"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
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."