CHAPTER IV
Immortality
Is There Conscious Immortality? What is Immortality? Why We Hope for Consciousness in a Future Life. How the Ancients Regarded a Future Life.
Virtue alone builds pyramids. Her monuments shall last when Egypt’s fall.—Young.
In order that there should be what is spoken of as conscious immortality—or post-mortem consciousness—there must be an entity or organism to manifest it. Consciousness is the resultant of the vibratory movements of certain groupings of electrons called brain cells, acted on by certain other outside vibrations. This resultant called consciousness is the “unconscious cerebration” of the scientists. There can no more be consciousness without brain cells than there can be the music of a violin without the violin. There must be the entity or personality with the brain to receive, preserve, and transmit the vibrations that are contained in the reservoir of thought in the universe.
All thoughts, words and deeds are preserved and exist as rates of vibration in the universe, and are open to those attuned to receive them. We spoke in a former chapter of the illustration of the wireless telegraph and telephone. The coherer, receiver and transmitter being attuned, communication is established. This is another illustration of intelligent PURPOSE in the universe, and man is the mouthpiece of it.
When it is seen that every thought or word belongs to its distinctive wave and must find a brain attuned to the same rate of vibration to receive and to voice it, the irrationality of endowing an intangible, substanceless, non-existing, so-called “spirit” with consciousness must be apparent to anyone.
This is immortality, which correlates every thought and word of man, holding them in universal phonographic records, as it were, forming a vast reservoir from which continuously flows by electrical energy all so-called intelligent and other vibrations, we receiving those to which we are attuned. This is a thought that might well engage our most serious attention, involving as it does a responsibility of no little magnitude. We may well pause to inquire of ourselves what are we depositing in those archives of thought for redistribution to ourselves, and to our posterity, to say nothing of mankind in general.
Certain forms of vibration, such as hatred, malice, envy, jealousy and especially fear, are productive of disease, poverty, old age and death—all those inharmonious vibrations which comprise the sum of all the troubles and sorrows of mankind. The most productive of these inharmonious conditions known as sickness, poverty, old age and death, is FEAR. Veneration and worship of all kinds is a form of fear and opens the body to every ill.
Man through religious teaching and self-made creeds has evolved the idea of rewards and punishments for the “good” and “bad” deeds of this life, and as there must be a conscious entity to punish and reward and a place in which to administer the same, a so-called “future life” becomes a necessity.
What rational ground for all this? None whatever. The cessation of consciousness in what is called death, is an inevitable step in the inauguration and evolution of existence. As we have stated heretofore life and death are one and the same. The same unit of electric energy with two impulses—life and death. Continuous vibration. Every movement being the evolution of some new form demonstrating life’s continuity and electrical nature.