HPB-SB-14-58: Difference between revisions

{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued|Life after Death.|14-56}}

{{Style P-No indent|fluence. We learn that the law of intercourse and communion with our departed friends is one with the law which governs the great political, intellectual, and religious movements of the race. “The higher Spirits, living as they are, not in a single person, but each living and acting in more than one, are a spiritual link between those persons, uniting them all in the same belief, the same truth, the same moral or political tendency. All the persons having a certain spiritual interest between them, belong to the body of one Spirit, and as co-ordinate members of it, work out the ideas which they have received from that Spirit. Sometimes one idea lives in a whole nation, a multitude of people are roused up to one great common enterprise: here is a mighty Spirit coming over them all, penetrating them all . . . . The gradual formation and growth of States, the progress of science and art, of commerce and trade, the development of all these spheres into larger and larger bodies harmoniously organised, is the consequence of numberless Spirits living and moving among men, and growing together into more extended spiritual organisms.” And what is true of every minor and partial centre of influence is of course pre-eminently true of those mighty ideal-personal powers which tend to suffuse all humanity with a common life and purpose. “The most striking instance of a great Spirit living and working on through posterity we find in Jesus Christ. You must not think it an idle phrase, that He liveth in those who believe in Him. Every true Christian carries Him within him, not in a symbolical manner, but in life and reality; every one that thinks and acts according to His mind has part with Him; for it is the Spirit of Christ that causes in him such thinking and acting.”}}

Professor Fechner distinguishes three stages in the evolution of human life, with a fourth beyond, which may be called a Divine or universal life. Each stage is concerned with the development of organs for the next, and birth into one is the death of the preceding. “In the first stage the body develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the second; in the second stage his mind develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the third; in the third the Divine germ develops itself, which lies hidden in every human mind to direct him, through instinct, feeling, and believing, to the world beyond, which seems so dark at present, but shall be light as day hereafter.” As already seen, the third stage, that in which we enter at death, will be characterised by a much greater community of life, the individual, however, not being absorbed by any one or more of the groups or spheres, but having his life partially in them in a far more real sense than in societies here. For they are the localities, so to speak, of his consciousness, its bodily circumference. Not yet is there the perfect unity of all in harmonious relation and universal order; but this is the organic ideal to which the several groups are incessantly tending, as here the individual to find his own place in the groups. Of re-embodiments, or successive personalities determined by the individual Karma on this earth, we hear nothing. Their Karma itself is the embodiment, or organic expression, of Spirits of the third stage. The segregation of individual consciousness by again concentrating it in a physical body would be a retrogression in the case of all but the undeveloped, if we accept our author’s account. Nor does this take any notice of the distinctions of which we now hear so much, between the different constituents of our composite being. But the nature and conditions of our future consciousness, of our present connection with the spiritual world, and especially of our communion, or rather community, with those Spirits who have had a true influence upon our lives or minds, are so described that to understand is almost to be convinced. And there is much more in this small volume which solicitude to bring out what seemed most important—developed Western conception of Karma—has left no space for noticing. How strikingly different the idea presented of the life hereafter is from common conceptions of continual personality with memory of the past, every thoughtful reader of the book, if not of this review, will appreciate. It is often said, though, we think, very superficially, that memory is essential to identity. But there is another sort of memory, of which we have had as yet no actual experience, and which is such a revelation of total identity that the ego of any given moment is lost in it. Our transient, hour to hour personality may indeed seem drowned in a consciousness so comprehensive. And the sense of it may be yet further diminished by the perception into which the author tells us we shall come for the first time, that much which now seems distinctly our own, and originated by ourselves, is in fact the part of other Spirits in us, their influence and suggestion. That is a Swedenborgian thought, as indeed is the whole conception of spiritual solidarity; but every reader of Professor Fechner’s book will gain from its pages a clearer apprehension of the evolution of individual intelligence and life through community and intersection.

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