A “Life Experience”

The “Progressive Thinker” lately reproduced from the “Sunday School Times” a “life experience” written by a valued contributor who, in a letter to the Editor of that journal, said:—

“I am dubious about offering this, even as my own enlightening and comforting experience, and yet, because we know so little, each real and attested bit of knowledge, so hardly won, may do something for other people. Give it no signature if you use it, and if you return it, at least remember that it came from one who feels like Lazarus—freed for ever from the fear of death.”

The “experience” referred to is not particularly new to Spiritualists, but it is valuable as an additional and corroborative piece of testimony, from an independent source, to the occasionally transcorporeal activity of the spirit. It is as follows:—

“The doctors and nurses stood about the bed. The matter had passed beyond their control and they were waiting. She, too, was waiting, consciously, indifferently, in some shadowy region between the land of struggle, of acute sensibility, of the torture called Life, and that other region which she named to herself as Death, and concerning which she felt little interest.

“Vaguely aware that before the mighty Presence there was no such dread as had lain always beneath the gladness of life, she waited; and then, because she was weary, she slipped away, and, in the darkness, a grateful wind blew in the face turned without fear to the night. The tormented body lay quiet on the bed. She was not conscious of leaving it; she knew only that it was quiet, and that it had been left. Great fields of black broken ice lay beneath, as the soul, the spirit, the subliminal self, this freed being—call it what you will—moved slowly on in utter content, in absolute loneliness, unhurried, unlighted, unafraid, across the windswept land of the Outer Dark. There was no body, no desire for one, no need of one, but there was a recognition that this was not a loss, but a gain, in that the freed soul, knowing itself with swift, sure knowledge to be ever and unchangeably itself and no other, rejoiced in its emancipation.

“On and on through the wide, wind-filled silence and the clear, unobscuring darkness, toward the lights that lay at the black horizon line; on and on over the broken ice, through the unpeopled spaces of the Land Between. At last, first faintly borne and then more clear, came a voice on the wind—a voice unvoiced; and the message was terribly, bitterly human, and smote the hearing with a pang of forgotten pain: ‘Two motherless, two motherless.’

“And for human love and longing, love stronger than death, longing keen as life, the soul, once so content, took up anew the burden, consciously, reluctantly, and turned with a sense of failure and of defeat back over the dark way it had come, to the light which in some inner fashion it knew to be the light of earthly love and home.

“Everything was as it had been. The soul stood pitiful, aloof, at the foot of the bed, and watched the body as it lay still as the bodies of the veritable dead. To this separate vision the most trivial details were clear. The eyes of the body were closed, but the soul saw all that went forward—saw futile effort and useless remedy, saw the bowed back of one who sat with his head buried in his hands, saw from the foot of the bed, as the body, even with senses keen and eyes wide and conscious, could not have seen.

“The soul moved forward, and was enshrouded in red mists of pain, caught in the agony of renewed struggle, and after endless striving, like the fighting upward of those who drown, once more the eyes of the body unclosed, the soul looked forth, and adjusted its strength anew to the burden of living.

“And out of it all—what? An unshakeable belief in the immortality of the soul; a joyous realisation of the naturalness of death—death now known to be life from its outer side; a conviction of the permanence of personality,—’I shall know, even as also I am known;’ a freedom for ever from an inner haunting dread, the dread of those ‘who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.’”

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Light, (April 21, 1906), p. 189.