HPB-SB-14-57

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

T i

vol. 14, p. 57	volume 14, page 57 vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 174
Legend HPB note HPB highlighted HPB underlined HPB crossed out <Editors note> <Archivist note> Lost or unclear SBT, DT Restored

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< Life after Death. (continued from page 14-56) >

October 14, 1882.]

LIGHT.

fully acknowledge the lucid expositions which are now coming thence to us through the columns of “Light,”*) we occasionally find welcome help nearer home. Such is the little book now before us, which by the mere force of clear intelligible statement, without metaphysics or abstruse argument, enlarges the conception of the reader, enabling him to survey the region immediately about him, to examine the meshes of its spiritual net-work, and to see how those meshes are being incessantly woven by himself and all others—Spirits and men—above and around him. According to this account, when we “die,” we shall find ourselves in the world of our own creation, which may be the narrowest prison-house, or the widest expanse. We shall enjoy a conscious home in every heart that loves us, in every life we have bettered, in every mind we have influenced. For our active faculties we shall have a basis and participation in every thought process, in every art process, in every movement into which we have at any time thrown ourselves. Thus will our whole effective past be simultaneously present to us, and we shall come into the consciousness of all the good and evil we have done as a veritable externalisation of ourselves. The retributive environment is no longer a mystery, for we recognise in it a web of our own weaving, an organism of our own projecting. The past will not be a memory to us, but a surrounding fact.

Now, this is the important point, and unless we succeed in understanding this, we shall get no further. It will be well, therefore, to give some of the author’s own words, though no extract can do justice to the connection of the thought. “All our volitions and actions in this world are intended to produce an organism which we shall perceive and use in the world to come as our own new self. All the mental influences, all the effects due to the actions of a person in his lifetime, which spread all over mankind and all over the earth, are, even at present, bound up together by a mysterious, invisible link, thus forming a person’s spiritual organs, worked out during his life, and combined into a spiritual body, an organism of continually active powers and effects, of which, though indissolubly fastened to his present existence, he has no consciousness at present. In the moment of death, however, when man has to part with those organs in which his power of acting lay, he will, all at once, become conscious of all the ideas and effects which, produced by his manifold actions in life, will continue living and working in this world, and will form, as an organic offspring of an individual stem, an organic individuality which only then becomes alive, self-conscious, self-active, ready to act through the human and natural world, of its own will and power.” This occult—soon to become manifest—presence of the past is a truth not to be apprehended without effort; we must think it for ourselves, not putting ourselves off through indolence or imbecility of imagination with any figurative sense, though there are many figures which may assist us to grasp the fact. Thus we may represent the finished product of our past as a picture which it has taken long to draw, but in which every particular stroke is contained. And as our life has been idle or purposeful, so we shall see it hereafter—not in a mere image of memory, but in a contemporary expression of ourselves—either as an embarrassing, unprofitable daub, or a true work of spiritual art. Take this further assistance from our author. “All things that had gone out of his mind in this life, man will then find again; they only dropped from his mind, as they went to the hereafter before him, where he finds them all gathered up for him, in a new and universal light, which saves him the trouble of collecting what he wants to associate, and dividing what he wants to separate. At a glance he will be able to survey all that is in him, his various ideas in their relations of agreement and contradiction, of connection and separation—not confined to one particular direction of his thoughts, but looking into every direction at once. There are instances of persons approaching such a state of inward illumination, even in this life, in cases of approaching death, as by drowning, or in somnambulism, or narcosis, and such like.” Just conceive it. Let any one, for instance, who is engaged from day to day in hard brain work, imagine what it would be to be spared the preliminary labour of “arranging” his thoughts, of re-awakening his ideas, of disentangling them from illogical associations. We know the inestimable value in all mental labour of a good memory, and the disadvantage of a defective one. What a philosopher’s heaven will that be in which “at a glance he will be able to survey all that is in him.” The moral applications are so obvious that they need not be indicated here, though Professor Fechner throws much striking light on this aspect also

But even yet have we got the thought, so to speak, alive? That which stands out before us as our present past is no merely objective circumference, but our own living consciousness therein. If nothing more were meant than that we shall be hereafter able to trace and follow our former activity in all its effects, so as to recognise just what was derived from us into the world outside us, that would be quite consistent with a real severance, which should leave us in the position of gratified or remorseful spectators of what is no longer our own in any strictly possessory sense, and from which we may therefore turn away as from the finished or the irremediable, so far as we are concerned. It is our own literal survival and conscious working wheresoever we have once established an influence, the fact of an organic relation thence resulting, that determines the range and circuit of our post-mortem life, binding it to other lives, and making all the energy of the past to be the diffused vitality of the present. Without that we get merely the principle of the survival of transmitted energy, that substitute for personal survival put forward by the Positivists, and notably of late years with great eloquence and fervour by Mr. Frederick Harrison. Or we get this plus a soul without vital connection therewith, and which, therefore, might very easily be dispensed with for all the purposes of scientific thinking. That the insistance upon it should be regarded as indicative of a low form of egoism, and as the traditional “Animism,” which it is the vice of all religions except that of Auguste Comte to perpetuate, is after all not very surprising. The representatives of a half truth are usually hostile to its unadjusted counterpart. But the Positivist half, the indestructibility of posthumous influence, the conservation of individual energy through all its transformations in succeeding minds, was indispensably needed. Barren by itself, with a sterility which no humanitarian fervour could warm into life, no sooner does it re-act upon and combine with the animistic conception than the whole truth is seen pregnant with infinite meanings, and yields the fullest satisfaction to every individual human being who can realise without dreading it. Add to the ideal continuation of a life through the whole range of its dispersed activity the conception of organic connection and the unity of self-consciousness, and we have a thought whose development may carry us far towards a solution of some of our most difficult and momentous problems. But we shall not really understand what is meant till we have learned to regard human intelligence, affections, and desires as substantialised in their effects, these latter being no evanescent phenomena dependent on casual memory for their revival, but distant points, so to speak, projected from the individual as from a centre, and continually connected with this by the radiation of organic lines or nerves, marking, or rather signifying, the directions of what, by the use of a legitimate analogy, we call magnetic attraction. Now just as in our present physical body, consciousness is co-extensive with its circuit, and may be localised on the occurrence of any stimulant at its most remote extremity, so when released from this confinement we shall find ourselves provided with an organism whose extent and sensibility will be exactly measured by our past effectual activity, and individual consciousness will thus as surely hereafter find a basis and home in all the results of its present affectional and ideal life, as now in whatever of physical and mental constitution serves to give it expression and force.

Wherever we have established a point of influence, there after death we can consciously dwell and act; nor in the most intricate blending of individual spheres is the circle of identity ever lost. This connection exists even now, but preoccupation at the centre of consciousness obscures our recognition of it, though on rare occasions it becomes phenomenally apparent. But in death we shall fully realise our moral organism, for then the centre of consciousness will be just that construction of our past lives, considered centrally, which those distant effects are, considered circumferentially. The function of this life, however, is to develop the body of the life hereafter, not to use it.

It would be impossible to describe the interaction of lives, their sectional blending with the maintenance of total integrity, more intelligibly, or with a happier use of analogy and illustration, than does Professor Fechner in these pages. That we really may and must have parts of our lives in others, as they have theirs in ours, and that by no figure of speech but as a fact of consciousness, is a truth that throws a brilliant light over what otherwise seems most mystical in regard to spiritual in- <... continues on page 14-58 >

* The letters of “A. P. S.” on Theosophy, in;“Light.”

Editor's notes