Dealings with the Dead/Part 2/The Winged Globe-Soul
The Winged Globe—Soul.
With unmingled astonishment I gazed upon the man as he sat there in his quiet study. I had often been told that man was a microcosm, or a world in miniature; but closer observation proved to me that he was more than that—for, instead of a world, he was a universe of worlds and mysteries, a few of the latter of which were comprehended by me for the first time.
Standing thus, I reasoned after this wise: 'Unquestionably all the faculties and qualities pertaining to man, as we find him upon the earth, are the results of a design on the part of the august Mind which placed him here. The purpose and function of these faculties and qualities, are to subserve man's best interests, his proper unfolding, and the divine purpose—here; and, doubtless, when by death he shall be transported elsewhere, to meet a new destiny and act in a new drama, other qualities and faculties, adapted to his changed position, will be given him; or, if already latent, will be duly brought into action. Perhaps their seeds are already planted in him; if so, they will assuredly spring up at death, blossom in the Soul-world, and bear golden fruit in that place, and at that period of the infinite year, when God shall so ordain it. We none of us know what we fairly are; and no one, not even the loftiest seraphs, can tell positively what we shall be; yet, that man is re-served, and will through all his trials be pre-served, for some great, some yet undreamed-of destiny or end, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt. Nor will this final end be the mere eternal dwelling in the Valhallas, of which we sometimes dream; nor in the 'spheres,' about which 'spiritual mediums' so glibly talk, nor in the gold-paved cities whereof we so often sing. Our final destiny is none of these. Beyond all question, much of the knowledge acquired in the earth-life will be found at death to have served its purpose here, and will never again come into play
Not a single one of the grander, more noble longings and ambitions of the soul can find their field of action here; but they are deathless; and as God has provided a supply for every proper demand in all things else, so He has in this instance; and therefore, though the aspiring soul may pass away with its strong wings drooping and weak for want of exercise, yet, up there—in its grand heaven—the air is pure and the field immense, the mountains tall, and the oceans wide; and the eagle soul shall essay its loftiest flight, and grow stronger from the trial. What a person acquires here is but a prophecy of harvests to be reaped in the great hereafter.
Man is really a unitary being, but seemingly is duplex, and even multiple; but this is seeming only, for in fact there is but one real sense in man—which truth I learned as I gazed upon the student in the chamber; and that sense is intuition—the human sprout of an infinite and God-like faculty, dormant in most people, yet incontestibly destined to an immense unfolding in all; albeit, it is so deeply buried in some that it can only express itself through organs. "And God said, Let us make man in our own image;" and so He made him; but God is ubiquitous, omnipresent, omniscient—man is not; and yet, if Scripture be worthy of our regard, and Progress be not a sham and delusive dream, the tremendous prophecy implied in the line from Genesis just quoted is certainly to be realized; and man is destined to move, through thorny fields—and slowly, it may be yet still to move, towards Ubiquity and Omniscience! Intuition is the sprout of which they are the full tree. True, man shall never reach absolute godhood yet ever will he move toward it.
"If this be so," says the caviler, "and God be stationary, and not an advancing Being, there must come a time—even though when many a yet unborn eternity shall have grown hoary with age—still there must come a time when man will overtake Deity; and then there can no longer be a God!" Specious this, very! Why? Because God, though not a progressive Being, as we understand it, yet is infinite; and man must ever be finite. God's omniscience is what the word proclaims it—all-knowing; but man shall be much-knowing. He is forced to approach Perfection in straight lines, and when he shall have attained immense power in any given direction, there will still be forever germinating new faculties, before the untold millions of which there shall ever be an infinite stretch, a limitless field, an endless road. God also is kaleidescopic; and, supposing it were possible for man to reach the point of greatness at which Deity is to-day, yet one exertion of His volition—and, lo! He presents a new aspect to the wondering souls of infinitude, more marvelous than before, and reveals points which will place a new infinity between man and their attainability; and so on for all the epochs yet to be—epochs whereof eternities, as we understand them, shall only count as moments in the everlasting year. Death is but an awakening, and there are to be myriads of these.
All this I knew and felt; all these mighty foreshadowings flowed into my soul, as, with clarified intellect, and spirit bowed down with awe, I stood gazing at the man within the chamber. More: Reason, the king-faculty given us here, was only intended to act as our pilot through life, and will have fulfilled its main office when we step into the grave; but very soon after we step out of it, on the other side, the union of the senses begins to take place, and the Sense—whose elements are the senses—comes into play—the all-absorbing Intuition. This uni-faculty is not a thing of earthly origin, though it here deepens and grows strong; it was an integer of the original being—became a part of the soul at the very instant wherein it fell from God; it is a triple faculty, and its role is Prevision, Present-knowing, and Reminiscence.
The skin of a man is not himself, although whoever sees one, recognizes something human. Beneath this skin is the muscular system, interlaced with a magnificent net-work of nerves, all in the form of, yet by no means the man himself. Next we come to the osseous system—the skeleton—the God-fashioned framework of the house he lives in—and a house only—one, too, that is often let to bad tenants, seeing how zealously they abuse it and batter down its walls. Now, when we see a skeleton, we know it is something that points towards the human, yet do not for that reason, even momentarily, confound the bones with the individual; for we instinctively know that the wonderful occupant of this bony edifice is, and to bodily eyes will forever remain invisible. Whoever looks for a man, must go below and above skin, flesh, muscles, and bones, to find him. Well, let the searcher enter the domain of the senses—a country that lies a long distance beyond the nervo-osseous land. Ah! here is the man, somewhere in this region of sense. Let's see! one, two, three, five, or a dozen—no matter about counting them—yet nowhere in all this region have we found or can find the man. We are certainly nearer to him than we were awhile ago; yet, not finding him, we conclude to go a little further in the search. 'He dwells in the Faculties.' Not so; try again. 'In the passions.' Further still; not home yet. 'In God-like reason, and the quality-parlors of virtue, aspiration, expression—each one step nearer the goal.' Go a little deeper, and in the centre of the brain you will find a winged globe of celestial fire, in which dwells the Man!—his part of God crowded into less than three square inches of surface. Here is the seat of the soul; here is the Grand Dépôt, at which all the Nerve, and Thought, and. Knowing, Thinking and Feeling trains, and telegraphic lines converge and meet! This Winged Globe is a House of Many Mansions, eternal in itself; and the principal parlor, in the grandest palace of them all, is devoted to the Peerless Power—Intuition! Born in man, it often lies perdu, or latent, till the final passage, and never bursts into full activity at once, save in very rare instances, as in the case of those wonderful genii, Newton, La Place, and men of that order; and even in these, it is only partially active. It requires peculiar conditions for its expansion, just as the reasoning and other faculties require time and exercise. The soul is really a divine monad[1] a particle, so to speak, of the Divine brain—a celestial corruscation from the Eternal heart; and, for that reason, an eternal existence—immortality being its very essence, and expansion constituting its majestic nature; and the Soul, this monad, was once an integer of God himself—was sent forth by His fiat—became incarnated and an individual, separate and distinct from, yet having strong affinities for all things material—stronger for all things spiritual, and for its brethren—and an attraction toward its ultimate Source stronger than all else beside. Here, then, I lay bare the very corner-stone of the splendid Temple of Progress, whose foundations are laid in Time, but whose turrets catch the gleams from the Eternal Sun of suns, whose warming rays diffuse themselves over every starry island in the tremendous Ocean of Being!
Intuition is but an awakening of the inmost soul to an active personal consciousness of what it knew by virtue of its Divine genesis.
Suffering appears to be one means toward this awakening, and the consequent intensification of the individuality and the passions of man, labor, and evil, are also agents to this end.
