Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/394

372 it will be found to afford proof of a curiously conceived impersonal kind of deity.

It is not that to one unacquainted with the gods there appears at first sight to be a very strong family likeness between them, so strong as to imply no very marked individuality in any, for such superficial resemblance is common to every race in the eyes of others. It is in the character of the divine consciousness that the peculiarity consists. For the consciousness of any one god is continuous in successive trances, and the consciousness of successive gods is continuous in any one trance. That is, in the person of the same man the god remembers what he did, said, and heard in different trances, and different gods remember what the others did, said, and heard in the same trance, while perfectly differentiating themselves from those others. But different gods do not remember about each other in different trances. The first of these capabilities is of course the usual trance-memory, as self-identifying a one as the man's normal memory. The second shows that an indefinite idea of god underlies the several special manifestations of it. The third indicates the extent of this common bond.