=1 "Death and becoming"
 |
 |
|
Death and becoming
by Sir George Trevelyan
All that we call ‘death’ is that the petal of the daffodil has rotted. But what has it done then? It has fallen to the earth which is breaking it down into humus which is itself the ground of all life. It rots back into the life forces of the whole living earth. You cannot anywhere find death in the sense of the disappearance, destruction, annihilation of the essential core of the being, whether plant or man. Once you have grasped that all Nature is One, that all Life is One and that God is everywhere, you realise that the essential core can never die. The essential being will move on to another plane, there to take on to itself a suitable body.
Or to take another analogy: We get into a diving suit and we are walking along the dark bottom of the ocean, and a glorious sight it is as we peer out of our limited view-finders and shine our lights upon the gorgeous fishes and wonderful landscapes. We flatter ourselves we have seen the world. We are unaware of the two tubes leading up to a world above which is pumping down air the whole of the time. If we are able to get out of the diving suit and come to the surface we see a world of light and sun and fill our lungs with the free air.
When we go back into our diving suit our whole attitude changes. We now know that the bottom of the ocean is not the only world, and that slow pace plodding along with leaden feet is not the only way that we can move. But we realise that if we are to explore the bottom of the ocean we have got to get into this diving suit and that there are many important experiences that we can get only while we are down there. When we have had those experiences we may discard the suit. When it wears out we may dispense with it, but the mere discarding of an old suit doesn't finish us.
What is becoming clear is the enthralling picture of the interpenetrating worlds, the possibility of knowing what happens to the Soul in its passage through the gate of Death, the realisation that it is not simply moving off into an infinitely different world but that there is a straight continuity of life when this limiting sheath of the body is discarded, and that the prospects in this further realm are of infinite width and scope and excitement.