REINCARNATION/PART 9
OBJECTIONS TO
REINCARNATION
The statement of objections here adduced is drawn from
those raised by opponents and inquirers, and is merely offered as a sample of
those most frequently met.
i. The Loss of Memory. This is fully dealt with under
the heading WHAT IT is THAT DOES NOT REINCARNATE, and the explanation need not
be repeated here.
ii. The Increase of Population. If the number of Egos,
it is asked, be a fixed number, how do you account for the increase of
population? This is perfectly consistent with a growth in the number of the
incarnated Egos, seeing the small proportion these bear to the total number of
Egos out of incarnation. To reduce the answer to a very concrete form: if, for
example, there are three thousand Egos to be incarnated; one hundred are
incarnated, leaving two thousand nine hundred out of incarnation; a period of
fifteen hundred years is to elapse before the first hundred come into
incarnation again, and so with each successive hundred; a very slight
shortening of the period out of incarnation for seme must vastly increase the
incarnated population. Those who raise this objection generally take it for
granted that the proportion of Egos out of incarnation to those in incarnation
is about half and half, whereas the number out of incarnation is enormously
greater than that of the Egos incarnated. The globe is as a small hall in a
large town, drawing the audiences that enter it from the total population. It
may be at one time half empty, at another crowded, without any change in the
total population of the town. So our little globe may be thinly or thickly
populated, and the vast number of Egos on which it draws to replenish its stock
of inhabitants remains practically inexhaustible.
iii. Reincarnation ignores the Law of Heredity, on the
contrary, it enforces it on the physical plane.
It admits that the parents in giving the physical
materials stamp these with their own signet, so to speak, and that the
molecules built into the child's body carry with them the habit of vibrating in
definite ways and of associating themselves in particular combinations. Thus
will be conveyed hereditary diseases; thus will be transmitted little tricks of
manner, habits, gestures, etc. But, "the objector proceeds," this is
not all. Mental likenesses are transmitted, mental peculiarities as well as
physical."This is true within limits, but not to the extent taken for
granted by those who would explain everything by the working of a single law.
Etheric atoms as well as physical are contributed by the parents, as are also
kamic elements —especially by the mother—and these work on the molecules of the
brain as well as on those of the rest of the body, and so cause the
reappearance in the child of vital and passional characteristics of the
parents, modifying the manifestations of the Thinker, the Manas, the
reincarnating Ego. The theory of reincarnation admits all these modes of
influence by the parents on the child, but while allowing to the fullest for
these, it refuses to ignore all the independent actions of which exist proof as
striking as those of parental influence on the Lower Quaternary; and so
Theosophy gives a full explanation of differences and of similarities, whereas,
heredity gives only a partial and one-sided one, laying stress on the
similarities and ignoring the differences.
iv. Reversion is sufficient to explain the
differences, is the answer to the last criticism; genius is explained by
reversion, as are all types wholly different from, the immediate progenitors.
But if genius be a case of reversion then we ought to be able to recognise the
ancestor endowed with it, since it marks out its possessor from the crowd.
Genius-should only appear, however long the intervals, in families in which it
has already been manifested. If Shakespeare be an instance of reversion, to
whom did he revert? The very fact that a genius suddenly renders illustrious a
family hitherto obscure negates, the hypothesis of reversion, since the
obscurity is itself the guarantee of the absence of genius. It may also be
remarked that when the birth of a vicious, child in a virtuous family is put
down to reversion, the explanation is a pure guess without a shadow of proof in
its support. If genius could be established as a reversion, then, by analogy,
the other cases might be similarly argued for, but where the presumption is
against this explanation in the case in which it might easily be verified, if
true, little stress can be laid on it in cases in which verification is almost
necessarily impossible.
v. The appearance of a vicious child in a virtuous
family, and of a virtuous child in a vicious family, is against the theory that
the Ego is drawn to those who can give it a suitable body and environment. At
the first blush, this objection seems a strong one, but it leaves out of
account the very important question of karmic ties. The Esoteric Philosophy
teaches that the future destinies of Egos become intertwined by the relations
set up between them in any earth-life. Love and hatred, service and injury,
comradeship in good and evil, all tend to draw the Egos back to earth-life
together, for the joint working out of effects jointly caused. Hence the
shocking, and on this plane unnatural, hatreds found to exist sometimes between
parents and children, brothers and sisters—hatreds as inexplicable as they are
malignant, marked with monstrous features of revenge as for some unremembered
but dominating wrong. Hence, too, the inseverable ties that bind hearts
together, out-reaching distance, out-lasting time, ties whose uncaused strength
in this life points to a genesis beyond the portal of birth.
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