CHAPTER IX
SPIRITS of the third stage will dwell, as in a common body, in the earthly nature, of which mankind itself is a part, and all natural processes will be the same to them as they are to us in our bodies. Their substance will encompass the forms of the second stage as a common mother, just as those of the second stage surrounded those of the first.
Every soul of the third stage appropriates as its own share of the universal body only what it in the earthly realm has developed and accomplished. What a man has changed in this world by hislife in it, that constitutes his further life in the universal existence.
This consists partly of definite accomplishments and deeds, partly of actions continuously recurring, just as the earthly body is made up of fixed parts and of parts which are movable and supported by the fixed ones.
All life circles of the higher spirits intersect each other, and you ask how it is possible that such numberless circles can intersect without disturbance, error, or confusion.
Ask rather first, how it is possible that innumerable undulations in the same pond, waves of sound in the same air, waves of light in the same ether, pulses of memory in the same mind intersect, that, finally, the countless life circles of man, bearing theirgreat future, already in this life intersect without disturbance, error, or confusion. Rather a far higher plane of life and growth is achieved through these vibrations and memories reaching from this present life to the one beyond.
But what separates the circles of consciousness which cross each other?
Nothing separates them in any of those details in which they cross each other; they have all characteristics in common; only each stands in different relations from the other; that separates them in general and distinguishes them in their higher individuality. Ask again what distinguishes or separates circles which intersect; nothing separately; yet you easily observe an outward difference yourself in general; still moreeasily will centres which are themselves self-conscious also distinguish an inner difference.
Perhaps you have sometimes received from a distant place a letter written across both ways. How do you decipher both writings? Only by the coherence which each has in itself. In like manner is crossed the spiritual handwriting with which the page of the world is filled; and each is read by itself, as if it occupied the whole space, and the others, too, which overlie it. Not merely two, but innumerable letterings make a network of record on the earth; the letter, however, is but an inadequate symbol of the world.
Still, how can consciousness continue to preserve its unity in so large an extensionof its ground, how withstand the law of the threshold of consciousness?[5]
Ask first, how it can preserve its unity in the smaller expanse of the body, of which the larger one is only the continuation. Is, then, your body, is yourbrain a point? or is there a central spot within as seat of the soul? No.[6]As it is now the nature of the soul to maintain the limited composite of your body, so in the future will it be to unite the greater composite of the greater body. The divine spirit knits together, indeed, the whole fabric of the world;—or would you seek even for God in one point? In that other world you will only acquire a larger part of His omnipresence.
If you fear that the wave of your future life will not in its extension reach the threshold which here it surmounts, remember that it does not spread itself into an empty world,—then, indeed,would it sink helplessly into an abyss,—but into a realm, which, as the eternal foundation of God, at the same time becomes the foundation of your life, for only in virtue of the divine life is the creature able to live at all.[7]
So a wren upon the back of an eagle can easily soar above a mountain-top, for which task he himself would be too weak, and at last, from the back of the eagle, fly still a bit higher than the eagle has flown with him. But God is the great eagle as He is the little bird.
How can man after the death of the body do without his brain, so marvellously constructed, that contained every impulse of his mind, that carried the further evolution of those impulses into still greater strength and fulness? Was it formed in vain?
Ask the plant how it can do without the seed, when it bursts from it to growinto the light, that wonderful creation which, through the impulsion of its inner germ, builds itself still further from within. Was it created for nothing?
Where, indeed, can be found a structure so wonderful as your brain, to replace it in the other world, and where, indeed, is there one that surpasses it; yet the future brain will surely transcend this present one.
But is not your whole body a finer and more highly organized creation than eye, ear, brain?—not beyond each part? So, and unspeakably more, the world, of which mankind with its state, its knowledge, art, and traffic is but a part, exceeds your little brain, the part of this part. If you would rise to a higher point of view, only see in the earth, not merely a ball of dry earth, air,and water; it is a greater and higher harmonious creation than you, a divine product, with a more wonderful life and action in its substance than you carry in your little brain, with which you contribute but an atom to its life. In vain you will dream of an after-life, if you fail to recognize the life about you.
