On this subject, Blavatsky wrote the following:
« We find in a very old letter from a Master, written
years ago to a member of the Theosophical Society, the following suggestive
lines on the mental state of a dying man:
« At the last
moment, the whole life is reflected in our memory and emerges from all the
forgotten nooks and corners picture after picture, one event after the other.
The dying brain dislodges memory with a strong supreme impulse, and
memory restores faithfully every impression entrusted to it during the period
of the brain’s activity. That impression and thought which was the strongest
naturally becomes the most vivid and survives so to say all the rest which now
vanish and disappear for ever, to reappear but in Devachan.
No man dies insane or unconscious — as some physiologists assert. Even a
madman, or one in a fit of delirium tremens will have his instant of perfect
lucidity at the moment of death, though unable to say so to those present.
The man may often appear dead. Yet from the last pulsation, from and
between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when the last spark of
animal heat leaves the body — the brain thinks and the Ego lives over in those
few brief seconds — his whole life again.
Speak in whispers, ye, who assist at a death-bed and find yourselves in
the solemn presence of Death. Especially have you to keep quiet just after
Death has laid her clammy hand upon the body.
Speak in whispers, I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought,
and hinder the busy work of the Past casting on its reflection upon the veil of
the Future...»
The above statement has been more than once strenuously opposed by
materialists; Biology and (Scientific) Psychology, it was urged, were both
against the idea, and while the latter had no well-demonstrated data to go upon
in such a hypothesis, the former dismissed the idea as an empty “superstition.”
Meanwhile, even biology is bound to progress, and this is what we learn of its
latest achievements.
Dr. Ferré has communicated quite recently to the Biological Society of
Paris a very curious note on the mental state of the dying, which marvellously
corroborates the above lines. For, it is to the special phenomenon of
life-reminiscences, and that sudden re-emerging on the blank walls of memory,
from all its long neglected and forgotten “nooks and corners,” of “picture
after picture” that Dr. Ferré draws the special attention of biologists.
We need notice but two among the numerous instances given by this
Scientist in his Rapport, to show how scientifically correct are the teachings
we receive from our Eastern Masters.
1) The first instance is that of a moribund consumptive whose disease
was developed in consequence of a spinal affection. Already consciousness had
left the man, when, recalled to life by two successive injections of a gramme
of ether, the patient slightly lifted his head and began talking rapidly in
Flemish, a language no one around him, nor yet himself, understood.
Offered a pencil and a piece of white cardboard, he wrote with great
rapidity several lines in that language (very correctly, as was ascertained
later on) fell back, and died. When translated — the writing was found to refer
to a very prosaic affair. He had suddenly recollected, he wrote, that he owed a
certain man a sum of fifteen francs since 1868 (hence more than twenty years)
and desired it to be paid.
But why write his last wish in
Flemish?
The defunct was a native of Antwerp, but had left his country in
childhood, without ever knowing the language, and having passed all his life in
Paris, could speak and write only in French.
Evidently his returning consciousness, that last flash of memory that
displayed before him, as in a retrospective panorama, all his life, even to the
trifling fact of his having borrowed twenty years back a few francs from a
friend, did not emanate from his physical brain alone, but rather from his
spiritual memory, that of the Higher Ego (Manas or the re-incarnating
individuality).
The fact of his speaking and writing Flemish, a language that he had
heard at a time of life when he could not yet speak himself, is an additional
proof. The EGO is almost omniscient in its immortal nature. For indeed matter
is nothing more than “the last degree and as the shadow of existence,” as
Ravaisson, member of the French Institute, tells us.
2) But to our second case.
Another patient, dying of pulmonary consumption and likewise re-animated
by an injection of ether, turned his head towards his wife and rapidly said to
her:
-
“You cannot find that pin now; all the floor has been
renewed since then.”
This was in reference to the loss of a scarf pin eighteen years before,
a fact so trifling that it had almost been forgotten, but which had not failed
to be revived in the last thought of the dying man, who having expressed what
he saw in words, suddenly stopped and breathed his last.
Thus any one of the thousand little daily events, and accidents of a
long life would seem capable of being recalled to the flickering consciousness,
at the supreme moment of dissolution. A long life, perhaps, lived over again in
the space of one short second!
3) A third case may be noticed, which corroborates still more strongly
that assertion of Occultism which traces all such remembrances to the
thought-power of the individual, instead of to that of the personal (lower)
Ego.
A young girl, who had been a sleepwalker up to her twenty-second year,
performed during her hours of somnambulic sleep the most varied functions of
domestic life, of which she had no remembrance upon awakening.
Among other psychic impulses that manifested themselves only during her
sleep, was a secretive tendency quite alien to her waking state. During the
latter she was open and frank to a degree, and very careless of her personal
property; but in the somnambulic state she would take articles belonging to
herself or within her reach and hide them away with ingenious cunning.
This habit being known to her friends and relatives, and two nurses,
having been in attendance to watch her actions during her right rambles for
years, nothing disappeared but what could be easily restored to its usual
place.
But on one sultry night, the nurse falling asleep, the young girl got up
and went to her father's study. The latter, a notary of fame, had been working
till a late hour that night. It was during a momentary absence from his room
that the somnambule entered, and deliberately possessed herself of a will left
open upon the desk, as also of a sum of several thousand pounds in bonds and
notes.
These she proceeded to hide in the hollow of two dummy pillars set up in
the library to match the solid ones, and stealing from the room before her
father’s return, she regained her chamber and bed without awakening the nurse
who was still asleep in the armchair.
The result was, that, as the nurse stoutly denied that her young
mistress had left the room, suspicion was diverted from the real culprit and
the money could not be recovered.
The loss of the will involved a lawsuit which almost beggared her father
and entirely ruined his reputation, and the family were reduced to great
straits.
