THEOSOPHY
Theosophical Society,
Cardiff
in March 1918
New
recruits form up outside the
at the corner of
Theosophy and the Great War
To Those Who Mourn
by
C.W.Leadbeater
First Published 1918
Theosophy and The
Great War Index
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and
deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit
forever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!
--Sir Edwin Arnold
__________________________
"Tis but as when one layeth
His worn-out robes away
And taking new ones, sayeth
"These will I wear today!"
So putteth by the Spirit
Lightly its garb of flesh,
And passeth to inherit
A residence afresh
--Sir Edwin Arnold
__________________
Friend: You have lost by death one whom you loved dearly, one who
perhaps was all the world to you; and so to you that world seems empty, and
life no longer worth the living. You feel that joy has left you forever, that
existence can be for you henceforth nothing but hopeless sadness, naught but
one aching longing for "the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a
voice that is still." You are thinking chiefly of yourself and your
intolerable loss; but there is also another sorrow. Your grief is aggravated by
your uncertainty as to the present condition of your beloved; you feel that he
has gone, you know not where. You hope earnestly that all is well with him, but
when you look upward all is void; when you cry there is no answer. And so
despair and doubt overwhelm you, and make a cloud that hides from you the sun
that never sets.
Your feeling is most natural; I, who write, understand it
perfectly, and my heart is full of sympathy for all those who are afflicted as
you are. But I hope that I can do more than sympathize: I hope that I can bring
you help and relief. Such help and relief have come to thousands who were in
your sad case. Why should they not come to you also?
You say: "How can there be relief or hope for me?"
There is the hope of relief for you because your sorrow is founded
in misapprehension; you are grieving for something which has not really
happened. When you understand the facts you will cease to grieve.
You answer: "My loss is a fact. How can you help me, unless
indeed you give me back my dead?"
I understand your feeling perfectly; yet bear with me for a while,
and try to grasp three main propositions, which I am about to put before you,
at first merely as broad statement, and then in convincing detail:
1. Your loss is only an apparent fact, apparent from your point of
view. I want to bring you to another viewpoint. Your suffering is the result of
a great delusion, of ignorance of Nature's law; let me help you on the road towards
knowledge by explaining a few simple truths which you can study further at your
leisure.
2. You need be under no uneasiness or uncertainty with regard to
the condition of your loved one, for the life after death is no longer a
mystery. The world beyond the grave exists under the same natural laws as this
which we know, and has been explored and examined with scientific accuracy.
3. You must not mourn, for your mourning does harm to your loved one.
If you can once open your mind to the truth, you will mourn no more.
You may perhaps feel that these are only assertions; but let me ask
you on what grounds you hold your present belief, whatever it may be. You think
you hold it because some Church teaches it, or because it is supposed to be
founded upon what is written in some holy book; or because it is the general
belief of those around you, the accepted opinion of your time. But if you will
try to clear your mind from preconceptions, you will see that this opinion also
rests merely upon assertion for the Churches teach different views, and the
words of the holy book may be and have been variously interpreted. The accepted
view of your time is not based upon any definite knowledge; it is mere hearsay.
These matters which affect us so nearly and so deeply are too important to be
left to mere supposition or vague belief; they demand the certainty of
scientific investigation and tabulation. Such investigation has been
undertaken, such tabulation has been accomplished; and it is the result of
these which I wish to put before you. I ask no blind credence; I state what I
myself know to be facts, and I invite you to examine them.
Let us consider these propositions one by one. To make the subject
clear to you I must tell you a little more about the constitution of man than
is generally know to those who have made no special study of the matter. You
have heard it said vaguely that man possesses an immortal something called a
soul, which is supposed to survive the death of the body. I want you to cast
aside that vagueness and to understand that, even if it were true, it is an
understatement of the facts. Do not say: : "I
hope that I have a soul," but " I know that I am a soul." For
that is the real truth; man is a soul." and has a body. The body is not
the man; it is only the clothing of the man. What you call death is the laying
aside of a worn-out garment, and it is no more the end of the man than it is
the end of you when you remove your overcoat. Therefore you have not lost your
friend; you have only lost sight of the cloak in which you were accustomed to
see him. The cloak is gone, but the man who wore it is not; surely it is the
man that you love and not the garment.
