Part 4 — XIII. WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

288When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams; but that we have only lost our sleep.—Richter.

Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin to wake but when they are to die.—De La Bruyere.

There is no death: what seems so is transition.

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life Elysian,

Whose portal we call Death.

Longfellow.

We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being must be so involved in our present constitution as to be therein discernible.

Isaac Taylor.

When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in.—Cato.

He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.

St. Paul.

But all lost things are in the angels’ keeping, Love.

No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.

The years of heaven will all earth’s little pain make good.

Together there we can begin again in babyhood.

Helen Hunt.

Death is another life. We bow our heads

At going out, we think, and enter straight

Another chamber of the king’s,

Larger than this we leave and lovelier.

Bailey.

The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends altogether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature of our being.—Schopenhauer.

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XIII.

WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

The latest developments of science agree with the occultists and poets that there is no death, and that nothing is dead. What seems to be extinction is only a change of existence. What appears to have no vitality has only a lower order of the life principle. Everything is pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well as animals and trees. The same force which animates the human body, the beasts, birds, and reptiles in their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes the mineral world into crystals on a still lower plane but with lifetimes reckoned by thousands of years. And below crystal-life, in the constituent atoms of shapeless matter, is a tremendous thrill of undiminished activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal uncreated energy. The physicists grasp at the same thing in their Law of Continuity, and modern science concedes that “energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself.”^[53] This life is the one essential energy acting under protean forms. It always inheres in every particle of matter, and makes no distinction between organic and inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing 290life-energy actively and the latter in dormant form. Because the scientist is unable to awaken into activity the latent life of inorganic matter, he insists, by the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from life. But that only marks the limit of his knowledge. The world’s development has bridged all the gaps now yawning between the different kingdoms of nature, though nothing remains now to show how it was done, and science has to confess its ignorance. There is nothing to contradict and much to enforce the occult axiom that the same life animates man, plant, and rock simply in different states of the one indestructible force,—the Universal Soul,—making all nature what Goethe terms “the living visible garment of God.”

It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When the tenant of the body moves out, the forces binding together the dwelling scatter to the nearest uses awaiting them. The positivists would have it that the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal fund of being—a sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, out-freezing any eastern conception of remotest destiny. This melancholy result of western materialism is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death and the future, and shows the unimpeachable reality of immortality. Reincarnation demonstrates that the personal ego, which permanently maintains its identity amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and the mental consciousness, must continue its individuality. In addition to the evidences already adduced for the genuineness of this truth, there stands the honest reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous 291concretion of deceptions, mischievously intentional or pathetically unconscious), and the actual experience of some orientals whose intense devotion to pure invisible realities has pushed them into the perception of ultra-mortal things.

It is the strong attachment to physical existence which makes death the king of terrors. Those who have learned the lesson of life find him the blessed angel who ushers them through the golden gates. There shall at length come to every ascending soul the experience of those whose departure from this life cannot be called death, as Jesus, Elijah, or Enoch, who “walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” They became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight touch shifted the equipoise and translated them into the invisible. The clarified spirit greets death with a welcome, and sings his praise as did Paul Hamilton Hayne in his dying song:—

Sad mortal! couldst thou but know

What truly it means to die,

The wings of thy soul would glow,

And the hopes of thy heart beat high;

Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools,

And laugh their jargon to scorn,

As the babbling of midnight fools

Ere the morning of Truth be born:

But I, earth’s madness above,

In a kingdom of stormless breath,—

I gaze on the glory of love

In the unveiled face of Death.

I tell thee his face is fair

As the moon-bow’s amber rings,

And the gleam in his unbound hair

Like the flash of a thousand springs;

His smile is the fathomless beam

Of the star-shine’s sacred light,

292When the summers of Southland dream

In the lap of the holy Night:

For I, earth’s blindness above,

In a kingdom of halcyon breath,—

I gaze on the marvel of love

In the unveiled face of Death.

