THE SURVIVAL OF OUR
CONSCIOUSNESS
1
Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached
this question in an essay on _Immortality_,[2] of which I will only
reproduce a few essential passages, restricting myself to supporting
them with new considerations.
What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into the
centre of the universe, the only point that matters in space and time?
Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts independent of
our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without our mind? And,
on the other hand, what would our mind be without our body? We know
bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is almost certain
that an intelligence devoid of senses, devoid of organs to create and
nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that ours could thus
exist and yet remain similar to that which has derived all that inspires
it from our sensibility.
This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of its
destruction, this ego, therefore, is neither our mind nor our body,
since we recognize that both are waves that roll by and are incessantly
renewed. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or substance,
for these are always in evolution, nor yet life, which is the cause or
effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for us either
to apprehend or define it, or even to say where it dwells. When we try
to go back to its last source, we find little more than a succession of
memories, a mass of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled, all
connected with the same instinct, the instinct of living: a mass of
habits of our sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions
against the surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast
point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to
be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case,
one of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear
the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. As an English
poet has very truly said, “that which cries aloud for eternity is the
very part of me that will perish.”
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Footnote 2:
This essay forms part of the volume published under the title of _Life
and Flowers_.—_Translator’s Note._
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2
It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious
ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively,
that every reality disappears before this phantom. It is utterly
indifferent to us that, throughout eternity, our body or its substance
should know every joy and every glory, undergo the most splendid and
delightful transformations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air,
star—and it is certain that it does so become and that we must look for
our dead not in our graveyards, but in space and light and life—it is
likewise indifferent to us that our intelligence should expand until it
takes part in the life of the worlds, until it understands and governs
it. We are persuaded that all this will not affect us, will give us no
pleasure, will not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a few
almost always insignificant facts accompany us and witness those
unimaginable joys.
“I care not,” says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand
nothing, “I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions
of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses:
they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network
of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centres
wherein lies the point which I feel to be my very self. They are thus
set loose, floating in space and time; and their fate is as alien to me
as that of the most distant stars. All that befalls has no existence for
me unless I can recall it within that mysterious being which is I know
not where and precisely nowhere and which I turn like a mirror about
this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are
reflected in it.”
3
Thus our longing for immortality destroys itself while expressing
itself, since it is on one of the accessory and most transient parts of
our whole life that we base all the interest of our after-life. It seems
to us that, if our existence be not continued with the greater part of
its drawbacks, of the pettiness and blemishes that characterize it,
nothing will distinguish it from that of other beings; that it will
become a drop of ignorance in the ocean of the unknown; and that,
thenceforth, all that may come to pass will no longer concern us.
What immortality can one promise to men who almost necessarily conceive
it in this guise? What is the use of it? asks a puerile but profound
instinct. Any immortality that does not drag with it through eternity,
like the fetters of the convict that we were, the strange consciousness
formed during a few years of movement, any immortality that does not
bear that indelible mark of our identity is for us as though it were
not. Most of the religions have been well aware of this and have
reckoned with that instinct which desires and at the same time destroys
the after-life. It is thus that the Catholic Church, going back to the
most primitive hopes, promises us not only the integral preservation of
our earthly ego, but even the resurrection of our own flesh.
There lies the crux of the riddle. When we demand that this small
consciousness, that this sense of a special ego—almost childish and, in
any case, extraordinarily limited; probably an infirmity of our actual
intelligence—should accompany us into the infinity of time in order that
we may understand and enjoy it, are we not wishing to perceive an object
with the aid of an organ which is not intended for that purpose? Are we
not asking that our hand should discover the light or that our eye
should appreciate perfumes? Are we not, rather, acting like a sick man
who, in order to recognize himself, to be quite sure that he is himself,
should think it necessary to continue his sickness in health and in the
unending sequence of his days? The comparison, indeed, is more accurate
than is the habit of comparisons. Picture a blind man who is also
paralyzed and deaf. He has been in this condition from his birth and has
just attained his thirtieth year. What can the hours have embroidered on
the imageless web of this poor life? The unhappy man must have gathered
at the back of his memory, for lack of other recollections, a few
halting sensations of heat and cold, of weariness and rest, of more or
less active physical sufferings, of hunger and thirst. It is probable
that all human joys, all our hopes and ideals, all our dreams of
paradise will be reduced for him to the vague sense of well-being that
follows the alleviation of a pain. There you have the only possible
equipment of that consciousness and that ego. The intellect, having
never been invoked from without, will sleep soundly, all-ignorant of
itself. Nevertheless, the poor wretch will have his little life, to
which he will cling as closely and eagerly as though he were the
happiest of men. He will dread death; and the idea of entering into
eternity without carrying with him the emotions and the memories of his
dark and silent sick-bed will plunge him into the same despair into
which we are plunged by the thought of abandoning a glorious life of
light and love for the icy darkness of the tomb.
