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.
And yet there are no signs in the normal life of this world. The
present has to build the heavenly body only for the future, not yet to
see and hear with the eye and ear that are to be. The blossom does not
thrive that is prematurely broken off. And even if one can assist his
faith in the future life by belief in these traces of its shining into
the present life, yet one should not build upon it. Healthy faith is
based upon fundamentals and limits itself to the highest point of view
of normal life, of which it forms a part.
You have hitherto believed that the light form in which a dead person
appears to you in remembrance is merely your own interior illusion. You
are mistaken; it is itself a reality, which, with conscious step, not
only comes to you but enters into you. The earlier form is still its
spiritual raiment; only, no longer fettered with its former dense body
and wandering inactive in its company, but transparent, light, divested
of its earthly burden, for the moment it is now here, now there,
following the voice of each one who calls to the dead, or of itself
appearing to you, to suggest the thought of the dead. Indeed the common
conception of the appearance of souls in the future life has always
been of light, immaterial forms, independent of the limits of space,
and so, though unintentionally, the truth has been reached.
You have also heard ghosts spoken of. Doctors call them phantasms,
hallucinations. So they are for the living, yet, at the same time, they
are actual apparitions of the dead, as we call them. For though they
be the weaker forms of memory in us, how should they not also be the
more pronounced corresponding apparitions. Therefore, why still dispute
whether they are the one or the other when they are at once both. And
why be afraid of ghosts, when you do not fear the remembered forms
within you which they already are.
And yet the reason for this is not wanting. Unlike the forms you have
yourself summoned or which of themselves steal gently and peacefully
into the fabric of your inner life, mingling helpfully with it, they
advance, and surprise you, with overpowering force, apparently coming
before you, really entering into you and bringing into your mind far
more dismay than comfort. To live at once in the two worlds makes a
morbid existence. The dead and the living should not communicate. To
approach the dead so nearly as to see them as clearly and objectively
as they are able to see each other means for the living already a
partial death; hence the terror of the living before such apparitions
of the dead; it is also a partial backsliding of the dead away from
the realm beyond death into that this side of it; from this comes the
saying--and perhaps more than saying--that only those spirits wander
about which are not quite released, which still by heavy fetters are
earth-bound. To drive away the unblest, call for the help of a better
and stronger spirit; but the best and the strongest is the Spirit of
all spirits. Who can harm you under His protection? And so is verified
the saying that before the voice of God every evil spirit vanishes.
Meanwhile in this sphere of spiritual sickness faith itself is
threatened with the contagion of superstition. The simplest way to
guard oneself against the coming of ghosts is not to believe in their
coming; for to believe that they come is to meet them halfway.
As they are able to appear to each other, I said. For the same
apparition which is against the order of this world is but taken
prematurely from the order of the other. The dwellers in the other
world will appear to each other in a luminous, clear, full, and
objective form, of which we in our memory of them have but a weak
echo, a dim outline drawing, because they pervade each other with their
full and complete being, only a little part of which reaches each of us
through memory of them. Only there as well as here attention needs to
be focussed upon the appearance in order to behold it.
Now, it may still be asked: how is it possible that they so unite and
appear so objectively and definitely to each other? But ask first,
how is it possible that what is received by you as the semblance of a
living person, and what is conveyed to your brain by the memory of a
dead one--and there is nothing else before you to base it upon--appears
in the one case as an objective perception, but in the other as a
circumscribed memory? The no longer exact impression which underlies
the mental picture deludes you as to the outline of the form from which
it proceeded in the beginning. You cannot know why from the plane of
this world; how can you expect to know from that of the other?
And so I repeat: do not conclude from arguments of this world which you
do not know, nor from suppositions which you make, but from facts clear
to you here as to the greater and higher facts of the life to come. Any
single conclusion may be erroneous; even that one which we have just
reached; therefore, do not be satisfied with any isolated proof: the
final conviction in regard to them, which we have to demand before and
beyond every conclusion, will be the best support of our faith below,
and our best guide on the upward path.
But once lay hold upon faith directly from above, and the whole path of
belief which will lead us upwards opens easily before us here.