THE Evidence of Immortality JEROME c4, ANDERSON \ \\l\inim LIBRARY OF THK University of California, GIFT OF* Received Qftd&n > ' 8 9 r / Accession No. / /<3 3 / • Class No. { a **~4~6~~~6 ^2, c-1<*£6+t_ *-** *»- V. DR. JER.OME ANDERSCW WHO DIED YES- TERDAY Tingley of Point Lomas, Suc- cumbs to a Lingering Illness, HIS CONTROVERSY WITH WOMAN WELL KNOWN after a lingering ill - Dr. Anderson had gained much pub owing to his determined views and was THEOSQPHIST OF NOTE DEAD Dr, Jerome Anderson, Who At- tacked Claims of Mrs, K, A. Dr. Jerome Anderson, one of the most > prominent Theosophists of the world. T passed away yesterday at his residence, + rreet * 4 ness t ♦ drawn into prominence two years ♦ ago when thwugh the medium of the press ♦ Tingley and the X United Brotherhood, of which sect she Is tgley sued General Otis •f of the Los Angeles •Times" for y reference to the Point Lomas settlement T and during the trial Dr. Anderson, though Jnot called on the witness stand by the de- trong advocate for ( I by his att. Among other sensational accusations made by Dr. Anderson at tb-i as not a Theosophb ; charged her with merely being a sharp, : literate spirit n. humbugged the publb ttera to show t: oman lacking even the first rudiments of a good ion. He also accused her of forging .-sages supposed to irit world. Dr caused a profound aei Tingley replied, and Lormy letters were published contain- ing the accusations of each side. Dr. Anderson, at the time of his death, was fifty-six years of age. He was born in the State of Indiana and came to Call. thirty- three years ago. He af I medical department of the U. >mia and upon graduate me. His first position v I 6urgeon on a steamer of the I | Steamship Company running do^ He then practiced medicine in tb •Joaquin Valley for two or the past twenty-five years he has practiced con- | tinually in this city. He had been a strong apostle of theosophy during the past decade. At the time of his death he was president of thf cisco Branch of the Theo- and also president of tb on of Branches of the Theosophical £ the Pacific Coast. He was a well-known author on the faith. Two of his best-known books are 'Reincarnation" and 'Karma or the Law of Cause and Effect." He was also well known as a lecturer. The funeral takes place from h dence on Monday. The body will 1 mated at Cypress Lawn. THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Boohs by Jerome H. Hndcrson REINCARNATION : A Study of the Hu- man Soul. Paper, 50c; cloth, $1.00. SEPTENARY MAN : The Soul in Relation to the Avenues of Consciousness. Paper, 50c; cloth, $1.00. KARMA : A Study of the Law of Cause and Effect. Paper, 50c ; cloth. $ 1 .00. THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY: Paper, 40c; cloth, $1.00. DRIFTINGS IN DREAMLAND. Poems. Cloth, $1.00. LOT is PUBLISHING COMPANY 117h II \i;ki f MliKKT ■as rBAjrenoo THE Evidence of Immortality BY JEROME A. ANDERSON, M. D. AUTHOR OP " REINCARNATION," ETC. There dwelleth in the heart of every creature, O Arjuna, the Master, Ishvara.—BHA GA VA D-GITA . SAN FRANCISCO THE LOTUS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1170 MARKET STREET 1899 Ooraueas .1 1 i.v. i«99 r,v Jxbomi A. AXDi 1733/ Press of the Academy Printing House San Francisco TO THK TIIKKK AS YKT r\ REQUITED SERVITORS OF HUMANITY 1b. fl>. 3B, m. C0N8CI0U8N T E8S 8 CHAPTER III Thought and Imagination 16 CHAPTER IV Thought, Reason, Intiition, Instinct, and Feeling 23 CHAPTER V Effect of Death upon the Consciousness of Life 34 CHAPTER VI Effect of Death upon the Senses .... 43 CHAPTER VII Effect of Death upon the Desire-Consciousness . 52 CHAPTER VIII Effect of Death upon Thought and Imagination . 57 CHAPTER IX Effect of Death upon Intuition and Feelings . 69 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER X Thk Mortal and ihk Immortal Max ... 72 CHAPTER XI Thk Process of Death 79 CHAPTER XII The Rk-Emhodimext of thk Son 88 CHAPTER XIII The Naturk ok thk Son 118 CHAPTER XIV I thk Dead Comminkmk? L28 CHAPTER XV Tin: HOMI ok thk Son 135 APPENDIX I In Dkkkkk Drkamlwh 141 APPENDIX II The World's Crucified Saviours . . . .156 INTRODUCTION This essay is an examination from a scientific view- point into the probability of the continued existence of human life after the death of the body. Of course, by scientific is meant the light of reason applied to the phe- nomena of life — not a demonstration by means of the microscope or balances. Perhaps philosophical would be a better word to use in describing its method, but as all true science is philosophical, and all true philosophy scientific, the writer is not disposed to insist too strongly upon the term used. It is believed that a careful analysis of undisputed phenomena of existence, which have been perhaps overlooked, or which have not been assigned their proper importance, will establish the truth of the persist- ence of life beyond the grave as certainly as any other fact of existence. It will assuredly place it upon a much firmer basis than that enjoyed by many of the accepted scientific hypotheses, such as those which attempt to prove the existence and functions of the ether, .atoms, matter itself, etc. Certainly, there can be no topic of greater or more pro- found interest to the human mind than that of its own survival after death. But, as is so often the case, the proof has been sought for afar when it lay immediately at hand ; has been accredited to divine revelation in books, instead of to divine revelations in nature. The writer is willing t<> '_"> so far as to assert that if the proof of the ex- viii THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY istence of the soul after death be not demonstrable from the phenomena of this present life by cold-blooded, scien- tific reasoning from the known to the unknown, then it i> B chimera, and we may as well relegate it to the dogmatist and fanatic, and have done with it forever. In this a tion he is in perfect sympathy with the thought in Hegel's mind when he wrote, " All that God is he imparts and re- veals, and He does so at first in and through nature." All mysteries stand revealed first, last, and all the time, in na- ture, had we but eyes to see and hearts to comprehend. So, let us seek in nature for the answer to this problem, Do we live after death V BRAft or rwnt DIVERSITY The Evidence of Immortality CHAPTER I THE EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT "y^"X)GITO, ergo sum," wrote Des Cartes after V ^ realizing the great truth that the source and meaning of life must be sought with- in. It was a terse, startling statement, and was at once seized upon by the large class who take their thinking at second-hand. But never was a philo- sophical truth more perverted. Translated as "I think, therefore I exist," it has been made a shibbo- leth by those who sail in shallow philosophical seas. A better translation would have been, "I think, therefore I am," thus linking life with the idea of eternal being, rather than with an " out-from," tran- sitory existence. Neither Des Cartes nor his best in- terpreters limited it to thought alone, but included with it other phases of consciousness. The original meaning of Des Cartes has thus been quite lost sight of, and attention directed wholly to thought as the sole phenomenon of existence, the one proof of life, the single and distinguishing attribute of the human soul. The error has grown, and widened until it 2 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY taints the entire philosophy of the West and ifl the direct cause of much of the uncertainty which sur- rounds existence after death. Thought, as most men conceive of it, is certainly destroyed by death, and having been taught to look upon man as a thinker only, and upon existence as depending upon thought, men have been driven either to deny existence after death altogether, as do modern materialists, or to set up a future life incongruous to, and ethically disconnected with, that of the present, as do modern Christians. The latter, indeed, have put forward many theories to bridge the ethical chasm between this life and the heaven or hell of the next, such as vicarious atonement, predestination, forgive] and other unjust and unjustifiable hypotheses, hut all have signally failed when ethically examined. The error, originated in part, at least, in the man- ner indicated, lias been perpetuated because of the exaggerated importance given to this earth -life at counterbalancing eternity. Thought is of para- mount importance to this life, but plays a minor part, indeed, in the drama of eternal life. It c< to be the dominant faculty, for reasons which we shall examine hereafter, when man passes beyond the threshold of death. To one engaged in blast- ing a drill is essential; to a farmer, some variant of the plow. So to the soul, while investigating the phenomena of an unexplored universe, the power to reason from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the group of phenomena to the underlying law of EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 3 which they are the apparently diverse expression, is absolutely essential. But just as the miner who turns his attention to extracting the gold from the quartz which he has blasted needs and uses other tools, so man, when he passes from this life of struggle and active comparison to one of rest and recuperation, lays aside his faithful servant, reason, to use other equally divine, and now more import- ant, faculties of his soul. Thought is truly a divine faculty, but an exceed- ingly imperfect one at the present stage of man's evolution. Most of the wars and woes under which mankind suffer today are the direct result of faulty thinking; of drawing differing conclusions from the same or similar data. Nor is this fault found wholly among the ignorant. It invades the very highest philosophic reasoning and has led to such widely varying schools as Idealists, Materialists, Theists, and Pantheists, and so on, each of which supports its claims by the most searching appeal to reason of which it is capable. " Holy wars " mark the path- ways of blind belief attempting to force its own convictions upon others; philosophy has also its anathemas, while no two scientists are at one on any of the fundamentals of their respective de- partments.* This lack of agreement ought to have warned man that thought was a somewhat frail reed upon which • See J. B. Stallo's " Some Modern " r ^ " jj* -gim^desires the exact proof of this. 4 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY to lean, and to have led him to search for something more stable. But so ingrained is the idea of thought as the sine qua non of existence that with many, and, indeed, with most, Western thinkers cessation of thought is synonymous with the cessation of life. Existence without thought is to them absurd and even unthinkable. "I think, therefore I e.\ is the reading which they now give their shibboleth. This is not so strange when we consider that every phenomenon of life is intended to and does provoke thought — else we would be fori as cattle upon the hills. For this reason the very form of man is con- structed so as to afford the largest cerebral develop- ment possible, as well as to ensure it the most com- plete protection from injury. Thought is compelled into activity by the incesflanl bombardment of the senses; its dormant powers evoked, nolens volens, by the environment in which the body is placed, So intentionally hostile is this environment that man would speedily be swept from the earth but for thought. He must rely upon it at all times. It is his sword, of which he has thrown away the scab- bard; the one gift which enables him to have "do- minion over all the creatures of the earth." But its activity ceases at death. The magnificent cerebral development is destroyed; the bombardment of the senses ceases, thought no longer is king, and we have to look to the energies of other faculties for evidence of the permanence of life. Even a superficial analysis of man's conscious- EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 5 ness reveals its compound nature and shows con- clusively that thought is only one of many faculties of the soul. Just as the prism breaks up the seem- ing unity and purity of the white light into seven startlingly dissimilar, and even opposite, constitu- ents, so analysis shows that which seemed but the one consciousness to be composed of similarly diver- sified, and also apparently opposing, faculties. As a fundamental faculty we have the conscious- ness of life itself; the recognition of existence. There is no doubt that man shares this conscious- ness with all the lower kingdoms of nature. With Des Cartes he may go to thought to prove that he exists, but he need not do so to feel that he does. Reason is entirely unnecessary to this recognition. Indeed, in the animal kingdom, it has been termed an instinct, because of the careful protection of their lives by animals devoid of reason. Even the sensitive plant shrinks from the touch lest its exist- ence be endangered, and all nature cries out with one voice* " Let me live I let me live ! " It is the undifferentiated consciousness of the great ocean of Being, in which all that is exists. It vibrates through the rock; it is quivering in the massive oak. "Out of nothing nothing can come;" and the recognition of this first divine thrill of ex- istence did not arise with man, nor even with the kingdoms immediately beneath him. It is univer- sal; it arose in and with the first faint flutter which attracted the atoms of star dust — if, indeed, it does 6 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY not long antedate this. Its first expression may be one great cosmic, hierarchial note, which, perhaps, voices an ecstacy that each succeeding differentia- tion in form may lessen rather than increase. The bliss of being is certainly not so perfect in man at present as in the lower, unthinking kingdoms, for it is tainted with doubt and uncertainty, its joys are recognized as fleeting, its course saddened by the knowledge of the gulf of apparent extinction, from which there is no possible escape, which awaits its seeming close. The animal takes no thought; it cats, drinks, and is contented; for it tomorrow con- tains no hint of ceasing to be. Only when life is endangered does it seek to save it; while life flows its natural course the animal simply is. With the animal it is "I am," not "I exist." It must be evident to the dullest comprehension that the consciousness of life, of being, pervades all nature, and that man holds no monopoly of it. It is also evident that he does not depend upon his fleeting, constantly changing body for its manifes- tation. He may do so, to be sure, for its manifesta- tion in that body, but to remove this by death only causes the indestructible principle to change its vehicle for manifestation. For no manifested, and therefore limited, life can be except it have a material form to focus and limit that manifesta- tion. Even illimitable Space itself is but the body of God; its formlessness the silent testimony of a Divinity above and beyond all form limitations. EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 7 So that man, unless by some unthinkable process we suppose him either inside or outside of space, must always have a body, even though in the last differentiation this be but the body of God — with whom he would then be at one. Compelled by death to abandon the gross physical body, he would still feel the same certainty of existence in inner and more ethereal bodies, until, if all matter we can comprehend be stripped off, his conscious- ness would exist in space and possess a body of which not even infinite power could deprive him. CHAPTER II SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESS ANOTHER faculty of the soul, or mode of consciousness, is that of sense-perception. Man's body is composed of numerous or- gans; some sensory, some for locomotion, some for thought, others for desire, and still others for vital or for purely assimilative purposes, and all intend- ed to enable him to contact this plane of being, maintain his foothold here, and to assimilate the wisdom accruing out of his manifold experiences. The sensory organs are so constructed as to inter- cept, and enable him to take conscious note of, vi- brations covering a vast, but very incomplete, are of the infinite cycle ol life. From smell or touch up to the almost infinitely rapid vibrations of color, his differing organs record the impressions or sensations produced by vibrations reaching him from without. There is, however, such a great hi- atus between the higher and the lower of these as to more than suggest the possibility of his evolving other sense organs to enable him to contact still wider areas of sensuous existence hereafter. Put- ting this aside for the present, we find the range of his sense-consciousness to be so great, and its recep- SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESSS 9 tion of impressions by constant contact with ma- terial things so multitudinous, that he has all his attention fully occupied if he segregates, analyzes, and gathers the ethical meaning of the phenomena with which they bring him into relation. So again we see the necessity of thought as the dominant faculty during embodiment upon earth. Like other animals, man's response to sense-im- pressions must always have been, and still is, Largely mechanical. But as evolutionary ages rolled by, there was accomplished the conscious segregation or differentiation of these stimuli into great classes and the consequent specialization of organs therefor, and so gradually and impercepti- bly was built up man's present sense-organs. Just how these sense-impressions reach the soul, the transient tenant of the body, is not within the province of our present inquiry; suffice it to say that the unity of source of all consciousness consti- tutes a common bond between the most highly de- developed and the most lowly, which enables each to touch a base where consciousness is common to both, so that the soul can be, and is, conscious of the lowly vibrations of its sensuous body because of there being, from their common origin, some- thing in its higher development which recognizes this, for it is a portion of the consciousness of the lower. Were it not for this common basis in which all forms and differentiations of consciousness must root, entities at differing stages of their evo- 10 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY lution would be absolutely cut off from all con- sciousness of other portions of the universe. In- deed, man is now conscious of but that small por- tion which he has actually experienced, and by ex- perience evolved the latent potentiality of so doing into an active potency. For no manifesting entity possesses any state of consciousness which it has not evolved by actual experience in the Cycle of Necessity, or arena of evolution. Man knows and recognizes his material universe because, and only because, he has BEER that universe in all its myriad details. He has buried himself in its rocks, pulsa- ted with and in its rythmic oceans, felt the peace and strength of its mighty oaks, or he could not now be conscious that such things exi While thought takes cognizance of these m impressions, it is not necessary to their existence. nor even to their recognition. The pure ecstasy arising out of the highest sense-consciousness ex- cludes thought entirely. Indeed, thought would only mar its perfectness. Who that has ever had his soul enwrapped in the tones of a perfect har- mony thought about, or tried to analyse, what WM taking place? While it lasted time was not; thought had ceased its querulous interrogations, and the soul was content. It had no questionings, no doubts; it did not even "exist;" it was. Similarly, beautiful landscapes, the low, ceaseless murmur of the restless waves breaking upon the shore, the roar of the storm, the stillness after it SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESS 11 has passed — all these things reach not the soul through the avenue of thought. They may evoke thought, but they are really a memory, a reminis- cense, of the soul, and penetrate it by means of the avenues of feeling. And, if perfect, they do not even evoke thought. Man does not have to reason with himself to know that he is happy; he does not even think of it until after the wave of perfect Miss has passed. The vibrations of seeing, hearing, tasting, and bo on, roll in upon the soul and man becomes con- scious of them entirely independent of any think- ing process. He usually does connect them with thought, but the connection is not essential to their existence or recognition. It is largely due to the association of ideas. At the awakening of sensuous life in man at each birth his world is new and won- derful, and he is little else than an animated inter- rogation point — as all who have the care of child- ren will recognize. The habit so engendered be- comes despotic in its sway, and, indeed, nature in- tended this, so that, automatically and by the asso- ciation of ideas, his questioning analysis goes on long after perfect familiarity with any phenome- non has rendered this unnecessary. But the crowning proof that sense-consciousness is distinct from, and not dependent upon, thought is to be found in the animal kingdom. Here it is seen in all its purity and perfectness, although here it is already at work upon its Herculean task of evoking 12 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY the latent power of thinking in a soul which is revelling only in the senses. The higher animals unquestionably think, but the star-fish as unques- tionably does not — its slow, laborious response to sense stimuli has not yet reached this plane of con- sciousness. But, natura non saltet, and we must not confound sense -consciousness with thought - sciousness because the two glide imperceptibly into each other. And they are but two differentiations of the one great Primal Consciousness, just as the senses themselves are but lower differentiations of the one sense-consciousm £8. Sense-consciousness is thus seen to be the servant who prepares the way for thought — the pioneer who blazes out the pathways by which thought may guide its following footsteps. By its aid life be- comes a long panorama of nature-sights and sounds, every one of which thought must analyse and un- derstand. We may sit idly and drink in the - uous impressions, Wit in so doing we are only lag- gards on the way. We should understand the meaning, from its ethical aspect, of every one of these. It is not enough to classify and name, to seek for external differences and similarities; the inner meaning of it all must be sought out. Knowl- edge which does not broaden the human character and make it more humane or god-like is no knowl- edge — its acquirement is time thrown away. But nature is infinitely patient, and although we must get our lesson before this earth grows old and dies, DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESSS 13 to give place to newer and, let us hope, more perfect ones, still the interval is so long that there is ample opportunity, and none need fail because of lack of this. Sense-consciousnes is probably one of the lowest and most humble of all the divine differentiations within the sea of conscious life, for it is certainly one of the most transient. Yet, nevertheless, it is an absolutely necessary accessory to other and higher states, so that it will not do to pass it by too quickly. Let us rather learn its lessons, assist it to perform its duties, lean not upon its transient pleasures or the glimpse of life which it affords, but use it as a door through which we may enter the real college of life — as a preparatory department in the University of Being. DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS The consciousness of Desire is the natural se- quence of sensuous perception. When one sees a beautiful thing, for example, he desires to be like it — to be the same as it. This feeling his dimly awakened reason attempts to satisfy by the posses- sion of the thing physically. It is the craving for unity; the groping of the soul painfully and blind- ly its backward way across the abyss of differenti- ation over which it has passed. Similarly those desires whose office is to perpetuate life are at first related solely to that center of universal life which 14 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY the man feels within his own breast. He is con- scious of no selfishness in desiring to live, so long as he has not separated his life from the infinite Whole. All desire is at its source pure and divine; it is differentiation and consequent further and further separation from its divine Source which permits of its becoming contaminated and tainted with selfishness. The purely divine desire to live thus becomes dulled, and for it is substituted the desire to live regardless of the rights of others, and, finally, the desire to live at the expense of others — the rast and most selfish stage. Yet a man does not necessarily assoeiate thought witli any of his desires. Memory and anticipation play a far more important part. One does ik>: "I think that I want this thing." hut, k ' I want it." Associated with thoughl through memory and im- agination, desire speedily falls under the sway of selfishness, thus acquiring a far higher potency; but it can not be said to be the offspring of thought. The desires are notoriously strongest where reason and its concomitant, will, are weakest. When we say that thought precedes desire, we often mean only that memory precedes desire, or that we desire a thing because memory, through the association o! ideas, or in some other manner, has brought the thing before our minds. Desire is the motive for action on the part of all manifested life. Like all divine forces it is entirely impersonal and may be perverted into evil. The ^p\ SRSITY j DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 15 devil is but God inverted, as the old saying tells us. In its highest aspect desire is but another name for compassion, for what is compassion but the desire to aid others? All the faculties of the lowliest, most fallen human soul have their roots in divinity — are but perversions through ignorance of the di- vinely beneficent forces of nature. Even the desires that seem — and are — most selfish are but the ef- forts of the soul to gain happiness through what seems to it the shortest method, and are due ;n the first instance entirely to ignorance. Ignorance of the meaning and purport of life; of the nature and essential divinity of the soul; of the universality of the law of cause and effect; of the fact of the re- peated return of the soul to the earth, the arena of its evolution — all this makes a sad chaos of life. No wonder that men commit the most horrible of crimes in their endeavor to reach and permanently possess happiness. Men murder, steal, forge, en- slave, form corporations and trusts, — commit all crimes — because their commission seems to bring happiness a step nearer. Truly, we need higher conceptions of both life and happiness! CHAPTER III THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION OPPOSITION is the law of differentiation, or rather, the means by which differentiation is accomplished. No force can be exerted except it be opposed by a counter force. The two may he disparate, the one yield to and be replaced by the other, but opposition of some degree is abso- lutely essential to the exhibition of energy. This being so — and its truth is self-evident — it follows that the manifestation of the faculties of the soul will tend to duality; there will be in each enough differentiation to afford the necessary basis for its activity. It may undoubtedly happen that one faculty finds the necessary opposing fore times in other faculties, as when reason opposes de- sire. But this outer opposition is not essential. Each faculty will be found to fall naturally into two great divisions which oppose each other suffi- ciently to afford the necessary energies to enable both portions to manifest and develope. Thought is no exception. In the Kosmos itself Primordial Thought divides into Absolute Wisdom, or the knowledge of worlds to be, and Creative Imagina- tion, or the power to clothe those Primal Ideas in THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 17 form. In the microcosm, or man, there is an exact parallel. Thought naturally divides itself into two great faculties — Reason and Imagination. The latter has never been accorded its proper place in the estimate of the faculties of the soul. The Sen- sational school of philosophers deal with it, strange to say, with more fairness and a more acute per- ception of its importance than any other class. They assign it creative functions, but assert that it can only use materials which have reached the mind through the senses — whence, in truth, they also derive all the faculties of the soul. They admit that the forms produced by the imagination are new, but not the material. Still, they see that the power to take even old material and work it up into some- thing quite new and unlike the old, is unique, and that, therefore, imagination, while employing mem- ory as its agent in gathering material, is much more than mere memory. It is, indeed. Few realize the tremendous power exercised in the idlest imaginings. Dream, for example, is a state where reason is notoriously in abeyance, often entirely absent, yet even the most foolish of dreams reproduce landscapes, persons, conversations, and so on, with a wealth of matter, and an accuracy of detail which is marvelous if philosophically examined. Memory may, and does, furnish much of the material for these idle visions, but this is simply because the soul is delighted with its sensuous existence, or with portions of it, 18 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY at least, and deliberately reconstructs these by the magic power of its truly creative faculty. If it be discontented with its environments of any kind. physical, mental or moral, it will quietly discard or reject these, and construct for itself others brighter and better in which memory has little or no part. This universe is but the Imagination of God. Whatever part be played by reason in its begin- nings, imagination is the mighty agent which carves out every detail. And we can easily that reason such as we know could well be absent from a process supervised by Absolute Wisdom. Imagination is the genii at whose touch form ap- pears. It is the opposite pole of thought, for thought and imagination are but the positive and fcive aspects of one and the same thing. Thought deals with externals; imagination with interior things. Of course, reason also deals with internal things, as does also imagination with ex- ternals, but this is not the method ordinarily em- ployed. Imagination, in