Theosophical
Society President
Among
the many ideas which have lightened the burden of men, one of the most
serviceable has been that of Reincarnation. It not only explains why one man is
born in the lap of luxury and another in poverty, why one is a genius and
another an idiot, but it also holds out the hope that, as men now reap what
they have sown in the past, so in future lives the poor and wretched of today
shall have what they lack, if so they work for it, and that the idiot may, life
after life, build up mentality which in far-off days may flower as genius.
When the idea of reincarnation is heard of
for the first time, the student naturally supposes that it is a Hindu doctrine,
for it is known to be a fundamental part of both Hinduism and Buddhism. But the
strange fact is that reincarnation is found everywhere as a belief, and its
origin cannot be traced to Indian sources. We hear of it in far-off Australia ( See The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia, by Baldwin Spencer & F.G. Gillen, 1904, page 175, et
seq.) and there is a story on record of an Australian aborigine who
went cheerfully to the gallows, and replied on being questioned as to his
levity :”Tumble down black-fellow, jump up white fellow, and have lots of
sixpences to spend!” It was taught by the Druids of ancient Gaul, and Julius
Caesar tells us how young Gauls were taught reincarnation, and that as a
consequence they had no fear of death. Greek philosophers knew of it; we have
Pythagoras telling his pupils that in his past lives he had been a warrior at
the siege of Troy, and later was the philosopher Hermotimus of Galzomenae. It
is not utterly unknown to Christian teaching, if we take the simple statement
of Christ, when questioned whether John the Baptist was Elijah or Elias reborn:
“If ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come,” and He follows up
the statement with the significant words: “He that hath ears to hear, let him
hear.” In later Jewish tradition, the idea is known, and the Talmud mentions
several cases of reincarnation.
There are many to whom reincarnation appeals forcibly, and Schopenhauer does
but little exaggerate when he says: “I have also remarked that it is at once
obvious to everyone who hears of it for the first time”. Some believe in the
idea immediately; it comes to them like a flash of light in thick darkness, and
the problem of life is clearly seen with reincarnation as the solution. Others
there are who grow into belief, as each doubt is solved and each question
answered
There is one, and only one, objection which can logically be brought against
reincarnation, if correctly understood as Theosophy teaches it. It lies in the
question: “If, as you say, I have lived on earth in other bodies, why don’t I
remember the past?”
Now if reincarnation is a fact in Nature, there surely will be enough other
facts which will point to its existence. No one fact in Nature stands isolated,
and it is possible in divers ways to discover that fact. Similarly it is with
reincarnation; there are indeed enough facts of a psychological kind to prove
to a thinker that reincarnation must be a fact of Nature and not a theory.
In answering the question why we do not remember our past lives, surely the
first necessary point is to ask ourselves what we mean by “memory”. If we have
some clear ideas as to the mechanism of memory, perhaps we may be able to
understand why we do not (or do) “remember” our past days or lives. Now,
briefly speaking, what we usually mean by memory is a summing up. If I remember
today the incidents of my cutting my finger yesterday, there will be two
elements in my memory: first the series of events which went to produce the
pain - the misadventure in handling the knife, the cut, the bleeding, the
sensorial reaction in the brain, the gesture and so on; and second, the sense
of pain. As days pass, the causes of the pain recede into the periphery of
consciousness, while the effects, as pain, still hold the centre. Presently, we
shall find that even the memory of the pain itself recedes into the background,
leaving behind with us not a direct memory as an event, but an indirect memory
as a tendency – a tendency to be careful in the handling of all cutting
implements. This process is continually taking place; the cause is forgotten
(though recoverable under hypnosis from the subconscious mind), while the
effect, transmuted into tendency, remains.
It is here that we are specially aided by the brain. We are apt to think of the
brain as a recorder of memory, without realizing that one of its most useful
functions is to wipe out memories. The brain plays the dual function of
remembering and forgetting. But for our ability to forget, life would be
impossible. If each time we tried to move a limb, we were to remember all our
infantile efforts at movement, with the hesitation and doubt and perhaps even
pain involved, our consciousness would be so overwhelmed by memories that the
necessary movement of the limb would certainly be delayed, or not made at all.
Similarly, it is with every function now performed automatically, which was
once consciously acquired; it is because we do forget the process of acquiring,
that we can utilize the faculty resulting therefrom.
This is what is continuously taking place in consciousness with each one of us.
There is a process of exchange, similar to copper coins of one denomination
being changed to silver coins of smaller bulk representing them, then into gold
coins of smaller weight still, and later bank notes representing their value,
and last of all to a piece of paper, a cheque, whose intrinsic worth is nil.
Yet we have but to write our signature on the cheque, to put into operation the
whole medium of exchange. It is a similar process which takes place with all
our memories of sensations, feelings and thoughts. These are severally grouped
into categories, and transmuted into likes and dislikes, and finally into
talents and faculties.