Before you can understand your friend's condition you must
understand your own. Try to grasp the fact that you are an immortal being,
immortal because you are divine in essence, because you are a spark from God's
own Fire; that you lived for ages before you put on this vesture that you call
a body, and that you will live for ages after it has crumbled into dust.
"God made man to be an image of His own eternity." This is not a
guess or a pious belief; it is a definite scientific fact, capable of proof, as
you may see from the literature on the subject if you will take the trouble to
read. * [A list of books will be found at the end of the pamphlet]
What you have been thinking of as your life is in truth only one
day of your life as a soul, and the same is true of your beloved; therefore he
is not dead. It is only his body that is cast aside.
Yet you must not therefore think of him as a mere bodiless breath,
as in any way less himself than he was before. As St Paul said long ago:
"There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." People misunderstand
that remark, because they think of these bodies as successive, and do not
realize that we, all of us, possess both of them even now. You, as you read
this, have both a "natural" or physical body, which you cannot see,
that which
If that idea is by this time clear to you, let us advance another
step. It is not only at what you call death that you doff that overcoat of
dense matter; every night when you go to sleep you slip it off for awhile, and
roam about the world in your spiritual body, invisible as far as this dense
world is concerned, but clearly visible to those friends who happen to be using
their spiritual bodies at the same time. For each body sees only that which is on
its own level; your physical body sees only other physical bodies. When you
resume your overcoat that is to say, when you come back to your denser body, it
occasionally happens that you have some recollection, although usually a
considerably distorted one of what you have seen when you were away elsewhere;
and then you call it a vivid dream. Sleep, then, may be described as a kind of
temporary death, the difference being that you do not withdraw yourself so
entirely from your overcoat as to be unable to resume it. It follows that when
you sleep, you enter the same condition as that into which your beloved has
passed. What that condition is I will now proceed to explain.
Many theories have been current as to the life after death, most of
them based upon misunderstandings of ancient scriptures. At one time the
horrible dogma of what was called everlasting punishment was almost universally
accepted in
The truth is that the day of blind belief is past; the era of
scientific knowledge is with us, and we can no longer accept ideas unsustained by reason and common sense. There is no reason
why scientific methods should not be applied to the elucidation of problems
which in earlier days were left entirely to religion; indeed, such methods have
been applied by The Theosophical Society and the Society of Psychical Research;
and it is the result of these investigations, made in a scientific spirit, that
I wish to place before you now.
We are spirits, but we live in a material world, a world, however,
which is only partially known to us. All the information that we have about it
comes to us through our senses; but these senses are seriously imperfect. Solid
objects we can see; we can usually see liquids, unless they are perfectly
clear; but gases are in most cases invisible to us. Research shows that there
are other kinds of matter far finer than the rarest of gases; but to these our
physical senses do not respond, and so we can gain no information with regard
to them by physical means.
Nevertheless, we can come into touch with them; we can investigate
them, but we can do it only by means of that "Spiritual body'' to which
reference has been made, for that has its senses just as this one has. Most men
have not yet learned how to use them, but this is a power which can be acquired
by man. We know that it can be, because it has been so acquired; and those who
have gained it find themselves able to see much which is hidden from the view
of the ordinary man. They learn that this world of ours is far more wonderful
than we have ever supposed; that though men have been living in it for
thousands of years, most of them have remained blankly ignorant of all the
higher and more beautiful parts of its life. The line of research to which I am
referring has already yielded many marvelous results, and is opening before us
new vistas every day. This information may be gleaned from Theosophical
literature, but we are here concerned with only one part of it, with the new
knowledge that it puts before us as to the life beyond what we call death, and
the condition of those who are enjoying it.