About nine years later the young girl who, during the previous seven
years had not been somnambulic, fell into consumption of which she ultimately
died. Upon her death-bed, the veil which had hung before her physical memory
was raised; her divine insight awakened; the pictures of her life came
streaming back before her inner eye; and among others she saw the scene of her
somnambulic robbery.
Suddenly arousing herself from the lethargy in which she had lain for
several hours, her face showed signs of some terrible emotion working within,
and she cried out:
-
“Ah! what have I done? . . . It was I who took the
will and the money . . . Go search the dummy pillars in the library, I have . .
.”
She never finished her sentence for her very emotion killed her. But the
search was made and the will and money found within the oaken pillars as she
had said.
What makes the case more strange is, that these pillars were so high,
that even by standing upon a chair and with plenty of time at her disposal
instead of only a few moments, the somnambulist could not have reached up and
dropped the objects into the hollow columns.
It is to be noted, however, that ecstatics and convulsionists (Vide the Convulsionnaires de St. Médard et de
Morzîne) seem to possess an abnormal facility for climbing blank walls and
leaping even to the tops of trees.
Taking the facts as stated, would they not induce one to believe that
the somnambulic personage possesses an intelligence and memory of its own apart
from the physical memory of the waking lower Self; and that it is the former
which remembers in articulo mortis,
the body and physical senses in the latter case ceasing to function, and the
intelligence gradually making its final escape through the avenue of psychic,
and last of all of spiritual consciousness?
And why not?
Even materialistic science begins now to concede to psychology more than
one fact that would have vainly begged of it recognition twenty years ago.
Ravaisson tells us:
-
“The real existence, the life of which every other
life is but an imperfect outline, a faint sketch, is that of the Soul.”
That which the public in general calls “soul,” we speak of as the
“reincarnating Ego.”
“To be, is to live, and to live is to will and think,” says the French
Scientist. But, if indeed the physical brain is of only a limited area, the
field for the containment of rapid flashes of unlimited and infinite thought,
neither will nor thought can be said to be generated within it, even according
to materialistic Science, the impassable chasm between matter and mind having
been confessed both by Tyndall and many others.
The fact is that the human brain is simply the canal between two planes —
the psycho-spiritual and the material — through which every abstract and
metaphysical idea filters from the Manasic down to the lower human
consciousness. Therefore, the ideas about the infinite and the absolute are
not, nor can they be, within our brain capacities.
They can be faithfully mirrored only by our Spiritual consciousness,
thence to be more or less faintly projected onto the tables of our perceptions
on this plane.
Thus while the records of even important events are often obliterated
from our memory, not the most trifling action of our lives can disappear from
the “Soul’s” memory, because it is no MEMORY for it, but an ever present
reality on the plane which lies outside our conceptions of space and time.
“Man is the measure of all
things,” said Aristotle; and surely he did not mean by man, the form of flesh,
bones and muscles!
Of all the deep thinkers Edgard Quinet, the author of La Création, expressed this idea the
best. Speaking of man, full of feelings and thoughts of which he has either no
consciousness at all, or which he feels only as dim and hazy impressions, he
shows that man realizes quite a small portion only of his moral being.
“The thoughts we think, but are unable to define and formulate, once
repelled, seek refuge in the very root of our being.” . . . When chased by the
persistent efforts of our will “they retreat before it, still further, still
deeper into — who knows what — fibres, but wherein they remain to reign and
impress us unbidden and unknown to ourselves . . .”
Yes; they become as imperceptible and as unreachable as the vibrations
of sound and colour when these surpass the normal range. Unseen and eluding
grasp, they yet work, and thus lay the foundations of our future actions and
thoughts, and obtain mastery over us, though we may never think of them and are
often ignorant of their very being and presence.
Nowhere does Quinet, the great student of Nature, seem more right in his
observations than when speaking of the mysteries with which we are all
surrounded:
“The mysteries of neither earth nor heaven but those present in the
marrow of our bones, in our brain cells, our nerves and fibres. No need,” he
adds, “in order to search for the unknown, to lose ourselves in the realm of
the stars, when here, near us and in us, rests the unreachable . . . As our
world is mostly formed of imperceptible beings which are the real constructors
of its continents, so likewise is man.”
Verily so; since man is a bundle of obscure, and to himself unconscious
perceptions, of indefinite feelings and misunderstood emotions, of
ever-forgotten memories and knowledge that becomes on the surface of his plane —
ignorance.
Yet while physical memory in a healthy living man is often obscured, one
fact crowding out another weaker one, at the moment of the great change that
man calls death — that which we call “memory” seems to return to us in all its
vigour and freshness.
May this not be due as just said,
simply to the fact that, for a few seconds at least, our two memories (or
rather the two states, the highest and the lowest state, of consciousness)
blend together, thus forming one, and that the dying finds himself on a plane
wherein there is neither past nor future, but all is one present?
Memory, as we all know, is strongest with regard to its early
associations, then when the future man is only a child, and more of a soul than
of a body; and if memory is a part of our Soul, then, as Thackeray has
somewhere said, it must be of necessity eternal.
Scientists deny this; we, Theosophists, affirm that it is so. They have
for what they hold but negative proofs; we have, to support us, innumerable
facts of the kind just instanced, in the three cases described by us.
The links of the chain of cause and effect with relation to mind are,
and must ever remain a terra incognita to the materialist. For if they have
already acquired a deep conviction that as Pope says:
-
“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain. Our
thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain . . .”
And that they are still unable to discover these chains, how can they
hope to unravel the mysteries of the higher, Spiritual, Mind! »
(This article was first publishes in Lucifer, Vol. V, No. 26, October,
1889, p.125-129; later in Blavatsky Collected
Writings XI, p.446-453)
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