by Anthony Borgia

Since the first moment when the earth world existed, exalted beings of the highest realms have had it in their charge. As you contemplate the chaotic condition prevailing at the present time, you may be disposed to think that these same beings have dismally failed in their task. That is not so. They have not failed.

When man was first evolved from a lower order of creatures, he was constantly watched and aided. As primitive man grew in intelligence, he was in active communication with the spirit world by the operations of those higher senses which are inherent in every soul, but which lie fallow and undeveloped chiefly through man’s ignorance. The progression of the earth world and its inhabitants has been slow, steady, and uninterrupted thousands upon thousands of years of its life.

Never for one instant of time were the two worlds out of direct contact. All this while, man was—and still is—exercising his free will. Sometimes he listened to the voices from the spirit world—then all was well. Many times his ears were deaf to those voices—then all was ill. The guidance was ever there. The ‘road of salvation’ was always the same. To teach that one great soul should suffer all the torments of persecution and a horrible ‘death’ in order to save the world from ‘damnation,’ and to teach same that this same tragedy should be demanded by the Father of Heaven to appease His wrath, is not only revolting in itself to us here in the spirit world, but it is far, far worse then is the grossest libel, the greatest defamation—to put it at its very least—that could ever be contemplated upon the character and nature and the very essence of the Great Father of the universe.

We who live in the spirit world can see the might and majesty of the Father’s great creation—the universe. But we can also see what is far greater and far more majestic, man himself. It will be said, perhaps, that there cannot be anything very mighty and majestic about those hideous denizens of the dark realms I have described. No! In their present state most certainly not.

But resident within every one of those unfortunate beings there is the germ of spiritual evolution and progression. And therein lies his might and majesty. Remember those ‘primitive’ men who have so evolved and spiritually progressed that they are now dwellers in the highest realms, who are possessed of immense knowledge and wisdom, and who are, in every sense, wondrous souls.

Throughout the whole course of the earth world’s existence, there have been born into it great teachers of great truths. There has been a long succession of them in the past. And they will so continue to come in the future. It rests with man himself whether he heeds such teachers—or rejects them.

Entrance to the spirit world is gained in one way only—through the ‘death’ of the physical body. No person or persons can assign to a single soul any other place in the spirit world than that which that soul has merited for himself. He cannot be saved through the intermediation of another, whoever that other may be. His merits for a realm of beauty as his residence must be his own merits. No other person can share his burden if his life upon earth has been hideous. He pays the penalty himself, as I have already tried to indicate to you.

If this be the case—and it is—of what use is the constant repetition of elaborate creeds and the perpetual reiteration from dismal and protracted formularies, in both of which the spiritual life of incarnate man is hemmed in and suffocated? There is no magic formula upon the pronouncing of which a safe journey to the spirit world is assured and a salubrious destination procured. Our merits alone will provide those, and no one can plead for us before the Great Throne. Our life upon earth is our sole advocate—and our most eloquent—for the state of our being when we arrive in the world of spirit. And that same life is also our incorruptible judge.

The many orthodox religions that have sprung up during the course of the two thousand years past are, all of them, completely out of touch with the realities of the spirit world. They are, all of them, based upon entirely false values and conceptions.

Some religious bodies are presumptuous enough to profess to know exactly what is in the Heavenly Father’s mind. Others lay stress upon the ‘saving power of Jesus’, that great soul whom the earth rejected two millenniums ago. They claim that none can be ‘saved’ except they be saved through him. By constantly reiterating this in the many rather fulsome and frigid prayers that are said publicly, it seems to be believed that some magical process will be put into operation whereby the soul can be assured that wherever else it may go when ‘death’ takes place it will not go for all eternity to hell.

Indeed, it may be said that Orthodoxy bases its only hope of the soul’s ‘salvation’ upon the merits of another, it is in this respect that Orthodoxy has taken the spin and made of it a Christian spirit world, or, at least the religious teachers would say that the Christian element more than predominates.

As an inhabitant of the spirit world, I soon discovered that the spirit world is so much greater than what the earth world denunciates ‘the Christian religion.’ Indeed it is away beyond all earthly religions of whatever denomination.

