Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms.  Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity.  When a man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass before the mind’s eye in an instant, and he comes from such an experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the meaning and purpose of life also.  The faces of the dead, those parchments where are written the last testament of the departed spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy, sometimes of wonder:  terror and agony are seldom written there, save when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.

THE PLAY OF BRAHM

Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death—­these things we say are irrational, and so in a sense they are.  Bergson has compared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of a cinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion by flashing upon the screen a correlated series of fixed images.  In like manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it to consciousness part by part, but never as a whole.  In supernormal states however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrier life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness.  Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances, in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear?  Might it not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world, higher-dimensional in relation to our own?  Just as a moving picture shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat images on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on the three-dimensional screen of the world men and women engaged in unfolding the drama of personal life may be but the images of souls enacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation.  The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is said to have been due to his belief that something of his personality, his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much the poorer from that time forth.  Suppose such indeed to be the case:  that the flat-man on the moving picture screen leads his little life of thought and emotion, related to the mental and emotional life of the living original as the body is related to its photographic counterpart.  In similar manner the potencies of the higher self, the dweller in higher spaces, may flow into and express themselves in and through us.  We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon the luminous screen of material existence, revealing there, however imperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higher space.