Now we know that as we manifest a like or dislike, or exhibit any capacity, we
are remembering our past, though we cannot remember one by one in detail the
memories which contributed to originate the emotions or faculty. As I write
these words in English on this page, I must be remembering the first time I saw
each word in a reading book, and looked up its meaning in a dictionary as I
prepared my home lessons; but it is a kind of transmuted memory. Nevertheless,
I do remember, and but for those memories being somewhere in my consciousness
(whether in touch with some brain cells or not is not now the point ) I should
not be able to think of the right word to express my thought, nor shape it on this
paper so that the printer will recognize the letters to set them up in print.
Furthermore, we know as a fact that we do forget these causative memories one
by one; it would be foolish if, as I write a particular word, I were to try to
call up the memory of the first time I saw it. The brain is a recording
instrument of such a kind that, though it registers, it does not obey
consciousness when it desires to unroll the record, except in certain abnormal
cases. The desire to remember is not necessarily followed by remembrance, and
we have to take this fact as it is.
Here it is that Bergson has very luminously pointed out that “we think with
only a small part of the past; but it is with our entire past, including the
original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act.” Clearly then it
would be useless to try to remember our past lives by the mere exercise of the
mind; though thought can remember something of the past, it is only a fraction
of the whole. But on the other hand, let us but feel or act, and
then at once our feeling or action is the resultant of all the forces, of the
past which have converged on our individuality. If, therefore, we are to trace
the memories of our past lives in our present normal consciousness, we must
note how we feel and act, expecting to recover little of such memories in a
mere mental effort to remember.
Every feeling and act, then, can be slowly traced to its component parts of
impressions from without and reactions from within. So much is this the case
with each one of us, that we can construct for ourselves what has been
another's past, as we watch that other feel and act, provided he does both in
an average fashion. But if he manifests a mode that is not the average
mode of thought or feeling, then he becomes incomprehensible to us and needs
explanation. Since, then, the average feelings and actions can be readily
explained as the result of average experiences, unusual feeling and actions
must be explained as having an unusual causation. If the present writer were to
deliver a lecture in English in India, where so many can speak English, each of
his listeners would take for granted that he had been to school and college,
without perhaps enquiring further when and where. But were he, instead of
speaking English, to speak Italian, than at once each listener would be curious
to know how and when that faculty of speaking Italian had been grown.
Furthermore, if an Italian were present in the audience, then judging from the
speaker’s phrasing and intonation, he would know that the speaker must have
lived in Italy, or must have spent a considerable time among Italians. Wherever
there is any manifestation of feeling or action — as indeed, too, of some
expressions of thought — which has something of the quality of the expert,
then we must postulate for that faculty a slow growth through experiences,
which are the result of experiments along that particular line.
Now each one of us has many qualities of an average kind, as also a few of an
expert kind. The former we can account for by experiences common to all. Let us
examine some of the latter, and see if we can account for them on any other
hypothesis than that of reincarnation.
Now one of the principal things which characterizes men is their likes and
dislikes. Sometimes these might be called rational, that is, they are such
likes and dislikes as an average individual of a particular type might be said
normally to possess at his stage in evolution. We can account for these normal
likes and dislikes, because they are such as we ourselves manifest under
similar conditions. But suppose we take the case of an extraordinary liking,
such as is termed “love at first sight.” Two people meet in the seeming
fortuitous concourse of human events, sometimes, it may be, coming from the ends
of the earth. They know nothing of each other, and yet ensues the curious
phenomenon that as a matter of fact the do know a great deal of each other.
Life would be a happy thing if we could go out with deep affection to all whom
we meet; but we know we cannot, for it is not in our nature. Why then should it
be in our nature to “fall in love” with a particular individual? Why should we
be ready to sacrifice all for this person whom, in this life at least, we have
met but a few times? How is it that we seem to know the inner workings of his
heart and brain from the little which he reveals at our conventional
intercourse at the beginning? “ Falling in love” is indeed a mysterious
psychological phenomenon, but the process is far better described as being
dragged into love, since the individual is forced to obey and may not refrain.
Now there are two logical explanations possible: one is the ribald one of the
scoffer, that it is some form of hysteria or incipient insanity, due it may be
to “complexes”; the other is that, in this profound going forth of one
individual as an expert in feeling towards another, we have not at first
meeting but the last of many, many meetings which took place in past lives.
Where or when were these meetings is of little consequence to the lovers;
indeed Rudyard Kipling has suggested in his “Finest Story in the World” that it
is only in order that we might not miss the delicious sensation of falling in
love with our beloved, that the kindly Gods have made us drink of the river of
forgetfulness before we returned to life on earth again. The principal thing to
note, in this emotional mood of being in love, is that the friendship is not as
one that begins, but as one that is continued; and in that psychological
attitude of the two lovers we have the remembrance of past lives, when they met
and loved and sacrificed for each other.