When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, the ruling tendencies of the soul carry it to its strongest affinities. If these still dwell on earth, the soul hovers affectionately among the old scenes and insensibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and being ministered to, with no essential difference from the former condition.^[54] Many veritable experiences, apart from all possibility of delusion, confirm this, although the darkness of matter blinds most of us to the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties the bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest allies to the realms of its choice. There the soul lives out an era of its true life, an expression of its deepest nature, as much more full and more real than the late physical life, as the waking state exceeds the dreaming. For the escape from material confinement allows the freest activity, in which the dominant desires, unconsciously nourished in the spirit, have the mastery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the earthly lethargy into its permanent individuality. The startling bound of the spirit into its own sphere must transfer the self-consciousness from its terrestrial form to a far higher vividness; but, as the wakefulness of day includes the somnambulence of night and knows itself superior to that dumb life, so the burst of unconstrained spiritual existence does not annul, but transcends the material phase.

293The condition of the period intervening between death and birth, like all other epochs, is framed by the individual. The inner character makes a Paradise, a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, as Dante found all the material for hell in what his eyes witnessed, so in the environments beyond death, where the subjective states of the soul are supreme, the appearance of the universe and the feelings of self are created, well or ill, by the central individual. There must be as many heavens and hells as there are good and bad beings. All the attempts to describe the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Republic, quotes the narrative of the Pamphylian Er, who had been killed in battle but came to life again on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was returned to earth to disclose the nature of the coming life. He found things about as Plato’s allegory pictures them: the good and the wicked who had just died being assigned their places in heaven or under the earth. A number of souls whose thousand years of one or the other experience had expired were made to cast lots for a choice out of a large number of human and animal lives, and to drink of the River of Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forgetfulness before entering the world again. As with all the visions of after death, this simply reflected the opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John’s Revelation paints the scene by colors obtained from his Jewish training, on the canvas of his Patmos imprisonment. Bunyan’s description shows a simple imagination saturated with the Apocalypse. Protestant visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and 294hell. Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. Swedenborg found the gardens of heaven laid out in the Dutch fashion of his time. English clairvoyants and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical. American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous details. The divergence in all these alleged liftings of the veil betrays their subjectiveness.

It is impossible in the nature of things that one should permanently leave the physical condition until the business of that existence is accomplished in transferring the affections from material to spiritual things. While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this world, all the forces of the universe conspire to continue the association of the two in repeated lives. On the other hand, a person dominated by spiritual proclivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away from temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories of the eternal. In Swedenborg’s phrase, “a man’s loves make his home.” The residual impulses coming from the momentums of past lives determine what and when shall be the next embodiment. The time and manner of reincarnation vary with each individual according to the impetus engendered by his lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of the earth life is absorbed from the personal soul manifested on earth into the immortal and unmanifested ego. This process may require days, years, centuries, or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth and hinder its liberation into pure spiritual life. But as in dreams a whole life’s history is sometimes condensed into a few seconds, time has no existence to the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long or short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must 295be assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring up in coming lives. The instances of alternate consciousness indicate that some such marked difference from the previous incarnation appears in each earthly life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, and working out the tendencies which embodied that particular life in a career that will achieve redemption or condemnation.

At the first thought reincarnation carries the unwelcome inference that death and re-births separate us from the dearest present ties and introduce us as strangers into new phases of activity where everything—friends, knowledge, and occupations—must be found afresh. This is a mistake. The unnoticed habits of thought and action derived from the alliance of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey toward those favorite companions. Among the thousands of acquaintances made in a lifetime, the rare friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attractions in the next life. Orpheus could not fail to discover Eurydice in the spirit realm. In this earthly existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory, or Hell of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar forms, frequently mistaking them for true friends, until suddenly we meet a soul with which there comes so intense and permanent an affection that every other person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must hail from the shores of long distant loves, and its new unrecognized mastery develops a mightier union than would be possible in one uninterrupted flow. The poets like to symbolize this as the blending of two hemispheres long since separated into their original 296perfect whole. The most probable explanation of such intimacies rests in the idea that they are repetitions of previous attachments. A sense of ancient familiarity grows upon these closest ties, notwithstanding the absence of memory’s confirmation. The powerful attractions residing in families and kinships may well be the result of ancestral affinities which have bound together in many earlier combinations, like a turning kaleidoscope, the same individuals.

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