The first thing that we learn is that death is not the end of life,
as we have ignorantly assumed, but is only a step from one stage of life to
another. I have already said that it is the laying aside of an overcoat, but
that after it the man still finds himself clad in his ordinary housecoat, the
spiritual body. But though, because it is so much finer, St Paul gave it the
name of "spiritual," it is still a body, and therefore, material,
even though the matter of which it is composed be very much finer than
ordinarily known to us. The physical body serves the spirit as a means of
communication with the physical world. Without that body as an instrument, he
would be unable to communicate with that world, to impress himself
upon it or to receive impressions from it. We find that the spiritual body
serves exactly the same purpose; it acts as an intermediary for the spirit with
the higher and "spiritual" world. But this spiritual world is not
something vague, faraway and unattainable; it is simply a higher part of the
world which we now inhabit. I am not for a moment denying that there are other
worlds, far higher and more remote; I am saying only that what is commonly
called death has nothing to do with those, and that it is merely a transference from one stage or condition to another in
this world with which we are all familiar. It may be said that the man who
makes this change becomes invisible to you; but if you think of it, you will
see that the man has always been invisible to you, that what you have been in
the habit of seeing is only the body which he inhabited. Now he inhabits
another and a finer body, which is beyond your ordinary sight, but not
necessarily by any means beyond your reach.
The first point to realize is that those whom we call the dead have
not left us. We have been brought up in a complex belief which implies that
every death is a separate and marvelous miracle, that when the soul leaves the
body it somehow vanishes into a heaven beyond the stars, no suggestion being
made as to the mechanical means of transit over the appalling spaces involved.
Nature's processes are assuredly wonderful, and often to us incomprehensible,
but they never fly in the face of reason and common sense. When you take off
your overcoat in the hall, you do not suddenly vanish to some distant
mountain-top; you are standing just where you were before, though you may
present a different outward appearance. Precisely in the same way, when a man
puts off his physical body he remains exactly where he was before. It is true
that you no longer see him, but the reason for this is not that he has gone
away, but that the body which he is now wearing is not visible to your physical
eyes.
You may be aware that our eyes respond only to a very small
proportion of the vibrations which exist in nature, and consequently the only
substances which we can see are those which happen to reflect these particular
undulations. The sight of your "spiritual body" is equally a matter
of response to undulations, but they are of quite a different order, coming
from a much finer type of matter. All this, if it interests you, you may find
worked out in detail in Theosophical literature.
For the moment all which concerns us is that by means of your
physical body you can see and touch the physical world only, while by means of
the "spiritual body" you can see and touch the things of the
spiritual world. And remember that this is in no sense another world, but
simply a more refined part of this world. Once more I say, there are other
worlds, but we are not concerned with them now. The man of whom you think as
departed is in reality with you still. When you stand side by side, you in the
physical body and he in the "spiritual" vehicle, you are unconscious
of his presence because you cannot see him; but when you leave your physical
body in sleep you stand side by side with him in full and perfect
consciousness, and your union with him is in every way as full as it used to
be. So during sleep you are happy with him whom you love; it is only during
waking hours that you feel the separation.
Unfortunately for most of us, there is a break between the physical
consciousness and the consciousness of the spiritual body, so that although in
the latter we can perfectly remember the former, many of us find it impossible to
bring through into waking life the memory of what the soul does when it is away
from the body in sleep. If this memory were perfect, for us there would indeed
be no death. Some men have already attained this continued consciousness, and
all may attain it by degrees, for it is part of the natural unfolding of the
powers of the soul. In many, such unfolding had already begun, and so fragments
of memory come through, but there is a tendency to stamp them as only dreams
and therefore valueless, a tendency specially prevalent among those who have
made no study of dreams and do not understand what they really are. But while
as yet only a few possess full sight and full memory, there are many who have
been able to feel the presence of their loved ones, even though they cannot
see; and there are others who though they have no definite memory, wake from
slumber with a sense of peace and blessedness which is the result of what has
happened in that higher world.
