REINCARNATION/PART 7
THE CAUSE OF
REINCARNATION
The fundamental cause of Reincarnation as of all
manifestation, is the desire tor active life, the thirst for sentient
existence. Some deep-lying essence of nature, obvious in its workings, but incomprehensible
as to its origin and reason, manifests as the " law of periodicity."
" An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping
and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception,
that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely
fundamental laws of the universe." The ebb and flow everywhere, the rhythm
which is the systole and diastole of the cosmic Heart, is manifest on every
hand. But the reason for it escapes us; we cannot say why things should be so;
we can only see that so they are. And in the Esoteric Philosophy this same law
is recognised as extending to the emanation and reabsorption of universes, the
Night and Day of Brahma, the out-breathing and the inbreathing of the Great
Breath.
Hence the Hindus have pictured the God of Desire as
the impulse to manifestation. "Kama, again, is in the Rig Veda (x, 129)
the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation.
He was the fast movement that stirred the ONE, after
its manifestation from the purely abstract Principle, to create, Desire first
arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind; and which sages, searching with
their intellect, have discovered to be the bond whieh connects Entity with
Non-Entity.'" Kama is, essentially, the longing for active sentient
existence, existence of vivid sensation, tossing tur-"bulence of
passionate life. When spiritual Intelligence comes into contact with this
thirst for sensation, its first action is to intensify it. Says the Stanza:
" From their own essence they filled (intensified) the Kama." Thus
Kama, for the individual as for the Cosmos becomes the primary cause of
reincarnation, and, as Desire differentiates into desires, these chain down the
Thinker to earth and bring him back, time after time, to rebirth. The Hindu and
Buddhist Scriptures are filled with reiterations of this truth. Thus in the
Bhagavad Gita we read:
He whose Buddhi is everywhere unattached, the self
subdued, dead to desires, he goeth by renunciation to the supreme perfection of
freedom from Karma.
So in the Udanavarga, a Northern Buddhist version of
the Dhammapada, translated from the Tibetan, the same note is struck:
It is hard for one who is held by the fetters of
desire to free himself of them, says the Blessed One. The steadfast, who care
not for the happiness of desires, cast them off, and do soon depart (to
Nirvana).
Again and again seeking for it (existence) they again
and again enter the womb; beings come and go; to one state of being succeeds
another. It is hard to cast off (existence) in this world; he who has cast off
lust, who has pulled up the seed (of existence), will no more be subject to
transmigration, for he has put-an end to lust, In the Scriptures of the
Southern Buddhist Church stress is continually laid on the same idea. The
disciple is bidden not to be confident till he has "attained the
extinction of desires," and after describing the way in which desires and
passions tie men to earthly life, the Dhammapada proceeds:
He who has reached the consummation, who does not
tremble, who is without thirst and without sin, he has broken all the thorns,
of life: this will be his last body. He who is without thirst and without
affection, who understands the words and their interpretation, who knows the
order of letters (those which are before and which are after), he has received
his last body, he is called the great sage, the great man. " I have
conquered all, I know all, in all conditions of life I am free from taint; I
have left all, and through the destruction of thirst I am free."
And so there is the triumphant apostrophe, when
Gautama attains Buddhahood:
Looking for the maker of this tabernacle, I shall have
to run. through a course of many births, so long as I do not find (him); and
painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast
been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are
broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has
attained to the extinction of all desires.
