"These thoughts are utterly beyond me," said Paul uneasily.

"As I told you they would be," replied Ah Ben, turning his chair and

looking at his pupil with a kindly expression; and then, with his

usual earnestness, he added: "But they will not be so always."

"And you tell me that these things are actually as real as the

furniture in Guir House?" inquired Henley.

"Quite!" answered the guide. "Test them for yourself. Do you not see

this magnificent dome above our heads, supported upon these wonderful

pillars? Try them, touch them, strike them with your hand. Are they

not solid? Apply every test in your power to their reality; they will

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not fail you in one--and, let me ask, what further evidence have you

of the furniture of which you speak? Thought is real; and the man who

can hold to his thought long enough endows it with objectivity."

"It is a mystery involving mysteries," sighed Paul; "and I could

never even ask the questions that are crowding into my mind."

"So it is with all life," the old man replied thoughtfully, pressing

his hand against his forehead as he gazed into the brilliant scene

without seeming to look at anything especial; "and so it is with all

life," he repeated in a minute; "it is a mystery involving mysteries!

What are dreams? Give them a little more intensity, as in the case of

the somnambule or clairvoyant, and they are real. The trouble is, Mr.

Henley, that few of us ever come to realize that life itself is a

dream; and when science recognizes that fact, many of the

difficulties she now encounters will vanish. Let me repeat a few

lines from the Song Celestial, or Bhagavad Gita.

"Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;

Never was time it was not; end and beginning are dreams,

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;

Death has not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.

"These thoughts are better understood in the East," continued Ah Ben,

"where the people give less time to religion and more to the

philosophy of life. And what are dreams but a part of our inner

existence? None the less mysterious because we are so familiar with

them. There are numerous authenticated records of dreams that have

carried a man through an apparently long life, but which have really

occupied less than a second of time as counted with us; through all

the minutiae and details of youth, courtship, marriage, a military

career, war with all its horrors, the details of the last battle

where death was inevitable, and where the last shot was fired and

heard that brought the great change--of awakening, and the sudden

perception that the entire phantasmagoria had been caused by the

slamming of the door, which the exhausted sleeper had only that

second opened as he dropped into a chair beside it. The facts in this

case are proven; no perceptible time having elapsed. Time--time is

nothing. Time is only what we make it. An hour in a dungeon might be

an eternity, while a million years in the Levachan of the Hindoo

would seem but a summer's day."




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