Theos-Talk Archives (January 2004 Message tt00409)

Jan 26 2005

Dear Friends:

Here are some notes on this subject. Hope they will prove of help as
they give the fundamental teachings of THEOSOPHY thereon.

Best wishes,

Dallas

------------------------------------
MEMORY IN THE DYING

Article 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. . . ." [ M L p. 170]

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. [ see Key p. 29, Isis U I pp. 278, 483-4 ]

But why write his last wish in Flemish? The defunct was a native of
Antwerp, but had left his country in childhood, without ever knowing the
language, and having passed all his life in Paris, could speak and write
only in French. 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!	[see
Key, pp. 29, 131-37 ]

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! [ see
Theosophist IV p. 202; KARMIC VISIONS in “Tell Tale Picture Gallery,”
p. 16-17 ]

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 the countless 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. B.
Lucifer, October, 1889 
 
1 Rapport sur la Philosophie en France au XIXme. Siècle.


=======================