REINCARNATION PART 1/INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
IF it be difficult for a new truth to gain a hearing
amid the strife of tongues that marks our modern civilisation it is yet more
difficult for a truth to make itself heard which has become new only by force
of age. If our eye could sweep over the intellectual history of the race,
unrolled before us for centuries of millenniums, then a gap in the dominance of
some world-wide idea, stretching over some few hundreds of years among a small
number of the nations, would but slightly impress us. But when that gap—a mere
partial fissure in an immemorial past—includes the intellectual development of
Europe, and is scanned by Europeans, it assumes an importance quite out of
proportion to its relative extent in time, its relative weight in argument.
Great and valuable as is the contribution brought by Europe to the mental
treasurehouse of mankind, we Europeans are very apt to overestimate it, and to
forget that the very brief period of intellectual achievement in Europe cannot
rationally be taken as outweighing the total mental fruitage of the
non-European races, gathered over thousands of centuries. This looming large of
our own recent past, until, as a plate held before our eyes shuts out the sun,
it hides the past of the world from our mental gaze, is a danger against which
we should be on our guard. The wise listen most readily to those whose habits
of thoughts are most alien from their own, knowing that thus they may chance to
catch a glimpse of some new aspect of truth, instead of seeing once more the
mere reflection of the aspect already familiar. Men's racial habits,
traditions, surroundings, are as coloured glasses through which they look at
the sun of Truth; each glass lends its own tint to the sunbeam, and the white
ray is transmitted as red, or blue, or yellow—what you will. As we cannot get
rid of our glass and catch the pure uncoloured radiance, we do wisely to
combine the coloured rays and so obtain the white.
Now Reincarnation is a truth that has swayed the minds
of innumerable millions of our race, and has moulded the thoughts of the vast
majority for uncounted centuries. It dropped out of the European mind during
the Dark Ages, and so ceased to influence our mental and moral development—very
much, be it said in passing, to the injury of that development. For the last
hundred years it has from time to time flashed through the minds of some of the
greater Westerns, as a possible explanation of some of life's most puzzling
problems: and during recent years, since its clear enunciation as an essential
part of the Esoteric Teaching, it has been constantly debated, and is as
constantly gaining ground, among the more thoughtful students of the mysteries
of life and of evolution.
There is, of course, no doubt that the great
historical religions of the East included the teaching of Reincarnation as a
fundamental tenet. In India, as in Egypt, Reincarnation was at the root of
ethics. Among the Jews it was held commonly by the Pharisees, and the popular
belief comes out in. various phrases in the New Testament, as when John the
Baptist is regarded as a reincarnation of Elijah or as when the disciples ask
whether the man born blind is suffering for the sin of his parents or for some former sin of his own. The Zohar,
again, speaks of souls as being subjected to transmigration. "All souls
are subject to revolution (metempsychosis, a'leen b'gilgoolah), but men do not
know the ways of the Holy One; blessed be it! they are ignorant of the way they
have been judged in all time, and "before they came into this world and
when they have quitted it." The Kether Malkuth evidently has the same idea
as that conveyed by Josephus, when it says: " If she (the soul) be pure,
then shall she obtain favour and rejoice in the latter day; but if she hath
been denied, then shall she wander for a time in pain and despair," So
also, we find the doctrine taught by eminent Fathers of the Church, and
Ruffinus states that belief in it was common among the primitive Fathers.
Needless to say that the philosophic Gnostics and Neo-Platonists held it as an
integral part of their doctrine. If we glance to the Western Hemisphere we meet
Reincarnation as a firmly rooted belief among many of the tribes of North and
South America. The Mayas, with their deeply interesting connection in language
and symbolism with ancient Egypt, held the traditional doctrine, as has been
shown by the investigations of Dr. and Mme. le Plongeon. To these, the name of
many another tribe might be added, remnants of once famous nations, that in
their decay have preserved the ancestral beliefs that once linked them with the
mightiest peoples of the elder world.
It could scarcely be expected that a teaching of such
vast antiquity and such magnificent intellectual ancestry should fade out of
the mind of mankind; and accordingly we find that the eclipse it suffered a few
centuries ago was very partial, affecting only a small portion of the race. The
ignorance that swamped Europe carried away belief in Reincarnation, as it
carried away all philosophy, all metaphysics, and all science. Mediaeval Europe
did not offer the soil on which could flourish any wide-sweeping and
philosophical view of man's nature and destiny. But in the East, which enjoyed
a refined and gracious civilisation while Europe was sunk in barbarism; which
had its philosophers and its poets while the West was densely illiterate; in
the East, the great doctrine held undisputed sway, whether in the subtle
metaphysics of the Brahmans, or in the noble morality which finds its home
under the shadow of the Buddha and His Good Law.
But while a fact of Nature may in some part of the
world for a time be ignored it cannot be destroyed, and, submerged for a
moment, it will again reassert itself in the sight of men. This has been
demonstrated anew in the history of the doctrine of Reincarnation in Europe, in
its occasional reappearances, traceable from the founding of Christendom to the
present time, in its growing acceptance today.
When Christianity first swept over Europe, the inner
thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried
ineffectually to eradicate it, and in various sects it kept sprouting forth
beyond the time of Erigena and Benaventura, its mediaeval advocates. Every
great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme and Swedenborg, has adhered to
it. The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The
best of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel,
Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The
anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact with
it. The younger Helmont, in De Revolutions Animarum, adduces in two hundred
problems all the arguments which may be urged in favour of the return of souls
into human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of English thinkers, the
Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and acuteness, most
conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudworth and Hume, it ranks as the most
rational theory of immortality. Glanvil's Lux Orientalis devotes a curious
treatise to it. It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. Andre Pezzani's
book on The Plurality of the Soul's Lines works out the system on the Roman
Catholic idea of expiation.
The reader of Schopenhauer will be familiar with the
aspect taken by Reincarnation in his philosophy. Penetrated as was the great
German with Eastern thought from his study of the Upanishads, it would have
been passing strange had this corner-stone of Hindu philosophy found no place
in his system. Nor is Schopenhauer the only philosopher from the Intellectual
and mystical German people who has accepted Reincarnation as a necessary factor
in Nature. The opinions of Fichte, of Herder, of Lessing, may surely claim to
be of some weight in the intellectual world, and these men see in Reincarnation
a solution for problems otherwise insoluble. It is true that the intellectual
world is not a despotic State, and none may impose his opinion on his fellows
by personal authority; none the less are opinions weighed there rather than
counted, and the mightier and more instructed intellects of the West, though
they be here in a small minority, will command respectful hearing for that
which they deliberately advance, from all whose minds are not so hide-bound by
modern tradition as to be unable to appreciate the value of arguments addressed
to the support of an unfashionable truth.
It is interesting to note that the mere idea of
Reincarnation is no longer regarded in the West— at least by educated people—as
absurd. It is-gradually assuming the position of a possible hypothesis, to be
considered on its merits, on its power of explaining puzzling and apparently
unrelated phenomena. Regarding it myself as, to me, a proven fact, I am
concerned rather to put it forward on these pages as a probable hypothesis,
throwing more light than does any other theory on the obscure problems of man's
constitution, of his character, his evolution, and his destiny. Reincarnation
and Karma are said by a Master to be the two doctrines of which the West stands
most in. need; so it cannot he ill done for a believer in the Masters to set
forth an outline, for the ordinary reader, of this central teaching of the
Esoteric Philosophy.
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