Charles Adam Simpson was a sensitive who channelled Dr. Lascelles. This book is a selection of some talks given in London during and after World War II. There is an unapologetic emphasis on Christianity. What is written here is worthy of our attention.
Introduction
A Way of Life in two Worlds cover
A “homily” is a usually short talk on a religious or moral topic. The ones in this book have the advantage of two points of view: this side of life, and the “other” side after death. Because the messages are from a discarnate spirit through a medium, one could be forgiven for dismissing it all as a ‘load of rubbish’.
But it is not rubbish at all: the words carry an authority about them which has been confirmed by other books about similar matters, especially what happens after we die.
I ask that you have the patience to read all the passages cited here, as you cannot but be altered by what is written.
Divine Love
”Fear is the greatest enemy the World has today. Fear engenders distrust. Distrust brings war, economic war and war of arms. Fear makes men try to overcome their neighbours. Fear as a bedfellow brings hopeless nights. Fear in the individual, fear of the loss of material wealth, fear of losing the job next week and having one’s family stranded, fear of death for oneself and for the loved ones—fear, fear, fear.
“That Divine Love casteth out fear. Through the power of that Divine Love the nations will be brought nearer to each other, distrust will be lifted and trust will take its place, and there will be no war. Instead of people walking the street of this big city showing down-cast faces, and (as we see) trembling auras with the fear mark in the mental aura, we would see a bright, happy, loving race if once that Divine Love that casteth out fear were set in motion.”
Love Your Neighbour
“If you had power to read the Akashic records of several of your past incarnations, no doubts you would suddenly see that this person you met just casually and liked, and to whom you unburdened your soul, and who responded to your feelings, has been part of your family before. He belongs to your group. People are divided into groups. You may fail to meet some of the people of your group in an incarnation but, taking your incarnations as a whole from the beginning, you are sooner or later brought into contact with these members of your group.”
Fear, Hope and Faith
“There is a law that you cannot get anything in this world, spiritual or material, without effort. Before you can have help from God’s Angel Kingdom you must obey the law of Asking and Receiving. If God left all the responsibility to the Angels and let man drift along in a kind of Utopia without making any effort of himself, He would be violating His own Law…”
Prayer
“Someone to pray to. Oh, I know the critics will say: ‘Oh well, that is only imagination’. So it is. The critic finishes there, but I go further. I say that imagination is a creative force and that this force draws either from evil or from good. The critic smiles when he mentions the word imagination, yet his own criticism is partly imagination. Every form of genius is imaginative and can be used for the good of the world. How much more then can the imagination that makes Christ real to you bring His aid, His love, and opens your lips to truly pray?”
What Happens When You Pray
“Let us return to our Prayer Circles, to the two or three who are gathered there and praying in His Name. It is not to say that there is an influx of Christ into the particular place where they are praying, but there is an outflux of the things of the Earth when prayers are said. It takes some little time to reach the full effect of that change. At first there is only a dim light to be seen, but as The Lord’s Prayer proceeds, the light grows clearer and clearer, the words seem to drive out whatever is miserable, or depressing, or evil, so that by the time The Lord’s Prayer is finished you have pure Christ in the Circle. There is a reason for that: upon The Lord’s Prayer, the Prayer of Approach, follows the Prayer of Asking in His Name. Christ has told you that if you ask in His Name, that for which you ask will be added unto you.”
The Holy Communion
“What happens in front of the Altar at the time of Communion? Two Angels stand, one on either side of the Altar, and according to Christ’s promise they pour the spiritual power through the priest. As he lays his hands on the wine and on the bread they are changed. The priest is used for one purpose only—to lower the very high vibration into one that can be absorbed by the wine and the bread.”
Faith
“So I can truly say that people today have very little belief and less faith. You cannot love Christ through the intermediary of another, be it priest or clergyman; and the Christ Who is represented by authority, by a Church built on temporal power, is rather a cold Christ. You cannot get into your heart to really love a Christ like that—a Christ Who is not, as it were, walking by your side, a Christ Whom you can only reach through curates, clergymen, deacons and bishops. The further you go, the more you are chilled.”
“The religion of the future therefore will be a co-operation between the Earth and the planes above the Earth, and it is your prayers that bring those in Heaven to your side. Each religion has its own band in Heaven, but they co-operate far more than the different religions on Earth, I can assure you. Many times we have had Buddhists working in our band, also Brahmins and Mohammedans. We do not say: ‘You must become a Christian before you can help here’. What we say is: ‘We are glad of your help, join your band with ours’. And they come.”
Proof
“Now, let us consider the evidence of the Gospels. A man once said to me: ‘Doctor, how can I believe in the Gospels? Some events are recorded in some of them and not in others, and they are often even contradictory’. I answered: ‘The very fact that they are contradictory should be circumstantial evidence that Christ lived on Earth’. He could not see that. But does it not stand to reason that if the Gospels had been written as a story without any facts underlying it, then one chapter or one part of the book would not differ from the rest on any important event? Then again, supposing it had been a book written for propaganda purposes by a certain sect, would they not have made it a tale of success and not of failure?”