What does the anatomist see when he examines the brain of man? A tangle of white filaments, the meaning of which he cannot decipher. And what does it see in itself? A world of light, tones, thoughts, memories, fancies, sensations of love and hate. And so realize the relation of that which you, standing outside the world, see in it, to that which it sees in itself, and do not require that both, the outer and the inner, shall appear more alike in the totality of theworld than in you, who are but a part of it. And only because you are a part of this world, see in yourself also a part of that which it sees in itself.
And finally, do you perhaps still ask why our ultimate body, as we call it, only awakens in the other life after we have expelled it here in this earthly realm, and why it is already the continuation of our limited body?
That which in this narrower existence dies, is indeed destroyed; it is nothing but an instance of the same universal law which prevails through the whole of this world; a proof that it still continues into the next. Doubter, if you must always reason alone from this life—be it so.
The living strength of consciousness never really rises anew, is never lost,but, like that of the body upon which it rests, can only change its place, its form, its manner of dissemination in time and space, only sink to-day or here, to mount to-morrow or elsewhere; only rise to-day or here, to sink to-morrow or elsewhere.[8]
For the eye to be awake so that you see consciously, the ear must be hushed to sleep; to arouse the inner world ofthought, the outward senses must be subdued into quiescence; a pain in the smallest spot can quite exhaust your soul’s consciousness. The more the light of observation is dispersed, the more feebly is any single part illuminated; the more clearly it strikes one point, the more all else enters into darkness; to reflect upon some one thing means abstraction from all besides. For your present freshness you have to thank your sleep since yesterday, the more deeply you sleep to-day the more brightly you will awake to-morrow, and the more vigilantly you have passed the waking hours the more profoundly you will sleep.
But the sleep of man in this world is in reality only a half sleep, which allows the body to wake again because it isstill present; not until death is the full sleep which allows a new awaking because the body is no longer there; yet the old law is still present, which demands an equivalent for the former consciousness, and hence the new body as a continuation of the old; therefore a new consciousness will also be present as an equivalent and continuation of the old.
As a continuation of the old! For that which enables the body of the old man to still bear the consciousness which the body of the child, no atom of which is longer his, bore, will enable the future body to bear the same consciousness which was in the body of the aged man, of which it no longer possesses an atom. So it is that every successor preserves within himself and is built up by thecontinuation of the actions of him who bore the earlier consciousness. This is therefore a law, which ordains the onward march of the life here from to-day to to-morrow, and from this life to the other. And can there be another law so fundamental as this of the eternal survival of man?
And so do not ask, how it is that effects which you produce in this outward world, which are outside you, shall still belong to you more than any others which are also outside. It is because the former much more than the latter have gone out from you. Every cause retains its effects as an eternal possession. But in truth your effects have never gone out from you; even in this world they formed the unconscious continuation of your existence,only awaiting the awakening to new consciousness.
As little as a man can ever die who has once lived, so little could he be awakened to life had he not lived before; it is only that he had not lived as an individual. The consciousness with which the child awakes at birth is only a part of the eternal, pre-existing, universal, divine consciousness which has concentrated itself in the new soul. We can indeed as little follow the ways and the changes of the living force of consciousness as those of the vital energy of the body.
But are you afraid that human consciousness, because born out of the universal, will again flow back into it; then look at the tree. Many years passed before the branches came out ofthe trunk; but once there they do not go down into it again. How would the tree grow and develop if this happened? So too will the life tree of the world grow and unfold itself.
After all, the strong argument in this world for the other is not from reasons unknown to us, nor from suppositions which we make, but it is from facts that we do know that we base our conclusions on the greater and higher facts of the future life, thereby strengthening and confirming a faith, practically demanded, depending upon a higher point of view and to be set in living relations with life. Indeed, if we did not need this faith, wherefore strengthen it; yet how use it, if it remain unsupported.