Remember always that this is the lower world and that is the
higher, and that the greater in this case includes the less. In that
consciousness you remember perfectly what has happened in this, because as you
pass from this to that in falling asleep, you are casting off a hindrance, the
encumbrance of the lower body; but when you come back to this lower life, you
again assume that burden, and in assuming it you cloud the higher faculties and
so lapse into forgetfulness. So it follows that if you have some piece of news
that you wish to give to a departed friend, you have only to formulate it
clearly in your mind before falling asleep, with the resolution that you will
tell him of it, and you are quite certain to do so as soon as you meet him . Sometimes you may wish to consult him on some point,
and here the break between the two forms of consciousness usually prevents you
from bringing back a clear answer. Yet even if you cannot bring back a definite
recollection, you will often wake with a strong impression as to his wish or
his decision; and you may usually take it that such an impression is correct.
At the same time, you should consult him as little as possible, for, as we
shall see later, it is distinctly undesirable that the dead should be troubled
in their higher world with affairs that belong to the department of life from
which they have been freed.
This brings us to the consideration of the life which the dead are
leading. In it there are many and great variations, but at least it is almost
always happier than the earth life. As an old scripture puts it:: "The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the universe they seem
to die, and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be
utter destruction; but they are in peace." We must disabuse ourselves of
antiquated theories; the dead man does not leap suddenly into an impossible
hell, nor does he fall into a still more impossible hell. There is indeed no
hell in the old wicked sense of the word; and there is no hell anywhere in any
sense except such as a man makes for himself. Try to understand clearly that
death makes no change in the man; he does not suddenly become a great saint or
angel, nor is he suddenly endowed with all the wisdom of the ages. He is just
the same man after his death as he was the day before it, with the same
emotions, the same dispositions, the same intellectual
development. The only difference is that he has lost the physical body.
Try to think exactly what that means. It means absolute freedom
from the possibility of pain or fatigue; freedom also from all irksome duties;
entire liberty (probably for the first time in his life) to do exactly what he
likes. In the physical life man is constantly under constraint; unless he is
one of a small minority who have independent means he
is ever under the necessity of working in order to obtain money, money which he
must have in order to buy food and clothing and shelter for himself and for
those who are dependent upon him. In a few rare instances, such as those of the
artist and the musician, the man's work is a joy to him, but in most cases it
is a form of labour to which he would certainly not devote himself unless he
were compelled.
In this spiritual world no money is necessary,
food and shelter are no longer needed, for its glory and its beauty are free to
all its inhabitants without money and without price. In its rarefied matter, in
the spiritual body, he can move hither and thither as he will. If he loves art
he may spend the whole of his time in the contemplation of the masterpieces of
all the greatest of men; if he be a musician, he may pass from one to the other
of the world's chiefest orchestras, or may spend his
time in listening to the most celebrated performers. Whatever has been his
delight on earth, his hobby, as we should say, he has now the fullest liberty
to devote himself to it entirely and to follow it out to the utmost, provided
only that its enjoyment is that of the intellect or of the highest emotions,
that its gratification does not necessitate the possession of a physical body.
Thus it will be seen at once that all rational and decent men are infinitely
happier after death than before it, for they have ample time not only for
pleasure but for really satisfactory progress along the lines which interest
them most.
Are there then none in that world who are unhappy? Yes, for that
life is necessarily a sequel to this, and the man is in every respect the same
man as he was before he left his body. If his enjoyments in this world were low
and coarse, he will find himself unable to gratify his desires. A drunkard will
suffer from unquenchable thirst, having no longer a body through which it can
be assuaged; the glutton will miss the pleasures of the table; the miser will
no longer find gold for his gathering. The man who has yielded himself during
earth-life to unworthy passions will find them gnawing
at his vitals. The sensualist still palpitates with cravings that can never now
be satisfied; the jealous man is still torn by his jealousy, all the more than
he can no longer interfere with the action of its object. Such people as these
unquestionably do suffer, but only such as these, only those whose proclivities
and passions have been coarse and physical in their nature. And even they have
their fate absolutely in their own hands. They have but to conquer these inclinations, and they are at once free from the sufferings
which such longings entail. Remember always that there is no such thing as
punishment; there is only the natural result of a definite cause; so that you
have only to remove the cause and the effect ceases, not always immediately,
but as soon as the energy of the cause is exhausted.