Not dissimilar to this unusual liking which constitutes falling in love, is the
unusual disliking which is not so very rare in human experience. Certain normal
dislikes we can readily account for; but take the case of two individuals
meeting for the first time, it may be knowing nothing even by hearsay of
each other, and then we have sometimes the striking phenomenon of one of the
two drawing back from the other, not outwardly by gesture, but inwardly
by a feeling or an intuition. In all such cases of drawing back, the curious
thing is that there is no personal feeling; it is not a violent feeling of “I
do not like you”, but far more an impersonal state of mind where almost no
feeling manifests, and which may be paraphrased into “It is wise to have little
to do with you.” Sometimes we follow this intuition, but usually we brush it
aside as unjust, and then turn to understanding our acquaintance with the mind.
Not infrequently, it then follows that we begin to like him, perhaps even love
him.
We forget our “first impression”, or we put
it aside as mere irrational impulse. Now there are many such revulsions that
are purely irrational impulses, but there is a residue of cases where
after-events show that the dislike was not an impulse but an intuition. For it
may happen, after years have passed of intercourse with out friend, that
suddenly without any warning he, as it were, stabs us in the back and deals us
a mortal blow; and then in our grief and humiliation we remember that first
impression of ours, and wish that we had followed it.
Whence came this first impression? Reincarnation offers a solution, which is
that the injured had suffered in past lives at the hands of his injurer, and
that it is the memory of that suffering which flashes into the mind as an
intuition.
More striking still are those cases where there exist at the same time both
like and dislike, both love and resentment. I well remember a lady describing her
attitude to a friend to whom she was profoundly attached in the following words
: “I love him, but I despise him!” I wonder how many wives say this daily of
their husbands, or husbands of their wives. Why should there be this
incomprehensible jumble of contradictory feelings?
The clue is strikingly given by W.E. Henley in his well-known poem:
Or
ever the knightly years were gone
With
the old world to the grave,
I
was a king in Babylon,
And
you were a Christian slave.
The poet goes on to tell us how the king “saw and took,” and toyed with the
maid and, as is a man’s way, finally cast her aside. Yet she loved him well,
but, heart-broken at his treatment, committed suicide. Now it is obvious that
the girl dies full of both love and resentment, and since what we sow we reap,
each of the two in the rebirth reaps in emotional attitude the result of past
causes. For, this time the man loves again, and desires to possess her; she too
loves him in return, and yet does not permit him to have his heart’s desire. So
the lover cries out :
The
pride I trampled on is now my scathe,
For
it tramples me again;
The
old resentment last like death,
For
you love, and yet you refrain;
I
break my heart on your hard unfaith,
And
I break my heart in vain.
Henley sees with is poetic vision that the present situation between the two
cannot remain the same throughout eternity; there must be a true loving and
understanding of each other at the long last; and so the poem ends with the
man’s pride in his past, and resignation in the present, with a hint of some
good from a past which need not be “undone” as of no worth at all.
Yet not for an hour do I wish undone
The
deed beyond the grave
When
I was a king in Babylon
And
you were a virgin slave.
There can only be one ending, that of the fairy tale, since it needs must be a
universe where there is but One who loves, that,
Journey’s
end in lover’s meeting.
Every wise man’s son doth know.
We have been so far been considering the manifestations of an individual’s
emotional nature, and it is obvious that, because of his own experiences, he
will be able to understand the emotions of others, so long as such emotions are
in the main like what he has known. But what of those individuals who
thoroughly understand such experiences as have not come to them? Shakespeare understands the working
of a woman's heart and mind, and, too, all the intricate mental and emotional
processes of the traitor ; Dickens knows how the murderer feels after
committing the crime.
Furthermore, some gifted men and women, when experiencing emotions, generalize
from them to what is experienced by all, while one not so gifted, though “once
bitten” is not “twice shy”, nor is made appreciably wiser by the same
experience coming to him over and over again. The gifted few, on the other
hand, will fathom the universal quality in a single experience, and they will
anticipate from it many experiences of like nature; for themselves, and
sometimes for others too, they will state their experiences, reducing them as
it were to algebraical formulae, and each formula including one general
statement all particular cases. Their thoughts and feelings are like aphorisms,
with the transmutation of many experiences into one Experience.
Now, to generalize from our individual emotions is as rare a gift as to
originate a philosophy from the particular thoughts which we gain about things.
