A Master of Wisdom on the Panoramic Vision at Death

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masters Speak Series · 8 pages

Eight pages from "Memory in the Dying," first published in Lucifer in October 1889 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI. It is built around a long quotation from a letter of Master K.H. written to Sinnett at Simla about October 1882, and the footnotes give the exact place in The Mahatma Letters where the original queries and replies can be found.

The quoted passage describes what happens in the last moments, and it is specific rather than general. At the last moment the whole life is reflected in the memory, emerging from every forgotten nook and corner, picture after picture and event after event: the dying brain dislodges memory with a strong supreme impulse, and memory faithfully restores every impression entrusted to it during the brain's activity. The impression and thought which was strongest naturally becomes the most vivid, and survives all the rest, which vanish for ever to reappear only in Devachan. Two claims follow which cut against ordinary medical opinion of the period and are stated as flat contradictions of it: that no man dies insane or unconscious, as some physiologists assert, and that even a madman or a man in delirium tremens has his instant of perfect lucidity at the moment of death, though unable to say so to those present. The window in which this happens is described precisely — from the last pulsation, between the last throbbing of the heart and the moment when the last spark of animal heat leaves the body, the brain thinks and the Ego lives its whole life over again in those few brief seconds. From that follows the practical instruction the file is best known for, addressed to anyone at a deathbed: speak in whispers in the solemn presence of death, and keep especially quiet just after it, lest the quiet ripple of thought be disturbed.

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