NOTE TO CHAPTER VI
In order not to burden this already rather lengthy chapter with matter which may not be needed, I append here some general considerations for those who have not given much attention to the subject of the various grades of consciousness in the body—considerations tending to show that the various parts and passions of the body and mind have a life and intelligence of their own, and that the whole human organism is a hierarchy (not always perfectly harmonious) of psychic entities.
We generally allow of course that our central or dominant selves are alive and conscious (though no doubt we use those epithets with a rather sad vagueness). But having allowed that, the extraordinary phenomena of variable and alternating personality compel us to admit that there may be many such centres within one person, each of which though now buried may in its turn become dominant and take conscious lead, and which must therefore be credited with life and intelligence (even if an alien life and intelligence to “our own”). Even the most ordinary brain-centres are in the habit of carrying on whole departments of the bodily organization with an independent intelligence of their own, and are sometimes liable under the influence of some excitement (like drink, or religion, or some enthusiasm) to take possession of the whole man and transform him into another creature—exhibiting in doing so a strange degree of invasive vitality and alertness. It is quite certain that the myriad microscopic cells of the body are alive, each with its own little particular life; and the more one studies these cells the more difficult it is not to credit them each, in their degree, with a particular consciousness or intelligence. And each body-organ again, composed of a congeries or colony of body-cells, has a life of its own on and beyond that of its component cells, and exhibits curious signs too of intelligence and emotion, which often (especially in sickness) affect the moods and thoughts of the entire man.
The whole of the subconscious world, in fact—that world which only occasionally breaks through into the upper consciousness—must be allowed to be alive, and in its various degrees methodical and calculating. This is well seen in the phenomena of dreams and of hypnotism, in both of which the most acute and diabolical ingenuity is often shown—as of weird imps working in dark chambers of the brain quite unbeknown to their supposed lord and master; or in the extraordinary phenomena of trance and “automatic” speaking and writing; or in telepathy and clairvoyance; or again in the craftiness of utter lunatics; or in the strange evasions and mental dodgery which (as just hinted) are induced by diseases of certain organs; or in the phenomena of mental healing, where an appeal to the subconscious intelligence in any and every corner of the body is often followed by extraordinary response; or in the subtle instinctive knowledge and perception of babes, and of animals, long before self-consciousness has developed; or again, in the sly cunning of ancient dotards; or in the complex bodily reflexes carried on perfectly unknown to ourselves during life; or in the continued functioning of some of the organs after death. In all these cases, and in scores of others not mentioned, it is clear that the majority of the processes of the human system are carried on by minor intelligences. They are indeed carried on by crowds of minor intelligences—to which we accord the epithet “automatic,” and which no doubt we regard as mechanical, as long, that is, as they work smoothly and without friction and opposition. But when they do not do so, when pain, disease and lunacy cut in—when a violent burn sets the epithelial cells screaming, and the scream comes into our consciousness as the vibration of pain; when a diseased liver twists the events of life and the faces of our friends into malignant shape and mien; when lust and hypochondria people the mind with phantoms; and drink makes all the functions mad—then we say we are “possessed with devils,” then we recognize, if only on the dark side, the pervading intelligence or intelligences of the body.
It is like the Head of a Department, as I have said, whose subordinate officials are working under him agreeably and harmoniously. As long as that is the case, he may have in his mind a general outline of the working of the Department. He probably is ignorant of most of the details; he certainly does not know personally many of his subordinates, but he superintends the working of the whole. Presently, however, occurs something of a strike or émeute; whereupon he discovers that vast numbers of his men are intelligently discussing questions or problems of whose existence he was almost ignorant; personalities appear before him whom, before, he knew at most only by name; and they argue their case with an acumen and vitality which surprises him. For the first time, in this revolt of his department, he comes to realize the amount of intelligent activity which is at work within it, beneath the surface. So it is with us in the case of disease. In health we have no trouble, unity prevails. As long as “we” are on top, and the intelligences which carry on the body are working on friendly terms with us, their minds do not intrude into our realm, and we are practically unaware of them. But when through our mismanagement or other cause dissension breaks out, then indeed we realize what kind of forces they are with which we have to deal, and of what a wonderful hierarchy of intelligences the body is composed.[[48]]
CHAPTER VII
IS THERE AN AFTER-DEATH STATE?
In the last chapter Death was compared to Birth, and it was said that probably the passage of the human soul into another world, on the other side of death, exactly corresponded to Birth—to the birth of a babe into this world. And certainly, seeing these apparent movements into the visible and away from it again, it is very natural to assume that there is such another and hidden world, and to speculate upon its nature.
But it may fairly be asked, is there after all any reason for supposing that there is a definite state of existence of any kind on that side? Is it not quite likely that there is only vacancy and nothingness, or at best a mere formless pulp (of ether and electrons, or whatever it may be) out of which souls are born and into which they return again at death? It is this question which I propose to discuss in the present chapter.
Historically speaking, we know of course that early and primitive folk, letting their imaginations loose, peopled that ‘other side’ and rather promiscuously, with all sorts of fairy beings and phantom processions. Giant grizzly bears, divine jackals, elves, dwarfs, satans, holy ghosts, lunar pitris, flaming sun-gods, and so forth, ruled and raged behind the curtain—in front of which the shivering mortal stood. But as time went on, the growing exactitude of thought and science made it more and more impossible to idly accept these imaginings; and it may be said that about the middle of last century these cosmogonies—for the more thoughtful among the populations of the Western world—finally perished, and gave place for the most part to a simple negative attitude. It was allowed that intelligences and personalities (human and animal) moved on this side of the veil, and were plainly distinguishable as operating in the actual world; but they, it was held, were more or less isolated and probably accidental products of a mechanical universe. That mechanical arrangement of atoms, and so forth, which we could now largely map out and measure, and which doubtless in the future we should be able completely to define—that was the universe, and somehow or other included everything. One of its properties was that it would run down like a clock, and would eventuate in time in a cold sun and a dead earth—and there was an end of it! Any intelligent existence behind or on the other side of this veil of mechanism was too problematical to be worth discussing; in all probability on that side was mere nothingness and vacancy.
Such, very roughly stated, was the attitude of the fairly intelligent and educated man about fifty years ago, but since that time the outgrowths of science and human inquiry have been so astounding as to leave that position far behind. The obvious signs of intelligence in the minutest cells, almost invisible to the naked eye, the very mysterious arcana of growth in such cells (partly described in a former chapter), the myriad action of similarly intelligent microbes, the strange psychology of plants, and the equally strange psychic sensitiveness (apparently) of metals, the sudden transformations and variations both of plants and animals, the existence of the X and N rays of light, and of countless other vibrations of which our ordinary senses render no account, the phenomena of radium and radiant matter, the marvels of wireless telegraphy, the mysterious facts connected with hypnotism and the subliminal consciousness, and the certainty now that telepathic communication can take place between human beings thousands of miles apart—all these things have convinced us that the subtlest forces and energies, totally unmeasurable by our instruments, and saturated or at least suffused with intelligence, are at work all around us. They have convinced us that gloomy phrases about cold suns and dead earths are mere sentiment and nonsense. Cold worlds there may certainly be, but nothing is more certain than that worlds on worlds, and spheres on spheres, stretch behind and beyond the actually seen—spheres so microscopic as to totally elude us, or so vast and cosmic as to elude, spheres of vibration which elude, spheres of other senses than ours, spheres aerial, ethereal, magnetic, mental, subliminal. The iris-veil of our ordinary existence may truly be rent, but the visible world, the world we know, is no longer now a film on the surface of an empty bubble, but a curtain concealing a vast and teeming life, reaching down endless, in layer on layer, into the very heart of the universe. And whereas, in the former time of which I have been speaking, we might have agreed that life could not well continue after the death of the body, to-day we should, as a first guess, be inclined to think that life is more full and rich on the other side of death than on this side. “I do not doubt,” says Whitman, “that from under the feet and beside the hands and face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant of, calm and actual faces—I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice.”
We come, then, to this problem of Death and Birth in a similarly modified spirit, and with a predisposition to believe that they do really indicate passages from one definite world or plane or region of existence to another. And here is the place to point out, and to guard ourselves against, a common error in the use of the word Death. Death is not a state. There may be an after-death state; but death itself is the passage into that state, or—better—the passage out of the present state. So Birth is not a state. There may be a pre-birth state; but birth itself is the passage into the present state. Either we pass through death into another life and condition of being; or else we are extinguished. In the former case there is clearly no state of death; and in the latter case there is no such state—because there is no self to be dead or to know itself dead. As Lucretius says,[[49]] endeavoring to disabuse man of the fear of the grave:—
“So to be mortal fills his mind with dread,
Forgetting that in real death can be
No self, to mourn that other self as dead,
Or stand and weep at death’s indignity.”
Birth and Death, then, we may look upon as two contrary movements, to some degree complementary and balancing each other; and it is possible that thus, from consideration of the one, we may be able to infer things about the other. One such thing that we may be able to infer is that Love presides over, or is intimately associated with, both movements.
The connection of Love with Birth is of course obvious. In some profound yet hidden way, almost throughout creation, the birth or generation of one creature is connected with the precedent love and sex-fusion of two others. And the connection of Love with Death, though not so prominent, can similarly almost everywhere be traced. The whole of poetry in literature teems with this subject; and so does the poetry of Nature! If we are to believe the Garden of Eden story, Love and Death came into the world together; and it certainly is curious that in the age-long evolution of animal forms the same thing seems to have happened. The Protozoa at first, propagating by simple division, were endued with a kind of immortality. But then came a period when a pair found they could enter into a joint life of renewed fecundity by fusing with each other. They literally died in each other, and rose again in a numerous progeny; so that love and death were simultaneous and synonymous. Sometimes parturition and death were simultaneous. The mother-cell perished in the very act of giving birth to her brood. Then again came the aggregation of cells into living groups—the formation of ‘colonial’ organisms; and it was then that distinctive sex-differentiation and sex-organs appeared, and with the capacity of sex also the capacity of death through the disruption of the colony. Everywhere love is associated with death. The expenditure of seed in the male animal is an incipient death; the formation of the seed vessel, and the glory and color of the flowering plant, are already the signs of its decay. “Both Weismann and Goette,” say Geddes and Thomson,[[50]] “note how many insects (locusts, butterflies, ephemerids, and so forth) die a few hours after the production of ova. The exhaustion is fatal, and the males are also involved. In fact, as we should expect from the katabolic temperament, it is the males which are especially liable to exhaustion.... Every one is familiar with the close association of love and death in the common May-flies. Emergence into winged liberty, the love-dance, and the process of fertilization, the deposition of eggs, and the death of both parents, are often the crowded events of a few hours. In higher animals, the fatality of the reproductive sacrifice has been greatly lessened, yet death may tragically persist, even in human life, as the direct Nemesis of love.”
George Macdonald, in one of his books (Phantastes, vol. i. p. 191), feigns a race of beings, for whom death is not so much the ‘nemesis’ of love, as its natural and inevitable outcome. Seized by a great love, too great for mortal expression, “looking too deep into each other’s eyes,” they (with great presence of mind, it must be said!) breathe their souls out in death, and so take their departure to another world. Heine touches the same note in his poem, the “Asra”:—
“Ich bin aus Jemen,
Und mein stamm sind jene Asra,
Welche sterben wenn sie lieben.”
And scores of scarcely noticed paragraphs in our daily papers, brief tales of single or double suicide, present us with a dim outline of how—even in the mean conditions and surroundings of our modern days—every now and then there comes to one or other a longing, a passion, and a revelation of a desire so intense, that, breaking the bounds of a useless life, it demands swift utterance in death.
Some deep and profound suggestion there is in all this—some hint of a life whose very form and nature is love, and which finds its deliverance and nativity only through the abandonment of the body—even as our ordinary life, conceived in love, finds its delivery into this world through what we call birth. At the very least it suggests that Death may have a great deal more to do with Love, and may be more deeply allied to it than is generally supposed. And it may suggest that the two things, being in some sense the most important occupations of the human race, should be frankly recognized as such, and should both be accordingly prepared for.
Another thing, about which we may be able to infer something from the analogy between Birth and Death, is the fate of the soul at death. If we can trace in any way the relation of the soul to the body at the time of the first appearance of the latter, that may shed light on the relation which will hold at its disappearance. We cannot certainly define very strictly what we mean by the word ‘soul’; but we are all very well aware that associated with our bodies, and in some sense pervading them with its intelligence, is a conscious (as well as subconscious) being which we call the self or soul; and we are all puzzled at times to understand what is the relation between this and the body. Now we have seen (ch. ii.) the genesis of the body from a single fertilized cell or germ almost microscopic in size, and its growth by continual and myriadfold division into, say, a human form; and we have seen that every cell in the perfect and final form—every cell, of eye, or liver, or of any part or organ—is there by linear descent or division from that first cell, though variously adapted and differentiated during the process. We are therefore almost compelled to conclude that that intelligent self (conscious or subconscious) which we are so distinctly aware of as associated with our mature bodies was there also, associated with the first germ.[[51]] It may not truly have been outwardly manifest or unfolded into evidence at that primitive stage. It could not well be. But it was there, even in its totality, and unless it had been there, we could not now be what we are. The conscious and subconscious self has been within us all along, unfolding and manifesting itself with the unfoldment and development of the body; and indeed to all appearances guiding that development. And more, we may fairly say—having regard to the mode of development of the tissue—that it dwells even in its entirety within every normal and healthy cell of our present bodies, and is the formative essence thereof.
Let me give an illustration. Sometimes in the morning you may see a bush glittering all over with dewdrops; every leaf has such a tiny jewel hanging from it. If now you look you will see in each dewdrop a miniature picture of the far landscape. Or, to take a closer illustration, some shrubs have, embedded in the very tissue of their leaves, tiny transparent and lens-like glands which yield to close scrutiny similar miniatures of the world beyond. Exactly, then, like these plants, we may think of the whole human body as trembling in light—each cell containing (if we could but see it!) a luminous image of the presiding genius or self of the body.
The question is often asked: Where is the self? does it reside in the head, or in the heart, or perhaps in the liver? is it an aural halo pervading and surrounding the body, or is it a single microscopic cell far hidden in the interior, or is it an invisible atom? Here apparently is the answer. It animates every cell. It pervades the whole body, and seeks expression in every part of it. Some cells, as we have said before, are differentiated so as to express especially this faculty, others to express especially that; but the human soul or self stands behind them all. Look at a baby’s face, and its growing sparkling expression—an individual being coming newly into the world, obviously seeking, feeling, tentatively finding its way forward—every morning a thinnest veil falling from its features! Playing through the whole body, is an intelligence, seeking expression. Helen Keller, the girl both deaf and blind, describes most graphically her agonizing experiences at the age of six or seven, when her growing powers of body and mind demanded the expression which her physical disabilities so cruelly denied. “The desire to express myself grew,”[[52]] she says; “the few signs I used became less and less adequate, and my failures to make myself understood were invariably followed by outbursts of passion. I felt as if invisible hands were holding me, and I made frantic efforts to free myself.” And then most touching, the description of her relief, “the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery,” when she at last, about the age of ten, was able to utter her first intelligible words. In some degree like Helen Keller’s is perhaps the experience of every babe that is born into the world.
It seems to me, therefore, that each person is practically compelled to think of his ‘self’ as moving behind or as associated with or animating every cell in the healthy body; and as having been so associated with the first germ of the same, even though that was a thing well-nigh invisible to the naked eye. You were there, you are there now, at the root of your bodily life. You may not, certainly, except at moments, be distinctly conscious of this your complete relation to the body; but, as we have already said, the term self must be held to include the large subconscious tracts which occasionally flash up into consciousness, and which, when they do so flash, almost always confirm this relation; nor must we lose from sight the still more deeply buried physiological or animal soul, whose operations we seem to be able to trace from earliest days, guiding all the complex of organic growth and development, and apparently conscious in its own way with a very wonderful sort of intelligence.[[53]]
All this compels us, I think, not only to picture to ourselves the mental self or soul as associated with the body, and taking part in its development from the first inception of the latter; but also to picture that self as in its entirety considerably greater and more extensive than the ordinary conscious self, and even as greater than any bodily expression or manifestation which it succeeds in gaining. We are compelled, I think, to regard the real self as at all times only partially manifested.
I think this latter point is obvious; for when, and at what period in life, is manifestation complete? Certainly not in babyhood, when the faculties are only unfolding; certainly not in old age, when they are decaying and falling away. Is it, then, in maturity and middle life? But during all that period the output of expression and character in a man is constantly changing; and which of all these changes of raiment is completely representative? Do we not rather feel that to express our real selves every phase from childhood through maturity even into extreme old age ought to be taken into account? Nay, more than that; for have we not—perhaps most of us—a profound feeling and conviction that there are elements deep down in our natures, which never have been expressed, and never can or will be expressed in our present and actual lives? Do we not all feel that our best is only a fraction of what we want to say? And what must we think of the strange facts of multiple personality? Do they not suggest that our real self has facets so opposite, so divergent, that for a long time they may appear quite disconnected with each other; until ultimately (as has happened in actual cases) they have been visibly reconciled and harmonized in a new and more perfect character?
With regard to this view that the real person is so much greater than his visible manifestation, Frederick Myers and Oliver Lodge have used the simile of a ship. And it is a fine one. A ship gliding through the sea has a manifestation of its own, a very partial one, in the waterworld below—a ponderous hull moving in the upper layers of that world—a form encrusted with barnacles and sea-weed. But what denizen of the deep could have any inkling or idea of the real life of that ship in the aerial plane—the glory of sails and spars trimmed to the breeze and glancing in the sun, the blue arch of heaven flecked with clouds, the leaping waves and the boundless horizon around the ship as she speeds onward, the ingenious provision for her voyage, the compass, the helmsman and the captain directing her course? Surely (except in moments of divination and inspiration) we have little idea of what we really are! But there are such moments—moments of profound grief, of passionate love, of great and splendid angers and enthusiasms which dart light back into the farthest recesses of our natures and astonish us with the vision they disclose. And (perhaps more often) there are moments which disclose the wonder-self in others. If we do not recognize (which is naturally not easy!) our own divinity, it is certain that we cannot really love without discovering a divine being in the loved one—a being remote, resplendent, inaccessible, who calls for and indeed demands our devotion, but of whom the mortal form is most obviously a mere symbol and disguise. There are times when this strange illumination falls on people at large, and we see them as gods walking: when we look even on the tired overworked mother in the slum, and her face is shining like heaven; or on the ploughboy in the field with his team, and see the mould and the material of ancient heroes. Yet of what is really nearest to them all the time these folk say nothing, and we are astonished to find them haggling over halfpence or seriously troubled about wire-worms. It is as if a play, or some kind of deliberate mystification, were being carried on—with disguises a little too thin. We see, as plain as day—and nothing can contravene our conclusion—that it is only a fraction of the real person that is concerned.
Your self, then, I say—covering by that word not only all that you and your friends usually include in it, but probably a good deal more—existed, with all its potentialities and capacities even in association with the first primitive germ of your present body.[[54]] That germ was microscopic in size, and its inner workings and transformations were ultra-microscopic in character. We do not know whence they originated; and whether we think of the soul which was associated with them as ultra-microscopic in its nature or as fourth-dimensional does not much matter. We only perceive that it, the soul, must have been there, in an unseen world of some kind, pushing forward toward its manifestation in the visible.[[55]] I do not think we can well escape this conclusion.
But if we conclude that the soul existed before Birth, or, more properly, at or before conception, in some such invisible world, then that it should so exist after Death is equally possible, nay, probable. For after conception, by continual multiplication and differentiation of cells, the soul framed for itself organs of expression and manifestation, and thus gradually came into our world of sight and sense and ordinary intelligence; and so, by some reverse process, we may suppose that in decay and death the soul gradually loses these organs and their coördination, and retires into the invisible. Whatever the nature of this invisible may be—whether, as I say, a world of things too minute for human perception, or too vast for the same, or whether a world which eludes us by the simple artifice of everywhere and in everything running parallel to the things of the world—only in another dimension imperceptible to us—in any case it seems reasonable to suppose that the soul is still there, fulfilling its nature and its destiny, of which its earth-life has only been one episode.[[56]]
And if the apparent loss of consciousness (the loss of the ordinary consciousness at any rate) which often takes place during the death-change, seems to point to extinction and not to continuance, I think that that need not disturb us. For in sleep, in our nightly sleep, the same suspension of the ordinary consciousness takes place, as we very well know; yet all the time the subconsciousness is functioning away—sorting out sounds, bidding us wake for some, allowing us to sleep through others, discriminating disturbances, carrying on the physiologies of the body, posting sentinels in the reflexes—and guarding us from harm—till untired in the morning it knits together again the ravelled thread of the ordinary consciousness and renews our waking activities. And if this happens in our ordinary and nightly sleep, it seems at any rate possible that something similar may happen in death. Indeed there is much evidence to show that while at the hour of death the supraliminal consciousness often passes into a state of quiescence or abeyance, the subliminal, or at any rate some portion of the subliminal, becomes unusually active. Audition grows strangely keen—so much so that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the things heard have been apprehended by extension of the ordinary faculty or whether by a species of clairaudience. Vision similarly passes into clairvoyance, the patient becomes extraordinarily sensitive to telepathic influences, and knows what is going on at a distance;[[57]] and not only so, but he radiates influences to a distance. All the phenomena of wraiths and dying messages, now so well substantiated—of apparitions and impressions projected with force at the moment of death into the minds of distant friends—prove clearly the increased activity and vitality (one may say) of the subliminal self at that time; and this points, as I say, not to extinction and disorganization, but perhaps to the transfer of consciousness more decisively into hidden regions of our being. One hears sometimes of a dying person who, prevented from departure by the tears and entreaties of surrounding friends, cries out “Oh! let me die!” and one remembers the case, above mentioned, of the apparently dead mother who, so to speak, called herself back to life by the thought of her orphaned children. Such cases as these do not look like loss of continuity; rather they look as if a keen intelligence were still there, well aware of its earth-life, but drawn onward by an inevitable force, and passing into a new phase, of swifter subtler activity in perhaps a more ethereal body.
