The little book of life after death

by Gustav Theodor Fechner

The way upon which we pass from the second to the third stage is not darker than that by which we reach the second from the first. The one leads to the outer, the other to the inner aspect of the world.

But as the child in the first stage is still blind and deaf to all the glory and joy of the life of the second, and his birth from the warm body of his mother is hard and painful, with a moment when the dissolution of his earlier existence feels like death, before the awakening to the new environment without has occurred,—so we in our present existence, in which our whole consciousness lies bound in our contracted body, as yet know nothing of the splendor and harmony, the radiance and freedom of the third stage, and easily hold the dark and narrow way which leads us into it as a blind pitfall which has no outlet. But death is only a second birth into a freer existence, in which the spirit breaks through its slender covering and abandons inaction and sloth, as the child does in its first birth.

Then all, which with our present senses only reaches us as exterior and, as it were, from afar, we become penetrated with and possessed of in all its depth of reality. The spirit will no longer wander over mountain and field, or be surrounded by the delights of spring, only to mourn that it all seems exterior to him; but, transcending earthly limitations, he will feel new strength and joy in growing. He will no longer struggle by persuasive words to produce a thought in others, but in the immediate influence of souls upon each other, no longer separated by the body, but united spiritually, he will experience the joy of creative thought; he will not outwardly appear to the loved ones left behind, but will dwell in their inmost souls, and think and act in and through them.

CHAPTER II

THE unborn child has merely a corporeal frame, a forming principle. The creation and development of its limbs by which it reaches full growth are its own acts. It has not yet the feeling that these parts are its possession, for it needs them not and cannot use them. A fine eye, a beautiful mouth, are to him only objects to be secured unconsciously, so that they may sometime become serviceable parts of himself. They are made for a subsequent world of which the child as yet knows nothing: it fashions them by virtue of an impulse, blind to him, which is clearly established alone in the organization of the mother.[1] But when the child, ripe for the second stage of life, slips away from the organ representing the provision for his former needs, it leaves it behind, and suddenly sees itself an independent union of all its created parts. This eye, ear, and mouth now belong to him; and even if acquired only through an obscure inborn sense, he is learning to know their precious uses. The world of light, color, tone, perfume, taste, and feeling is only now revealed as the arena in which the functions acquired to that end are to operate for him, if he makes them serviceable and strong.

The relation of the first stage to the second recurs in a higher degree in the relations of the second to the third. Our whole action and will in this world is exactly calculated to procure for us an organism, which, in the next world, we shall perceive and use as our Self. All spiritual influences, all results of the manifestations which in the lifetime of a man go forth from him, to be interwoven with humanity and nature, are already united by a secret and invisible bond; they are the spiritual limbs of the man, which he exercises during life while still bound to a spiritual body, to an organism full of unsatisfied, upreaching powers and activities, the consciousness of which still lies outside him, though inseparably interwoven with his present existence, yet, only in abandoning this, can he recognize it as his own.

But in the moment of death, when the man is separated from the organ upon which his acquisitive efforts were bent here, he suddenly receives the consciousness of all, which as a result of his earlier exterior life in the world of ideas, powers, and activities, still survives, prevails, flowing out as from a well-spring, while still bearing also within himself his organic unity.

This, however, now becomes living, conscious, independent, and, according to his destiny, controls mankind and nature with his own completed individual power.

Whatever any one has contributed during his life, of creation, formation, or preservation, to the sum of human idealism, is his immortal part, which, in the third stage, will continue to operate even if the body, to which, in the second, this working power was bound, were long since destroyed. What millions who have died have acquired, performed, and thought, has not died with them—nor will it be undone by what the next millions shall have acquired, performed, and thought, but continues its power, unfolds itself in them spontaneously, impels them towards a great goal which they do not themselves perceive.

This ideal survival seems indeed to us only an abstraction, and the continued influence of the soul of the dead in the living but an empty fancy.