I knew quite well what had happened to me; that I had passed through
what mortals call Death: and two thoughts came to me; one was this.
There had been times on earth when one had felt sure with a sort of deep
instinct that one could not really ever die; yet there had been hours of
weariness and despair when one had wondered whether death would not mean
a silent blankness. That thought had troubled me most, when I had
followed to the grave some friend or some beloved. The mouldering form,
shut into the narrow box, was thrust with a sense of shame and disgrace
into the clay, and no word or sign returned to show that the spirit
lived on, or that one would ever find that dear proximity again. How
foolish it seemed now ever to have doubted, ever to have been troubled!
Of course it was all eternal and everlasting. And then, too, came a
second thought. One had learned in life, alas, so often to separate what
was holy and sacred from daily life; there were prayers, liturgies,
religious exercises, solemnities, Sabbaths--an oppressive strain, too
often, and a banishing of active life. Brought up as one had been, there
had been a mournful overshadowing of thought, that after death, and with
God, it would be all grave and constrained and serious, a perpetual
liturgy, an unending Sabbath. But now all was deliciously merged
together. All of beautiful and gracious that there had been in religion,
all of joyful and animated and eager that there had been in secular
life, everything that amused, interested, excited, all fine pictures,
great poems, lovely scenes, intrepid thoughts, exercise, work, jests,
laughter, perceptions, fancies--they were all one now; only sorrow and
weariness and dulness and ugliness and greediness were gone. The
thought was fresh, pure, delicate, full of a great and mirthful content.
There were no divisions of time in my great peace; past, present, and
future were alike all merged. How can I explain that? It seems so
impossible, having once seen it, that it should be otherwise. The day
did not broaden to the noon, nor fade to evening. There was no night
there. More than that. In the other life, the dark low-hung days, one
seemed to have lived so little, and always to have been making
arrangements to live; so much time spent in plans and schemes, in
alterations and regrets. There was this to be done and that to be
completed; one thing to be begun, another to be cleared away; always in
search of the peace which one never found; and if one did achieve it,
then it was surrounded, like some cast carrion, by a cloud of poisonous
thoughts, like buzzing blue-flies. Now at last one lived indeed; but
there grew up in the soul, very gradually and sweetly, the sense that
one was resting, growing accustomed to something, learning the ways of
the new place. I became more and more aware that I was not alone; it was
not that I met, or encountered, or was definitely conscious of any
thought that was not my own; but there were motions as of great winds in
the untroubled calm in which I lay, of vast deeps drawing past me. There
were hoverings and poisings of unseen creatures, which gave me neither
awe nor surprise, because they were not in the range of my thought as
yet; but it was enough to show me that I was not alone, that there was
life about me, purposes going forward, high activities.
The first time I experienced anything more definite was when suddenly I
became aware of a great crystalline globe that rose like a bubble out of
the sea. It was of an incredible vastness; but I was conscious that I
did not perceive it as I had perceived things upon the earth, but that
I apprehended it all together, within and without. It rose softly and
swiftly out of the expanse. The surface of it was all alive. It had
seas and continents, hills and valleys, woods and fields, like our own
earth. There were cities and houses thronged with living beings; it was
a world like our own, and yet there was hardly a form upon it that
resembled any earthly form, though all were articulate and definite,
ranging from growths which I knew to be vegetable, with a dumb and
sightless life of their own, up to beings of intelligence and purpose.
It was a world, in fact, on which a history like that of our own world
was working itself out; but the whole was of a crystalline texture, if
texture it can be called; there was no colour or solidity, nothing but
form and silence, and I realised that I saw, if not materially yet in
thought, and recognised then, that all the qualities of matter, the
sounds, the colours, the scents--all that depends upon material
vibration--were abstracted from it; while form, of which the idea exists
in the mind apart from all concrete manifestations, was still present.
For some time after that, a series of these crystalline globes passed
through the atmosphere where I dwelt, some near, some far; and I saw in
an instant, in each case, the life and history of each. Some were still
all aflame, mere currents of molten heat and flying vapour. Some had the
first signs of rudimentary life--some, again, had a full and organised
life, such as ours on earth, with a clash of nations, a stream of
commerce, a perfecting of knowledge. Others were growing cold, and the
life upon them was artificial and strange, only achieved by a highly
intellectual and noble race, with an extraordinary command of natural
forces, fighting in wonderfully constructed and guarded dwellings
against the growing deathliness of a frozen world, and with a tortured
despair in their minds at the extinction which threatened them. There
were others, again, which were frozen and dead, where the drifting snow
piled itself up over the gigantic and pathetic contrivances of a race
living underground, with huge vents and chimneys, burrowing further
into the earth in search of shelter, and nurturing life by amazing
processes which I cannot here describe. They were marvellously wise,
those pale and shadowy creatures, with a vitality infinitely ahead of
our own, a vitality out of which all weakly or diseased elements had
long been eliminated. And again there were globes upon which all seemed
dead and frozen to the core, slipping onwards in some infinite progress.
But though I saw life under a myriad of new conditions, and with an
endless variety of forms, the nature of it was the same as ours. There
was the same ignorance of the future, the same doubts and uncertainties,
the same pathetic leaning of heart to heart, the same wistful desire
after permanence and happiness, which could not be there or so attained.
Then, too, I saw wild eddies of matter taking shape, of a subtlety that
is as far beyond any known earthly conditions of matter as steam is
above frozen stone. Great tornadoes whirled and poised; globes of
spinning fire flew off on distant errands of their own, as when the
heavens were made; and I saw, too, the crash of world with world, when
satellites that had lost their impetus drooped inwards upon some central
sun, and merged themselves at last with a titanic leap. All this enacted
itself before me, while life itself flew like a pulse from system to
system, never diminished, never increased, withdrawn from one to settle
on another. All this I saw and knew.