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Death—and After? by Annie Wood Besant
page 60 of 93 (64%)
mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship
seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to
re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to
manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the
clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends
and comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old
recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the
prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son
protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. Would the
relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the
one tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different
strands of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives
they may hold to each other many relationships, and finally, standing
as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over
past lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways
possible to human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of
love and duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the poorer
for the many-stranded tie? "Finally", I say; but the word is only of
this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness,
no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this very variety of
experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it is a
rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one
little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a
thousand or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be
ample, and I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of
his nature. But those who object to this view need not feel
distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in the
one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are
conscious of _for as long as the desire for that presence remains_.
Only let them not desire to impose their own form of bliss on
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