HPB-SB-14-57: Difference between revisions

  | notes =

}}

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

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

{{Footnotes start}}

{{Footnotes end}}

{{HPB-SB-footer-footnotes}}