That the human soul does pass through great transformations—moultings and sloughings and metamorphoses—and so forward from one stage to another, we know from the facts of life. Physiologically the body takes on a new phase at birth, and another at weaning and teething, and another at puberty, and another in age at the ‘change of life,’ and so on; and transformations of the soul or inner life (some of them very remarkable) are associated with these outer phases. The last great bodily change is obviously accompanied—as we have just indicated—by the development or extension of hidden psychic powers. What exactly that final transformation may be, we can only at present speculate; but we can see that, like the others, when it arrives it has already become very necessary and inevitable. At every such former stage—whether it be birth, or teething, or puberty, or what not—there has been constriction or strangulation. The growing inner life has found its conditions too limited for it, and has burst forth into new form and utterance. In this final change the bodily conditions altogether seem to have grown too limited. With an irresistible impulse and an agonizing joy of liberation the soul sweeps out, or is fearfully swept, into its new sphere. Sometimes doubtless the passage is one of pain and terror; far more often, and in the great majority of cases, it is peaceful and calm, with a deep sense of relief; occasionally it is radiant with ecstasy, as if the new life already cast its splendor in advance.[[58]]
Yes, we cannot withhold the belief that there is an after-death state—a state which in a sense is present with us, and has been present, all our lives; but which—for reasons that at present we can only vaguely apprehend—has been folded from our consciousness.
CHAPTER VIII
THE UNDERLYING SELF
Allowing, then, the great probability of the existence of an after-death state, and of a survival of some kind, the question further arises: Is that survival in any sense personal or individual? or does it belong to some, so to speak, formless region, either below or above personality? It is conceivable of course that there may be survival of the outer and beggarly elements of the mind, below personality; or it is conceivable that the deepest and most central core of the man may survive, far beyond and above personality; but in either case the individual existence may not continue. The eternity of the All-soul or Self of the universe is, I take it, a basic fact; it is from a certain point of view obvious; we have already discussed it, and, as far as this book is concerned, it is treated so much as an axiom that to argue further without it would be useless. That being granted, it follows that if the soul of each human being roots down ultimately into that All-self, the core of each soul must partake of the eternal nature. But as far as it does so it may be beyond all reach or remembrance or recognition of personality.
Such a conclusion—whatever force of conviction may accompany it—is certainly not altogether satisfactory. I remember that once—in the course of conversation with a lady on this very subject—she remarked that though she thought there would be a future life she did not believe in the continuance of individuality. “What do you believe in, then?” said I. “Oh,” she replied, “I think we shall be a sort of Happy Mass!” And I have always since remembered that expression.
But though the idea of a happy mass has its charms, it does not, as I say, quite satisfy either our feelings or our intelligence. There is a desire for something more, and there is a perception that Differentiation and Individuation represent a great law—a law so great as probably to extend even to the ultimate modes of Being. And though a vague generality of this kind cannot stand in the place of strict reasoning or observation, it may make us feel that personal survival is at any rate possible, and that a certain amount of speculation on the subject is legitimate.
At the same time we have to bear in mind that the subject altogether is a very complex one, and that we have to move only slowly, if we want to move forward at all, and to avoid having to retrace our steps. We must not too serenely assume, for instance, that we at all know what we are! We have already (ch. v.) analyzed to some degree the constitution of the human being, and found it complicated enough in its successive planes of development. We have now to remember that—at least on the two middle planes, those of the human soul and the animal soul—there is another subdivision to be made, namely between that part which is conscious and that which is only subconscious; so that further complications inevitably arise. We may not only have to consider, as in the chapter referred to, which of these planes may possibly carry survival with it, but again whether such survival may be in the conscious region, or only in the subliminal or subconscious. This chapter will be largely occupied with a consideration of the subliminal or underlying portion of the self, and it will be seen that that is probably of immense extent and variety of content compared with the surface or conscious portion; but it will also be seen that there is no strict line of demarcation between the two, and that a continual interchange betwixt them is taking place, so that for the present at any rate it is safest to give the word ‘self’ its widest scope and make it include both portions and every mental faculty, rather than limit its application.
In attacking the subject, then, of the Survival of the Self, I suppose our first question ought to be: What is the test of survival, what do we mean by it? And to this, I imagine, the answer is, Continuity of Consciousness. This would seem to be the only satisfying definition. Consciousness is necessary in some form or other, as the base and evidence of our existence; and continuity in some degree is also necessary, in order to link our experiences together, as it were into one chain. Continuity, however, need not be absolute. The chain of consciousness may apparently be broken by sleep, or it may be broken by a dose of chloroform, or by a blow on the head; but it may be re-knit and resumed. It may pass from the supraliminal state to the subliminal, and again emerge on the surface. It may even be discontinuous; but as long as Memory bridges the intervals we get the sense of continuity of life or personality.[[59]] Supposing a body of memories—of life say in some village of ancient Egypt—suddenly opened up in one’s mind, as vivid and consistent and enduring as one’s ordinary memory of childhood days, it would be natural to conclude that one really had pre-existed in that village; it would be difficult not to make that inference. And similarly if at some future time, and in far other than our present surroundings, the memory of this one’s earth-life should emerge again, vivid and personal as now, the being thus having that memory would, we suppose, conclude that he had once lived this life here on earth.
Thus Memory would be the arbiter of survival and of the continuity (on the whole) of consciousness. Frederick Myers, indeed, goes so far as to define consciousness as that which is “potentially memorable”[[60]]—thus suggesting that memory is a necessary accompaniment of any psychic state to which we can venture to give the name of consciousness.
It may indeed seem precarious to rest our test of survival on so notoriously fallible, and even at times fallacious, a thing as Memory; but one does not see that there is anything better, or that there is any alternative! The memory may not be continuously enduring and operative; but if at any future time one should be persuaded of having survived from this present life, it must, one would say, be by memory in some form or other, of this present life. And it must be remarked that though memory is fitful and fallible, these epithets apply mainly to the supraliminal memory, to that superficial memory which we make use of by conscious effort, and which often fails us in the moment of need. Deep below this we dimly perceive, and daily are becoming more persuaded of, the existence of vast and permanent but latent stores, which from time to time emerge into manifestation; and more and more our psychologists are inclining to think that the supraliminal self gains its memories by tapping these stores, and that its lapses and oblivions are more due to failure in the tapping process than to any failure of the memory stores themselves. Indeed not a few psychologists are now asking whether it is not likely that every psychic experience carries memory with it, and so is preserved in the great storehouse.
I have already, in the last chapter, spoken of the so-called subliminal self as, among other things, a wonderful storehouse of memory; and I propose now to occupy a few pages with the more detailed consideration of the nature of that self; because, as we are discussing the question of survival, our discussion, as I have just said, ought obviously to include the under as well as the upper strata of consciousness. We cannot very well confine our meaning and our inquiry to the little brain-self only, and leave out of consideration the great self of the emotions and impulses—of genius, love, enthusiasm, and so forth.[[61]] No, we must include both—the more intimate, though more hidden, self, as well as the self of the façade and the front window.
This hidden self is indeed an astounding thing, whose extent and complexity grows upon us as investigation proceeds. For when the term ‘subliminal’ was first used it had apparently a fairly simple connotation—as of some one obscure and unexplored chamber of the mind; but now instead of a single chamber it would seem rather some vast house or palace at whose door we stand, with many chambers and corridors—some dark and underground, some spacious and well lighted and furnished, some lofty with extensive outlook and open to the sky; and the modern psychologists are puzzling themselves to find suitable names for all these new domains—which indeed they cannot satisfactorily do, seeing they know so little of their geography!
I can only attempt here—very roughly I am afraid, and unsystematically—to point out some of the properties and qualities of the underlying or hidden or subconscious self—whichever term we may like to use. In the first place, its memory appears to be little short of perfect, and at any rate to our ordinary intelligence and estimate, nothing short of marvellous. When a servant girl, who can neither read nor write, reproduces, in her wandering speech during a nervous fever, whole sentences of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which she could not possibly understand, and which had only fallen quite casually on her ears years before from the lips of an old scholar (who used to recite passages to himself as he walked up and down a room adjoining the kitchen in which the girl at that time worked[[62]]); we perceive that the under or latent memory may catch and retain for a lengthy period, and with strange accuracy, the most fleeting and apparently superficial impressions. When Dr. Milne Bramwell instructs a hypnotized subject to make a cross on a bit of paper exactly 20,180 minutes after the giving of the order; and the patient, having of course emerged from the hypnotic sleep, and gone about her daily work, and having no conscious remembrance of the command, does nevertheless at the expiration of the stated number of days and minutes take a piece of paper and make the said cross upon it,[[63]] we can only marvel both at the persistence and accuracy of memory which the subliminal being displays, and at the strict command which this being may exercise in its silent way over the actions of the supraliminal self. When we are repeatedly told that in the moment of drowning, people remember every action and event of their past life, though we may doubt the exact force of the word ‘every,’ we cannot but be convinced that an enormous and astounding resurgence of memory does take place,[[64]] and we cannot but suspect that the memorization is somehow on a different plane of consciousness from the usual one, being simultaneous and in mass instead of linear and successive. Or when, again, a ‘calculating boy’ or prodigy of quite tender years on being asked to find the cube-root of 31,855,013 instantly says 317, or being given the number 17,861 immediately remarks that it consists of the factors 337 × 53,[[65]] we are reduced to the alternative suppositions, either that the boy’s subconscious self works out these sums with a perfectly amazing rapidity, or that it has access to stores of memory and knowledge quite beyond the experience of the life-time concerned. In all these cases, and hundreds and thousands of others which have been observed, the memory of the subliminal self—whether manifested through hypnotism, or in sleep or dreams, or in other ways—seems to exceed in range and richness, as well as in rapidity, the memory of the supraliminal self; and indeed Myers goes so far as to say that the deeper down one penetrates below the supraliminal, the more perfect is the remembrance: that, in cases where one can reach various planes of memory in the same subject, “it is the memory furthest from waking life whose span is the widest, whose grasp of the organism’s upstored impressions is the most profound.”[[66]] This is, I think, a very important conclusion, and one to which we may recur later.
But the hidden being within us does not show this extraordinary command of mental processes merely in technical matters. Its powers extend far deeper, into such regions as those of Genius and Prophecy. The wonderful flashes of intuition, the complex combinations of ideas, which at times leap fully formed and with a kind of authority into the field of man’s waking consciousness, obviously proceed from a deep intelligence of some kind, lying below, and are the product of an immensely extended and rapid survey of things, brought to a sudden focus. They yield us the finest flowers of Art; and some at any rate of the most remarkable instances of Prediction. For though there may be—and probably is—a purely clairvoyant prophetic gift, freed as it were from the obscuration of Time, yet it cannot be doubted that much or most of prophecy is simply very swift and conclusive inference derived from very extensive observation.
These flashes and inspirations are clearly not the product of the conscious brain; they are felt by the latter to come from beyond it. They are, in the language of Myers, “uprushes from the subliminal self.” And even beyond them there are things which come from the same source—there are splendid enthusiasms, and overwhelming impulses of self-sacrifice, as well as mad and dæmonic passions.
Yet again, it is not merely command of mental processes that the subconscious being displays, but of the bodily powers and processes too. Intelligent itself to the marvellous degrees already indicated, it is evident also that its intelligence penetrates and ordains the whole body. Every one has heard of the stigmata of the Crucifixion appearing on the hands and feet of some religious devotee, as in the celebrated case of Louise Lateau. Dr. Briggs of Lima once told a hypnotized patient that “a red cross would appear on her chest every Friday during a period of four months”—and obediently the mark appeared.[[67]] A whisper in such cases is often sufficient; and the latent power swiftly but effectually modifies all the complex activities and functions of the organism to produce the desired result. What an extraordinary combination of elaborate intelligence and detailed organizing power must here be at work! And the same in the quite common yet very remarkable cases of mental healing, with which we are all now familiar!
Sometimes again—quite apart from any oral suggestion or apparent outside influence—we find the subjective being taking most decisive command of a person’s faculties and actions. This happens, for instance, in somnambulism, when the sleepwalker perhaps passes along the narrow and perilous ridge of a roof or wall with perfect balance and sureness of foot—adjusting a hundred muscles in the most delicate way, and yet with total unconsciousness as far as the supraliminal self is concerned. Or it happens sometimes—even more remarkably—to people in full possession of their waking faculties, at some moment when extreme danger threatens to overwhelm them. John Muir in his The Mountains of California,[[68]] describes how when scaling the very precipitous face of a cliff he found himself completely baffled, at a great height from the ground, and unable to proceed either up or down. He was seized with panic and a trembling in every limb, and was on the point of falling, when suddenly a perfect calm and assurance took possession of him, and somehow—he never quite knew how—with an astonishing agility and sure-footedness he completed the ascent, and was saved. “I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other Self—bygone experiences, Instinct or Guardian Angel, call it what you will—came forward and assumed control. My trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.”
Mæterlinck, in his chapter on “The Psychology of Accident” (in Life and Flowers), describes how in the nerve-commotion of danger, Instinct, “a rugged, brutal, naked, muscular figure,” rushes to the rescue. “With a glance that is surer and swifter than the onrush of the peril, it takes in the situation, then and there unravels all its details, issues and possibilities, and in a trice affords a magnificent, an unforgettable spectacle of strength, courage, precision, and will, in which unconquered life flies at the throat of death.” And similar instances—of instinctive presence of mind, and an almost miraculous development of faculty in extreme danger—are within the knowledge of most people. The subliminal being steps in quite decisively, and the ordinary conscious mind feels that another power is taking over the reins.
But there is another faculty of the subjacent self which must not be passed over, and which is very important—I mean the image-forming power. This is one of the prime faculties of all intelligent beings, lying at the very root of creation; and it is a faculty possessed to an extreme and impressive degree by the self “behind the scenes.” I have discussed this subject generally at some length in my book The Art of Creation, and need not repeat the matter here, except to allude to a few points. The image-forming faculty is a natural attribute of the conscious mind, in all perhaps but the lowest grades of evolution; at any rate it is difficult to think of a mind at all like ours without this faculty. This faculty is most active when the mind is withdrawn into itself, in quietude. In his study or when burning the midnight oil the writer’s brain teems, or is supposed to teem, with images! But in sleep the image-forming activity is even greater. It then shows itself in the subconscious mind, in the world of dreams, whose bodiless creations are more vivid and energetic than those of our waking hours, and have a strange sense of reality about them. But again, in the deeper sleep of trance still more vivid images are produced. A young student hypnotized imagines himself to be Napoleon, then to be Garibaldi, then to be an old woman of ninety, then to be a mere child. He acts the parts of these characters, imitates their handwriting, their voices, issues proclamations to his soldiers in the name of the first two, assumes the shaky penmanship of childhood and of old age; and all in the course of half-an-hour or so.[[69]] The images thus formed in the deep trance of the young man are so vivid, so powerful, so dramatic, that they take possession of the organism and compel it to become the means of their manifestation. In mediumistic trance the same thing happens. There may be suggestion from outside, or there may not, but in the depth of the medium’s mind images are formed which speak and act through the entranced person, making use in doing so of the marvellous stores of memory and knowledge which the inner mind has at command, and sorely puzzling the spectators at times, as to whether the performance is merely histrionic or whether by chance it indicates a bona fide communication from the dead.[[70]]
This energetic dramatic quality of the image-forming faculty is tremendously important. It has not been enough insisted upon; and it has been greatly misunderstood and misrepresented. It is, as I say, a root-property of creation. It is seen everywhere in the healthy activity of the human mind, in its delight in romance and imagination, in the play of children, the stage, literature, art, scientific invention—the sheer joy of creation, going on everywhere and always. Lay the conscious and controlling and selective power of the upper mind at rest, in the trance-condition, and you have in the deeps of the subliminal self this primal creative power exposed. Offer to it the lightest suggestion, and there springs forth from that abyss a figure corresponding, or a dozen figures, or a whole procession! The mere delight of creation calls them forth. Could anything be more wonderful? What a strange glimpse it gives us of the possibilities of Creation.
Some people seem to be quite shocked at the idea that this subliminal mind, or whatever it is that possesses these marvellous powers, should act these parts, and lend itself to unsubstantial and quasi-fraudulent representations. But why accuse of deception? It is a game—the great game we are all of us playing—the whole Creation romancing away; with endless inexhaustible fertility throwing out images, ideas, new shapes and forms forever. Those forms which hold their own, which substantiate themselves, which fill a place, fulfil a need—they win their way into the actual world and become the originals of the plants, the animals, human beings, works of art, and so forth, which we know. Those which cannot hold their own pass back again into the unseen. In the far depths of the entranced medium’s mind we see this abysmal process going on—this fountain-like production of images taking place—the very beginnings of creation. It is the sheer joy of manifestation. As one gives a musician a mere hint or clue—a theme of three or four notes—and immediately he improvises a spirited piece of music; so is it with the hypnotized person or with the medium. One gives him a suggestion and he immediately creates the figures according. And so it is for us, to direct this wonderful power, even in ourselves—not to call it fraudulent, but to make use of it for splendid ends.
Doubtless it can be used for unworthy ends. It is easy to understand that the mediumistic person, finding this wonderful dramatic and creative faculty within himself or herself, is sometimes tempted to turn it to personal advantage; and succumbs to the temptation. The dramatic habit catches hold of the waking self, and renders the person tricky and unreliable.[[71]] But below it all is creation, and the instinct of creation—the power that gives to airy nothing a local habitation, the genius of the dramatist, of the artist, of the inventor, and the very source of the visible and tangible world.
For from the Under-self—as exposed in the state of trance, or in extreme languor and exhaustion of the body, or in the moment of death, or in dreams, or even in profound reverie—proceed (strange as it may seem) Voices and Visions and Forms, things audible and visible and tangible, things anyhow which are competent to impress the senses of spectators so vividly as to be for the moment indistinguishable from the phenomena, audible, visible and tangible, of our actual world. Amazing as are the materializations connected with mediums—the figures which appear, which speak, which touch and are touched, the faces, the supernumerary feet and hands, the sounds, the lights, the movements of objects—all in some way connected with the medium’s presence—these phenomena are now far too well established and confirmed by careful and scientific observation to admit (in the mass) of any reasonable doubt.[[72]] And similarly with the wraiths, or phantoms which are projected from dying or lately dead persons, the evidence for them in general is much too abundant and well attested to allow of disbelief.[[73]] What an extraordinary story, for instance, is that given by Sir Oliver Lodge in his Survival of Man (p. 101)—of a workman who having drunk poison by mistake, appeared in the moment of death, with blue and blotched face to his employer, to whom he was greatly attached, and told him not to be deceived by the rumor that he (the workman) had committed suicide! Yet the story is fully and authoritatively given in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. iii. p. 97, and cannot well be set aside. But if such things happen in the hour of death, so do they also happen in the dream-state.[[74]] The dreamer has a vivid dream of visiting a certain person, and is accordingly and at that time, seen by that person. And in the state of reverie the same. It is at times sufficient to think profoundly of any one, or to let one’s inner self go out toward that person in order to cause an image of oneself to be seen by him.
It will of course be said, and often is said, that those phenomena are only hallucinations, and have no objective existence. But the sufficient answer to that is that the things also of our actual world are hallucinations in their degree, and certainly have no full objective existence. The daffodil in my garden is an hallucination in that degree that with the smallest transposition of my senses, its color, its scent, and even its form might be quite altered. What we call its objectivity rests on the permanence of its relations—on its continued appearance in one spot, its visibility to different people at one time, or to one person at different times, and so forth. But if that is the definition of objectivity, it is obvious that the forms which have been seen over and over again, and under strict test-conditions, in connection with certain mediums, have had in their degree an objective existence.
In America, in connection with Kate Fox (one of the earliest and most spontaneous and natural of modern mediums), a certain Mr. Livermore—a thoroughly capable business man of New York—came into communication as it seemed with his deceased wife. She appeared to him—not in one house only, but in several houses—over and over again; sometimes only the head, sometimes the whole figure; her appearance was accompanied by inexplicable sounds and lights; she communicated sometimes by raps, sometimes by visibly writing on blank cards brought for the purpose; and these phenomena extended over a period of six years and 388 recorded sittings, and at many of the sittings were corroborated by independent witnesses.[[75]] It is difficult to imagine hallucinations or deceit maintained under such circumstances.
In England (in connection with the medium Florence Cook) the figure “Katie King” appeared to Sir William Crookes a great number of times during three years (1881–84) and was studied by him and Mr. C. F. Varley, F.R.S., with the greatest scientific care. Her apparition often spoke to those present, was touched by, and touched them, wrote, or played with the children. It often came outside the cabinet, and three times was seen by those present simultaneously with, and by the side of, the entranced medium. The figure was taller than the medium and different in feature; Crookes observed its pulse and found it making 75 beats a minute to the medium’s 90, and so forth.[[76]]
Professor Richet, the French scientist, examined with great care the phantasm “Beni Boa,” which appeared to him some twenty times in connection with the Algerian medium Aisha; he obtained several photographs of it, and observed its pulse, its respiration, and so forth.[[77]] Lombroso, the author of many scientific works, and a man who to begin with was a complete sceptic on these matters, assures us that at the sittings of Eusapia Paladino he saw his own mother (long dead) a great number of times, and that she repeatedly kissed him.[[78]] In connection with Mme. D’Espérance[[79]] the girlish figure of “Yolanda” appeared and disappeared very frequently during a period of ten years, and was well known to frequenters of her circle; and in 1896 a committee formed by some twenty-five high officials and well-known persons in Norway publicly attested the repeated appearance at her seances of a very beautiful female figure who glided among the sitters, grasped their hands, gave them messages, and so forth, and disappeared before their eyes in a misty cloud.[[80]] Such evidence of the objectivity of seance figures could be rather indefinitely multiplied. But the same may be said, though perhaps less conclusively, of various ghosts and other manifestations, whose relations to certain persons or places or houses seem quite definite and well established—and not unfrequently steadily recurrent under the same conditions.[[81]]
Without going into the vexed question of whether these and the like manifestations are merely products or inventions of the trance-mind of the medium or other person concerned, or whether some at least of them are the work or evidence of separate ‘spirits’—leaving that question open for the present—we may still say that all these things are actual creations—creations of the hidden self of Man in some form or other; not so assured, certainly, and not so permanent as the well-known shapes of outer Nature; abortive creations, if you like, which come a little way forward into manifestation, and then retreat again; but still creations in the same sense as those more established ones; and wonderfully revealing to us the secret of the generation and birth of all the visible world.
