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Page 8
"Yes," said Amroth, "that was the misery of the poor body!"
"And yet I used to think," I said, "in the old days that I was grateful
to the body for many pleasant things it gave me--breathing the air,
feeling the sun, eating and drinking, games and exercise, and the
strange thing one called love."
"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or to
appear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; but
of course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of the
happiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that one
desired, but the real thing behind it; even the purest thing of all, the
sight and contact of one whom one loved, let us say, with no sensual
passion at all, but with a perfectly pure love; what a torment that
was--desiring something which one could not get, the real fusion of
feeling and thought! But the poor body was always in the way then,
saying, 'Here am I--please me, amuse me.'"
"But then," I said, "what is the use of all that? Why should the pure,
clear, joyful, sleepless life I now feel be tainted and hampered and
drugged by the body? I don't feel that I am losing anything by losing
the body."
"No, not losing," said Amroth, "but, happy though you are, you are not
gaining things as fast now--it is your time of rest and refreshment--but
we shall go back, both of us, to the other life again, when the time
comes: and the point is this, that we have got to win the best things
through trouble and struggle."
"But even so," I said, "there are many things I do not understand--the
child that opens its eyes upon the world and closes them again; the
young child that suffers and dies, just when it is the darling of the
home; and at the other end of the scale, the helpless, fractious
invalid, or the old man who lives in weariness, wakeful and tortured,
and who is glad just to sit in the sun, indifferent to every one and
everything, past feeling and hoping and thinking--or, worst of all, the
people with diseased minds, whose pain makes them suspicious and
malignant. What is the meaning of all this pain, which seems to do
people nothing but harm, and makes them a burden to themselves and
others too?"
"Oh," said he, "it is difficult enough; but you must remember that we
are all bound up with the hearts and lives of others; the child that
dies in its helplessness has a meaning for its parents; the child that
lives long enough to be the light of its home, that has a significance
deep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, to
lighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surely
for all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives,
why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportion
so wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we are
bound in the body--some few of us do, and many of us say that we do. But
we do not realise that the little life is but one in a great chain of
lives, that each spirit lives many times, over and over. There is no
such thing as waste or sacrifice of life. The life is meant to do just
what it does, no more and no less; bound in the body, it all seems so
long or so short, so complete or so incomplete; but now and here we can
see that the whole thing is so endless, so immense, that we think no
more of entering life, say, for a few days, or entering it for ninety
years, than we should think of counting one or ninety water-drops in the
river that pours in a cataract over the lip of the rocks. Where we do
lose, in life, is in not taking the particular experience, be it small
or great, to heart. We try to forget things, to put them out of our
minds, to banish them. Of course it is very hard to do otherwise, in a
body so finite, tossed and whirled in a stream so infinite; and thus we
are happiest if we can live very simply and quietly, not straining to
multiply our uneasy activities, but just getting the most and the best
out of the elements of life as they come to us. As we get older in
spirit, we do that naturally; the things that men call ambitions and
schemes are the signs of immaturity; and when we grow older, those slip
off us and concern us no more; while the real vitality of feeling and
emotion runs ever more clear and strong."
"But," I said, "can one revive the old lives at will? Can one look back
into the long range of previous lives? Is that permitted?"
"Yes, of course it is permitted," said Amroth, smiling; "there are no
rules here; but one does not care to do it overmuch. One is just glad it
is all done, and that one has learnt the lesson. Look back if you
like--there are all the lives behind you."
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