THE RETURN JOURNEY
We have seen that there is some reason for believing that,
simultaneously with the birth or coming to consciousness of what we have
called the divine soul, there occurs within us the formation of a
‘spiritual’ or very subtly material body. This body, if only composed of
atoms, may easily be so fine and subtle as to pass practically unchanged
through ordinary gross matter—the walls, for instance, and other
obstacles that surround us. (At this moment there is an astronomical
theory current that the stellar universe consists of two vast
star-systems which are passing in nearly opposite directions right
_through each other_.) If composed of electrons its subtlety and
pervasive powers must be much greater. Moreover, its fineness and
subtlety would make it difficult of destruction. The ordinary agents of
death—physical violence, water, fire, and so forth—would, as already
pointed out, hardly reach it; and it is easy to suppose that it might
continue onwards and perdure in stability and activity for thousands of
years. Even the Atom of matter, which is now regarded as a complex
system of electrons, is supposed to have an immensely extended
lifetime—nearly two thousand years in the case of Radium, and much
longer in the case of all other substances; and if two thousand years or
thereabouts is the minimum lifetime of an atom, it is not difficult to
suppose that the lifetime of a subtle body composed as above described
may be equally or much more extended.
During its lifetime, the radio-active atom, slowly disintegrating, pours
out a prodigious amount of energy; and in the process apparently is
transformed and takes on other characters and qualities. Radium for
instance, or rather some products of its disintegration, are thought to
take on the characters of Helium and of Lead. And similarly we have
every reason to believe that the subtle body of Man is continually
pouring out energy on all sides, radiating like a sun—pouring out
mental states, sensible forms, influences of all kinds, even images of
itself, and so continually entering into a wider life and touch with
others, and undergoing a slow transformation of its outer form. At the
same time—and leading to the same results—it is continually storing up
in its recesses impressions and memories for the seed of future
expression and development.
It may be imagined that the gross terrestrial body—though splendidly
necessary for the localizing of the Self, and the establishment of the
sense of identity, and for the electric accumulation of stores of
emotion and passion, and so forth—acts on the whole in such a way as to
greatly hamper and limit the activities of the inner body; and we can
imagine that (as at death and under other special conditions) the
liberation from the gross body is naturally accompanied by an enormous
extension of faculty. The soul in its new and subtler form passes out
into an immensely wider sphere of action and perception—so much so,
indeed, as to make direct converse between the two worlds (the new world
it is in, and the old one it has left) difficult to establish and very
difficult permanently to maintain. The author of _Interwoven_ says (p.
221) that the first body and the second body differ greatly in their
chemical particles, “and so the same degree of sight and hearing is not
possible.... _We_ have just as much trouble to see the outsides of
things as mortals have to see the insides.”
Nor can we place a necessary limit to the birth of finer bodies. There
may be a succession of such things. The electron brings us very near to
a _mental_ state; for whereas an Atom—conceived as similar to the speck
of dust which one can roll between one’s fingers, only much more
minute—seems to have no relation to mentality, a tiny electric charge,
capable of conveying a _shock_, comes very close! And at that stage the
truth becomes apparent that the inner intelligent being in all things is
the core, and the body is only the surface of contact—the surface, in
fact, along which one intelligence administers shocks to another! With
liberation from the gross body that surface may grow enormously
extended, and it may become possible to _touch_ or _see_, or to render
oneself visible or tangible, to others far beyond all ordinary
possibilities of contact or perception.
The succession of finer bodies may exist in any gradation, from what we
call gross matter to the subtlest ether of emotion. At any rate we can
see that at every stage there will be a finer body which is _more_ of
the nature of thought, and an outer and coarser which is less so. As the
gifted author of _The Science of Peace_, Bhagavan Das, says:—“At each
stage the Jiva-core (_i.e._ the core of the living individual) consists
of matter of the inner plane, while its outer upâdhi (or sheath)
consists of matter of the outer plane; and when a person says, I think,
I act, it means that the matter of the inner core, which is the I, for
the time being, is actually, positively, modified by, or is itself
modifying in a certain manner, the outer real world.” The inner film of
matter (or mind), as he says, “is posing and masquerading, for the time
being, as the truly immaterial self.”