The Work of the Guides
“Let us begin with the newly-dead. Very often the first question one of them will ask is, ‘How can I help those I left on the Earth?’ Well, there are many ways in which they can help. Being newly dead they can still see Earthly conditions; they are heavier, so find it easy, for the first ten or fifteen years, to visit the Earth without ‘cloaking’. And love gives them extra power for help. That is why so many people who pray have their loved ones near them keeping constant watch and anxious to answer their prayers.”
The Angel Kingdom
“Then there are Angels whom I would call Earth Controllers. They have never been in the flesh. They encircle the globe wherever there are human beings; they control the trees, the flowers and all the life that grows on Earth. They control the vast number of nature spirits. You will smile when I tell you they protect the fairies. Yes, there are fairies. There is not a flower that grows without ‘little people’ to look after it, and the ‘little people’ are looked after by the Earth Controllers. These Angels also look after the animal kingdom. They arrange for loved animals to live on after death. If your dog dies and you forget him, he really dies, but if you remember and love him he lives on and you have him with you after death. Dogs, horses, cats, birds, all survive if they have been loved on the Earth. I know an old lady who walks about with a budgerigar on her finger and five cats in her wake. If you hurt an animal you hurt its Angel; an unkind act to a dumb animal is a great sin and has to be paid for quickly. These Angels come very close to the Earth. We have a saying that the Angels of the Earth hover with the butterflies.”
The Process of Incarnation
“After death you pass through the Hall of Initiation. You are left alone there, and you are very glad that you are alone—at least I was—and all your past life is shown to you on a screen, you see it, as it were, in a moving picture. You are not there for any length of time but you see the whole of your life, the good and the bad, pass by. The things you did not think were good sometimes happen to be the good ones, and the things that you thought were very good indeed may happen to be the bad ones, and you get rather a shock. You may find that what you thought were your virtues really are vices and what you thought were vices really are virtues. You may not find very much on the good side of the line and a lot on the bad. You come out of the Hall of Initiation feeling very humble indeed.”
A Glimpse of Heaven
“Well, we have looked at these mountains and hills and fields and yet you have seen so little—so very little. But there is a little home, not so far from the Western field, and it is mine. Yes, and it has got a garden. And there are a lot of flowers in that garden. Some of you would be surprised if you saw them. You would see little labels on some of them. And you would say, ‘Good gracious, but I wrote that “to dear Doctor with my love”’. I have kept the flowers and I have kept the labels. It is a very unpretentious kind of home. I always admired it. On Earth, it was a little cottage that my father’s gardener lived in. It has a long sloping thatched roof, and the rooms are very small. There are some pictures, and one or two little things that I loved on Earth. Some of them have been broken in the material World, but they are still here with me.
“And just behind the little house is a little hummock of the green sward, as though I had taken it from the still waters. And there sometimes when my day is done and I want to refresh my etheric, for my soul is tired, I rest there, hand in hand with my beloved.”
How the Dead Communicate with Each Other
“Now this picture-writing is a kind of indentation on the ether. We can send pictures through the ether and this will not seem strange to you who are familiar with television. There is another method of communication which is very difficult to explain. A message is sent and the receiver sees and hears the despatcher—it is transmitted with the very act and speech of the sender. A message from on high, say from the Seventh Sphere, is blinding to look at, it is like looking into the sun, and only gradually is it possible to discern the form of the Angel within it and to hear him speak. If a message is sent back the Angel has to throw a certain light upon it otherwise he is unable to read it, it is in a fog to him.”
Colour
“All living beings are more or less affected by the vibrations of the heavenly bodies. Astrology is often ridiculed, and most so-called astrology should be regarded with scepticism. Yet a genuine astrologer can map out destiny because he knows the effect on the mental aura of the vibrations emanating from the planets, the stars and the moon.”
Colour and Spiritual Development
“I know there are times when you grow impatient with spiritual exercises and tire of them. There are no visible results at first and you find it difficult to persevere. There is so much to do in your daily life that you have little time to spare for such things. But the effect of fifteen minutes or half an hour spent in true spiritual exercise can be felt for a long time, and if practiced over a longer period it would last perhaps for the rest of your life. You would be so happy with your results that you would never willingly give them up. All spiritual exercises are associated with colour.”
Meditation
“Now suppose people want to know how to meditate. How do they set about it? Meditation is one of the hardest things to practise. I remember one man told me that he had been practising it for thirty years, yet he was only just beginning to learn. But there are simple ways in which people can meditate, and as they go on they can penetrate more and more deeply into the matter on which they are meditating. I will give you an instance. Some of my people wanted to know if they could learn to see inside things, clairvoyantly. ‘Yes, you can, anybody can’, I answered. Take a pod of peas and meditate on it, and it will not be long before you can count the peas inside it, because you will be able to see them. So meditation gives inward sight.”