truth, is slowly changing the whole earth, and especially man himself, but molecular matter is unwieldy and needs a more powerful imagination than that of man to bring about speedy change. But we have every reason for supposing that finer states of matter are more easily affected. In- deed, there is no other way of accounting for the forms we see in dreams except to suppose them to have actually leaped into being, "full panoplied," THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 19 in response to our imagination, and to De con- structed out of matter in these rarer conditions. They persist only so long as our feeble wills hold them intact, even as the very universes will per- sist just so long as the mighty Creative Will of their Cosmocratores holds the idea of them clearly in its imagination, when they, too, will fade away like the vagaries of a departing dream. The " writ- ten upon the tablets of the brain" theory has long since been abandoned by thoughtful Sensational- ists, or Materialists, for they recognize the insuper- able mechanical difficulties which beset such an ex- planation. Idle dreams and equally idle fancies in waking are but the moods of a childish giant ; they presage the power which will be exerted when the giant realizes his strength and exerts it intelli- gently. Another thing to be remembered, and which will have a most important bearing upon the course of our future argument, is that the imagination is the subjective faculty of the soul, par excellence. Reason is its objective faculty, for it is so universally exer- cised upon external phenomena that it can scarcely be said to act interiorily, in the true sense of the term. But with imagination it is different. Its first step is to retire within; it can not be exer- cised while the mind is occupied with externals. For it no exterior universe is required, except to furnish material for its inner activity. In sleeping or waking, in night-dreaming or day, the external 20 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY universe is unnecessary ; it creates its own worlds, and peoples them with its own beloved, utterly in- different as to whether external universes exist or not. Reason represents the working phase of exis- tence; imagination its opposite, or rest, and both are equally necessary to a happy existence. The law of cycles, of alternating activity and restin seen throughout all nature. Ever the night follows the day; ever are the tired faculties of activity re- cuperated by the grateful cessation from toil. It is a law of life; it is but another example of tli<»se "pairs of opposites" by which manifestation is accomplished, and through which existence wends its blissful way. There will never be that total cessation from toil which Western religions teach, nor is there warrant for this in all nature. "Work, then rest," is the command of nature, and it has been recognized, if but dimly, by every peo- ple who have set one day apart as sacred from toil. Imagination is a most perfect means of resting (for rest in its true sense is but a change of occupa- tion) inasmuch as it is above all limitations of time. When one retires into its recesses for pi sure, he cares not whether past, present or future be the subject-matter for its creations. Naturally, the young choose the future; equally naturally the old prefer to live in the past. When one sits down to rest in the fictions of today, does he not enter with an equal zest into the lives and loves of THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 21 the Antediluvians, the old Greeks and Romans, the ancient Britons, as with the fates of those of the present? One rather prefers, if there be any choice, that a time be selected by the novelist which enables him to complete the picture presented, thus leaving no element of happiness to the uncertainty of the future. For uncertainty is the minor chord of our human existence both actually and music- ally. The real difference between minor and major music is unexplainable by the science of music alone. But psycho-physiology comes to its aid, and shows that the difference consists wholly in the sense of incompleteness and uncertainty which (a uses the feeling of sadness, and that this is due to the relation of the key-tone to the over-tones. In major music this is evident, and both har- mony and melody return to it as a base of support clearly denned and evident to the most untrained ear. In minor music this relation is concealed by the position of the key-note, which is neither prom- inent nor dominant. Therefore, there runs through it all a sense of incompleteness and uncertainty which causes the soul to feel that melancholy which must always attend it so long as it wanders in doubt and uncertainty. It may be, and is, sweet for it is buoyed by hope, but throughout' is the wail of Demeter for Persephone. And the imagination is not bound to the rock of reality, as is reason. There need be no incompleteness nor uncertainty to its creations. Throughout the days of life one 22 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY must toil with imperfection both within and with- out; during sleep and death is restored the perfect and unconditioned, else would the heart get hard- ened and the hands grow weary Holding tin-in up for their heritage. Excepting moments of sensuous enjoyment, the only rest the soul knows in waking life is found in the imagination. It constitutes the sole rest of the child who has not learned to live in the sen- suous and whose happy imaginings are but tin disappearing vestiges of its blissful life beyond the grave. The boy soldier gets more true pleasure in the mock drill and the ragged attempt to imitate the uniform, than the real soldier does in all the glory of the actual battle. The child is yet living in its imagination, and the adult turns lovingly to the same source of happiness until he is taught by a false philosophy of life to seek happiness in the fleeting and equally unreal pleasures of sensuous enjoyment. CHAPTER IV THOUGHT, REASON, INTUITION, INSTINCT, AND FEELING IF we now examine thought, as thus analyzed, we will find much of the doubt and uncer- tainty which surrounded it capable of ex- planation. In its dual aspect, as we have seen, it is composed of reason and imagination, these being opposite poles of one and the same faculty, and each necessary to the activity and even exist- ence of the other. But thought is capable of still further analysis because of the fact that man is not identical with, nor the outcome of, the molecu- lar and chemical activities going on within his body, as our Materialistic philosophers would fain prove. That is to say, its effects are so different, accordingly as it occupies itself with high or low ideas or images, as to entitle it to a dual classifi- cation, as is the case also with the desires, which are beneficent or maleficent accordingly as they are directed to high or low things. Again, if we would regard the mind as only one of many faculties of the soul, and the brain-mind as only a semi-material organ, just as the eye and ear are purely material organs, much of the per- plexity as to what happens to the soul at death 24 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY would be relieved. .lust as the eye, ear, and so on, are organs which relate the soul to molecular vibra- tions upon this, the molecular, plane, so the brain- mind is hut a superior kind of organ to enable the son] to synthesize all the various reports conv< to it by the senses, and to reason out the relation which one hears to another. We over-estimate its importance, and imagine that the brain-mind is our very lift- h» -cause its bombardment by the senses is so incessant, and its response thereto so prompt It is as though one were to assume the superintendence of a vast, rapidly revolving ma- chine which demanded his entire attention. He would have to merge hi- Consciousness entirely in the work which it did, and for him, while so in- tently occupied, the rest of the world would be non-existent. Now, sight alone bombards the senses with many trillions of vibrations per Bee for the violet ray alone, while if we include the whole spectrum, whose united effect is light, the number of vibrations exceeds all comprehension. Add to this, that all these vibrations reveal to the delighted soul an ever-changing panorama of beauty — an almost infinite Aladdin's Palace- it is easy to perceive that it can nut hut be over- whelmed by the senses, and entirely over-esti- mate the importance of sensuous life. 8 BUOUS life consists almost wholly of thoughts and images aroused by the senses, and gloated ov< to speak, by the brain-mind without even an at- REASON AND INSTINCT 25 tempt being made to properly exercise the reason- ing power of the soul upon them. The Sensualists are not wholly un philosophical, but they mistake the part for the whole. As we retreat inward we may, perhaps, reach a point where reason and imagination, as we know them, are one. We can well fancy creative imag- ination and divine intelligence, or reason, to be united id unmanifested deity. But in man they arc in manifestation, and therefore opposed. For without opposition there can be no manifestation, as we have seen. They relieve one another, so to say, in the eternal cycle of life. When the one is most active the other is in abeyance. Both afford the very highest states of bliss. But reason offers no higher happiness than the imagination. Cre- ativc imagination even when dulled and materi- alized brings a happiness, as in the case of the poet OX ]>ainter, which is akin to ecstacy. What must it be, then, when one has but to will, and see his images spring forth in all the glorious beauty of a primal birth ? Reason, indeed, might be said to mar the highest 1)1 iss, even as would the conscious exercise of the imagination. There must be no sense of effort in our happiness, or the soul will sooner or later tire. Reason passes without any perceptible break into instinct, below, and intuition, above. Studied by the light of these relations, its function and office in the economy of the soul become still more ap- 26 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY parent. Both instinct and intuition are relatively much nearer the divine than is reason ; each fuses into and becomes indistinguishable from the other under certain conditions. Instinct is intelligent change of relations, unaccompanied by self-con- sciousness, or the intervention of reason, and reaches down into atomic and molecular activities, upon the one hand, and upward into the semi-self-conscions response to necessities of environment, upon the other. Intuition is more difficult to describe be- cause it transcends the present normal state of con- sciousness for man ; yet it represents the same cer- tainty of knowing, without the possibility of err- ing or the necessity of reasoning, upon mental planes, that instinct displays in action among ma- terial environments. As said, reason merges into intuition above, and into instinct below, as it must do if const ion- be unity in source and essence. In its own domain proper, reason is but the process of comparison be- tween things, with conclusions drawn therefrom. It is said to be the crown of man; it is rather the collar of the serf. It is the sign of imperfection; the acknowledgment of ignorance. It is the grop- ing oi a Mind Sampson among the pillars of a ma- terial prison, and is often as destructive when it puts forth its strength. Except the real nature and ee 94 nee of the things which it compares be known, its deductions must often, perhaps always, err. The presence of reason in the universe would REASON AND INSTINCT 27 seem to indicate that the Absolute itself is capable of change ; of having the sum of its conscious ex- periences added to, and a widening of its conscious area in consequence. For if the universe exists by- virtue of the Absolute, then either man, with his experiences of hopes and fears, his sufferings and bliss, is a part of and due to the action of this Ab- solute, or he is apart from it, and but an evanes- cent will-o'-the-wisp, resulting from chance com- binations in the elements out of which nature con- structs her eternal verities. But man can unques- tionably uncover depths in his own consciousness which link him to and make him an essential fac- tor in, the cosmos in which he apparently awakens to being ; therefore, within him is acting an actual portion of the Absolute; and as he is continuously undergoing new conscious experiences, the Absolute is also doing this by means of him, its representa- tive and agent. The infinite unity of the Ab- solute can only manifest itself finitely by means of an infinite succession of finite phenomena; so that unless nature be postulated as a weary treadmill where the same experiences are, after ages have cycled by, gone through with again, there must be recognized the possibility of an infinite number of new experiences. Mathematics hints at the same thing in demonstrating that an infinite number of atoms require infinite time for their infinite permu- tations. Self-consciousness accompanies and distinguishes 28 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY reason. For illusion is the producer of self-con- sciousness, and within its grasp the soul must grope. Reason represents consciousness so blinded by matter that it believes itself separate from the great Whole; upon which erroneous conception the entire structure of personal self-consciousness is reared. Failing to recognize that the Self is the same in all, but perceiving its glimmer among the clouds of its material encasement, it proceeds to erect an impassable, if wholly imaginary, barrier between that light of consciousness within itself and the same light illumining the (to it) outer mos. This basic error well illustrates its nature and its province. It is the servant of pure con- sciousness ; the hardy and fearless explorer oi those unknown abysses, those dreamed-of but unattained powers which must continually arise in the infinite changes of an illimitable, resistlessly pr< Universe. It is the pioneer : the explorer; and sfl heedless of peril as pioneers ought to be. It blazes out the rude path which intuition transforms into the broad highway. Wit li infinite patience it changes chaos into cosmos, and is rewarded by be- ing itself transformed into intuition in the process. So that reason represents divine conscious struggling with that infinitely new succession of phenomena which the manifestation of changing universes implies and necessitates. Dealing with the eternally new and unfamiliar, it is for this reason uninformed and fallible; it ought there- REASON AND INSTINCT 29 fore, to be cautious. It is divine in that it rep- resents the divine potentiality of consciousness in grappling with and mastering new problems. Instinct is creative imagination impressed upon plastic, obedient, unreasoning substance; therefore, the latter plays its part blindly and well. Yet, as this impress is also an emanation, reason is bound to be born from the seed so implanted, and it ap- pears as feeble, yet as full of promise, as a child. Its first concepts are as those of a child ; it makes mistakes, commits errors, falls under the sway of illusion, but, because of its oneness in essence, it finally wins its way back to its divine Source ; its new experiences, ripened into intuition, are added to the stores of Absolute Wisdom. Reason, therefore, must be assigned its proper value in the study of consciousness. It is not the supreme and only arbiter, as modern thought would teach. This function has been assigned it through the glamour of its own illusions. It is invaluable as a servant; it is but a blind master. While groping in the bonds of matter, man must perforce trust it; but he should know its weakness, recog- nize that its conclusions are finite, founded upon imperfect knowledge, and liable to be set aside at any time by larger experience. And he ought ever to seek for the light of intuition which glows within his heart, and foster, encourage, and wholly trust it, for it is the lord, and reason but its humble il. Then slowly the recognition of the divine 30 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY man within will dawn; his divine powers will be- gin to function; and reason, controlled and di- rected, will prove of a thousandfold more service than when it ignorantly claims the throne of the true man. Yet reason will always be. There must ever arise new conditions, new states of conscious 1 for the great heart of nature can not cease to beat, nor the universes die. And with these, as we have seen, it must always be its province to grapple; so that before it is the priceless promise of endless employment; a future which can never weary nor grow commonplace. Intuition again, is usually described as that fac- ulty of the soul by means of which it cognizes truth directly. Yet while the soul undoubtedly poss. this faculty by virtue of its divine origin, it is only as a potentiality until further developed by its pension through conscious experience. Intuition is Stored knowledge, the memory of which the s<>ul can draw upon; it is also the perfection of reason- ing processes which go in a flash from the known to the unknown; it is the ideation of the Higher — the Divine Soul which informs body after body, and which is untouched by either birth or death. For intuition is utterly inexplicable except by the light of reincarnation. Admitting — which is but the truth — that the soul lives life after life, re- taining the aroma, so to say, of its conscious periences, then intuition is seen to be but the con- REASON AND INSTINCT 31 servation of consciousness — the expansion, through infinite conscious experience of the finite I am I into the infinite I AM ! Instinct is its counterpart in the animal king- dom, but here the conservation would seem to be hierarchal — as, indeed, it may be in man, in some great Oversoul, which we can dimly sense, but can not yet clearly perceive. Instinct seems to be hierarchal because each member of any particular family possesses all the conscious power that any other individual has. One bird builds its nest just as perfectly as another of the same species, with only the slightest of divergings. Imper- ceptible as are these differences, they are yet in this kingdom the point of unstable equilibrium, where the ascent of life is actually taking place, and constitute the only mark by which we are sure that instinct is not a fixed quantity and, therefore, evolution not a dream, and the Cycle of Necessity a bible and an illusion. So, intuition also marks the point of unstable equilibrium for the soul — the conserved faculties of the divine man, the Ishvara who "dwells in every human heart." It is admit- tedly greater in some than in others ; in many it seems entirely absent, while not a few men show very clear traces of being still under the dom- inance of instinct — at such infinitely varying stages of evolution have the different members of the human race arrived ! Of the faculty of feeling little can be said. Feel- 32 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ing is consciousness; to analyze it is to explain the mystery of life, to answer the riddle of the Sphynx. It is the synthesis of all the various fac- ulties of the soul. All alike root in it at their last analysis. The consciousness of life is a feeling at its base; the consciousness that we are alive, or self-consciousness, is no less a feeling. To feel is to know, to be conscious. Yet as the faculties of man run the entire gamut, from the lowest to the highest and most divine, so do the feelings naturally divide into those of the lower and those of the higher man. The former we speak of as rt emotions," although the latter are often, but wrongly, included in tins designation. Properly ■peaking, the emotions are those which appertain strictly to sensuous experiences, while the truer, deeper feelings, such as pity, —ion, love, hope, and so on, belong to the higher nature entirely. Not but that these may be evolved — perhaps liberated would be a better worcf — by and through sensuous experiences, for sensuous ex- perience is the schoolhouse of the soul, but being once evolved they are naturally conserved by the real, and not by the transient, man. \W indeed, the germs of compassion — not to be con- fused with the animal maternal instinct — in many animals, but this only shows the common base of all consciousness, the unity of life on all planes. The opposite of feeling is, of course, matter, feeling being only a synonym for consciousness, or REASON AND INSTINCT 33 spirit. Yet matter is only embodied entities whose consciousness is so different from our own that to us it seems non-consciousness, so that spirit and matter again are shown to be only opposite poles of the same thing. Certainly, in the deeper feelings, we are in the land of divinity, and far be- yond our ability to analyze. We may not ques- tion; we can only accept and bow before the mighty mystery of life. CHAPTER V EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LIFE HAVING briefly studied the nature of the chief faculties of the soul, it remains to examine by the light of reason and logic the effect upon them of the death of the phynnl body. At the very outset, the query meets us : Is con- sciousness annihilated absolutely by death, or does some portion of it escape this fate? And, if so, what portion? Consciousness implies a cognizer, the thing cog- nized, and the act of consciousness itself. That which is conscious of life, in the case of primal, basic, life-consciousness, may be termed the first Manifested Logos, or Infinite Unity, which, being infinite, is certainly capable of manifesting itself in an infinite number of centers of consciousness, upon an infinite number of planes of consciousness and during an infinite succession of units of time. The thing of which it is conscious is motion — Infinite, Absolute, Motion — which is the material aspect of Itself. The act of consciousness is that Infinite Volition by which it eternally cognizes its own Being. DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 35 Motion is the material manifestation of life; recognition of that motion, the spiritual manifesta- tion, or conscious aspect of life. A body in which motion ceases as a whole is dead as an inde- pendent body, although its constituent parts may be in violent motion. Thus we say the moon is dead because it has ceased to exhibit the two forma of motion by means of which we recognize planetary life — independent motion about its own axis, and independent orbital motion about the sim. Especially is the revolution upon its own axis evidence of volition in a planetary body, for it is a motion which astronomers have exhausted all possible theories in a vain attempt to explain. However satisfactorily their celestial mechanics may account for other motions, in the face of axial revo- lution they break hopelessly down. The moon, it is true, has an axial motion of twenty-eight days, but this is due to the attraction of the earth alone, and is in no sense volitional. For moons, earths, and suns revolve upon their own axes because they will* to do so — a fact which astronomy will be driven to accept ere long. Absence of all motion is not only impossible, but inconceivable. A meaningless, senseless mo- tion is unthinkable in an orderly cosmos. The effect can not be greater than the cause, and * That is. their Reeents will to do this. The material molecules of their bodies no more will to act than do those of the body of man. In both eases it is the Regent, or soul. 36 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY if we find order and plan at the periphery of being, we may be assured it exists at its center. There- fore, Absolute Motion is both planned and nized by Absolute Wisdom, or Absolute Conscious- ness, and for this reason, the consciousness of life is infinite in both space and time. The consciousness of life, then, pervades all space. It is the base, apparently, upon which all other states of consciousness rest, the source from which they spring. It is as incapable of annihilation as space itself. It is even independent of form, for it can equally well exist in the Formless. Therefore, death or the destruction of form can not de- stroy or annihilate the consciousness of life, or of being. But with this consciousness of existence in the human soul, is associated the added conse; ness that I exist — I, a particular individual, a self-cognizing entity. Is this individualized con- sciousness annihilated at death ? This I-am-myself consciousness does seem to de- pend upon form. It is a differentiation which has arisen within the universe of life, and is a which must be recognized and explained — not hi inked. The I, or ego-consciousness, roots in the very Ab- solute itself. It is primal ; it precedes and deter- mines all subsequent evolution. From I-centers of consciousness must proceed that Infinite Ideation whose wisdom results in cosmos. To such I- centers must run all the reports, so to speak, of the DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 37 cosmic senses. It is possible, as we have seen, for the Absolute to manifest itself as an I at any point in space or time — a confused comprehension of which lies at the base of the Deism of Hegel. From these primal I-centers spring the I-am- myself — a reflected state of consciousness caused by embodiment in material forms. This manifes- tation of Divinity as a human soul, or self-recog- nizing center of consciousness, is the most wonder- ful of all the dark mysteries of Being. For in the human soul consciousness separates itself from the universe of which it is a portion, and then proceeds to study and analyse that other por- tion which is really itself, but from which it is ap- parently divided. But to separate itself, even ap- parently, requires a material basis, as the Secret Doctrine points out, and any thing material must have form, though this be but that Primeval Chaos of which all olden philosophies speak. So that Form becomes a sine qua non of all soul manifesta- tion. It will be evident upon a moment's examination that this I-am-I which is at the base of the human soul does not depend for its existence upon the an- imal form of its body, however strange this asser- tion may seem to Western ears. But if it did, then would the sense of I-am-ness change with the changing body, which is never for any two consecu- tive moments precisely the same. The most radi- cal and complete changes, as between the infant 38 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY and the old man, are all accompanied by the same sense of I-am-myself. One may feel that that self has had many experiences; that its opinions and beliefs have undergone many changes, but the inner feeling that I am experiencing this, or chang- ing my views into these or those, is always the same. From the cradle to the grave, throughout infancy, childhood, adult life, and old age, the I has remained untouched by all the panorama which has passed before it. Character may change — it is the object of the ages and of evolution to change it — but that which recognises itself as I never changes. The form which reflects the cosmic I am, and causes the feeling of ego-hood in the hu- man soul, is not that of its animal body, of this we may be assured. It is permanent ; it is, perhaps, the noumenon of form, and capable of manifesting in any form, whatsoever. But the soul, or I-am-myself, does depend upon its physical form for bringing it into relationship with this molecular plane, which is done through and by means of the senses. Without physical or- gans for receiving and transmitting vibrations the physical universe would be non-existent for it. It sits within, occupying a plane of the universe more stable than this molecular one, and receives the reports of the senses, almost exactly as a telegraph operator might receive reports of the doings of dis- tant cities. It is evident that if the wires were cut the operator would be unable to communicate with DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 39 those distant places, and it is also true that death must cut off all communication with this molecular plane, for the nerve-wires are completely destroyed by death. This is the first and most important of the truths to learn from the death of the body — that it separ- ates the soul effectually from this molecular world. It will throw a broad and bright light upon all so- called communications with the dead. It is possi- ble to reach the dead, or, what is the same thing, for the dead to communicate with us, but it is the rare exception, and not the rule. A number of abnormal or unusual conditions must exist, which will be studied when dealing with this subject, in another chapter. It is enough for our present purpose to point out that the physical senses re- quire physical peripheral cells to receive the im- pact of the vibrations coming from our physical universe, physical nerves and nerve fluids to con- vey these vibrations to the sense-centers, and physi- cal cells to receive, record and preserve them until the inner ego can take cognizance of them. Death completely breaks this necessary sequence, and even sleep does so temporarily. Indeed, the latest, and probably correct, theory of the modus operan- dum of sleep supposes the actual physical inter- ruption of this sequence by the separating, or mutual withdrawing, of the central nerve cells which are in contact when the ego is awake. Sleep is the exact counterpart of death in that it 40 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY cuts off the soul from communication with the ex- ternal universe. To all intents and purposes, a man asleep is a man dead, the sole difference being in the power that the living man has to awaken. Let the sleep be profound enough, and the dulled senses convey no reports whatsoever to the sleeper. "Seeing, and hearing and feeling are done," for him who slumbers, until he again awakens. Sleep has been too little studied ; within its blank lapses of consciousness may be found the most instructive and helpful analogies with death, did we but exam- ine them in the proper spirit. For in sleep the body is exhausted temporarily; in death it is out- worn altogether. The soul rests its body ten- thousand times, but at last must lay it aside en- tirely, so that death is but a longer, more profound sleep. One is dead when asleep, and but asleep when dead. Similarly, trance, unconsciousness from concus- sion, fainting, etc., all throw the light of analogy upon their great congener, death. The writer once questioned a particularly intelligent young man, dying from traumatic peritonitis, and in full pos- session of all his faculties, as to the nature of the sensation of dying. u I feel exactly as if I were go- in g to faint," was the reply. And presently he did faint — into a swoon that will last him a thousand years, it may be. Had he awakened, by any chance, in his old body, he would have picked up from the record upon the brain cell the thread of DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 41 this life, and gone on ; when he awakens in a new one, he will have to renew all his associations with this molecular universe, and again go through the slow process of building for himself a habitation. However complete and unbroken may be the web of life upon deeper planes in which the soul has its true home, the interregnum between earth lives is as real as a chasm between precipices, and can only be bridged by uniting the consciousness and mem- ory of the soul while in the body to that inner thread upon which all its molecular and transient personalities are strung. For the body is not the home of the soul, how- ever much it may appear to be. It is a continual struggle for it to maintain itself here, and the slightest break in the channels by means of which it reaches the earth is sufficient to annul all con- sciousness of earth-life and its concerns. Fatigue wearies the delicate wires daily, and the soul is compelled to relax its hold and to abandon, if but temporarily, its communication with earth. Sleep the brain must, or madness and death will quickly follow. Disease, accident — ten thousand things — surround the soul's avenues to this molec- ular universe, and all seeking to exclude it from this, to it, abnormal consciousness, either tempo- rarily, by sleep, delirium, or trance, or to destroy these approaches permanently by death. So that there can be nothing in the casting off of the physical body to warrant the apprehension that 42 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY the I-am-myself consciousness will not survive the process. If it be, as it unquestionably is, independ- ent of all change in the body; if it is unaltered by growth or age; if it remain the same when paralysis removes all knowledge or sensation of almost the whole of its habitation; if it survive the inter- regnums of sleep, delirium, trance or madness, dur- ing which the body is for it, at least temporarily, annihilated, then there can be no reason for alleg- ing that death destroys or even changes this primal, individualising and permanent consciousne^ I AM MYSELF! CHAPTER VI EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE SENSES THE sense-organs are in the material body ; no one will dispute this fact. Indeed, the body is but a congeries of sense-organs, together with the various accessory systems for maintaining these in a serviceable condition, for receiving their reports, for locomotion, reproduction of other bodies, etc. Death unquestionably destroys these organs, and so cuts off all the avenues by which the vibrations of this molecular plane of the uni- verse reach the soul. There can be no seeing, hear- ing, tasting, touching, or smelling of molecular things after the death of the body. And, indeed, unless we assume a sensuous state of existence be- yond the grave, such as the Christian heaven or the Moslem paradise, there is no further use for these. The senses are indubitably differentiations of a di- vine sense-consciousness, which is one of the native faculties of the soul. They enable the soul to perceive and examine any exterior plane. The dif- ferent methods by which matter may be approached and its various qualities and properties recognized, cause the differentiations of the one sense-conscious- ness into the so-called different senses. 