That we should have, all of us, this magic source somewhere buried within—this Aladdin’s lamp, this vase of the Djinns, this Pandora box of evil as well as of good, is indeed astounding; and must cause us, when we have once fully realized the fact, to envisage life quite differently from what we have ever done before. It must cause us to feel that our very ordinary and daily self—which we know so well (and which sometimes we even get a little tired of) is only a fraction, only a flag and a signal, of that great Presence which we really are, that great Mass-man who lies unexplored behind the very visible and actual. Difficult or impossible as this being may be to define, enormously complex as it probably is, and far-reaching, and hard to gauge, yet we see that it is there, undeniably there—a being that apparently includes far extremes of faculty and character, running parallel to the conscious self from low to high levels,[[82]] having in its range of manifestation the most primitive desires and passions, and the highest feats of intellect and enthusiasm; and while at times capable of accepting the most frivolous suggestions and of behaving in a humorous or merely capricious and irresponsible manner, at other times capable, as we have seen, of taking most serious command and control of the whole physical organism, and as far as the spiritual organism is concerned, of rising to the greatest heights of prophecy and inspiration.[[83]]
I say, then, that we must include in this problem of survival both the ordinary upper and conscious self and the deep-lying subjective and subconscious (or superconscious) being. Just as the organizing power of the Body includes the Cerebro-spinal system of nerves on the one hand, and the Great-Sympathetic system on the other, so the organism of the soul includes the supraliminal and subliminal portions. The two must be taken together, and either alone could only represent a fraction of the real person. The exact relation of these two selves to each other is a matter which can only become clear with long time and study of this difficult subject. It may be that the subliminal self is destined to become conscious in our ordinary sense of the word. It may be, on the other hand, that the conscious self is destined to rise into the much wider consciousness of the subjective being. There is a great deal to suggest that the supraliminal self is only the front as it were of the great wave of life; and that the brain consciousness is only a very special instrument for dealing with the surroundings and conditions of our terrestrial existence—an instrument which will surrender much of its value at death and on mergence with the larger and differently constituted consciousness which underruns and sustains it. That the two selves are in constant communication with each other, and that they are both intelligent in some sense, is obvious from the facts of suggestion, by which often the lightest whisper so to speak from the upper is understood and attended to by the under self; while, on the other hand, the under-self communicates with the upper, sometimes by inner Voices heard and Visions seen, sometimes by automatic actions, as in dream- or trance-writing, sometimes even by Sounds and Apparitions so powerful as to appear at least external.
So we cannot but think that the question of survival may ultimately resolve itself very much into the question of the more complete and effectual understanding between these different portions of the self. When they come into clear relation with each other, when the unit-man and the Mass-man merge into a perfect understanding and harmony, when they both become conscious of their affiliation to the great Self of the universe, then the problem will be solved—or we may perhaps say, the problem will cease to exist.
NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII
ON TRANCE-PHENOMENA
It may seem rash or unbalanced to dwell, in the preceding chapters, on trance and mediumistic phenomena as much as I have done, considering that they are in some sense abnormal—that is, they are unusual, and comparatively few people have an opportunity of verifying them; also they may (it is said) be abnormal in the sense of being the products of conditions so special or even so morbid that conclusions drawn from them can have no general importance or value.
There is a certain fashion in such matters, and with large sections of the public and during a long period it has no doubt been the habit simply to dismiss all consideration of this subject, as for one reason or another unadvisable. But now these phenomena in general (or enough of them to constitute a solid body of observation) are so thoroughly corroborated that it would be mere affectation to pass them by; and the best science nowadays refuses to ignore exceptional happenings on account of their exceptionality—recognizing that these very happenings often afford the key to the explanation of more common events.
The phenomena connected with mediums and seances have been so amazing and unexpected that they have often produced a kind of fear and dismay. The religious people have been terrified at the prospect of having to acknowledge miracles not connected with the Church; or of having to confess to the resurrection of John Smith as well as of Jesus Christ. The scientific folk (in many or most quarters) being always just on the point of completing their pet scheme of the universe—whatever it may happen to be at the time—have naturally been in no mood to admit new facts which would totally disarrange their systems; and have, therefore, with a few brilliant exceptions, consistently closed their eyes or looked another way. And the general public, not without reason, has feared to embark on a subject which might easily float it away from the dry land of practical life, into one knows not what sea of doubt or even delusion.
But these difficulties attend at all times the introduction of a new subject—or at least of one which is new to the generation concerned; and can of course not be allowed to interfere with the candid and impartial examination of the subject, or with the assimilation, as far as feasible, of its message. It should certainly, I think, be admitted that there are dangers attending the new science—or rather attending the hasty and careless investigation of it—just as there are attending any other science. There is no doubt that the phenomena connected with it are so astounding that they in some cases unhinge people’s minds, or at least for the time upset them; and what we have already said once or twice of the frequent bodily exhaustion of the Medium, not to mention the occasional exhaustion of the sitters, must convince us that the greatest care should be exercised in connection with trance-conditions, and that the whole subject should be studied with a view to discovering its proper and best handling. It is clear—whatever view is taken of the process—that a certain disintegration of the organism, and even of the personality of the medium, is liable to occur, one portion of the organism acting in a manner and under influences foreign to another portion, and that such disintegration oft repeated or long continued may be liable to produce a permanent degeneration of physique or even possibly demoralization of character. If there is a danger in this direction—and the extent of the danger should certainly be gauged—equally certainly it ought to be minimized or averted by the proper conditions. On the other hand, while noting this danger, we should not leave out of mind that some evidence points in the other direction—namely, to the favorable effects and influences of trance when rightly conducted.[[84]] We may also in this connection allude to the changed attitude of the general mind to-day toward Hypnotism—a subject allied to that which we are considering. Fifty years ago the word had a sinister sound, and hypnotism and mesmerism were thought to be inventions of the devil and agencies of all evil. To-day they are recognized as a great power for good, and in at least two hospitals (in France) as the main instrument of healing. Naturally, when people are ignorant of a subject, or only in the first stages of knowledge with regard to it, they mishandle and misunderstand it. It may well happen therefore that with better understanding of mediumship and trance-conditions, some of their drawbacks or less favorable aspects may pass out of sight.
Mediums and trance-phenomena—prophecy, second sight, speaking in strange tongues, the appearance of flames and lights, and of figures apparently from the dead—are things that have been known all down history, and recognized almost as a matter of course, both among quite primitive peoples like the Kaffirs, or the Aleuts or the Mongolians, or among the more cultured like the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus, Chinese, and so forth. The Bible teems with references to wizards and “necromancers” (note the meaning of the word); and the story of the Witch of Endor gives us a penetrating glimpse into what was evidently a common practice of “consultation.” These phenomena have never been so common as to break up and disorganize the routine of ordinary life, yet they have always been there, and recognized, as on the fringe or borderland—in somewhat the same way as the knowledge or recognition of Death does not interfere with daily life or prevent us making engagements; though we know it may do so at any time. And beyond any direct uses that trance-communication and manifestations may have now, or may have had in the past (a matter on which no doubt there is a good deal of difference of opinion), we may fairly suppose that as examples of real things and of a real world lying just outside the sphere of our ordinary and actual experience they may be of immense value—both as delivering us from a cramped and petty belief that we have already fathomed the possibilities of the universe, and as giving us just a hint and a glimpse of directions in which we may fairly look for the future. That we should for the present be limited for the most part to a definite sphere of activity, or to a definite region of creation, seems only natural. “One world, please, at a time!” said Thoreau when on his deathbed he was plagued by some pious person about the future life; and if we in our daily life were entangled in the manifestations of two very different planes of existence it might be greatly baffling. At the same time, the occasional hint or message from another plane may be of the greatest help.
Condensations and manifestations (as of beings from such other plane) may be abnormal at present. They may be rare, they may occur under unexpected and even unhealthy conditions, they may cause dislocations of mind and of morals, they may be confused and confusing. All these things we should indeed in some degree expect; and yet it may not follow that these objections will continue. It is quite possible that in the future they will disappear. As I have had occasion to say many times, every new movement or manifestation of human activity, when unfamiliar to people’s minds, is sure to be misrepresented and misunderstood. It appears in humble guise, without backing or patronage, forcing its way to light in the most unlikely places, “to the Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness,” often distorted and out of shape owing to its very birth-struggles, and for the very same reason diffident at first and uncertain of its own mission. Possibly a time is coming when Mediumship, instead of being left over (as not unfrequently now) to quite ignorant and uncultured specimens of humanity, and being exercised in haphazard, careless fashion, or for monetary gain, or personal vanity, will be looked upon as a sacred and responsible office, worthy of and requiring considerable preparation and instruction, demanding the respect of the public, yet thoroughly criticized, both in method and result, by intelligent examination and logic. Possibly a time is coming when messages and manifestations from another plane than that of our daily life will come to us under the most obviously healthy and sane conditions, and will be fully recognized as having value and even, in their way, authority.
For the present—allowing (as I do) the absolute genuineness of a great body of “spiritualistic” phenomena—there still is (owing to various causes already indicated) considerable doubt as to who or what the manifesting beings or forces are. I suppose the main theories on the subject may be gathered under the following heads: that the manifesting powers are (1) Images, more or less unconsciously projected from the Medium’s own mind; or, in case of raps, and so forth, emissions of force from the medium’s body; (2) that they are the same projected from the minds or bodies of other persons present; (3) that they are independent Beings, making use of the medium’s or other person’s organism for the purpose of expression; or (4) that there is a blending of these actions.
I think everyone who has studied the matter practically admits the first explanation in some degree; most people perhaps allow the second and fourth; but a good many—though not all—exclude the third. With regard, however, to this last theory (that there really are occasional messages or manifestations from the dead—or from “the other side”) there certainly seems to be a very considerable residuum of evidence which, though not absolutely conclusive, is favorable to it; and there certainly are a considerable number of eminent and responsible men—like Myers, Lodge, Lombroso, and others—who, though not dogmatic, profess themselves inclined to accept the theory, on the evidence so far available. For myself—having so little personal and direct experience in this field—I do not feel in a position to form a definite opinion, and am content to leave the evidence to accumulate.
CHAPTER IX
SURVIVAL OF THE SELF
In the last chapter we pointed out that for any adequate understanding of the subject before us the self must be taken to include the more obscure and subconscious portion of the mind, as well as the specially conscious portion with which we are most familiar. There is a constant interaction and flow taking place between the two parts, and to draw a strict line dividing them would be impossible. Indeed it would rather appear that growth comes largely by their blending and throwing light on each other. We also brought forward some considerations to show the nature of the underlying or subconscious self—its immense extent, the swiftness of its perceptions, and so forth. If then, to continue our argument, there should come a time (in death) when the outer and more obvious ego merges, or at least comes into closer relation, with the under-self, it would seem likely that the surviving consciousness would be greatly changed from its present form, and would take on something of the instantaneous wide-reaching character of what has been called the Cosmic Consciousness. And this is a conclusion much to be expected, and surely also much to be desired. However one may envisage the matter, it hardly seems possible to imagine an after-death consciousness quite on the same plane as our present consciousness. (This, too—one may say in passing—probably explains the difficulty we experience in holding direct communication with the dead—the same sort of difficulty, in fact, that the outer mind during life has in directly reaching the inner mind.) Myers[[85]] speaks of our supraliminal life as merely a special phase of our whole personality, and suggests that there are good reasons for thinking that there is a relation—“obscure but indisputable—between the subliminal and the surviving self.” Under these circumstances it would seem natural to inquire what definite reasons there may be for thinking that the subliminal self survives; and I shall occupy this chapter largely with that question.
(1) In the first place, from the observed process of the generation and growth of the body from a microscopic origin, we have already argued (chapter vii.) the probability of the pre-existence in a sub-atomic or fourth-dimensional state of the being which is manifested in the body, and therefore the probability of the continuance of that being after the dissolution of the body. And this argument must include the Under-self, which is responsible for so much of the organization and growth and sustentation of the body, as well as the Upper; and may well lead us to infer that both upper and under selves continue after death—only conjoined in some way, and with some added experience gained during life.
(2) In the second place, we are struck by the fact that continuous Memory—which we decided to be the very necessary condition of survival—is just the thing which is so strong in the subjective being and so characteristic of it. The huge stores of memory—and of quite personal and individual memory—which this being has at command, their long dormancy and their extraordinary resurgence at times when conditions call them forth, are a marvel to the investigator, and make us feel that it is hardly probable that they are all swept away at death. Even if dormant at the time of death, it seems not unlikely that here again later conditions may awake them once more to life.
But (3), we have a great deal of evidence to show that, as a matter of fact, the underlying self is especially active at the moment of death. The whole phenomenon of ‘wraiths’—now in the mass so amply proved[[86]]—the projection of phantasms sometimes to an immense distance,[[87]] by persons in articulo mortis—goes to show its intense energy and vitality (if one may use the word) at that moment. And the vivid resurgences of memory at the same moment (or in any hour of danger) point in the same direction. T. J. Hudson, and others, insist that the subjective mind never sleeps—that whatever drowsiness, or faintness, or languor may overpower the upper or self-conscious mind, the under mind is still acutely awake and operant, and if this is (as it appears) true with regard to sleep, it may well also be so even with regard to death.
Again (4), the Telæsthetic faculty of the under-self (I mean during life)—its power of clairvoyantly perceiving things and events at a distance, even in minutest details—is a very wonderful fact—a fact that is amply established, and one that must give us pause. Here are vision and perception at work without eyes or ears, or any of the usual bodily end-organs[[88]]—and acting in such a way as to suggest or practically to prove that the soul has other channels or instruments of perception than those connected with the well-known outer body. Every one has heard of cases of this kind. They are common on the borderland of sleep, or in dreams, and—what especially appeals to us here—they are very common in the hour of death. If the soul (as is evidently the case) can perceive without the intermediation of mortal eye or ear; then—though we may conclude that these special organs have been fashioned or developed for special terrene use—we may also conclude that, without them, it would still continue to exercise perception, developing sight and hearing and other faculties along lines with which at present we are but slightly acquainted. These faculties spring inevitably deep down out of ourselves, and will recur again doubtless wherever we are.... “Were your eyes destroyed, still the faculty of sight were not destroyed; out of the same roots again as before would another optic apparatus spring.”[[89]]
And the same may be said, (5), about the telepathic faculty—that is, the power (not of perceiving, but) of sending impressions or messages to a distance. This power which the under-self has of communicating with the under-selves of other persons, and often at a great distance, is one of the best-established facts in the new psychology; and again, it is very pregnant with inference. It shows us the soul acting vividly along certain lines independent as far as we can see of the known body, certainly along lines independent of the known organs of expression. It compels us to conclude a possible and even probable activity quite apart from that body. With this telepathic power, or as an extension of it, may be classed the image-projecting faculty, which we have already seen to be peculiarly active in death. And it may be appropriate here to notice that in quite a number of the cases of wraiths or phantasms projected (in forty cases out of three hundred and sixteen as given by Edmund Gurney in Proceedings S.P.R. vol. v. p. 408) the apparition was seen after the death had occurred—though within twenty-four hours after. This may directly indicate an after-death activity of the person who projected the image, or it may merely indicate a relay of the telepathic impression on its way, or in the subconscious mind of the recipient, previous to emerging in the latter’s conscious mind.[[90]]
All these things are strongly indicative. They do not give the impression that at death the underlying self is in the act of perishing. On the contrary, they point to its continuance, and if anything increased activity; while at the same time the strongly personal character of many of the phenomena referred to—the wonderfully distinct personal memories, the very personal images or phantasms projected, the telepathic appeal to nearest and dearest friends—all suggest that the continuing activity does not merely tail off into an abstract life-force or vague stream of tendency, but is of a distinctly personal or individual character.
There is another consideration, (6), on which I may dwell for a moment here. The passion of Love, whether considered in its physical or in its psychical and emotional aspects, is notably a matter of the subjective or subliminal life. The little self-conscious, logical, argumentative personality is completely routed by this passion, which seems to spring from the great depths of being with Titanic force, full-armed in its own convictions, and overturning all established orders and conventions. It surely must give us a deep insight into the nature of that hidden self from which it springs. Yet nothing is more noticeable about the passion than its recklessness of mortal life—nothing more noticeable than its willingness to sacrifice all worldly prospects and the body itself in the pursuit of its ends. Even the most physical love, as we have said already (chapter vi.), has a strange relation to Death, and often slays the very object of its desire:—
“For each man kills the thing he loves,
Though each man does not die.”
While the more emotional form of the passion almost rejoices in its contempt of life and its willingness to face dangers and death for the sake of the beloved. It says as plain as words:—“I can fulfil myself and my purposes all right, even without this mortal part which you hold so dear”; and unless we think that the hidden being who thus speaks is a perfect fool, we must conclude that it is aware of a life surpassing that of the body.
Such a continuing life we no doubt have evidence of, and indeed commonly admit to exist, in the Race-life; and as a first approximation it seems natural and obvious to interpret the underlying or subliminal self as being simply the Race-self. In the case of the lower and less developed forms of creation, perhaps this is the wisest thing to do. In default of more detailed and perfect knowledge, we may easily assume that in a shoal of several million herrings or in a ‘culture’ of several billion microbes the underlying self of each particular herring or microbe is practically identical with the self of the race concerned. But in the case of man and some of the higher animals it is not so easy to do this. We find a strongly individual element in his subconscious mind, which must also be accounted for. I have already alluded to the stores of individual memory which this mind retains, thus differentiating it from others; and I have alluded to the intensely individual phantasms which it projects. And now again we are brought face to face with the greatly individual character of its love-passion. However much the love-passion may be symbolical of the life of the race, and deeply implicated in the same (and both of these it certainly is), still—except in its lower forms—there is nothing vague and general and undifferentiated about that passion; on the contrary, it is most strongly personal and sharply outlined. Why is it that out of the hundred thousand people that a man may meet only one will arouse this tremendous response? Why is it that every great love in its depth seems different from every other? Do not these things suggest a profound difference of outline in the subconscious beings themselves from whom these loves proceed? These beings are manifestations and organic expressions of the Race—yes. But they are also deeply individual and different—each one from the other.
And here we seem to come upon the first emergence of the solution of the problem before us. The self of which we are in search has—especially through its subconscious part—a vast continuing life, affiliated to the life of the race and beyond that to the cosmic life of the All; but it also has a strongly individual outline and character. Nursed in the womb of the Race during countless ages, like a babe within its mother, passing through numberless reincarnations in a kind of collective way, and in more or less unconsciousness of its supreme and separate destiny, it at last in Man attains to the clear sense of individuality, and (through much suffering) is set free to an independent existence; being finally exhaled from earth-mortality into a cosmic life under other conditions of space and time than ours.
Difficult as this conception of a continued individual existence may be to hold to in view of the terrible and external flux of general Nature, and difficult as it may be to understand in all detail; yet, as I say, it is Love which compels us to the insight of its truth. It is Love which has the clear conception of the uniqueness of the beloved, it is love which positively refuses to believe in her (or his) annihilation, it is love alone which in the hour of loss can face the awful midnight sky, and dare to sing:—
“Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace,
Sleep, holy Spirit, blessed soul!
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.”
And it is in the meeting of lovers that the heavens open, allowing them to see—if only for a moment—the eternities to which they both belong.
There are no doubt other considerations—I mean those connected with mediumistic and so-called spiritualistic phenomena—which point toward the conclusion of an individual survival of some kind after death; but although this kind of evidence is likely to prove in the end of immense value, it is possible that the time has not yet quite come when it can be completely substantiated, tabulated, and effectively utilized; at any rate I do not feel myself in a position to so deal with it. It has also to be said that a great deal of this evidence (relating to actual communications from the dead) is necessarily of so very personal a character that it can only appeal to the individual persons concerned, and however convincing it may be to them does naturally not carry the same conviction to the world at large. I shall therefore for the present pass these considerations by, and, on the strength of the arguments already brought forward, assume the general truth of man’s survival.
The course of the argument has been somewhat as follows. In the first place, we have urged the enormous possibilities (disclosed by modern investigation) of other life than that which we know—thus enlarging the bounds of the likely, and weakening the argument from improbability. In the second place, we have pointed out that continuance of memory seems the best test of survival; that even in our law courts (as in a Tichborne case) it is not so much the facts of feature and form as the facts of memory which are relied on to prove identity. Thirdly, we have argued that not only the supraliminal but also the subliminal self must be considered in this matter, and that probably the surviving self will arise from a harmony or conjunction between these two. Fourthly, we have shown that in respect of memory and many other matters the subliminal self shows a quite remarkable activity even in the hour of bodily death—which does not certainly suggest its decease and cessation from existence. Fifthly, we have seen that all through life the soul has faculties (of clairvoyance, transposition of senses, and so forth) which point to its independence of the material body. Sixthly, that through love it reaches a deep conviction of its own duration beyond the life of the body. And, seventhly, we have suggested that it is largely through the supraliminal and self-conscious life that the sense of identity and individuality is educed and finally established.
Proceeding, then, further along these lines, the next and obvious question which arises is, In what sort of body is this continuing life manifested? That it must be manifested in some sort of body is, I think, clear. If we had only arrived at the conclusion that at death the human being merged in the All-soul, or became an indistinguishable portion of the ‘Happy Mass’—that his individual memory flowed out into the great ocean of the world-memory and became lost in it, and that his power of individual action or perception passed away in like manner—why then the question of a continuing body could not well arise, or at farthest stretch such body could only be thought of as something indistinguishable from the entire universe. But if there is any truth in the idea of an individual survival, then it seems clear that there must be some kind of form, to mark the bounds of the individual, and to give outline to his relations to other individuals—whether those relations be active and invasive or passive and receptive; there must be some surface of resistance and separation.
