There were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old I used to
walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had
been interred there in the antehistoric times. The sun of the summer
morning shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the
wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing
faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells.
I became absorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air,
the yellowing corn turning from its sappy green to summer’s noon of
gold, the lark’s song like a waterfall in the sky. I felt at that
moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in
the tumulus; I could understand and feel his existence the same as my
own. He was as real to me two thousand years after interment as those I
had seen in the body. The abstract personality of the dead seemed as
existent as thought. As my thought could slip back the twenty centuries
in a moment to the forest-days when he hurled the spear, or shot with
the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again as swiftly to this
moment, so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was
nothing.
Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause its
extinction. It was no longer to the soul than my thought occupied to
me. Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly,
death did not seem to me to affect the personality. In dissolution
there was no bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the
spirit did not immediately become inaccessible, leaping at a bound to
an immeasurable distance. Look at another person while living; the soul
is not visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely
because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it
does not still live. The condition of being unseen is the same
condition which occurs while the body is living, so that intrinsically
there is nothing exceptionable, or supernatural, in the life of the
soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had
been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was
quite natural, as natural and simple as the grass waving in the wind,
the bees humming, and the larks’ songs. Only by the strongest effort of
the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was
supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural,
like earth. Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as
I felt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyond
immortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence, higher
than immortality.
That there is no knowing, in the sense of written reasons, whether the
soul lives on or not, I am fully aware. I do not hope or fear. At least
while I am living I have enjoyed the idea of immortality, and the idea
of my own soul. If then, after death, I am resolved without exception
into earth, air, and water, and the spirit goes out like a flame, still
I shall have had the glory of that thought.
It happened once that a man was drowned while bathing, and his body was
placed in an outhouse near the garden. I passed the outhouse
continually, sometimes on purpose to think about it, and it always
seemed to me that the man was still living. Separation is not to be
comprehended; the spirit of the man did not appear to have gone to an
in conceivable distance. As my thought flashes itself back through the
centuries to the luxury of Canopus, and can see the gilded couches of a
city extinct, so it slips through the future, and immeasurable time in
front is no boundary to it. Certainly the man was not dead to me.
Sweetly the summer air came up to the tumulus, the grass sighed softly,
the butterflies went by, sometimes alighting on the green dome. Two
thousand years! Summer after summer the blue butterflies had visited
the mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The
azure morning had spread its arms over the low tomb; and full glowing
noon burned on it; the purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy
in the vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at midnight through the
mystic summer night, which is dusky and yet full of light. White mists
swept up and hid it; dews rested on the turf; tender harebells drooped;
the wings of the finches fanned the air—finches whose colours faded
from the wings how many centuries ago! Brown autumn dwelt in the woods
beneath; the rime of winter whitened the beech clump on the ridge;
again the buds came on the wind-blown hawthorn bushes, and in the
evening the broad constellation of Orion covered the east. Two thousand
times! Two thousand times the woods grew green, and ring-doves built
their nests. Day and night for two thousand years—light and shadow
sweeping over the mound—two thousand years of labour by day and slumber
by night. Mystery gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine,
speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for
twenty centuries round about this low and green-grown dome. Yet all
that mystery and wonder is as nothing to the Thought that lies therein,
to the spirit that I feel so close.
Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the
psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am
in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the
butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is
now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by
this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries,
the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this
tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment.
To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in
now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really
no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round
upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock
had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There
may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is
none for me.
I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the
particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the
current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow—the
time—of the brook does not exist to me. The great clock of the
firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling
two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my
hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in
time. Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial
arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always
will be. By no possible means could I get into time if I tried. I am in
eternity now and must there remain. Haste not, be at rest, this Now is
eternity. Because the idea of time has left my mind—if ever it had any
hold on it—to me the man interred in the tumulus is living now as I
live. We are both in eternity.
There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When
all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity
of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not
super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this
mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper
is thought than the million miles of the firmament! The wonder is here,
not there; now, not to be, now always. Things that have been miscalled
supernatural appear to me simple, more natural than nature, than earth,
than sea, or sun. It is beyond telling more natural that I should have
a soul than not, that there should be immortality; I think there is
much more than immortality. It is matter which is the supernatural, and
difficult of under-standing. Why this clod of earth I hold in my hand?
