“Has one ever stolen the key of the House of Life?” I asked.
“I know of none such,” was the cautious answer of wisdom.
Then I—“Talk to me, Mother, of Life and Death. What is Life?”
And she—“A dream in the heart of a dream.... It is as if one should sleep, and sleeping dream that he was dead. That dream within a dream is this, that men call Life.”
“And Death?”
“To-morrow’s dream. The next-door house. God’s tenant am I in this house in which you find me. But agreement I have none. God will tell me to quit, nor give me notice. Death is but the house I next inhabit. There will be other houses after that.” Death, it would seem, is but a change of house, we have failed to repair the present tenement, or it is too small for us, or our neighbourhood is unsuitable, so we are given the chance of another, and after that, perchance, yet another and another, through all the lives appointed to us. But our personalities remain. We can never sink those.
Once again, she talked of Death as “the Innermost Dream—but we shall wake.” “The end of the Death dream is only sleep, that is Life: when we wake from life, it is to Life Eternal.”
“And what is that?”
“Rest—in the perfect attainment of all truth, of all knowledge and of all reality.”
The body, I gather, is degradation to the soul. Any “house” is in a measure degradation and belongs to the state of progress. Some day we shall be free of all houses. We shall lose ourselves in the Great Soul. That is the final “Twilight”—the time of Union for each individual soul.