With this question I shall deal in the next chapter. Before, however, going into any definite theory of this ‘soul-body,’ it may be useful to dwell for a moment on general considerations. In the first place, it is clear that if the individual survives, he does not do so in any fixed and unchanging form. The form of the individual is not fixed in this earth-life; nor can we expect or wish it to be so in any other life. As long as there is a continuous stream of experience and memory, going on from this life to another life, and from that perchance to others—that is all we can expect to find. There may, indeed, be a fixed and transcendent Individuality, an aspect of the Universal, at the root of all these experiences, but with that we are hardly concerned at this moment—only with the stream of personal manifestations which proceed from it—everchanging yet linked together from hour to hour. In the second place, though we have dwelt upon and emphasized the idea of separateness and differentiation, in the surviving self, in contra-distinction to the idea of fusion in a formless aggregate, yet it is clear here too that the common life and bonds must hold individuals together, just as much as, if not more than, in the earth-life. The salient facts of telepathy, sympathy, clairvoyance, and so forth convince us that souls, freed to some extent from their grosser present envelopes, will react upon each other in the future, or in that farther world, more swiftly and more intimately than they do now. And as they progress from stage to stage, developing individualities and differences always on a grander and grander scale, so they will also develop through love their organic union with each other. It seems possible, indeed, that growth will largely take place through love-fusion; till at length, rising into the highest ranges of combined Individuality and Universality, the transformed consciousness of each soul will take on its true quality—“that of space itself—which is at rest everywhere.”
CHAPTER X
THE INNER OR SPIRITUAL BODY
In order to form a conception of what kind of body the surviving Self may have, it seems best for the moment to go back to the genesis of our present body. We saw (chapter vii.) that we were compelled to suppose, even in the first germ of our actual body an intelligent form of some kind at work, which while gathering up and representing race-memories of the past, presided over and directed their rehabilitation in the present, thus building up the present body according to a certain pattern—(though subject of course to modification by outer difficulties and obstacles). From the very first, the exceeding complexity and delicacy of the movements within the germ-cells, combined with the decisiveness of their divisions and differentiations, and the perfection and adaptation of the bodily structures and organs ultimately produced, all point in the suggested direction.[[91]] At the same time, we were compelled to conclude that this form, whose first manifestations in the tiny germ-cell evidently originate from quite ultra-microscopic movements, was itself invisible, invisible through belonging either to an ultra-microscopic world, or to a world of a fourth-dimensional or other order of existence. I think, therefore, that for the present we may accept that conclusion, and fairly suppose that some such invisible form underlies the genesis of each of our bodies.
But at the same time the conclusion of invisibility must not be supposed to carry with it the conclusion of immateriality. Quite the contrary. A creature living in the two-dimensional world formed by the water-film on the surface of a pond might have no conception of the water-world below or the air-world above—both of which might be quite invisible to it; all the same a fish or a bird breaking through the surface would instantly cause some very powerful and very material phenomena there! And again, though atoms and electrons individually may be quite invisible, it is only a question of their number and the force of their electric charges, as to how far they intrude upon what we call the material world. Also, we must remember that invisibility or imperceptibility does not by any means imply non-occupation of space. On the contrary again. For four-dimensional existence carries with it an occupation of space which is quite miraculous to us—as, for instance, the power of appearing in two places at the same time; while a number of ultra-microscopic atoms, by their electrostatic attractions and repulsions, may maintain definite relations of distance from each other, and may altogether constitute a cloud of considerable size and complex organization—quite imperceptible as a rule, yet occupying a definite area and fully capable of affecting material things.
It may be a question, then, whether it is not some such invisible cloud—perhaps of quite human size and measurement—which at conception begins to enter the fertilized germ-cell, stimulating it to division, and penetrating further and further into the newly-formed body-cells, as by thousands and millions they divide and multiply to form the growing organism. Whatever it is, it is something of infinitely subtle organization and constitution, representing the inmost vitality of the body, and not that inmost vitality in a merely general sense, but the vitality of every portion and section of the body. It establishes itself within the gross body (or it builds that body round itself) and becomes the organizer and provider of its life; maintains its form and structure during life, fortifies it against change and disease, and wards off as long as it can the arrival of death.
What, then, of Death? Why, granted so much as we have supposed, it seems easy to suppose that at death this inner body passes away again. It just leaves the gross body behind and passes out of it. For a fourth-dimensional being this must be easy to do! But not to presume too much on other-dimensional conditions, if we only assume the inner body to be such a cloud of atoms or electrons as already mentioned, the passage of such atoms through the tissues of the gross body would be entirely in accordance with the well-known facts of osmose and the diffusion of liquids and gases, and would present no exceptional or impossible problem. Through cell-walls and muscular and other tissues such atoms would pass, conceivably maintaining still their relative ‘form’ and organization with regard to each other, and forming a cloud similar to that which entered the germ and other cells at conception (though of course so far modified by the life-experience), and leaving now the gross body devitalized, and doomed to slow corruption and to serve only as material for lower forms.
One would not, of course, venture on conjectures so speculative as the above, if it were not that long tradition and history, and even modern experience, so singularly confirm or favor their general truth. The conception of a cloud-like ghost—sometimes visible, sometimes invisible[[92]]—leaving the body at death, roaming through the fields of Hades or some hidden world, and from time to time revisiting the glimpses of the moon and the gaze of wondering mortals—penetrates all literature and tradition. Among all primitive peoples it seems to be accepted as a matter of course; it informs the legends and the drama and the philosophies of the more cultivated; it claims detailed historical instances and proofs[[93]] (as in the case of Field-marshal von Grumbkoff, to whom the wraith of King Frederick Augustus announced his own death—which had just occurred; or in the case of the poet Petrarch, to whom Bishop Colonna made a similar announcement); and in modern times it has met with extraordinary and in many quarters quite unexpected confirmation at the hands of scientific investigation.
To this evidence of general probability that at death a vital and subtle yet substantial inner body is withdrawn from every part and portion of the gross body, we may add the evidence, such as it is, from actual sensation and experience. In the hour of death and in allied physical changes sensations are experienced corresponding to such a conclusion. Though necessarily there is little quite direct evidence, for the actual moment of death, yet in the just preceding stage, of extreme weakness, the sensation of depletion in every part of the body, and of withdrawal, as of a hand being drawn out of a glove, is very noticeable. (And it may be remarked that clairvoyants not unfrequently observe, at death itself, a luminous cloud of the general outline and shape of the dying person being slowly distilled, head first, from his or her head.) Furthermore, in the state of ecstasy—which is closely allied to death—the same sensation of withdrawal is experienced. The person seems to himself to stand outside and a little beyond his own body—and doubtless this experience is denoted in the very etymology of the word. In trance the same: the medium experiences the extreme of exhaustion while some portion of her vital being is functioning (as it appears) outside. Under anæsthetics it is a common experience to dream that one has left the body and is flying through space. (See The Art of Creation, p. 18.) And again, in the case of love—whose close relation to death we have several times already noted—whether it be in the strain of emotional desire or the stress of the physical orgasm this ‘hand from the glove’ sensation is often most acute and seems to suggest that every portion of the body is contributing its part to the process in hand; which indeed in this case of love may very fairly be supposed to consist in a transfer of the cloud-like organism (or a large part of it) to the other person concerned.
There are cases, too, where in a kind of dream-consciousness the sensation of the self passing out through walls and other obstacles is so powerful as to leave an impress on the mind ever after. Such is the case already alluded to (chapter viii. p. 148, supra) from Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, where a lady half waking from sleep “felt herself carried to the wall of her room, with a feeling that it must arrest her further progress. But no; she seemed to pass through it into the open air. Outside the house was a tree; and this also she appeared to traverse as if it interposed no obstacle.” She thus passed to the house of a lady friend, held a conversation with her, and in her dream returned. But afterward the friend reported that she had seen the apparition that night and conversed with it. Similarly a young friend of mine, dreaming one night that his mother (in the same house) was ill, was intensely conscious of dashing—not along corridors and through doorways but through the partition walls of two rooms—into the chamber where his mother slept, when finding her all right he returned; and the experience was so vivid that it remained with him for days afterward.
Taking all these considerations together, we may say that there is a strong general probability in favor of the proposition put forward. And it is interesting and important to find that at this juncture modern science is coming out from her old haunts and beginning seriously to tackle a question which she has hitherto for the most part evaded or ignored. The whole of the psychology and even physiology of Death have (as I have previously remarked) been sadly neglected; but now and of late quite a number of books on this subject have been published,[[94]] and a good deal of scientific activity is moving in that direction.
Professor Fournier d’Albe, in his book New Light on Immortality,[[95]] has made some very interesting suggestions—which though they may not as yet be accounted more than suggestions, seem to be in the right direction, and certainly acquire some authority from his intimate command of the modern discoveries in Physics as well as in the field of Psychical Research. His view is that every one of the twenty-five thousand million million cells which constitute say the human body has probably some ‘centrosome’ or other vital point within it, which is in fact the governing and organizing power of that cell. Such point or collection of points, though ‘material,’ may likely weigh only a ten-thousandth part of the cell-weight. Hence if this ‘soul’ was abstracted from each cell, the total weight of the twenty-five thousand billion souls resulting would be only a ten-thousandth part of the body weight, or about a fifth of an ounce! But these soul-fragments or psychomeres as he calls them, would together make up the total soul of the man, and—as already explained—might not only by their negative and positive charges maintain certain spatial relations and organization with regard to each other, but would, owing to their extreme minuteness, easily pass through the tissues and liberate themselves from the gross body. Thus a human soul, weighing a fraction only of an ounce, but of like shape and size to the human body, and of intense vitality and subtlety, might disengage itself at death, to begin a fresh career and to enter into a new life—leaving the existing body to fall to ruin and decay. Further, Professor Fournier d’Albe, greatly bold in speculation, surmises that such a spiritual body, discharging the atmosphere from its interior frame, might quite naturally rise in the air till it attained its position of equilibrium at a great height up—say in a region 35–80 miles over the earth, which would thus become the (first) abode of the departed.
Whatever may be said about the details of this theory, and whatever difficulties they may present, the main outlines—as I have already indicated—seem quite feasible and probable, and in line with world-old belief and tradition. And certain details (which we shall return to again) are powerfully corroborated by modern observation.
Meanwhile it is interesting to find, in corroboration of the general theory, that some experiments lately carried out, in weighing the body before and after death, have apparently yielded the result of a decided loss of weight at or very shortly after, the moment of Death. Dr. Duncan M‘Dougall, experimenting with considerable care, found that one of his patients lost ¾ ounce precisely at death;[[96]] another lost ½ ounce, with an additional loss of 1 ounce during the next few minutes, after which no further loss took place; another yielded very nearly the same result; and so on. Thus we have the old Egyptian idea of the weighing of the soul after death resuscitated in a very practical form in modern times—only with the medical practitioner in the place of Thoth, the great assessor of the Underworld! And it would be satisfactory to know how far modern observation of a normal soul weight corresponds with ancient speculation in the matter. It is curious anyhow to find that Fournier d’Albe’s estimates are so nearly corroborated by Dr. M‘Dougall; and we must await with interest further and perhaps more detailed observations along the same line.
Another line along which something seems to have been done by hard and fast science to corroborate the general theory of the extrusion of a cloud-like spirit form from the body at death, is in the matter of photography. Dr. Baraduc, in his book, Mes Morts: leurs manifestations (1908), gives an account of photographs which he took of his wife’s body within an hour after death and of his son’s body (in the coffin) nine hours after death. When developed the plates all showed cloud-like emanations hovering over the corpses, not certainly having definite human outline, but apparently shot through by lines and streaks of light. And though here again the experiments are not conclusive, they so far are corroborative, and may be taken to indicate a direction for further inquiry.
This last I think we are especially entitled to say, on account of what has been already done in the way of photographing the cloud-figures (some of them very definite in outline) which are found to emanate on occasions from mediums in the state of trance. For notwithstanding the doubt which has commonly been cast on all such photographs and notwithstanding the very obvious ease with which cameras can be manipulated and shadow-figures of some kind fraudulently produced, the evidence for the genuineness of some such ‘spirit’ photographs is—to any one who really studies it—beyond question. The celebrated “Katie King,” who appeared at seances in connection with the medium Florence Cook, and during a period of two years or more was seen by some hundreds of people—and especially studied by Sir William Crookes—was photographed several times under test conditions.[[97]] Professor Charles Richet, who when he first heard of Crookes’ conclusions was convulsed with laughter over their supposed absurdity, afterward confessed his error,[[98]] for time after time he not only saw a phantasm (“Beni Boa”) in connection with the Algerian medium Aisha, but obtained photographs of the same.[[99]] Dr. A. R. Wallace, in a long note, pp. 190, 191 of his book, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, gives a careful description of his own experiments in this line. Several different figures were at different times photographed in connection with Mme. D’Espérance; and the very detailed account, with illustrations, which she gives of these phenomena in ch. xxvii. of her book, Shadowland, must give the unbeliever pause. And so on.[[100]] The evidence is so abundant, and so on the whole so well confirmed, that we are practically now compelled to admit (and this is the point in hand) that cloud-like forms of human outline emanating from a medium’s or other person’s living body may at times be caught by the photographic plate. And this is important because it removes the phenomenon from the region of the fanciful or imaginative and gives it automatic and objective registration.
That these forms occurring and occasionally photographed in connection with mediums are independent ‘spirits’ or souls is of course in no way assumed. They may be such, or (what seems more likely) they may be simply extensions of the spiritual or inner body of the medium. The point that interests us here is that their appearance in either case points to the actual existence of such an inner body, capable of becoming extruded from the gross body, and of becoming the seat and manifestation of intelligence. Further than that we need not go at present.
But it will be objected, if the inner or spiritual body is, as has just been supposed, of such a subtle and tenuous nature as to be in itself quite invisible, what connection can this have with phantoms that can be photographed, or that can be seen, or that can be actually touched and handled? This question—the question as to how an excessively rare and tenuous and invisible being may gradually condense and materialize so as to come first within the region of photographic activity, and then within the region of normal visibility, and so on into audible and tangible and material existence and operation, I shall discuss more at length in the next chapter. Suffice it here to point out that the general consensus of thoughtful opinion on this subject at the present time points to a probable condensation of some kind, and utilization of such suitable materials as may be to hand, by which the subtle inner body gradually clothes itself in an outer and denser garment. Whether with Fournier d’Albe we suppose a soul-like core to every single cell, or whether we take a more diffused and general view, in any case we seem compelled to believe that our actual bodies are carried on by organizing powers distributed in centres throughout the body.[[101]] If by any means these vital centres were separated from the gross body, it would still seem natural for them to continue their organizing activity whenever they were surrounded with suitable material. And if, as seems likely, in the case of mediums and seances, a considerable quantity of loose floating organic material is commonly evolved from the bodies of those present, such effluences might be quickly caught up and condensed by any such vital centres present into more or less visible forms and figures.
If, by way of illustration, we were to suppose an army-corps to represent a gross body, then the officers, from corporals to general, would represent the inner or organizing soul; and all these officers together, though really being a ‘body,’ would constitute a mass so small and so scattered compared with the mass-body of the army, that in comparison they would be invisible, and might easily all pass out and away from the army without being observed. They might pass out and conceivably organize another army-corps elsewhere; but the result on that left behind (of which they were really the soul) would soon be seen in its complete disintegration and collapse. Now suppose further that in a neighboring nation, across the frontier, there was a great deal of disaffection existing—that large masses of the people there were out of touch with their own Government (the case of a medium in trance), and waiting for some one to come and organize them. Then it is easy to imagine the small group of officers aforesaid passing across the frontier (quite unseen and unobserved) and immediately on doing so finding ready to their hands a quantity of material just suitable for their activity. In a wonderfully short time the various officers would begin to organize the various departments of a new army-corps; the people would flock to their standard. Even in a day or two the faint outline of a new political form or movement would show itself; and in a week this might become substantial enough to exhibit serious manifestations of force!
The general application of this to the question in hand is obvious enough. But there is another point which it illustrates—a point which we have raised before. I am convinced that science will never yield any very fruitful understanding of the world, until it recognizes that life and intelligence (of course in the broadest signification) pervade all the phenomena of Nature. It is perfectly useless to try to explain human development, human destiny, mental activity, the forces of nature, and so forth, in terms of dead matter. No explanation of such a kind could possibly be satisfying. And more and more it is becoming clear that even what we call the inorganic world is as subtle and swift in its responses as what we call the organic. Many difficulties must inevitably arise in any attempted solution of the problem before us—that problem which is generally denoted by “the nature of the soul and its relation to the body”; but we shall never arrive at any harmonious view of the whole question until we are persuaded, and practically assume, that life and intelligence in some degree are characteristic of all that we call ‘matter’ as well as of all we call mind, and pervade the whole structure of the universe. We shall then see that the forces, for instance, which organize and direct the human body, even down to its minutest parts, are probably just as individual and intelligent in their action as those (to take the example just given) which organize and direct an army-corps.
CHAPTER XI
ON THE CREATION AND MATERIALIZATION OF FORMS
I have suggested more than once, in preceding chapters of this book, and in The Art of Creation and elsewhere, that in the ordinary evolution of thought, in dreams, in trance and in other psychic states, we are witness of a process which is continually and eternally going on, by which the faintest invisible forms and outlines, the nearest cloud-currents of the inner soul, gradually condense themselves, pass into visibility, tangibility, and so forth, and (if the process is continued) ultimately take their place among the substantial things of the outer world.
Hitherto this thought has been applied in certain departments of inquiry, but I am of impression that its considerable and world-wide significance has been missed. Freud, in his Traumdeutung, insists that behind the dream, and inspiring its action and symbolism there always lurks an emotion, a desire, a wish. And Havelock Ellis (though with due caution) corroborates this. He speaks[[102]] of “the controlling power of emotion on dream-ideas,” and says, “the fundamental source of our dream-life may be said to be emotion.” That is, an emotion (from whatever source) arises in the mind. Vague and cloudlike at first, it presently takes form, and (if in sleep) clothes itself with the imagery of a dream, which becomes at last vivid and dramatic and real, to a degree which astounds us. But dream-life is only a paraphrase, so to speak, of waking life—a phase largely corresponding to the waking life of children[[103]] and animals; and in waking life the same thing happens. A wish or desire appears in the background of the mind; it moves forward and becomes a definite thought and a plan; then it moves forward again and becomes an action; the action creates a result; and the desire finally establishes itself or its image in the actual world. These emotions and desires and the images which sprung from them have a certain vitality and growth-power of their own. The figures in dreams move of themselves and concatenate with each other of their own accord—much as the figures do in a drama, as Coleridge long ago observed—and as the waking thoughts of all of us do, when we leave them a little to themselves and to go with loose rein. More than that; in some cases waking thoughts or passions become powerful enough to take possession of the whole man and embody themselves in his deeds—sometimes to heroic, sometimes to criminal ends. Or, taking possession of portions of the man, they precipitate conflict within him. The dramatic quality of dreams is evidently due to the different figures or incidents of the dream being inspired by different qualities or experiences of the dreamer; and in the waking man the same process may lead to tragic struggles and disintegrations of personality. In hysteric patients, where the central controlling power is weak, the very thought or fear of a disease may seize upon a certain centre in the body and stimulate there all the symptoms of that disease; or a mental image may seize upon a certain portion of the brain, and break up the personality with strange new manifestations.
In all these cases, and scores of others which we cannot consider now, the same action is taking place—by which invisible psychic and spiritual forces, for good or evil, are ever pressing forward into the manifest, and condensing themselves into visible and even tangible forms, or taking possession of existing forms for the purpose of expression and manifestation. And here we have (as I think will be seen one day) the whole rationale of Creation—we have the conception which brings into line the phenomena of the visible and material world and their genesis, with the genesis of thoughts in our own minds, and their passage into visibility and expression; we have the conception which unites the mental and material, and which makes the whole Creation luminous with meaning. Especially is this obvious to-day, when the theory of electrons is introducing us to a world as far finer and subtler than the atom, as the atom is finer and subtler than the tangible world of our experience; and is suggesting that these finest states of matter are of the nature of electrical charges, which, again, are quite analogous to mental states.[[104]] Thus we have, almost forced upon us as the key to the creation of visible forms, the conception, of a process of condensation by which the most subtle thought and emotion does in course of time (brief or lengthy) tend to manifest itself in material shape, and may ultimately take on the most persistent and quasi-indestructible forms.
Reverting, then, to the subject of last chapter, we see that a ‘spiritual’ body—that is, a material body of a texture so fine and so swiftly plastic as to be the analogue of thought—is a conception quite in line with the conclusions of modern science; and that granted the existence of such a thing, it is quite in line also to conclude that it would tend toward condensation and manifestation in grosser and more visible form. I gave in that chapter some general outline of how such condensation might take place. I now propose to consider this process more in detail, and to give some evidence as to its actually taking place.
There is something perhaps a little comic about the idea of spirit photography—something which has thus helped to retard its acceptance. The busy photographer with his camera is so banal, and sometimes so obnoxious, a figure, that to think of him photographing a ghost, or the spirit of a dead relation, verges on bathos or the burlesque. Nevertheless, Nature does not attend to our canons in such matters, and in reality the thing is perfectly feasible and in order. It is well known that the photographic plate is most sensitive to the violet end of the spectrum—that it is this end which has the actinic quality. Moreover, it is known that the actinic quality extends beyond this end, and that there are ultra-violet rays which we cannot see, and which yet are photographically powerful. But the violet rays, as is also well known, are those whose light-waves are smallest—being only about half the size of the red waves;[[105]] and the ultra-violet rays are still smaller. Consequently, by means of the violet end of the spectrum, information can be got about small objects and infinitesimal details which would elude the more ordinary light. A particle, in fact, may be so small that it would reflect the violet waves, while it would be unable to reflect the red—just as a boat floating on the water will reflect and turn back tiny ripples, while it will simply be tossed about by good-sized waves. Advantage has been taken of this in microscopy, and by ingenious arrangements photographs of objects under the microscope can now be taken by ultra-violet light, so as to show the very minutest details.
