Silver Birch was a spirit guide who communicated through Hannen Swaffer while in a trance state. Silver Birch talked to a group of people known as the Home Circle who met at weekly seances held in a London flat in the thirties. Silver Birch spoke about truth, death, fear, love, immortality, the laws of life, the Great White Spirit — his name for God — and a few other ever-relevant subjects.
“On one occasion, Silver Birch told the circle: ‘Your world does not understand the function of pain and suffering and difficulty and hardship, but all these play an important part in the evolution of the human spirit.
Look back in your own lives and see that often the greatest crisis, the most difficult problems, the darkest hours, were the stepping stones that led to greater understanding. You would not evolve if forever you dwelt in the sunshine, lived free from care, anxiety, and worry, where every approaching difficulty was automatically smoothed out so that it never touched you, where there were no rough stones in your pathway, where there was nothing for you to conquer. It is in the facing of, and rising supreme over, trouble that you grow.
Every experience is part of the pattern of your life,” he told another gathering of the circle. “You try to judge eternity by temporal happenings. You see in matter apparent confusion, but you do not realize that a divine thread runs throughout all your lives.”
The darkness and the light, the shadow and the sunshine, are all but reflections of one whole. Without shadow, there could be no light and without light there could be no shadow. The difficulties of life are steps which enable the soul to rise.
Difficulties, obstacles, handicaps — these are the trials of the soul. And when it conquers them all, it rises stronger, more purified, deepened in intensity and more highly evolved. There is no experience that comes to the human soul, which, rightly understood and rightly faced, does not leave you better for it.”
Silver Birch Anthology, Edited by William Naylor, pgs. 7-8, 24 – 25.