This central Self we can never _wholly_ reach, but the movement of each
divine soul is toward it; and the assurance and salvation of each soul
is in the growing sense of union with it. The personal self can only
‘survive’ by ever fading and changing toward the universal. Our inner
identity is fixed, but our outward identity we can only preserve by, as
it were, forever losing it.
After life’s fitful fever—after the insurgence and resurgence of
passions; after the heart-breaking struggles which are forced upon
some for the sake of a mere material footing upon the earth; after the
deadly sufferings which others must undergo in order to gain scantiest
allowance and expression of their inner and spiritual selves; after the
mortal conflict and irreconcilableness of material and mental needs;
the battles with opponents, the betrayal of friends, the fading and
souring of pleasures, and the dissipation of ideals—the consent of
mankind goes to affirm and confirm the conclusion that sleep is well,
sleep is desirable. As after a hard day’s labor, when the sinews are
torn and the mind is racked, Nature’s soft nurse commends a period of
rest and healing—so it would seem fitting that a similar period should
follow, for the human soul, on the toil and the dislocation of life.
It seems indeed probable—and a long tradition confirms the idea—that
the human soul at death does at first pass, with its cloud-vesture of
memories and qualities, into some intermediate region, _astral_ rather
than _celestial_ (if we may use words which we do not understand), some
Purgatory or Hades, rather than Paradise or Olympus; and for a long
period does remain there quiescent, surveying its past, recovering from
the shocks and outrages of mortal experience, knitting up and smoothing
out the broken and tangled threads, trying hard to understand the
pattern. It seems probable that there is a long period of such digestion
and reconcilement and slow brooding over the new life which has to be
formed. Indeed when one comes to think of it, it seems difficult—if
there is to be continuance at all—to imagine anything else. When one
thinks of the strange contradictions of our mortal life, the hopelessly
antagonistic elements, the warring of passions, the shattering of
ideals, the stupor of monotony: the soul like a bird shut in a cage, or
with bright wings draggled in the mire; the horrible sense of sin which
torments some people, the mad impulses which tyrannize over others; the
alternations of one’s own personality on different days, or at different
depths and planes of consciousness; the supraliminal and the subliminal;
the smug Upper-self with its petty satisfactions and its precise and
precious logic, and the great Under-self now rising (in the hour of
death) like some vast shadowy figure or genius, out of the abyss of
being—when one thinks of all this one feels that if there is to be any
sanity or sequence in the conclusion, it must mean a long period of
brooding and reconciliation, and of readjustment, and even of sleep.
At first it may well be a troubled period, of nightmare-like confusion;
but at last there must come a time when harmony is restored. The past
lifetime is spread out like a map before one—all its events fall into
their places, composed and clear. The genius, rising from the depths,
throws a strange light upon them. “This was necessary. That could not
have been otherwise. And that again which seemed so fatal, do you not
now see its profound meaning?” The soul surveying gradually redeems the
past. It comes to understand. _Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner._
It beholds, far down, the little fugitive among the shadows, pursued by
the hideous and imbecile mask—the sense of Sin—and, recognizing a
fleeting embodiment of itself, it smiles: for that mask has been seen
through and is useless any longer. It beholds another—or is it the
same?—pursued by the Terror of Death; and again it smiles: for _that_
shadow—like the vast moonshadow in a total eclipse of the sun, which
seemed so solid and all-devouring, has swept by; it has been passed
through, and it was only a shadow.