The application of this to the question before us is clear. If there be a spiritual body, composed of particles so infinitesimal as to be—to begin with—far beyond the limits of visibility, yet gradually condensing and accreting to themselves other and subsidiary particles, there might come a time when such a cloud-form would approach the limit of visibility—the molecules of which it was composed having grown so far. It would be perfectly natural, then, for a body composed of such molecules to come into the region of possible photography in the camera through the ultra-violet rays before it came into the region of visibility to the human eye by means of ordinary light. And thus the seeming paradox may be accounted for—of the appearance of spirit-forms, or even thought-forms, on the photographic plate which are not yet discernible by the eye. At a later stage of materialization the form may of course yield an image both to the eye and to the camera.[[106]]
Again, in this connection, it is often urged against the reality of spirit-forms, ghosts, and so forth, that they cannot bear a strong light; and this is held to dispose of all their claims for consideration. But what has just been said shows that on the contrary such an effect is just what might be expected. The delicate growing structure, whose particles were just large enough to reflect the smaller light-waves, might easily be broken up and quite disintegrated by the larger and more powerful weaves of a strong glare—just as, in fact, our forms, which can endure light, are broken up and disintegrated by the still larger waves of intense heat. Katie King, who, as before mentioned, appeared so many times in connection with the medium Florence Cook, was frequently seen to fade away if the light was too strong. “At the earlier seances she could only come out of the cabinet for a few seconds at a time, once or twice during the seance; she had to go back quickly into the cabinet to gather fresh power from her medium, saying that the strong and unaccustomed brilliancy of the light made her ‘melt quite away.’”[[107]] And Nepenthes, that finely formed and beautiful figure which appeared in connection with Mme. D’Espérance, was more than once seen, by a large company assembled, to walk by the side of the medium up to the open French window at the end of the room and then to disappear as she came into the full daylight.[[108]]
Photographs, it may be noticed, of forms appearing at seances, or in connection with sitters, vary from mere cloudlike masses without or almost without shape to very distinct human figures with much detail of feature and dress,[[109]]—the same figure being often recognized in various stages of clearness and definition. And this is interesting because it entirely corroborates the observations made in hundreds of seances, and in other cases, in which a form is first distinguished by the eye as a faintly luminous cloud, and gradually grows in distinctness and definition till it becomes visible in all detail, and even tangible. Mme. D’Espérance, whose book, Shadowland, should be read on account of its intelligent handling and obvious sincerity, as well as on account of the remarkable phenomena reported, describes (p. 151) the first occasion on which a ‘materialization’ appeared to her:—“One evening, for some reason or other, we were sitting without a lighted lamp. The daylight had not faded when we commenced the sitting, but though it grew dark no one suggested making a light. Happening to glance over to the part of the room where the shadows were deepest it seemed to me that there was a curious cloudy luminosity standing out distinct and clear from the darkness. I watched it for a minute or two without saying anything, wondering where it came from and how it was caused. I thought it must be a reflection from the street lamps outside, though I had never seen it like that before. While I watched, the luminous cloud seemed to concentrate itself, become substantial, and form itself into a figure of a child, illuminated as it were by daylight that did not shine on it but, somehow, from within it—the darkness of the room seeming to act as a background, throwing up by contrast every curve of the form and every feature into strong relief.” And in another passage she says:—“As soon as I have entered the mediumistic cabinet my first impression is of being covered with spider webs. Then I feel that the air is filled with substance, and a kind of white and vaporous mass, quasi-luminous, like the steam from a locomotive, is formed in front of the abdomen. After this mass has been tossed and agitated in every way for some minutes, sometimes even for half-an-hour, it suddenly stops, and then out of it is born a living being close by me.”[[110]]
Another figure—that of Yolande (a young woman)—is mentioned in the same book (p. 254) as appearing again and again out of such a filmy cloudy patch on the floor. Similarly, Professor Richet noticed over and over again the outgrowth of a figure (Beni Boa) from a white cloud. “Near the cabinet we could see, betwixt the curtain and the table, a whitish globe forming, luminous, and rotating on the floor; from this globe Beni Boa sprang.” The figure would then walk round the room and disappear again; but after a time the white cloud would again form and Beni Boa reappear. And Professor Lombroso, alluding to this, says:[[111]]—“This observation is of great importance, since it is not possible to attribute to fraud the formation of a luminous patch on the floor which transforms itself into a living being.” Further, Lombroso says:—“Five photographs were obtained at these sittings by magnesium and chlorate of potash light, with a Kodak and with a Richard stereoscopic apparatus simultaneously, which fact excludes the possibility of photographic fraud; and all the plates were developed in Algeria by an optician who was unaware of what had preceded. On the plates appeared a tall figure wrapped in a white mantle” (and similar to the figure which the seven sitters present at the seances had seen).
I have alluded to this cloud-formation before as characteristic of an early stage of the appearance of these figures, and as suggesting a process of condensation going on. Lombroso, from various considerations which he brings forward (p. 185),[[112]] seems convinced that the phenomena of these forms are largely connected with radio-activity. He says:—“It would seem that these bodies belong to that further state of matter, the radiant state, which now at last has established a firm footing in science—and which thus offers the only hypothesis which can reconcile the ancient and universal belief in the persistence of some form of life after death with the postulates of science which maintain that without organ there can be no function.” This radio-active condition of matter is of course that finest and most active state represented by the electrons—in which each electron is excessively minute,[[113]] yet moves at enormous speed, and carries with it an electric charge. It connects itself with condensation in this way, that “an electric charge assists vapor to condense,” and “where ions (i.e. positively or negatively charged particles) are present in considerable numbers a thick mist will form whenever the space is saturated with vapor.”[[114]] And Fournier d’Albe says:[[115]]—“In the physical theory of ionization and condensation we have become familiar with the fact that the smallest charged particles are the most effective promoters of condensation. In fact, it would suffice to extract a very small proportion of the innumerable electrons within the body to bring about a vigorous condensation in the moist air around it.”
Thus it is quite probable that the cloud-formation, which in general precedes the manifestation of distinct figures, is due to condensation, and in part at any rate to a condensation of water-vapor on the accreting particles of the spirit-body. And this is made the more probable by the strong sensation of cold which so frequently accompanies these appearances, and which is a common accompaniment of condensation. Crookes, in his Researches, emphasizes this in connection with almost all the phenomena, and says[[116]] they “are generally preceded by a peculiar cold air, sometimes amounting to a decided wind. I have had sheets of paper blown about by it, and a thermometer lowered several degrees. On some occasions ... the cold has been so intense that I could only compare it to that felt when the hand has been within a few inches of frozen mercury.” Some such sensation seems to be quite a common experience, and the authoress of Shadowland, speaking of her earlier sittings (p. 228), says:—“It was not long before the same strange disturbances in the air began as on the previous occasion. I felt my hair blown and lifted by currents of air, and cool breezes played about my face and hands.”
Thus (with the corroborating evidence of Crookes’ thermometer) we may suppose that, after all, the cold airs and shivering sensations which seem so often to accompany apparitions may not be merely subjective to the observer, but may be real phenomena due to physical condensations taking place in his immediate proximity. Moreover, it has to be noted that the condensations may not be merely of water-vapor, but of other substances as well, namely (according to an opinion now gaining ground), of fine matter or effluences provided by the bodies of the sitters present (or some of them) as well as by the body of the medium. The passage last quoted from Shadowland continues: “then began a strange sensation, which I had sometimes felt at seances. Frequently I have heard it described by others as of cobwebs being passed over the face, but to me, who watched it curiously, it seemed that I could feel fine threads being drawn out of the pores of my skin.” And in another passage[[117]] the same writer describes the cloud which precedes a materialization as “a slightly luminous haze” which often appears “about the head, shoulders, elbows and sometimes the knees and feet (of the medium). Frequently it gathers slowly at the fingers, increasing in density till it resembles a slight transparent film of slightly luminous cotton wool.” Further, she explains that it goes on condensing till it becomes cobwebby and perceptible to touch. The evidence generally seems to show that these clouds are of the nature of effluences from the medium or other person present; and the above quotation affords corroboration of that view and makes easily intelligible the great exhaustion from which mediums often suffer on these occasions. It suggests also that the condensation is by no means of water-vapor only, but of other substances drawn from the interior vitality of the persons concerned, and necessary for the building up of the apparitional form.
It is difficult in the case, for instance, of “Katie King,” who, as already said, appeared hundreds of times during two or three years, or of Estella Martha, who appeared to her husband during five years and in 380 or more seances in connection with the medium Kate Fox,[[118]] not to believe that such figures are (as we should say) really the individuals they profess to be, and not mere thought-forms or images projected from the medium’s under-mind. But whichever view we take, it is obvious that they are centres in some degree, of intelligent force or vitality, centres which, though in their essence rare and tenuous as thought or feeling, succeed in clothing themselves with a certain grade of corporeality by the use of the materials at hand, and in so coming into visible manifestation. And this general view is confirmed by the fact, so often observed, that when the same figure appears repeatedly, it does, as time goes on, acquire skill and adroitness in carrying out the process of condensation or whatever it is, which is concerned, and consequently comes into manifestation and activity more quickly and decisively. Also, it may be noted, and has often been observed (as in the case of the said Estella Martha and many others), that by practice the figure attains the power of enduring strong light—that is, its state of condensation reaches a point of solidity almost comparable with that of our tissues, which are not as a rule disintegrated by light.
The radio-activity of the ‘inner being’ also helps to explain the extraordinary manifestations of sheer physical force in these connections. Some of these manifestations have been so astonishing, that the fact alone has caused them to be disbelieved; but though, of course, fraud has played a part in such phenomena, and has to be guarded against, it is now quite evident that in a multitude of cases fraud does not enter at all.
Eusapia Paladino, for instance—though capable of little fraudulences—was obviously the seat of extraordinary powers not to be explained by these. Mr. Carrington, who made a special study of this medium, and who (as I have said before) has also made a special study of fraudulent methods in so-called spiritualism, vouches most strongly for the great exhibitions of inexplicable force in her vicinity—especially perhaps in the way of levitations. He says:—“Every one who has studied Eusapia’s phenomena knows that practically every seance (for some reason) commences with table-levitations—this, whether they are wanted or not! It seems the necessary programme, and it is almost invariably carried out. Seeing them time after time, one can obtain a very fair idea of their nature and reality. And I may say that I now consider levitations as well established as any other physical facts. They are not open to the objection to which most psychical phenomena are subjected—that they cannot be repeated or induced and studied experimentally, as one would study other physical facts—for they can be induced and studied in just this laboratory manner. I have probably seen several hundreds of these levitations now, under every conceivable condition and in excellent light, and I consider them so far established that, as Count Solovovo said, “the burden of proof is now on the man who asserts that they are not real, not upon the man who asserts that they are.” These are pretty strong words, and by a very responsible observer! And then Mr. Carrington proceeds with a detailed account of these and other physical phenomena.[[119]]
Some years ago, the reports and accounts of such phenomena were generally at once dismissed as absurd and incredible; but by a remarkable coincidence the last few years have seen the wonderful development of the science of radio-activity—dating from the epoch-making experiments of Crookes, in 1879 and earlier. These experiments, curiously enough, were worked out during much of the same period as Crookes’ researches into spiritualistic phenomena, and have led to the shedding of much light upon the latter. For the new science developed from them, and already more or less popularized,[[120]] compels us to suppose that the most enormous forces lurk all around, within the very structure of the atom itself—which of course is totally invisible to our eyes. The new facts observed, with regard to radium and other such substances, seem to compel the supposition that each atom is composed of an immense number (say 100,000) of highly charged electrical particles moving each with huge velocity—a velocity at any rate comparable to that of light. The dissociation of such atoms and the liberation of their constituent particles develops a fabulous energy. When it is calculated that one gramme or fifteen grains of matter (say the weight of thirty postage stamps) moving with the speed of light, would have energy enough to lift the British Navy to the top of Ben Nevis (Crookes); or that one milligramme (say the sixty-sixth part of a grain of wheat) at the same speed would represent the energy of fifteen million foot-tons (Lodge); or when, according to J. J. Thomson, the combined speed and mass of the electrons within such a milligramme of matter would total up to the work represented by a hundred million kilogram-metres;[[121]] then we can at any rate see—whatever small variations there may be in the estimates—how immense are the potentialities of the tiniest points of matter; how each minutest atom comprehends, as Shelley says, “a world of loves and hatreds” (i.e. positive and negative electric charges); we realize that no manifestations of unexpected power are per se incredible; and we are indeed rather inclined to wonder how it is that these great inter-atomic energies do not more often force themselves on our attention!
It is evident that any such condition of being as we have supposed in the case of the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ body, might afford means for the liberation—even from a single atom—of forces amply sufficient for the most ‘miraculous’ phenomena; and we are led to wonder and to ask whether it may not be the case that, after all, our gross bodies are really a hindrance rather than a help—whether it may not be true that the powers we could exert without them and independently of muscles and sinews and hands and feet would be far greater than those we actually do exert by means of these organs and appendages; whether, in fact, our gross bodies do not exercise a limiting effect, confining our activities to certain very clearly specified directions, and within certain very definite bounds? At any rate, this point of view is worth considering.
Certainly the well-established facts of telepathy, and the equally well-established facts of the projection of phantoms from persons dying, or passing through great danger, to friends even at a great distance, seem to show that the inner self of one person can send out rays or in some way impress itself on the inner self of another far-off person;[[122]] and this, under the theory of electrons moving at prodigious speed, seems not impossible. For though there is a difficulty in supposing ordinary physical vibrations or radiations to reach effectively from one person to another (say a thousand miles away) on account of the law of space itself, which makes such radiations diminish in intensity as the square of the distance increases, yet in the case of electrical radiations it seems possible to suppose two people related to each other as positive and negative poles—in which case the radiations of electric charges would pass along lines connecting the two, and with comparatively little loss of intensity. Our present rather crude and lumbering bodies probably impede these subtle exertions of force; and the fact (already noted once or twice) of the greater activity of people in the telepathic or phantasmogenetic directions, when they are themselves outwardly in a dying or exhausted condition, seems to point to a considerable liberation of these powers after death.
On the other hand, the well-established facts of perceptivity at a great distance, or without the mediation of the gross body and the usual end-organs, point in the same direction. Considerable investigations have been made in this subject; and not only is the evidence for occasional clairvoyance at a distance well established, but there are curious cases in which the faculty of sight or of hearing seems to be transferred from its natural organ to some other part of the body, as of seeing with the knee, or the stomach, or the finger-tips. Myers gives considerable attention to this subject, and thinks that Professor Fontan’s experiments[[123]] “cannot lightly be set aside”; while Lombroso quotes an hysterical patient of his own, a girl of fourteen, who lost the sight of her eyes, but was able to read perfectly with the lobe of her left ear! Later on, in the same patient, the sense of smell concentrated itself in the heel of her foot! Mrs. Piper, as is well known, commonly raises her hand for the sitter to speak into, as if it were her ear. And in cases of somnambulism the sleepwalker will sometimes move securely through difficult or dangerous places with eyes absolutely closed. All these things seem to point to an aboriginal power of perception independent of the end-organs. It is obvious that if in the course of evolution our present faculties of sight, hearing, and so forth have been developed from the diffused sensitivity of an amœba or some such creature, then those faculties must have existed, in their undifferentiated state, in the amœba; or, to put the matter another way, the faculty of sight clearly does not reside in the cornea of the eye, or in the crystalline lens, or even in the retina itself; which are merely an apparatus evolved for dealing with the details of the matter. The retina catches the light-disturbance, and the optic nerve conveys it to the brain, and the brain-cells are agitated by it; but where does sight come in? At some point, doubtless, the agitations of the brain-cells or of their internal molecules are seen and interpreted; but the being that sees and interprets them may (we had almost said must) be capable of directly seeing and interpreting similar agitations in the outer world—that is, it may or must by its nature be capable of seeing the events of the outer world without the mediation of the end-organs or the brain. Frederick Myers, dealing with this subject, says:—“I start from the thesis that the perceptive power within us precedes and is independent of the specialized sense-organs, which it has developed for earthly use. ‘It is the mind that sees and the mind that hears, the other things are blind and deaf.’”[[124]] He thinks that in the development or unfolding of life on our planet “certain sensibilities got themselves defined and stereotyped upon the organism by the evolution of end-organs. Others failed to get thus externalized; but may, for aught we know, persist nevertheless in the central organs.”[[125]] It is evident—however we may explain the matter—that activities and sensibilities do persist and manifest themselves in the human organism quite independent of the ordinary and stereotyped end-organs, and this fact must go far to persuade us, not only that there is an inner, a more subtle, and a more durable body than that which we usually recognize, but that in some respects this latter body is a limitation and a hindrance to the activity of the former, and to the swiftness and range of the perceptions of the soul.
What, then, it will naturally be asked, is the object or purpose or use of our incarnation in this grosser body?—why, if there is such an ethereal or spiritual frame within, should it thus tend to accrete denser particles upon itself and ultimately to clothe itself in a vesture of so opaque and material a nature? It would be rash to attempt to answer so profound a question offhand—off one’s own bat as it were; and still more rash perhaps to accept any of the ready-made answers which are offered in such profusion, and in so many different jargons and lingos, by the sects and schools, from the Gnostics and Theosophists to the most philistine of the chapels and churches. Yet if one may venture a suggestion, it would seem rather likely that the object and purpose and use of this process by which the soul is entangled in matter, and its operation and perception so strangely hampered and limited, is—limitation; that limitation itself and even hindrance are part and parcel of the great scheme of the soul’s deliverance. But the further consideration of this I will defer to a later chapter.[[126]]
CHAPTER XII
REINCARNATION
There is a good deal of talk indulged in, on the subject of Reincarnation—talk of a rather cheap character. One does not quite see what is the use of saying that the ego will be reincarnated again some day, unless one has some sort of idea what one means by the ego, and unless one has some understanding of the sense in which the word “reincarnation” is used. If it is meant that your local and external self, approximately as you and your friends know it to-day—including dress, facial outline, professional skill, accomplishments, habits of mind and body, interests and enthusiasms—is going to repeat itself again in five or five hundred years, or has already appeared in this form in the past; one can only say “impossible!” and “I trust not!” For all these things depend on date, locality, heredity, surrounding institutions, social habits, current morality, and so forth, which—though they have certainly played their part in the spirit’s growth—must infallibly be different at any other period (short of the whole universe repeating itself). And anyhow to have them repeated again da capo at some future time would be terribly dull. But if you say “Of course I don’t mean anything so silly as that,” it becomes incumbent on you to say what you do mean.
Supposing, for instance, you had been planked down a baby in the Arabian desert, and grown up to maturity or middle age there, instead of where you are, would any of your present-day friends recognize you? Where would be your charming piano-playing, your excellent cricket, your rather sloppy water-color painting, your up-to-dateness in the theatrical world? Where your morality (with three wives of course) or your religion (something about “Christian dogs”), or where your British sang froid and impeccability? And if it is obvious that in such a case as this you would, owing to the changed conditions, be changed out of all recognition, much more—one might say—would this be the case if you had been born five hundred years ago, or were to be born again five hundred years hence. Your whole outlook on life, and its whole impress on you, would be different.
Of course I am not meaning, by these remarks, to say that reincarnation is in itself impossible or absurd; that would be prejudging the question. All I mean at present is that if we are going to study this subject, or theorize upon it, it is really necessary to define in some degree the terms which we use. I do not say that you, the reader, might not be reincarnated, but I think it is clear that if you were, we should have a good deal of trouble in following and finding you! It is clear that the you, so reappearing, would not be your well-known local and external self, but some deep nucleus, difficult perhaps for your best friend to recognize, and possibly even unknown or unrecognized by yourself at present. And similarly of some friend that you love for a thousand little tricks and ways. We all have such friends, and at times cherish a sentimental romance of their being restored to us in some future æon habited in their old guise and with their well-worn frocks and coats. But surely it is no good playing at hide-and-seek like that. The common difficulties about the conventional heaven—the difficulty about meeting your old friend who used to be so good at after-dinner stories, about meeting him with a harp in his hand and sitting on a damp cloud—is no whit the less a difficulty whatever future world may be the rendezvous. He would be changed (externally) and we should be changed, and it might well happen that if we did seem to recall any former intimacy we should both feel like strangers, and be as shy and tentative in our approaches to each other as school-children.
What do we mean by the letter “I”? and what do we mean by the word Reincarnation? These two questions wait for a reply.
The first is a terribly difficult question. It lies (though neglected by the philosophers themselves) at the root of all philosophy. Perhaps really all life and experience are nothing but an immense search for the answer. What do we mean by the Ego? It is a sort of fundamental question, which it might be supposed would precede all other questions, but which as a matter of fact seems to be postponed to all others, and is the last to be solved. All we can at the outset be sure of in the way of answer is the enormous extent and depth of the being we are setting out to define. We sometimes think of the ego as a mere point of consciousness, or we think of the ordinary self of daily life as a fragile and ephemeral entity bounded by a few bodily tissues and a few mental views and habits. But even the slight discussion of the subject in former chapters of this book (chapters vi., vii., and so forth) has revealed to us the vast underlying stores and faculties which must be included—the wonderful powers of memory, the subtle capacities of perception at a distance, or without the usual organs of sight and hearing, the power of creating images out of the depths of one’s mind, and of impressing them telepathically upon others, the faculty of clairvoyance in past and future time, and so forth. The more we try to fathom this ego, with which we supposed ourselves so familiar, the more we are amazed at its labyrinthine profundity, and the more we are astonished to think that we should ever have ventured to limit it to such a petty formula and conventional symbol as we commonly do—not only in our judgment of friends, but even in our estimate of ourselves.
Reincarnation, as we have already said, can hardly be the reappearance, in a new life on earth (or even in some other sphere), of the very local and superficial traits which we know so well in ourselves and our friends—which are mainly a response to local and superficial conditions, and which mainly constitute what we call our personalities. If reincarnation does occur, it must obviously consist in the reappearance or remanifestation of some such very interior self as we have just spoken of—some deep individuality (as opposed to personality), some divine æonian soul, some offshoot perhaps of an age-long enduring Race-soul, or World-self—and in that sort of sense only shall I use the word in future.
In that sense the idea is feasible and illuminative. It explains the obvious limitations and localism of our personalities, as being more or less passing and temporary embodiments of our true selves; and it represents the latter as immense storehouses of experience from all manner of places and times, and similarly as centres of world-activity operating in different fields of time and space. At the same time, it presents various difficulties. For one thing, it poses the difficulty that for each of us this vast interior being is, as a rule, so deeply buried that both oneself and one’s friends are only faintly conscious—if at all—of its true outline. And if one does not recognize this being, of what use is it to us? It is true that we sometimes meet people who at first sight give us a strong impression of far-back intimacy; but this is only a vague impression and hardly sufficient to afford proof of pre-existence. The only way of meeting this difficulty seems to be to suppose, as residing in this inner being or true self, another order of consciousness, faint intimations of which we even now have, and by which, as it grows and develops, we may some day clearly recognize our true selves and true nature.