44 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY These have been differentiated upon the molecu- lar plane to meet its necessities. When the soul in its journey through the great Cycle of Necessity, finds itself face to face with any new plane of mat- ter, it must and will meet the new conditions by constructing new sense-organs. It is said that the astral plane lies next in our pathway, and that we are already beginning to develope the necer- senses to enable the soul to contact it, and that this is the secret of the abnormal powers of mediums and psychics. Whether this be true or not, matters little to our present enquiry; the sense organs which we have evolved, and which we are beginning (very imperfectly) to use, are unquestionably destroyed by death, and with them all possibility of sensuous perception of the molecular earth. This is the all- important fact for our purpose. We are not even concerned as to whether or not disembodied souls can use the remnants of their physical sense-organs, or embryotic astral ones, for bringing them into m -nsuous contact with the astral plane; it is suffi- cient to know that the physical organs are de- stroyed, and that with their destruction all power of sensuous contact with the earth is gone. Whether or not other methods of communication are available will be discussed in its proper place. Centers of sensation certainly exist in an inte- rior and comparatively permanent vesture of the soul after the destruction of the body, but they are as useless for sensuous perception of the earth as DEATH AND THE SENSES 45 telegraph stations whose wires have been cut, are for communicating with distant places. No doubt the soul, through sheer force of habit, fancies it sees, hears, and tastes, upon the astral plane after it leaves the body, just as while in the body it often fancies it feels an amputated limb. But it is noth- ing more than the association of ideas acting under the force of habit, in the former case, and the pinching by the cicatrix of the amputated nerve- ends, in the latter, which nerve-ends, again through habit, refer the sensation to a non-existent periph- eral distribution. There seems no escape from the fact, therefore, that sensuous perception ceases with the death of the body, and that whatever is preserved of the faculties of the soul, this does not follow man beyond the grave. It is small wonder, in view of this, that death seems such utter annihilation, for our earth-lives are almost entirely based upon the reports of our senses. For the average person life consists in what he sees and hears, together with utterly chaotic and useless speculations and fancies induced thereby. The average man imagines that he thinks, but he only, idly and vacuously, re- thinks the thoughts of the very few who really do think. Deprive him of all sensuous contact with external things, and his sole recourse for thought or imagination would lie in his memory of what he had seen or heard, and when this failed or became out-worn, insanity or idiocy must result. This 46 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY has been too often proven in the cases of those only partially deprived of new sensuous association by solitary confinement. Yet the ordinary man fan- cies that he has had suflh dent experiences during the few years of his sensuous life to occupy his mind throughout the eternities of the future heav- en which he ignorantly hopes to attain. There must be a more stable foundation laid for eternity than in mere sensuous experiences, or in the thoughts arising therefrom, if the Pilgrim through the Cycle of Necessity ever reaches such a condition of consciousness — which is exceedingly improb- able. Meanwhile, let us be content with the cy- cles of rest following upon those of activity which nature has so kindly and considerately provided for our weaknesses and our scanty intellectual ac- cumulations during anyone of our many lives in the embodied state. Most theories of the after-death states which pre- vail in the West, and which are not Christian, suppose everlastingly new experiences. In other words, the traveller through the great Cycle of Ne- cessity is hurried from experience to experience, without having the necessary time to find out the meaning of any of them, or, in fact, to really ob- serve any of them. He is in even a worse condition than a passenger in one of our modern railway coaches. The latter is hurried through a whirling panorama of moving plain, forest, farm or city. travelling both day and night, until he arrives at DEATH AND THE SENSES 47 his journey's end. If the object be to simply get there in the shortest possible time, it is accom- plished, but if it be to observe and study the nature and capacities of the country through which he hurries, it is not. Similarly, if the Pilgrim through the Cycle of Necessity had only to hurry to the end, the rushing from this to new experiences upon some other world would quickest accomplish his object. But such is evidently not nature's purpose. She is infinitely patient — as she is infinite in all other aspects, if we but recognize this fact. She af- fords us almost endless opportunities, but she is a rigidly exacting teacher, and will accept no half- learned lessons. That which has been conceived in the great, Infinite Mind will some day be accom- pli shed, though time which we might conceive of as eternity be occupied in the task. If she desires to produce an eagle to wing his way through the ether, she may not — and does not — fashion him out of clay, a feathery Adam, and launch him in the skies. She takes a single cell, and begins a patient evolution, from within without, slowly molding the potential thought into the potent form until the eagle appears, though long ages may have been consumed in the process, and the eagle for weary eons a creeping reptile before he at last leaves the earth for the sky. So there is no warrant in all or any of nature's processes for supposing that this earth, which is evidently the schoolhouse of the soul, is visited but once by its pupil, and then 48 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY abandoned eternally in order to enter new fields of unexplored phenomena, through which it is equally hurried on in that which would then be its mad rush through the Cycle of Being. Sensuous perception is the alphabet only, in the great curriculum which reveals to the soul the mys- teries of its own being. It is but reasonable to sup- pose that once learned thoroughly it will be Laid aside or relegated to the n econaar y but unimport- ant position of all alphabets in the subsequent pur- suit of knowledge. Nature would become infinitely wearisome did not her object-lessons present in- finite variety. We do sometimes weary of sense- life, but only because we linger unnecessarily long over our tasks. However, it is evidently not the object of nature to keep us eternally employed in learning her sensuous alphabet. Only the very rim — the outermost portion of being — can be per- ceived by means of the sense-organs. We may smell, taste, see, hear, and touch the material en- velope of things, but if we do not evolve the power to perceive and comprehend the essence or spirit, we can never really progress. This, nature is con- tinually pointing out. She tempts us on by means of sensuous perception, but it is only that we may enter the path of attainment. She bombards us through the senses in order to compel us to think ; she surrounds us with hostile forces to evoke our powers of resistance. She continuously removes the possibility of sensuous perception by sleep and DEATH AND THE SENSES 49 death to enforce upon our understandings the truth that sensuous life is not essential to the existence of the soul, but is only a temporary aid for pupils in her primary department. There is another office of the senses which must not be overlooked, if we would rightly estimate their place and function in the development of the faculties of the soul and the economy of being. They supply the resisting force which enables the true faculties of the soul to evolve. As we have seen, any force must have a counter force or it be- comes non-existent. So that the senses directly oppose themselves to the progress of the soul in this stage of its evolution. They demand that it shall cease to struggle on; that it shall abide with them. This fact is the reason for the recognition of two souls which Goethe found warring within his breast; for the spiritual man and the man of earth which St. Paul found opposing each other even unto death ; it is the key to the statement in the Book of the Golden Precepts that "the Self of matter and the Self of spirit can never meet; one of the twain must disappear ; there is no room for both." The opposition, the allurements, the be- guilings, the temptations, of the senses, are wise, beneficent, and wholly for the soul's good. Nature may seem to lay snares for our feet, but she does it to teach us caution; she tempts us to make us strong; she adjusts the effects to the foolish and wicked causes which we set up to teach us wisdom. 50 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Experience is the great Teacher, and errors and mistakes — aye, sins and vices — constitute her most effectual object-lessons. If earth were a place free from sensuous temptation and sin, the soul would leave it no wiser than when it came. The recognition of the fact that the senses di- rectly oppose the progress of the soul, and this in its own best interests, throws a flood of light upon the problem of being. If we are living in the senses alone, we may know that we are making no progress, but rather retrograding — as we undoubt- edly are, if we permit them to tempt us into com- mitting sin and vice. They are the trainers of the soul, and if they do not buffet and tyrannize over it — do not oppose strength against strength — they fail to call out the highest of which the soul ii able. The greater the temptation, the greater the opportunity to overcome ; the stronger the enemy, the greater the credit for the victory. But we must face the fact, too, that the soul may lose in the contest. There would be no merit in fighting a battle where victory was pre-ordained, where the soul could not but win. The senses are the devils of all religions, the tempters in every soul -myth. We think the senses are our friends; they are, in the experiences which they afford the soul, and in the opportunities for the development of strength which the struggle with them offers, but they be- come our deadly enemies unless we conquer and dominate them. Against their giant might the DEATH AND THE SENSES 51 soul struggles for eons, until at length it becomes, because of the struggle, a still stronger giant, and so conquers in the feud of the ages. Then will the soul be glad that it had such opportunities, as it turns from this conquered foe to other and inner worlds which it would perhaps have never dared to attempt had it not the discipline and strength growing out of its long battlings with the senses. Since the senses directly oppose the soul, and since nature always ensures the opportunity to rest after any struggle, it is but fitting, and a portion of her great plan, that these should be laid aside at death. It is but the tired warrior unbuckling his sword after the day's battle that his rest may be undisturbed. Similarly, the senses would mar and make imperfect the rest after the battle of life, and the soul willingly lays them aside during the truce of death, even if it must again gird them on during its next struggle with the temptations of earthly existence. It is one of the wisest provisions in all the compassionate plan of nature that the deafen- ing roar of the senses should not be heard during the rest beyond the grave. CHAPTER VII EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS DBS I R B of some nature would seem to be at the basis of all manifestation. It is as univ. r- sal, as omnipresent, as the consciousness of life itself. It cannot be destroyed. Like all forms of force it may be changed into other expressions, but that which reappears must be the exact equivalent of that which disappeared; it is under, and exemp- lifies, the law of the oonserv&tioil of force and the correlation of energy. The object of desire may be changed; one may transmute, by hard and long- continued effort, his selfish into unselfish de- but the force will not be lessened. On the con- trary, it will be apparently increased, for selfish desire stands alone and is inharmonic; while when unselfish it tends to become harmonic and cosmic ; the entity draws upon and becomes in desire one with the great, infinite source of all desire and ex- hibits all the desire-force that its organism per- mits. It follows, then, that desire persists beyond the grave, and we must endeavor, by analogy and logical inference, to determine its nature, mode of DEATH AND DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 53 manifestation, and vehicle. We have seen * that it is impossible to deprive the soul of a material body, even though this be as tenuous as space itself, and that there can be no reason for doubting that when the physical is thrown off, the soul is still clothed with an inner and more ethereal form. But we may go still farther with our reasoning, and de- clare that inasmuch as the physical body is un- doubtedly the result of thought, and may be, and is, changed at all times under the force of thought, this inner body is also thought-constructed. More than this ; by the facility with which this inner matter takes form under the chaotic stimulus of dream, we have every reason for believing that the soul instantly constructs for itself, under the stress of its desire to live, a body in every respect resem- bling in form and appearance that which is out- worn. Reason is in abeyance ; imagination comes to the rescue, and from the long association with the old body, together with the knowledge and feeling of the soul that it is still alive, the new form takes automatically, so to speak, the sem- blance of the old. Besides, the germs of the cen- ters of sensation must be preserved, that they may expand and blossom in the next physical body, so that there is every reason why this inner form should be the counterpart of the one cast off. And there is ample evidence in the shape of dop- plegangers, or double appearances of the same per- * Chapter II 54 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY son in two apparently identical bodies, to warrant the assertion above made as to the nature of the body which persists beyond the grave. It is physi- cal ; and, while not so gross as that with which the soul is now clothed, conserves every purpose, at least so far as preserving the sense of identity I-am-ness, which the physical body accomplisl The nature of the desires which follow the BOnl beyond the grave can but be a continuation and conservation of those which dominate it while in the physical body. Life is a continuous Bequ Bach successive state the legitimate offs prin g of those which preceded it. While it is true that this sequence may be interrupted and entirely new di- rections given it by the will, yet it is also true that the human will is almost a negative factor at the present stage of human evolution. The animal will, or that which arises in the lower sensual de- sires, almost entirely dominates man, and this is that whose origin is in each fleeting moment, and as unstable as water. It is entirely incompetent to control and divert the intense desires of a long life of animal enjoyment into any new or dift channel. The automatic habit of desiring certain thing! will of itself carry the s«»ul far beyond the gates of the mere death of the body. But at death beneficent nature interrupts the succession of events by entirely depriving the soul of any new sense-enjoyments. There is, as we have seen, no seeing, hearing, or tasting, because the DEATH AND DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 55 organs are destroyed by death, and the most active mind will weary at length of internal desire when external gratification no longer follows. So that, little by little, these material, earthly desires die out from want of new stimulus, and inner and more spiritual ones beghr to be active. Underneath the most stolid exterior, benumbed by the most selfish, and perhaps bestial, gratification of the animal na- ture, lie the dormant powers of a soul which is really divine. However tainted we may be with the personal equation, there are few who have not dreamed dreams of benefiting their fellow-men; who have not seen visions, however dimly, of the dawning of universal brotherhood; of an era of peace and good-will upon this sin-cursed earth. All these must have their time of activity; every longing of the soul must be satisfied ; all desire, ex- cept that unquenchable one to live, must have at- tained fruition in the imagination, and have died out ere the soul returns to earth to again take its part in the grand harmony of Being. So after death one by one the desires will tend to become higher and purer, until the soul wearies and turns aside from the very last of them, and, breathing out its wordless prayer to its own divine Father in heaven, " Let me live again," returns to active self- conscious life, amid the old environments, and again takes up the task of the Ages — to transmute, in the crucible of sorrow and suffering, the baser metals of earthly life into the gold of spiritual existence. 56 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Desire, then, and desire alone, creates our life be- yond the grave. Each will construct for himself the place which he has prepared while in the body, and if it be a hell or a heaven, he may rest content with the assurance that he alone has been its sole architect. CHAPTER VIII EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION WE have now to examine more fully into the effect of death upon thought. By separ- ating it into its two poles, reason and im- agination, our task has become comparatively easy. Thought, as reason, is almost completely destroyed by death as an active process in the ordinary man. The potentiality of thinking remains, but its pro- vocative, sense-stimuli, no longer exists. For the chief use of reason upon any plane of manifested being is to predicate from the known the nature of the unknown ; and the unknown is contacted through exteriorizing any new plane by means of sense-organs constructed of the matter of that plane. Upon this molecular plane the sense-con- sciousness acting through molecular sense-organs must furnish the data which reason examines and from which it draws more or less correct con- clusions. Our senses also furnish the data with which the imagination must chiefly occupy itself until man has attained the power to soar beyond reason into the certainty of intuition and feeling. They can, of course, furnish no immediate data for the evolution of pity, compassion, love, etc., but 58 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY the observation which they render imperative arouses through reason these latent faculties of th" soul. Indeed, it will be well to remember at all times that the soul does not evolve, in the scientific sense of the term. All which it can ever become, all that the eternal ages can have in store for it, lies locked dp in the infinite potentialities of its own being, and the passing panorama of physical phenomena only draws this into manifestation upon the finite side of life. Upon the infinite, unmanifested, subjective side of Being, may be all knowledge, all wisdom and all power, but it can only exist, as it seems to the writer, as one Infinite Whole or Unity. THAT is utterly unconscious* by our standards, for these only begin with differentiation and consequent manifestation. The evolution (so-called) of the soul consists hut in the transfer of the potential- ities of the great undivided, subjective SELF into the potencies of the manifested, differentiated sep- arate selves. And it may be that the sense of iso- lation and separation which now so saddens these separated selves will disappear when once the soul truly recognizes this fact of its basic One-ness with the Whole. Let him who thinks the soul evolves in the scientific sense of the word pause, and rehVet. How many millions of years would it take for the wind and rain to produce a plant ? or for the sun to grow an eye upon the face of some granite boul- DEATH AND IMAGINATION 59 der exposed directly to its rays ? Evolution is from within without, and the potentiality lies ever within, else not all the forces of the external uni- verse acting through the eternal ages could call it forth. The wind and the rain, the sun's rays and the darkness, force evolution, to be sure, but it is an evolution of something quite foreign to their own qualities — something to be found within the life germ alone. So that the phenomena of life do not produce, de novo, pity, hope or compassion, but they do stimulate these qualities of the soul itself into activity, just as the warmth and moisture compel the acorn to produce out of the germ within if.« If the mighty oak. The germ-soul, whether of the oak or the man, seizes upon the elements of that plane within which it is forced into activity, and constructs for itself a body which truly belongs to that particular plane, and which body as a form may be said to evolve, but it is always the inner force which guides the construction of the form; not the outer. Forms evolve under the stress of the necessities of the soul ; not the soul itself. The so-called forces of nature only afford the soul opportunity to transfer the potencies of the unmanifested to the manifested side of Being to arouse from latency into activity the wondrous faculties and powers concealed within itself. For reason to persist, it must be supplied with new data almost continuously. No doubt, the soul does reason in a dazed sort of way during that in- 60 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY terval after death for which its fading memory affords food. But this must be soon exhar. with even the strongest minds. Isolate a man from all contact with his fellows — from all sources of new phenomena in nature about him, as is done in solitary confinement in certain penal institutions — and what happens? First the weakening and thru the total destruction of the reasoning powers. The man is driven into the excessive use of his imagin- ation, and soon fails to distinguish the real from the unreal. Let him who thinks that he has laid in a suffi- cient stock of knowledge in one short life to afford occupation for the rest of eternity sit down and en- deavor to anticipate that eternity by dwelling in his remembrances for even one hour, and be will perceive his mistake. So, after death, however vivid the remembrances of earth-life may be, the shutting out of new stimuli in the shape of new ex- perienceSj will soon cause reasoning upon the old to grow distasteful, and they will no longer command the attention of the reason, although the imagin- ation might find in them food for long centuries of activity during a purely subjective existence after death. There are, of course, certain stimuli which tiow in from the higher pole of man's being which may be truly termed subjective. But these are very rare in the ordinary man, and consist only in the more or less feeble attempts of the conscience to DEATH AND IMAGINATION 61 force reason to consider the purport and effects of evil acts. These stimuli are no doubt very active for a short period after death, and may prove a source of much suffering for a time. But the to- tally different conditions, from those which it has been taught to anticipate, which meet the soul at death must soon dissipate all fear of hell, and with the disappearance of fear (but too often the only means of commanding attention which conscience possesses) these subjective stimuli are no longer heeded and the imagination assumes full control. Like all force, that of the imagination, takes the direction of least resistance, which in this case is that of the greatest desires, and so each soul, when it falls completely under the dominion of the im- agination, will construct for itself such environ- ments as afford it the greatest satisfaction. As pointed out by Madame H. P. Blavatsky, if this be the Christian heaven, the soul will imagine itself to be there ; if it be a Musselman paradise, this will be constructed. And no doubt the sincere Methodist will spend much of his subjective existence before again incarnating in a long, large and enthusiastic protracted meeting, during which innumerable sin- ners will be converted. If one be advanced so far as to be unable to be deluded by his imagination, his reason will be ex- ercised upon these inner stimuli, as well as from the stimuli coming from the exterior of his plane of thought, for the power to exteriorize inner con- 62 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY dition.8 of matter keeps step with the widening of the area of consciousness. Such an one will use his imagination consciously in actual creation, and not he left to the vagaries of its unconscious exercise — a good example of which latter we see in dreams. For just as our reason is very imperfect, so al- our imagination, and neither give scarcely a hint of what their perfected powers really are. This universe, for example, is brought into existence by the creative imagination of high beings who were once men ; whom we may reverence but not worship, for they are of the same essence as ourselves, and are our brothers — not our gods. Where they are we must, in the eons of eternity, surely arrive. These higher stimuli flow into the mind at all times during life, and constitute, as we have Been, the source in which arises the higher mentality m contra-distinguished from the lower. They consist of the reproofs of conscience, flashes of intuition, feelings of pity and compassion, etc., but they arc so few and so little heeded, that they are hardly worth considering in the ordinary man. "Do unto others as they do unto you," is good enough ethics for him, and his after-death life will be accord in*: to his thought and desire. He who is seeking to honestly explore the beyond will take facts as he finds them and reason accordingly, and will not promise an eternity of happiness to one who, out < »f cowardice perhaps, repents at his last gasp. The future of the ordinary man will be constructed out DEATH AND IMAGINATION 63 of the same material, and in the same manner as are his ordinary dreams, and if they are at first unpleasant, he may be consoled by the fact that, with the cessation of his earth-desires, he will con- struct the best heaven which he is capable of en- joying. At any rate, it has been made plain that the soul can not hope to take its ordinary reasoning powers with it beyond the grave until it has crossed many wide and deep abysses in its evolutionary path- way. Reason will cease for the simple and logical cause that there will be nothing to think about. No new stimuli can reach the soul because of the destruction of the sense organs, and because it has not constructed, or evolved, those which will enable it to exteriorize the next inner, ordinarily termed the astral or ethereal according to the bent of the mind. That these organs