To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

42 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
with our lives. How little we know of those mysterious
regions into which our consciousness enters nightly in sleep
and for a far longer interval after the death of the body. Yet
we follow these circulatory routes as though drawn magnetically
to them, much as birds migrate thousands of miles by
magnetic currents. In like manner we humans unerringly
find our way back to earth time and again after migrations
lasting perhaps hundreds, even thousands, of years in nature’s
interior realms.
Sleep we accept gracefully, thankful for our nightly rest;
but death, we feel, is di¤erent. Intellectually we may recognize
it as nature’s way of restoring her life forces, that the
release of the soul from an ailing or aged body is a boon, and
that without periodic changes of form there could be no
continuity of inner growth. Still, the coming of death is
always a shock: we feel held by a power vaster than we can
comprehend; we sense its irrevocability, that all hope is gone
of sharing the unspoken thought. Yet mercifully we are
sustained by a profound peace, an inflow of strength,
an atmosphere of quiet assurance that the bonds linking
us with those we love are as immortal as the heart of
Being.
We tend to think of our life on earth as of absolute
importance, when in reality it represents only a part of our
unfolding destiny. Like the Aśvattha tree of India, which is
said to grow with its roots in heaven and its branches and
leaves reaching downwards, we human beings are rooted in
our divine monad whose light is reflected in our spiritual
intelligence, our mental/emotional nature, and even in our
physical body.