Yet it is this generalization from particular emotions that is characteristic
of a poet, and the more universal are his generalizations, the greater is he as
a poet. Why then should an individual here and there have this wonderful
ability of seeing particular men as representatives of types, and particular
emotions as expression of universal emotions? We say that such a man is a
genius, but the word genius merely describes but does not explain. There are
geniuses in every department of life - religion, poetry, art, music,
statesmanship, the drama, in war and in commerce, and in many other phases of
life. These geniuses are characterized by many abnormal qualities; they are
always men of the future and not of their day and each genius is a lawgiver to
future generations in his own department of activity; and above all, they live
emotionally and mentally in wide generalizations. Whence comes this wonderful
ability?
One explanation offered is Heredity. But how far does heredity really explain
genius? According to the ordinarily accepted theory of heredity, each
generation adds a little to a quality brought from the generation before, and
then transmits it to the next; this in turn adds a little, and passes on the
total of what it has received, plus its own contribution; and so on generation
after generation, till we arrive at a particular generation, and to one
individual of it, in whom the special quality in some mysterious way gets
concentrated, and that individual is thereby a genius. According to this
popular theory, some remote ancestor of Shakespeare had a fraction of
Shakespeare’s genius, which he transmitted through heredity to his offspring;
this offspring then, keeping intact what was given him by his parent, added to
the stock from his own experiences, and then passed on both to his child; and
so on in successive generations, each generation treasuring what was given to
it from all previous generations, and adding something of its own before
transmitting it to the next. Shakespeare then is as the torrent from a
reservoir which has slowly been dammed up, but bursts its sides when the
pressure has passed beyond a certain point.
Such a conception of heredity is based upon the assumption that what an
individual acquires of faculty, as a result of adaptability to his environment,
is passed on to his offspring. Such indeed is the conclusion that the Darwinian
school of biologists came to, from their analysis of what happens in Nature.
But biological research during the last twenty-five years, has been largely
directed to testing the validity of the theory of the transmission of acquired
characteristics. Not only has not one indisputable instance been found, but all
experiments in breeding and crossing, on the other hand, accumulate proofs to
the contrary.
The new school of biologists known as the Mendelians have therefore come to
theories about heredity which are not only novel but startling. According to
them, structural characteristics, upon which must depend the mental and moral
capacities of an individual, exist, in every ancestor in their fulness;
and further, they must all have been in the first speck of living matter.
Nothing has been added by evolution to this original stock of capacities
in protoplasm. Every genius whom the world has known or will know existed
potentially in it, though he had to wait millions of years before there arose
the appropriate arrangement of the “genetic factors” to enable him to appear as
a genius on the evolutionary stage. Nature has not evolved the complex brain
structure of Shakespeare out of the rudimentary brains of the mammals; that
complexity existed “in a pin-head of protoplasm”. Nature has not evolved the
genius; she has merely released him from the fetters which bound him in
the primordial protoplasm, by eliminating, generation after generation, such
genetic factors as inhibited his manifestation. Bateson sums up these modern
theories when he says:
“I have confidence that the artistic gifts
of mankind will prove to be due not to something added to the makeup of an
ordinary man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit
the development of these gifts. They are almost beyond doubt to be looked upon
as – “releases” – of powers normally suppressed. The instrument is
there, but it is stopped down.” (Presidential Address, British Association,
1914).
Time alone will show how far the Mendelian conception will need to be modified
by later discoveries; but it is fairly certain already that the older Darwinian
conception of heredity is untenable, and that if a man is a genius he owes very
little to the intellectual and emotional achievements of his ancestors. If,
however, we admit with the Mendelians that a genius is “released” merely by the
removal of the inhibiting factors, and is not the result of slow accumulations,
we still leave the original mystery unsolved, and that is to explain the
synthetic ability of the genius. We are therefore no nearer really explaining
the nature of genius along Mendelian lines than along the Darwinian; the
theories of science merely tell us under what conditions genius will or will
not manifest, but nothing more.
The only rational theory of genius, which accepts scientific facts as to
heredity and also explains what genius is, comes from the conception of
reincarnation. If we hold that an individual is a soul, that is an imperishable
and evolving Ego, and manifests through a body appropriate to his stage of
growth and to a work which he is to do in that body, then we see that his
emotional and mental attributes are the results of experiences which he has
gained in past lives. But since he can express them only through a suitable
body and brain, these must be of such a kind as Nature has by heredity selected
for such use. The manifestation of any capacity, then, depends on two
indispensable factors; first, an Ego or consciousness who has developed the
capacity by repeated experiments in past lives; and second, a suitable
instrument, a physical body of such a nature structurally as makes possible the
expression of that capacity. When therefore we consider the quality of genius,
if on the one hand the genius has not a body fashioned out of such genetic
factors as do not inhibit his genius, he is “stopped down”, to use Bateson’s
simile, and his genius is unreleased. But on the other hand, if Nature were to
produce a thousand bodies that were not “stopped down”, we should not ipso
facto have a thousand geniuses. Two lines of evolution must therefore
converge, before there can manifest any quality that is not purely functional.