are beginning to be evolved, the phenomena of trance, clairvoyance, etc.. prove beyond per ad venture, but if they were evolved to any large extent all would undoubtedly be clairvoyant and clairaudient, or be able to see and hear upon astral planes. Those souls who have ; by turning their attention to them, stimu- lated abnormally the evolution of their astral or- gans will have an unhappy time after death, for reasons which will be pointed out in their proper place. The imagination is. as we have asserted, a native faculty of the soul and one of the most important 64 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY which it possesses. Within its mysterious ree< lie unlimited potentialities. During life, and i cially during waking life, its powers are but seldom appealed to, and never to create upon the physical plane. Yet the hour must come to every soul when it shall create physically by the power of imagina- tion — else is evolution a snare and this material universe an unreal nightmare oppressing the sleep of material monsters. For though this uni\ was planned by divine Ideation, yet the models upon which are built its wilderness of forms, were constructed by the creative imagination of entities which, while divine, are almost infinitely lower than those in whose thought the cosmic plan originated. Blind force taking the direction of the least n ance never did, nor never will, produce form; its efforts can only end in chaos. Yet it would be as absurd to suppose the Absolute, or whatever we choose to term Creative Deity, to occupy itself with arranging and unfolding the petals of a daisy, as it would be to suppose a supervising architect to occupy himself in actually laying the bricks of the building he had planned. But the architect must know the office and nature of bricks, and be able to determine whether or not the work has been well done. Therefore, as these lower cosmocratores are also divine — are a portion of the Divine Mind, even as man is himself — so, through this lower portion of itself, is Divine Idea- tion conscious of even the tracings upon the most DEATH AND IMAGINATION 65 delicate fern. But neither the tracings nor the fern itself are reasoned into existence — they are imag- ined to be, and, lo ! they are. Reason is but one-half of thought, just as the negative current is but one-half of electricity. Indeed, the office of reason and that of imagina- tion are so different that while unquestionably interdependent faculties of the soul, their action may be profitably studied independently of each other. Reason is of necessity constantly occupied with the problems of an unknown universe and its labors therefore placed upon the pinnacle of use- ful human attainment, while imagination is as constantly but foolishly relegated to the domain of the false and the unreal. It is assigned, half contemptuously, to the poet, or artist, who is him- self looked upon as a visionary and unprofitable member of the community. Yet imagination re- venges herself upon her self-appointed master by yielding to thought but vagaries, when her powers, enfeebled by disuse, are called by some unforseen necessity into active operation. Still, how perfect is a perfect dream ! Yet every detail is the work of the imagination alone, for reason only interferes here to spoil, and causes but an unwelcome awakening. The mingling with the loved and lost, but who by the alchemy of the im- agination are no longer lost but gloriously present; the perfect peace and harmony; the assembly or landscape with not one detail marred or absent — 66 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ought not these things to awaken us to the wonder- ful faculty of the soul which lies ready to our hand when we shall become wise enough to use it ? And this glorious faculty is untouched by death ! Indeed, the perfect stilling of the roar of the s< which follows upon the separation of the soul from its physical encasement affords it ideal conditions for the exercise of its wonderful powers. As we have seen, it is an entirely interior faculty, the soul, even though awake, abandoning externals com- pletely when exercising the imagination in its purity. To think a thing out — a common expres- sion — is slow and laborious, but to imagine it — how different is the process ! Those who have en- abled it by use to throw off its partial paralysis and who are thus able to exteriorize, or to see its creations pass before their eyes, are alone capable of appreciating what its full, unfolded potencies may contain. With eyes closed to all but its feet visions, with ears dulled to all but its magical sounds, the subjective life of the soul under the beneficent administration of the imagination may and does become the very highest bliss. Its exercise during waking life is marred by a sense of unreality caused by the presence of the taint of reason. Death removes all this. He who has suffered the amputation of a limb believes that he feels the presence of the severed toes because the apparatus for conveying impressions has been di- vided and not completely destroyed. Much more DEATH AND IMAGINATION 67 perfectly will the inner sense-centers left after the destruction of the body by death continue to repro- duce the scenes and impressions of the last life, and all under the guidance of the dominant desires of that life. Indeed, this is so faithfully done that for a time it constitutes the means by which karma * adjusts effect to cause, and bestows upon each one the kind of a subjective life which he deserves. For he who has been low and vicious will have low and vicious imaginings, which will surely end with imaginary detection and punishment. And this must con- tinue until the stock of sense-impressions of this nature is exhausted and those of a deeper stratum are uncovered, when his happy, or devachanic, im- aginings will begin. That which was to be shown, however, is the persistence of the imagination after death, and the possibility of this has been undoubtedly estab- lished. Sleeping is but a shorter death, and in its states of consciousness we have the warrant for the persistence of the imagination. Most dreams, it is true, are chaotic reproductions of the lowest sense- impressions, but they are none the less the work of the imagination. And if this faculty, at work in the unwieldy, molecular matter of the brain, can produce such perfect pictures, how much more must it be able to accomplish when its vehicle is that * Karma — that truly infinite and omniscent law which adjusts effects to causes, whether on the material or spiritual side of nature. 68 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ethereal, perfected substance which is the vesture of the soul!. For it will be admitted by all but those who deny its existence altogether, that the soul uses this material, molecular body as a vehicle to express its innate powers, and to bring it into sensuous relation with the earth. It is also plain that the matter of which the body is constituted is gross and unwieldy, and that the soul with diffi- culty enforces obedience. Man's life is a continu- ous warfare with the passions and appetites of the body, thus showing to all but the willfully blind that the soul is the transient tenant of its tenement of clay. Can not the soul, then, exhibit its divine qualities in other bodies, and exhibit them with all the greater freedom, if these bodies be composed of matter more plastic and yielding? Nor can it 1><- deprived by death of any but those faculties which depend for expression entirely upon the matter of the grossly physical body — in other words, it will be deprived of sense-impressions only. And it will only be deprived of these until it shall have built for itself a new body, when, after having assimilated all the wisdom possible out of the experiences of its past life during its subjective rest after death, it re- turns again to the physical earth to renew its old search for wisdom. CHAPTER IX EFFECT OF DEATH UPON INTUITION AND FEELINGS INTUITION is but the wisdom stored in the higher ego (incarnating ego) as the result of its experiences during its many incarnations upon earth. The memory of these experiences may be lost forever, and it is well that this is so, for it would consist very largely in a record of mis- takes and sins through many a long and weary life, but the net result, or the wisdom resulting therefrom, remains. As has been pointed out, the man who uses the multiplication table in his daily occupation does not wish to be encumbered by the memory of the hours spent in learning it origin- ally. It is one of the many evidences of the wis- dom of Those who planned this universe that its dissolution erases the records of the past, and only preserves the effects. The record of each earth-life is erased from the physical brain at each death of the body, and although preserved elsewhere in the more permanent vestures of the soul for a time, yet these, too, will likewise be overtaken with de- struction as the universes of manifestation slowly lapse back into Unmanifested Being. Thus eter- nity presents an eternal tabula rasa; an infinite 70 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY opportunity to begin anew, with the memory of past errors all expunged, while at the same time preserving the wisdom accruing therefrom. But intuition is the wisdom resulting from past experiences, and can never be destroyed. It will pass on life after life, and when all life as we can understand it is done, it will still be preserved in the unfathomable abysses of Infinite Wisdom. So with the Feelings. In the last analysis, they are consciousness itself and are just as indestruct- ible as is this. The only question which could possibly arise is, whether the feelings are preserved as an individual expression; whether egoism ac- companies them back to the Infinite, as it has cer- tainly accompanied them as a potentiality in their journey out from that Infinite. That the feeli] ego-hood, of I-am-I, has arisen in nature, and is now expressing itself in man, is conclusive proof that it came from Divinity and will re-ho divine, even if it does not constitute the very es- sence of Divinity itself, as many philosophers, notably Hegel, have believed and taught. No stream can rise higher than its source, and if we find the feeling of I-am-ness expressing the very acme of consciousness and at the apex of evolution, we may expect confidently that it will be still farther accentuated as man rises to high. Our selfish conception of it will and must disap- pear, but who can conceive of the power and glory of an Hierarchial I — a great note of common DEATH AND THE FEELINGS 71 consciousness as much beyond the petty, personal I as the united strength of all humanity is superior to that of any unit thereof ? And beyond this lies the cosmic I, and still beyond the universal I-am- myself-and-all-others, of perfected bliss ! So that we have every warrant for assuming that the feelings will always be associated with an I who feels them, and that this I will never cease to be our very selves, although we may be made happy beyond all conception in finding that within that which we feel and know to be our own ego- hood is also that of all humanity — of all that lives and breathes. For this is brotherhood : to find within our own hearts all our lost brothers; to hear in our own voice, the tone, the mass-chord of all humanity, and to feel that in the far-off eons to come we may be able to include the entire manifested universe in one solemn, cosmic harmony that breathes its. and our, bliss in one great I- AM ! CHAPTER X THE MORTAL AND THE IMMORTAL MAN IT has become clear in the course of our suulv that man falls naturally into a mortal and an immortal portion — a perishable and an im- perishable part but thinly welded together and easily separable. The materialistic belief that the whole man perishes at death, and the equally ma- terialistic teaching of one life in a physical body followed by an incomprehensible, eternal heaven or hell, are both due to the same causes. They arise in mistaking the man of tlesh for the man, and for the somewhat childish reason that he is tangible and in sensuous evidence, while the real man is not discoverable by the senses but must be sought out by the aid of reason — a thing which we proudly claim to possess, but of which only the first faint functionings are beginning to flutter and stir in our being. Reason, in the brain-mind, has only reached the stage of ignorant egotism, that wherein it sees nothing unreasonable in supposing that the sun and moon were created solely to light man's doddering footsteps by day, while the stars which inhabit the unthinkable abysses of space are only put there to afford a very imperfect substitute MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MAN 73 for the sun and moon at night ! Nothing absurd is discovered in the teaching that this is the only in- habited spot in the universe ! Yet we think we reason ! It is well that the magnificent reason of our brain-minds does not follow us beyond this very imperfect life, but must be constructed anew at each return to earth. The mortal portion of man, having been con- structed especially to relate his consciousness to this earth — to enable him to approach a state of matter far below that of the real home of the soul by means of the coarse and imperfect senses — it is small wonder, in view of his imperfect reasoning powers, that this specially constructed bundle of sense-organs should appear of such paramount importance, or that earthly concerns should loom so large upon his mental horizons. Indeed, it is right that we should bend our energies and direct our will towards any task at hand, and not permit our minds to go wool-gathering. Our present task is to understand the meaning of life here, and to profit by its lessons, for the entire universe is divine, and no portion of it unnecessary to the soul's experiences. It is, therefore, only the fatuity of unnecessary ignorance which makes man blind to this indwelling, immortal portion. All nature cries aloud that existence does not depend upon the in.itorial/orm, and demonstrates this' beyond cavil every time it reproduces the dead plant, with every detail preserved in all its perfection, from a seed or 74 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY bulb. Except in a few instances, as the lotus, for example, there is absolutely no hint of the form which lies hidden in the germ that reproduces either animal or vegetable creations. The one seed will evolve from its mysterious recesses the humble, tiny fern ; its exact counterpart, the acknowledged monarch of the forest. Two ovums, almost exactly identical in external appearance and internal his- tology, will result in the colossal elephant and the pigmy mouse. This divergence in form is solely due to the inner force coming from the soul-side of nature; the so-called external forces — the air, sun- shine, earth, water, etc, — are powerless to produce the slightest original variation. Scientists have dissected and analyzed the ma- terial universe to discover the secret source of the wonderful development of life, and have at last been compelled to admit the old, despised vital force as a factor. And, however external the sources of the ordinary physical forces may appear, this vital force comes from within — from some mysterious realm to which the senses, aided with all the instruments of precision of science, can not penetrate. This fact ought to have directed atten- tion to an inner man as the permanent base upon which the outer was constructed, but it did not. Earth and its transient concerns have been held to be of paramount importance, and the interests of the real man neglected and forgotten. Man loses by death his sense-organs which re- MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MAN 75 lated him to the earth of molecular matter. With them he loses the power to externalize his universe, and must live in a world of his own creating until he rebuilds his sense-organs upon reincarnating. The senses, also, having furnished the data upon which reason was exercised, the latter power slowly ceases its functions under the lack of new stimuli. Comparing, therefore, the permanent with the im- permanent portions of man's nature, we have : THE MORTAL MAN THE IMMORTAL MAN The Senses The Consciousness of Life The Lower Desires The Imagination The Emotions Intuition The Brain-Mind The Feelings. Reason (due to objective- Reason (due to subjective stimuli) stimuli) The Physical Body The Causal Body The Astral Body (Linga Sarira) It is at once apparent how perfect is the man who passes on from life to life — the eternal Pil- grim, for whom death does not exist — and how imperfect and unimportant the unreal man who passes away at death. The physical and astral body perish, and with them go all the lower man — his impulses, his lower desires, emotions, brain- mind, and all thought which is aroused by the senses. But the soul takes with it the conscious- ness of life, the imagination, the higher, or subjec- tively aroused reason, the intuitions, the feelings, 76 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY and all these in a body so stable, yet so ethereal, that no entity struggling in the cycle of evolution can disturb the perfect peace and safety of man's subjective existence. Nay, no entity lower than the gods can even know of his existence — much less disturb his felicity. He exists far above — or with- in — the great ocean of being; where change is not; where the ceaseless struggle for place, which af- fords the necessary training ground for entities actively climbing the ascents of life, is unknown. He does not exist; he IS. He has ascended, if but temporarily, to the Sources of Life; lie sits beside the Fountain of Being. It may seem startling to the unthinking to a- that the brain-mind perishes; yet not only is this true, but all ] would be choked and stopped, if it were not bo. That this is true is self- evident from the fact that all start with absolutely no mind at birth. Whatever' hypothesis of life we may set up, all must admit that the brain-mind is the result of experience and education, acting un- der the law of cause and effect. The higher mind comes over as a potentiality, and is only capable of exhibiting its powers when the necessary condi- tions are furnished. Genius is evidence that the higher mind, or that belonging to the reincarnating ego, is enabled to act, and its rarity is the warrant for the assertion that the great mass of humanity live only in the brain-mind. For much that is called genius is not at all this divine faculty. y SRSITY ^CALIFORH^ MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MA W ■ " ■ ■* Musical, mathematical, and other infant prodigies, are often but the effects of brain-mind training ac- quired in former lives, and which passes over as the "karmic heirloom of the lower ego — not the higher. A very fine mathematician, for example, may be very low morally, and the same is true of musicians, which shows that this is not the higher ego manifes- ting its divine functions, but a karmic sequence of lower, brain-mind training. The tendency to, and expertness in, thieving or counterfeiting, may be, and is, also transmitted as the effects of a former life of crime, yet we would hardly, in these in- stances, term the unfortunate possessor a genius. But this has been fully dealt with in the previous works of the author. It is evident that the brain-mind represents the mortal man, for it perishes at the death of the mor- tal portion. The possessor of an hundred painfully acquired languages, for example, loses all recollec- tion of them after death, or at least before reincar- nating. Much of the training and instruction that our brain-minds receive is positively hurtful, as cul- tivating shrewdness and similar qualities at the ex- pense of the finer feelings and altruistic sentiments. Witness the philanthropist, who is almost univer- sally regarded as a kind of softy, to be admired, per- haps, but not imitated by any means. So that he who is compelled, or rather permitted, by death to retire to the divine shores of subjective life, leaves little, indeed, of any value behind. He 78 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY is in an incorruptible body ; he has the conscious- ness of pure, blissful existence ; he constructs his own paradise by the divine power of his imagina- tion ; intuition and the higher reason abide as faculties for use in the next earth-life ; the divine feelings of pity, compassion, love, hope, find in this subjective state ideal conditions for their divine functions. For who in the body, even, would not relieve suffering and make others happy if he could do so without cost to himself, and without con- scious effort ? All this the soul freed by death from bodily desires and limitations can in its imagina- tion do and, therefore, however much it may b< turbed by its lower desires for a time after death, when these subside, and the real, subjective life of the true ego begins, it will be dominated only by the very highest desires of which it ever dreamed while in that body now cast aside. CHAPTER XI THE PROCESS OF DEATH DEATH itself is at present a most mysterious and appaling phenomenon. It takes place under the law of cycles, which is itself in- explicable. We can only recognize death as a law of Being, and submit to its immutable decrees. It is a phenomenon of change, and, of course, oc- curs most quickly and oftenest where change is the most rapid. And that, unfortunately for mortals, is exactly the condition which obtains in our un- stable world. Not in all the eternities during which it lias existed has it been for a single moment the same. It is a Wandering Jew — unable to find rest until it shall be at last dissipated in space. From the moment in which its star-dust began to be mag- netically attracted towards a non-magnetic center, throughout all the states of fire, gaseous, liquid, and solid, down to that in which it slowly dissipates in space — a cold, dead moon — a world is under the domain of change; of restless, resistless motion not only as a mass, but down to its tiniest molecule. Death is a change which need be neither mys- terious nor appalling. It is our benighted view of 80 THE PROCESS OF DEATH life, the belief that we are here upon earth for the first time, and that we leave it for all eternity in dying, which makes it seem dreadful and awesome. We have refused to look beyond the grave from the point of view of common sense — to say nothing of true science — and can see naught in the gulf be- yond; a gulf entirely of our own creating. The most superficial examination ought to have con- vinced us that the body was not the real man, and that its perishing was but a comparatively trivial incident in the progress of the soul. The body changes constantly from the cradle to the grave j the soul is a spectator, and its recognition of self is immutable and eternal. It lives in the ( t« r mil Present, in that NOW whose mysterious persistence affords mortals a hint of the real na- ture and essence of eternity. It is NOW with the first dawn of consciously^ in the child; it is N< >W when the vigor of manhood is attained; it is still NOW when the panorama of molecular life fades because the failing bodily senses no longer enable the soul to perceive it. Ought not this persistent now-ness to lead us to suspect the truth — that the soul belongs not to time, but to eternity? and that time is but an illusion caused by the fleeting ] pan- orama of material phenomena ? The body dies, as said, in obedience to the law of cycles — that mysterious ebbing and flowing of something which would seem to be akin to a posi- tive and negative life-electricity, and which will THE PROCESS OF DEATH 81 not permit a permanent association of the life- atoms, but drives them asunder when some un- known point of equalization of energy is reached. Normal death is as painless and far more pleasant than the sinking into sleep of a tired wanderer. That tremendous energy which, in the case of the the heart suffices to lift so many tons of foot- pounds of blood during the twenty-four hours, and in the deltoid muscle alone enables it to exert a force of some six-hundred pounds, when, after death, the same muscle will only sustain a bare fifty ; that mysterious, wonderful force is with- drawn, and the body dies — quietly, suddenly, pain- lefisly. No illness precedes it, for it is a perfectly normal process. If there be suffering in abnormal death it is because it is abnormal, but it is doubtful even in this case. The accumulation of carbonic acid gas through the failure of the respiration and circulation acts as an anaesthetic in almost all cases, and death is thus rendered painless. But during this process of physical death occurs an awesome, fearsome hour for the soul. It is brought directly before the Judgment Seat, and sees all its acts pass before its freed and quickened vision, knows wherein it has sinned, and in what it has done well. For the Judge upon the Judgment Seat is ITSELF. Freed from the clamor and con- fusion of the senses, with all its powers evoked and quickened by the tremendously important event which is taking place, the soul itself sits in judg- 82 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY merit upon its past life. No sin can be hidden, for the soul knows them all — participated in them all. There can be no hiding from that GOD which we suddenly find our real selves to be! All through life the Judge has spoken — has warned its lower, incarnated self when it walked in evil paths, but alas, too often the solemn voice was unheeded ! Materialistic philosophy (so-called) has even tried to still its counsels by declaring it to be only the outcome and product of education and environ- ment. For the voice of the Judge during life is CONSCIENCE, and although it may say different things to different men — may even issue contradict- ory commands in different cases — yet it never fails to warn a man of the wrong he contemplates, and to point out the best and highest path which he rendered it possible for him to take. That it tells a savage that he ought to kill his enemy, is not 1.. - cause it is right to kill enemies, but because the savage has so benumbed its voice that nothing bet- tor than this can be understood by him. From whatever heights one may have attained, into what- ever depths one may have fallen, its voice is always perceived, counseling the very highest which that particular soul can understand. It holds no one to account except for those conceptions of right and wrong which he is capable of understanding. It draws no hard and fast line to which all must hew. One man's right is not another's unless he is capable of realizing fully its ethical bearings. It THE PROCESS OF DEATH 83 will lead any soul out of any depths, however low, if he but live up to its highest warnings, for as his moral perceptions become less clouded by his up- ward effort, so will it set newer and ever higher conceptions before him. Because it speaks in dif- fering voices to differing men is not that the source is less divine, but that the vehicle through which it must make itself heard is less perfect. Man is the very highest expression of divinity upon earth, and the depth and grandeur of that divinity he little realizes when incarnated in, and listening to, the roar of the senses. But in the solemn hour of death these are stilled, the soul stands in the presence of its Higher Self; judges itself, and KNOWS that the judgment is just. This reviewing of the acts and thoughts of the passing life is too well attested by science to be questioned. Case after case of partial drowning, or hanging, or deadly peril to bodily existence, have been recorded wherein the whole life, down to its most minute de- tail, has passed in review under the extraordinary stimulus of the circumstances which encompassed the soul. But such cases are only faint foreshad- owings of that which takes place when death has really seized upon the body. Here, the busy brain deliberately reviews the ebbing life to its uttermost detail, and, without passing any formal sentence, simply KNOWS the effect which will await each act if the account have not been already balanced. It sees the circumstances which must surround it in 84 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY its next life, in order to satisfy that exact justice which holds the universe in its unrelaxing grasp. Being divine, and face to face with its own divinity, it demands that justice be done even though the future life which confronts it be full of the blackest horror. Nothing but personal suffering, it well knows, can atone for the personal sin. The soul stands in the presence of the Christ, which is itself ! None but the SELF may atone for its lower Belvee, and this can only be done by affording exact justice in every instance of transgression. That the soul willingly yields to the delights and temptations of sensuous existence, is shown in that sincere repentance which so often accompanies ill- ness. This fact has passed into a popular proverb which runs : The devil got sick — The devil a monk would be ; The devil got well — The devil a monk was he 1 Such an universal desire and resolution to live a better life when this physical one seems to be ap- proaching its end, is the surest proof that we are not living up to the well-understood behests of our conscience. If we quail in the presence of the voice of conscience in sickness, how will it be when the soul stands in its presence with all its deeds fully unveiled in the hour of death ? This is the bar, and the only bar, before which the soul will ever be arraigned. In this court THE PROCESS OF DEATH 85 there can be no partiality, no forgetting, no con- fusing, no forgiving. Only justice — exact justice. The soul will go forth from it not to everlasting damnation nor to eternal bliss, but to the atone- ment of another life, where it will have opportunity to right all the wrong it has done, and to stand be- fore itself at the end of its long pilgrimage, justi- fied and glorified! We can follow by the light of scientific facts the fate of the soul even after death for a time, and know what awaits it. This is due to the fact that life is continuous, and that no hard and fast lines divide life in the body from that out of, and be- yond, the body. One of the most instructive ex- periences along this line of phenomena is recorded by a physician. It is especially valuable because of the trained power of observation and ability to analyze which its experiencer possessed. He re- lates that as he lay upon his bed, severely ill, he appeared to die — and did die, so far as the obser- vation of his attendants could determine. He found himself out of his body and watching with a curious interest the weeping relatives who sur- rounded it. Suddenly he perceived that he was entirely naked, and feeling somewhat abashed he started to leave the room, but had not reached the door when, to his surprise, he found himself clothed. Passing out of the house, he noted all the objects with which long association had made him familiar. Nothing appeared new nor strange until 86 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY he had gone some little distance, when the road, perfectly normal heretofore, suddenly ascended into the sky. From this time the real and the unreal were strangely blended, growing more and more confused, until a lapse of consciousness ensued, when the physician found himself again in the body, with his relatives rejoicing at his apparent resuscitation from the dead. Now, if this entirely truthful account is carefully studied, it will be at once apparent that the imag- ination plays the leading role in the souls con- sciousness after death. The feeble remains of the physical senses enabled the bodiless soul to locate itself physically for a time, but were not sufli to prevent the subjective visions of the imagination being interjected. All of us unconsciously locate heaven above, notwithstanding the fact that above is never the same direction for any two succe moments. For this reason, the physician uncon- sciously to himself projected the road in an upwind direction — pretty good evidence, by-the-way, that his conscience was not troubled very much, else it would undoubtedly have inclined to the opposite angle! Similarly, the clothing which appeared in response to his unexpressed desire for it, shows how quickly the imagination responds to our light- est thought. Out of its depths all the environments of the naturally disembodied soul appear as surely and as instantaneously as when God said: "Let there be light; and there tvas light I" THE PROCESS OF DEATH 87 To each soul must come differing experiences after death because each one will create differing surroundings out of the resources of his own imag- ination. The persistence of the remains of the senses will be much greater in some than in others. The activity of the imagination will be displayed in a thousand ways, accordingly as the passing life has given it trend or bias. Out of its activities will grow all the heavens and all the hells which the soul ever experiences in post-mortem conditions. And when the imagination shall have become wearied, or its stock of material exhausted, then will come a new rest and sleep — only this time the Bleep will be that waking dream we call earth-life ! CHAPTER XII THE RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL THE relation oi the soul to the body and to the disembodied state can not be adequately ex- plained except the fact of its repeated re- embodiment or reincarnation be accepted. As this is an unfamiliar belief in Western lands, it has been thought best by the writer to condense the evidence which demonstrates it to be a fact in nature, and the chief factor in, or, rather, the very process of, evolution, into a brief chapter upon this subject. An examination of the philosophy and fact of reincarnation demands the establishing of the affirmative of the following propositions, viz: 1st. That re-embodiment is a universal law in every kingdom and upon every plane of nature, and includes man by virtue of his being a part of nature, distinct in but not separate from the Whole. 