THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Memory in the Dying
By H P Blavatsky
WE find in a very old letter from a MASTER, written years ago to
a member of the Theosophical Society, the following suggestive lines on the
mental state of a dying man:
"At the last moment, the whole life is reflected in our
memory and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners, picture after
picture, one event after the other. The dying brain dislodges memory with a
strong, supreme impulse; and memory restores faithfully every impression that
has been entrusted to it during the period of the brain's activity. That
impression and thought which was the strongest, naturally becomes the most
vivid, and survives, so to say, all the rest, which now vanish and disappear
for ever, but to reappear in Devachan.
No man dies insane or unconscious, as some physiologists assert.
Even a madman or one in a fit of delirium tremens will have his instant of
perfect lucidity at the moment of death, though unable to say so to those
present. The man may often appear dead. Yet from the last pulsation, and
between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when the last spark of
animal heat leaves the body, the brain thinks and the EGO lives, in these few
brief seconds, his whole life over again. Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a
death-bed and find yourselves in the solemn presence of Death. Especially have
ye to keep quiet just after Death has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak
in whispers I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought and hinder the
busy work of the Past casting its reflection upon the veil of the Future. . .
."
The above statement has been more than once strenuously opposed
by materialists; Biology and (Scientific) Psychology, it was urged, were both
against the idea, and while the latter had no well demonstrated data to go upon
in such a hypothesis, the former dismissed the idea as an empty
"superstition." Meanwhile, even biology is bound to progress, and
this is what we learn of its latest achievements. Dr. Ferré
has communicated quite recently to the Biological Society of Paris a very
curious note on the mental state of the dying, which corroborates marvellously the above lines. For, it is to the special
phenomenon of life-reminiscences, and that sudden re-emerging on the blank
walls of memory, from all its long neglected and forgotten
"nooks and corners," of "picture after picture" that Dr. Ferré draws the special attention of biologists.
We need notice but two among the numerous instances given by this
Scientist in his Rapport, to show how scientifically correct are the teachings
we receive from our Eastern Masters.
The first instance is that of a moribund consumptive whose
disease was developed in consequence of a spinal affection. Already
consciousness had left the man, when, recalled to life by two successive
injections of a gramme of ether, the patient slightly
lifted his head and began talking rapidly in Flemish, a language no one around
him, nor yet himself, understood. Offered a pencil and a piece of white
cardboard, he wrote with great rapidity several lines in that language--very
correctly, as was ascertained later on--fell back, and died.
When translated--the writing was found to refer to a very prosaic
affair. He had suddenly recollected, he wrote, that he owed a certain man a sum
of fifteen francs since 1868--hence more than twenty years--and desired it to
be paid. But why write his last wish in Flemish? The defunct was a native of
Evidently his returning consciousness, that last flash of memory
that displayed before him, as in a retrospective panorama, all his life, even
to the trifling fact of his having borrowed twenty years back a few francs from
a friend, did not emanate from his physical brain alone, but rather from his
spiritual memory, that of the Higher Ego (Manas or
the re-incarnating individuality). The fact of his speaking and writing
Flemish, a language that he had heard at a time of life when he could not yet
speak himself, is an additional proof. The EGO is almost omniscient in its
immortal nature. For indeed matter is nothing more than "the last degree
and as the shadow of existence," as Ravaisson,
member of the French Institute, tells us.
But to our second case.
Another patient, dying of pulmonary consumption and likewise
reanimated by an injection of ether, turned his head towards his wife and
rapidly said to her: "You cannot find that pin now; all
the floor has been renewed since then." This was in reference to
the loss of a scarf pin eighteen years before, a fact so trifling that it had
almost been forgotten, but which had not failed to be revived in the last
thought of the dying man, who having expressed what he saw in words, suddenly stopped
and breathed his last. Thus any one of the thousand little daily events, and accidents of a long life would seem capable of
being recalled to the flickering consciousness, at the supreme moment of
dissolution.
A long life, perhaps, lived over again in the space of one short
second!
A third case may be noticed, which corroborates still more
strongly that
assertion of
Occultism which traces all such remembrances to the thought-power of the
individual, instead of to that of the personal (lower) Ego. A young girl, who
had been a sleepwalker up to her twenty-second year, performed during her hours
of somnambulic sleep the most varied functions of
domestic life, of which she had no remembrance upon awakening.
Among other psychic impulses that manifested themselves only
during her sleep, was a secretive tendency quite alien to her waking state.
During the latter she was open and frank to a degree, and very careless of her
personal property; but in the somnambulic state she
would take articles belonging to herself or within
her reach and
hide them away with ingenious cunning. This habit being known to her friends
and relatives, and two nurses, having been in attendance to watch her actions
during her night rambles for years, nothing disappeared but what could be
easily restored to its usual place. But on one sultry night, the nurse falling
asleep, the young girl got up and went to her father's study. The latter, a
notary of fame, had been working till a late hour that night. It was during a
momentary absence from his room that the somnambule
entered, and deliberately possessed herself of a will
left open upon the desk, as also of a sum of several thousand pounds in bonds
and notes. These she proceeded to hide in the hollow of two dummy pillars set
up in the library to match the solid ones, and stealing from the room before
her father's return, she regained her chamber and bed without awakening the
nurse who was still asleep in the
armchair.
