Your present surroundings are, in a sense, your creation, in that you are mentally so unemancipated, your nerves and senses convey to you your perception of life. If you were capable of focusing your ego or daily consciousness within your deeper mind, if in short you trained yourself to pass into a thought compound from which form, as the senses convey it, were absent, the material world would vanish. You would no longer perceive it. If you were sufficiently developed spiritually you might be able to escape form altogether, though actually this is not possible until you have had numberless further experiences.

However, on higher planes of being your intellectual power is so greatly increased that you can control form; you learn how to draw life to it. As a sculptor takes up the formless clay and shapes it, so does your mind draw life and light to it and shape your own surroundings according to your vision. In the first state your vision is limited by your earth experiences and memories, and so you create your own version of the appearances you knew on earth. Understand, however, that in Illusionland you do not consciously create your surroundings through an act of thought. Your emotional desires, your deeper mind manufactures these without your being actually aware of the process.
For still you are the individualized soul caught within the limitations of your earthly self and caught also within the fine etheric body which now is yours.

“The Prison of the Senses” is an extract from The Road to Immortality by Geraldine Cummins.