2nd. That reincarnation in man is a specific return of the same, distinct, individualized soul to successive bodies without less of conscious iden- tity. These two propositions — the second of which is indeed but a corollary of the first — are fully RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 89 capable of proof under the most exacting methods of scientific procedure. The latter has been declared by a German philosopher to be only scientific when all investigators can arrive at similar results by re- peating the processes of any alleged demonstration. This test Theosophy fully accepts in its proof of the fact of reincarnation ; and only demands that the steps by which it arrives at this demonstration be repeated and not set aside without proper exam- ination, as is too largely the custom of so-called scientists of the West when dealing with the spirit- ual aspect of nature. The proofs of reincarnation, then, are to be found in the law of evolution, of which it is the process, and in the further laws of the conservation of force and the indestructibility of matter. Certain axio- matic truths will also be of service if kept in mind as we proceed, the most important of which are: That the lesser can not contain the greater. That the widening of a conscious area is the ex- act equivalent of a physical or mathematical addi- tion upon lower planes. That any law in nature must of necessity be uni- versal. In illustration of this last truth of the necessary universality of law, a moment's digression may be permitted in order to show why any law whatever which obtains in any kingdom of nature must be an universal law. This is easily accomplished, for 90 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY if it be not universal then it would conflict with some superior law, and cease to exist. And two conflicting or opposing forces can not be present in the cosmos, however much the universal pairs of opposites would seem to imply this, for either they must be equal or unequal. If equal, then nature would rest throughout eternity upon an infinite dead center, each force would exactly neutralize the Other and no progression nor evolution be possible. If unequal, then in the eternities of the past the greater must have overcome the lesser, and it would have become practically and actually non-existent. So that one single instance of reincarnation or re- clothing in matter of the inner, spiritual essence establishes the universality of the process, even if it seems to elude our discovery as a potency in ac- tion upon all plains of the cosmos. Theosophy claims as a fact that the law of re-embodiment ifl an actual and potent factor in every process in the cosmos, but that the cycles required to complete its vaster operations are so immense that the small portion of their arcs which one brief life subtends is so minute that we are unable to perceive that it is a portion of a tremendous spiral, and not the straight line we have imagined. It is to such im- mense cycles that we must assign the re-embodiment or re-birth of stars and worlds ; the sufficient proof of which is in the fact that upon lower planes we have discovered the action of this foice or mode of motion which must of necessity be universal, and RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 91 so by correspondence and analogy we apply the law in these higher instances. In the demonstration of the first postulate, that reincarnation is universal throughout nature, the law of the conservation of force will be first exam- ined, after which appeal will be had to the facts of evolution. At the very outset certain self-evi- dent generalizations under these laws of evolution and force conservation must be briefly defined. These are : That evolution is continuously displacing the threshold of consciousness in man and in nature, and thus compelling the constant widening of the conscious area of every entity in nature. That this continuous addition to conscious ex- periences, and the infinite variation of conscious states, necessitates the ultimate individualization of conscious centers of force, or units of conscious- ness, moving in orbits or along lines pre-deter- mined by the coloring and limitations arising out of past conscious association. That as a result of this individualization of such conscious centers within the whole, atoms, elements, and molecules are continuously being correlated in higher forms of matter by conscious entities seek- ing higher expressions of cc sciousness under the stress of evolutionary neces&i ^'es. And, lastly, which brings us logically and legitimately to our second basic postulate : That the human soul has been thus individual- 92 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ized, without having been separated from the whole of nature, and as a consequence reincarnates in successive bodies as a distinct, individualized, self- conscious center of consciousness, or soul. Taking up the examination of the first general- ization, it is evident that in its correlation of force and conservation of energy, modern science lias, unwittingly perhaps, laid the foundations upon which the structure of universal, cyclic reincarna- tion may be safely and even scientifically reared. For what is force? Science is dumb, except to de- fine it as anything which changes the relation l>e- tween atoms, molecules, and objects. Farther than it refuses to go, although in the assertion that it is eternally conserved, it advances it to the dig- nity of an entity; for, if force had no real being, then it would be impossible for it to be conserved. It is an aspect entity, as Theosophy defines it ; or, in other words, it is one side of the manifested tri- angle behind whose veil the Absolute lies eternally concealed. Matter, force and consciousness are in- separable and co-eternal, and one can not be thought of as existing apart from the other two. Matter affords the vehicle; force (motion), the means ; and consciousness, the directing intelligence for every conceivable manifestation in the universe. Force must have a material vehicle or basis, and as it cannot be dissociated from this, if it be con- served, then its material basis is conserved, as must also be the associated intelligence which directs RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 93 its action. Until scientists can show pure force un- associated with matter and exhibiting no phase of intelligence, their proof that it is conserved carries with it the farther proof that its material base and guiding consciousness are also conserved. Science admits matter to be, like force, indestructible, yet, by the strangest inconsistency, it denies the perma- nency of the one element, intelligence, which alone renders possible the orderly sequence exhibited in the manifestations of its two admittedly indestruc- tible elements. The failure of modern science to recognize this universal reincarnation in nature arises from its faulty conception of the basic principles underly- ing the phenomenal universe. Refusing to recog- nize the absolute one-ness in origin of everything in the universe, whether force, matter or conscious- ness, Western scientists can not bring themselves to apply the laws obtaining upon the physi- cal plane to psychic and spiritual realms. They can very well see that force can not escape the grasp of the All-container, space, and recognize that matter, too, is limited by the same inexorable bounds; but consciousness, the superior and ruler of the other two, is most absurdly and illogically conceived of as capable of annihilation. It is true that this dilemma is sought to be avoided by claim- ing that consciousness is only a property of matter, manifested because of certain, they would have us believe, entirely fortuitous combinations of force 94 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY and matter. But this claim is a purely gratuitous assumption. The idealists, who look upon matter as a property or product of consciousness, have even a better warrant for their position. The claim will not stand. When science shall have presented us with matter free from conscious- ness; unable to assert a determining choice, if resolved into its chemical elements and placed in the presence of other similarly situated elements, its property plea will be entitled to consideration; until then, the counter-claim that matter is a prop- erty of consciousness is equally valid. Therefore, in this inquiry, reincarnation will be proven by facts and phenomena capable of scientific observa- tion and classification only; scientific deductions therefrom being set aside as incomplete and incapa- ble of that universal generalization and application which Theosophy demands as a sine qua non of any and all laws in the universe. For, as stated, if matter is indestructible, then the material ba- the soul is indestructible; if force is eternal in its action, this includes intellectual and spiritual or soul force, and hence the necessary preservation oi the conscious factor in all its essential integrity as an element upon which the intelligent action of both matter and force depends. Therefore, to establish the universality of rein- carnation in nature, it is sufficient for the present, to rest upon the accepted fact that force is con- served; that it but abandons one material guise to RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 95 reappear in another. Let us follow it for a time in its conservations and correlations and see if, before we proceed far, it does not prove to be something more than mere force, and thus establish as a cor- ollary the further truth that this process results in the necessary evolution of individualized centers of conscious force, or souls. At its every turn we perceive this empty abstrac- tion — this mere "matter in motion" — exercising choice as to its modes of motion. Atoms will only combine with other atoms in certain definite pro- portions. They cannot be made to exercise an in- discriminate selection and combination, such as would be their only method if force were the non- intelligent non-entity science would have us believe. So with molecular associations ; they must have se- lective choice, or the combination perishes. Man can as easily fill his lungs with nitrogen alone as with a mixture of this and oxygen, yet, in the former case, would perish almost instantly because of the impossibility of atomic interchange taking place. All such refusals of atoms to enter into combinations, when there is no other reason than non-amnity, show that there has already been such a divergence through former conscious experiences among the atoms that each seeks the line of its en- gendered affinities with an almost irresistible ten- dency. This shows the absolute truth of the asser- tion—in reality an axiom — that the laws of nature are universal, and that the addition of conscious- 96 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ness through additional experiences is just as truly an addition in magnitude as is the adding of one material molecule to another. By the latter pn the physical magnitude is increased, rendering a double amount of Bpaoe necessary, under the law that two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time; by the former, the conscious area is widened, and can never be compressed back into the old limits any more than can the oak be com- pressed again within the limits of the acorn in which it had its physical origin, and this under the law that the lesser can not contain the greater. It is plain that, under this law, consciousness which has impressed upon it the vegetable stamp, can never N -enter the mineral kingdom ; it lias widened its area beyond the limits capable of finding -ion in that kingdom. Similarly conscious centers of force which have readied the animal can not again re-enter the vegetable plane, nor can hu- man consciousness ever again function in the ani- mal kingdom. All of these facts, depend, primar- ily, upon the law that the lesser can not contain the greater, and, secondarily, upon the necessity of law upon one plane obtaining upon all the planes of the cosmos. Human consciousness added to animal consciousness is as veritable an addition as that 2+2=4. If the law be thus general in its application it is also particular, for the whole is composed of its I -arts. So that a center of conscious force by con- RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 97 tinual addition to its experience in different species of the vegetable kingdom would slowly but surely eliminate its possibilities of choice until it would be driven, by the final impossibility of finding a suitable vehicle in this kingdom, to seek an avenue for its widening intelligence in a higher one, or, in this instance, the animal kingdom. Here the same cumulative widening of consciousness would in the course of ages of successive incarnations tend to bring these conscious centers to the same condi- tion ; and, indeed, we are told in the Secret Doc- trine that some of the higher animals have almost reached the plane of definitely individualized mo- nads — in other words, the lower margin of the human plane. This inevitable widening of conscious area and consequent individualization of conscious centers, being plainly the necessary corollary of the con- servation of conscious force acting in harmony with and, indeed, guiding evolution, it will be evi- dent that as a result of this individualization the simpler elements as well as atoms and molecules are of necessity continuously built up and synthe- sized into higher forms in order to afford expres- sion in form for conscious entities too far progressed to longer use these lower substances. A conception of this truth will go far to elucidate the mysterious relation our own souls bear to our bodies. The proof of the synthesizing of lower entities by those higher rests upon the axiomatic proposition 98 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY tli at the lesser can not contain the greater. Hence, if evolution is to proceed at all, its easiest and, in- deed necessary, method is for more advanced en- tities to take lower forms of matter and, without annuling, superceding, or even disturbing the con- sciousness of entities finding in such lower forms their normal expression, to build up therefrom suit- able vehicles for their own higher need. And while so occupying forms composed of hosts, it may be, of lower entities, which they thus in no way dis- tort), the association must he helpful to the lower lives, for it .necessarily infuses into their essence a faint emanation from that of the higher synthesiz- ing entity. Because of this bestowing of their own purer and more spiritual essence — which is also an universal law upon every plane of the cosmos — it is said in the Secret Doctrine* that "Compassion is an attribute of the very Absolute itself.' ' This synthesizing of matter occupied by less progressed entities into composite bodies suited f<»r the use of those higher, constitutes, together with the fact of their repeated reincarnation in such syn- thesized forms, the complete key to, and the very process of, evolution, as stated at the outset. That it is conscious entities which thus correlate lower into higher forms, is proven by the very fact of any form in any kingdom of nature being repeated at all. For if not so, then every new production of *"The Secret Doctrine: the synthesis of Science, Relisrion, and Philosophy,'' by H. I*. Blavatsky: New York and London: 1893. RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 99 crystal, plant or animal, would be practically a new and perfectly fortuitous combination or creation of form, and all method, or necessity for method, would disappear from nature. There is no possible reason, except as the work of an intelligent, con- scious (not necessarily self-conscious) entity for the repetition of form and the preservation of Bpecies. And variation in form and ultimate ex- tinction of species only mark the gradual expan- sion of consciousness forcing the evolution of higher types. The agents of it all in the three lower kingdoms are the elementals, or nature spir- its, from those ensouled in the tiny moss upon its bark to the single, mighty one which builds and in- forms the giant oak. Each is an entity; each on the road to ulti- mate individualization and self-consciousness, and each at a point where it has left those relatively lower eternally behind it in the scale of becoming. The lesser can never contain the greater. Nor can any one cell in the oak or in the man be shown to be so much superior to the others that in it lies the synthesizing power. There is absolutely required a synthesizer. In man, this is a self-conscious cen- ter, or soul; in the plants and animals, a sub- conscious center, or elemental. In the manifested cosmos there can be no excep- tion to this universal law of the synthesis of lower by higher entities. Worlds are but the garments of their chief rectors — garments composed of myr- 100 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY iads of lower elemental hosts. Men are but units in a thinking body which we term humanity, and which, by all the laws of analogy, is synthesized in some grand, incomprehensible (to us) Hierarchial whole. That we do not' realize this consciously, is because our consciousness is upon a plane s<> far be- neath that of the synthesizing host; just as the cells of our body, although so plainly an organism to our consciousness, are unable to comprehend that they are such an organism, or to conceive of the in- telligence which can use and direct a complex whole, formed of such countless and diverse units. It may be claimed that as all organisms develop from a germ or seed, herein is to be found the reason for the exact reproduction of form and conscious function. But this is one of those half- truths; dangerous because it is half true. The seed only furnishes the material element and basis for the reincarnating elemental or soul. And hav- ing within it of necessity certain cells which have never died since the first appearance of organic life upon this planet, these cells have the impress of previous form-associations upon them, and h« when they are again revivified, the line of least re- sistance for the returning entity would be in the di- rection of, or tendency toward, the reproduction of the old form. But if this were the sole source of the reproduction of specific forms, then variation would be impossible. Exact reproduction of that form preserved in the records of the seed would be RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 101 inevitable, whereas variation is as much a law and a necessity in evolution as is its opposite. To ac- count for variation there must enter the higher conscious factor, exactly as the same factor must be postulated in the production of the very first cell or plant, which originated of necessity without the aid of any material seed. Sir William Thomp- son's hypothesis of seeds having been brought to the earth by some comet only removes the materi- alistic enigma to still more difficult grounds; it does not solve it. It were wiser and infinitely more logical for all materialists to admit, with Haeckel, Huxley, Bain, and others, the fact of spontaneous generation, and face the problems involved in this fairly. Their unwillingness to do so is easily ex- plained, for, if admitted, it will be apparent that the conscious or spiritual factor must be recognized as at the base of any and all spontaneous genera- tion and evolution of form. Blind force taking the direction of the least resistance will not stand the light of logical analysis, for it neither could nor would take this direction were it blind. The power to recognize the line of least resistance is a con- scious one, and never was nor can be exercised un- consciously or blindly. It is thus seen how completely the law of the con- servation of force — necessarily conscious, though not necessarily se(f-conscious — and the facts of evolution establish the truth of reincarnation as an universal process in nature; and that the ebbing 102 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY and flowing of force includes also the ebbing and flowing of consciousness, and explains the orderly appearance of an universe out of apparent noth- ingness. For that which appears to us as non- being is but the subjective arc of Being which equally with its objective arc is included in the complete circle and cycle of reincarnation. By the latter is also explained the appearance of any type of form-building by entities upon any plane of be- ing, whether that type be the ponderous mass of the elephant or the humble vestment of a lichen. For the spontaneous generation of the materialist is but the returning entity building for itself the form necessary for the objective arc of its exist- ence. Recognizing this, the seeming mysteries of both birth and death stand unveiled. They are but the objective and subjective arcs of the One Life, as expressed in the countless crores of (seemingly) separate existences. The truth of the first postulate being thus un- equivocally established, it only remains to examine the second, which is, that the human soul, thus in- dividualized, does reincarnate in successive bodies as a distinct, self-conscious center of conscious- ness. It has already been shown that the process of in- dividualizing centers of consciousness begins at the very dawn of differentiation ; that every experience in matter imposes a widening of conscious area and limitations as to the choice of material vehicles, RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 103 which gradually force not only a farther differen- tiation in its own kingdom but also compels the in- dividualized entity to at length seek a higher one. Therefore, it must not be supposed that in man alone there is specific reincarnation. Nature never leaps. The centers of consciousness, or elemental souls, in all the kingdoms below the human must reincarnate ; that is, each specific repetition of form in any kingdom is the reincarnation of an ele- mental center of consciousness which has received this definite stamp as the result of conscious expe- riences in its evolutionary past. Such centers do not have subjective cycles of the same nature as the human soul because they are below the plane of self-consciousness. Therefore, their subjective arcs are passed in latency — a bare potentiality of again manifesting the same form when their subjective arc is completed and environing conditions per- mit. That there is an actual re-clothing of the same entity, is proven by the repetition of the exact form, leafage and flowering of plants from roots, rhi- zomas or bulbs, for here the entity has plainly never abandoned its hold upon the material plane. So that when we speak of the reproduction of a plant from a dried, withered bulb as a growth, we are but hiding our ignorance of what has actually occurred behind technical phraseology. The plant has not been dead ; it has been living in this bulb, which gave no evidence of its presence, the subjec- tive arc of its life cycle. 