And it may well be also that this whole process of reconciliation and
adjustment and the building up of diverse elements into one harmonious
being may occupy more than one such interval between two lifetimes; it
may require several periods of incubation, so to speak. Looking at the
matter from the physical side, and seeing how the inner and subtle body
has probably to be formed during all this time—as in a chrysalis—and
differentiated into an independent life, it seems likely that several
intervals of outer rest and inner growth may be needed, and a series of
successive moultings! But in the end, when the string of earth-lives is
finished, and the reconciliation is complete, then the essential, the
divine, self has become manifest, and is ready for a whole new world, a
new order of experience, even to the farthest confines of the universe.
* * * * *
I have suggested in a former chapter that Memory—that very wonderful
faculty—is probably our best test of Identity, our best test of
Survival. If we apply this canon to the evolution of the independent
soul out of the race-life, it may help us. When an animal dies, the
group of memories, which is its life’s-experience, probably passes back
and is transmitted in a more or less diffused way into the general
race-life or soul.[136] In the case of some higher animals it is
possible that the memory-group thus returning may cohere for a time or
to a certain degree, and not be immediately diffused. In the case of the
higher types of _Man_ it is probable that such group may cohere for a
long time and rather persistently; and though embedded in the general
race-life and memory, and much mingled with and modified by these, it
may still form to some degree an independent centre of intelligence and
organization (something like a nerve-plexus in the brain or body). It
will form, in fact, what I have already called a soul-bud or budding
soul, and will be capable of that mixed or partial reincarnation of
which I have spoken—in which some truly individual streaks of memory
will be mixed with general memories of race-life.
But after each successive reincarnation the group of memories
returning—and allying themselves to the former groups—will necessarily
give more and more definition to such budding soul, till at last the
time will come when its individuality will be complete; its severance
from the race-life will follow as a matter of course; and it will float
out into the sea of the all-pervading and divine consciousness.
During this budding period of the human soul, which generally speaking
may be said to coincide with the civilization-period of human history,
the memory of each earth-life will go back into the race-soul there to
swell the nucleus of the individual soul which is being brought to
birth; but it will not generally revive into _evidence_ in the next
earth-life, for, being so deeply buried within, it will be too much
overlaid by external layers and happenings to come distinctly into
consciousness. It is not probably till the completion of the whole
series of its earth-lives that the soul will resume all these memories
and come into its complete heritage. Then, at some deep stage or state
all its incarnations (clarified and comprehended) will become manifest
to it—a glorious kingdom beyond the imagination of man at present to
conceive. All its various lives it may live over again; but with as much
difference in its understanding of their meaning as there is between an
accomplished player’s rendering of a piece of music, and a child’s first
stumbling performance of the same.
It will perceive that, in a sense, it has _pre-existed_ from eternity.
For though certainly there was a time when it first sprang as a bud from
the Race, and entered into a gradually evolving and self-defining series
of personal lives, yet that first bud was itself but a particular
limitation and condensation of the Race-self; and _that_ again, far back
and beyond, a limitation through many intermediate stages of the
All-self. It (the human-divine soul) will perceive that it pre-existed
from eternity as the All-self; that it suffered in its time the
necessary obscurations and limitations; that it abdicated the high
prerogative of universal consciousness; and that it was born again as a
tiny Cinderella-spark; destined to rise through all the circles of
personal and individual life, and the enacting of the great drama of
Love and Death—the great cycle of Evolution and Transfiguration—once
more to the eternal Throne.
* * * * *
The glory of that Heaven where the All-self dwells radiant as the Sun,
and each lesser or partial soul knows itself as a ray conveying the
whole light, but in a direction of its own—we need not dwell on or
attempt to portray. As the emancipated soul, just described, may include
the personalities of many earth-lives and bodies, so there may
be—probably are—larger inclusive selves, special gods, having troops
of souls united to them in the bonds of love and devotion. Telepathic
radiations, travelling as it were on lines of light, and with the
velocity and directness of light, bring each unit into possible touch
with every other, and over an enormous field. As the modern theory of
electricity supposes that every electric charge, however small, or
associated with the smallest atom, is connected by lines of force with
some other and complementary charge _somewhere_—even perhaps at a
practically infinite distance—negative with positive, and positive with
negative; so the idea is suggested that in the free world of the spirit
every need felt by one atom of personality anywhere is felt also and
answered to by some complementary impulse and personality _somewhere_.
