Death - and After? - Annie Besant (e book reading free .TXT) 📗

its nest, the rock, and man, is more and more
clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all
being found to be identical, chemical Science may well say
that there is no difference between the matter which composes
the ox and that which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is
far more explicit. It says: Not only the chemical compounds
are the same, but the same infinitesimal _invisible lives_
compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the
daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree
which shelters him from the sun. Each particle--whether you
call it organic or inorganic--_is a life_.[6]

These "lives" which, separate and independent, are the minute vehicles of Prana, aggregated together form the molecules and cells of the physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during all the years of bodily life, thus forming a continual bridge between man and his environment. Controlling these are the "Fiery Lives," the Devourers, which constrain these to their work of building up the cells of the body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man. These Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,[7] and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army; marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. At "Death" they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily
united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To
the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a
dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in
the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the
molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them
asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must
be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as
Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an
intense vital energy.... Says Eliphas Levi: "Change attests
movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would
not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which
compose it are living and struggle to separate."[8]

Those who have read _The Seven Principles of Man_,[9] know that the etheric double is the vehicle of Prana, the life-principle, or vitality. Through the etheric double Prana exercises the controlling and co-ordinating force spoken of above, and "Death" takes triumphant possession of the body when the etheric double is finally withdrawn and the delicate cord which unites it with the body is snapped. The process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and definitely described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, "the Poughkeepsie Seer", describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six hours after apparent death. Others have described, in similar terms, how they saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually condensing into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring person, and attached to that person by a glistening thread. The snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body, being left as a cast-off garment.

Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and--as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis--emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the conscious entity either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kamic or astral body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the excarnated condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that "life" does not depend on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man who has thus repeatedly "shed" his lower bodies, and has found the process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended freedom and vividness of life--why should he fear the final casting away of his fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he realises as the prison of the flesh?

This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric Philosophy. Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This living flame, passing out from the Central Fire, weaves for itself coverings within which it dwells, and thus becomes the Triad, the Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the reflection of the Immortal Self. This sends out its Ray, which becomes encased in grosser matter, in the desire body, or kamic elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric double and the physical body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus entangled, enswathed, enchained, works heavily and laboriously through the coatings that enwrap it. In its own nature it remains ever the free Bird of Heaven, but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into which it is plunged. When man recognises his own inherent nature, he learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his encircling gaol; first he learns to identify himself with the Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he knows the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at his own will. And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive, because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. The sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; at Death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. Short are the twilight periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but in our blinded state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real existence, while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought of passing into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man. Of the real Man he says:

He will be present in the body in such wise that the best
part of himself will be absent from it, and will join himself
by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things, in such a way
that he will not feel either love or hatred of things mortal.
Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be
servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as
the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue
which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands,
stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him
not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and
blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot
tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain
degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is
subject to the divinity and to nature.[10]

When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we gain our liberty, Death loses for us all his terrors, and at his touch the body slips from us as a garment, and we stand out from it erect and free.

On the same lines of thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:

According to certain views of the West man is a developed
ape. According to the views of Indian Sages, which also
coincide with those of the Philosophers of past ages and with
the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
united during his earthly life, through his own carnal
tendencies, to an animal (his animal nature). The God who
dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The animal endows
him with force. After death, _the God effects his own release
from the man_ by departing from the animal body. As man
carries within him this divine consciousness, it is his task
to battle with his animal inclinations, and to raise himself
above them, by the help of the divine principle, a task which
the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
demanded of it.[11]

The "man", using the word in the sense of personality, as it is used in the latter half of this sentence, is only conditionally immortal; the true man, the evolving God, releases himself, and so much of the personality goes with him as has raised itself into union with the divine.

The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives--previously held in constraint by Prana, acting through its vehicle the etheric double--begins to decay, that