The little book of life after death

by Gustav Theodor Fechner

Ask the plant how it can do without the seed, when it bursts from it to grow into the light, that wonderful creation which, through the impulsion of its inner germ, builds itself still further from within. Was it created for nothing?

Where, indeed, can be found a structure so wonderful as your brain, to replace it in the other world, and where, indeed, is there one that surpasses it; yet the future brain will surely transcend this present one.

But is not your whole body a finer and more highly organized creation than eye, ear, brain?—not beyond each part? So, and unspeakably more, the world, of which mankind with its state, its knowledge, art, and traffic is but a part, exceeds your little brain, the part of this part. If you would rise to a higher point of view, only see in the earth, not merely a ball of dry earth, air, and water; it is a greater and higher harmonious creation than you, a divine product, with a more wonderful life and action in its substance than you carry in your little brain, with which you contribute but an atom to its life. In vain you will dream of an after-life, if you fail to recognize the life about you.

What does the anatomist see when he examines the brain of man? A tangle of white filaments, the meaning of which he cannot decipher. And what does it see in itself? A world of light, tones, thoughts, memories, fancies, sensations of love and hate. And so realize the relation of that which you, standing outside the world, see in it, to that which it sees in itself, and do not require that both, the outer and the inner, shall appear more alike in the totality of the world than in you, who are but a part of it. And only because you are a part of this world, see in yourself also a part of that which it sees in itself.

And finally, do you perhaps still ask why our ultimate body, as we call it, only awakens in the other life after we have expelled it here in this earthly realm, and why it is already the continuation of our limited body?

That which in this narrower existence dies, is indeed destroyed; it is nothing but an instance of the same universal law which prevails through the whole of this world; a proof that it still continues into the next. Doubter, if you must always reason alone from this life—be it so.

The living strength of consciousness never really rises anew, is never lost, but, like that of the body upon which it rests, can only change its place, its form, its manner of dissemination in time and space, only sink to-day or here, to mount to-morrow or elsewhere; only rise to-day or here, to sink to-morrow or elsewhere.[8]

For the eye to be awake so that you see consciously, the ear must be hushed to sleep; to arouse the inner world of thought, the outward senses must be subdued into quiescence; a pain in the smallest spot can quite exhaust your soul’s consciousness. The more the light of observation is dispersed, the more feebly is any single part illuminated; the more clearly it strikes one point, the more all else enters into darkness; to reflect upon some one thing means abstraction from all besides. For your present freshness you have to thank your sleep since yesterday, the more deeply you sleep to-day the more brightly you will awake to-morrow, and the more vigilantly you have passed the waking hours the more profoundly you will sleep.

But the sleep of man in this world is in reality only a half sleep, which allows the body to wake again because it is still present; not until death is the full sleep which allows a new awaking because the body is no longer there; yet the old law is still present, which demands an equivalent for the former consciousness, and hence the new body as a continuation of the old; therefore a new consciousness will also be present as an equivalent and continuation of the old.

As a continuation of the old! For that which enables the body of the old man to still bear the consciousness which the body of the child, no atom of which is longer his, bore, will enable the future body to bear the same consciousness which was in the body of the aged man, of which it no longer possesses an atom. So it is that every successor preserves within himself and is built up by the continuation of the actions of him who bore the earlier consciousness. This is therefore a law, which ordains the onward march of the life here from to-day to to-morrow, and from this life to the other. And can there be another law so fundamental as this of the eternal survival of man?