When the nature of desire is realised by the student,
he will understand why its destruction is necessary to the perfecting of the
spiritual Man. Desire must be,
till the harvest of experience
has been gathered, for only by feeding on that harvested experience can growth be nourished and sustained. So while experience
still is lacking, the thirst for it remains unslacked, and the Ego will return to
earth again and
again. But its fetters must fall off one by one as the Ego reaches the
perfecting of its tabernacle, for desire is personal and therefore selfish,
-and when desire prompts action the purity of the action is tainted. The
condition of Arhatship is unceasing activity
without any personal returns;
the Arhat must " give light to all, but take from none." Hence in
the upward climbing one desire after
another must be unloosed, desire for personal enjoyment, personal pleasure,
personal gain, personal loves, personal
attainments, and, last and subtlest of all, desire for personal
perfection, for the personal self must be lost in the ONE SELF, that is the
SELF of all that lives. And here two warnings against misunderstanding are
necessary. First: personal loves are not to be killed out, but are to be
expanded till they become universal; we are not to love our dearest less, but
all are to become dear so that the sorrow of any child of man shall wring our
hearts as much as that of our own child, and stir us into equal activity of
help. Loves are to be levelled up, not down. The heart is not to be frozen, but
to be aflame for all. The failure to realise this, and the tremendous
difficulty of the task, when realised, have led to the stifling of love instead
of its growth. Overflowing love, not lovelessness, will save the world. The
Mahatma is the Ocean of Compassion; He is not an iceberg.
It is easy to see why this widening out must precede
the attainment of Mastership, for the Master holds His powers for the good of
all and not for the elevation of any particular family or nation. He is the
Servant of Humanity, and the way to His help must be need, not kinship. To
superhuman powers He must needs join superhuman impartiality, and personal
affection must never be allowed to weight the scale of Justice. Beyond all
other men He must be a slave to duty, for any swaying from its line would bring
about results proportionate to the greatness of His height.
He is to be a force for good, and the good must flow
in the channels where it is most needed, not in those cut by personal loves or
racial predilections. Hence the long training, the personal asceticism, the
isolation, which are the conditions of chelaship.
Second: action is not to be stopped because the
disciple no longer seeks the fruits of action as reward. "Inaction in a
deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin." "Shalt thou abstain
from action? Not so shall gain thy soul her freedom. To reach Nirvana one must
reach Self- Knowledge, and Self-Knowledge is of loving deeds the child."
But while action must be carried on at the full strain of human powers, desire
for its fruit in personal satisfaction must pass away. A good deed must be done
for the sake of its helpfulness, of its use to others, not for the sake of
praise either of others or of self, nor even for the subtler longing for
self-improvement. Here again the failure to realise the distinction between
action and desire for the fruits of action has led to the stagnation and
passivity characteristic of Eastern nations, since spiritual selfishness and
indifference brought on their decay.
As this general desire for sentient existence is the
cause of reincarnation universally, so is the determining cause of each
individual reincarnation the renewed longing for the taste of existence on the
physical plane. When a long life on the earth plane has been lived and a store
of experiences has been gathered, this longing for physical existence is
satiated for the time, and the desire turns towards, rest. Then comes the
interval of disembodiment, during which the Ego, re-entering as it were
into-himself, ceases to energise externally on the physical plane, and bends
all his energies to internal activities, reviewing his gathered store of
experiences, the harvest of the earth-life just closed, separating and
classifying them, assimilating what is capable of assimilation, rejecting what
is effete and useless. This is the work of the devachanic period, the necessary
time for assimilation, for gaining equilibrium. As a workman may go out and gather
the materials for his work, and having-collected them may return home, sort and
arrange them, and then proceed to make from them some artistic or serviceable
object, so the Thinker, having; gathered his store of materials from life's
experiences, must weave them into the web of his millennial existence. He can
no more be always busied in the whirl of earth-life than a workman can always
be gathering store of materials and never fabricating from them goods; or than
a man can always be eating food and never digesting it and assimilating it to
build up the tissues of his body. This with the rest needed between periods of
activity by all forms of being, makes Devachan an absolute necessity, and
rebukes the impatience with which ill-instructed Theosophists chafe against the
idea of thus "wasting time." The rest itself is a thing, be it
remembered, that we cannot do without. "The tired and worn-out Manu
(thinking Ego)" needs it, and it is only "the now-rested Ego"]
that is ready and fit for reincarnation. We have not the energy needed for
taking up the burden of the flesh again until this period of refreshment has
enabled the forces of life, mental and spiritual, to store themselves up once
more in the spiritual man. It is only at the approaching close of the cycle of
rebirths that the Ego, grown strong by his millenniums of experience, is able
to gird himself for the awful strain of his last swiftly recurring lives,
"without devachanic break," scaling those last seven steps of the
ladder of existence with the tireless muscles hardened by the long ascent that
lies behind.
