THE FATE OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
1
Let us dispense with their uncertain aid and endeavour to make our way
to the other side alone. To return then to the theories which we were
examining before these necessary digressions, it would seem that
survival with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and as
incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were
admissible, it could not be dreadful. It is certain that, when the body
disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time; for
we cannot imagine a spirit suffering in a body which it no longer
possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental
or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well,
spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our spirit feels the
reaction of the sufferings of our body, or of the bodies that surround
it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection,
shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, betrayal, personal
humiliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it
loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which
it animates. Outside its own pain, which is the pain of not knowing, the
spirit, once delivered from its flesh, could suffer only in the
recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the
troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes,
since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief
that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and
knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.
The spirit is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only
for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can
grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits,
when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend
them.
2
It is now a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all
sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the
bosom of infinity; and up to what point it is important that it should
recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without
consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of
to-day.
Survival without consciousness seems at first sight the more probable.
From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side
of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for
those who prefer the easiest solution and that most consistent with the
present state of human thought, to limit their anxiety to that. They
have nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any
remained, should deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can
no longer suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and
pain, is extinguished, scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and
what comes is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without
measure, without dreams and without awakening.
But this is only a solution that fosters indolence. If we press those
who speak of survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean
only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we
have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of
consciousness to persist in infinity.
Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to
solve very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
man’s brain.
3
It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every side,
we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite
consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words
consciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the
most definite thing conceivable in the finite; consciousness, properly
speaking, is the finite huddled into itself in order to discover and
feel its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as
possible. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to separate the
idea of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence
that does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness
becomes for us a mysterious phenomenon to which we give names more
mysterious still, lest we should have to admit that we understand
nothing of it at all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a
dot in space, we see expended in every scale of life (remember, for
instance, the wonderful combinations and organisms of the insect world)
a mass of intelligence so vast that our human intelligence cannot even
dream of assessing it. Everything that exists—and man first of all—is
incessantly drawing upon that inexhaustible reserve. We are therefore
irresistibly driven to ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not
the emanation of an infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or
later, elaborate one. And this sets us tossing between two irreducible
impossibilities. What is most probable is that here again we are judging
everything from the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the summit of
our infinitesimal life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the
extreme point of thought; and from this we infer that, at the summits of
all lives, there could be naught but intelligence and consciousness,
whereas these perhaps occupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of
spiritual or other possibilities.
4
Survival absolutely denuded of consciousness would, therefore, be
possible only if we denied a cosmic consciousness. As soon as we admit
this consciousness, under whatsoever form, we are bound to share in it;
and, up to a certain point, the question is indistinguishable from that
of the continuance of a more or less modified consciousness. There is,
for the moment, no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in its
darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.
Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its
highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of
life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with
the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be
accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that
greets a birth.
Suppose that a child in its mother’s womb were endowed with a certain
consciousness; that unborn twins, for instance, could, in some obscure
fashion, exchange their impressions and communicate their hopes and
fears to each other. Having known naught but the warm maternal shades,
they would not feel straitened nor unhappy there. They would probably
have no other idea than to prolong as long as possible that life of
abundance free from cares and of sleep free from alarms. But, if, even
as we are aware that we must die, they too knew that they must be born,
that is to say, suddenly leave the shelter of that gentle darkness and
abandon for ever that captive but peaceful existence, to be precipitated
into an absolutely different, unimaginable and boundless world, how
great would be their anxieties and their fears! And yet there is no
reason why our own anxieties and fears should be more justified and less
ridiculous. The character, the spirit, the intentions, the benevolence
or the indifference of the unknown to which we are subject do not alter
between our birth and our death. We remain always in the same infinity,
in the same universe. It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate to
persuade ourselves that the tomb is no more dreadful than the cradle. It
would even be legitimate and reasonable to accept the cradle only on
account of the tomb. If, before being born, we were permitted to choose
between the great peace of non-existence and a life that should not be
completed by the glorious hour of death, which of us, knowing what he
ought to know, would accept the disquieting problem of an existence that
would not lead to the reassuring mystery of its end? Which of us would
wish to come into a world where we can learn so little, if he did not
know that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best
thing about life is that it prepares this hour for us, that it is the
one and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that
incomparable mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be
possible, because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where
the worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we number
among the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost
unimaginable that a thought should not survive to mingle with the
substance of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it
be not a waste of indifference, can be nothing but a sea of joy.
5
Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to maintain
their ego that they are calling for the sufferings which they dread. The
ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in so far as it is
separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger the ego, the
narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The more painful
too; for the mind, if it remain as we know it—and we are not able to
imagine it different—will no sooner have seen its limits than it will
wish to overstep them; and, the more separated it feels, the greater
will be its longing to unite with that which lies outside. There will
therefore be an eternal struggle between its being and its aspirations.
And really it would have served no object to be born and die only to
arrive at these interminable contests. Have we not here yet one more
proof that our ego, as we conceive it, could never subsist in the
infinity where it must needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It
behoves us therefore to clear away conceptions that emanate only from
our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight
emanate only from the lowlands. Pascal has said, once and for all:
“The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view.”
6
On the other hand—for we must keep nothing back, nor turn from the
adverse darkness should it seem nearest to the truth, nor show any
bias—on the other hand, we can grant to those who yearn to remain as
they are that the survival of an atom of themselves would suffice for a
new entrance into an infinity from which their body no longer separates
them.
If it seems impossible that anything—a movement, a vibration, a
radiation—should stop or disappear, why then should thought be lost?
There will, no doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to
allure the new ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it
will find in that boundless environment, just as the other ego, on this
earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we
have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it be
impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to
us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day; it
is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much more chance
than purpose has entered into it; and much more foreign substance than
any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a long series of
acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not become aware until
the awakening of our memory; and its kernel, of which we do not know the
nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less concrete than a thought. If
the new environment which we enter on leaving our mother’s womb
transforms us to such a point that there is, so to speak, no connexion
between the embryo that we were and the man that we have become, is it
not right to think that the far newer, stranger, wider and richer
environment which we enter on quitting life will transform us even more?
We can see in what happens to us here a figure of what awaits us
elsewhere and can readily admit that our spiritual being, liberated from
its body, if it does not mingle at the first onset with the infinite,
will develop itself there gradually, will choose itself a substance and,
no longer trammelled by space and time, will go on for ever growing. It
is very possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law
of our future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts
will welcome us on the farther shore and that the quality of our
intellect will determine that of the infinite which crystallizes around
it. Every hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be
addressed to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us.
It finds no place in the human imagination that methodically explores
the future. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of
our destiny.
7
We have said that the peculiar sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of not
knowing or not understanding, which includes the sorrow of being
powerless; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer
paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he
who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a
mistake, which is not possible, an infinite mistake being inconceivable.
I do not believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined.
The only one sorrow which, at first thought, might seem admissible—and
which, in any case, could be but ephemeral—would arise from the sight of
the pain and misery remaining on the earth which we have left. But this
sorrow, after all, would be but one aspect and an insignificant phase of
the sorrow of being powerless and of not understanding. As for the
latter, though it is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but
even at an insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it
would be intolerable only if it were without hope. But, for that, the
universe would have to abandon any attempt to understand itself, or else
admit within itself an object that remained for ever foreign to it.
Either the mind will not perceive its limits and, consequently, will not
suffer from them, or else it will overstep them as it perceives them;
for how could the universe have parts eternally condemned to form no
part of itself and of its knowledge? Hence we cannot understand that the
torture of not understanding, supposing it to exist for a moment, should
not end by absorption in the state of infinity, which, if it be not
happiness as we comprehend it, could be naught but an indifference
higher and purer than joy.