Why this water which drops sparkling from my fingers dipped in the
brook? Why are they at all? When? How? What for? Matter is beyond
understanding, mysterious, impenetrable; I touch it easily, comprehend
it, no. Soul, mind—the thought, the idea—is easily understood, it
understands itself and is conscious.
The supernatural miscalled, the natural in truth, is the real. To me
everything is supernatural. How strange that condition of mind which
cannot accept anything but the earth, the sea, the tangible universe!
Without the misnamed supernatural these to me seem incomplete,
unfinished. Without soul all these are dead. Except when I walk by the
sea, and my soul is by it, the sea is dead. Those seas by which no man
has stood—which no soul has been—whether on earth or the planets, are
dead. No matter how majestic the planet rolls in space, unless a soul
be there it is dead. As I move about in the sunshine I feel in the
midst of the supernatural: in the midst of immortal things. It is
impossible to wrest the mind down to the same laws that rule pieces of
timber, water, or earth. They do not control the soul, however rigidly
they may bind matter. So full am I always of a sense of the immortality
now at this moment round about me, that it would not surprise me in the
least if a circumstance outside physical experience occurred. It would
seem to me quite natural. Give the soul the power it conceives, and
there would be nothing wonderful in it.
I can see nothing astonishing in what are called miracles. Only those
who are mesmerised by matter can find a difficulty in such events. I am
aware that the evidence for miracles is logically and historically
untrustworthy; I am not defending recorded miracles. My point is that
in principle I see no reason at all why they should not take place this
day. I do not even say that there are or ever have been miracles, but I
maintain that they would be perfectly natural. The wonder rather is
that they do not happen frequently. Consider the limitless conceptions
of the soul: let it possess but the power to realise those conceptions
for one hour, and how little, how trifling would be the helping of the
injured or the sick to regain health and happiness—merely to think it.
A soul-work would require but a thought. Soul-work is an expression
better suited to my meaning than “miracle,” a term like others into
which a special sense has been infused.
When I consider that I dwell this moment in the eternal Now that has
ever been and will be, that I am in the midst of immortal things this
moment, that there probably are Souls as infinitely superior to mine as
mine to a piece of timber, what then, pray, is a “miracle”? As commonly
understood, a “miracle” is a mere nothing. I can conceive soul-works
done by simple will or thought a thousand times greater. I marvel that
they do not happen this moment. The air, the sunlight, the night, all
that surrounds me seems crowded with inexpressible powers, with the
influence of Souls, or existences, so that I walk in the midst of
immortal things. I myself am a living witness of it. Sometimes I have
concentrated myself, and driven away by continued will all sense of
outward appearances, looking straight with the full power of my mind
inwards on myself. I find “I” am there; an “I” I do not wholly
understand, or know—something is there distinct from earth and timber,
from flesh and bones. Recognising it, I feel on the margin of a life
unknown, very near, almost touching it: on the verge of powers which if
I could grasp would give me an immense breadth of existence, an ability
to execute what I now only conceive; most probably of far more than
that. To see that “I” is to know that I am surrounded with immortal
things. If, when I die, that “I” also dies, and becomes extinct, still
even then I have had the exaltation of these ideas.
How many words it has taken to describe so briefly the feelings and the
thoughts that came to me by the tumulus; thoughts that swept past and
were gone, and were succeeded by others while yet the shadow of the
mound had not moved from one thyme flower to another, not the breadth
of a grass blade. Softly breathed the sweet south wind, gently the
yellow corn waved beneath; the ancient, ancient sun shone on the fresh
grass and the flower, my heart opened wide as the broad, broad earth. I
spread my arms out, laying them on the sward, seizing the grass, to
take the fulness of the days. Could I have my own way after death I
would be burned on a pyre of pine-wood, open to the air, and placed on
the summit of the hills. Then let my ashes be scattered abroad—not
collected in an urn—freely sown wide and broadcast. That is the
natural interment of man—of man whose Thought at least has been among
the immortals; interment in the elements. Burial is not enough, it does
not give sufficient solution into the elements speedily; a furnace is
confined. The high open air of the topmost hill, there let the tawny
flame lick up the fragment called the body; there cast the ashes into
the space it longed for while living. Such a luxury of interment is
only for the wealthy; I fear I shall not be able to afford it. Else the
smoke of my resolution into the elements should certainly arise in time
on the hill-top.
