Between the twilights : $b Being studies of Indian women by one of themselvesSorabji, Cornelia
General
Between the twilights : $b Being studies of Indian women by one of themselves
Sorabji, Cornelia
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
So, she cured herself of a serious illness during which, thinking it
(perhaps meaning it) to be her last, she had summoned to her side by
some telepathic power the faithful from all parts of North India. I say
“meaning,” because I am forced to believe that the Indian woman who has
her will in training can die at will: more rarely she can live at will.
Probably the latter is the rarer because, poor thing, she has so much
more incentive to die than to live.
Well, this time my Wisest of the Wise had elected to live after all.
Her choice was not incompatible with her faith in a God who held the
keys of Life and Death. It was only that, being given free will, it was
within her power to steal the key of the House of Death.
“Has one ever stolen the key of the House of Life?” I asked.
“I know of none such,” was the cautious answer of wisdom.
Then I--“Talk to me, Mother, of Life and Death. What is Life?”
And she--“A dream in the heart of a dream.... It is as if one should
sleep, and sleeping dream that he was dead. That dream within a dream
is this, that men call Life.”
“And Death?”
“To-morrow’s dream. The next-door house. God’s tenant am I in this
house in which you find me. But agreement I have none. God will tell
me to quit, nor give me notice. Death is but the house I next inhabit.
There will be other houses after that.” Death, it would seem, is but
a change of house, we have failed to repair the present tenement, or
it is too small for us, or our neighbourhood is unsuitable, so we are
given the chance of another, and after that, perchance, yet another and
another, through all the lives appointed to us. But our personalities
remain. We can never sink those.
Once again, she talked of Death as “the Innermost Dream--but we shall
wake.” “The end of the Death dream is only sleep, that is Life: when we
wake from life, it is to Life Eternal.”
“And what is that?”
“Rest--in the perfect attainment of all truth, of all knowledge and of
all reality.”
The body, I gather, is degradation to the soul. Any “house” is in a
measure degradation and belongs to the state of progress. Some day we
shall be free of all houses. We shall lose ourselves in the Great Soul.
That is the final “Twilight”--the time of Union for each individual
soul.
“Then shall there be no more Death.”...
She ceased speaking, my Wisest of the Wise, and silence fell between us
as we looked together at the dying Sun.
Oh! the gray and silver gray on the water. Oh! the gold, limpid,
liquid, lambent gold in the sky and on the water....
“And the King of Death is but the first Sunset.”...
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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