Neither personal pain nor personal pleasure can be really expressed
in words. It is never possible to communicate them in their original
form. It is only possible, by vivid portrayal of the circumstances
or conditions causing them, to awaken in sympathetic minds some
kindred qualities of feeling. But if the circumstances causing the
pain or the pleasure be totally foreign to common human experience,
then no representation of them can make fully known the sensations
which they evoked. Hopeless, therefore, any attempt to tell the real
pain of seeing my former births. I can say only that no combination
of suffering possible to _individual_ being could be likened to such
pain,--the pain of countless lives interwoven. It seemed as if every
nerve of me had been prolonged into some monstrous web of sentiency
spun back through a million years,--and as if the whole of that
measureless woof and warp, over all its shivering threads, were pouring
into my consciousness, out of the abysmal past, some ghastliness
without name,--some horror too vast for human brain to hold. For, as
I looked backward, I became double, quadruple, octuple;--I multiplied
by arithmetical progression;--I became hundreds and thousands,--and
feared with the terror of thousands,--and despaired with the anguish
of thousands,--and shuddered with the agony of thousands; yet knew
the pleasure of none. All joys, all delights appeared but mists or
mockeries: only the pain and the fear were real,--and always, always
growing. Then in the moment when sentiency itself seemed bursting into
dissolution, one divine touch ended the frightful vision, and brought
again to me the simple consciousness of the single present. Oh! how
unspeakably delicious that sudden shrinking back out of multiplicity
into unity!--that immense, immeasurable collapse of Self into the blind
oblivious numbness of individuality!
*
"To others also," said the voice of the divine one who had thus
saved me,--"to others in the like state it has been permitted to see
something of their preëxistence. But no one of them ever could endure
to look far. Power to see all former births belongs only to those
eternally released from the bonds of Self. Such exist outside of
illusion,--outside of form and name; and pain cannot come nigh them.
"But to you, remaining in illusion, not even the Buddha could give
power to look back more than a little way.
"Still you are bewitched by the follies of art and of poetry and of
music,--the delusions of color and form,--the delusions of sensuous
speech, the delusions of sensuous sound.
"Still that apparition called Nature--which is but another name for
emptiness and shadow--deceives and charms you, and fills you with
dreams of longing for the things of sense.
"But he who truly wishes to know, must not love this phantom
Nature,--must not find delight in the radiance of a clear sky,--nor in
the sight of the sea,--nor in the sound of the flowing of rivers,--nor
in the forms of peaks and woods and valleys,--nor in the colors of them.
"He who truly wishes to know must not find delight in contemplating
the works and the deeds of men, nor in hearing their converse, nor in
observing the puppet-play of their passions and of their emotions.
All this is but a weaving of smoke,--a shimmering of vapors,--an
impermanency,--a phantasmagory.
"For the pleasures that men term lofty or noble or sublime are
but larger sensualisms, subtler falsities: venomous fair-seeming
flowerings of selfishness,--all rooted in the elder slime of appetites
and desires. To joy in the radiance of a cloudless day,--to see the
mountains shift their tintings to the wheeling of the sun,--to watch
the passing of waves, the fading of sunsets,--to find charm in the
blossoming of plants or trees: all this is of the senses. Not less
truly of the senses is the pleasure of observing actions called great
or beautiful or heroic,--since it is one with the pleasure of imagining
those things for which men miserably strive in this miserable world:
brief love and fame and honor,--all of which are empty as passing foam.
"Sky, sun, and sea;--the peaks, the woods, the plains;--all splendors
and forms and colors,--are spectres. The feelings and the thoughts and
the acts of men,--whether deemed high or low, noble or ignoble,--all
things imagined or done for any save the eternal purpose, are but
dreams born of dreams and begetting hollowness. To the clear of
sight, all feelings of self,--all love and hate, joy and pain, hope
and regret, are alike shadows;--youth and age, beauty and horror,
sweetness and foulness, are not different;--death and life are one and
the same; and Space and Time exist but as the stage and the order of
the perpetual Shadow-play.
"All that exists in Time must perish. To the Awakened there is no Time
or Space or Change,--no night or day,--no heat or cold,--no moon or
season,--no present, past, or future. Form and the names of form are
alike nothingness:--Knowledge only is real; and unto whomsoever gains
it, the universe becomes a ghost. But it is written:--'_He who hath
overcome Time in the past and the future must be of exceedingly pure
understanding_.'
"Such understanding is not yours. Still to your eyes the shadow seems
the substance,--and darkness, light,--and voidness, beauty. And
therefore to see your former births could give you only pain."
*