The first is that of the evolution of an indestructible Consciousness, which
continually experiments with life and slowly becomes expert thereby; and the
second is the evolution of the physical structure, which is selected by
heredity to respond to a given stimulus from within.
If with this is clue as to what is happening in Nature, we examine the various
geniuses whom the world has produced, we shall see that they are remembering
their past lives as they exhibit their genius. Take for instance, such a genius
as the young violinist, Mischa Elman, who a few years ago began his musical
career; he was then but a lad, and yet even at that age he manifested
marvellous technical ability. Now we may perhaps legitimately account for this
technical ability along Mendelian lines, as being due to a rare confluence of
genetic factors; but by no theory of physical heredity can we explain what
surprised the most exacting of musical critics - Mischa Elman’s interpretation
of music. For it is just in this interpretation that a music lover can see the
soul of the performer, whether that soul is a big one or a little, whether the
performer has known of life superficially or has touched life's core. Now
Mischa Elman’s interpretation, absolutely spontaneous as it was, and
un-imitated from a teacher, was that of a man and not that of a boy. Little
wonder that many a critic was puzzled, or that the musical critic of the London
Daily Telegraph should write as follows:
“Rain beat noisily upon the roof and thunder roared and rattled, but Mischa
Elman went calmly on with his prescribed Paganini and Bach and Wieniawski.
Calmly is the word, be it noted, not stolidly. We have had stolid wonder-children
on our musical platforms; Mischa is not one of them. Upon his face, as he plies
the bow, rests a great peace, and only now and then, with a more decided
expression, does he lower his cheek upon the instrument, as though he would
receive from it the impulse of its vibrations and to it communicate his own
soul-beats. The marvel of this boy does not lie in his execution of difficult
passages. If it did, perhaps we should award it but perfunctory notice, seeing
that among the children of our generation there are so many who play with
difficult passages much as their predecessors did with marbles. We have gone
beyond mere dexterity with bowing and fingering, and can say, in the spirit of
one of old time, that from the babe and suckling comes now the perfection of
such praise as lies within the compass of a violin.”
Asked to account for this — to explain why Mischa Elman laying cheek to wood,
reveals the insight and feeling of a man who has risen to the heights and
plumbed the depths of human life — we simply acknowledge that the matter is
beyond us. We can do no more than speculate, and, perhaps, hope for a day in
which the all-embracing science of an age more advanced than our own shall
discover the particular brain formation, or adjustment, to which infants owe
the powers that men and women vainly seek. Those powers may be the
Wordsworthian “clouds of glory”, brought from another world. If so, what a
brilliant birth must that of Mischa Elman have been! The boy was heard in a
work by Paganini and another Wieniawski, both good things of their meritricious
kind, and both irradiated, as we could not but fancy, by the unconscious genius
which shines alike on the evil and the good, making the best of both. Upon the
mere execution of these works we do not dwell, preferring the charm of the
moments in which the music lent itself to the mysterious emotion of the
youthful player, and showed, not the painted visage of a mountebank, but the
face of an angel!
If along the lines of reincarnation we
suppose that Mischa Elman is a soul who in his past lives has in truth
"risen to the heights and plumbed the depths of human life”, then we have
a reasonable explanation for his genius. There is reflected in each
interpretation the summing up of his past experiences, and he can through his
music tell us of a man’s sorrow or a man’s joy, because as a man in past lives
he has experienced both, and retains their memory in emotional and intellectual
generalizations. This explanation further joins hands with science, because the
reincarnation theory of genius implies the need by the musical soul of a body
with a musical heredity, which has been “selected” by evolution and built up by
appropriate genetic factors.
Reincarnation alone explains another genius who must remain a puzzle according
to all other theories. Keats is known in English poetry as the most “Greek” of
all England's poets; he possessed by nature that unique feeling for life which
was the treasure of the Greek temperament. If he had been a Greek scholar and
steeped in the traditions of Greek culture, we might account for this anima
naturaliter Graeca of the Greek-less Keats.” But when we consider that
Keats had “little Latin and less Greek,” and began life as a surgeon’s
apprentice and a medical student, we may well wonder why he sings not as a
Christian poet should, but as some Greek shepherd born on the slopes of Mount
Etna. The wonder, however, at once ceases if we presume that Keats is the
reincarnation of a Greek poet, and that he is remembering his past lives as he
reverts to Greek ways of thought and feeling.
With reincarnation as a clue, it is interesting to see how a little analysis
enables us to say where in the past an individual must have lived. In the
culture of Europe and America, there are three main types of “reversion,” to
Rome, to Greece, and to India. Anyone who has studied Roman institutions and
the Roman conception of life finds little difficulty in noting how the English
temperament is largely that of ancient Rome in a modern garb; the values, for
instance in writing history, of such historians as Gibbon, Macaulay, Hume, are
practically the same as those of Roman historians, Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and
the rest; whereas if we take the French historians we shall find them scarcely
at all Roman in temperament, and far more akin to Greek. The equation Tennyson
= Virgil is certainly not far-fetched to those who know the quality of both
poets.
We find the reversion to Greece very clearly in such writers as Goethe,
Schiller and Lessing. Why should these writers have proclaimed to Germany with
unbounded enthusiasm the message of “back to Greece”, except that they knew
from their own experience in past lives what Greek culture had still for men?
For what is enthusiasm but the springing forward of the soul to experience a
freshness and a delight in life which it has known elsewhere, and whose call it
recognizes again? These men of enthusiasm, these pioneers of the future, are
otherwise than sports or freaks of Nature; let us but think of them as
reincarnated souls remembering in their enthusiasm their past lives, and they
become not sports but the first-fruits of a glorious humanity that is to be.
Who that has studied Platonism has not been reminded of Platonic conceptions
when reading Emerson? Though Emerson has not the originality nor the daring of
Plato, yet he is truly “Greek”; it does not require such a great flight of the
imagination to see him as some Alexandrian follower of Plato. How natural then
too, that Emerson, after entering the Christian ministry to give his message,
should find himself unable to do it as a Christian minister, and should
strike out a path for himself as an essayist to speak of the World-Soul! And
who that has studied Indian philosophies does not recognize old Vedantin
philosophers in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and a Buddhist philosopher in
Schopenhauer, all reverting to their philosophic interests of past lives, and
uttering their ancient convictions more brilliantly than before?
Wherever the deeper layers of a man’s being are offered to the world in some
creation through philosophy, literature, art or science, there may we note
tendencies started in past lives. For the pageant of the man’s life is not
planned and achieved in the few brief years which begin with his birth, and he
that knows of reincarnation may note readily enough where the parts of the
pageant were composed.
Reincarnation, as it affects large groups of individuals, is a fascinating
study to one with an historical bent of mind. I have mentioned that the English
race as a whole is largely a reincarnation of the ancient Roman; but here and
there we find a sprinkling of Greeks in men like Byron, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold,
and in those Englishmen and women who have the Greek feel for life, and hemmed
in by English tradition are as strangers in a strange land. Let such a return
Greek, wherever he be born this life, but go to South Italy or to Greece, and
he will begin to remember his past life in the instinctive familiarity which he
will feel with the hidden spirit of tree and lake and hill. As none but a Greek
can, he will find a joy in the sunshine, in the lemon groves and vineyards and
waterfalls, which in a Greek land give the message of Nature as in no other
land.
Others there are who, born last life in the Middle Ages somewhere in Europe,
perhaps in Italy or Spain of Germany, where they re-visit the land of their
former birth, will have a strange familiarity with the things that pass before
them. In striking ways, they read into the life of the people, and understand
the why of things. To some, this mysterious sense of recollection may be
strongest in Egypt, or India, or Japan; but wherever we have the intuitive
understanding of foreign people, we have one mode of remembering our past
lives.
It is in the characteristic intellectual attitude of the French that we see the
reincarnation of much that was developed in later Greece. The French
intellectual clarity and dispassionate keenness to see things “as they are”
(whether they bring material benefits or not) are typically Greek. And perhaps,
could we know more fully of the life of the Phoenicians, we should see them
reborn in the Germans of today. Then the commercial rivalry between England and
Germany for the capture of the markets of the East would be but the rebirth of
the ancient rivalry between Rome and Carthage for the markets of the
Mediterranean.
An eruption of Greek egos is fairly evident in the United States of America. On
the Pacific Coast especially, there are many men and women of the simple Greek
temperament of the pre-Periclean age, and yet their ancestors were not
infrequently New England Puritans. It is in America too, that we have the
Sophists of Greece in full strength in the “New Thought” writers who spring up
in that land month after month. In them we have the same characteristics as had
the Sophists of Greece whom Plato denounced — much sound sense and many a
useful wrinkle, an independence of landmarks and traditions, an unbounded
confidence in their own panacea, and a giving of their message of the Spirit “for
a consideration.” The lack of distinction in their minds, when in Greece,
between Sophism and Wisdom returns in the twentieth century as a confusion
between the New Thought ideas of the Divine Life and the real life of the
Spirit. Let us hope that as the Sophists helped to bring in the Golden Age of
Greece, so the “New Thought-ers” are the forerunners of that True Thought that
is to dawn, which is neither old nor new.
Here and there in India we find one who is distinctly not Hindu. For the most
part, the modern Hindus seem scarce to have been in other lands in their late
incarnations; but now and then a man or woman is met with for whom the
sacrosanct institutions of orthodoxy have no meaning, and who takes up western
ideas of progress with avidity. Some of these are “England-returned,” in this
present incarnation, and we can thus account for their mentality. But when we
find a man who has never left India, who was reared in strict orthodoxy, and
yet fights with enthusiasm for foreign ways of thought, surely we have here a
“Europe-returned” ego, from Greece or Rome or from some other of the many lands
of the West.
We must not forget to draw attention to the egos from Greece who have returned
to Europe to usher in the age of art. To one familiar with Greek sculpture and
architecture, it is not difficult to see the Greek artists reborn in the
Italian masters of painting and architecture. The cult is no longer that of
Pallas Athene and the Gods; there is now the Virgin Mary and the saints to give
them their heavenly crowns. Whence did the Italian masters gain their surety of
touch, if not from a past birth in Greece? It is striking, too, how the Romans,
who excelled in portraiture, should be reborn in the English school of portrait
painters, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence and the rest.
Nor must we forget the band of Greeks who like an inundation swept over the
Elizabethan stage, Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Peele, Johnson, and the rest -
are they not pagans thinly veiled in English garb? They felt life in un-English
modes; they felt first and then thought out the feeling. The Greek, is ever the
Greek, whatsoever the language which is given him to speak, and his touch in
literature and art is not easily veiled.
Strong impressions made on the consciousness in a past life often appear in the
present in some curious mood or feeling. Sometimes, fears of creeping things,
fires, cutting implements, etc., are thus to be accounted for, though sometimes
these “phobias” may only be sub-conscious reminders of this life. In the cases
where we have no sub-consciousness of the present body appearing, there is sure
to have been some shock, resulting it may be, in a violent death, in a past
life. The after effects appear now in some uncontrollable fear, or in
discomfort in the presence of the object which caused the shock. More strange
is the attitude of one individual towards another which is brought over from a
past life. Sometimes one sees the strange sight of a girl of ten or twelve
taking care of her mother in a maternal way, as though the positions were
reversed, and almost as if she had the onerous duty of bringing up her mother
in the way she should go. Of a deeper psychological nature is it when, as
sometimes happens, a wife mated to a husband who causes her suffering, finds
charity towards him possible only when she looks on him not as her husband but
as her son. Here we have a reminiscence of a life when he was indeed her child,
and his better nature came out towards her in the relation which he bore to her
then.
A rather humorous instance of a past recollection is found when there has been
between the last life and this a change of sex of the body. In the West
especially, where there is a more marked differentiation temperamentally
between the sexes than in the East, not infrequently the girl who dislikes
playing with dolls, who delights in boy’s games, and is a pronounced tomboy, is
really an ego who has just taken up a body of the sex opposite to that with
which he has been familiar for many lives. Many a girl has resented her skirts,
and it takes such a girl several years before she finally resigns herself to
them. Some women there are, on whose face and mode of carriage the last male
incarnation seems still fairly visibly portrayed. A similar thing is to be seen
in some men, who bring into this life traces of their habits of thought and
feeling when last they had women's bodies.
A consideration of the many psychological puzzles I have enumerated will show
us that, as a matter of fact, people do remember something of their past lives.
Truly the memory is indirect, only as a habit or a mood, but it is nevertheless
memory of the past. Now most people who are willing to accept reincarnation as
a fact in life naturally ask the question: “But why don’t we remember fully
?” To this there are two answers, the first of which is: “It is best for us not
to remember directly or fully, till we are ready for the memories.”
We are not ready for remembrance so long as we are influenced by the memories
of the past. Where for instance, the memory is of a painful event, up to a
certain point the past not only influences our present but also our future, and
both in a harmful way; and therefore, so long as we have not gone beyond the
sphere of influence of the past, our characters are weakened and not
strengthened by remembrance. Let us take an extreme case, but one typical
nevertheless. Suppose that in the last life a man has committed suicide as the
easiest way out of his difficulties. As he dies, there will be in his mind much
mental suffering, and especially he will lack confidence in his ability to
weather the storm. The suicide does not put an end to his suffering, for after
death it will continue for some time more acutely still, till it slowly
exhausts itself. There will be a purification through his great suffering, and
when it ends there will be in him a keener vision and a fuller response to the
promptings of his higher nature. When, then, he is reborn, he will be born with
a stronger conscience, as the result of his sufferings. But he will still
retain the lack of confidence in his ability, because nothing has happened
after his death to alter that. Confidence can be gained only by mastering
circumstance, and it is for that very purpose that he has returned. Now sooner
or later, he will be confronted with a situation similar to that before he
failed in the last life. As difficulties crowd around him in the new life, once
more there will be the old struggle. The fact of committing suicide will now
come as a tendency to suicide once again, as a resignation to suicide as the
easiest way. But on the other hand, the memory of the suffering after the last
suicide will also return in a stronger urge of conscience that this time the
solution must not be through suicide. In this condition of mental strain, when
the man is being pulled on one side by his past and on the other by his future,
if he were to know, with vivid memory, how he had committed suicide in the past
in a like situation, the probabilities are that he would be influenced by his
past action, and that his lack of confidence would be intensified, with suicide
as a result once again. Forgetfulness of the nerve-racking details of the past
enables him to fight now more manfully. We little realize how we are being
domineered over by our past. It is indeed a blessing for most of us that the
kindly Gods draw a veil over a record which, at our present stage of evolution,
cannot be anything but deplorable in many ways.
Only so long as we identify ourselves with our past, that past is hidden from
us, except in indirect modes as faculties and dispositions. But the direct
memory will come, if we learn to dissociate our present selves from our past
selves. We are ever the Future, not the past: and when we can look at our past
— of this life first, and after, of that of other lives — without heat,
impersonally, in perspective as it were, like a judge who has no sense of
identity with the facts before him for judgment, then we shall begin to
remember, directly, the past in detail– but till then, as Tennyson truly says :
We
ranging down this lower track
The path we came
by, thorn and flower,
Is shadow’d by the
growing hour.
Lest life should
fail in looking back.
The second reason for our not directly remembering
our past lives is this : – the “ I “ who asks the question, “Why don’t I
remember?” has not lived in the past. It is the Soul who has lived, not
this “ I “ with all its limitations. But is not this “ I “ that Soul? With most
people not at all, and this fact will be evident if we think over the matter.
The average man or woman is scarcely so much a Soul as a bundle of attributes
of sex, creed, and nationality. But the Soul is immortal, that is, it has no
sense of diminution or death; it has no idea of time, which deludes it to think
that it is young, wastes away, and grows old; it is neither man nor woman,
because it is developing in itself the best qualities of both sexes; it is
neither Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Christian, nor Muslim, because it lives in One
Divine Life and assimilates that Life according to its temperament; it is not
Indian, nor English, nor American, for it belongs to no country, even though
its outermost sheath, the physical body, belongs to a particular race; it has
no caste nor class, for it knows that all partake of One Life, and that before
God there is neither Brahmin nor Shudra, Jew nor Gentile, aristocrat nor
plebeian.
It is this Soul which puts out a part of itself, a Personality, for the period
of a life, “as a mere subject for grave experiment and experience.” Through a persona,
a “mask” of a babe, child, youth or maid, man or woman, bachelor, spinster or
householder, old man or old woman, it looks out into life, and, as it observes,
eliminates the distorting bias which its outer sheath gives. Its personalities
in the past have been Lemurian or Atlantean, Hindu or Roman or Greek, and it
selects the best out of them all and discards the rest. All literatures,
sciences, arts, religions and civilizations are its school and playground, its
workshop and study. Its patriotism is for an indivisible Humanity, and its
creed is to co-operate with “God’s plan, which is Evolution.”
It is this Soul who has had past lives. How much of this Soul are we, the men
and women who ask the question, “Why don’t we remember our past lives?” The
questioner is but the personality. The body of that personality has a brain on
whose cells the memories of a past life have not been impressed ; those
memories are in the Divine Man who is of no time, of no creed, and of no land.
To remember the Soul’s past lives, the brain of the personality must be made a
mirror onto which can be reflected the memories of the Soul. But before those
memories can come into the brain, one by one the various biases must be removed
— of mortality, of time, of sex, of color, of caste.
So long as we are wrapped up in petty thoughts of an exclusive nationalism, and
in narrow beliefs of creeds, so long do we retain the barriers which exist
between our higher selves and our lower. An intellectual breadth and a larger
sympathy, “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color,” must first
be achieved, before there breaks, as through clouds, flashes of our true
consciousness as Souls. There is no swifter way to discover what we are as
Immortals out of time than by discovering what is our Work in time.
Let but a man or woman find that Work for whose sake sacrifice and immolation
are serenest contentment, then slowly the larger consciousness of the Soul
descends into the brain of the personality. With that descent begins the direct
memory of past lives. As more and more the personality presses forward,
desiring no light but what is sufficient for the next step on his path to his
goal of work, slowly one bias after another is burnt away in the fire of
purification. Like as the sun dissipates more clouds the higher it rises, so it
is for the life of the personality; it knows then, with such conviction as the
sun has about its own nature when it shines, that “the soul of man is immortal,
and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendor have no
limit.”
Then come back the memories of past lives. How they come those who live the
life know. There are many kinds of knowledge useful for man, but none greater
than the knowledge “that evolution is a fact, and that the method of evolution
is the constant dipping down into matter under the law of adjustment.” This
knowledge is for all who seek, if they will but seek rightly; and the right way
is to be a Brother to all men, “without distinction of race creed, sex, caste
or color.
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