“Not necessarily,” he answered; “probably never. The most advanced are unadvertised, in the least assuming positions. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them, hard of attainment by those the world applauds. The successful, so called, are the younger, cruder souls, passionately acquiring still the external prizes men hold so dear. Maturer souls have long since discarded these as worthless. The qualities the world crowns are great, perhaps, at that particular stage, but they never are the highest. Intellect, remember, is not of the soul, and all that reason teaches must be unlearned again. Theories change, knowledge shifts, facts are forgotten or proved false; only what the soul itself acquires remains eternally the same. The old are the intuitional; and the oldest of all—ah! how wonderful!—He who came back from loftier heights than most of us can yet even conceive of, was the—son of a carpenter.”
I left my seat upon the boulder and lay beside him, listening for a long time while he talked, and if there was much that seemed visionary, there was also much that thrilled me with emotions beyond ordinary. Nothing, certainly, was foolish—because of the man who said it. And, while he took it for granted that all Nature was alive and a manifestation of spiritual powers, the elements themselves but forces to be mastered and acquired, it grew upon me that I had indeed entered an enchanted valley where, with my strange companions, I might witness new, incredible things. Finding little to reply, I was content to listen, wondering what was coming next. And in due course the talk came round again to ourselves, and so to the woman who was now his wife.
“Then she has no idea,” I said at length, “that we three—you and I and she—have been together before, or that there is any particular purpose in my being here at this moment?”
“In her normal condition—none,” he answered. “For she has no memory.”
“There is a state, however, when she does remember?” I asked. “You have helped her to remember? Is that it, Julius?”
“Yes,” he replied; “I have reached down and touched her soul, so that she remembers for herself.”
“The deep trance state?”
“Where all the memories of the past lie accumulated,” he answered, “the subconscious state. Her Self of To-day—with new body and recent brain—she has forgotten; in trance—the subconscious Self where the soul dwells with all its past—she remembers.”