THE DISTRUST OF LIFE
Come Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe:
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
If there is no cause to fear death, even when one views life as purely
physical, there is still less cause to fear it when one holds the
second possible view of what life is—the view that life is the Unseen
Consciousness and is within one’s self. These are two opposing views;
it is only when we try to combine them that we find ourselves filled
with fears. When we reason about our bodily life, thinking of ourselves
as animals, and apply the conclusions to our lives as men, we find
confusion, uncertainty, and fear: for our minds reach conclusions that
our hearts tell us cannot be true.
What man fears is not death—_as an animal_ he does not know or see
death. As long as a man is mainly animal he suffers only as an animal.
The deer that flees before the dogs is not afraid of death, for it is
not possible that it could conceive of death: that is possible only
to the reflecting and comparing mind. He fears the suffering that must
follow from an attack from creatures of superior strength and fierce
appetites. So man fears that his animal existence, which he does
know,—with all its changes,—may be painfully cut off. As a rational
being, man knows that death is only a natural and never-ending change.
He knows that life is only that which he recognizes as humanness in
himself when he meditates upon it. He says to himself, “I feel my
life, not as I have been or as I shall be, but I feel it thus: that
I am, that I never began anywhere, that I shall never end anywhere.”
According to this view, death does not exist.
His animal view of life, as the changes in his body, differs so much
from the spiritual view of life as Unseen Consciousness, that he cannot
reconcile them. They lead to “warring in his members,” a conflict
between the limitations of the mind and the intuitions of the soul.
This causes fear.
There is, of course, a merely physical shrinking from death, the result
of race inheritance. In the early days of our race, before man had
learned to control the forces of material life, those men or races of
men that did not love life, feared death and avoided it, made less
effort, and took less care of their lives, and, accordingly, soon
ceased to exist. Only the hardy survived. The fear of death helped to
preserve the race.
But this inherited shrinking from death is not what tortures man. What
causes the uneasiness is rather that superstitious fear of death,
which is really fear of a life after the throes of death. We have
made this present life so unreasonable and so inconsistent with our
own nature that we feel as if any life after death must be just as
incomprehensible and inconsistent as this one, so we fear it. We fail
to see that all life goes on developing and improving, and so we think
our future life may be much worse than what we have now; then, like
Hamlet, we ask is it really “better to endure the ills we have than
fly to others that we know not of?” Because we hold these two views
of life, the animal’s view and the spirit’s view, we seem to hear two
voices crying in our hearts when we consider things: the voice of the
Body and the voice of the Soul. The Body says, “I shall cease to be,
I shall die, all that I set my life in shall die.” The Soul cries,
“I am, I cannot die, I ought not to die,” and, as if from still deeper
depths, comes an appalling whisper, “Yet I am dying.” (Tolstoy.)
It is because of this contradiction that terror seizes the mind when
we think of the death of the flesh. Man has so long assumed that his
fleshly life is the same as himself that he cannot easily rid himself
of the idea. Yet, if a man lose a hand or an arm or a leg by accident,
he does not think that part of his consciousness or self is gone. He
knows that a part of his body—through which himself is made manifest
to other men—is gone, but he does not for a moment think that he, the
human being, is any less. And he is not.
It is true that the automatic processes of his mind refuse for some
time to accept the loss of the members of his body, he misses that way
of expressing his will. But that is not so strange as it may at first
seem. All voluntary motion arises from desire, and is sent out from the
directing mind by means of the nerves to the part of the body fitted to
perform that motion. We are not conscious of sending an order to any
nerve center when we wish to put one foot before the other in walking
or to use our fingers in writing.
Yet such an order is given, and the desire and the nerve center have
both learned from repeated experiences just how properly to direct that
message to the foot or to the tips of the fingers. If, for any reason,
we miscalculate, we find ourselves walking haltingly or stumblingly
along; or our fingers do not move the pencil fairly so as to get the
right results. So, too, when we have lost a foot or a hand, the nerve
centers send out their messages with the same force as before, but
the messages find no way of being delivered. But at no time does a
man think that he is less himself because of the missing member. For
myself and my body are not one and the same. _Myself_ is that which
lives in my body, and neither that body nor the years it exists in any
way determine the life of myself. This self of mine, which thinks and
feels, is older than recorded time; why, then, should we think that
it will end with the century? It would not be possible, within the
few years that the body exists, for the intelligence or consciousness
of the individual to begin at nothingness and attain the degree of
development of a human being.
This self or consciousness is really the outcome of the impressions,
experiences, and conclusions of my ancestors for thousands upon
thousands of years back, and this self began to be shaped even by that
from which man sprang. It is continuous; just as it began before my
body was formed, so it must go on after the body ceases to exist; it
cannot be a mere part of the body which will change with it or end with
it.
We do not know, as yet, how we shall continue to live after the body is
laid away: whether in the thoughts and feelings and deeds we have done
in the flesh; or in our unending, though unconscious, influence; or in
the lives of the children of our bodies or of our minds and hearts.
But we do know that the world will never be the same as if we had never
been here. We do know that what has existed through unnumbered ages
will not end in this.
Life does not cease with sleep nor end with death. “I never was not,”
says the Bhagavad Gita, “nor shall I hereafter cease to be.”