All life circles of the higher spirits intersect each other, and you ask how it is possible that such numberless circles can intersect without disturbance, error, or confusion.
Ask rather first, how it is possible that innumerable undulations in the same pond, waves of sound in the same air, waves of light in the same ether, pulses of memory in the same mind intersect, that, finally, the countless life circles of man, bearing their great future, already in this life intersect without disturbance, error, or confusion. Rather a far higher plane of life and growth is achieved through these vibrations and memories reaching from this present life to the one beyond.
But what separates the circles of consciousness which cross each other?
Nothing separates them in any of those details in which they cross each other; they have all characteristics in common; only each stands in different relations from the other; that separates them in general and distinguishes them in their higher individuality. Ask again what distinguishes or separates circles which intersect; nothing separately; yet you easily observe an outward difference yourself in general; still more easily will centres which are themselves self-conscious also distinguish an inner difference.
Perhaps you have sometimes received from a distant place a letter written across both ways. How do you decipher both writings? Only by the coherence which each has in itself. In like manner is crossed the spiritual handwriting with which the page of the world is filled; and each is read by itself, as if it occupied the whole space, and the others, too, which overlie it. Not merely two, but innumerable letterings make a network of record on the earth; the letter, however, is but an inadequate symbol of the world.
Still, how can consciousness continue to preserve its unity in so large an extension of its ground, how withstand the law of the threshold of consciousness?[5]
Ask first, how it can preserve its unity in the smaller expanse of the body, of which the larger one is only the continuation. Is, then, your body, is your brain a point? or is there a central spot within as seat of the soul? No.[6] As it is now the nature of the soul to maintain the limited composite of your body, so in the future will it be to unite the greater composite of the greater body. The divine spirit knits together, indeed, the whole fabric of the world;—or would you seek even for God in one point? In that other world you will only acquire a larger part of His omnipresence.
If you fear that the wave of your future life will not in its extension reach the threshold which here it surmounts, remember that it does not spread itself into an empty world,—then, indeed, would it sink helplessly into an abyss,—but into a realm, which, as the eternal foundation of God, at the same time becomes the foundation of your life, for only in virtue of the divine life is the creature able to live at all.[7]
So a wren upon the back of an eagle can easily soar above a mountain-top, for which task he himself would be too weak, and at last, from the back of the eagle, fly still a bit higher than the eagle has flown with him. But God is the great eagle as He is the little bird.
How can man after the death of the body do without his brain, so marvellously constructed, that contained every impulse of his mind, that carried the further evolution of those impulses into still greater strength and fulness? Was it formed in vain?