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.