be true for the individual who has not neglected the opportunities
for development which this life offers. A self which has been
sufficiently strengthened in life will be fit to enter on higher planes
of existence. Islam holds the individual responsible for equipping
himself for a higher life after death. He can do so by realising the
powers that are latent in him. Of course, Islam insists that this can
properly be done only in a social environment. In short it is the duty
of society to provide opportunities of self-development to its
members and it is their duty severally to turn such opportunities to
the full account. To the fully developed personality, death opens out
a vista of further development. The following excerpt from
Ouspensky’s book will serve to clarify this point. Ouspensky has
cited Gurdjieff in support of his view:
If a man is changing every minute, if there is nothing in him that can
withstand external influences, it means that there is nothing in him that
can withstand death. But if he becomes independent of external
influences, if there appears in him something that can live by itself; this
something may not die. In ordinary circumstances we die every
moment.
External influences change and we change with them, i.e., many of our
“Is” die. If a man develops in himself a permanent “I” that can survive
a change in external conditions, it can survive the death of the physical
body.(10)
Professor Campbell, quoted below, writes to the same effect:
There can be no ground for asserting that our self expresses all that it
is, in the different forms of self-manifestation disclosed by human
experience. The self as an ontological entity, as a spiritual substance,
may be, for all we can say to the contrary, a being of far richer potency
than is, or even can be, revealed under the conditions of human life, in
the guise, that is to say of the “empirical self”.(11)
He goes on to say:
I^ refer to the mind’s power of retaining within it, in some form, its past
experiences, and utilising them, on receipt of appropriate stimuli, in
the course of its future experience.(12)
The following quotation from Dixon also bears on the same
point:
If in the denial of any renewal of life beyond the grave, we do not
virtually deny all life’s present values, I know not where to find a more
resolute denial of them.(13)
The Self of Man and Its Destiny 76