There are many people who have avoided these more glaring vices,
yet have lived what may be called worldly lives, caring principally for society
and its conventions, and thinking only of enjoying themselves. Such people as
these have no active suffering in the spiritual world, but they often find it
dull, they find time hanging heavy on their hands. They can foregather with
others of their type, but they usually find them somewhat monotonous, now that
there is no longer any competition in dress or in general ostentation, while
the better and cleverer people whom they desire to reach are customarily
otherwise engaged and therefore somewhat inaccessible to them. But any man who
has rational intellectual or artistic interests will find himself quite
infinitely happier outside his physical body than in it, and it must be
remembered that it is always possible for a man to develop in that world a
rational interest if he is wise enough to do so.
The artistic and intellectual are supremely happy in that new life;
yet even happier still, I think, are those whose keenest interest has been in
their fellow men, those whose greatest delight has been to help, to succor, to
teach. For though in that world there is no longer any hunger or thirst or
cold, there are still those who are in sorrow who can be comforted; those who
are in ignorance who can be taught. Just because in western countries there is
so little knowledge of the world beyond the grave, we find in that world many who need instruction as to the possibilities of this new
life; and so one who knows may go about spreading hope and glad tidings there
just as much as here. But remember always that "there" and
"here" are only terms in deference to our blindness; for that world
is here, close around us all the time, and not for a moment to be thought of as
a distant or difficult of approach.
Do the dead then see us? may be asked; do
they hear what we say? Undoubtedly they see us in the
sense that they are always conscious of our presence, that they know whether we
are happy or miserable; but they do not hear the words we say, nor are they
conscious in detail of our physical actions. A moment's thought will show us
what are the limits of their power to see. They are
inhabiting, what we have called the "spiritual body," a body which
exists in ourselves, and is, as far as appearance goes, an exact duplicate of
the physical body; but while we are awake our consciousness is focused
exclusively in the latter. We have already said that just as only physical
matter appeals to the physical body, so only the matter of the spiritual world
is discernible by that higher body. Therefore, what the dead man can see of us
is only our spiritual body, which, however, he has no difficulty in
recognizing. When we are what we call asleep, our consciousness is using that
vehicle, and so to the dead man we are awake; but when we transfer our consciousness
to the physical body, it seems to the dead man that we fall asleep, because
though he still sees us, we are no longer paying any attention to him or able
to communicate with him. When a living friend falls asleep we are quite aware
of his presence, but for the moment we cannot communicate with him. Precisely
similar is the condition of the living man (while he is awake) in the eyes of
the dead. Because we cannot usually remember in our waking consciousness what
we have seen during sleep, we are under the delusion that we have lost our
dead; but they are never under the delusion that they have lost us, because
they can see us all the time. To them the only difference is that we are with
them during the night and away from them during the day; whereas when they were
on earth with us, exactly the reverse was the case.
Now this which, following
You still say that all this has little in common with the heaven
and hell of which we are taught in our infancy; yet it is the fact that this is
the reality which lay behind these myths. Truly there is no hell; yet it will
be seen that the drunkard or the sensualist may have prepared for himself
something which is no bad imitation thereof. Only it is not everlasting; it
endures only until his desires have worn themselves out. He can at any moment
put a period to it, if he is strong enough and wise enough to dominate those
earthly cravings and to raise himself entirely above them. This is the truth
underlying the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, the idea that after death the
evil qualities have to be burned out of a man by a certain amount of suffering
before he is capable of enjoying the bliss of heaven.
There is a second and higher stage of the life after death which
does correspond very closely to a rational conception of heaven. That higher
level is attained when all lower or selfish longings have absolutely disappeared;
then the man passes into a condition of religious ecstasy or of higher
intellectual activity, according to the line along which his energy has flowed
out during his earth-life. That is for him a period of the most supreme bliss,
a period of far greater comprehension, or nearer approach to reality. But this
joy comes to all, not only to the specially pious.
It must by no means be regarded as a reward, but once more only as
the inevitable result of the character evolved in earth life. If a man is full
of high and unselfish affection or devotion, if he is splendidly developed
intellectually or artistically, the inevitable result of such development will
be this enjoyment of which we are speaking. Be it remembered that all these are
but stages of one life, and that just as a man's behaviour
during his youth makes for him to a large extent the conditions of his middle
life and old age, so a man's behaviour during his
earth-life determines his condition during these after-states. Is this state of
bliss eternal? You ask. No, for, as I have said, it is the result of the earth
life, and a finite cause can never produce an infinite result.
