Legend
< True and False Personality (continued from page 10-95) >
from individualism that we turn from the sublime conception of primitive philosophy as from what concerns us as little as the ceaseless activity and germination in other brains of thought once thrown off and severed from the thinking source, which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power. It is not a, mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for Nirvana, Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary belief, while in the Sankya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably vindicate the individuality of soul (spirit). Individual consciousness is maintained, perhaps infinitely intensified, but its “matter” is no longer personal. Only try to realise what “freedom from desire,” the favourite phrase in which individualism is negated in these systems, implies! Even in that form of devotion which consists in action, the soul is warned in the Bhagavad-Gita that it must be indifferent to results.
Modern Spiritualism itself testifies to something of the same sort. Thus we are told by one of its most gifted and experienced champions, “Sometimes the evidence will come from an impersonal source, from some instructor who has passed through the plane on which individuality is demonstrable.”—M. A. (Oxon), Spirit Identity, p. 7. Again, “And if he” (the investigator) “penetrates far enough, he will find himself in a region for which his present embodied state unfits him: a region in which the very individuality is merged, and the highest and subtlest truths are not locked within one breast, but emanate from representative companies whose spheres of life are interblended.”—Id., p. 15. By this “interblending” is of course meant only a perfect sympathy and community of thought; and I should doubtless misrepresent the author quoted were I to claim an entire identity of the idea he wishes to convey, and that now under consideration. Yet what, after all, is sympathy but the loosening of that hard “'astringent” quality (to use Bohme’s phrase) wherein individualism consists? And just as in true sympathy, the partial suppression of individualism and of what is distinctive, we experience a superior delight and intensity of being, so it may be that in parting with till that shuts us up in the spiritual penthouse of an Ego—all, without exception or reserve—we may for the first time know what true life is, and what are its ineffable privileges. Yet it is not on this ground that acceptance can be hoped for the conception of immortality here crudely and vaguely presented in contrast to that bourgeois eternity of individualism and the family affections, which is probably the great charm of Spiritualism to the majority of its proselytes. It is doubtful whether the things that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” have ever taken strong hold of the imagination, or reconciled it to the loss of all that is definitely associated with the joy and movement of living. Not as consummate bliss can the dweller on the lower plane presume to commend that transcendent life. At the utmost he can but echo the revelation that came to the troubled mind in Sartor Resartus, “Aman may do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.” It is no sublimation of hope, but the necessities of thought that compel us to seek the condition of true being and immortality elsewhere than in the satisfactions of individualism. True personality can only subsist in consciousness by participation of that of which we can only say that it is the very negation of individuality in any sense in which individuality can be conceived by us. What is the content or “matter” of that consciousness we cannot define, save by vaguely calling it ideal. But we can say that in that region individual interests and concerns will find no place. Nay, more, we can affirm that only then has the influx of the new life a free channel when the obstructions of individualism are already removed. Hence the necessity of the mystic death, which is as truly a death as that which restores our physical body to the elements. “Neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist,” a passage which has been well explained by a Hindu writer (Peary Chand Mittra), as "meaning “that when the spiritual state is arrived at, I and mine, which belong to the finite mind, cease, and the soul, living in the universum and participating in infinity with God, manifests its infinite state.” I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage from the same instructive writer:—
Every human being has a soul which, while not separable from the brain or nerves, is mind, or jeratma, or sentient soul, hut when regenerated, or spiritualised by yge, it is free from bondage, and manifests the divine essence. It rises above all {phenomenal states joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all slates resulting in pain or pleasure, and becomes blissful, realising immortality, infinitude, and felicity of wisdom within itself. The sentient soul is nervous, sensational, emotional, phenomenal, and impressional. It constitutes the natural life and is finite. The soul and the non-soul are thus the two landmarks. What is non-soul is prakrit, or created. It is not the lot of every one to know what soul is, and therefore millions live and die possessing minds cultivated in intellect and feeling, but not raised to the soul stale, in proportion as one’s soul is emancipated from prakrit or sensuous bondage, in that proportion his approximation to the soul state is attained; and it is this that constitutes disparities in the intellectual, moral, and religious culture of human beings, and their consequent approximation to God.— Spiritual Stray Leaves, Calcutta, 1879.
He also cites some words of Fichte, which prove that the like conclusion is reached in the philosophy of Western idealism: “The real spirit which comes to itself in human consciousness is to be regarded as an impersonal pneuma—universal reason, nay, as the spirit of God Himself; and the good of man’s whole development, therefore, can be no other than to substitute the universal for the individual consciousness.”
That there may be, and are affirmed to be, intermediate stages, states, or discrete degrees, will, of course, be understood. The aim of this paper has been to call attention to the abstract condition of the immortalised consciousness; negatively it is true, but it is on this very account more suggestive of practical applications. The connection of this society with the Spiritualist movement is so intimately sympathetic, that I hope one of these may be pointed out without offense. It is that immortality cannot be phenomenally demonstrated. What I have called psychic survival can be, and probably is. But immortality is the attainment of a state, and that state the very negation of phenomenal existence. Another conse-<... continues on page 10-97 >