One kind of progress—outside the necessary process of
assimilation just spoken of, which is a condition of further progress—may be
made in Devachan. H. P. Blavatsky says:
In one sense, we can acquire more knowledge; that is,
we can develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after during life,
provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal things, such as music,
painting, poetry, etc., since Devachan is merely an idealised and subjective
continuation of earth-life.
This may explain the marvellous infantile genius
sometimes shown, especially in music, going far beyond any point known to have
been reached before in the history of that art in the Aryan race. However that
may be, it is well to remember that the resolute following of abstract thought,
of idealistic longings, gives a trend to the devachanic state that will make it
a state of active, as well as of passive, progress. While Devachan is
essentially the world of effects, yet, to this extent, it borrows from the
world of causes, though it is also true that the impulse must be given here
which will let the wheel still turn along that peaceful road. In Devachan is no
initiation of cause, no origination of endeavour, but it allows of continuation
of efforts aimed at the highest planes of being that man can reach from earthly
life. Why there should be this possibility it is easy to see, for the abstract
and the ideal heights are illumined by the manasic radiance, and that brightens,
it is not dimmed, when Manas-Taijasi (the shining or resplendent Manas) soars
unfettered to its own plane.
An interesting question arises at this juncture: when
the rest period is over, the forces that carried the Ego out of earth-life are
exhausted, the longing for sentient physical existence is reviving, and the Ego
is ready to cross "the threshold of Devachan" and pass to the plane
of reincarnation, what now guides him to the special race, nation, family,
through which he is to find his new tabernacle of flesh, and what determines
the sex he is to wear? Is it affinity? Is it free choice? Is it necessity? No
questions fall more readily from an inquirer's lips.
It is the law of Karma that guides him unerringly
towards the race and the nation wherein are to be found the general
characteristics that will produce a body, and provide a social environment,
fitted for the manifestation of the general character built up by the Ego in
previous earth-lives and for the reaping of the harvest he has sown.
Karma, with its army of Skandhas, waits at the
threshold of Devachan, whence the ego re-emerges to assume a new incarnation.
It is at this moment that the future destiny of the now rested Ego trembles in
the scales of just retribution, as it now falls once again under the sway of
active Karmic law. It is in this re-birth which is ready for it, a re-birth
selected and prepared by this mysterious, inexorable, but in the equity and
wisdom -of its decrees, infallible LAW, that the sins of the previous life of
the Ego are punished. Only it is into no imaginary Hell, with, theatrical
flames and ridiculous tailed and horned devils, that the Ego is cast, but
verily on to this earth, the plane and region of his sins, where he will have
to atone for every bad thought and deed. As he has sown so will he reap.
Reincarnation will gather around him all those other Egos who have suffered,
whether directly or indirectly at the hands, or even through the unconscious
instrumentality, of the past personality. They will be thrown by Nemesis in the
way of the new man, concealing the old, the eternal Ego. . . . The new
"personality" is no better than a fresh suit of clothes with its
specific characteristics,, colour, form and qualities; but the real man who
wears it is the same culprit as of old.
Thus, say, through a militant personality in one
incarnation the Ego would set up causes tending to draw him for rebirth to a
race and nation passing through a militant period in its history; the Ego of a
Roman of the combative colonising type would be drawn, e.g., to the English
nation under Elizabeth, a nation and epoch at which physical heredity would
provide a body, and social forces an environment, fitted for the manifestation
of the character built up fifteen centuries before.