The life of man is far longer and far greater than you have
supposed. The Spark which has come forth from God must return to Him, and we
are as yet far from that perfection of Divinity. All life is evolving, for
evolution is God's law; and man grows slowly and steadily along with the rest.
What is commonly called man's life is in reality only one day of his true and
longer life. Just as in this ordinary life man rises each morning, puts on his
clothes, and goes forth to do his daily work,and then
when night descends he lays aside those clothes and takes his rest, and then
again on the following morning rises afresh to take up his work at the point
where he left it, just so when the man comes into physical life he puts upon
him the vesture of the physical body, and when his work-time is over he lays
aside that vesture again in what you call death, and passes into the more restful
condition which I have described; and when that rest is over he puts upon
himself once more the garment of the body and goes forth yet again to begin a
new day of physical life, taking up his evolution at the point where he left
it. And this long life of his lasts until he attains that goal of divinity
which God means him to attain.
All this may well be new to you, and because it is new it may seem
strange and grotesque. Yet all that I have said is capable of proof, and has been
tested many times over; but if you wish to read all this you must study the
literature on the subject, for in a short pamphlet with a special purpose, such
as this, I can merely state the facts, and not attempt to adduce the proofs.
You may perhaps ask whether the dead are not disturbed by anxiety
for those whom they have left behind. Sometimes that does happen, and such
anxiety delays their progress; so we should, as far as possible, avoid giving
any occasion for it. The dead man should be utterly free from all thought of
the life which he has left, so that he may devote himself entirely to the new
existence upon which he has entered. Those therefore who have in the past
depended upon his advice should now endeavour to
think for themselves, lest by still mentally depending upon him they should
strengthen his ties with the world from which he has for the moment turned. So
it is always an especially good deed to take care of children, whom a dead man
leaves behind him, for in that way one not only benefits the children, but also
relieves the departed parent from anxiety and helps him on his upward path.
If the dead man has during life been taught foolish and blasphemous
religious doctrines, he sometimes suffers from anxiety with regard to his own
future fate. Fortunately there are in the spiritual world many who make it
their business to find men who are under such a delusion as this, and to set
them free from it by a rational explanation of facts. Not only are there dead
men who do this, but there are also many living men who devote their time
during the sleep of the body each night to the service of the dead, endeavouring to relieve people from nervousness or
suffering by explaining to them the truth in all its beauty. All suffering
comes from ignorance; dispel the ignorance and the suffering is gone.
One of the saddest cases of apparent loss is when a child passes
away from this physical world and its parents are left to watch its empty
place, to miss its loving prattle. What then happens to children in this
strange new spiritual world? Of all those who enter it, they are perhaps the
happiest and the most entirely and immediately at home. Remember that they do
not lose the parents, the brothers, the sisters, the playmates whom they love;
it is simply that they have them to play with during what we call the night
instead of the day; so that they have no feeling of loss or separation. During
our day they are never left alone, for, as here children gather together and
play together, play in Elysian fields full of rare
delights. We know how a child here enjoys "making believe,"
pretending to be this character or that in history, playing the principal part
in all sorts of wonderful fairy stories or tales of adventure. In the finer
matter of that higher world, thoughts take to themselves visible form, and so
the child who imagines himself a certain hero promptly takes on temporarily the
actual appearance of that hero. If he wishes for an enchanted castle, his
thought can build that enchanted castle. If he desires an army to command, all
at once that army is there. And so among the dead the hosts of children are
always full of joy, indeed, often even riotously happy.
