The Passing

The Passing

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting.

And cometh from afar—

Not in entire forgetfulness.

And not in utter nakedness.

But trailing clouds of glory do we come To God, who is our home.

Our birth into this new life differs in almost every point from our birth into the earthly. We owe our earthly body to others; our psychic body to ourselves. 

That is, the state of development in which we arrive here depends greatly on our past life, and we may be said to be born here as infants, children, or mature beings according to the past life and the present state of the true self. 

Our psychic body is being formed within the earthly during our earthly life, but the materials of which it is composed are not earthly but are finer, rarer, though still material, and capable of outward manifestation to the psychic vision.

The clay out of which the Spirit of Life creates our new bodies is not the old red earth, not the old Adam, but is like unto the resurrection body of the Master; a body which could not see corruption, and which the grave could not hold, though it might be guarded ever so closely.

The psyche, then, when it has quitted the earthly tenement appears immediately and suddenly in this—just as you see a man when he emerges from his house; a moment ago he was invisible to you, now he is completely visible. So it is here; the body, which is the only part of a man visible to your eyes, is the part that is invisible to us and hides him from us. Sometimes he appears for a moment here—shadowy and unreal, more like a vision—then disappears again for a while. 

This is when the soul is loth to leave the body and lingers near it.

When the time arrives for the psyche to quit the earthly plane and leave its earthly covering behind it, then the link which unites it to the physical is broken. This link partakes of the two natures, and the only pain and struggle connected with this passing is when the soul is unwilling to loose its hold on the earthly, or fears to do so. Then a moment of unconsciousness supervenes—a time of longer or shorter duration, according to circumstances. The psychical does not generally quit the body immediately, but slowly withdraws itself, and then only the body gradually decays and disintegrates—the lower forms of life escape to reincarnate themselves in some other form, while there must always be a certain degree of life abiding in each atom, for without it they would have no existence.

So the spirit of the animal goeth downward, remaining in the earthly sphere, and the spirit of the man goeth upward, entering into the higher life.

We now have the man, divested of his lower form, ready to enter into the intermediate state. And with what body does he come? With one that closely resembles the earthly one—very closely indeed at first—but with powers infolded within it that far transcend the old ones, though those powers are yet more or less dormant. 

The man is still far from being a pure spirit; he bears a form like the Master’s, a form which is in four dimensions, and which cannot be seen by ordinary earthly vision. The old body is the matrix in which the new man is formed, and from which, by the pangs of death he is parted, to enter into his second life. 

Now how does he appear on our side? Our eyes do not see the physical, which you always must bear in mind. What we see of the earthly is only the soul-image reflected in some medium. It is therefore after this uncovering that the newborn appears within the scope of our vision. He awakes and finds himself in a state that seems to him at first but the same to which he has been accustomed; he continues—as he thinks—his old life, until the fact gradually dawns upon him that the great change has taken place and that he has passed from death unto life.

Communicated by automatic writing, I Awoke! Conditions of Life on the Other Side, 1895, David Stott, London, Part I, The Psyche, The Passing, 22-6

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