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The Home Instinct of the
Soul[From The American Rosae
Crucis May 1920]By an understanding home must be a localization that is known. We say a localization, because it carries the idea of more than a locality by reason of the personalities that we are bound to include in the term, which personalities moving from locality to locality take with them as they go from place to place the idea of Home. The personalities composing the family entering into the details of the locality make up the localization of home. And, home is also a localization known by a previous experience, which experience binds us in heart and desire to the localization whenever we are absent from it. "Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. Home, Home, Sweet Home." The head, as the seat of the intellect, may be shaken by the statement, "After death is the great unknown," but the heart, as the seat of the consciousness, is fixed upon its realization as home, where Father, Mother, Brother, Sister,--loved long since, and lost awhile, now are. We can never think of home as a place where we have never been. And thinking home is evidence that we have been there. To the assertion that theology and the Church, and even the Bible as theology and the Church interpret it, fails to state that we have ever had an experience previous to the experience of birth into the present life, little heed is given. In the Cathedral they are singing, "Jerusalem, my happy home, name ever dear to me." In the Camp-meeting, the oft refrain is "I'm going home." In worship of intensest devotion, "I'm but a stranger here, Heaven is my home." The parent leaning over the cradle asks, "Where did you come from, Baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here," knowing meanwhile that "everywhere" is too vague, it had better be "from God." And the eyes of the dead are gently closed as we are possessed with the thought, that in the presence of death sweeps away all imaginings, "They have gone home." You can't kill out the sentiment, because it is more than a sentiment. To tear out the thought it would be necessary to tear out the human heart. The thought of Heaven as a "home" and death as a "going home" by the authority of the universal consciousness is exactly true. Theology is silent about it, save to show that heaven is a localization that may be made home, if we are fortunate enough to get there. And the Bible, read with preconception, to discover what we already know as orthodoxy, is silent as it is orthodox. The simply wise will assert, Ah! but we mean that after death we go to our "Eternal Home." But, does eternity have an end? Or beginning? Then why maintain that it begins with our death? Or our Birth? Materialism that argues that death ends all, appears as bleak and dark as a rugged shore line, against which the ocean of truth ever flows with gentle ripple or mighty dash of wave. In the deepest recesses of our materio-spirit thinking, as in the caves and deeply dug mines of earth where the atmosphere persistently follows, so the home consciousness of the Soul crowds in. As each Soul unfolds in its growth, like the heart of the seed unfolding, each life grows from the hidden center that has been, is and will be,--unfolding out of and into the consciousness of God as Home. Let the consciousness and heart of man be true, though all else that is human be found false! All this, because it is so! Poetry expressing the Cosmic thought throbs with this conception. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home." --Wordsworth. Holy Scripture in its Wisdom Literature speaks of death as "The dust returning to the earth as it was, and the Spirit returning to God who gave it." (Eccles. 12:7.) And St. Paul expressly states out of his philosophic mind and actual experience, "We are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord." (2 Corth., 5:7, American Revised Version). A moment's thought convinces us that birth is one experience and creation is another. And science declares birth to be a stage of growth or development. Mysticism knows that the Soul comes from God at the first. As it knows also that the Soul comes again from God to each new birth of the individual. The Soul goes back to God at so-called death, again and again. As it was primarily with God so also is it longer with God, from the viewpoint of experience, if not of time, as we mortally estimate duration as time. This can be demonstrated. Is demonstrated. Is evidenced in Holy Writ. Is the belief of a majority of mankind. Is as a belief, more than twice as old as Christianity. Metempsychosis or Re-incarnation is the only reasonable and satisfying conclusion, in the presence of all the facts we have been considering, and in the harmony of the Unit of Being. Listen! I hear singing! It's a dialect song of old Scotland. No one doubts the orthodoxy of the Scotch. Or gives a second place to their philosophic, theological and intellectual acumen. And all the world listens when a Scotchman sings. "I am far frae my hame, an' I'm weary aftenwhiles, For the longed for hame-bringin', an' my Faither's welcome smiles. An' I'll ne'er be fu' content, until my een do see, The gowden gates o' Heav'n an' my ain countrie. The earth is fleck'd wi' flowers, mony tinted, fresh an' gay. The birdies warble blithely, for my Faither made them sae: But these sights an' these soun's will as naething be to me, When I hear the angels singin' in my ain countrie." He is singing as he feels, which is better than he knows. Of the home from which he came, and the home to which he goes. | ||
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