What do we mean by survival? This word is not so simple in its connotation as we might at first suppose. What is the personality which does, or does not, survive? There is a strong reason to suppose that the powers and experiences of our everyday life are only a fraction of our potential powers and experiences. It seems likely that the human brain is an organ of inhibition rather than of manifestation. By this we mean that just as you put blinkers over a horse's eyes because you want to keep them fixed upon the road so that he may not be terrified, or his mind diverted, by looking at the way-side view, so our brain and bodily organs are given to us so that we may specialize on those particular and restricted experiences which appertain to this terrestrial scene, and may not be put out of tone with the happenings of this world by becoming conscious of the vastly extended powers and experiences which would be ours if it were not for the severe restrictions of our sensuous nature.There seems then to be a state of consciousness which comes very rarely and only to a few people, in which the limitations of space and time completely break down, and the universe appears with complete clarity, and without any of the limitations which are forced upon us by our ordinary life. If we take a careful record of our dreams, we shall find that a considerable proportion of them refer not to the past or the present, but to the future.
It would appear then that during the passage of the spirit through this earthly life the power which controls the universe has placed upon our mind a veil which temporarily obstructs our view of reality. We can well believe that this is done for a wise purpose, in order that we shall keep our mind fixed upon the temporary happenings which would, apart from this veil, cease to interest us. Through the choices which we make and interests which we form while we are thus prevented from seeing the larger aspects of reality, while, to use the words of St. Paul, "we see through a riddle in a mirror," we are at the same time progressing in our power of handling the things of eternity. It would appear that the idea of incarnation does not apply only to that supreme instance of the Incarnation of the Son of God, but in some measure applies to all of us.
If we now return to the idea of survival we see that we have to ask ourselves a much more searching question than we may have imagined. It is not likely that our very restricted earthly experience survives in anything like the shape with which we are now familiar. "Flesh and blood," as St. Paul says, "cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption." It would rather appear that the process which we call death is a removal of the veil which, during the spirit's sojourn upon earth, has been placed over its highest capacities. In the innumerable instances of the appearance of persons either just before or just after death, it would appear that the crisis which we call death reveals quite suddenly to the person who undergoes it astounding revelations of an enlarged world, and enables them, either before or immediately after death, to communicate their presence to those who are still under the disabilities of the fleshly life. Communications with the departed seem to be most frequent at the moment and generally to diminish rapidly in number and cogency as the years go by.
The stories which we have of communication would seem to suggest that the enfranchised spirit quickly forgets the limitations which had held it own during the present world. All those relationships which were purely conventional and which had to do only with the flesh, the relationships of parenthood, of marriage, of neighbourhood, of nationality, in so far as they did not rest upon underlying spiritual links, fall rapidly away. It is difficult, and becomes apparently increasingly difficult, for the personality to remember names, times, and places. It is quite comprehensible that this should be so. The relationship of the liberated soul with those who are still upon earth is primarily a relationship of their own enlarged spirit with the spirit of those on earth, and to communicate with the spirit enclosed still in fleshly surroundings is not likely to prove a permanent or satisfactory relationship, nor one to be desired as a normal or frequent experience.
We shall, I think, now perhaps understand why it is that communications, if we believe them to be real, are so often jejune and unconvincing. It requires probably a great effort for the departed spirit to put himself back into the condition in which present, past, and future, together with the limitations of space, have great importance. It is constantly emphasized that it is a work of immense difficulty to communicate with this present world. It seems to suggest that the inhabitants of the next world do not find us very pleasant, nor our surroundings at all congenial.
The conclusion to which I think we shall come is that there is a survival of that which existed previous to the soul's entry into flesh. It is not a survival of all those relationships due to the temporary limitations in which we now find ourselves entangled.
Dr. Walter Matthews says,
"Personal survival is the hypothesis that the centre of consciousness which was in existence before death does not cease to be in existence after death, and that the experience of this centre after death has the same kind of continuity with its experience before death as that of the man who sleeps for a while and wakes again ... One is sometimes tempted to believe that some power - whether beneficent or malevolent I do not know - has determined that we shall never reach certainty on the subject of the life beyond, and that to secure this it has sent a lying spirit into the prophets. The records of psychical research are full of deceit, fraud, and lies. But when one has discounted all this there remains a residuum of established facts which, prima facie, suggest the hypothesis of survival; that at least is my opinion."