104 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Similarly, in the metamorphosis of insects, a caterpillar, for instance, passes through a complete cycle of subjectivity to re-emerge as the same en- tity clothed in the same physical molecules — these having never been dispersed — but with entirely different form, functions and habits. If the inner, elemental force can bring about so complete and wonderful a change without abandoning the old material, it is sheer unreason not to recognize that, when the butterfly existence is ended, the same entity is amply able to rebuild the old caterpillar form from an egg after the close of the subjective arc between the butterfly and caterpillar stages. If, therefore, we find that throughout all the kingdoms below man there is a plain leading up to and preparation for self-conscious reincarnation; that the self-conscious subjective arcs in the human kingdom are a natural sequence and corollary of sub-conscious or latent arcs in the lower ones ; and further, that reincarnation is the process of evo- lution, we may assume this as a reasonable working hypothesis in explanation of the phenom- ena of human existence. And, logically, if we show the absolute necessity for the presence of a certain law in the cosmos in order to rationalize otherwise inexplicable phenomena, we prove the existence [of that law, although we may not fully comprehend its real nature nor mode of operation. Thus, ether has never been demonstrated other than by the necessity for such a medium in order to ex- RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 105 plain certain natural phenomena, yet no one doubts nor disputes its existence. Similarly, if, as has been pointed out, we find that every process in nature tends toward and leads up to the rebirth of indiv- idualized human souls, we have a scientific right to assume that rebirth or reincarnation is a natural and therefore universal law. And if we further find that in the human kingdom itself there are numerous phenomena which can only be explained by such a law, its existence passes into the domain of certitude and exact knowledge ; while if we still further find that the very highest and most philo- sophic conceptions of life and of the universe re- quire it ; if the grandest generalizations of modern science, the conservation of force, the indestructi- bility of matter, and the process of evolution, de- mand it, we shall be but blind followers, not lead- ers, of the blind, if we do not accept the divine truth which it reveals. A brief examination of some of these phenomena, as well as philosophic categories, which require re- incarnation in order to explain them, will consti- tute the remaining portion of this chapter. All of the higher mental, psyhic and spiritual phenomena are utterly unexplained except by re- incarnation. Among these we may note the sud- den appearance of a genius in an entirely mediocre family; a Shakespeare,, rising out of the muddy stream of a Warwickshire tenant-farming and petty-trading family. Then will appear a mathe- 106 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY matical prodigy, such as Zera Colburn among Mis- souri clodhoppers ; a musical wonder, a blind Tom, out of ignorant, slave parentage; a Napoleon, bred from a camp follower, and so on, ad infinitum. No possible theory limited by one life can explain these. But if we recognize reincarnation we at once see that each instance is but the pursuing of a lino of development by an ego who has already brought this particular line to a wonderful perfection in preceding lives. And the obverse of these instances is equally explainable by reincarnation. Mental inferiority; stupid sons of wise or illustrious par- ents, are impossible to account for under the law of physical heredity, to which, of course, false science would relegate them. True science con- fesses its inability, except to vaguely conjecture that atavism may be the agent. But atavism iteeli can not be explained except by reincarnation. Under physical law, any force must diminish ac- cording to definite ratios when disconnected with its original impulse, and atavism plainly flit the face of this law, if it be a reversion to a remote ancestor. Reincarnation shows that atavism is but a soul returning with tendencies so strongly im- pressed upon the eternal cell (transmitted from parent to offspring physically) by some remote an- cestor that this ancestor is copied rather than the nearer ones. Many of these cases of atavism, es- pecially in this selfish age of violence, may be the actual return of the same ego, in which case the RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 107 tendency to reproduce the old form and traits would be almost irresistible. And if we enter the domain of logic and philoso- phy, we are, if possible, in still greater perplexity unless we accept reincarnation. Immortality posi- tively demands it ; justice absolutely requires it. The inequalities of birth, of racial, national and social environments, represent a chaos of injustice unless explained by it. Even if we were to accept the theory of physical heredity as accounting for one child having a vicious and another a lovable disposition, one a highly intellectual, and another a stupid, animal nature, we are still unable to ac- count for the terrible injustice which sends one soul to vicious, another to virtuous parents ; one to cul- tured Aryans, another to African Bushmen, with- out the unfortunate or fortunate souls having any choice in the matter. Either we must accept the reincarnation of souls who have lived such lives as have unavoidably attracted them, under the law of cause and effect, to the black or the white, the vir- tuous or the vicious parents, or we must admit that the universe is but a chapter of accidents ; or, if designed and controlled by a god, then that god must be at heart a careless, indifferent monster. There are absolutely no two individuals in the world whose social station, character, and intellect- ual capacities have been the same from birth. This inequality, thus attending the very entrance of the soul upon this sphere of action, must be justly and 108 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY logically accounted for by any religion or philoso- phy before the latter is entitled to the slightest consideration or respect. It is in their foolish and puerile attempts to account for original sin, and the presence of evil as a most patent and potent factor in the world, that all one-birth religious and phil- osophic theories break hopelessly down. But if we recognize in the soul a pilgrim through the great Cycle of Necessity, starting pure but undeveloped, and having to develope all its powers and faculties through use alone, we have at once in our hands the thread of Ariadne ; the clue which shall guide us safely out of the labyrinths of evil in which we have become entangled during our endeavors to slay the monster, ignorance. For a perfect knowledge of earth-states requires that each man undergo <•• possible experience; subdue every variety of hu- man passion; resist every form of temptation whether of the physical, emotional or intellectual. Only by reincarnation is it possible to do this; to round out and develope patience, fortitude, pity, charity, benevolence, and a host of god-like attri- butes ; all of which have to be refined out of the crucible of actual experience and suffering. One life is all too short for the lessons of sympathy and love we have to learn, ere we develop compassion for the woes of others from the fires of our own purification, from the ashes of our sacrificed pas- sions. But reincarnation affords ample opportunity for RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 109 even infinite progression, and contemplates man as eventually becoming a god compared to his present position and powers, while before him still lie vis- tas, eternal, indescribable, incomprehensible ! Yet it is not by soaring into dreamy conjectures of the future that this philosophy finds its highest usefulness, but rather because it solves the present, every-day problems of life. It removes all injus- tice, all chance and all accident from every human environment. Acting under the universal law of cause and effect it determines inexorably every cir- cumstance that foolish philosophers and more fool- ish theologians call the accidents of birth. As has been stated, a soul is born to vicious or virtuous parents, to black or white ones, with capacities which cause it to become wise or foolish, rich or poor, through endless diversities of circumstance and seeming accident, because it has created in former lives that character which causes it to seek race, nation, and parent, under the law of cause and effect, as surely as atoms of oxygen and hydro- gen seek each other in the crucibles of nature to form water. The law is absolute ; like is attracted to like; similar causes produce similar results. Even the very diseases of men are karmic inherit- ances through reincarnation by means of diseased parents having presented the line of least resist- ance or greatest attraction. The insane, the epi- leptic, the hunchback, the consumptive, would not — could not— come to parents having these taints 110 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY in their blood had they not deserved to be bom under such conditions by acts done and tendencies originated in former lives. There is no chance; there is no chaos ; above all, there is no revengeful Deity controlling man's circumstances or destiny and "cursing him even unto the fifth generation. " Man is his own arbiter, judge, executioner. Under the law of cause and effect — to which men and gods alike must bow — he works out his own sal- vation or perdition. Every act, thought or word is a cause which modifies his nature to some ex- tent and, taken together, form that character and those affinities which determine absolutely, without the possibility of interference, his every position and power in his next life. No cruel fate nor blind chance has been the slightest factor in the produc- tion of any evil or any blessing which now makes earth a heaven or hell to him, How can any one-birth theory, from the stand- point of justice, account for those born diseased, blind, deformed, idiotic? Such theories offer only chance, or the whim of some imaginary god, in explanation of these seeming injustices. The mind revolts against such puerile absurdity. If chance can rule in one single instance, then the universe is all chance, and he who can get the better of his brother by robbery, or even murder, is amply justi- fied, for we are then but cattle driven helplessly to the slaughter. But, realizing that we have lived on this earth in the past, and shall do so in the future, RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL HI with every life controlled by the acts of former ones, even selfishness prompts us to pursue a line of con- duct which shall send us into pleasant and happy environments in future incarnations. Yet, as reincarnation teaches the truth that we are absolutely dependent upon the function of par- entage for our ability to return here when this be- comes inevitable under the law, it is at once appar- ent how intimate is the bond which unites ail souls in a common brotherhood. One can not soar away from the rest; he must use a body furnished by physical parents, and the wisest and most evolved soul will find his wings crippled, his powers limit- ed, if he be compelled to seek reincarnation through inferior physical progenitors. He is thus violently thrown back to partake in the common lot, to share in the suffering he has selfishly tried to avoid. Only by raising the whole of humanity is it possible for its egos to make real and permanent progress. Thus reincarnation, even from the physical stand- poins, re-enforces and re-declares the law of the brotherhood of man ; the law of his very highest being as well as his lowest, and in which is to be found his only hope of attainment to the elysian fields of the gods. We see, then, true philosophy, true science and true religion, all requiring reincarnation to meet their demands ; that innumerable phenomena upon every plane of nature are alone explicable by it ; that it satisfies the heart and intellect alike. Let 112 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY us, therefore, if we be men and not babes afraid of our own shadows, accept it, and, accepting it, so live that humanity will one day have progressed until incarnation in these mortal bodies upon this plane of illusion will no longer be necessary. CHAPTER XIII THE NATURE OF THE SOUL THE soul is a unit of consciousness. But what is consciousness? The universe, including man, must have a source. This source may be termed God, or the Absolute, or the Unknow- able, as one chooses. It is of necessity infinite ; and that which is finite can not comprehend the infin- ite. But the infinite can not be out of all relation to the finite, for the finite depends upon the infinite for its existence; and, therefore, the Unknowable must present to the finite certain aspects of itself which are comprehensible. These aspects are mat- ter, force and consciousness. Consciousness is that aspect of the Absolute which perceives, reasons, feels, wills, and directs. Neither matter, nor force, possess any of these discriminating powers; there- fore consciousness appears to be the superior of the three. Man's body, in common with the entire universe (for the universe is but embodied consciousness), is governed from within outward. Every thought which enters the human brain comes into it ready- made; every motion of which the human body is capable arises through some inner impulse. 114 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Inner control is universal and absolute. The fact that the universe is governed from within outward is evidenced by the appearance or design every- where. Theological assumptions and assertions have caused this argument of design to become somewhat discredited. Theology teaches that an anthropomorphic God created the universe, and governs it solely by his personal, and, therefore, mutable, will. But certain laws of nature were recognized which transcend the possibilities of an- thropomorphic divinity, and blind force, taking the direction of least resistance, displaced and en- deavored to discredit the view of design. If one takes the larger view that everything in the uni- verse is governed from within without, the argu- ment of design holds good, and proves that there is within the cosmos that which designs in advance of execution ; and this is consciousness. Material laws themselves are only the evidence of a broader, deeper designing. They show that there are beings as far in advance of ourselves as we are apparently in advance of the flower or the insect ; beings whose thought takes form in mate- rial worlds and in the forms of entities which in- habit them ; whose will is seen in the laws which govern such worlds. In short, if there were not this inner consciousness, designing, guiding, con- trolling everything, then this universe would be but chaos. Matter is incapable of self-guidance. Of itself, NATURE OF THE SOUL ' 115 it is inert and lifeless. Force, of itself, is non-intel- ligent ; for even the laws of nature which are the wills of high, divine beings, in their mere action show themselves to be mechanical. An earthquake does not choose its victims ; a hurricane does not avoid certain localities and devastate others, for these are but examples of general laws under which the entire world exists ; and in any specific case are necessarily non-intelligent. Consciousness and matter are ever associated and force is but an expression of the effect of con- sciousness acting in matter. Yet matter ever lim- its consciousness; prevents it from exhibiting all its powers. The more dense the matter, the less the consciousness which can be displayed. This is im- portant to remember. We do not know what con- sciousness is in itself. We do not know that it can even exist without a material association. Cer- tainly, there is no evidence of such existence in the manifested universe, and with unmanifested realms we have no present concern. Therefore, in its ma- terial associations we may expect to find infinite gradations of the manifestations of consciousness, for the infinite can only manifest itself finitely by an infinite number or succession of finite phe- nomena. For convenience of study, consciousness may be divided into the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. In the mineral and vegetable kingdoms there is no appearance of the Not-me, 116 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY no self-differentiation is possible. But both these states are throbbing with the consciousness of life, which, as yet, is in the universal. In the animal kingdom the Not-me is faintly dawning; in the human it appears as an I-am-myself, which separ- ates itself from the universe without. This recog- nition of egoity is a possibility in all states of con- sciousness. It does not appear in the lower king- doms because it is prevented from manifesting by the density or materiality of the vehicle; but it is there as a potentiality. But what is egohood — this mysterious power of self-recognition as I-am-I ? It roots in the Abso- lute — is lost in that "pavilion which is surrounded by darkness." Out of Absolute Unity all mani- fested differentiation of necessity proceeds. It is evi- dent that this unity is manifesting itself in an infi- nite number of units of consciousness, every unit of which is capable through the process of involution and evolution, of manifesting all potentialities con- tained in its Source. Every phenomenon of the manifested universe, all evolution in nature, dem- onstrates that atomic units of consciousness are passing through some great Cycle of Necessity, and so widening infinite potentiality into actual potency. This is the meaning of, and the reason for, the pro- cess of evolution. The soul, then, is a unit of consciousness. But unity, by its very nature, is incomprehensible. What says mathematics, the most exact of all NATURE OF THE SOUL 117 science, of the unit? Once one is — what? Two? No; once one is onel One divided by one is — what? A half of one? No; one divided by one is still one ! Is there not herein a great mys- tery ? One added to one makes two ; one subtract- ed from one leaves nothing. "We can add units of consciousness together, until out of them we have an infinite universe, but to multiply them or divide them, or, in other words, to produce them out of each other is impossible. The soul remains forever a unit, uncreate and immutable. Unity, thus seen to dwell in matter, enters also into consciousness ; for matter, force, and conscious- ness are inseparable. Unity in one demonstrates it in all, so that, mathematically, we are forced to recognize a unit of consciousness or a soul. There is no science which is not built upon unity ; which does not depend upon units for its existence. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astron- omy, all are based upon this mysterious unity, this atom which must be postulated before the demon- stration of any science whatever. Material atoms must exist that the universe may exist ; conscious atoms must exist, that differentiated consciousness, or souls, may exist. The soul, then, is a conscious unit, or a unit of consciousness. It must be a unit because it can cognize or know unity. It is not possible for the soul to conceive of a quality which it does not pos- sess. Can the stone or the flower think of itself as 118 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY I ? But man — all his thoughts, his emotions, his passions, his will, everything which constitutes him man, every faculty of his soul, depends for its ex- istence upon this recognition of I-am-myself, this unit of consciousness upon which has at length dawned the first, faint, reflection of that infinite, eternal unity in which it has it source and which it IS. It is, therefore, a self-evident truth that the soul is a unit because it perceives unity. The soul is a unit, also, because it conserves con- scious experiences. The acorn brings forth oaks ; and throughout the eternities it will produce but oaks so long as this unit of consciousness seeks and finds expression within the vegetable kingdom. In the human soul, identity is equally evident. Each soul has a multitude of conscious experiences, in- volving the production of conscious energy. The law of the conservation of energy is universal; and no soul can conserve the conscious experiences of another. Whatever conscious experiences one has can be recorded only upon his own soul ; not upon that of another, and therefore, this record Can not be made, preserved, nor conserved, unless the soul is an indestructible, eternal unit of con- ness. The soul is a unit, also, because it can perceive itself. Can the flower perceive itself? Does the rock recognize that it is a rock ? But the human soul recognizes unity, which is but itself, yet being still under the sway of the the illusion of matter / NATURE OF THE SOUL 119 separates itself from its source and, therefore, from all other units, which is the Great Illusion. This recognition of I-am-I is born with the human soul, and is just as strong in the cradle as it is at the very threshold of the grave. All through life it is the one thing which ever persists ; which is never lost. With its very first expression of conscious- ness, the child exclaims, " I-am-myself ." With its last breath it makes the same assertion. All the wilderness of change, all the phenomena of mental growth, of conscious expansion, have not altered in one iota that innate recognition of unity which pro- claims, "I-am-myself-and-none-other ! " The soul is a unit of consciousness because it re- members its past. Memory implies a stable, sure, permanent record, upon which experiences are en- graved, or the soul could not recall them. Each one remembers his past — not another's. And it would be impossible for us to remember any past if the soul were not a unit, eternal and immutable. The brain is a molecular, mechanical apparatus. Its molecules are coming and going incessantly. Seven years, we are taught, is sufficient to complete the change of the very hardest bone ; seven hours, perhaps, may completely change the entire brain substance. Certainly, it changes with great ra- pidity. The material tablet upon which an event is recorded is destroyed and renewed scores of times, yet throughout all memory persists — a thing im- possible if there were not an unchanging unit of 120 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY consciousness, upon which all conscious experi- ences are recorded, and which the phenomena of memory proves to exist and to be beyond the do- main of decay or chance. The soul is a unit because it synthesizes all the various reports of the senses. The hand feels a thing. The sense of sight reports a thing quite different. If there were not that within which takes these two reports — that conveyed by touch, and that recorded by sight — and harmonizes and synthesizes them, what would the world be but chaos and unreality? These every-day experiences, these things which are necessary to our lives hour by hour and moment by moment, prove beyond question the existence of the soul and its unity; if we only patiently observe and reason upon them. The soul is a unit of consciousness, then, and it is independent of the body. The body is destroyed almost entirely by old age, or by sickness; yet, if the person has cultivated his reasoning powers, does old age dim them ? It does not ; it only weak- ens the reasoning powers of those who have lived as vegetables. The man who has lived a life of thought takes the power of thought to the grave with him. It can not be destroyed. The body may be emaciated by disease, yet the soul will reason the more acutely because of this suppres- sion of the merely animal portion of man. There are many diseases which suspend conscious i NATURE OF THE SOUL 121 but this is because they impair its principal ve- hicle, the brain. But, setting this aside, there are numberless instances of disease which destroy the body without impairing consciousness. Old age it- self never impairs the consciousness of that soul which has compelled its brain to think. The universal belief in a soul is not evidence ; it is only testimony. Yet, when almost the entire world accepts a thing, may we not believe that the idea is innate, and innate because it is true ; that the soul recognizes its truth, even though it be har- assed and limited by matter, and asserts from its own nature the truth which it thus intuitively rec- ognizes ? It is not demanded that the soul be placed as a material thing in evidence. In one aspect it is material, but its matter can not be seen, touched or tasted. In consciousness itself must be sought the proof of consciousness. Materialists may declare, "You have never seen a soul." Let us answer, "You have never seen a body." A flux and flow of * atoms, streaming in and out by millions, never for the "thousandth of an instant the same, is more unreal than the soul. The soul is not an object of physical perception ; but of spiritual, or conscious, recognition. Logic and philosophy, on the one hand, agree with the phenomena of life, on the other, in de- claring that man is a soul, and not the mere lump of clay which chains him to the earth. It is the 122 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY body alone, with its desires and passions, which separates us from each other, not the soul within, which, when it can make itself heard, always de- clares its unity — its brotherhood — with all other souls. This feeling of brotherhood has a deep sig- nificance, for it is the mute testimony of the soul to the common origin of all souls — the recognition of a divine Unity, in which all have their source and life. So, recognizing that man is a soul, an eter- nal, imperishable center of consciousness, which life or death affects not, except to change its tem- porary vestments, each can press forward toward the goal of his own god-like destiny; each can face the gates of deatli undaunted; for life in the cv of time will bring us again and again to its portals for the unfolding of that divine nature, now so deeply buried in the coils of matter. So let us set ourselves earnestly to seek the meaning of out journ in these bodies of clay, not foolishly declar- ing the sensuous experiences of the body to be all there is of life. Nothing can come to us hut our own, whether of joy or sorrow; for the Galilean Adept stated* the whole law of life when he de- clared: "Brethren, be not deceived; God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." CHAPTER XIV CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? THIS question can only be answered after a thorough examination of the constitution of the mortal man. For, after all, the question is not so much, Can the real ego communicate ? as, Can the last personality communicate ? We want to hear from our dead as they were when we knew them. Anything which is new or strange is something to which we strenuously ob- ject. "What is the use," we ask, "of communica- ting unless rt is with the personality we knew and loved ?" So the whole question, from its spiritual- istic aspect resolves itself into an eager search for tests that the communication is genuine, and really from the personality from whom it claims to eman- ate. How satisfactory this has proven, is shown by the fact that the life-long, veteran spiritualist is just as eager for new and more satisfactory tests to-day as he was a half-century since, when he be- gan investigating. This condition could not ob- tain if the tests were really as satisfactory as the advocates of this philosophy would have us be- lieve. We must first of all realize that the soul is a center of consciousness — a unity representing that 124 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY great Unity of which the cosmos is an adumbra- tion. It eludes analysis — is as incapable of com- prehension as the Absolute itself. Like the latter, its nature can only be conjectured from the phe- nomena which it causes, and which betray its in- dwelling. Thus it is a unit because it perceives and comprehends unity and postulates it of things outside itself — an impossibility did it not possess unity as an attribute of itself, as has been well shown by Professor Ladd and others.* It has also the elements of pity, compassion, love, unselfish- ness, with many other divine qualities, because it feels these things. The opposites of these, as hatred, revenge, selfishness, etc., do not inhere in its true essence because it constantly rejects them — tries eternally to purge these things from its conscious- ness. They can, therefore, be but perversions, finite and temporary, of truly divine qualities. No one desires to hate unless under the sway of selfishness and ignorance — and ignorance is the source of all selfishness. This divine, incomprehensible center and unit of consciousness manifests itself upon the finite Bide of existence by means of so-called material ve- hicles, although these vehicles are themselves the seat of the consciousness of entities at different stages, and traversing differing arcs, of the infinite- ly varied cycles of evolution. Coming from the Absolute, as it must, and manifesting upon this * Elements of Psychological Physiology. CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 125 outer, material rim of the cosmos, as it undoubted- ly does, it follows as a logical and partially dem- onstrable proposition, that the soul has an almost infinitely compound vehicle, which ranges from the coarse molecules of which our bodies are composed to matter which not only eludes analysis, but baffles comprehension in its fineness, tenuity, and above all, its potentialities of conscious manifesta- tion, or of permitting the evolution of the soul through undreamed-of fields of conscious experi- ences. This matter also proceeds from unity, and, because of this, there are no hard and fast lines dividing this compound vehicle into so many lay- ers, or skins, like those of an onion, for example. A knowledge of this fact must follow us through all our investigations, and will enable us to extricate ourselves from many an otherwise insuperable dif- ficulty. In it is to be found the only solution to the question under consideration. For, while not separating like the skins of an onion, there are certain lines of cleavage — certain weak or critical states of matter, which, because partaking of the nature of the states both above and below, are not so strong as either of these, and therefore afford normal lines of separation. It is these lines of cleavage which, from their material aspect, mark the divisions known in Theosophical philosophy as the Seven Principles. But as each state or principle passes by insensible grada- tions into the state or principle above or below, the 126 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY separation, at first, is never complete, either me- chanically or consciously. Time — that universal factor in all the phenomena of finite manifestation — is required to complete the separation. Thus, the soul which dies out of its physical body has still enough remnants of molecular matter to enable it to dimly sense the things of earth, though not enough to enable the man of earth to sense its presence except under very exceptional conditions. This power is quite faint in normal deaths — but who dies normally? Not one in a million, perhaps. We are so ignorant of the laws of the plane upon which we are struggling to maintain our existence thai practically none conform to them exactly (an absolute necessity if our stay here is to prove nor- mal), and so has arisen that abnormal state of con- sciousness known among Theosophists as kaina- loka, and among Catholics, though wholly misun- derstood, as purgatory. This is not to be wondered at. With religious concepts which would almost be dignified if cl; as superstitions; with ideals based wholly upon erroneous conceptions of life; with our whole na- ture tending earthward and longing for the things of earth ; with our mutilated lives cut short while our desires are still unsatisfied, it is small wonder, indeed, that the soul is unable to rest after death. So it has widened a normally narrow critical con- dition into a deep and yawning gulf, out of which it can not be prayed, and of whose unrealities it CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 127 must become utterly weary before it can cross to the safe shores of temporary oblivion — of sleep and dream. From this purgatory the PERSONALITY can under exceptional conditions, communicate. That is to say, the person as we knew him, the man of earth, through the creative power of his imagina- tion, builds for himself a faint, and ordinarily in- visible, replica of his physical body from matter of a molecular nature which still clings to his disem- bodied soul, by means of which he maintains a faint and exceedingly temporary hold upon ma- terial things. Such a soul coming in contact with a medium or person with a diseased and, therefore, abnormally sensitive astral body, can undoubtedly make its identity known. The communication is fleeting and unsatisfactory to all concerned, both to the disembodied entities and to those in the flesh ; but it can be accomplished. Under exceed- ingly abnormal conditions the personality can even materialize and become visible to the physi- cal eyes of any one. These abnormal conditions are largely the coming together of personalities from both sides of the grave, each imbued with an intense desire to manifest, one or more of them being a medium, or person with an abnormally developed and sensitive astral body, and an ac- quired tendency for it to " ooze out." Now let the light be so dim as not to disintegrate the form, and the " spook " may so clothe itself with the 128 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY medium's astral shape as to become plainly visible. But it is rarely, if ever, that those who claim to be dead relatives, etc., really are such. The audiences are usually so self-hypnotized, so self-deluded by their intense desire for abnormal phenomena, that the same spook will often impersonate a host of the "dear departed." Or, the thought of some strong will present may actually mold the astral matter. unconsciously to himself, into the resemblance stamped by affection upon his memory. Besides, the spooks who can return in this way are the very lowest and most material of all. Lost souls, or those from whom the reincarnating ego has depart- ed, and whose very existence depends upon their being able to prey like vampires upon the foolish living, are often to be found among them. Mate- rialization is wholly abnormal and uncanny, and so many influences are at work in its production that its modus operandum is hard to unravel. As a proof that there is some sort of existence beyond the grave, although this be extremely undesirable, it is of some doubtful value ; as a means, or proof of, communication with the dead, it is utterly val- ueless. Probably nine hundred and ninety-nine of « vi ry thousand alleged materializations