Man is beset by evil on all sides, doubtless to the end that, in shunning it, and conserving the self-hood, he may effect the earliest possible completion and rounding out of his entire being, and, consequently, be all the better prepared to encounter the immense destiny that lies before him in the Hereafter. * * * * * * And I gazed upon the man within the chamber; the weather to him—but not to me, for I was totally unaffected—seemed to be oppressively warm; and it was exceedingly difficult for him, after a while, to overcome the somnolent or drowsy influence thus induced, and prevent himself from falling asleep. However, he made strenuous efforts to conquer the tendency, and for a time it was mastered; but, in the struggle between himself and the slumber-fay, a secret was disclosed to me, and another beautiful arcanum of the human economy revealed.
The student of these pages will remember that erewhile I mentioned the astonishing fact—one of great value to all who think—that I was as a perfectly disembodied soul during the experience now recounted, and could and did behold, at one and the same time, both the external and the essential part of whatever my glance fell upon. The reader will perhaps arrive at a clearer understanding of what is here meant to be conveyed if this double power be thus illustrated: A person may look through one glass vase at several others, many colored, within it, the last of which contains the image of a man, in still finer glass,—his eye resting upon the surface of each particular vase, yet at the same time penetrating and grasping the whole. Thus it was in the present case: I saw,—and what obtained of that student in the room obtains of all immortal beings,—the clothes; beneath the clothing his body; and interfilling that, as water does a sponge, I beheld the spiritual man.
Here let me define a few terms: Body is that which is purely material, corporeal, dense, weighable, atomical or particled; spirit is a thing of triplicity: in the most external sense, that which interpenetrates, flows through, from, and constitutes the life of material existences is spirit; second, the great menstruum in which the universe floats and has its being is spirit, but vastly different from the foregoing; and third, the mental operations, as well as their results, are spiritual—a man's thought, for instance. Great care must be taken to distinguish these last two from the first, which is the effluvium from, or surrounding aura of all material forms and things. Soul is that more stately principle and thing which thinks, feels, tastes, sees, knows, aspires, suffers, hates, loves, fears, calculates and enjoys.
Hoping that these definitions will be retained, and that my meaning only will be given to the terms used, we will now proceed. I became a rapt observer, not of the man in the study, as a person, but as a rare mechanism. The clothes he wore, emitted a dull, faint, leaden-hued cloud, perfectly transparent, and extending about three inches from their surface in all directions. His body was apparently composed of orange-colored flame, and its emanations reached to the distance of fifteen feet on all sides; it penetrated the wood-work, walls, chairs, tables,—all with which it came in contact; and I noticed two facts: first, that its form was an oblate spheroid, and second, that a portion of it adhered to whatever he touched.
Thus it is true that a man leaves a portion of himself wherever he may chance to go: this explains why a dog is enabled to trace his master through the streets of a crowded city. * * * * * When the man rose to silence the noise of his children, I discerned the form of this sphere, in the centre of a similar one of which every created being stands. Its poles were the head and feet, and its equator, whose bulge exceeded the polar dimensions about one-fortieth, was directly on the plane of the abdominal centre. This sphere penetrated that of the clothes; and, although it was so marvelously fine, still it, like its exemplar—a large soap-bubble—appeared to be particled, or heterogeneous. Within the physical body of the man there was a second,—itself constituting another human form, like the vase within a vase. The substance of this last was beautiful and pearly; its mass was apparently in perfect coalescence,—indivisible, atomless and unparticled. This was the man's true shell—his house, his home,—the outbirth of, but not the man himself.
And now the question is asked me: "What constitutes the ego: what is the man?" The answer is: Soul is a thing sui generis, and unique. Sight, taste, and the senses generally, are some of its properties; reflection, reason, and fancy are a few of its qualities;—judgment its prerogative;—physical scenes its theatre;—earthly experience its school;—and the second life its university, whence it will graduate to—what? This shall bye-and-bye be answered. Time is but one of a vast multitude of other phases of existence, through which it yet must pass. We know something about its propensities, powers, methods and qualities; but only a very little about the soul itself. We realize somewhat of its accidents and incidents, and not much else beside. Most assuredly, modern "Spiritualism" has not added much to our knowledge; it may do so in the future, but some of us do not like to wait.
