Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins fall from our
hands. But it sometimes happens that the horse knows the road home
even better than we know it ourselves.
He puts "the horse" outside of the dreamer plainly enough here. He further
says (p. 280).
If we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming,
subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping,
life which may be said to be limited.... Sleep, Vaschide has said,
is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and,
it may be added, the elder brother....
He quotes from Bergson (_Revue Philosophique_, December, 1908, p. 574):
This dream state is the substratum of our normal state. Nothing is
added in waking life; on the contrary, waking life is obtained by
the limitation, concentration, and tension of that diffuse
psychological life which is the life of dreaming.... To be awake
is to will; cease to will, detach yourself from life, become
disinterested: in so doing you pass from the waking ego to the
dreaming ego, which is less _tense_, but more _extended_ than the
other.
Ellis continues (p. 281):
I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and
it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path
of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the
universe.
But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the records of
dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing new--nothing to
relieve man from the blessed necessity of eating his bread, intellectual
as well as material, in the sweat of his brow; and, perhaps more important
still, little to make the interests or responsibilities of this life
weaker because of any realized inferiority to those of a possible later
life.
It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you prefer, to
start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating us in knowledge
and character through labor and suffering, but at the same time throwing
open to our perceptions, from another life, a wider range of knowledge and
character attainable without labor or suffering.
I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who deny a plan
in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from Nature. It appears to
have been a part of that plan that for a long time past most of us should
"believe in" immortality, and that, at least until very lately, none of us
should know anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a
dangerous thing. So far we haven't all made a very good use of it. Many of
the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most with it, so
to speak, have largely transferred their interests to the other life, and
neglected and abused this one. "Other-worldliness" is a well-named vice,
and positive evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere
confidence in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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