are fraudu- lent and impudent impositions upon the credulity of those present, and from the few spooks who do maintain an uncertain existence for a few moments upon this, to them, abnormal plane, nothing of value ever did come, or, from the very nature of the CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 129 circumstances, ever can come. Such phenomena may confound the gross materialist, but here use- fulness ends, and it is an exceedingly doubtful question if the whole game is worth the candle. The communication by the dead through the senses must always be attended with great diffi- culty, owing to the exceedingly imperfect sense or- gans which remain for a brief period after the death of the body. Yet it is just this sensuous communication which the sensuous man demands. He must see and hear and feel the ghost — must thrust his hand into the wounded side, before he will believe. With his own senses dulled by the grossness of his desires, and with the faintest re- plica of sense-organs remaining in the case of the dead, it is small wonder that the persistent search after tests is so futile And this remaining re- plica is the more marked as the soul is more gross, whence it is easy to see that the most bestial men when living are exactly those who can communi- cate the most easily when dead. This is not an idle assertion, but one capable of scientific demonstration. Matter is not the dead thing which our materialists would have us be- lieve. It is always associated with consciousness of some degree, and this associated conscious- ness really determines the plane to which it be- longs. Thus in the case of a normal line of divis- ion between two states of matter, already referred to, it is plain that the thought of the individual 130 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY will largely determine the exact line of cleavage. Physical matter passes by imperceptible degrees into the finer matter of the next higher plane. Coarse desires and low thoughts will so taint the consciousness of the cells along this critical line that they will divide much lower down than is the case in one whose thoughts and desires were high, and thus a stratum of tainted matter, which ought to have remained with the body and to have per- ished with it, remains as a basis for the astral senses of the sensuous entity. Such vicious and sin-tainted souls will naturally cling to the only consciousness which appeals to them. They will seek the things of earth with a passionate longing. A lie more or less counts for nothing with them, if it enables them to partake vicariously, even for a few minutes, of the lost pleasures of earth. The fleshpots of Egypt are sweet to their palates, and personification of the dead relative of a credulous dupe wonderfully easy. It will thus be -seen that sensuous messages, or those which come through the avenues of the senses, are as unreliable and, therefore, as useless as are materializations. Occasionally, and under exceptional circumstances (a pure, unselfish and spiritually minded medium is absolutely essential), a genuine message may drift through while the de- parted soul is yet in the borderland and held to earth by the ties of a strong personal affection. But for all except the vicious and depraved there is CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 131 ample reason for believing that this borderland is swiftly crossed, and that the soul begins to live in its imagination within a few minutes, even, of death. Note the case of the physician, referred to heretofore. But there is a means of communicating with the dead, as well as with the living, ever at hand. This is through the higher faculties of the soul, and these are equally active in life or death. Con- sciousness is vibration, and the consciousness of love crosses all gulfs. The soul, embodied or dis- embodied, knows no higher vibration than that aroused and created by the feeling of pure love. There is nothing molecular in it — it roots in the very Absolute itself. It may be speechless — for who can find words to express even sense-tainted compassion and pity? — but it is able to reach the consciousness of the soul on both sides of the grave. Else who could endure the sorrow of death's awful separations? Entire annihilation of the soul, total oblivion, forever and ever, would be far preferable to the chasm between us and our be- loved were this as real as our deluded senses would have us believe. The comforting consciousness, the evidence of the real presence of disembodied souls through their uninterrupted love and sympathy, enable us all to dry our tears, while we won- der, perhaps, why our grief will not stay. For it is only selfish and sensuous souls who sink into the depth of their very lowest sense-consciousness, and 132 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY refuse to listen to the tender assurances of the higher and true Self. Such grieve because they are selfish, and the luxury of their grief affords them for the present the very highest pleasure, however much they would affect to be shocked if they were told the truth. In fact, all the emotions of the lower self — anger, hatred, pouting, or sulking, etc., are always indulged in because the lower and, for the time, dominant self finds in them its present highest satisfaction — is actually taking pleasure in them ! Not only these high and holy feelings, which lie at the very base of our being, but high, pure, and unselfish thoughts, also cross the Bridge of Sighs which seems to divide the two worlds of life and death. The inspirations of the poet, the art- ist, the musician — who can tell their exact source? Similarly, messages of hope, of encouragement in days of difficulty, may come from either side of the grave. They are the truest communications, for they assure us that we are not alone nor forgotten by gods or men in this awful, lonely sense-school, in which we are now striving to learn the meaning of life. The dramatizing power of the untram- meled imagination of the disembodied soul may even construct a guard of protecting entities around the beloved one who still remains in the darkness of the flesh. The cases of premonitions, of warn- ings of danger, are much too numerous to be all due to blind chance. They show a protecting love CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 133 which may well come from those whom we have dearly loved, but who have passed to the subjective side of the cycle of life. But here we enter a land of shadows and mystery which it is not our present purpose to explore. But, let it be repeated and emphasized, the com- munications from the "summerland" of Spiritual- ism are from the personalities of the dead, and are strong and decided in exact proportion to the earthly tendencies of those personalities. The true soul, the real being whom we loved through, per- haps, a long life of changing form, never communi- cates except from its own higher plane, and in the manner indicated. It is the astral corpse, the un- canny remains of the lower nature, that haunts mediums, and seeks to renew and re-experience the old sensuous delights. Such communications are as valueless and unreal as would be the utterances of a physical corpse galvanized into a semblance of life by electrical or other means. These communications usher their participants into the company of those with whom they would scorn to associate if they were embodied, but whose foul embraces are now considered holy because of the apparent mystery which accompanies their manifestation. Lost souls, murderers, suicides, In- dians, and the undeveloped and vicious generally, are the chosen friends of reverential test-seekers. Like causes produce like effects, and spiritualistic phenomena would not be surrounded by that 134 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY aura of deceit and trickery, did they proceed from the souls of our pure and virtuous dead. Besides, all that any spook can accomplish in the way of communications alleged to come from beyond the grave, and supposed to be verified by exhibiting a knowledge of occurrences known only to the questioner, may be, and have often been, du- plicated by thought transference, without any at- attempt to interject the wholly unnecessary and clumsy artifice of a dead personality. When the wondrous powers of the human soul are developed and recognized, spooks as aid-de-camps will no longer be tolerated. That large class of phenom- ena which cluster around the borderland between life in the body and life beyond the grave, will then be understood, and the vagaries of modern Spiritualism will cease to be a reproach to the in- telligence of the West. Some day we will have progressed so far that we will recognize all souls as brothers, and will to demand that our own dead shall return to com- fort us. But then the chasm of seeming death will have been wholly bridged, for we will have learned our lesson — that brotherhood is the basis of being. CHAPTER XV THE HOME OF THE SOUL A STUDY of the nature of the soul, and the relation it bears to the body, even as brief and fragmentary as has been possible in this brochure, makes it abundantly clear that this molecular earth is not its permanent home. Upon what blissful realms of cosmos it has its abiding place, we can only conjecture. Confused by the roar of the senses, with the memory of its past deadened, it wanders in this phenomenal universe of coarse, uncongenial matter, a pale ghost of its true self; believing itself too often, to be but the animal body with which it is transiently asso- ciated. There is no suffering without adequate recom- pense — even this crude earth is governed by the law of cause and effect — and so the reward of the faithful soul for its toils while in the flesh must be as bright and hopeful as its condition now is dark and doubtful. The soul has no passions, no appetites, no hatreds, no fears, no doubts, no despairings. All these belong to, or are born from, the purely physi- cal man. Let the soul be freed from its body, and 136 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY these fall away from it as the slime from the lotus that has thrust its petals above the stagnant pool. The faculties of the soul, as we have seen, are pity, compassion, love, unselfishness, the delights of pure wisdom, the contemplation of the beautiful and true, the intelligent seeking after God I Creative geometry! (What unexplored domains await our god-like activities in this department of nature alone !) "God geometrizes," declares Plato, and in this blissful creative brooding the soul must share — for is it not of the very essence of God ? The home of the soul is — can be — no place, as we understand locality. It is a state of conscious- ness, rather, and one which lies not within the pos- sibilities of molecular matter. The vibrations of the latter are too coarse; its agglomerations too crude and harsh. Error abides here; there can be no error or falsehood in the regions the soul perma- nently inhabits. Only truth can there abide; illu- sion is impossible. Sorrow can not enter there; woe is forgotten ; struggles and temptations are re- membered only as evil dreams, from which we have happily awakened ! For the home of the soul is heaven, paradise, nirvana ! What matters the name where all names fail utterly; or why attempt to describe that which passes description ? One thing unknown to mortals must be there — rest; and freedom from that change which here mars all our fleeting pleasures. To-day our be- THE HOME OF THE SOUL 137 loved clasp our hands and walk by our side ; to- morrow they depart — forever, so far as our be- numbed senses can perceive. There can be — there must be — no to-day and to-morrow there ! It must be a Now which contains not even a dream or thought of ceasing ! For what is time but the crudest of all illusions ? The soul knows it not, even while in the body. Was there ever a time when it was not now to every soul? Ought not this wonderful fact to arouse in us a keener percep- tion of the nature of Being, of the impossibility of death, of that unalterable calm which abides by eternal existence ? Forms perish and pass, but the soul, the spiritual essence, endures forever and forever after ! From its material aspect the soul is undoubtedly an atom of thought-matter ; from its conscious as- pect, it is a unit of consciousness — a reflection through and by means of a material basis of that Infinite Unity which of necessity constitutes the subjective side of Being. It is, therefore, doubly assured of immortality; death of its body disrobes it of form, but touches not that innermost center which is life itself. Why this deathless, eternal center and unit of conscious- ness should be engaged in this weary journey through the Cycle of Necessity, the labyrinth of infinite evolution, it were idle to question. But being caught in the coils of matter, and recogniz- ing itself as a feeling, loving, suffering, experiencing 138 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY center of consciousness, it is its right and its duty to seek its own source, examine its own faculties, test its evolved potencies, postulate its divine po- tentialities. Like an eagle, it must try its wings in the lower air first, that it may gain the power to cleave the pure ether. Now it is weighted by the fetters of matter that it may acquire the energies which are absolute prerequisites ere it mounts to higher, purer realms. The Self of spirit may be freed by the slow and laborious process of evolution ; but its recognition, the knowledge of its divine presence and nature, quickens the process a thousand fold, So, let each seek within in his own heart for "that light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." for that divine Ishwara which "dwelleth in the heart of every creature." The soul is an uncrowned king, dwelling pa- tiently within until its divine right to reign shall have been recognized. It will not accept a divided loyalty ; it must reign alone, or it will not ascend the throne. It ever comforts, counsels, warns, checks, by its whispered admonitions ; and, indeed, all that the lower man has become is due to its compassionate care, its silent influence. What, then, must lie in store for the true man when the soul shall ascend its throne, an acknowledged sov- ereign and lord ? It is not the destiny of the soul to remain an exile in this land of death; a derelict drifting on THE HOME OF THE SOUL 139 the sea of material life. It must some day — when the earth shall melt with fervent heat, and the heavens pass away — return to its home. This is in the strong, loving Thought of the Oversoul ; in the safe, changeless depths of Absolute Bliss. A wayfarer on the path of life; a weary pilgrim journeying to the land of the gods, let us all hope and trust that the parable of the Prodigal Son was the true vision of a Christ who had passed over much of the way we have yet to traverse. We have all erred ; we have all suffered ; we have all sinned, but we can each one of us atone. That tender com- passion for the overborne and fallen which arises in our own hearts surpasses not the pity and love of its infinite Source — it were blasphemy to enter- tain the morbid thought. So, let us hope on, struggle on ; lifting our eyes above the darkness of matter which now encompasses us, and some bliss- ful day we shall see afar off our Father's House, shall catch a glimpse of the Place of Peace, the City Beautiful, the HOME OF THE SOUL ! APPENDIX I IN DEEPER DREAMLAND RIGHTLY studied, there are few subjects more in- structive than dreams. The light they throw upon the mystery of life comes from many, and often most unexpected, sources. "Trifles light as air," though they be, there are yet causes lying behind them of which the dream gives as little indication as do the illusory phantoms of waking life to its realities. All materialistic hypotheses of life break down hope- lessly when applied to the phenomena of dream. The state is itself a profound mystery. One-third of every hu- man life is passed in a condition only comparable to that of profound swoon. Mind has entirely departed ; man is but a helpless clod of earth at the mercy of the weak- est of that kingdom of which he is the lord when awake. This swooning abyss, this interregnum of apparent an- nihilation, indicates very clearly that life is much more complex than would seem to be the case when its waking states alone are studied, for the fact that the soul returns from this state, and tranquilly connects itself with its past life, shows that there has been no real break in its con- tinuity ; but that the being which feels and wills as I-am- myself in the waking condition has been at least existing, if not active, in some other state, with which waking life 142 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY is not at present consciously correlated. Yet, if there has been no break in the real, there has been in the normal, waking consciousness, and an apparently abnormal state either substituted or superimposed. The ordinary dream has long been recognized as not only failing in the reasoning faculty but as occupying a distinctly lower moral plane than the waking conscious- ness. Cicero was not the first nor the last to discover this fact ; it is of universal experience. It points to the almost irresistible conclusion that man is either a dual being, with a Dr. Jekyll waking morality, while in sleep he is a Mr. Hyde, or that his true consciousness is absent during the latter state. The second hypothesis will appeal to most thinkers, for the normal consciousness is certainly absent in dream, and the normal is, or ought to be, one with the true. But if reason and conscience are gone what is the na- ture of the decidedly lower consciousness which dreams these dreams without recognising their Lack of reason, or moral and ethical failure? For the absence in dream of both reason and conscience is a strong link connecting these faculties, and locates them as attributes of a soul Which would seem to be limited in its activities to the wak- ing state. A very important fact bearing directly upon the question of the source of these reasonless and con- scienceless dreams, is that animals — notably dogs — un- questionably dream. Who has not seen the hunting dog re-enact the scenes of the chase, until he awakens himself in the act of springing upon his too vividly-imagined foe ? And who has not recognized the shamefacedness with which he mutely apologizes to his human audience for having yielded to such unreal folly? No one will claim that the animal possesses a reasoning soul, however much IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 143 we may be inclined to believe the germ of this to be pres- ent. Analogy would certainly indicate that man in the dreaming state is but an animal ; and this brings us direct- ly to the point from which we must study dreams, if we would study them intelligently. For thus early are we brought face to face with the unavoidable deduction that man must be a soul occupying, or incarnated in, an animal body, from which, for reasons which are no doubt purely physical, and governed by alternating cycles of fatigue and rest, or waste and repair, he retires during its sleeping periods, leaving the body but a superior kind of sleeping animal which re-enacts, but confuses and distorts, the events of its waking life. The technique of this retiring of the soul from the body need not here concern us. The separation is evidently only partial, and involves the mere receding of the soul to those inner or ethereal states of matter upon which the outer or molecular body must rest — unless we take the onphiloeophica] position that there is nothing behind physical matter, which would then become a kind of material atlas, supporting the world of sentient existence with no foundation for its own feet. Assuming, then, for the time, that this relation of soul to body is true, let us abandon the field of these plainly animal dreams, and seek in deeper dreamland for further light upon the mys- tery of conscious existence. Accepting, for the present, the provisionary hypothesis that man is a soul occupying an animal body, the study of these deeper dreaming states becomes merely the tracing of the direct or indirect action or influence of the soul upon its brain and body, even though the latter be asleep. This hypothesis also recognizes the necessity, philosophi- cally, of the continuous existence of the soul, whether its 144 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY physical body be sleeping or waking. It further recognizes the fact that the evolution, or widening of the conscious area of the soul's experiences, may go on upon more than one plane, and under more than one mode, at the same time. Thus there may be a parallel evolution to the physical proceeding upon an inner plane, or state of mat- ter, simultaneously with this, and which utilizes the ap- parently wasted period spent in sleep. Something of this kind is actually taught by Eastern philosophies, for these maintain that evolution takes a much wider sweep than is contemplated by Western theories. Besides material evo- lutiim, or that of molecular matter, the former predicate! a similar process resulting in the acquiring of self-con- sciousness under other and inner material conditions. The soul In its evolutionary progress, they teach, has acquired self-consciousness under molecularly-material conditions; it li in the process of acquiring this in atomic-material states. If the next inner, but still material, plane be termed astral, for want of a better word, then the soul must there perfect organs capable of projecting exterior vibrations interiorly perceived into an exteriorized world, in a manner analogous to its method of sensuous percep- tion and subsequent exteriorization of nature in this state of existence. It would appear that it is already beginning to do this, and that these deeper dreams are the tirst evi- dences of the fact. Who has not in dreams become conscious that he was dreaming? Yet, here enters a factor entirely new, which quite removes this class from the ordinary, or sensuous dream. The influence of the soul is beginning to be felt; evolution is proceeding in this inner matter ; and an inner, or astral, set of organs are feebly commencing to function, in a manner similar to the uncertain steps of a child IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 145 learning to walk. And this power to recognize that one is dreaming is callable of quick and immense expansion. So very little training is required that one is almost forced to the conclusion that the next step in astral evolution is very much closer at hand than the ordinary individual suspects. Whether or not this be so, recognition of the dreaming state by dreamers is comparatively common. Fully developed, it constitutes a class which may, for descriptive purposes, be termed waking dreams. As far as the personal experience of the writer goes, these waking dreams nearly always supervene upon the ordinary kind. That is, one will be dreaming quite a com- monplace and, it may chance, senseless dream, when there will take place a kind of inner awakening. The realization that one is dreaming will come, simultaneously with which confused or commonplace occurrences will as- sume a vividness and reality placing them far above ordin- ary dream events, while the scenery or other environ- ments of the dreamer will become flooded with light, as a cloudy landscape might if the sun were to pour its full glory upon it. The cessation of this waking dream is a sensation of yielding to an overpowering inclination to sleep, to which, struggle as the delighted dreamer may, he must yield — to find himself not asleep, as the sensation would indicate, but awake to ordinary humdrum exist- ence. Or, the waking dream may change back into the ordinary senseless type without physical awakening. The writer has had numerous experiences of this na- ture. Some of these, if not instructive, are at least curious enough to warrant description. Before doing so, however, it must be premised that he accepts the hypothe- sis that the class of dreams under present consideration are subjective; are very largely, if not wholly, the ere- 146 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ations of the dreaming imagination. Believing thus, it chanced that in a waking dream a young man was pn upon whom he was performing a trifling surgical oper- ation. In the midst of this, and while bandaging an in- jured but apparently very real arm, he remarked to the young man: "Look here, do you know that I created you?" Upon another occasion, the writer attempted to cross a small stream by means of the prostrate trunk of a tree, which unfortunately reached but part way over. Instead of turning back when this was noticed, he, recogni/in- that he was master of the situation, simply willed that the log should touch the farther bank, which it forthwith did, and the stream was passed. It will be admitted that whether the subjective theory of dream be true or not, it is a most comfortable one to hold when dreaming! Certain of these waking dreams would indicate that there is at times a partial and, perhaps, imperfect ex- teriorization accomplished by the dreaming ego, in which purely subjective creations are intermingled with real ob- jects, and even persons normally present, such persons being either themselves dreaming or otherwise. Thus upon one occasion, finding himself in this state, the writer resolved to go to New York, and, further, to find a certain friend there. Never having visited that city, how- ever, he had not the slightest clue of his friend's resi- dence. Success apparently attended both efforts, for he found himself in New York, and in a residence the de- scription of which, as afterwards verified, corresponded accurately with that of the friend he was seeking. The friend came forward to greet him, clad in a very peculiar, shaggy and warm overcoat. (In San Francisco where the dreamer was it was warm, which makes this circumstance IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 147 more remarkable). Now a very odd thing was that the friend had no such overcoat, but confessed to having re- peatedly seen in a clothier's window, and to have wished to possess, the exact counterpart of the one which he had apparently appropriated in the dream ! Such dreams as that just related leave it quite an open question in the mind of the writer whether or not real entities may be seen in this class of dreams. Do we not all live a double life — a waking and a dreaming, which as has been said, are not correlated ? Besides. this instance, the writer once awakened to find himself in the very large park adjoining his own city — San Francisco. Here he met two young ladies, one of whom he accosted and asked her to give him her place of residence so that he might be able to verify it in the morning ; he fully recognizing the fact that he was dreaming. This in a most naturally modest manner she hesitated to do, but upon being urged, and the reason for the request made plain to her, she yielded so far as to admit that her name was Mott, and that she was visiting friends living upon Ellis street. The writer begged earnestly for the exact number, but while she hesitated the familiar and overpowering sensation of sleepiness came upon him, and he awakened before ob- taining the coveted information. From the manner of the young lady, he is certain that she at least had no idea that the occurrence was a dream, until she awakened and found it so — providing always that it all was anything more than his own dreaming imagination. Certain of these dreams would seem to be quite under the sway of both conscience and reason, showing that the true soul was cognizant of, if not actually concerned in, them. Thus in one the writer was approached and solicit- ed to accompany as pretty and bright a bevy of young 148 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY houris as heart could wish for; but deliberately turned away from them. Upon another occasion this temptation was repeated, except that there was but one female, and the look of sarcastic, tempting derision upon her fascin- atingly beautiful features will not soon be forgotten. Also in still another, in which the dreamer was riding in the midst of a most bright and beautiful landscape, his horse chanced to stumble. In what would have been a very normal waking pet, the writer swore at him, when the landscape instantly changed from its previous golden brightness in a most remarkable manner, the gloom ap- pearing to close in from all sides until visible objects had disappeared except for a very few feet in the Immediate vicinity. This seemed to be a purely mechanical effect of the disturbance of the ether by vibrations set up by the oath, much as the transparency of a pool is destroyed when a stone is thrown in it; and, if a real occurrence, il- lustrates how a Beamingly trifling fit of anger o* other passion destroys the tranquility of the soul's physical mirror, the brain, and annuls all possibility of the per- ception of higher things. Once the dreaming consciousness accustoms itself to this inner awakening, it is curious to observe how accur- ately it will carry over any information bearing upon this state which it learns in waking life. Thus in the case of being annoyed by certain elementals, the writer had been told that a violent blow from an imaginary sword would effectively dispose of them. And it chanced, it may be because of this information, that in another waking dream he was attacked by a grotesque figure, very much resem- bling a Chinaman, which was armed with a formidable sword. Remembering his instruction, he advanced boldly and struck it a swinging blow with another sword, which IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 149 even in the dream was entirely imaginary. The imp curled up in death, with a curious expression of having been vanquished by superior knowledge, for which it bore not the slightest malice. Yet the dreamer promptly se- cured the sword of his vanquished foe, with the remark to himself that imaginary swords were well enough in their way, but if he had to do any more fighting he pre- ferred a real one ! Often in these deeper dreams knowledge superior to that of the dreamer seems to be possessed by his drama- tized creations, just as in the case of ordinary dreams. Thus the writer had puzzled for a long time over a knotty metaphysical problem, when in a waking dream he chanced to meet a supposed Hindu yogi. The question being referred to him, he promptly decided directly oppo- site to the view held by the writer when awake, and which decision, upon further study and investigation, proved to be correct, although it was months before the writer was able to solve by his reason the problem which his own dreaming creation had decided instantly. Such instances, as before remarked, raise the question whether or not real entities may be encountered in these dreaming conditions. If this is not so, they point conclusively to the fact that the soul, even when partially disembodied in dreams, possesses powers far transcending its normal waking capacities. They also seem to prove the theory, maintained in Eastern metaphysics, that the soul is a divine being whose proper habitation is upon planes of pure thought, and that by incarnating in these molecular- ly-constructed bodies it loses almost wholly its divine reasoning powers, and is thus swayed by the passions of a body, with which this very loss causes it to ignorantly identify itself. 