“No! that cannot be, for I—no, not I, for I am here—but my body yonder is manifestly animate. How easily I can move!”
All feeling of strangeness soon wore off. Simply from force of desire he rose in the air for a short distance, and looked down upon his material counterpart as one would view a sleeping comrade. What wonderful liberty and power before unknown! No wings were needed to move through the air as he might choose.
Amoz, wide awake, was sitting quietly near the dim lamp, but saw nothing unusual, believing that Saulus was asleep. Though the little lamp gave but a feeble light, the cave, to Saulus, seemed filled with a soft but brilliant illumination. Considering the unwonted powers and resources at his command, he was surprised at his own lack of surprise. His senses were extended and sublimated to a wonderful degree. He then tried to attract the attention of Amoz, but received no recognition. Not to be baffled, he took hold of him, and finally shouted in his ear, but with no effect.
Then Saulus began to wonder. He could see and [pg 306]hear, but not be seen or heard. He moved about the cave and made some further exploration, and found that the solid walls were no obstruction. They were not solid. He could not only see through them, but pass through.
Then the thought of Cassia, which had been so strongly present before, again became uppermost. But something of the same uncertainty within himself regarding her still remained.
Realizing that desire was all that was now needed for propulsion, he came to a sudden determination.
“I will go up to the Holy City, and once more behold Cassia, and all the things that I left behind.”
With the speed of thought, he left his own body, Amoz, and the cave behind him, and passed out from the mountain over the desert, and on, on, unerringly, by the power of simple volition. Space and time were limitations of the past.
How “cabbin’d, cribb’d, and confined” is man when weighted down with the little load of dust which he has picked up, moulded, and for a brief season carried about! To him chasms of time and space are wide and unbridgable, and he travels his little round with barriers on every hand, and an ever-present sense of servitude.
But it is not the grosser body per se which is so much his real encumbrance as his false consciousness concerning it. He is steeped in a prevailing and ever-ruling materialism. He is enslaved because he is ignorant of the laws of his own independence. He not only lives in the thought that it—the body—is I, but also [pg 307]bows in subjection to those ever-varying conditions, which with chameleon-like accuracy shadow forth, in exact expression, the quality of his past composite of thought. The consciousness which he has carelessly or ignorantly taken on, both racially and individually, makes it his tyrannical master. Sometimes, smarting under its rule, he has turned and denounced it as bad, and hence a gloomy and destructive asceticism. This is no less a mistake than a garish and overwrought materialism.