It is made up of peoples from every quarter of the earth world, representing every school of earthly religious thought. In the realms wherein I dwell, we have cast aside forever the allegiance to the Church of our earthly lives. We have no orthodox religion here. We are all of one mind and that mind is regulated by the strict truth.

I have already recounted to you how in certain quarters of these realms one can find churches, such as are to be found upon the earth-plane, supported by adherents of a variety of religious sects. But that makes no difference whatever to my statement that we have done with earthly religions. These churches are permitted to exist under conditions that are perfectly understood and as perfectly defined. They merely form a carefully segregated community that is bound by strict rules. There is no harm in erecting a beautiful edifice in the style and manner of earthly ecclesiastical buildings. It is what takes place within them that is subject to the most exact laws.

The spirit world, in short, is undenominational. Orthodoxy may make as many claims as it wishes in respect of its self-arrogated right to be the guardian of man’s ‘immortal soul.’ Admittance to the spirit world is not through any one Church or collection of Churches; nor is it obtained through the merits of any one person or body of persons.

There is no saint of the ecclesiastical calendar whose merits will assist us to escape or dodge the results of our wrongdoing when we were incarnate. We must pay ourselves alone. Nor will membership to the Church which makes the greatest claims of assuring ‘salvation’ for ourselves avail us one fraction. We undergo the experience of passing through the portal of physical death alone, although we may have willing help in the actual procedure from those who are already discarnate. But it stops there.

Such helpers cannot assign us to any destination other than that which we have earned for ourselves. It is plain, therefore, as the noonday sun—and I speak from exact experience—that the tragedy that took place at Calvary nigh upon two thousand years ago, although a personal sacrifice of sublime beauty, yet that tragedy does not and cannot have any bearing upon the individual souls who have been born upon earth since that time, or who were born at that time or before it.

That great event demonstrated a profound truth of which I and countless millions are the living witnesses, namely, that the death of the physical body is but the beginning of a new life and that as we have sown during our life in the earth world, so shall we reap in the life of the spirit world. But great as that sacrifice was, neither its grandeur nor its merits are communicable, just as the sacrifice and merits of us all are incommunicable. We are each and every one of us responsible for our own misdeeds.

All this, you will perhaps say, is a far cry from the supposed story of our first parents. It is not so really. Adam and Eve were our first parents, so you are taught. They committed the first ‘sin,’ and were punished by being cast out from their ‘garden of paradise.’ Up to this time these individuals were strangely constructed. They were, in fact, immortal in their physical bodies while at the same time they were living upon a corruptible earth. They lost this strange attribute when they committed their ‘sin,’ ‘death’ was introduced. The whole race of mankind that was to come was involved in the crash, and it was only the promise of the visitation ‘from on high’ to the earth-plane of one who would redeem the earth world that made life possible upon it.

I have tried to show you that this story is fantastic and in doing so to bridge the immense gap between the formation of the world, with its subsequent steady evolution, and that era which commenced two thousand years ago. Adam and Eve as our first parents had no existence in fact. The story is a fantasy. Jesus was born upon earth two thousand years ago, and he is today an immense force upon the earth-plane. That is fact. The fantasy and the fact have no relation whatever to one another, but the Church has made the one dependent and consequent upon the other. From this there has arisen all the strange variety of religious sects and religious observances that are to be seen throughout the earth.

It is against every law of the spirit world that one person can assume responsibility for another’s wrong doing. There are no merits belonging to another person of which we can avail ourselves and by which we can evade our responsibilities. But, it will be said, this great soul who perished so tragically, is different. He is one apart. He is Divine. He is the Son of God come down to earth to redeem us. He is, in fact, God Himself. With God all things are possible. Therefore, by virtue of his Divinity, Jesus will wash away our sins if we have sufficient faith and do what the Church teaches. We must be repentant, of course, and being repentant, we have one who will plead our cause by the merits of his supreme sacrifice we shall he saved. That is a very comforting and comfortable thought belief, but there is just one flaw. It simply is not true.

Excerpt from Facts

See Part I here.