The little book of life after death

by Gustav Theodor Fechner

The human eye is only a little radiant spot upon the earth, and only gets the impression in the firmament of points of light. Man’s longing to know more of the universe is not here gratified.

He discovers the telescope and magnifies with it the surface, and so the capacity of his eye; in vain, the stars still remain little points.

Now he believes that he will attain in the next world what this life cannot grant, the final satisfaction of his curiosity; that once in heaven he will immediately perceive all that has been hidden from his earthly eyes.

He is right; but he does not reach a heaven because he receives wings to fly from one planet to another or even into an unseen heaven over the visible one; where in the nature of things could wings exist to that end? He does not learn to know the whole universe, by being slowly borne from one planet to another in ever-repeated birth; no stork is there to carry children from one star to another;—his eye does not gain the capacity for the infinite ethereal depths by being made into a great telescope; the principle of earthly sight will no longer suffice;—yet he will attain to all, in that, as a conscious part of the other life in the great heavenly existence that holds him, he wins a place in its high fellowship with other divinely illuminated beings. A new vision! Not for us here below, because no one of us has reached that plane. In the firmament the earth itself swims like a great eye wholly immersed in the vast star spaces, and swinging around therein, to receive from all sides the impact of waves which cross each other millions and millions of times and yet cause no disturbance. With this eye will man some time learn to discern the heavens, while the forward surging of his future life, with which he pierces it, meets and presses against the wave of the surrounding ether, and with finest pulsations penetrates the universe. Learn to see! And how much will man have to learn after death! For he must not think that, at the first entrance, he will possess the whole divine perception for which the future life will offer him the means. Even here the child first learns to see and hear; for what he sees and hears in the beginning is uncomprehended appearance, is mere sound without meaning—at first indeed only bewilderment, astonishment, and confusion; and nothing different does the new life offer to the new child at first. Only what man brings with him from this life, the composite echo of memories of all he has done and thought and been here, does he see, in the transition, all at once clearly lighted up within itself, yet still he remains primarily only what he was. Neither does any one think that the glory of the other world shall result otherwise to the foolish, the idle, and the bad, than to make them feel the discord of their lives, and to emphasize the necessity for reform. Already in the present life man brings with him an eye to behold the whole glory of heaven and earth, an ear to hear music and the speech of man, an understanding to grasp the meaning of all this; what does it avail to the foolish, the indolent, and the bad?

As the best and the highest in this life so is also the best and the highest in the other only there for the best and the highest, because alone by such understood, wished for, and acquired. Therefore, the higher man of the next world alone can gain a comprehension of the conscious intercourse in the existence into which he has passed with other divine beings, entering with them himself into this fellowship.

Who knows whether the whole earth, revolving in an ever slowly narrowing orbit, will not return to the heart of the sun from which it came, after eons of years, and then a sun life of all earthly creatures will begin; and where is the need of our knowing this now?

CHAPTER IX

SPIRITS of the third stage will dwell, as in a common body, in the earthly nature, of which mankind itself is a part, and all natural processes will be the same to them as they are to us in our bodies. Their substance will encompass the forms of the second stage as a common mother, just as those of the second stage surrounded those of the first.

Every soul of the third stage appropriates as its own share of the universal body only what it in the earthly realm has developed and accomplished. What a man has changed in this world by his life in it, that constitutes his further life in the universal existence.

This consists partly of definite accomplishments and deeds, partly of actions continuously recurring, just as the earthly body is made up of fixed parts and of parts which are movable and supported by the fixed ones.