The silky grass sighs as the wind comes carrying the blue butterfly
more rapidly than his wings. A large humble-bee burrs round the green
dome against which I rest; my hands are scented with thyme. The
sweetness of the day, the fulness of the earth, the beauteous earth,
how shall I say it?
Three things only have been discovered of that which concerns the inner
consciousness since before written history began. Three things only in
twelve thousand written, or sculptured, years, and in the dumb, dim
time before then. Three ideas the Cavemen primeval wrested from the
unknown, the night which is round us still in daylight—the existence of
the soul, immortality, the deity. These things found, prayer followed
as a sequential result. Since then nothing further has been found in
all the twelve thousand years, as if men had been satisfied and had
found these to suffice. They do not suffice me. I desire to advance
further, and to wrest a fourth, and even still more than a fourth, from
the darkness of thought. I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain
that there are more yet to be found. A great life—an entire
civilisation—lies just outside the pale of common thought. Cities and
countries, inhabitants, intelligences, culture—an entire civilisation.
Except by illustrations drawn from familiar things, there is no way of
indicating a new idea. I do not mean actual cities, actual
civilisation. Such life is different from any yet imagined. A nexus of
ideas exists of which nothing is known—a vast system of ideas—a cosmos
of thought. There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised.
These, rudely expressed, constitute my Fourth Idea. It is beyond, or
beside, the three discovered by the Cavemen; it is in addition to the
existence of the soul; in addition to immortality; and beyond the idea
of the deity. I think there is something more than existence.
There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the
vessel of thought has not yet been launched. I hope to launch it. The
mind of so many thousand years has worked round and round inside the
circle of these three ideas as a boat on an inland lake. Let us haul it
over the belt of land, launch on the ocean, and sail outwards.
There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined. As I write
these words, in the very moment, I feel that the whole air, the
sunshine out yonder lighting up the ploughed earth, the distant sky,
the circumambient ether, and that far space, is full of soul-secrets,
soul-life, things outside the experience of all the ages. The fact of
my own existence as I write, as I exist at this second, is so
marvellous, so miracle-like, strange, and supernatural to me, that I
unhesitatingly conclude I am always on the margin of life illimitable,
and that there are higher conditions than existence. Everything around
is supernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning.
Twelve thousand years since the Caveman stood at the mouth of his
cavern and gazed out at the night and the stars. He looked again and
saw the sun rise beyond the sea. He reposed in the noontide heat under
the shade of the trees, he closed his eyes and looked into himself. He
was face to face with the earth, the sun, the night; face to face with
himself. There was nothing between; no wall of written tradition; no
built up system of culture—his naked mind was confronted by naked
earth. He made three idea-discoveries, wresting them from the unknown;
the existence of his soul, immortality, the deity. Now, to-day, as I
write, I stand in exactly the same position as the Caveman. Written
tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no
existence. If ever they took any hold of my mind it must have been very
slight; they have long ago been erased.
From earth and sea and sun, from night, the stars, from day, the trees,
the hills, from my own soul—from these I think. I stand this moment at
the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with nature, face to face
with the supernatural, with myself. My naked mind confronts the
unknown. I see as clearly as the noonday that this is not all; I see
other and higher conditions than existence; I see not only the
existence of the soul, immortality, but, in addition, I realise a
soul-life illimitable; I realise the existence of a cosmos of thought;
I realise the existence of an inexpressible entity infinitely higher
than deity. I strive to give utterance to a Fourth Idea. The very idea
that there is another idea is something gained. The three found by the
Cavemen are but stepping-stones: first links of an endless chain. At
the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with the unknown, they
prayed. Prone in heart to-day I pray, Give me the deepest soul-life.