Mansi" Place in the Kosmos (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906. Excerpt: ... WHERE AND WHAT IS HEAVEN? "Heaven lies all about us in our infancy," says the poet Wordsworth, referring to it in the spiritual sense of the word. It is also quite as true in the literal and scientific sense. The spiritual heavens of our planet surround the earth in a series (seven in number) of concentric spheres or zones that extend sixty degrees north and south from the equator toward either pole. These zones or belts are placed at different distances from each other and from the earth, varying from fifty miles near the earth to many hundreds of miles each, for the higher spheres, as I have been informed by my celestial teachers. These spheres or zones, as they are termed in spirit life, are very much like our own earth for the first and second spheres. They are not only provided with mountain systems very much like those of our own world, but also with streams of water, hills, valleys, lakes and seas. These lower spheres--the first and second--have not in past times been subject to much improvement, having been abandoned by the higher classes and given up to the lower and very lowest elements of humanity, as they have been upon the earth plane itself; and it is this abandonment of the lower spheres to the lower castes and classes, thus practically converting them into the dens, prisons and the slums of spirit life, that has given these dire abodes of spirit life their terrible reputation during the long past ages, down to quite recent times. But within the last three-fourths of a century a new order of things has been growing up amid those dread abodes of spirit men--originated and put in operation by the wise and the good of spirit life, who are now earnest and active in the work of cleaning up and putting in order all parts of the spiritual lower wo...