By Mrs. ANNIE BESANT

Answers to this question have been sought for by man along various roads, and the answers may be classified as religious, spiritualistic, theosophic, and materialistic.

The last may be summed up in the statement that nothing happens to us, because we cease to exist when the body dies. The religious answers are various, but all unite in the belief that we continue to live beyond death.

The spiritualistic answers agree as to the revival of the individual after the death of the body, and a mass of evidence is proffered, which, in the opinion of all who have carefully studied it, places the fact of revival beyond dispute. When every possible deduction has been made for fraud, hallucination, self-deception, there remains an irreducible minimum of evidence, which is sufficient to prove that the man survives on the other side of death. The evidence, as is well known, is obtained through the class of sensitives known as "mediums," and is of the most varied kinds - writing, speaking, materialising, under trance conditions or otherwise.

The answers given by theosophists depend on investigations carried on by means of the exercise of super-normal senses, sometimes born with the person using them, sometimes developed by deliberate effort.

The theory as to these senses is easily stated. Man is a spiritual intelligence clothed in matter. This matter exists in our worlds in five main states, differing from each other by the fundamental types of their atoms, the aggregations of which form the materials of which each world is composed.

For our purpose we may ignore the two higher worlds, and consider only the three lower, in which the normal evolution of man is going on. These are: the physical world, from which are drawn the materials forming our physical bodies; the intermediate world, generally called the astral world, from which are drawn the materials forming the astral body, the seat of sensations, desires, and emotions; the heavenly, or mental world, from which are drawn the materials forming the mental body, the seat of thought.

The man himself, the spiritual intelligence, the conscious being, uses these bodies of his for thinking, feeling, and action in relation to the worlds in which he lives and moves, and in his normal everyday consciousness he is active in these three worlds, working from the mental world through the cerebro-spinal system in the physical body, and from the astral world through the sympathetic system, the physical body being the apparatus, the mechanism, through which the forces of thought or of desire are able to manifest themselves in the physical world.

As Sir Oliver Lodge has pointed out, only a part of man's consciousness works in the physical body, but that part shows the threefold characteristics of the whole - thinking, desiring, acting.

The greater part of man's consciousness, according to this view, is outside man's physical body, and can manifest itself through the medium of the astral and mental bodies in the astral and mental worlds. In "waking consciousness" the activity is shown through the physical body; but man is not "awake" all the time.

Consciousness is active when the body sleeps, and psychologists recognise and have investigated the "dream-consciousness," and by the study of dreams, of trance-conditions, hypnotic and mesmeric, they have accumulated a number of facts which show that when the senses are deadened and the brain is inactive, the consciousness manifests certain powers more extensive than it can show during the use of its ordinary physical apparatus. These powers are manifested by the consciousness through the lesser dense medium of astral matter, the matter of the "intermediate world," in which consciousness performs functions actively when the body is asleep.

To put it in other words, the consciousness which works in the waking body is largely withdrawn from the body when it sleeps, and consciousness is less impeded in the exercise of its powers when it is working outside the dense and comparatively sluggish matter of the physical body.

In certain conditions of very deep trance the consciousness is almost withdrawn from the astral as well as from the physical body, and then it works in still rarer regions, and we have the visions of saints, of great seers like Sweden-borg, etc.

Now, physical, astral, and mental bodies have all organs of perception, by which consciousness perceives the corresponding external worlds. The senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch are such, bringing the external world into relation with human consciousness.

According to theosophical teachings, the astral and mental bodies have also their organs of perception, bringing the worlds from which their materials are drawn into relation with human consciousness. Hence, observation of the phenomena of the astral and heavenly worlds is possible for all those who have in the course of their evolution, whether normally or by any quickening process, brought into functional activity these perceptive organs.

It is on observation carried on by means of these that theosophists depend for their knowledge of after-death states. An increasing number of students are able to carry on such observations, and the records of these are accumulating.

The conditions of the world in which our consciousness works when outside the physical body - whether leaving that body in sleep or dead - are as various as those of the physical world, and the observations of students must vary according to the regions they investigate. But certain broad facts emerge.

The man after death, in his desires and emotions, is the same man as he was before death; hence, if his desires were such as need a physical body for their satisfaction, he suffers keenly from unsatisfied cravings, which only gradually disappear by a process of slow starvation; the application of this knowledge to conduct leads a man to lessen such desires, and to seek gratification rather in the class of desires which pertain to emotions than in those which pertain to appetites. AEsthetic emotions, the pursuit of knowledge, persist for the functioning of consciousness in the astral or intermediate world, and help can be sent thence, by the wireless telegraphy of thought and emotion, to those who are still labouring in the physical world.

Many an experience of happiness and of suffering, as the results of the physical earth-life, are engraven by the consciousness on the tablets of the spirit's memory, and appear as "conscience" in a subsequent life, as the impulse to do the right or to abstain from the wrong.

When the experiences of these results are all assimilated and recorded in memory, the man passes on into the heavenly world, and there transmutes into faculty all mental and emotional experiences of a pure and useful nature. The work of the consciousness in the heaven-world is this assimilation and transmutation of experiences, and when all these are thus changed the result passes on into the spiritual consciousness of the man himself, who retains the memory of all the experiences; but when he puts forth a part of his consciousness again to gather new food of experience in the lower worlds, he implants in the new materials he gathers round him only the results of past experiences as faculties, not the facts of the experiences as memories. The memories reside in the spiritual consciousness, not in the part which is embodied as mind, emotion, and activity.

Our work, then, on the other side of death is the building of conscience and of faculty out of the experiences gathered during physical life. With these we return to a new earth-life, to make further progress. Edward Carpenter wrote truly: "Every pain that I suffered in one body was a power which I wielded in the next." By this process is evolution carried on, and we pass out of weakness into strength, out of ignorance into knowledge.

I have not touched here, in this dry record of observed facts, on the joys of the larger life, the loves which pass unbroken through death, the glad companionships which irradiate immortal life with beauty and with happiness. Our future is in our own hands, for the Spirit, who is Man, is the Inner Ruler Immortal; we create our future by our present, for we live in a world of law, and for him who lives nobly Death is but the entrance into a larger consciousness, a fuller life.