150 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY In fact, dreams show by their gradings into classes in which the conscience and reason slowly emerge from an entirely reasonless and conscienceless condition, that the relation of the soul to the body is one very far from being fixed by any hard and fast line. The point of union is unquestionably the line of unstable equilibrium, pointed out by Herbert Spencer, along which all evolutionary progress must take place. Upon this subjective and mys- terious battlefield the real contest of eternity is waged, and whatever dominion over matter mind possesses has been won in a silent conflict maintained throughout ages whose duration .the mind itself in its incarnate state fairly reels if it attempts to grasp. And this point is eternally varying, in both dreaming and waking states. Eastern wisdom avers that spirit, or consciousness, and matter are but aspects of an Absolute Unity, with which it makes no attempt to deal for the very good reason that finite minds can not comprehend infinite problems. But, granting these two aspects, it holds that matter passes by an uninterrupted gradation to states which to ether are as the latter is to granite. And all of these inner material conditions are present in man as well as in every object in nature, for each object of whatever kind rests upon some material cause from its material aspect, and upon a con- scious cause, from this aspect; these two final causes blending in the Absolute itself. It thus rejects entirely the theory that there are, or can be, disconnected objects in the universe which exist aimlessly in space, and which have no root in, or hold upon, the divine. At any rate, the corollary that the mind uses differing material vehicles in its varying relations with the body, is borne out very strongly by the phenomena of dream as will as those of waking life. In the ordinary senseless IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 151 dream the thinking soul has abandoned nearly all relation to molecular matter, and man is a dreaming animal. As the dreams become more reasonable the soul is approach- ing more and more to its normal relations with the body. We at once can see how under passion and desire it would be driven from one material vehicle to another, until at last it is compelled by the very violence of the passion to loose all control over its animal associate, which then does those passionate and unreasoning deeds at which in its normal condition the soul sickens. The dream in which the landscape closed in and was blotted out by an angry word well illustrates this. And one can perceive that once consciousness in dream is attained how much superior must its sleeping tranquility and hushed passions be to the proper functioning of the soul than the tornado of waking life. Among these deeper dreams must be classed those which distinctly foretell events; especially dreams of premonition or warning. Thousands might be instanced ; let a single one suffice for an example. A father living in Oakland, a suburb of San Francisco, dreamed that his son, a small lad, was drowned. So vivid was the impres- sion created that he refused to go to work the next morn- ing until the boy had given his word not to go upon the water that day. Later on the lad succeeded in convincing his mother that his father's fears were foolish, went out boating and was drowned. The father in his dream had seen the lifeless body dragged into a boat — doubtless a merely dream-dramatized detail, as the body was not recovered. If, as these higher dreams seem to show, there is in man a soul superior to and independent of his body, then it can easily happen that a strange, unaccountable dream 152 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY may be a page torn from the records of a former and for- gotten life. For there can be no effect without its ante- cedent cause, and, therefore, every dream must arise in some actual experience in consciousness. Therefore, science correctly enough finds in the ordinary sense dream a confused recalling of the thoughts and scenes of the waking hours. But when a connected, sequential dream happens which from its very nature could not have had its basis in thoughts, acts, or in the environments, even, of this life, it is but logical to presume that it is the living over and re-enacting of some strongly impressed detail of a forgotten one. In dream, then, might often be found the thread of Ariadne by means of which we may grope our way into the labyrinths of an otherwise buried pre-existence. There are many by-paths in dreamland into which one would delight to wander, but these are forbidden because interminable. There is, however, a lesson to be learned from dreams which must not be overlooked. That is, that in every dream there is an entity which dreams tliat dream. No one will admit that it is himself in his nor- mal state which dreams senseless or vicious dreams. They are accredited in some vague manner to the imagina- tion when divorced, in some equally mysterious manner, from reason and conscience. But even the study of dream shows that the soul can take no part in these ; t hat- it is independent of and most probably away from the body when they occur. Then, taking into consideration the unquestioned fact that animals dream, it logically follows that such low dreams are the work of the human brain alone, and whether we relegate the causes of them to external or internal stimuli, automatism, or what not, the fact remains that some entity that must be consciem ■• - N I V ERSITY IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 153 less and unreasoning perceive and records them. It can- not be the reasoning soul or moral and rational distinc- tions would be made. It is idle to talk of nothing per- ceiving something, yet this is the strait to which we are reduced unless we accept the fact that some entity dis- tinctly below the human plane — reason and conscience both being absent — dreams these dreams. And that this is the fact one experience of the writer strongly indicates. In awakening from a dream upon a certain occasion, the real I of the writer seemed to be in the attitude of a spectator so far as its relation to the body was concerned, and for a brief moment watched in wondering awe the process of a dream which was then actually occurring. There appeared to be an entity like to his body in appearance, engaged in active thought, and in some incomprehensible manner these thoughts ap- peared to be thrown upon the brain as pictures, and which pictured thought constituted the dream. The process of dream would seem to be similar to a magic lantern entertainment, except that the presence of the operator in the dream is not suspected. The inference is plain and unavoidable, in view of the above study, that man would seem to be associated with an animal body in which is enthroned an animal entity similar in nature to other entities in the animal kingdom. This association is neither idle nor fortuitous; it occurs under the universal law of cause and effect, and one can easily imagine its object to be the slowly lifting up of the lower entity into the human or reasoning condition, while at the same time an almost infinite amount of experience, with its resulting wisdom, is gained by the food for thought afforded a purely thinking soul during its experiences while thus incarnated among entities entirely below it, 154 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY and in whom -the ruling principal is desire. The further thought is also forced upon one that, as this association is not, or can not be, under the laws of nature, fortuitous, jt has persisted during perhaps innumerable lives in the past and must so persist in future ones, which doctrine is the very essence of the fact, and the reason for, reincar- nation. Therefore, in the most senseless and vicious dreams may be read the record of the impressions which man's mind has imparted to his unreasoning associate. In them one may learn the precise point to which he would descend were his soul to desert, him, and may also test how pure and unselfish his thoughts are upon interior planes of which no one knows, or can catch even a glimpse, except his own soul. The real morality of the waking ego is undoubtedly reflected in the dreaming one, and he who habitually dreams cruel or immoral dreams may be sure that these taint, it may be all ansuspected, the garments of his soul, and that it would 1m- well to set about living that life ami thinking those thoughts that would render it impossible for his lower self to dream such dreams. For even admitting the fact that most of these are dramatizations of some external (a noise) or internal (indigestion) stimuli, yet the sequence of that dramatization will depend entirely upon the real ten- dencies of the hidden mind of each individual. Thus a drop of water falling upon the face of two individuals will be dramatized in the one into storm and ship- wreck, it maybe, while, to the other, they will unfold into the dramatization of the scenes of one of the Roman baths of old. Let me repeat it ; each one may form a cor- rect estimate of the general tendencies, moral or other- wise, of his mind by the careful study of even his most absurd dreams. For, in the case of the writer the delight IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 155 of the dreaming entity, thus caught in the act of dream- ing while the real I was away from the body, was intense, but still animal-like in nature. So strong was it, that the writer no longer wonders at men yielding to sensuous gratifications urged upon them by their animal associate. He must have a strong will who can sternly forbid and tit the projecting of unclean images into his brain- mincL One point more. Some will say they never dream. Change this into "they never remember their dreams," and it will be correct. Remembering dreams is a habit easily cultivated. The scientist reads a book and remem- bers all its details ; the child reads a novel, and recalls it vividly, while the blase man or woman will cram novel after novel without being able to recall anything unless re- read. The scientist deliberately, though unconsciously, it may be, wills to impress his mind with what he reads ; the child is interested. This is the clue. Become inter- tied in your dreams, and try to remember them, and you will find the fact following upon the heels of the wish. APPENDIX II THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS THE principal object of the Universal Brotherhood or- ganization being to establish the fact that men are brothers in the fullest sense that the term con- notes, it will be at once evident that to reconcile religious beliefs must prove a most important means to this end. No wars are so bitter as those fought under the banners of differing faiths; no quarrel so vindictive as that where each antagonist believes himself to be defending truth and God against error and blasphemy. It can be demonstrated beyond peradventure that all religious faiths and beliefs have a common ancestry — are all the offspring of an old Wisdom Religion, which, in these later days, has become known under the title of Theosophy, or, literally, the "Wisdom of the Gods." It is said by the Wise Ones that this Wisdom Religion was originally taught to this humanity in its infancy by beings from other spheres who had passed through that arc of the Cycle of Necessity which we are now treading, and because of this knew whereof they taught. Certain it is that a very brief examination of comparative religion will demonstrate that a time when the gods (or God) walked with men was a matter of universal belief. Jehovah walking in the Garden of Eden is only one, and a com- THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 157 paratively recent, variant of an account to be found in the mythology of every religion. Whatever may have been the original source of the teaching it is absolutely certain that every religion worthy of the name descends from this archaic parentage. No unbiassed student will deny this for a moment. Modern science and materialistic philosophy make of the evident one-ness of pagan myth and Christian teaching their strongest argument for dis- crediting the divine source of any and all religions. But this agreement, while a stumbling block to the narrow-minded sectarian who would compel all men to ac- cept his faith, however illogical, and to the materialist who recognizes nothing divine in any religion, becomes an all-compelling argument to him who seeks to unify the race ; to prove to men that religion is a common heritage ; that God has never forgotten the world ! While the dog- matist may be dismayed, the lover of the race will be re- joiced to find that all men are really praying to the same gods, are fighting the same foes, are striving for the same goals of purity and peace. Each new link forged, each new fact dug out of the buried records of the past, will be to him a new joy, for it brings one step nearer the day when men shall no longer face each other in fratricidal struggles because one names that as Jehovah which others know as Brahm, Zeus, or Osiris ; when all shall be so wise that they will no longer disagree because of the name if the inner meaning be one. This old WLsdom Religion presents as a basis for its philosophy of life (for what is any religion more than this?) certain fundamental concepts, which must be at least briefly studied preparatory to showing that all re- ligions root in these teachings, and are all really one in es- sence and in their divine origin. These are : {a) Evolm 158 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY tion conceived of in such wide, deep, and universal as- pects that that taught by modern science only describes a small arc of its infinite and perfect circle, (b) That the law of cause and effect governs every plane of the uni- verse physical, mental, moral, or spiritual. (c) Re- embodiment, or the eternal re-clothing of the inner, im- mutable, spiritual essence in mutable, material forms, and as a corollary, the re-birth of the human soul in Bl -i\f bodies, u/) All religions proceed from a common source; have their origin in the old, universal Wisdom Religion, referred to before The evolution of the Wisdom Religion teaches that spirit, or consciousness, eternally descends into matter, and as eternally re-ascends out of it in Immense eye evolutionary activity. All manifested existence proceeds in cycles, or recurring periods of objective existence in material form followed by subjective arcs, thus maintain- ing the continuity of life unbroken. In the heavens are now visible worlds in every stage of material life-cy- from the nebulous, through the fiery sun stage, to the cool, habitable (for entities clothed in flesh) one of earth. Others again are apparently dead and re-embodying their vitality in newer planets, as has the moon; or, finally be- coming so ethereal and tenuous that they can no longer be seen by physical means, as is said to have happened with one or two intra-Mercurial planets. The objective life- cycle of worlds is thus plainly written in the strata of the heavens making up the abysses of visible space about us. Descending from cosmos to earth the law of cyclic life is found to be absolutely unbroken. It is seen in the life and death of man ; in the recurrence of night and day ; of the seasons; in all the phenomena of life. As this ma- terial universe must proceed from the Causeless Cause, it THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 159 logically follows that this universally imposed limitation of cycles is a law of the very Absolute unto itself, and as such imposed upon all its emanations. This primal and perhaps infinite cycle of manifestation is composed of an almost equally infinite number of lesser cycles. So it must happen that within this great period will always be found worlds in every stage of evolutionary activity. In our own system the sun and moon represent uninhabitable stages — at least for such beings as our- selves — while the Earth and Venus and Mars, probably, are in habitable stages, but at differing arcs of the evolu- tion of their humanities. Therefore, it follows that there are and have always been other humanities than ours, ma- tured and perfected upon other planets. There are upon the earth no two individuals at exactly the same stage of their intellectual, moral, and spiritual development, and the same divergence, only in greater degrees, marks the different humanities, for, as stated in the Secret Doctrine, every entity in the universe either is, was, or prepares to become, a man. These humanities, therefore, which have passed beyond our condition have their egos at varying stages of attainment, and the less advanced are able to impart their wisdom to advanced earth egos. That is to say, that nature never proceeds by leaps nor breaks ; and there is always possible that interblendi ig and intercom- munication between egos of different world periods which enables past humanities to teach those of worlds coming after them. Humanities are necessarily in relation, and correspond, to the ordinary human family. Upon the accumulated wisdom and experience of the parents, the children have a lawful lien, and in like manner it is the duty of the parents and elder brothers of this race to impart to it their wisdom. 160 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY The Wisdom Religion then, comes from and is the heir- loom of our humanity from a humanity which has ] n through these material stages, and which has transmit- ted to us as our heritage their knowlegde thus ac- quired. The religious instinct is innate and universal, for each ego at the beginning of its human experience has had im- pressed upon it this Primal "Wisdom. Besides this, man retains a certain memory or reminiscence of a divine state which he baa lost by his fall into matter. The faint mem- ory, the far-off reminiscence, of this state persists in us to- day, and lies, it may be, at the bottom of every effort to attain to something purer, truer and higher than man now is. For this reason even the religion of a Bushman is to be respected. It expresses the desire of his soul to re- gain a lost spiritual condition, the memory of which still unconsciously haunts him. One of the strongest evidences of all religions having this common origin, is the myth (and truth) of a crucified Saviour. This is an universal myth. The cross itself is the most ancient symbol existing. On the cosmic plane it is a symbol of the descent of spirit into matter; on the hu- man, of man '8 soul, fallen and incarnated in a fleshly body. The cross has never been anything else but a symbol. There is not a particle of evidence to show that there has ever been a Saviour really crucified, all these myths to the contrary, notwithstanding. The niyth means, and means only, that the soul of man is crucified in the fleshly desires and appetites of its sensuous body, and not that any particular Saviour has suffered death in this manner. In reference to this, it is a significant fact that Euse- THE WORLD S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 161 bius, 1 one of the early Christian Bishops, declares, upon the authority of the martyr, Polycarp, that it was ac- cepted among all the early church Fathers that Jesus of Nazareth was never crucified, but on the contrary lived to be fifty years of age. But crucifixion is not the only key to the Saviour legends. All our souls may be said to be crucified in the flesh, while the origin of these Saviour myths, is either the voluntary descent and incarnation of high souls of former humanities, or the equally voluntary relinquishment of glorious spiritual states won, by ad- vanced souls of this humanity who reincarnate at times of great spiritual debasement. To thus save humanity by restoring lost spiritual truths, is the meaning which runs through all these myriad stories of crucified Saviors. It is the meaning, certainly, which the early Christians gave to the crucifixion of Christ. If he were really cruci- fied, contemporary history ought to have noted it. The Jewish historian, Josephus, was a bitter opponent of his kinsman, Herod, and recorded all his wicked acts and it is not reasonable that he would have omitted to mention in this connection such a remarkable occurrence as the mas- sacre of infants. There is no Christian teaching which has not been an- ticipated by other teachers long previous to the era of Christ. Especially does the story of a crucified Saviour appear in all histories or legends of great religions. There are historical accounts, allusions, or legends of the following crucifixions : 2 1 Iremeus. 2 This list of Saviours is from the "World's Crucified Saviours," by Kersey Graves, from which work many of the authorities mentioned are quoted, 162 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY ^hrishna, of India, 1200 years B. C. 2 Sakia of Hindustan, 600 years B. C. "Thammuz, of Syria, 1100B. C. 4 Wittoba, the Telingonese, 552 B. C. 6 Iao, of Nepaul, 622 B.C. •Hesus, of Great Britain, 834 B. C. 'Quexalcote, of Mexico, 587 B. C. 8 Quirinus, of Rome, 506 B. C. •Prometheus, of Greece, 547 B. C. 10 Thulis, of Egypt, 1700 B.C. "Ir.dra, of Thibet, 728 B.C. u Alcestos, of Greece, 600 B. C. 18 Atys, of Phrygia, 1170 B. C. 14 Crite, of Chaldea, 1200 B. C. "Bali, Of Ori-a, 725 B. C. "Mithra, of \\ tm;,. iiOOB.C. Other Saviours declared to have been crucified also, but the date of which event is Uncertain, are: Salvahana, <>f Bermuda; Osiris, of Egypt; II<»rus, of Egypt; Odin, of Scandinavia; Zoroaster, of Persia; Baal, of Phoenicia; 1 The Hindu Pantheon. 2 Progress of Religious Ideas. 3 Ctesias. quoted in Hig: grins' Anacalepsis. 4 Anacalcpsis. 6 Georgrius. Anacalepsis. 'Mexican Antiquities. 8 Iligrgrins* Anacalepsis. < i-a and Hesiod. •"Wilkison. ll Oeorgius. 12 Anacalepsis. 13 Anacalepsis. 14 Anacalepsis. W AnacMlt'i'^i-. 18 Faber and Bryant. THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 163 Taut, of Phoenicia; Bali, of Afghanistan; Xamolxis, of Thrace; Zoar, of the Bonzes; Adad, of Assyria; Deva Tat, of Siam ; Alcides, of Thebes ; Mikado, of the Shintos ; Beddru, of Japan ; Thor, of the Gauls ; Cadmus, of Greece ; Hil and Feta, of the Mandaites ; Gentaut, of Mexico, and several others, of lesser note. If the influence of the World's Saviours upon humanity be. judged by their present following, it is interesting to note that Chrishna has 400,000,000 adherents ; Christ, 200,- 000,000; Mahomet, 150,000,000; Confucius, 120,000,000; and Mithra, 50,000,000. Their histories are strangely similar ; too much so not to have been derived from a common source. Let us take as a type that of Chrishna. 1 It is said of him that his birth was foretold ; that he was an incarnate God ; his mother a virgin ; that he had an adopted father who was a carpenter; that there was rejoicing on earth and in heaven at his birth ; that his mother's name was Maia. He was born in obscurity on December 25th ; was vis- ited by wise men and shepherds who were led by a star ; was warned of danger by an angel ; that all the children near his birthplace were ordered destroyed in order to include him ; that his parents fled to Mathura. (An ancient legend states that Joseph and Mary jour- neyed to a place called Mateira, where they fled from Herod into Egypt.) He had a forerunner (Bali-Rama); was wise in childhood ; was lost and searched for by his parents ; had other brothers ; retired to solitude ; fasted ; preached a noteworthy sermon ; was entitled a Saviour, Redeemer, Shepherd, Lion of the tribe of Sakia; existed l " Three hundred and forty-six Striking Analogies Between Christ and Chrishna," Loc at. 164 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY prior to birth ; and on earth and in heaven at the same time; was both human and divine; did miracles of which one or the first was to cure a leper ; healed all manner of diseases; raised the dead ; cast out devils; had apostles; reformed the existing religion ; abolished law of lineal de- scent in priesthood; was poor; was conspired against; de- nounced riches ; meek ; unmarried and chaste ; merciful ; associated with sinners ; was rebuked for it ; befriended a widow ; met a gentle woman at a well ; submitted to in- juries and insults ; was a practical philanthropist; had a last supper; was crucified between two thieves ; darkness supervened; descended to hell; was resurrected after three days ; and seen by many people. Again, of Quexalcote, 1 the Mexican Saviour, we are told, that he was born 300 years before Christ ; of a spot- less virgin; that he lived a life of humility and piety; retired to a wilderness and fasted forty days; was worshipped; crucified between two thieves; descended to hell and rose again the third day ; rode on an ass ; forgave sin, etc. As it will be impossible in the short space of a chapter to note the similar important incidents in the life of each Saviour separately, merely the incident will be noted, ami under it grouped all the Saviours of whom there is trust- worthy evidence of that particular event having been re- corded. Let us, then, as an appropriate beginning, take the prophecies concerning their birth. Under this head we find that the coming to earth of Chrishna, Chang-Ti, Osiris, Cadmus, Quirinus, and Quexalcote were all thus foretold, while prophecies of Saviours run through nearly 1 Mexican Antiquities, Vol. VI, Codex Bonrianus. Codex Yati- canus. THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 165 all sacred writings. Thus the Vedas, the Chinese Sacred Books, 1 those of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Arabia, Persia, etc., contain Messianic prophecies. Of Saviors connected in some manner with a Serpent-symbol, we have Osiris, spoken of as having bruised the serpent's head after it had bitten his heel ; Hercules is represented with his heel on a serpent's head; Chrishna is both pictured and sculptured with his heel on a serpent's head; Persia has the same legend to the effect that Ormuzd made the first two pure, and that Ahriman took a serpent-form in order to tempt them. Miraculous conceptions are recorded of: Plato, who was said to have been a son of Apollo ; Zoroaster, 2 born of a Ray of Divine Wisdom ; Mars and Vulcan, conceived by Juno ; Quexalcote, 3 of Suchiquetqual ; Yu, 4 of a lily, or a star ; Appolonius, 5 of Proteus ; Buddha, of Mahamaya ; Chrishna, of Yasoda, by Narayana. Jesus, of Mary, by the Holy Ghost. Of Virgin Mothers 6 we have: Yasoda, mother of Chrishna ; Maia, of Sakia; Celestine, of Zulis ; Chimalman, of Quexalcote; Semele, of Bacchus ; Prudence, of Hercules ; 1 Martinus — " History of China." Halde— " History of China." 2 Malcolm— " History of Persia." 3 Mexican Antiquities, Codex Vaticanus. * Tod—" History of the Rajahs." 5 Philostratus. " Hicreins— Anacalepsis. 166 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Alcmene, of Alcides ; Shing-mon of Yu ; Mayence, of Hesus ; Mary, of Jesus. Angels, shepherds, magi, etc., visited: 1 Confucius, "Chrishna, 8 Sakia, 'Mitlira. 6 Pythagoras, •Zoroaster, and Jesus. The births of many were preceded by the appearance of a new star, and occurred upon December 25th, formerly the beginning of the new year. Of those to whom this date is specifically assigned we have : Bacchus, Adonis, Chrishna, Chang-ti, Chris (of Chaldea), Mithra, Sakia, Jao (of Ancient Britain), and Jesus. Jesus is often poetically spoken of as the Lamb of God. Other nations have been equally poetical in the titles they have given their particular Saviour. Thus we find Chrish- na spoken of as the Holy Lamb ; Quexalcote, as the Ram 1 Five Volumes. 2 Ramayami. 3 New Covenant Religion. 4 History of Persia. 5 Progress of Religious Ideas. 6 Aristotle ami Pliny. THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 167 of God ; the Celts had their holy Heifer ; and Egypt its sa- cred Bull. Of Jesus and Chrishna it is recorded that they were born in caves, for the manger in which the birth of the former is declared to have occurred was hollowed out of a hillside. Of infants threatened by hostile rulers, we have: Bacchus, Romulus, Chrishna, Osiris, Zoroaster, Alcides, Yu, Rama, Indra, Salvahana, and Jesus. The two last were sons of carpenters. (World Build- ers?) The Wisdom Religion affirms that there are seven keys to all these myths according as we read them in a hu- man, terrestrial, cosmic, or other sense. To turn the as- tronomical key to the above, we find that Herod means the "Hero of the Skin," or Hercules, and that the Sun (Hercules) enters Gemimi in May. Rachel equals Ramah, and Ramah means the Zodiac in both Indian and Chal- dean astronomy. Rachel had Joseph and Benjamin; Gemimi has two stars. He who runs may easily read. Of those who descended into hell and were resurrected after three days, we have : Quexalcote, Chrishna, Quirinus, 168 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY Prometheus, Osiris, Atys, Mithra, Chris, and Jesus. If we examine the doctrines of these Saviours we shall find the same close analogy, bespeaking a common origin! that the "Religion of Jesus Christ is neither new nor strange," as was asserted by Eusebius, and that St. Augustine was quite right in claiming that: " This in our day is the Christian religion, not as having been un- known in former times, but as recently having received that name." Among other resemblances we note that the doctrine of the Trinity was recognized in Brahmanism, Zoroas- trianism, and in the religions of Chaldea, China, Mexico and Greece. Speaking of this doctrine of the Trinity, Bishop Powell declares: " I not only confess but I main- tain such a similarity between the Trinity of Philo and that of John as bespeaks a common origin." The cere- mony of the Eucharist was also observed by the Essenes,. Persians, Pythagoreans, and Gnostics who used as ele- ments bread and water. It also was recognized an any part of tin- Hailed - sda or Mc\i< o $2.36 (Qs. lOd.) A YEAR . Post paid to Foreign Countries SAMPLE COPY SENT FREE ON APPLICATION Send Subscriptions for tin- I'ni renal Brotherhood to THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 144 Madison Avenue, New York. 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