Another difficulty is that (as already said) for any satisfactory sense of survival continuity of memory is needed; and we should have to suppose that the memory of each earth-life was continued into and stored up in this deeper soul or æonian self. Memory would not normally pass from one embodiment or incarnation to another, but each stream would flow into the central self and there be stored. And I think we may admit that this is by no means impossible. Indeed there are not a few facts (some already mentioned) with regard to the recovery of memory which make the mater probable. Though any given earth-life in a given form could not be repeated, the memory of such an earth-life, fresh and clear, may survive for an indefinite time in the crystal mirror of the deeper consciousness.[[127]] And it is perhaps allowable to suppose that in this way, and with the lifting of the opaque veil of our present consciousness, we may some day come clearly into the presence of friends we have lost.
Here again, however, one has to be on one’s guard. The mere fact of remembering (or thinking one remembers), in this our terrestrial life and with our terrestrial consciousness, some detail or other of a previous terrestrial life proves little—for, for aught we know, quite apart from our psychic selves, a streak of memory of more physical origin from some ancestor may have come down even several generations, and may be surviving in one’s brain.[[128]] Indeed it is extremely probable that all organic matter carries memory with it, and not unlikely that inorganic matter does so too. If you thought, for instance, that you remembered seeing Charles the First beheaded—if you had a rather distinct picture in your mind of the scene at Whitehall, which you afterwards found by investigation to be corroborated in its details, you might at first jump to the conclusion that you had really lived at that time, and witnessed the scene. But after all it might merely be that an ancestor of yours had been there, and that the vividly impressed picture had somehow persevered in some subterranean channel of memory and emerged again in your mind. Even then you might contend that, since it was your memory, you must have been there—or at any rate some fraction of yourself in the ancestor, which now has become incorporated in your personality. There are a good many stories of this kind going about, which point to the possibility of the transmission of shreds of remembrance through hereditary channels, and suggest the idea of an active Race-memory, or Earth-memory, in itself continuous—a storehouse of experiences, but fed continually by the individuals of the race, and coruscating forth again in other individuals.[[129]] Indeed one can hardly withhold belief in the existence of such a larger life, or identity, ‘reincarnated’ if one likes to use the expression, in thousands or millions of individuals; but to be satisfactorily assured of the reincarnation of one distinct and individual person is another thing, and would almost demand that there should be forthcoming not only shreds and streaks of remembrance, but a pretty continuous and consistent memory of a whole former life.
Thus the whole question which we are discussing is baffled and rendered the more complex by the doubt as to what is meant by the word “I.” It is clear, from what we have already said, that one person may use it to indicate (1) the quite local and superficial self; while another may have in mind (2) a much profounder being (the underlying self) whose depths and qualities we have by no means fathomed; while others, again, may be thinking (3) of the self of the Race or the Earth, or (4) the All-self of the universe.
I present these questions and doubts, not—as I have said—for the purpose of discrediting the possibility of Reincarnation, but by way of showing how complex and difficult the problem is, and how much some exact thought and definition is needed in dealing with it. At the same time, in pleading for exact thought I would also urge that in avoiding the whirlpools of sentimentalism we should be careful not to fall upon the rocks of a dry and barren formalism. Systems of hard and fast doctrines on these subjects—even though issued with all the authority of ancient tradition, and enunciated in a long-dead jargon—are the most unfruitful and uninspiring of things. They seem to contain no germ of vitality and are liable to paralyze the mind that feeds upon them. Besides the drawback—as I have pointed out before—that all such systems are inevitably false. Nature does not, in any department, work upon a cut-and-dried system; and while at the outset of an investigation we often seem to discern something of that kind, further study invariably discloses an astounding variety of order and method. It may be well therefore to be prepared to find a general principle of Reincarnation in operation in the world, but worked out, in actual fact, in a great variety of ways.
Certainly there comes into our minds, at a certain grade of their development, a deep persuasion of the truth, in some sense, of reincarnation—that “the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, hath had elsewhere its setting.” It blossoms, this persuasion, in a curious way, in the very depths of the mind; and in moments of inner illumination, or deep feeling, is discerned in a way that seems to leave no room for doubt. At the same time, it not only has this intuitive sanction, but it commends itself also to the intellect, because at a certain stage we perceive very clearly both how vast is the whole curve of progress which the soul has to cover from its first birth to its final liberation, and how tiny is the arc represented by a single lifetime—the two thoughts almost compelling us to believe in a succession of lives as the only explanation or solution. We are compelled towards a practical belief in Reincarnation, and yet (as above) we have to confess that our conception of what it really is, or what we mean by it, is only vague. This, however, is no more than what happens in a hundred other cases. The young bird starts building a nest for the first time, driven by some strange instinct to do so, and yet it can only have a very dim notion of the meaning and uses the nest will subserve when finished. And we found our lives on deep intuitions—of social solidarity, of personal responsibility, of free will, and so forth—and yet it is only later and by degrees that we learn what these things actually mean.
Referring, then, to the four alternative forms of the self given two or three pages back, and taking the last first, we may say definitely, I think, that as far as the self of each one of us is identified (4) with the All-self of the universe, its reincarnation is assured. Its reincarnation indeed is perpetual, inexhaustible, multitudinous beyond words, filling all space and time. Though the consciousness of this self is deeply buried, yet it is there, in each one of us. Occasionally—if even only for a moment—it rises to the surface, bringing a sense of splendor and of joy indescribable—the absolute freedom and password of all creation, the recognition of oneself everywhere and in all forms. But this phase of the self—I need hardly say—is for the most part hidden; and more common is it perhaps for the Race-self (3) to rise into our consciousness with more or less distinct assurance that we live again and are re-embodied in other members of the race to which we belong. The common life of the race carries us away and overmasters us with a strange sense of identity and community of being. Heroisms and devotions—as of men dying for their country, or bees for their hive—spring from this; and superb intoxications of joy. The whole of the life of primitive races and tribes, and the life of the animals and insects, illustrates it—in warfares, migrations, crusades, frantic enthusiasms, mad festivals—the genius of the race rushing on from point to point, inspiring its children, incarnating itself without end in successive individuals.
It is not so uncommon, I say, for us to be able to identify ourselves with this great Race-self, and to feel its thrill and pulse within our veins. And it might well be thought that, with these two forms of reincarnation (3) and (4) and the immense joy they bring, we should be content: even as all the tribes of the animals and the angels are content.
But it seems that man—when the civilization-period sets in, and after that—is not content. The little individual soul, now first coming to the consciousness of its own separateness, sets up a claim for an immortality and a reincarnation of its very own—apart from the Race-self, apart even from the Divine self. It demands that its ego should continue indefinitely into the farthest fields of Time—a separate entity, perpetually re-embodied. Can such a claim—in the light of what has been said above—be possibly conceded?
Certainly not. We have seen the absurdity of supposing that the local and superficial self (1) can ever recur again or be re-embodied in that form, except as a mere matter of memory (or possibly of a repetition of the whole universal order). And as to the underlying self (2), whatever exactly it may be, there are a thousand reasons for seeing that as a wholly separate entity the same must be true of that. I may refer the reader to The Art of Creation, the whole argument of which is to show that even the mere attempt to think of itself as a separate entity involves the human soul in hopeless confusion and disintegration; and I may remind the reader that we know nothing in the whole universe which is thus separate and apart, and that the conception, whether from a physical point of view or a psychological point of view, is impossible to maintain. That being so, there remains only to consider the possibility of the underlying self or individual soul being re-embodied—not as an absolutely separate entity, but as affiliated to some greater Life which shall afford the basis of successive incarnations. The problem is narrowed down, practically to the question whether the individual may not obtain some kind of individual reincarnation through the Race-self, or possibly through the All-self of the universe.
And here I will state what I personally think and believe about this problem, leaving the reasons for the present to commend themselves. I think that in the early stages—in animal and primitive human life—the Race-self is paramount; that each individual self proceeds from it, in much the same way as a bud proceeds from the stem of a growing plant, or even as a single cell forms part of the tissue of the stem; and is absorbed into it again at death. There are no individual and death-surviving souls produced, apart from the Race-soul. In the great race or family of bunny-rabbits, for instance—though there are certainly individual differences of character—just as there are differentiations of tissue-cells in the stem of a plant—it is difficult to believe that there are individual and immortal souls. Each little self springs from the race, and is an embodiment of it, representing in various degree its characteristics; and at death—in some way which we do not yet quite understand[[130]]—returns thither, yielding its experiences to the stores of the race-experience. The same is probably true of the great mass of the higher animals, even up to the primitive and earliest Man. The Race-self in all these cases moves onward, upgathering the experiences of the individuals, wise with their united knowledge, and rich with their countless memories. And these tracts again, of experience, knowledge and memory, largely in a vague and generalized form, but sometimes in sharp, individualized and detailed form, are transmitted from the Race-self to its later individuals and offshots. Thus a kind of broken reincarnation occurs, by which streaks of memory and habit pass down time from one individual to another, and by which perhaps—in us later races—the persistent ‘intimations of immortality’ and persuasions of having lived before are accounted for.
I think that this process, of mixed and broken reincarnation, may go on for countless generations—the animal or animal-human souls so differentiated from the race-soul returning continually to the latter at death. But that a period may come when the Race-self (illustrated by the growing plant-stem) may exhibit distinct buds—the embryos, as it were, of independent souls—which will not return and be lost again in the race-soul, but will persevere for a long period and continually attain to more differentiation and internal coherence and sense of identity. In such cases any reincarnations that occur connected with these buds—though mingled with the race-life—will become much less broken than before, and more distinctly individual; till at last a phase is reached when such a soul-bud, almost detached from the race-life, may be reincarnated (or let us say ‘re-embodied’) as a separate entity, with a kind of immortality of its own.
It must be at this stage that the characteristic human soul of the Civilization-period is evolved—which coheres quite firmly round itself, which protests and revolts against death, which even largely throws off its allegiance to the race-soul, and to the laws and solidarities of the race-life, and which has an enormous and overweening sense of identity and self-importance, claiming for itself, as I have just said, a kind of separate persistence. Here ensues, as may be imagined, a terrible period of confusion and trouble—the whole period of competitive civilization. The splendid claim of identity and immortality is made; but for the time being it is spoiled by what we call ‘selfishness,’ the mirror is cracked through ignorance. The Soul has disowned her allegiance to mere instinct and the race-self, and has yet not found a firm footing beyond—is only floundering in the bogs of self-consciousness and anxiety. What kind of Re-embodiment may belong to this period we shall best perhaps see when we have considered the further course of the argument.
For at last the process of transition completes itself. The human soul tossed about beyond endurance at length discovers within itself a divine Nucleus—a nucleus of growth and life and refuge and security, apart from its own fragility, quite apart from the race-life, independent of all the latter’s laws and conventions and sanctions and traditions, independent of caste or color, of world-period or locality; and from that moment it (the soul) rests; it ceases (like the little rose of Jericho) from its desert wanderings; it radiates itself and begins to grow from a new centre; it is born again; it becomes the beginning of what may be called a Divine Soul. The man becomes conscious of an ethereal body forming within, unassailable or at least undestroyable by Death; and it is probable that, during this period, the subtle organism which we have already termed the Inner or Spiritual Body (ch. x.) is actually forming and defining and, so to speak, consolidating itself. The subtle body of a more perfect being is forming—a body which can pass unharmed through walls, fire, water, which can navigate the air and the planetary spaces, and which is built on the basis of the ether, itself the all-pervading life-substance of creation. A divine soul is coming to expression, an ego indeed, marvellously different and distinct from all other egos, and ever more majestic and unique growing; but rooted deep in the universal self, and ever from that root expanding and sharing the life of that self and of all its children.
With the formation of this divine soul, re-embodiment in its complete and adequate sense commences. The spiritual or subtle body formed within the gross body retains its characteristics after the death of the latter (many of which characteristics no doubt hardly gained expression in the one life just ended)—and passes on to other spheres, there to assume more or less definitely material bodies according to the sphere and the conditions in which it may need to move. It may seek re-embodiment on earth through ordinary heredity and childbirth—in which case presumably it enters into the growing germ, and moulds the development of the latter to an adequate, if not to a quite perfect and unsullied, expression of itself. If the reincarnation is to be into ordinary human and terrestrial life, this is probably the only available method. And it would seem that some advanced and well-nigh perfect souls do adopt this method, appearing as infants with a kind of divinity about them, and a germinal purity so great as to seem to proceed from an ‘immaculate conception.’
But to most, in this stage, the toil and tedium of passing through embryonic life and physical birth and infancy may well appear intolerable; and since by now they have developed the subtle or spiritual body and the powers belonging to it, this ordeal is no longer necessary. The subtle body can—as we have gathered from former chapters—by a process of condensation clothe itself in a visible or even tangible vesture,[[131]] and may function, at any rate for a time, in such outer or apparitional form without going through all the abracadabra of birth. If on the earth, such functioning can only be very temporary, owing to the difficulty here of the conditions, and of the supply of the necessary condensation-material; but in other and less ponderous spheres the difficulty is probably much less, and the formation of suitable bodies comparatively easy. Anyhow, it will be seen that reincarnation of this second kind is unitary and single in character instead of being divided or fragmentary; it is unalloyed instead of being broken and mixed;[[132]] and a vision rises before us, in connection with it, of ever-growing forms and more perfect life-embodiments carrying out, one after another in long succession, the evolution and expression of each divine soul or separate ray of universal being.
Thus in answer to query two, on an early page of this chapter, we may say that there are two kinds of reincarnation proper—quite different from each other:—(1) That of the race-self in which the individual members of the race share only in a streaky fashion, each going back at death into the race-soul, and emptying its memories and experiences into that soul for general sporadic inheritance, but not for transmission in mass to any one later individual; and (2) that of the individual who has found his divine soul and evolved his inner body to a point where it cannot be broken up again; and who is thus reincarnated or re-embodied complete through successive materializations or condensations, in other spheres and without again undergoing the ordinary race-birth and death.
But though these two represent the normal forms of reincarnation, a third kind should be added which represents the transition from one to the other, and which is important for us because it mainly covers the period in which we now are—the great period of civilization. We saw how the soul of the animal is so close to the race-self, and so little differentiated from it, that it probably returns quite easily into the race-self at death; and this is likely to be the same with very early or primitive man. But when the distinctly human soul begins to form and to shape itself, it does not so easily forget its individuality and obliterate itself in that from which it sprang. And so we have the tentative, half-formed human soul, by no means well assured of itself, or certain of its own powers, and by no means perfect or contented, but much persuaded of its own importance and anxiously seeking reincarnation as a separate entity—and seeking this by the only means available to it, i.e. through heredity and birth as a member of the race.
It is a painful situation and experience. The soul, as human and not animal soul, is longing to separate itself from the race, to mark its distinction and independence—yet it has not, so far, found the divine nucleus which alone can give it real independence; and it can only gain expression and manifestation through the race-self and the ordinary paraphernalia of birth and death. It has learned no other way. Moreover, it is not yet completely differentiated from the race-self. It thus arrives at what can only be a very mingled and broken expression. Some father-stream and some mother-stream uniting, as it were, in the psychological neighborhood of this half-formed soul give it the desired opportunity; and blending itself with them it comes down into the world—a being of triple nature, embryonic and incompletely formed in itself, and utilizing as best it can the diverse elements of its maternal and paternal sources. Its career, consequently, and its life on earth are marked by a continual inner struggle and conflict—both physiological and psychological (due to the effort of the soul to bend the race-life and the elements of corporeal heredity to its own uses), and in strange contrast both with the hardihood and calm insouciance of the animals, in whom the race-life is untampered, and with the transparent health and serenity of those other beings in whom the divine soul has finally established its sovereignty.
Such, briefly described, are I believe the outlines of the reincarnation story. To put it in a few words, the whole process by which the race-self evolves and finally gives birth to myriads of free, independent and deathless individuals curiously resembles and may well be illustrated by a certain biological phenomenon common both in the vegetable and the animal worlds. Some growing stem or portion of tissue, perhaps of a plant, perhaps of a sponge or higher organism, is at first of a simple homogeneous character, fairly uniform and undifferentiated: but after a time it exhibits knobs and inequalities, which presently define themselves in a sort of botryoidal or clustered bud-like growth (as, for instance, in the spadix of an arum or the ovary of a mammal); finally these knobs or buds become entirely distinct and fully formed, and are thrown off ‘free,’ as seeds (in the case of plants and animals), or gemmules (in the case of sponges), or spores (in ferns and mosses), or as fresh and complete individuals in many aquatic creatures—in any case to enter on the beginnings of a free and independent life of their own. This kind of process, anyhow, is found in every department of biology, and it may well be that it extends upward even into the highest domains. The growing stem—proliferating cells without number, which are born and die in a kind of even uniformity within the limits of the stem—corresponds to the race-self in its early stages; the formation of knobs and buds in various degrees of clustered development corresponds to the partial growth of human souls out of the race-soul; and the liberation of the buds and germs corresponds to the liberation of the human souls into the freedom of a universal life.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DIVINE SOUL
The liberation of buds and germs, as in the biological processes alluded to in the last chapter, is in general connected with sex, and brought about by its operation. And, similarly, I think we may say that the liberation of human souls and their disengagement from the race-matrix is brought about by love. I have already pointed out (ch. ix.) the intensely personal and individualizing character of human love. If one can imagine a love-relation going on between two members of a race—two portions, as it were, of the race-soul—at present only slightly individualized, one can see how the attraction to each other, the drawing away from their surroundings, the excitement, the agitation, all tend to further their growth as individuals—to give them form, apart from the matrix in which they are embedded, and definition and character. Of course all experience does this, but most of all and most deeply does love. It breeds souls out of the Race-self, and finally brings them away to an independent life. “It is for this that the body exercises its tremendous attraction—that mortal love torments and tears asunder the successive generations of mankind—That underneath and after all the true men and women may appear, by long experience emancipated.”
As said in an early chapter, in love, though we do not know exactly what is happening, we are persuaded that something very profound and far-reaching is working itself out. And one such thing, I am sure, is the liberation of the soul of the lover—and, in less degree, the soul of the loved one. The tremendous experiences and convulsions, the profound stirrings, and the wrenchings from old ties and associations, do at last not only build the soul up into a distinct individuality, but they dig it up from its roots in the race and plant it out in the great Eden garden of emancipated humanity—the beginning of a new career.[[133]]
Another thing that I think is happening is that when love is strongly reciprocated the elements (as we have seen several times already), whether physical or psychical, pass over from one to the other and are interchanged—regenerating and immensely enlarging the life and capacity of each individual. This happens, I believe, in all grades of the universal life, from the Protozoa upwards. Two individuals drawn together interchange some elements of their being, and grow thereby into a larger and grander life; or may even in cases fuse completely into one individual person. As Swedenborg says somewhere:—“Those who are truly married on earth are in heaven one Angel.”
Thirdly, I think that the reciprocated love of two sometimes creates a new soul. We are familiar with the idea that the love (sexual) of two bodies commonly creates a new body; and there is an age-long tradition that the same is true in the world of souls. There is in that world also, not only regeneration but generation. “Love is the desire of generation in the beautiful, both with relation to the soul and the body,” says Plato;[[134]] and Ellen Key, in a passage already quoted above (ch. iv., p. 61), says that “two beings through one another may become a new being, and a greater than either could be of itself alone.” By love a new soul is sometimes generated which takes possession of both persons, and which suggests—as in the Swedenborg phrase above—that in some other sphere they really become one. And by love, we may also think, between man and wife, a new soul or soul-bud is sometimes created, which may descend into and vivify the physical germ of their future child.
To consider this last point a moment. The connection between heredity and the individual self is very mysterious. We acknowledge our descent, and what we owe, both mentally and bodily, to our parentage; but we are fain to think of our ego as something apart, something not to be confused with parents, and by no means merely derivative from them. Sometimes indeed there is great harmony between this ego and the parental inheritance, sometimes much the reverse; sometimes the line between the two is doubtful and uncertain. What is the explanation of all this? and what are the true facts of the relationship?
Does it not seem likely that, in the intense organic excitement which attends sexual union, this excitement—especially if strong love be also present—reaches right down into the soul-depths of each person, stirring these also, and the race oversoul at that point, most profoundly? So that, at the same moment that the germ of a bodily child is being fertilized, there is formed in the race-soul a soul-bud corresponding, which consequently descends into the physical germ and becomes its organizing life—the soul-bud thus being related to the souls of the parents, somewhat as the physical germ is related to their bodies? It springs, in fact, from a related portion of the race-oversoul.
Or again, does it not seem likely that in some cases, instead of a quite new bud being formed, the profound stirring of the race-life in that vicinity causes some older and more developed soul-bud—which has perhaps already had some earth-experiences—to wake into activity and take possession of the germ? In the first case mentioned the child born will be singularly like the parents, and in nature harmonious with them, with very little extraneous in its character, and with the fair prospect before it of a smooth and even career. But in this latter case, though the child will be harmonious with the parents it will have great depths beside, of authentic character of its own which will show out as time goes on.
And again, if deep love be absent, and consequently there is no special birth or awakening of souls in that region where they should be related to the body which is being born—what is likely to happen? Is it not likely that some other soul-bud, or soul which chance or other indication of destiny may bring that way, may enter in and possess the developing organism? And is it not likely, then, that strife and conflict and doubt may also enter in, causing a character of mixed elements, possibly leading to heroic developments, but also probably to a broken or tragic life-story?