And those other children of different disposition, those whose
thoughts turn more naturally to religious matters, they also never fail to find
that for which they long. For the angels and the saints of old exist, they are
not mere pious fancies; and those who need them, those who believe in them are
surely drawn to them, also find them kinder and more glorious than ever fancy
dreamed. There are those who would find God Himself, God in material form; yet
even they are not disappointed, for from the gentlest and the kindest teachers
they learn that all forms are God's forms, for He is everywhere, and those who
would serve and help even the lowest of His creatures are truly serving and
helping Him. Children love to be useful; they love to help and comfort; a wide
field for such helping and comfort lies before them among the ignorant in the
higher world, and as they move through its glorious fields on their errands of
mercy and of love they learn the truth of the beautiful old teaching:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren ye
had done it unto Me."
And the tiny babies, those who are as yet too young to play? Have
no fear for them, for many a dead mother waits eagerly to clasp them to her
breast, to receive them and to love them as though they were her own. Usually
such little ones rest in the spiritual world but a short time, and then return
to earth once more, often to the very same father and mother. About these the
mediaeval monk invented an especially cruel horror, in the suggestion that the
un-baptized baby was lost to its friends forever. Baptism is a true sacrament,
and not without its uses; but let no one be so unscientific as to imagine that
the omission of an outward form like this can affect the working of Gods's eternal laws, or change Him from a God of love into
a pitiless tyrant.
We have spoken so far only of the possibility of reaching the dead
by rising to their level during sleep, which is the normal and natural way.
There is also, of course, the abnormal and unnatural method of spiritualism,
whereby for a moment the dead put on again the veil of flesh, and so become
once more visible to our physical eyes. Students of occultism do not recommend
this method, partly because it often holds back the dead in his evolution, and
partly because there is so much uncertainty about it and so great a possibility
of deception and personation. The subject is far too
large to take up in a pamphlet such as this, but I have dealt with it in a book
called The Other Side of Death. There also will be found some account of
instances in which the dead spontaneously return to this lower world and
manifest themselves in various ways, generally because they want us to do
something for them. In all such cases it is best to try and find out, as
speedily as may be, what they require, and fulfil
their wishes, if possible, so that their minds may be at rest.
If you have been able to assimilate what I have already said, you
will now understand that, however natural it may be for us to feel sorrow at
the death of our relatives, that sorrow is an error
and an evil, and we ought to overcome it. There is no need to sorrow for them,
for they have passed into a far wider and happier life. If we sorrow for our
own fancied separation from them, we are in the first place weeping over an
illusion, for in truth they are not separated from us; and secondly, we are
acting selfishly, because we are thinking more of our own apparent loss than of
their great and real gain. We must strive to be utterly unselfish, as indeed
all love should be. We must think of them and not of ourselves, not of what we
wish or we feel, but solely of what is best for them and most helpful to their
progress.
If we mourn, if we yield to gloom and depression, we throw out from
ourselves a heavy cloud which darkens the sky for them. Their very affection
for us, their very sympathy for us, lay them open to
this direful influence. We can use the power which that affection gives us to
help them instead of hindering them, if we only will, but to do that requires
courage and sacrifice. We must forget ourselves utterly in our earnest and
loving desire to be of the greatest possible assistance to our dead. Every
thought, every feeling of ours influences them; let us then take care that
there shall be no thought which is not broad and helpful, ennobling and
purifying.
If it is probable that they may be feeling some anxiety about us,
let us be persistently cheerful, that we may assure them that they have no need
to feel troubled on our account. If, during physical life, they have been
without detailed and accurate information as to the life after death, let us endeavour at once to assimilate such information ourselves,
and to pass it on in our nightly conversations with them. Since our thoughts
and feelings are so readily mirrored in theirs, let us see to it that those
thoughts and feelings are always elevating and encouraging. "If ye know
these things, blessed are ye if ye do them."
Try to comprehend the unity of all. There is one God, and all are
one in Him. If we can bring home to ourselves the unity of that eternal Love,
there will be no more sorrow for us; for we shall realize, not for ourselves
alone but for those whom we love, that whether we live or die, we are the
Lord's and that in Him we live and move and have our being, whether it be in
this world or in the world to come. The attitude of mourning is a fruitless
attitude, an ignorant attitude. The more we know, the more fully we shall
trust, for we shall feel with utter certainty that we and our dead are alike in
the hands of perfect Power and perfect Wisdom directed by perfect Love.
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