Another strand in the rope of Karma, and one of the
strongest, is the dominant tendency and trend of the last-closed life. Dominant
tendencies and the resolute following of any line of thought and action,
reappear as innate qualities. A man of strong will, who steadfastly sets
himself to acquire wealth, who follows this resolve through his life
relentlessly and unscrupulously, will in another incarnation be likely to be
one of those men who are proverbially "lucky," of whom it is said,
"Everything he touches turns to gold." Hence the enormous importance
of our choice of ideals, of our selection of our aim in life, for the ideals of
one life become the circumstances of the next. If they are selfish, base,
material, our next incarnation will bring us into an environment in which they
will fall into our grasp. As an iron will compels fortune here, so it stretches
its mailed grasp across the gulf of death and rebirth, and grips the end it is
resolute to gain; it does not lose tension and force during the devachanic
interlude, but gathers up all its energies and works in subtler matter, so that
the Ego finds prepared for it on its return a tabernacle built by that strong
and passionate desire and fitted for the accomplishment of the foreseen end. As
a man sows so he reaps; he is the master of his destiny, and if he wills to
build for temporal success, for physical luxury, none can say him nay. Only by
experience he will learn that power and wealth and luxury are but Dead-Sea
fruit; that with them the body may be clothed, but the Ego will be shivering
and naked; that his true self will not be satisfied with the husks that are fit
food but for the swine; and at last, when he has full-fed the animal in him and
starved the human, he will, though in the far country whither his wayward feet
have carried him, turn yearning eyes towards his true home, and through many
lives he will struggle thitherwards with all the force once used for dominance
now yoked to service, and the strong man who built his strength for mastery of
others will turn it to mastery of self and to training it into obedience to the
Law of Love.
The question, "What determines sex?" is a
difficult one to answer even by a suggestion, and definite information on this
point has not been given out. The Ego itself is sexless, and each Ego, in the
course of its myriad reincarnations, dwells in male and female bodies. As the
building up of the perfect humanity is the object of reincarnation, and in this
perfect humanity positive and negative elements must find complete equilibrium,
it is easy to see that the Ego must by experience develop these characteristics
to the fullest in their appropriate physical subjects, and therefore that an
alternation of sexes is necessary. It is also noticeable, as a matter of
observation, that at this stage of human progress advance is being made in the
synthesising process, and we meet noble types of each physical sex showing some
of the characteristics historically developed in the other, so that the
strength, the firmness, the courage evolved along the male line are welded to
the tenderness, the purity, the endurance, evolved along the female, and we
catch some glimpse of what humanity shall be when the" pairs of
opposites" divorced for evolution are once more united for fruition. Meanwhile
it seems likely that sex-experience constantly redresses the balance of the
evolutionary process, and supplies the qualities lacking at any given stage,
and also that the karmic consequence of the infliction of wrong by one sex on
another will be the drawing back of the wrong-doers to suffer in the wronged
sex the effects of the causes they initiated.
Thus Karma traces the line which forms the Ego's path
to the new incarnation, this Karma being the collectivity of causes set going
by the Ego himself. In studying this play of karmic forces, however, there is
one thing that ought not to be left out of account—the ready acceptance by the
Ego, in his clearer-sighted vision, of conditions for his personality far other
than the personality might be willing to choose for itself. The schooling of
experience is not always pleasant, and to the limited knowledge of the
personality there must be much of earth-experience which seems needlessly
painful, unjust and useless. The Ego, ere he plunges into the "Lethe of
the body," sees the causes which ultimate in the conditions of the
incarnation on which he is to enter, and the opportunities which there will be
therein for growth, and it is easy to realise how lightly will weigh in the
balance all passing griefs and pains, how trivial, to that piercing, far-seeing
gaze, the joys and woes of earth. For what is each life but a step in the perpetual
progress for each incarnating Ego, or divine soul, in an evolution from the
outward into the inward, from the material to the Spiritual, arriving at the
end of each stage at absolute unity with the Divine Principle. From strength to
strength, from the beauty and perfection of one plane to the greater beauty and
perfection of another, with accessions of new glory, of fresh knowledge and
power in each cycle, such is the destiny of every Ego.
And with such a destiny, what boots the passing
suffering of a moment, or even the anguish of a darkened life?
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