In the childhood of the race, the time of its exclusively animal life,
it was necessary for its protection that there should exist in the
slowly unfolding human mind a great, overwhelming terror of death. In
fact at that time indifference to death would have involved the entire
race of man in utter extinction. From that time have come down to us
superstitions and fears which, while acting still in the minds of the
ignorant as a preservative of human life even under most terrible
conditions, have at the same time shrouded countless numbers of good
and useful lives with gloom, overshadowing them with a horror from
which they could not escape. It has been less the actual fear of
death, but of what might be in store for them after they should have
passed through this experience which is so inevitable to us all. Jesus
prophesied of a time to come wherein death should lose its sting, and
thus be swallowed up in the victory of the spirit over matter.
The enjoyment of this life demands that, right here and now, we should
begin to know and understand how we are to establish our individual
relationship to the invisible, the real world--the world of causes, the
world of law--so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the hidden
mysteries of the future life to give us some certain grounds for faith
in the unseen. This can only be accomplished by the development of our
own occult powers, or by learning of the psychic experiences of others
which serve to point the way to what we may come to know for ourselves.
It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the web of life,
there is no escape from its demands upon the individual soul.
Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate. Upward and
onward, or down into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things.
It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and toilsome
path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop around
through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to the
Christ.
It is the fear of death, of physical dissolution, that is to be
individually conquered. This can only come as a result of a perception
of spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spiritual nature.
The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, has been nature's safeguard
against a universal stampede out of this life when the miseries of
existence on this earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne; when
the tortures of the soul in the tortured body drives out all reason and
all philosophy, and the consciousness senses only the demand for
surcease of agony. But when the "golden bowl" is broken--the silver
cord of human life is severed--by suicide--nothing has been gained by a
changed environment. There are the same responsibilities and soul
needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied desires of their minds are
exactly the same. Nothing has been gained, but much has been lost.
Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the call to march over the "border
land" into nature's invisible realms; they cannot help themselves, no
one can. On they go, an endless caravan into the land of revelations,
the place of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched up with a
"round turn," and made to realize that a real godliness is the only
thing that can "pass muster," that mere beliefs do not count, and only
character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are filled;
nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the
gods--the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled. Life here is
just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of individual existence.
* * * * * *
Most fortunate is the soul that is started out to make the journey of
life without being handicapped by some narrowing religious superstition
or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, preventing all unfoldment
of originality.