Page:The Sikh Religion, its gurus, sacred writings and authors Vol 1.djvu/75

Rh time of death, but not from the latter unless the state of Nirvan supervenes. While the jīvātama is encased in a subtile body, it is susceptible of punishment.

Sokrates, in discussing the possibility of a separate existence after death, dilates on the pleasure it would afford to meet such men as Homer, Hesiod, &c.; but Plato has not recorded what Sokrates' sensations would be on meeting his tormentors and persecutors in the same happy region. John Stuart Mill, too, thought that the most serious loss which would result to mankind from a disbelief in an after existence would be the despair of reunion with those dear to us who have ended their earthly life before us. An aspiration for such a reunion is easy to understand, and the hope of its realization has soothed the death-bed of many a believer in the soul's immortality. But all people are not equally dear to us, and it did not apparently occur to that eminent philosopher that, granted the hope of meeting those we love beyond the grave, there is also the possibility of meeting those who are not equally the objects of our affection—those who have perhaps embittered or even abridged our terrestrial existence, and who, it may be as the result of predestination or elective grace, are admitted to the sempiternal joys of paradise. To the believer in Nirvan there is no apprehension of such associations. Only those who are sufficiently purified can be absorbed in the Absolute, in the all-dazzling fount of God's infinite perfection and love. Here individual consciousness ceases, the supreme goal of existence is attained, and neither sorrow, misery, nor remembrance of earthly evils can be apprehended.

CHAPTER VI About thirty miles south-west of the city of Lahore, the capital of the Panjab, and on the borders of the present civil districts of Gujranwala and Montgomery, stands the town of Talwandi, deep in a lonely forest. It is on the margin