CONSCIOUS OR UNCONSCIOUS IN DEATH.
By A. J. Osborne
A. FRIEND B., did you ever retire at night and have such perfect sleep that it seemed that you had been to sleep only a few minutes when morning came? B. Yes, tho not often. Few people have such experience because of the human family being subject to so many physical disorders which disturb the sleep. A. What did you know at those times when you had perfect sleep? A. And yet you knew nothing? B. I certainly had no knowledge of anything while in that state of perfect sleep. A. When you were in perfect sleep what was the condition of the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling? A. When these are active, you have knowledge; and when they are inactive, or at rest, you have no knowledge? B. It seems to be that way. A. When one or more of the senses and the brain are in a normal condition, you have thought and consciousness, do you? A. Could you have consciousness and thought without the senses or the brain—the central organ of the nervous system, the organ of knowledge and thought? A. Now, B., if while in the condition of perfect sleep, but in the possession of life, you are wholly unconscious because of the inactivity of the organ of thought, do you think thought, activity, and consciousness would be suddenly restored and increased by some agency that would cause the heart to cease beating, and every organ and cell of the body to become lifeless? B. It does not seem reasonable that I should know more; but rather that the sleep and unconsciousness should become more profound. A. If in perfect sleep you have no knowledge, what must be the condition of that part termed the soul? B. Well, it would seem that it must be in the same condition as the brain,—asleep. A. Then if the entire man, including the soul, can be asleep for an hour, or during an entire night, could not the man entire sleep from death till the resurrection? B. It would seem so, truly. A. And would not the lack of knowledge of the lapse of time be just as great, and more so, than in the case of a few hours of perfect sleep in life? Would it not be to the one closing the eyes in the sleep of death only a moment till the opening of them in the morning of the resurrection? A. What do you think of that theology which teaches that a person in death knows more than when alive? B. I have always taken for granted that it was all right. But I see that it must be wrong. But A., is it not stated in the Bible, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it?” A. Yes. But it does not follow that that which returns to God is a something constituting the real individual, possessed of the powers of thought, capable of experiencing pleasure or sorrow, and yet separate from, and independent of, that organism which made such experience possible when in life. We have found that individual thought and consciousness could be, only by the existence and activity of the living, individual body,—that upon the activity of certain organs of the body depend individual thought and consciousness. A. And when we appeal to the Word of the One who created man, we read, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” Ps. 146:3, 4. “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything. . . . Also their love, and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.” Eccl. 9:5, 6. Man in death, with the spirit having returned to God who gave it, is as he was when “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,” but had not yet “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” But when he received “the breath of life,” he “became a living soul.” Gen. 2:7. And now with this union of “the breath of life” with the body, mental activity and the development of character occurs. When dissolution takes place, when God takes back to himself the “breath of the spirit of life” (Gen. 7:22, margin), mental activity and the development of character ends,—man is dead. And the next thing he knows is the resurrection to that experience which he merits by the character which he chose to form while in life. Read John 5:28, 29. Bishop, Cal. A. J. OSBORNE.