The human being may be likened unto a circular avenue, divided by a central wall, which separates the known from the unknown. We begin at the centre of this wall, our conscious point, and look toward the outer edge of the circle; we see one hemisphere, and one only. What pertains to the other hemisphere,—the one behind this conscious point? Make the trial to ascertain what lies on the thither side; seek to fathom the soul within you, and what results? Why the wall is reached, nothing more; you strike it, think it, feel of it, but cannot recede from nor look behind yourself. But that there is a greater mystery behind than the one before you is proved by the fact that your entire being is but the result of an infinite, propulsive power, which whirled you into being, but will never hurl you out. There is a point reachable, quite beyond that of outer consciousness. Well, the man strove to baffle the tendency to somnolence. His brain was one living mass of phosphor-like luminescence; there was a large and brilliant globe, apparently of white fire-mist, encompassing the head. Its center rested exactly on what anatomists call the corpus callosum; and this body—this central cerebral viscus—I affirm to be the seat of consciousness,—Soul!
On other occasions I have beheld similar bright globes of what can only be compared to pure fire. Others claim to have witnessed the same; they have described it, and uniformly, nay, invariably locate this ball on the precise spot indicated. The volume of this singular something, varies in different people, from the bulk of a large pea to some three or four inches in mean diameter, in which latter case it, of course, has only its axis in the place indicated, while its body penetrates the circumjacent brain. The effulgence, as the volume, also varies in different persons. In some it is, comparatively speaking, no brighter than the flame of a good candle, while in others it is an infinite intensification of the dazzling radiance of the Drummond or the calcium light. In the man before me this globe was nearly a perfect sphere; in other instances I have observed its shape to be somewhat angular. The better the person, the greater the intelligence (intuitive, not mere memory-learning), the larger, smoother, and rounder is this wondrous Soul-Sun.[2]
In the student I beheld the operations of this great mystery; whenever the drowsiness came over him—and he exerted his will to keep it off—I noticed that one side of this winged globe (for there were two wing-like appendages attached thereto, something like the connections of the uterus) would collapse, and straightway a perfect stream of radiant fire-flecks went forth in the opposite direction, like spark-rays from the sun. These corruscations sped through all parts of the brain, causing it to sparkle more brightly; they ran along the nerves, leaped to the muscles, and diffused new life and animation throughout the body,—which being accomplished, the globe resumed its former shape again. This struck me as being at once both sublime and curious; but something still more so now took place.
As I observed above, when he strove to keep awake, the globe became indented, from the outside, which was generally smooth,—albeit a countless multitude of filmy rays of light streamed forth in all directions—the surface meanwhile retaining its polished, burnished, and ineffably dazzling general appearance.
The man laid down his book, lifted a pen, dipped it in the inkstand, held it over the table for a while, and appeared to be concentrating his thoughts; and while he did so the winged globe within his head began to enlarge until it occupied not less than four times its original space within the brain. This it did gradually, and as gradually resumed its former bulk; but, in the mean time, his hand had flown over the paper, and the man had indited a Thought! Anxious to know what this thought was, I looked upon the paper, and was surprised by observing a very curious phenomenon. The words written upon the paper were: "The ancients were far behind the moderns in general intelligence, but far, very far beyond them in isolated instances of mental power. Probably the simplicity of the lives of devout men of yore had a powerful influence in bringing out the concealed treasures, and in developing the extraordinary conceptive power which not a few of them undoubtedly possessed. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job and the great Cathayan have never been equaled, in their several specialties, by men of later times; it is extremely doubtful if they ever will be. Really great men are few and scarce in any age, but popular men are plentiful in all eras. It is only the sad-hearted man,—he who stands and walks alone in the crowded cities of the world, shunned, laughed at, derided, scorned and unsupported,—who succeeds in engraving a name upon the walls of Time; and of all that ever lived, Jesus, the Nazarene, looms up in such magnificent proportions, over the edges of the dead years, that we instinctively know that he was a real personage,—one who lived and loved, suffered and died with, for, and among men; and we reject the absurdities of Strauss and the Cavilers, and triumphantly proclaim that Jesus was not a myth. He sought to do good, and not to merit the plaudits of the mob, or of those who rule. A popular man is one who keeps just within the front ranks of the human army, leading it whither its fancy and whim may at the moment prompt; but a great man is one who volunteers to become the pioneer of the race, and is, at the same time, the Herald of the coming age of Goodness. He feels the pulse of God in his heart—and he knows to live and lives to know. "We are approaching an era when human genius shall be the rule, and not the exception, as now. When that day shall dawn, the earth will fully blossom. It has painfully labored heretofore, and brought forth abortions—perfect, seemingly, to their contemporaries, but, in view of her yet untested energies, abortions still."