What Meditation will Bring You
“Let us ponder this for a moment. How will meditating on The Lord affect your life? It will affect it in this way: it will make you happier. It must, because by meditating and bringing that greater understanding into your life you will in time find that you are flooded with Divine Love. Now that must make you happy. When you go out into the fields or into the garden with that glow of Divine Love in you, these fields or that garden will become different. You will see beauties you never dreamt were there, for the power of understanding beauty is enhanced through the greater understanding of God. If you pluck a flower you have in your hands a thing of beauty that God has made for your enjoyment, and you will think: this flower has come from a seed, and if from a seed God can build so much beauty, then surely God can build beauty into my soul. He can and He will.”
The Power of Affirmations and the Development of the Subconscious
“Life after death is a simplification of life on Earth, so you understand, do you not, that it must be an entirely new kind of life. It is a continuation of your many former lives in the Beyond. But since you do not die and become perfect, you still have those faults of yours and those idiosyncrasies that stand in the way of full enjoyment and happiness. You have still some karma, built up in the past, to get rid of. You still have your own personality, and you still have that subconscious of yours that makes things so difficult for you, that has made you sick of body and mind. You still have memory which is more intense because the subconscious is uncovered. It no longer has to make the heavy passage through your conscious mind.
“So what do we learn from this? Well, I think we learn two things. First that there is no saying ‘When I am dead I will be able to put things right’. You will not. You have got to do it ‘here’ and ‘now’, it has got to be done in the flesh. And certainly the second lesson you learn is that you must not let yourself be controlled by your subconscious mind. You will have to educate it; it is there and it is hard to get at because it is a thing of habit. As you gain control over that subconscious you will get more in touch with the Spheres above because they are the realm of the subconscious. That stands to reason, does it not? You will have your eyes opened and your ears unstopped and you will begin to live in that fourth dimension which is interpenetration. You will develop other senses and that will give you hope and happiness.”
Spiritual Development and Affirmations
“Now I did say, did I not, that the ego is entirely separate from the body. If a person is hypnotised, what he really does under the influence of the hypnotist is to hand over his ego, and the hypnotist is then able to have control over it. If the hypnosis is very deep the person goes into a cataleptic state whereby the subconscious is further removed from the consciousness, or from the body. The body, having no subconscious near or closely associated with it, goes stiff as in death. The reason for this is that the motor nerves are for the time being severed from the body. I think that is clear proof that your body is not you.”
The Education of the Soul
“Thus all things that are of God on the Earth become transformed. It is as though you have been blind and your eyes are opened, as though you have been deaf and at last you can hear. And so, my friends, take notice of this: do not only just educate yourselves for worldly ends. Even if you are getting on in years, set about now to educate your soul and remember there are many teachers but there is one Teacher who is ‘your’ Teacher—Jesus Christ. Do you really know what His message means? His message means this, that you should educate your souls to love each other and to love God. That is all; but if your soul is not educated you are like a child who has not learnt his letters and so cannot read—your soul then cannot understand Christ and what His message really means.”
Christ Consciousness
“Now can you love a soul who lived two thousand years ago? Can you? With just a little and yet so important little that is told of His life on Earth in the Bible? Can you love Him, not having known Him except through His deeds and sayings? Can you love Him as much as you love your children, or those you call your ‘loved ones’ of the flesh? Can you? Mark you, the love of Christ will not take away from the love for them, it will only increase it. Can you take from the Heavens a bit of the Kingdom of Heaven and bring it into your homes? If you can, you are beginning to love Christ. Go on loving Him until your home is filled with the Kingdom of Heaven. It is for you now at this time to ‘seek’. Most of you here are Seekers, and it is for you now to seek that Kingdom, and you can only find it through Christ. We for our part love you and cherish you and will do our best to guide and help you with your prayers. But we would have no power to help you if it were not for Christ.”
Christmas Address (1943)
“What would happen if Jesus of Nazareth were born in 1953 or 1954? That is the year in which we on my side are told that a Jesus of Nazareth will be born. He may not be born in England, He may be born in Ireland, in America, in Persia or in Palestine. He may be born in the cold of Russia or the heat of Asia. What would happen? Well, there are certain people in the world, north, south, east and west—not a great number but a certain number, who have occult knowledge, and who are today—this day, this hour—expecting a Child to be born and are waiting, as they waited two thousand years ago, for the sign to be given to them as to when and where that Child will be born.”
God, Prayer, and Jesus Christ
“I could describe prayer in so many ways. Prayer could be likened to the concentrated Light of God in man, and in all prayer one has to link up with God through the Angel Kingdom. I have in previous addresses tried to explain this in order to help people to understand what prayer really means and that in the linking-up we use spirits. When you pray you do not pray to an empty void, for there is always a spirit standing by your side listening to your prayers. That spirit is connected with the Angel Kingdom, but he does not answer your prayers. As the Light of God passes down through the spheres of the Earth the words of your prayer are written in that Light and a simple prayer may on its way be read by many spirits and many Angels. If only people would put their lives into the care of that Light of God that is given them through prayer, their lives would be so different.”
“And when you people read the promises that Christ gave when He was in the world before, remember they are all true. How far have the promises of Jesus helped you? For His promises can help you. If you believe in God, if you pray and you believe in Christ and love Him and believe in His words, all things will be added unto you.”