As in the earliest and most primitive developments of life, so in the latest and most exalted, the soul is born through love, and through love it grows and expands. It may indeed be asked whether any other way is possible. Oppositions and conflicts may give form to the growing thing, and help to carve its outlines; but this gives it expansion. Every profound attachment necessarily modifies and enlarges the man. It pulls him out of his little orbit into a wider path—even if for the moment with some amount of eccentricity. Something is incorporated in his life which was not part of it before—something possibly which he did not before appreciate or understand. What we now are—whether mentally or physically—is an epitome of multitudinous loves in the past. The very cell-alliances which constitute our bodies are the records of endless heart-yearnings and romances (dating from far-back ages, and even now enduring) among a tiny people to us well-nigh invisible. And we may ask ourselves whether in the regions above and beyond our present life there may not be soul-alliances and even soul-fusions, by which we humans in our turn build up the very life of the gods? Plato in his Symposium, speaking of the strange desire of lovers for each other, makes Aristophanes say:[[135]]—“But the soul of each manifestly thirsts for, from the other, something which there are no words to describe, and divines that which it seeks, and traces obscurely the footsteps of its obscure desire. If Vulcan should say to persons thus affected, ‘My good people, what is it that you want with one another?’ And if, while they were hesitating what to answer, he should proceed to ask—‘Do you not desire the closest union and singleness to exist between you, so that you may never be divided night or day? If so, I will melt you together, and make you grow into one, so that both in life and death ye may be undivided. Consider, is this what you desire? Will it content you if you become that which I propose?’—We all know that no one would refuse such an offer, but would at once feel that this was what he had ever sought; and intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.” And we may think—though this strange and intimate longing is never fulfilled, as we know, in the actual earth-life—that it still may possibly be an indication (as happens in other cases) of something which really is working itself out in the unseen world.
It was suggested, in the end of chapter xi. above, that limitation and hindrance are a part of the cosmic scheme of the creation of souls, and that there is a purpose in these things in regard to this mortal life. It was also suggested that the profound soul-stuff of which we are made is capable of infinitely swifter and more extended perceptions than those of which we are usually aware; and that there is a good deal of evidence to show that perceptive powers of this kind—quite independent of the usual end-organs of sight, hearing, taste, and so forth, still linger buried deep down within us. The question then naturally arises, If this limitation of faculty really exists as a fundamental fact of our mortal life, what purpose does it subserve?—And the answer to this is, I think, very clear.
It subserves the evolution of Self-consciousness and of the sense of Identity. It is obvious that diffused faculties and perceptions, however swift and powerful, could never have brought these gifts with them. It was only by pinning sensitiveness down to a point in space and time, by means of a body, and limiting its perceptions by means of bodily end-organs, that these new values could be added to creation—the local self and the sense of Identity. All the variety of human and animal nature, all the endless differences of points of view, all diversity and charm of form and character and temperament must be credited to this principle; and whatever vagaries and delusions the consequent growth of self-consciousness and selfness may have caused, it is incontestable that through the development of Identity mankind and all creation must ultimately rise to a height of glory and splendor otherwise unimaginable.
And not only limitation but also hindrance. These things give an intensity and passion to life, and a power and decisiveness to individuality, the absence of which would indeed be sad. As a water-conduit by limiting the spread of the stream and confining it in a close channel gives it velocity and force to drive the mill, so limitation and hindrance in human life give the individualized energy from which, for good or evil, all our world-activities spring. As the Lord says in Goethe’s Prologue to Faust:—
“Of all the spirits of denial
The mischief-maker I most tolerate,
For man’s activity doth all too soon unravel;
Of slumber he seems never satiate;
Therefore I gladly hand him to a mate
Who’ll plague and prick, and play in fact the Devil.”
Over a long period in this cosmic process this action, we may think, goes on. The vast and pervasive soul-stuff of the universe, in its hidden way omniscient and omnipresent, suffers an obscuration and a limitation, and is condensed into a bodily prison in a point of space and time; but with a consequent explosive energy incalculable. The Devil—diabolos the slanderer and the sunderer, the principle of division—reigns. To him, the ‘milk and water’ heaven of universal but vague benevolence is detestable. He builds up the actual, fascinating, tragic, indispensable world that we know. Selfishness and ignorance, the two great Powers of discord and separation, are his ministers; the earth is his theatre of convulsive hatreds and soul-racking passion; and our mortal life, instead of being the fair channel of cosmic activities, becomes a “stricture knot,” as Whitman calls it, and a symbol of disease.
But this diabolonian process is only one segment of the whole. After the long descent and condensation and imprisonment of the spirit in its most limited and inert and self-regarding forms, after its saturation in matter, and its banishment in the world of death and suffering, the rising curve of liberation sets in, and the long process of its return. It is through love mainly, as we have seen, that this second process works itself out. From point to point through unison with others, by absorbing something from their experience, by sharing a wider life, the spirit’s manifestation grows. By this the great tree of organic life spreads upon the earth; by this each race-stem multiplies its tissues and expands; by this the buds of human souls are formed; and by this the souls themselves are freed to independent life, and ultimately to circle again “dancing and sporting” as Plutarch says, “like joyous satellites round about their sun in heaven.” There is continual Transformation; but there is also continuity from end to end. For every being there is continuance, but continuance only by change. Each soul is a gradual rising to consciousness of the All-soul; a gradual liberation and self-discovery of the divine germ within it. First the race-soul rising toward this consciousness, and then the individual souls thrown off, rising each independently toward the same. It is when the latter are moving over from their (instinctive and so to speak organic) community with the race-soul to a distinct and separate knowledge of and allegiance to the divine germ now declaring within themselves, that all this period of confusion and dismay, naturally enough, occurs—this that we have called the period of Civilization and the Fall of man—the period in which indeed we are now so fatefully involved. But it is in this period too that ‘divine souls’ are formed, and their feet first set upon the path of splendor.
Love indicates immortality. No sooner does the human being perceive this divine nucleus within himself than he knows his eternal destiny. Plunged in matter and the gross body he has learned the lesson of identity and separateness. All that the devil can teach him he has faithfully absorbed. Now he has to expand that identity, for ever unique, into ever vaster spheres of activity—to become finally a complete and finished aspect of the One.
CHAPTER XIV
THE RETURN JOURNEY
We have seen that there is some reason for believing that, simultaneously with the birth or coming to consciousness of what we have called the divine soul, there occurs within us the formation of a ‘spiritual’ or very subtly material body. This body, if only composed of atoms, may easily be so fine and subtle as to pass practically unchanged through ordinary gross matter—the walls, for instance, and other obstacles that surround us. (At this moment there is an astronomical theory current that the stellar universe consists of two vast star-systems which are passing in nearly opposite directions right through each other.) If composed of electrons its subtlety and pervasive powers must be much greater. Moreover, its fineness and subtlety would make it difficult of destruction. The ordinary agents of death—physical violence, water, fire, and so forth—would, as already pointed out, hardly reach it; and it is easy to suppose that it might continue onwards and perdure in stability and activity for thousands of years. Even the Atom of matter, which is now regarded as a complex system of electrons, is supposed to have an immensely extended lifetime—nearly two thousand years in the case of Radium, and much longer in the case of all other substances; and if two thousand years or thereabouts is the minimum lifetime of an atom, it is not difficult to suppose that the lifetime of a subtle body composed as above described may be equally or much more extended.
During its lifetime, the radio-active atom, slowly disintegrating, pours out a prodigious amount of energy; and in the process apparently is transformed and takes on other characters and qualities. Radium for instance, or rather some products of its disintegration, are thought to take on the characters of Helium and of Lead. And similarly we have every reason to believe that the subtle body of Man is continually pouring out energy on all sides, radiating like a sun—pouring out mental states, sensible forms, influences of all kinds, even images of itself, and so continually entering into a wider life and touch with others, and undergoing a slow transformation of its outer form. At the same time—and leading to the same results—it is continually storing up in its recesses impressions and memories for the seed of future expression and development.
It may be imagined that the gross terrestrial body—though splendidly necessary for the localizing of the Self, and the establishment of the sense of identity, and for the electric accumulation of stores of emotion and passion, and so forth—acts on the whole in such a way as to greatly hamper and limit the activities of the inner body; and we can imagine that (as at death and under other special conditions) the liberation from the gross body is naturally accompanied by an enormous extension of faculty. The soul in its new and subtler form passes out into an immensely wider sphere of action and perception—so much so, indeed, as to make direct converse between the two worlds (the new world it is in, and the old one it has left) difficult to establish and very difficult permanently to maintain. The author of Interwoven says (p. 221) that the first body and the second body differ greatly in their chemical particles, “and so the same degree of sight and hearing is not possible.... We have just as much trouble to see the outsides of things as mortals have to see the insides.”
Nor can we place a necessary limit to the birth of finer bodies. There may be a succession of such things. The electron brings us very near to a mental state; for whereas an Atom—conceived as similar to the speck of dust which one can roll between one’s fingers, only much more minute—seems to have no relation to mentality, a tiny electric charge, capable of conveying a shock, comes very close! And at that stage the truth becomes apparent that the inner intelligent being in all things is the core, and the body is only the surface of contact—the surface, in fact, along which one intelligence administers shocks to another! With liberation from the gross body that surface may grow enormously extended, and it may become possible to touch or see, or to render oneself visible or tangible, to others far beyond all ordinary possibilities of contact or perception.
The succession of finer bodies may exist in any gradation, from what we call gross matter to the subtlest ether of emotion. At any rate we can see that at every stage there will be a finer body which is more of the nature of thought, and an outer and coarser which is less so. As the gifted author of The Science of Peace, Bhagavan Das, says:—“At each stage the Jiva-core (i.e. the core of the living individual) consists of matter of the inner plane, while its outer upâdhi (or sheath) consists of matter of the outer plane; and when a person says, I think, I act, it means that the matter of the inner core, which is the I, for the time being, is actually, positively, modified by, or is itself modifying in a certain manner, the outer real world.” The inner film of matter (or mind), as he says, “is posing and masquerading, for the time being, as the truly immaterial self.”
This central Self we can never wholly reach, but the movement of each divine soul is toward it; and the assurance and salvation of each soul is in the growing sense of union with it. The personal self can only ‘survive’ by ever fading and changing toward the universal. Our inner identity is fixed, but our outward identity we can only preserve by, as it were, forever losing it.
After life’s fitful fever—after the insurgence and resurgence of passions; after the heart-breaking struggles which are forced upon some for the sake of a mere material footing upon the earth; after the deadly sufferings which others must undergo in order to gain scantiest allowance and expression of their inner and spiritual selves; after the mortal conflict and irreconcilableness of material and mental needs; the battles with opponents, the betrayal of friends, the fading and souring of pleasures, and the dissipation of ideals—the consent of mankind goes to affirm and confirm the conclusion that sleep is well, sleep is desirable. As after a hard day’s labor, when the sinews are torn and the mind is racked, Nature’s soft nurse commends a period of rest and healing—so it would seem fitting that a similar period should follow, for the human soul, on the toil and the dislocation of life.
It seems indeed probable—and a long tradition confirms the idea—that the human soul at death does at first pass, with its cloud-vesture of memories and qualities, into some intermediate region, astral rather than celestial (if we may use words which we do not understand), some Purgatory or Hades, rather than Paradise or Olympus; and for a long period does remain there quiescent, surveying its past, recovering from the shocks and outrages of mortal experience, knitting up and smoothing out the broken and tangled threads, trying hard to understand the pattern. It seems probable that there is a long period of such digestion and reconcilement and slow brooding over the new life which has to be formed. Indeed when one comes to think of it, it seems difficult—if there is to be continuance at all—to imagine anything else. When one thinks of the strange contradictions of our mortal life, the hopelessly antagonistic elements, the warring of passions, the shattering of ideals, the stupor of monotony: the soul like a bird shut in a cage, or with bright wings draggled in the mire; the horrible sense of sin which torments some people, the mad impulses which tyrannize over others; the alternations of one’s own personality on different days, or at different depths and planes of consciousness; the supraliminal and the subliminal; the smug Upper-self with its petty satisfactions and its precise and precious logic, and the great Under-self now rising (in the hour of death) like some vast shadowy figure or genius, out of the abyss of being—when one thinks of all this one feels that if there is to be any sanity or sequence in the conclusion, it must mean a long period of brooding and reconciliation, and of readjustment, and even of sleep.
At first it may well be a troubled period, of nightmare-like confusion; but at last there must come a time when harmony is restored. The past lifetime is spread out like a map before one—all its events fall into their places, composed and clear. The genius, rising from the depths, throws a strange light upon them. “This was necessary. That could not have been otherwise. And that again which seemed so fatal, do you not now see its profound meaning?” The soul surveying gradually redeems the past. It comes to understand. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. It beholds, far down, the little fugitive among the shadows, pursued by the hideous and imbecile mask—the sense of Sin—and, recognizing a fleeting embodiment of itself, it smiles: for that mask has been seen through and is useless any longer. It beholds another—or is it the same?—pursued by the Terror of Death; and again it smiles: for that shadow—like the vast moonshadow in a total eclipse of the sun, which seemed so solid and all-devouring, has swept by; it has been passed through, and it was only a shadow.
And it may well be also that this whole process of reconciliation and adjustment and the building up of diverse elements into one harmonious being may occupy more than one such interval between two lifetimes; it may require several periods of incubation, so to speak. Looking at the matter from the physical side, and seeing how the inner and subtle body has probably to be formed during all this time—as in a chrysalis—and differentiated into an independent life, it seems likely that several intervals of outer rest and inner growth may be needed, and a series of successive moultings! But in the end, when the string of earth-lives is finished, and the reconciliation is complete, then the essential, the divine, self has become manifest, and is ready for a whole new world, a new order of experience, even to the farthest confines of the universe.
I have suggested in a former chapter that Memory—that very wonderful faculty—is probably our best test of Identity, our best test of Survival. If we apply this canon to the evolution of the independent soul out of the race-life, it may help us. When an animal dies, the group of memories, which is its life’s-experience, probably passes back and is transmitted in a more or less diffused way into the general race-life or soul.[[136]] In the case of some higher animals it is possible that the memory-group thus returning may cohere for a time or to a certain degree, and not be immediately diffused. In the case of the higher types of Man it is probable that such group may cohere for a long time and rather persistently; and though embedded in the general race-life and memory, and much mingled with and modified by these, it may still form to some degree an independent centre of intelligence and organization (something like a nerve-plexus in the brain or body). It will form, in fact, what I have already called a soul-bud or budding soul, and will be capable of that mixed or partial reincarnation of which I have spoken—in which some truly individual streaks of memory will be mixed with general memories of race-life.
But after each successive reincarnation the group of memories returning—and allying themselves to the former groups—will necessarily give more and more definition to such budding soul, till at last the time will come when its individuality will be complete; its severance from the race-life will follow as a matter of course; and it will float out into the sea of the all-pervading and divine consciousness.
During this budding period of the human soul, which generally speaking may be said to coincide with the civilization-period of human history, the memory of each earth-life will go back into the race-soul there to swell the nucleus of the individual soul which is being brought to birth; but it will not generally revive into evidence in the next earth-life, for, being so deeply buried within, it will be too much overlaid by external layers and happenings to come distinctly into consciousness. It is not probably till the completion of the whole series of its earth-lives that the soul will resume all these memories and come into its complete heritage. Then, at some deep stage or state all its incarnations (clarified and comprehended) will become manifest to it—a glorious kingdom beyond the imagination of man at present to conceive. All its various lives it may live over again; but with as much difference in its understanding of their meaning as there is between an accomplished player’s rendering of a piece of music, and a child’s first stumbling performance of the same.
It will perceive that, in a sense, it has pre-existed from eternity. For though certainly there was a time when it first sprang as a bud from the Race, and entered into a gradually evolving and self-defining series of personal lives, yet that first bud was itself but a particular limitation and condensation of the Race-self; and that again, far back and beyond, a limitation through many intermediate stages of the All-self. It (the human-divine soul) will perceive that it pre-existed from eternity as the All-self; that it suffered in its time the necessary obscurations and limitations; that it abdicated the high prerogative of universal consciousness; and that it was born again as a tiny Cinderella-spark; destined to rise through all the circles of personal and individual life, and the enacting of the great drama of Love and Death—the great cycle of Evolution and Transfiguration—once more to the eternal Throne.
The glory of that Heaven where the All-self dwells radiant as the Sun, and each lesser or partial soul knows itself as a ray conveying the whole light, but in a direction of its own—we need not dwell on or attempt to portray. As the emancipated soul, just described, may include the personalities of many earth-lives and bodies, so there may be—probably are—larger inclusive selves, special gods, having troops of souls united to them in the bonds of love and devotion. Telepathic radiations, travelling as it were on lines of light, and with the velocity and directness of light, bring each unit into possible touch with every other, and over an enormous field. As the modern theory of electricity supposes that every electric charge, however small, or associated with the smallest atom, is connected by lines of force with some other and complementary charge somewhere—even perhaps at a practically infinite distance—negative with positive, and positive with negative; so the idea is suggested that in the free world of the spirit every need felt by one atom of personality anywhere is felt also and answered to by some complementary impulse and personality somewhere. In the bringing together of these needs and affections, in the recovery and the building up and the presentation in sensible form of all the worlds of memory, slumber infinite possibilities, and the outlines of endless situations and developments. The individual is clearly not lost in any ‘Happy Mass’; but may contribute to the formation of such a thing in the sense that he comes into such wide and extended touch with others as to have a practically unlimited range of experience, memory, knowledge, creative power, and so forth, to draw on.
Nor is there any call to think of a bodiless heaven or bodiless state of being in any plane of existence. The body in any stage or state is, I repeat, a surface of contact. Wherever one intelligent being comes into touch with another—whether actively, by impressing itself on the other, or passively by being impressed—there immediately arises a body. There arises the sense of matter, which is in fact the impression made by one being upon another. The external senses, of sight, hearing and the rest, are modifications or limitations of more extended inner faculties, of vision, audition, and so forth. The actual world of Nature which we know, in the bodies of the woods and streams, and of animals and men, is built up out of the material of our senses; out of the kind of impressionability of which our senses are susceptible; but if these materials, of our sight and hearing and touch and taste, were altered but slightly in their range, the whole world would be different. They would create for us another world. And so, if these present end-organs of sense were destroyed, the soul, furnished with the inner faculties corresponding, would create another world of sense and of Nature, which would become the medium of expression and communication on that new plane, and the material of its bodily manifestation there. At present, owing to entanglement in the grosser senses, life is certainly in the main a matter of food and drink, of sex, of money-making, and the exercise of rather rude recreations and arts. With a finer range of sense, there would still remain the roots and realities of these things; the need of sustenance would still survive in the finer body, and the need of interchange and the indrawing of vitality; the hunger of union and of intercourse would remain—to be expressed in some shape or other; the delight in music and in beauty of form would be no less, though sounds and colors might be different from those we know; and all the faculties that we have—and others too that are now only embryonic with us—would demand their exercise and expression. Out of such demands and needs would arise a corresponding world.
I have suggested above (ch. xi.) how, deep in the subliminal self, there lies a marvellous faculty of producing visible and audible phenomena—Visions and Voices and Forms. Out of the depths of being these can be evoked, and bodied forth into the actual world.[[137]] In other words, each such Self, in its moods of power, can call forth its own thoughts and mental images with such force as to impress them irresistibly on others within its range—with such force, in fact, as to give them a material vesture and location. What we have said of the vastness and range of the human Under-self, of its swift interrelation with others, of the immensity of its memory extending far back into the deeps of time, must convince us that its powers of creation must be correspondingly wonderful. The phenomena exhibited by entranced mediums, and by hypnotized subjects, are only a sample of these powers; but they hint dimly to us that when we understand ourselves, and what we are, and when we understand others, and what they are, Time and Space and Estrangement will no longer avail against us; they will no longer hinder us from recognition of each other, nor hold us back from the spheres to which we truly belong, and the fulfilment of our real needs and desires.
Man is the Magician who whether in dreams or in trance or in actual life can, if he wills it, raise up and give reality to the forms of his desire and his love. It is not necessary for us feverishly to pursue our loved ones through all the fading and dissolving outlines of their future or their past embodiments. They are ours already, in the deepest sense—and one day we shall wake up to know we can call them at any moment to our side; we shall wake up to know that they are ever present and able to manifest themselves to us out of the unseen.
CHAPTER XV
THE MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY
It will have been noticed that throughout this book there has been a tendency to return again and again to the question of what we mean by the Self. As I have said before (see ch. xii., supra), one might very naturally suppose that as the ego underruns all experience, and we cannot make any observation of the world at all except through its activity, the general problem of the nature of the ego would be the first to be attacked, and the very first to be solved; whereas, curiously enough, it seems to be the last! Only towards the conclusion of philosophical speculation does the importance of this problem force itself on men’s minds. Nevertheless, I think we may say that in the department of philosophy it is the great main problem which lies before this age for solution; and that one of the greatest services a man can do is—by psychologic study and manifold experience, by poetical expression, especially in lyrical form, and by philosophic thought and investigation—to make clear to himself and the world what he means by the letter ‘I,’ what he means by his ‘self.’
To the unthinking person nothing seems simpler, more obvious, than his own existence—and hardly needing definition. Yet the least thought shows how complex and elusive this ‘self’ is. It is one of those cases with which the world teems—a juggle of the open daylight—in which an object appears so perfectly simple, frank, innocent, and without concealment, and yet is really profoundly complex, deliberate, and unfathomable.
The most elementary considerations easily illustrate what I mean.[[138]] When we speak of the ego, do we mean the self of to-day, or of yesterday, or of some years back—or possibly some years in the future when we shall have found the expression now unhappily denied us? Do we mean the self of boyhood, or even of babyhood? or do we mean that of maturity, or of old age? Do we mean the self indicated by the mind alone, or by the spirit, apart from the body? or do we mean that indicated specially by the body, or even (as some folk seem to consider) by the clothes? It would be very puzzling to be asked to place one’s finger, so to speak, on any one of these manifestations as really and completely representative. Rather perhaps we should be inclined, if pressed, to say that our real self was something underrunning all these forms—that it required all the expressions, from infancy, through maturity, even to old age, and all the apparatus of body and mind, in order to convey its meaning; and that to pin it down to any particular moment of time, or to any particular phase of the material or spiritual, would be to do it a great injustice.
If so, we seem at once compelled to think of the Self as something greatly larger than any ordinary form of it that we know, as something perhaps on a different plane of being—underrunning, and therefore in a sense beyond, Time; and similarly underrunning, and therefore in a sense beyond, both body and mind. And this all the more, because, as I have said on an earlier page, we all feel that at best much of our real selves remains in life-long defect of expression; and that there are great deeps of the Under-self (as in chapter viii.) which, though organically related to our ordinary consciousness, are still for the most part hidden and unexplored. All, in fact, points to the existence within us of a very profound self, which so far we may justifiably conclude to be much greater than any one known manifestation of it; which requires for its expression the forms of a lifetime; and still stretches on and beyond; which perhaps belongs to another sphere of being—as the ship in the air and the sunlight belongs to another sphere than the hull buried deep in the water.
