MY PRESENT ENVIRONMENT,
WORK, AND ACTIVITIES

While my environment differs in rather important respects (humorously) from that of my readers, I can assure you, with ironic understatement, that it is as vivid, varied, and vital as physical existence. It is more pleasurable — though my ideas of pleasure have changed some since I was a physical being — being more rewarding and offering far greater opportunities for creative achievement.

My environment, now, is not the one in which you will find yourself immediately after death. I cannot help speaking humorously, but you must die many times before you enter this particular plane of existence. (Birth is much more of a shock than death. Sometimes when you die you do not realize it, but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition. So there is no need to fear death. And I, who have died more times than I care to tell, write this book to tell you so.)

My work in this environment provides far more challenge than any of you know, and it also necessitates the manipulation of creative materials that are nearly beyond your present comprehension. I will say more of this shortly. First of all, you must understand that no objective reality exists but that which is created by consciousness. Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way around. So my environment is a reality of existence created by myself and others like me, and it represents the manifestation of our development.

They are created by our mental patterns, [just] as your own physical reality is created in perfect replica of your inner desires and thoughts. You think that objects exist independently of you, not realizing that they are instead the manifestations of your own psychological and psychic selves. We realize that we form our own reality, and therefore we do so with considerable joy and creative abandon. In my environment you would be highly disoriented, for it would seem to you as if it lacked coherency.

Now: In my home environment I assume whatever shape I please, and it may vary, and does, with the nature of my thoughts. You, however, form your own physical image at an unconscious level in more or less the same manner, but with some important differences. You usually do not realize that your physical body is created by you at each moment as a direct result of your inner conception of what you are, or that it changes in important chemical and electromagnetic ways with the ever-moving pace of your own thought.