The result was, that, as the nurse stoutly denied that her young
mistress had left the room, suspicion was diverted from the real culprit and
the money could not be recovered. The loss of the will involved a law-suit
which almost beggared her father and entirely ruined his reputation, and the family were reduced to great straits. About nine years later
the young girl who, during the previous seven years had not been somnambulic, fell into a consumption of which she
ultimately died. Upon her death-bed. the veil which had hung before her physical memory was
raised; her divine insight awakened; the pictures of her life came streaming
back before her inner eye; and among others she saw the scene of her somnambulic robbery. Suddenly arousing herself from the
lethargy in which she had lain for several hours, her face showed signs of some
terrible emotion working within, and she cried out "Ah! what
have I done? . . . It was I who took the will and the money . . . Go search the
dummy pillars in the library, I have . . ." She never finished her
sentence for her very emotion killed her. But the search was made and the will
and money found within the oaken pillars as she had said. What makes the case
more strange is, that these pillars were so high, that even by standing upon a
chair and with plenty of time at her disposal instead of only a few moments,
the somnambulist could not have reached up and dropped the objects into the
hollow columns. It is to be noted, however, that ecstatics
and convulsionists (Vide the Convulsionnaires
de St. Médard et de Morizine) seem to possess an abnormal facility for climbing
blank walls and leaping even to the tops of trees.
Taking the facts as stated, would they not induce one to believe
that the
somnambulic personage
possesses an intelligence and memory of its own apart from the physical memory
of the waking lower Self; and that it is the former which remembers in articulo mortis, the body and physical senses in the latter
case ceasing to function, and the intelligence gradually making its final
escape through the avenue of psychic, and last of all of spiritual
consciousness? And why not? Even materialistic science
begins now to concede to psychology more than one fact that would have vainly
begged of it recognition twenty years ago.
"The real existence" Ravaisson
tells us, "the life of which every other life is but an imperfect outline,
a faint sketch, is that of the Soul." That which the public in general
calls "soul," we speak of as the "reincarnating Ego."
"To be, is to live, and to live is to will and think," says the
French Scientist.1 But, if indeed the physical brain is of only a limited area,
the field for the containment of rapid flashes of unlimited and infinite
thought, neither will nor thought can be said to be generated within it, even
according to materialistic Science, the impassable chasm between matter and
mind having been confessed both by Tyndall and many others. The fact is that
the human brain is simply the canal between two planes--the psycho-spiritual
and the material--through which every abstract and metaphysical idea filters
from the Manasic down to the lower human
consciousness. Therefore, the ideas about the infinite and the absolute are
not, nor can they be, within our brain capacities. They can be faithfully
mirrored only by our Spiritual consciousness, thence to be more or less faintly
projected on to the tables of our perceptions on this plane. Thus while the
records of even important events are often obliterated from our memory, not the
most trifling action of our lives can disappear from the "Soul's"
memory, because it is no MEMORY for it, but an ever present reality on the
plane which lies outside our conceptions of space and time. "Man is the
measure of all things," said Aristotle; and surely he did not mean by man,
the form of flesh, bones and muscles!
Of all the deep thinkers Edgard Quinet, the author of "Creation," expressed this
idea the best. Speaking of man, full of feelings and thoughts of which he has
either no consciousness at all, or which he feels only as dim and hazy
impressions, he shows that man realizes quite a small portion only of his moral
being. "The thoughts we think, but are unable to define and formulate,
once repelled, seek refuge in the very root of our being." . . . When
chased by the persistent efforts of our will "they retreat before it, still
further, still deeper into--who knows what--fibres,
but wherein they remain to reign and impress us unbidden and unknown to
ourselves. . . ."
Yes; they become as imperceptible and as unreachable as the
vibrations of sound and colour when these surpass the
normal range. Unseen and eluding grasp, they yet work, and thus lay the
foundations of our future actions and thoughts, and obtain mastery over us,
though we may never think of them and are often ignorant of their very being
and presence. Nowhere does Quinet, the great student
of Nature, seem more right in his observations than when speaking of the
mysteries with which we are all surrounded: "The mysteries of neither
earth nor heaven but those present in the marrow of our bones, in our-brain
cells, our nerves and fibres. No need," he adds,
"in order to search for the unknown, to lose ourselves in the realm of the
stars, when here, near us and in us, rests the unreachable. As our world is
mostly formed of imperceptible beings which are the real constructors of its
continents, so likewise is man."
Verily so; since man is a bundle of obscure, and to himself
unconscious
perceptions, of
indefinite feelings and misunderstood emotions, of
ever-forgotten memories
and knowledge that becomes on the surface of his
plane--ignorance.
Yet, while physical memory in a healthy living man is often obscured, one fact
crowding out another weaker one, at the moment of the great change that man
calls death--that which we call "memory" seems to return to us in all
its vigour and freshness.
May this not be due as just said, simply to the fact that, for a
few seconds at least, our two memories (or rather the two states, the highest
and the lowest state, of consciousness) blend together, thus forming one, and
that the dying being finds himself on a plane wherein there is neither past nor
future, but all is one present? Memory, as we all know, is strongest with
regard to its early associations, then when the future man is only a child, and
more of a soul than of a body; and if memory is a part of our Soul, then, as
Thackeray has somewhere said, it must be of necessity eternal. Scientists deny
this; we, Theosophists, affirm that it is so. They have for what they hold but
negative proofs; we have, to support us, innumerable facts of the kind just
instanced, in the three cases described by us. The links of the chain of cause
and effect with relation to mind are, and must ever remain a terra-incognita to
the materialist. For if they have already acquired a deep conviction that as Pope
says--
Lulled in thecountless chambers of the
brain Our thoughts are link'd
by many a hidden chain. . . .--and that they are still unable to discover these
chains, how can they hope to unravel the mysteries of the higher, Spiritual,
Mind!
H P Blavatsky
First published 1889
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY