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Some students are concerned over the organised effort to legalise euthanasia, and wonder about the placing of power of life and death in the hands of the physician. At the same time, they are aware that there is involved also the humane factor, in cases where no surcease can be given to prolonged suffering. To them I would say: The problem which a consideration of the proposed practice of euthanasia involves will not exist when continuity of consciousness is achieved. That means that the time will come... when the soul will know that its term of physical life is over and will prepare itself to withdraw, in full consciousness, from the form. It will know that the service of the form is no longer required and that it must be discarded. It will know that its sense of awareness, being focussed in the mind nature, is strong enough and vital enough to carry it through the process and the episode of abstraction. When that consciousness has been developed in man, and the process has come to be recognised by the medical profession and the scientific students of the human mechanism, then the whole attitude to death and its processes, involving as they do pain and suffering, will be altered materially. Then the man whose time has come to die may avail himself of certain methods of release which, from the average point of view, might be regarded as involving euthanasia. Modes of abstraction will be studied and applied when death is near, and the process will be regarded as soul withdrawal, as a process of liberation and release. That time is not so far away as you might think. p. 319 (en) |