4
Let us now suppose that a miracle suddenly quicken his eyes and ears and
reveal to him, through the open window by his bedside, the dawn rising
over the plain, the song of the birds in the trees, the murmur of the
wind among the leaves and of the water lapping its banks, the echoing of
human voices among the morning hills. Let us suppose also that the same
miracle, completing its work, restore the use of his limbs. He rises,
stretches his arms to that prodigy which as yet for him possesses
neither reality nor name: the light! He opens the door, staggers out
amidst the effulgence; and his whole body is merged in the wonder of it
all. He enters into an ineffable life, into a sky whereof no dream could
have given him a foretaste; and, by a freak which is readily admissible
in this sort of cure, health, introducing him to this inconceivable and
unintelligible existence, wipes out in him all memory of days past.
What will be the state of this ego, of this central focus, the
receptacle of all our sensations, the spot in which converges all that
belongs in its own right to our life, the supreme point, the “egotic”
point of our being, if I may venture to coin a word? Memory being
abolished, will that ego recover within itself a few traces of the man
that was? A new force, the intellect, awaking and suddenly displaying
unprecedented activity, what relation will that intellect keep up with
the inert, dull germ whence it has sprung? Where, in his past, shall the
man fix his moorings so that his identity may endure? And yet will there
not survive within him some sense or instinct, independent of his
memory, his intellect and I know not what other faculties, that will
make him recognize that it is indeed in him that the liberating miracle
has been wrought, that it is indeed his life and not his neighbour’s,
transformed, irrecognizable, but substantially the same, that has issued
from the silence and the darkness to prolong itself in harmony and
light? Can we picture the disorder, the wandering hither and thither of
that bewildered consciousness? Have we any idea in what manner the ego
of yesterday will unite with the ego of to-day and how the “egotic”
point, the only point which we are anxious to preserve intact, will
behave in that delirium and that upheaval?
Let us first endeavour to reply with sufficient precision to this
question which comes within the province of our actual and visible life;
for, if we are unable to do this, how can we hope to solve the other
problem that stares every man in the face at the hour of death?
5
This sensitive point, in which the whole problem is summed up—for it is
the only one in question; and, except in so far as it is concerned,
immortality is certain—this mysterious point, to which, in the presence
of death, we attach so high a value, we lose, strange to say, at any
moment in life without feeling the least anxiety. Not only is it
destroyed nightly in our sleep, but even in waking it is at the mercy of
a host of accidents. A wound, a shock, an illness, a little alcohol, a
little opium, a little smoke are enough to affect it. Even when nothing
impairs it, it is not uniformly perceptible. An effort is often
necessary, a deliberate looking into ourselves, before we can recover it
and become aware of some particular event. At the least distraction, a
joy passes by us without touching us, without giving up the pleasure
which it contains. One would say that the functions of that organ by
which we taste and know life are intermittent and that the presence of
our ego, except in pain, is but a rapid and perpetual sequence of
departures and returns. What reassures us is that we think ourselves
certain to find it intact on awaking, after the wound, the shock or the
distraction, whereas we are persuaded, so fragile do we feel it to be,
that it is bound to disappear for ever in the awful impact between life
and death.
6
One foremost truth, pending others which the future will no doubt
reveal, is that, in these questions of life and death, our imagination
has remained very childish. Almost every elsewhere, it is ahead of
reason; but here it still loiters over the games of infancy. It
surrounds itself with the barbaric dreams and longings wherewith it
cradled the hopes and fears of cave-dwelling man. It asks for things
that are impossible because they are too small. It clamours for
privileges which, if obtained, were more to be dreaded than the most
enormous disasters with which nihility threatens us. Can we think
without shuddering of an eternity contained wholly within our paltry
present-day consciousness? And behold how, in all this, we obey the
illogical whims of fancy, which men in the olden time called _la folle
du logis_. Which of us, if he were to go to sleep to-night in the
scientific certainty of awaking in a hundred years exactly as he is
to-day, with his body intact, even on condition that he lost all memory
of his previous life—would such memories not be useless?—which of us
would not welcome that age-long sleep with the same confidence as the
brief, gentle slumbers of his every night? And yet between real death
and this sleep there would be only the difference of that awakening
deferred for a century, an awakening as alien to the sleeper as the
birth of a posthumous child would be.