Now, the ink had scarcely dried upon the paper, and yet the dark violet of the aura, emitted by it when in the inkstand, and which rose from the paper wherever the pen touched it, was almost immediately obscured by a far brighter one, which proceeded from the general writing; by which I discovered that thoughts were living things, endowed with a being in themselves! This thought was really a part of the man himself. I beheld a small cell within the winged globe open and emit a line of fire, which leaped to one of the cerebral organs, passing up one of the fibrils and down the other—thence to a nerve along it to the arm, the pen, and to the paper, where it became diffused and sealed in the inky letters. And at that moment it came to me, from the far-off regions of positive Knowledge, that, should the paper containing the ideas be burnt, yet the thought itself could never perish, because it was part and parcel of a Soul; but it would float about in the human world—at some time be absorbed into a human soul, undergo a new gestation, and in due time be born again into the conscious realm around us.
Much more the man wrote; but at length his weary task and the sultry weather overpowered him, and, rising from his seat, he closed the blinds, threw himself upon the lounge, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. While watching the process, I became aware, for the first time, that I was being practically educated by a glorious being—an inhabitant of the Soul-world—whose presence was now made clear, direct and palpable. This bright one conversed with me by a process not easily explained, but an idea of which may be gained if we call it infusion of thought. His lips moved not, and yet the full meaning he intended, was transmitted, even more perfectly than if by the use of words. Such beings can speak, but not so effectively as by the silent language.
The object of his visit, he said, was to instruct me in certain essentials with reference to future usefulness on my part, but principally that the world might gain certain needed light upon the soul, and its career, through a book or books thereafter to be written. His name, he said, was Ramus—that, in history, he was best known as Thothmes, or Thotmor, and that he was an Egyptian, of the second dynasty—a king, and the eleventh of the line.
This was all I learned of him at that time; for after the brief introduction, he pointed toward the man upon the sofa, and bade me "Look!" The man was wrapt in deep sleep, and the winged globe within his head was rapidly altering its shape. First, it flattened out to a disk; this disc concaved toward the skull; then it put forth a point in the direction of the medulla oblongata, into which it rapidly passed, entered the spinal-marrow, and ran along the vertebras until it reached the vicinity of the stomach. Here it left, and instantly immerged itself within the solar plexus. The man was in a death-like, dreamless slumber. "The soul," said Thotmor, "has gone to infuse new life throughout the physical body, in doing which it also recuperates its own energies. Souls can grow tired, but they find rest—not in inactivity, as doth the body, but by a change of action. The mathematician, weary of figures, finds repose by performing chemical experiments or in studying music. That man's soul is now supplying fuel to the body, by converting the essences of his system into the pabulum of rife. Presently its task will be finished, whereupon it will again resume its seat upon the regal throne of its own mighty world." * * * * *
Thotmor ceased to speak. I turned from the sleeper in wondering awe, and, guided by the rare being at my side, felt that I was once more rising through the air.
- ↑ Monad—first definition, an ultimate atom; a simple substance without parts, indivisible, a primary constituent of matter. Second definition a monad is not a material, but a formal atom, it being impossible for a thing to be at once material and possessed of a real unity and indivisibility.
- ↑ This central globe is the sun of the microcosm; a duller globe of fire, situated behind the stomach, in the Solar Plexus, is its moon, and the Sensations are the meteors, &c., &c., there being not merely a perfect correspondence, but a wonderful similarity, complete and full, between the universe without and the universe within.