Bird of Heaven, but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into
which it is plunged. When man recognises his own inherent nature, he
learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his
encircling gaol; first he learns to identify himself with the
Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure
mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot
hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the
sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he
knows the country into which he emerges, having trodden its ways at
his own will. And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme
importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this
material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken,
unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which
he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious
existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during
these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his
consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings
which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that
real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory. The
sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of
it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period
of our incarceration; at Death we step out of the prison again into
the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. Short are the twilight
periods, and long the periods of the sunlight; but in our blinded
state we call the twilight life, and to us it is the real existence,
while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought of passing
into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our
Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man.
Of the real Man he says: