There is another grand division of my subject, but the difficulty of
presenting it through the medium of written language is even greater
than that already dealt with, and only a slight attempt will now be
made. Not only do thoughts take the place of timings in the Beyond, but
_emotions take the place of forces_. By emotions in this connection I
mean those currents of energy which have their rise in, and are more or
less under the control of individualized intelligence, as love and hate,
joy and sorrow, hope and fear, happiness and distress; and by forces I
mean those which are sometimes called blind forces, such as attraction
in its various forms, heat, electric vibration, and the like. As these
last pertain especially to matter, we should expect them to retire into
the background in a world where mind-realities, or facts of
consciousness, absolutely dominate. And so they do. And here may be a
good place to indicate what part matter really plays in this immaterial
world. Let me call attention to the world of art. Let us recall its
great names, and the masterpieces which have given them fame, the
wonderful poems, the paintings, the sculpture, and the musical creations
that will never die, and then pause and consider how slight are the
demands made by this wonder-world on the lower world of matter. The poet
and the musician call for writing materials, the sculptor needs some
clay and a few modeling tools, the painter some pigments and brushes,
and a bit of canvas. With these slight aids the noble conceptions of
genius are materialized for the delight of future generations.
Take another illustration. When a ship goes out of the harbor, it is to
be assumed that she takes her anchor with her, and carefully guards it
against possible loss.
It is likewise true that within the scope of the great and splendid
activities of a free spirit, a material anchor is somewhere safely cared
for, yet such an anchor has no more prominent relation to the activities
of the spirit than the anchor of a ship has to the ship's power to cross
the sea. If we could think of a ship with nothing else to do but to lie
around the harbor, the relative importance of the anchor would increase
very much; and if it had no anchor of its own, it might attempt to tie
up to some other vessel that had one. And so with earth-bound spirits
whose testimony is sometimes quoted to the effect that spirit-life is
as dependent on matter as any other. Most of them are blissfully
ignorant of their own poverty, and move about the earth, that is to say
in the lower or earthly strata of thoughts and feelings, because they
have no desires above them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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