Or else, to say very much what Schopenhauer said to one who was
unwilling to admit an immortality into which he would not carry his
consciousness:
“Suppose that, to snatch you from some intolerable suffering, you were
promised an awakening and a return to consciousness after a wholly
unconscious sleep of three months?”
“‘I would accept it gladly.’
“But suppose that, at the end of the three months, they forgot you and
did not wake you until ten thousand years had passed, how much the wiser
would you be? And, sleep once begun, what difference does it make to you
whether it last for three months or for ever?”
7
Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes
first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is
supplied by our senses; and even the images and the words—which in
reality are but images—by the aid of which it strives to sever itself
from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could
that mind remain what it was, when it has nothing left of that which
formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall it carry with
it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows
itself only by favour of that body? A few memories of their common life?
Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to
separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space
and in unlimited time?
“But,” I shall be told, “there is more in us than our intelligence
discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not
placed there; we contain a greater being than the one we know.”
That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by the inconscient,
that is to say, by that which represents the universe, is enormous and
preponderant. But how shall the ego which we know and whose destiny
alone concerns us recognize all those things and that greater being
neither of which it has ever known? What will it do in the presence of
that stranger? If I be told that the stranger is myself, I will readily
agree; but was that which upon earth felt and weighed my joys and
sorrows and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to
me, was that this impassive, unseen stranger who existed in me all
unsuspected, even as I am probably about to live in him without his
concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the sorry
recollection of a thing that has ceased to be? Now that he has taken my
place, while destroying, in order to acquire a larger consciousness, all
that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life
commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my head, not
even brushing with their new-born wings the being which I am conscious
of to-day?
8
Lastly, how shall we explain that, in that consciousness which ought to
survive us, the infinity that precedes our birth has left no trace? Had
we no consciousness in that infinity, or did we perchance lose it on
coming into the world and did the catastrophe that produces the whole
terror of death take place at the moment of our birth? None can deny
that this infinity has the same rights over us as that which follows our
decease. We are as much the children of the first as of the second; and
we must of necessity have a part in both. If you maintain that you will
always exist, you are bound to admit that you have always existed; we
cannot imagine the one without having to imagine the other. If nothing
ends, nothing begins, for any such beginning would be the end of
something. Now, although I have existed since all time, I have no
consciousness whatever of my previous existence, whereas I shall have to
carry to the boundless horizon of the endless ages the tiny
consciousness acquired during the instant that elapses between my birth
and my death. Can my true ego, then, which is about to become eternal,
date only from my short sojourn on this earth? And all the preceding
eternity, which is of exactly the same value as that which follows,
since it is the same, shall it not count? Will it be flung into
nihility? Why is a strange privilege accorded to a few meaningless days
spent on an unimportant planet? Is it because in that previous eternity
we had no consciousness? What do we know about it? It seems very
unlikely. Why should the acquisition of consciousness be a phenomenon
unrepeated in an eternity that had at its disposal innumerable billions
of chances, among which—unless we set a limit to the infinity of the
ages—it is impossible to conceive that the thousands of coincidences
which went to form my present consciousness did not occur over and over
again? The moment we turn our gaze upon the mysteries of that eternity
wherein all that happens must already have happened, it seems much more
credible, on the contrary, that we have had consciousness upon
consciousness which our life of to-day hides from our view. If they have
existed and if, at our death, one consciousness must survive, the others
must survive as well, for there is no reason to bestow so
disproportionate a favour upon that consciousness which we have acquired
here below. And, if all of them survive and awaken at the same time,
what will become of the petty consciousness of a few terrestrial
moments, when it is submerged in those eternal existences? Besides, even
if it were to forget all its previous existences, what would become of
it amid the perpetual buffeting, the endless wash of its posthumous
eternity? For it is but as a poor sand-drift of an island in the
unrelenting jaws of two boundless oceans. It would hold its own there,
puny and so precarious, only on condition that it acquired nothing more,
that it remained for ever closed, isolated and confined, impenetrable
and insensible to all things, in the midst of the astounding mysteries,
the fabulous treasures and visions which it would have eternally to pass
through without ever seeing or hearing anything; and that surely would
be the worst death and the worst destiny that could befall us. We are,
therefore, driven on all sides towards the theories of an universal
consciousness or of a modified consciousness, both of which we shall
examine presently.