And so do not ask, how it is that effects which you produce in this outward world, which are outside you, shall still belong to you more than any others which are also outside. It is because the former much more than the latter have gone out from you. Every cause retains its effects as an eternal possession. But in truth your effects have never gone out from you; even in this world they formed the unconscious continuation of your existence, only awaiting the awakening to new consciousness.
As little as a man can ever die who has once lived, so little could he be awakened to life had he not lived before; it is only that he had not lived as an individual. The consciousness with which the child awakes at birth is only a part of the eternal, pre-existing, universal, divine consciousness which has concentrated itself in the new soul. We can indeed as little follow the ways and the changes of the living force of consciousness as those of the vital energy of the body.
But are you afraid that human consciousness, because born out of the universal, will again flow back into it; then look at the tree. Many years passed before the branches came out of the trunk; but once there they do not go down into it again. How would the tree grow and develop if this happened? So too will the life tree of the world grow and unfold itself.
After all, the strong argument in this world for the other is not from reasons unknown to us, nor from suppositions which we make, but it is from facts that we do know that we base our conclusions on the greater and higher facts of the future life, thereby strengthening and confirming a faith, practically demanded, depending upon a higher point of view and to be set in living relations with life. Indeed, if we did not need this faith, wherefore strengthen it; yet how use it, if it remain unsupported.
CHAPTER X
THE soul of man permeates his whole body; when it abandons the body, forthwith the body dies; yet light of consciousness of the soul is now here, now there.[9]
We have just seen it wandering back and forth within the narrow body, lighting up in turn the eye, the ear, the inner and the outer senses, finally, in death, to depart from it wholly, just as one, whose little house in which he has for long moved about back and forth is destroyed, goes out into the open and begins a new pilgrimage. Death makes no division between the two lives except to allow the exchange of the narrower scene of action for the wider. And as little as the light of consciousness is always and everywhere the same in this life, where it can be so interrupted and dispersed, so will it be in the future life.
It is only that the field of action is unspeakably larger, the possible extension wider, the ways freer, the points of view higher, embracing all the lower ones of this world.
But even in this life exceptionally, in rare cases, we see the light of consciousness wander out of the narrower body into the wider and return again, bringing news of what happens in distant spaces, in distant time. For the length of the future depends on the breadth of the present. Suddenly a rift shows itself in the otherwise forever closed door between this life and the other, to close again quickly—the door, which will wholly open in death, and only then will open never more to be closed. But a mere glance through the rift in advance is not profitable. Yet the exception to the law of this life is only an example of the greater law of life which embraces at once the two worlds.
It may happen that the earthly body falls asleep in one direction deeply enough to allow it in others to awaken far beyond its usual limits, and yet not so deeply and completely as to awaken no more. Or, to the subjective vision there comes a flash so unusually vivid as to bring to the earthly sense an impression rising above the threshold from an otherwise inaccessible distance. Here begin the wonders of clairvoyance, of presentiments, and premonitions in dreams: pure fables, if the future body and the future life are fables; otherwise signs of the one and predictions of the other; but what has signs exists, and what has prophecies will come.