In the bringing together of these needs and affections, in the recovery
and the building up and the presentation in sensible form of all the
worlds of memory, slumber infinite possibilities, and the outlines of
endless situations and developments. The individual is clearly not lost
in any ‘Happy Mass’; but may contribute to the formation of such a thing
in the sense that he comes into such wide and extended touch with others
as to have a practically unlimited range of experience, memory,
knowledge, creative power, and so forth, to draw on.
Nor is there any call to think of a _bodiless_ heaven or bodiless state
of being in any plane of existence. The body in any stage or state is, I
repeat, a surface of contact. Wherever one intelligent being comes into
touch with another—whether actively, by impressing itself on the other,
or passively by being impressed—there immediately arises a body. There
arises the sense of matter, which is in fact the _impression_ made by
one being upon another. The external senses, of sight, hearing and the
rest, are modifications or limitations of more extended inner faculties,
of vision, audition, and so forth. The actual world of Nature which we
know, in the bodies of the woods and streams, and of animals and men, is
built up out of the material of our senses; out of the kind of
impressionability of which our senses are susceptible; but if these
materials, of our sight and hearing and touch and taste, were altered
but slightly in their range, the whole world would be different. They
would create for us another world. And so, if these present end-organs
of sense were destroyed, the soul, furnished with the inner faculties
corresponding, would create another world of sense and of Nature, which
would become the medium of expression and communication on that new
plane, and the material of its bodily manifestation there. At present,
owing to entanglement in the grosser senses, life is certainly in the
main a matter of food and drink, of sex, of money-making, and the
exercise of rather rude recreations and arts. With a finer range of
sense, there would still remain the roots and realities of these things;
the need of sustenance would still survive in the finer body, and the
need of interchange and the indrawing of vitality; the hunger of union
and of intercourse would remain—to be expressed in some shape or other;
the delight in music and in beauty of form would be no less, though
sounds and colors might be different from those we know; and all the
faculties that we have—and others too that are now only embryonic with
us—would demand their exercise and expression. Out of such demands and
needs would arise a corresponding world.
I have suggested above (ch. xi.) how, deep in the subliminal self, there
lies a marvellous faculty of producing visible and audible
phenomena—Visions and Voices and Forms. Out of the depths of being
these can be evoked, and bodied forth into the actual world.[137] In
other words, each such Self, in its moods of power, can call forth its
own thoughts and mental images with such force as to impress them
irresistibly on others within its range—with such force, in fact, as to
give them a material vesture and location. What we have said of the
vastness and range of the human Under-self, of its swift interrelation
with others, of the immensity of its memory extending far back into the
deeps of time, must convince us that its powers of creation must be
correspondingly wonderful. The phenomena exhibited by entranced mediums,
and by hypnotized subjects, are only a sample of these powers; but they
hint dimly to us that when we understand ourselves, and what we are, and
when we understand others, and what they are, Time and Space and
Estrangement will no longer avail against us; they will no longer hinder
us from recognition of each other, nor hold us back from the spheres to
which we truly belong, and the fulfilment of our real needs and desires.
Man is the Magician who whether in dreams or in trance or in actual life
can, if he wills it, raise up and give reality to the forms of his
desire and his love. It is not necessary for us feverishly to pursue our
loved ones through all the fading and dissolving outlines of their
future or their past embodiments. They are ours already, in the deepest
sense—and one day we shall wake up to know we can call them at any
moment to our side; we shall wake up to know that they are ever present
and able to manifest themselves to us out of the unseen.