THE RIDDLE OF ETERNITY

THE ROAD

TO IMMORTALITY

Being a description of the after-life

purporting to be communicated by the late

F. W. H. Myers

[Frederic William Henry Myers, 1843-1901]

through

GERALDINE CUMMINS

"For it has been my lot to be concerned in a work more important and more successful than anything in my own capacity or character could have led me to expect. I have been one of the central group concerned in a great endeavour; the endeavour to pierce, by scientific methods, the world-old, never-penetrated veil. The movement which took overt shape in 1882, with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, was aided indeed by help from other quarters, but in its essential character was the conception of a few minds, and was piloted through its early dangers by a small group of intimate friends. With this endeavour to learn the actual truth as to the destiny of man I have from the very first been identified and, so to say, incorporate. Edmund Gurney worked at the task with more conscientious energy; the Sidgwicks with more unselfish wisdom; but no one more unreservedly than myself has staked his all upon that distant and growing hope." --Frederic Myers

Part I

Comment 9

I Why? 10

II The Chart of Existence 13

III The Plane of Illusion 15

IV Consciousness 30

V The Plane of Colour (the World of Eidos) 34

VI The Group-Soul 42

VII The Plane of Flame 47

VIII The Plane of White Light 51

IX Out Yonder, Timelessness 52

X The Universe 54

XI From the World of Eidos 57

XII The Incident of Death 58

XIII The Evolution of the Psyche 71

Part II

XIV Free Will 77

XV Memory 79

XVI The Great Memory 85

XVII Attention 87

XVIII The Subliminal Self 89

XIX Sleep 95

XX Telepathy 100

XXI The Interpenetration of Thought between the Two Worlds 103

XXII Happiness 109

XXIII God is Greater than Love 112

PART I

EXISTENCE AFTER DEATH

COMMENT

IN writing of that mystery men call "The Other World," "Existence after Death," or "Our Father's many Mansions," I am, you will understand, limited by what I know, limited by my own experiences. So I can only endeavour to write of the truth as I perceive it. You must pardon me if I seem to blaspheme, or if I seem merely to be treading the path others have trod.

We are working, I hope, for the same end. We both feel, perhaps, that if we can add anything to the sum of human knowledge, as regards man's spiritual nature, our pains and our labours are worth while. You and I may not have the power to bring about sensational happenings, but at least we can, in our small way, help in the furtherance of the knowledge that there are vast horizons quite beyond our perception, stretching limitless into the infinite.

These stray remarks of mine are the expression of my own "other world" knowledge. I can only retail to you the truth as I know it. Many and varied are the conditions that prevail when the soul comes alive in this world, or in one of the states to which we are subject after death. I use advisedly the term "comes alive" in connection with the soul. For the soul seems to us as dead when it lives in its body of clay as we would seem to the average agnostic. It is certainly true that many of us shades almost doubt the existence of a soul in the bodies of certain men and women of the low animal kind, who live, in the physical sense, on earth at the present moment.

Chapter I

WHY?

THE RIDDLE OF ETERNITY

MANY wonderful speculations have been made about the whence and whither of man's destiny. Few have directly attempted to discuss why man was created, why the material universe spins apparently for ever and ever through space, its elements ever continuing, nothing lost, seemingly immortal, changing but in its imagery.

"A vast purposeless machine." Such was the epitaph the scientist of the last century wrote of it, and in so doing he declared the faith of the thinking men of his age, namely, that there is no why. There is, therefore, no fulfilment. Matter is the only reality. And this terror, a purposeless mechanical drama of motion and life, must, with ghastly monotony, play on for ever and ever.

Now, truth is far from us all; but it was immeasurably remote from those who came to this melancholy conclusion. However, if mind is accepted as existing apart from matter, there is a very definite prospect of discovering the reason for the strange fantasy of existence.

First, it is necessary to define it, so far as is possible, in one sentence. If the contents of the following phrases be taken as a working hypothesis, then we may find an answer to the riddle of eternity.

Shadow and Substance:

Matter, Soul and Spirit:

Manifestation and its Source:

God, the Unifying Principle:

Disintegration in Matter, in ever finer and finer Substance:

Unification again in Spirit.

WHY?

The spirit, or deeper mind, which nourishes a number of journeying souls with its light is a thought of God. This thought is individualised, but not in the human sense. It is individual in that it has a certain apartness from its Creator, the apartness of the created thing from the One who gave it life.

Now, the mystic speaks of the god within him. This is an entirely erroneous statement. The term God means the Supreme Mind, the Idea behind all life, the Whole in terms of pure thought, a Whole within which is cradled the Alpha and Omega of existence as a mental concept. Every act, every thought, every fact in the history of the Universes, every part of them, is contained within that Whole. Therein is the original concept of all. So it is preposterous presumption on the part of the mystic to call his own spirit God.

These myriad thoughts, or spirits, begotten by the Mighty Idea, differ from one another; many of them, nearly all, before they control and manifest themselves in matter, are crude, innocent and incomplete embryos. They must gather to themselves numberless experiences, manifest and express themselves in uncountable forms before they attain to completion, before they may know perfect wisdom, true reality. Once these are acquired, they may take on divine attributes and pass out Yonder, entering within the Supreme Idea and becoming part of the Whole.

The reason, therefore, for the universe and for all appearances, for even the little mundane joys and sorrows of human beings, is to be found in the term "evolution of spirit," the need for complete fulfilment which can be obtained through limitation, through the expression of the spirit in form. For only through that expression can spirit grow, developing from the embryo, only through manifestation in appearance can spirit obtain fulfilment. For this purpose were we born, for this purpose we enter and

THE ROAD TO IMMORTALITY

pass through myriad worlds or states, and always the material universe is growing, expanding, giving fuller and fuller expression to mind. The purpose of existence may be summed up in a phrase--the evolution of mind in matter that varies in degree and kind--so that mind develops through manifestation, and in an ever-expanding universe ever increases in power and gains thereby the true con-ception of reality. The myriad thoughts of God, those spirits which inform with life all material forms, are the lowest manifestation of God, and must thus learn to be- come God-like--to become an effective part of the Whole.

Chapter II

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 858