- 122 - joking when He said to Moses: ‘I shall make the cloud thicker, so that all of the people can hear me when I speak to you’, that He could have increased the volume of His voice without thickening the cloud of Od? Or do you believe that the great cloud that settled upon Mount Sinai amidst thunder and the sound of trumpets was merely outward show, and that the thunder and the sound of trumpets could have been produced without the cloud? And when David asked Abiathar, the priest, to bring him the ephod with the breastplate of judgment because he wanted to consult God and receive His answer, was the breastplate of judgment only game playing too? Or were the flames in the thorn bush, the pillar of cloud, the breastplate of judgment, and the other things you come across in the Bible when you read about the communication of the spirit world with mankind, not rather the absolutely essential conductors for the “telephone conversations” from the Hereafter to the Here? Indeed, they constituted the bridge over which God’s spirits travelled to reach the people of those times. Without that bridge, they could not have come. The material contributed by terrestrial beings was the odic force, and it became visible to everyone, in the shape of a flame in the burning bush, and as a cloud of od in the case of the pillar of cloud. In the same way odic force was required for constructing the material form of the many spirit materializations in those days. A sufficient amount of that same force had to be available to those spirits that indicated the letters on the breastplate of judgment that formed the sentences constituting the answers sent from the Beyond. The sources of odic force for the spirit communications recorded in the Bible were, just as they are today, the ‘mediums’. In the writings of the Old Testament, you find a great deal written of ‘prophets’ and ‘prophet schools’. What do you think is meant by that? Do you believe perhaps that the gift of prophecy can be learned at school, in the same way that a worldly scientific education is acquired? In your modern parlance you use the word ‘prophet’ to designate a person who can foretell the future, and according to that definition it would be natural to assume that it was possible at the ancient prophet schools to acquire the ability to predict future events. That is a misconception of the meaning of the terms ‘prophet’ and ‘prophet schools’ as used in the Bible. A ‘prophet’ is a person through whom not his own, but a foreign spirit speaks. It was in this sense that the Apostle Paul wrote of ‘spirits of prophets’. (I Corinthians 14: 32) If the spirits that speak through ‘prophets’ are spirits of truth, they are called ‘true’ or ‘real’ prophets. If, however, they are lying spirits, in other words evil spirits, the Bible speaks of them as ‘false prophets’. • A person who was called a ‘prophet’ in Biblical times would today be known as a ‘medium’. The choice of words is immaterial; it is the substance that counts. All great personalities of the Old and the New Testament were great ‘mediums’, and although the mediumistic conditions under which they surrendered their odic force to the spirit world are not minutely described in the Holy Writ, they are at least indicated in quite a few of the accounts. • Abraham was a medium. The state of trance into which he passed to enable him to release his od during his communication with the Beyond is clearly referred to in one passage:
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