing out to her lover, who she always sees in her dream, that this place I lived, this place I lived, this place I lived. Then suddenly the five-year-old boy is an infant. Then she realizes that she, herself, is just out of her teens, bringing confirmation from the depths of her soul of what I’ve been telling you. And then she wakes. If man could only be told that, he wouldn’t be afraid of dying, wouldn’t be afraid of departing, because you don’t die anyway. As you’re told in the very beginning of the story in Genesis, “Did God tell you that you would die?” asked the serpent and she replied, “Yes. The day I eat of this tree I will die.” The serpent said, “God knows you will not surely die, but you will become like the gods, knowing good and evil” . Now read, “And God said, ‘What will we do with man, for he has become like us, knowing good and evil’” . So we entered this world having partaken of the knowledge of good and evil. We enter a world where we still live in the world of good and evil. Which, may I tell you, is a blessing, for we could be forever an innocent babe knowing neither good nor evil and be automatons. So we come into a world to know good and evil and become as the gods, for that’s what they know. Then after much suffering, but much suffering, the soil is prepared and the word is engrafted. After that that’s all that matters. After the word is engrafted, what do you do? This kind of pregnancy is never brought about in the form of miscarriage, never! This is a divine pregnancy; there is no miscarriage in that. When that is engrafted it will grow, and in God’s own good time, it erupts. No one knows that moment…it comes like a thief in the night. You don’t even know you’re carrying the child…haven’t the slightest idea that you’re pregnant. All of a sudden, an explosion and the whole drama unfolds before you and you are the central figure, the star in the drama.397 ¶46