But we may go further in our exploration of the “abysmal deeps.” We have once or twice in the foregoing chapters alluded to the possibility of the self dividing into two personalities, or even more. We have supposed, for instance, that at death the psychic organism may possibly split up—some more terrestrial portion remaining operant and active on the earth-plane, and some other portion removing to a subtler and more ethereal region. Are we—we may ask—and those others who propound the same ideas talking nonsense in doing so? Is it anyhow possible for a self to be active in two bodies or in two places at the same time? It may indeed seem impossible and absurd—until we envisage the actual facts; but when we do so, when we study the facts of the alternation of personalities, so much in evidence at the present time, when we find that two or more personalities, or coherent bodies of consciousness, may not only succeed each other in one human organism, but may simultaneously be active in the same,[[139]] when we find that there is such a thing as ‘bilocation,’ and that the apparition of a person may come and deliver a message while the original person is far away and otherwise engaged, when we notice carefully our own internal psychology and find that we not unfrequently “talk to ourselves” and in other ways behave as two persons in one body—we see that the absurdity or unlikelihood of the suggestion may not by any means be so great as supposed, and that we may after all be forced to largely remodel our conception of what Personality is.[[140]]
That one Personality should divide into two or more may seem to be foreign to our habitual views; yet we must remember that worms, annelids, and molluscs of various kinds commonly so divide; and though it is puzzling to think what becomes of the ‘I’ or ‘self’ of a sea-anemone when the latter is cut in twain and each part goes its way as a new creature, we must not therefore refuse to envisage the fact and the problem thus flowing from it. As to the Protozoa, which certainly exhibit signs of considerable intelligence, fission of one cell into two or more is one of the most normal and frequent events of their lives. The same, of course, is true of the elementary cells of the human body; the fission even of whole organs of the body is not uncommon, though more pathological in character; and the fission of the personality, as just mentioned, is quite frequent; and in some cases—as in the well-known case of Sally Beauchamp—very striking, on account of the furious apparent opposition developed between one portion and another.[[141]]
The conception therefore of Personality must, it would seem, include the thought of possible bilocation—that is, of possible manifestation in two places at the same time; and it must not refuse the thought of inclusion—i.e. of one personality being possibly included within another—as of living and intelligent cells within the body.[[142]] Furthermore, we must not only allow division of self as one of the attributes of personality, but also, apparently, fusion with other selves. This may seem far-fetched and unreasonable at first, but on consideration we cannot but see that in one degree or another it is quite in the order of Nature. The Protozoa, of course, quite frequently combine with each other, and so make a new start in life; in the higher organisms the sperm-cell and germ-cell fuse completely for the conception of the offspring, and the organisms themselves fuse partially and interchange elements during the process of conjunction; and in the psychology of love among human beings we notice a similar fusion, and sometimes also almost a confusion, of personalities.
The little self-conscious mind (of the civilized man) no doubt protests against all this. It desires to think of itself as a separate and definite entity, distinct from (and perhaps superior to) all others; and it finds any theories of possible fission or fusion of personalities quite baffling and impracticable. Yet in the light of the All-self—the key-thought of this book—the whole thing is obvious, and there is really no difficulty, except perhaps in the linking up (through memory) of the continuity of each lesser self.
What we said in the last chapter, namely that “the personal self-consciousness can only survive by ever fading and changing toward the universal,” must be borne in mind. Continual expansion is a normal condition of consciousness. Time is an integral element of it.[[143]] Consciousness must continually grow. Through memory it preserves the past, through the present it adds to its stores. The author of The Science of Peace illustrates the subject (p. 303) by asking us to consider the spheres of consciousness of various officials in a country whose departments more or less overlap each other: “There are administrative officers in charge of each department, whose consciousness may be said to include the consciousness of their subordinates in that department, to exclude those of their compeers, and to be in turn included in those of their superiors. The more complicated the machinery of the government, the better the illustration will be of inclusions and exclusions and partial or complete coincidences, and overlappings and communions of consciousness. At last we come to the head of the government, whose consciousness may be said to include the consciousnesses, whose knowledge and power include the knowledges and powers of all the public servants in the land, and whose consciousness is so expanded as to enable him to be in touch with them all and feel and act through them all constantly. An officer promoted through the grades of such an administration would clearly pass through expansions of consciousness.... Such expansion of consciousness, then, is not in its nature more mysterious and recondite than any other item in the world-process, but a thing of daily and hourly occurrence. In terms of metaphysic it is the coming of an individual Self into relation with a larger and larger not-self.”
In the light of the All-self, I say, the difficulties disappear. It is the question of Memory (explicit or implicit) which seems to decide the limits of personalities and their survival. The One Self is experiencing in all forms, but the stores of experience and memory are kept separate. Here is a man who has a Town house and a Country house and an Italian villa. When he changes his abode from one to the other he becomes to a great extent a different person. His surroundings and associations, his pursuits and occupations, his dress and habits, his language may be, are changed. It may even happen that each of his three lives goes on growing and expanding after its own pattern, and becoming more and more different from the two others; and yet the ultimate person behind them all remains the same. Is it not possible that the lives of us human beings may go on expanding and growing each according to its own law, and yet the ultimate individual or Being behind them all may remain the same?
If a worm be supposed to have memory (and worms no doubt have memory in some degree), then it might well be supposed that, if divided in two, each of the parts would inherit the said memory complete. But from that moment the experiences of the two portions, moving in different directions, would bifurcate, and the future stores of memory would be different. Thus we should have a bifurcation of the stream of memory, and a bifurcation of personality—until ultimately, as time went on, and the common memory faded into the background, the two new personalities would begin to feel themselves almost quite separate. Is not this again something like what may have happened to ourselves from Creation’s birth? The stream of life has bifurcated and bifurcated till we have lost our common memory and have become convinced of the absolute separation of our personalities one from the other.
On the other hand, the conjunction and fusion of two streams of memory in one is as probable and intelligible as the bifurcation of one into two. Two protozoa fuse; but the race-self in one is the same as in the other, and in reality the process is only a fusion of organic memories and experiences. A man who had been in the habit of changing every year from his Town to his Country house might some day find it convenient to combine his establishments in one suburban residence. Certainly if he had so far forgot himself that in changing houses he had always quite changed his memories, then it would seem impossible to him to combine the two lives in one. Otherwise there would be no difficulty in the process. The stores of one establishment, with their associations and memories would after a time (and not without some maturation-divisions and extrusions!) be got into relation with the stores of the other establishment; and the two bodies of memory and association would settle down together.
All this seems to suggest to us that our conception of personality must be considerably altered from its ordinary form, and rendered more fluent, in order to tally with the real facts. There is no such thing as a fixed and limited personality, of definite content and character, which we can credit to our account, or to the account of our friends. All is in flux and change, the consciousness ever enlarging, the ego which is at the root of that consciousness ever growing in the knowledge of itself as a vital portion of the All-self. That last alone is fixed; that alone as the ‘universal witness’ is permanent. But the streams of memory and experience, by which from all sides that central fact and consciousness is reached, are infinite in number and variety. It is in the continuity of a stream of memory that what we call personality must be supposed to consist; and when this continuity covers not only a single life, but extends from life to life, then we must find a new name for the persistent being and call him not a personality, but, if we will, an individuality. Such individualities must exist by millions and billions; they must be as numerous as all the possible lines of experience (and these are quasi-infinite in number) by which the soul may grow from its birth in the simplest speck of matter to its realization of divine and universal life. The author (Bhagavan Das) of The Science of Peace illustrates this infinitude of individualities, and how they are all contained in the All-self, and each in a sense as an aspect of the One, by the simile of a museum or gallery. “If a spectator,” he says (p. 289), “wondered unrestingly through the halls of a vast museum or great art gallery, at the dead of night, with a single small lamp in one hand, each of the natural objects, the pictured scenes, the statues, the portraits, would be illumined by that lamp in succession for a single moment, while all the rest were in darkness, and after that single moment would fall into darkness again. Let there now be not one but countless such spectators, as many in endless numbers as the objects of sight within the place, each spectator wandering in and out incessantly through the great crowd of all the others, each lamp bringing momentarily into light one object, and for only that spectator who holds that lamp.” Then he goes on to say that each line or succession of experiences might represent an individuality; each individuality in the end would reach the totality of experience, but in a different order and in a different manner from any other; and all the individualities would all the time—though changing themselves—remain within the unchanging intelligence of the absolute, and would only be exploring that intelligence each in a different order. “For,” he again says (p. 317), “an individuality can no otherwise be described, discriminated and fixed, than by enumerating the experiences of that individual, by narrating its biography.”
We may also illustrate the matter by the conception of a Tree. A single leaf at the end of a twig may seem to have a little separate self of its own; but it is very ephemeral. It perishes with the season and another leaf takes its place. There is a deeper self, in the twig, which endures, and from which new leaves spring. And again the twig springs from a small spray, which is the source of other twigs and leaves. Should the leaf desire to trace its complete and total self it would have to follow its life-line through the twig and the spray, to the branch, and so right down to the central trunk. It could not stop at any halfway point, and say, This is my final self. But on its way to the trunk, at different points, it would find that its sap or life was flowing into other twigs and leaves, as well as the twig and leaf first mentioned. It would come into relation, so to speak, with other bodies beside the first. If we were to call the first leaf and twig a personality we should have to call some deeper self involving many twigs and leaves an Individuality, and so on to the All-self of the tree. The self of every leaf would approach the main trunk along a different line, and through various ranges of individuality; but all would ultimately participate in one whole.
I think some such view is clearly the most satisfactory way of looking at the matter. We are all essentially one; our differentiation from each other does not consist in differences in the central ego, but in the different lines of experience and memory. We can none of us boast, at any point, of a rounded, definite and stationary self, apart from all others; but we are all approaching the universal from different sides. Yet, also, it is perfectly true that consciousness is born in us first through our very limitations. Through the very obstacles that surround us, and through the things that seem to divide us from others, first simple consciousness and then self-consciousness are born. Then comes a time when the limitations and the barriers become intolerable. The soul that at first gloried in them comes to find the burden of self-consciousness too great. Why should it be forever John Smith? As Mrs. Stetson says:—
“What an exceeding rest ’twill be
When I can leave off being Me!...
Done with the varying distress
Of retroactive consciousness!...
Why should I long to have John Smith
Eternally to struggle with?”
When the consciousness arises of this fact, that we need not be tied to John Smith forever—that our real self is far vaster, and essentially one with others, then in each of us the Divine Soul is born; a vista of glory and splendor opens in front, and on all sides the barriers fall to the ground. On the way to this supreme conclusion the stream of memories which one calls oneself may of course take on form after form; it may bifurcate, or it may fuse with other streams. That does not very much matter. The real identity, once established, can hardly be lost. For every leaf there is a channel of sap which connects it with the main trunk. Personality is real, but it yields itself up in the greater Individual of which it is the expression; and the individual or divine soul is real—enduring perhaps many thousands of years—but it yields itself up ultimately in the All. Finally, in that union, Memory itself, in its mortal form, ceases, for it is swallowed up in actual realization, in the power of actual presence in all space and time. The divine soul which has thus completed its union needs memory no more. It is there wherever it desires to be. As the author of Siderische Geburt (Berlin, 1910) says, “We mortals are separated from the divine all-embracing universal Vision; and Memory is only a first glimmering reawakening—a beginning of renewed seraphic life and a coming into relation with all that lies beyond the little world-corner of our presence.”[[144]]
At first sight, and to one who does not yet realize the inner unity of being, these views on the nature of Personality and Individuality may appear strange and even painful. For such a person the thought of the dissociation of his ‘self,’ of its separation into two or more parts—either in life or in death—and the divergence of the two parts from each other, must be grotesque and terrible, and verging even towards madness. And so also must be the thought of the possible dissociation of the personalities of his friends. And yet it may be necessary for us at length and by degrees to understand and assimilate such a view. Certain it is that, as we come to understand it, we shall see that any dissociation that may occur can only be of the superficial elements—something of the nature of a divergence of the chains of memory; and that dissociation of the real and intimate self is a thing quite impossible. We shall see that by degrees the self may learn to deal with such dissociations, and to express itself in various guises, and in more than one personality at a time. If, for instance, there does occur at death a certain break-up of the psychic organism—if the animal soul, and the human soul, and the divine soul do to a certain extent part from each other and go along different ways, we may see that it is quite possible that the personal stream of memory may correspondingly branch in different directions. One portion of the consciousness, having always been animal and terrestrial in character, may identify itself mainly with the animal vitality of the residue and its corresponding memories—and may persevere for some time as a wandering passional centre, liable to attach itself to the organisms of living folk, or to figure as a ‘ghost’ of very limited activities and occupied with eternal repetitions of the same action; another portion, more distinctly human, may linger in some intermediate state, partly in touch with the earth-life and the souls of mortal friends, yet partly drawn onward into wider spheres; and may function on for a long time in a kind of dreamland—creating perhaps the objects of its own consumption till it wearies of them, or building up imaginative worlds of occupations and activities similar to our own, as in “the happy hunting grounds” of Indians, or the worlds described from time to time by mediumistic ‘controls.’ And again a third portion may pass into that far wider and grander state of being which we have described—that of the ‘divine’ soul which recognizes its equality and unity with all others, and its freedom of the whole universe. In all these cases the main stream of memory, branching, must pour itself into the section of life which follows, and render the latter quite continuous with the former—though naturally with some differences, both in the memories transmitted, and in the degrees of community, in each case.
We may apply these considerations to the question of the messages and apparitions from the unseen world which have been alluded to in former chapters. How far or in what special way these communications really represent the active and continuing consciousness of our departed friends is a question which is generally admitted to be most doubtful and difficult. And its difficulty is not lessened, I think, by our conclusions (so far) on the nature of Personality. If the stream of a man’s earth-life memory may diverge at death into two or more streams, then it must remain difficult for us to say whether the communication which is coming to us proceeds from a mere overflow of that stream, which has eddied itself, so to speak, into the brain of the medium; or from some ‘astral’ shell of the departed one, which has already begun decaying and dissipating, in our atmosphere; or again from the true soul of the man which is pushing forward into the world beyond. Probably we do not yet know enough about the matter to form decisive judgments. In either case the memory exhibited may be surprisingly perfect. And it seems to me that in most cases nothing but personal evidence and personal detail, even down to the minutest points, can decide—and even then not in such a way as to decide for others. And perhaps it is best and most natural so. In our world of ordinary life it is so. If an apparent stranger turns up from the other side of the earth and claims a far-back acquaintance; if another makes the same claim over the telephone; if a known friend behaves strangely, and we are in doubt whether to attribute his conduct to bona fides or to incipient madness; in these and a thousand other cases, personal relationship and personal understanding (though by no means unerring) count for more than all science and legal proof. And perhaps this is the healthiest way to take the subject: not to be over-curious or speculative or sentimental, but where solid help and a permanent and useful relationship seems to be gained, there to accept the communications as so far commending and justifying themselves.
If, as I have just said, there is something a little disquieting and even terrible in the thought that our personality may thus be subject to rupture or dissociation into two or more portions, that matter after all depends upon how we look upon it—whether from below, as it were, or from above. There is nothing particularly terrible in the thought that our bodily organs and parts—our “Little Marys,” and so forth—may have (probably do have) very distinct personalities of their own. We look down upon them, so to speak, and include them. And we shall one day no doubt, and in the realization of our greater selves, have the splendid experience of including two (or more) bodies—of having them at our service, and available for command and expression. Even now we are sometimes conscious of having one envelope of a more ethereal and intense nature, swift and far-reaching both in movement and perception in the innermost regions, and another more local body, in touch with terrestrial life. And there would be nothing surprising or dreadful in finding, after death, that an ethereal and a terrestrial body were both still at our command—though both perhaps more developed and more differentiated from each other than at present;—or even that we might be capable of inhabiting several such bodies.
It is of course puzzling, under our ordinary conceptions of Space and Time, to imagine how it could be possible to deal with several bodies at the same time; but in reality it is no more puzzling than the problem which we habitually solve every day and every hour of our lives. How do we, for instance, deal with and dispose the activities of our hands and our feet and our eyes and our brain, with simultaneous care, say, in walking through the streets? We inhabit these separate organs, these distinct personalities, simultaneously, and ordain their movements and gather in their perceptions by the act of attention. Attention in the world of the spirit corresponds to extension in the physical world. Whatever your spirit attends to, that some physical radiation from yourself extends to. And similarly if you had bodies in different worlds and regions, by the simple act of attention your spirit would reach them. Nevertheless—to return to the one body and the various organs, like hands and feet and eyes, which we seem to have under control—it is clear that our minds could not possibly overlook all the details of their management, unless there were some general ordaining spirit in the body which was in close touch and sympathy, and ready to act with and aid us; and similarly it is clear that we could not ordain and organize any movement of a secondary body at a distance—even though ‘belonging’ to us—unless there were a spirit, in that body and the intervening spaces, in touch and sympathy with ours. It is the knowledge that there is such a community of life, such an abounding Self, which gives the ‘divine’ soul its great joy and its great power—“for whatever he desires, that he obtains from the Self.” He who knows has indeed the freedom of the universe, and of all its powers—who knows that the Spirit of the whole is his own.
It is natural therefore to suppose that that portion of the consciousness which has circled and centred very definitely and conclusively round the All-self—or such aspect of the same as specially belongs to it; or (what perhaps comes to the same thing) has circled very definitely round the divine soul of a loved one; will pass through death easily and without much loss of continuity. It will with its attendant memories pass easily and continuously into the inmost sphere; or (to put the matter in another way) remaining in that sphere it will simply become aware that a mass of husks have been shed off, which clouded it. It will become aware of the glorious state of being to which it has always implicitly belonged, and of its connection with not one only but many bodies.
It may be—and I think one almost feels that it must be—that the most intimate self of any of us cannot be realized short of externalization in a vast number of separate manifestations or lives. One has the impression with regard to one’s body, that “this is one of my bodies”; or that “this body represents a portion of myself”; but one does not feel “this body represents my total, complete and final self.” And as we have just suggested that in a more intimate state of being we may become distinctly aware of having relation to several bodies simultaneously, so the world-old doctrine of reincarnation in its general form has long suggested that our most intimate selves are related to a great number of bodies in succession to each other in Time. The higher or inner Individual—of agelong and æonian life—is reincarnated (it is said) thousands of times; thus to embody that aspect of the Divine which it represents.
These embodiments may be in forms by no means resembling each other—though doubtless there will be a thread of similarity running through; and one embodiment may have little idea (except in moments of inspiration) of its relation to the others, or of any continuity of memory between itself and the others. Yet the memories of these lives and embodiments passing into the inner sphere are ultimately gathered together and drawn up to constitute that most glorious world of each Being of which we have spoken—a world in which each overlooks and ordains its various lives and manifestations as from a mountain-top. These are indeed “the ageless immortal gods who seek ever to come in the forms of men”—whom we ever and anon seem to feel and hear knocking at the inner door of our little local selves, as though they would gain admittance and acknowledgment.
CHAPTER XVI
CONCLUSION
And so we seem to find—in the farthest and loftiest reaches of life, as in its first beginnings—Love and Death strangely linked and strangely related. Changing their form but not their essence they accompany us to the last; and we forebode them, in the final account, as no longer the tyrannous and often terrible over-lords of our mortal days, but rather our most indispensable companions without whom life in its higher ranges could not well be maintained.
For a time, certainly, we cling to our limited and tiny self-life and consciousness; and deem that all good resides in the careful guarding of the same. But again there comes a time when the bounds of personality confine and chafe beyond endurance, when an immense rage sweeps us far out into the great ocean; when to save our lives we deliberately lose them; when Death becomes a passion even as Love is.
The mystery of mortal life clears, or dissolves away, by our passing in a sense beyond personality; and the hour arrives when we look down on these local days, these self-limitations, as phases—phases of some far vaster state of being. Death is the necessary door by which we pass from one such phase to another; and Love is even a similar door.
Growing silently within there emerges at last something which has its home in the great spaces, which dives under and through Death, and is the companion of Titanic and Cosmic beings; something strangely surpassing all barriers and limits, and strangely finding identity by fusing and losing it in the life of others; something which at times seems almost mockingly to abandon its own identity and rise creative in new forms—sporting in the great ocean; and yet can somehow instantly recall its past and the tiny limits from which it first sprang—trailing forever with it the wonderful cloud-wreaths of earth-memory and association, and the myriad fragrance of personal remembrance. “What are thou then?” says the poet, addressing his departed friend:—
“What art thou then?—I cannot guess;
But tho’ I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power
I do not therefore love thee less.”
Even in the farthest spheres the poignant syllables ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ will surely still be heard; and a thousand deaths shall not avail to exhaust their meaning or to make of Love a pale and cold abstraction.
The memory of the earth-life and of personal identity is never lost; but it passes out into that far greater form, the memory and resumption into a coherent Whole of many lives, and the sense of an Individuality which has value because it is merged in and is an expression of the All. Memory indeed changes from being the faint dream-shadow that we know, of things in the past, to being the things themselves, actual and ever present at our command; and with this finding of the inner soul and heart’s core of all beings it becomes possible to live over again with them the days gone by, in all detail and with ever deeper understanding of their true meaning.
The supra-liminal returns into harmony with the subliminal; the individual life and the mass-life are reunited. With the overpassing of the local and terrestrial self we are liberated into a fluid region where a thousand personalities yield their secrets and their co-operation into our hands. With the releasing of our attention from personal objects and terrestrial gains, materials and people correspondingly cease to obstruct. They find nothing which they can obstruct! The body moves freely about the world; life ceases to be the ‘obstacle race’ and the queer perpetual vista of barricades which it mostly now is; and a fortiori the soul moves freely, because truly for the redeemed soul it is possible to feel that all things and creatures are friendly, all beings a part of itself. These and many other such realizations are indeed possible now—even in our present terrestrial state—under those rare conditions when the divine creature which is within the mortal body achieves a momentary deliverance, and under which we sometimes pass out of our little mundane dream into that other land where the great Voices sound and Visions dwell.