present we know of the future? As our former state is in relation to the present, so is the relation of our present state to the future. Lichtenberg.
7, You came into this world not knowing how, but you know that you came into this world the possessor of that specific "I" which you are; then you walked along the path of life, and suddenly midway, half in joy, half in fear, you balk and refuse to budge because you can not see what is "there." But you had not seen even this world into which you came, and still you came. You entered through the entrance gate, but refuse to pass through the exit gate. All your life consisted of going onward and onward in bodily life. And you marched on, hurriedly at times, and now you grieve because that is happening which you have been doing right along. You are appalled by the dreadful change which will take place in your body at death. But as great a change occurred to you also when you were bom, and it showed no ill effects—in fact it turned out so well that you hate to part from your state.
V.
Death Frees the Soul from the Confines of
Personality
1. Death is a release from the onesidedness of personality.
To this doubtless is due the appearance of peace and serenity on the faces of the deceased. Calm and peaceful is as a rule the death of a good man. But to die readily, willingly, joyfully is the prerogative of him who has renounced himself, of him who has renounced the life of personality, who abnegates it. For only such a man really and
not seemingly desires death and therefore neither requires nor demands a further existence of his personality.
Schopenhauer.
2. The consciousness of all that is confined within the body of the individual strives to expand its boimdaries. . Herein is the first half of human life. Man in the first half of his life manifests an increasing love of objects and persons; that is exceeding his own boundaries, he transfers his consciousness to other beings.
But love as he may, he can not leave his boundaries and only in death sees the possibility of their obliteration. How then should he in view of this fear death? The process is somewhat similar to that of the metamorphosis of a butterfly from a caterpillar. We are as caterpillars; we are first born, then fall into the sleep of a chrysalis. But we know ourselves as butterflies in the life to come.
3. Our body confines within its boundaries that divine principle which we call our soul. And these boundaries, like a vessel giving form to the liquid or the gas contained therein, gives this divine principle its outward form. When the vessel is broken that which is contained therein ceases to have the form which it had and escapes. Does it combine with other substances? Does it receive a new form? We know nothing of that, but we know for a certainty that it loses the form which it had in its former confinement, because that which confined it has been destroyed. This we know, but we can not know what happens to that which has been confined. We only know that the soul after death becomes something else, but what—^this we have no means in the present life of judging.
4. Some say: "True immortality is only such wherein my personality is retained." But my personality is the very
thing that is most loathsome to me in this world, and from which alt through life I have sought to be delivered,
5. If life is a dream, and death an awakening, then the fact that I see myself separated from everything in matter is a dream from which I hope to awake in dying.
6. It is only then a joy to die when you weary of jrour separateness from the world, when you realize the whole horror of separateness and the joy if not of uniting with all, then at least of escape from the prison house of separateness in this life, where you only rarely commune with others through the passing sparks of love.
One so longs to say: "Enough of this cage. Give me another relationship to the world, more appropriate to my soul. And I know that death will give it to me. And yet they try to comfort me with the assurance that even there I shall remain a personality."
7. Beneath my feet is solid ground, frozen with the cold of the winter, around me are trees of gigantic growth, above me an overcast sky; I feel my body; thoughts surge through my mind, hut I know, I feel in every fibre of my being that all of these things—the solid and frozen ground, the trees and the sky, my body and my thoughts—are but accidents, that they are all the product of my five senses, of my imagination—a world created by myself, and all of this is because I form this and not a different particle of the world, because such is the form of my separateness from the world. I know that I have but to die, and all of these things will not vanish but change their form, like a change of scene in a theatre, where out of bushes and stones palaces and towers are formed. Such will be the trans-formation wrought in me by death, if I only am not totally destroyed, but pass into another being differently separated from the world. And then the whole world, remaining un-
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changed for those who are left to live in it, will yet be changed for me. The whole world is such and not different because I consider myself to be just such a creature and not a different one, just so separated from the world and not differently. And there is no end to the number of forms of separation of creatures from the world.
VI.
Death Reveals that Which Had Been Unfathomable
1. The longer a man lives, the more life reveals itself to him. That which had been unknown, becomes known. And so until death. But in death all is revealed that man can know.
2. Something reveals itself to the dying man in the moment of death. "Is that it?" This is the expression which we nearly always seem to read in the features of the dying man. But we who remain can not see that which has been revealed to him. It will be revealed to us also when the time comes.
3. All things are revealed, while you live, in the manner of a uniform ascent to higher and higher levels by regular steps. But when death comes, that which was formerly revealed suddenly ceased to reveal itself, or he who received the revelations ceases to see that which was for-merely revealed, because he sees something new, something entirely different.
4. That which is dying is in part already a partaker of eternity. It seems as though the dying man speaks to us from beyond the tomb.
That which he says seems to us a commandment. We picture him almost as a prophet. It is evident that for him who feels life ebbing away and the tomb opening up be-
THE PATHWAY OF LIFE
fore him the time of portentous speech has arrived. The essence of his nature must manifest itself. The divine principle that is within him can no longer remain in hiding.
Amiel.
5. All misfortunes reveal to us that divine, immortal, self-contained principle which forms the basis of our life. But the paramount misfortune—^as people judge it to be— death—reveals to us fully our true "I."
The life of man and its blessedness consist in the ever closer union of the soul, which is through its body separated from other souls and from God, with that from which it is separated. This union is effected by the soul as it manifests itself through love and ever more frees itself from the body. And therefore if man realizes that in this release of the soul from the body lies his life and its blessedness, his life in spite of all misfortunes, sufferings or ailments can not be anything else but a state of uninterrupted blessedness.
I.
Life is the Highest Blessing Attainable to Man
1. Life, whatever its course, is a blessing than which there is no higher. If we say at all that life is an evil we only say so in comparison with another, an imaginary and better life. But we know no other or better life, nor can we know it, and therefore life, whatever its course, is the highest blessing for us.
2. We frequently despise the blessing of this life, anticipating a higher blessing somewhere else. But no such higher blessing can exist anywhere, for in our life we have been granted so great a blessing—^the blessing of life—than which nothing is, nothing can be higher.