s.--Thoreau.

CHAPTER VII.

DEATH

Perhaps one of the reasons why death is so commonly associated with a
feeling of fear is because we give so little thought to it. Most people
seem never to think of the subject at all until death invades the home
and threatens some member of the family. Then terror fills the mind and
all but paralyzes the reasoning faculties.

Such fear of death, so widespread in Occidental civilization, is
eloquent testimony to the materialism of our times. It is doubt about
the future that causes fear of death. Only when we have a scientific
basis for the hope of immortality will the awful fear of death
disappear. It is feared because it seems like annihilation. If people
really believed in a heavenly existence beyond the physical life they
could not possibly be filled with terror at the prospect of entering it.
If a man's religion has not given him a genuine confidence in a future
life, and made it as much of a reality to him as this life is, it has
failed to do what we have a right to demand of religion. If it does not
enable him to look upon the face of his dead without a doubt, or a fear,
there is something wrong, either with his religion or with his
comprehension of it. What possible reason is there for fearing death? A
thing that is universal, that comes to all, can not be pernicious. To
regard death as a disastrous thing would be an indictment of the sanity
of nature.

Death is merely the close of a particular cycle of experience. It is the
annihilation of nothing but the physical body, in its aspect of an
instrument of activity and a vehicle of the consciousness upon the
physical plane. The atoms of the body, drawn together in the human form
for temporary use, are, in death, released from the cohesive force of a
living organism and will return whence they came.

In reality there is no such thing as death, unless it be strictly
applied to the form, regarded as a temporary vehicle of consciousness.
As for the consciousness, there is no death. There is life in a physical
form and life out of it, but no such thing as the death, or cessation,
of the individual intelligence. What we name "death" is but a change in
the orderly evolution of life, and it is only because the phenomenon is
viewed from the physical plane that such a term can be applied to it.
From this plane it is death, or departure. But looked at from the astral
world it is birth, or arrival. What we call birth is the be