THE RIDDLE OF LIFE/PART 6
CHAPTER
VI
THE
LAW OF RE-BIRTH
REINCARNATION
IN THE PAST
THERE
is, perhaps, no philosophical doctrine in the world that has so magnificent an
intellectual ancestry as that of reincarnation—the unfolding of the human
spirit through recurring lives on earth, experience being gathered during the
earth life and worked up into intellectual faculty and conscience during the
heaven-life, so that a child is born with his past experiences transmuted into
mental and moral tendencies and powers. As Max Muller truly remarked, the
greatest minds humanity has produced have accepted reincarnation. Reincarnation
is taught and illustrated in the great epics of the Hindus as an undoubted fact
on which morality is based, and the splendid Hindu literature, which is the
admiration of European scholars, is permeated with it. The Buddha taught it and
constantly spoke of his past births. Pythagoras did the same, and Plato
included it in his philosophical writings. Josephus states that it was accepted
among the Jews, and relates the story of a captain who encouraged his soldiers
to fight to the death by reminding them of their return to earth. In The Wisdom
of Solomon it is stated that coming into an undefiled body wins the reward of
'being good'. The Christ accepted it, telling His disciples that John the
Baptist was Elijah. Virgil and Ovid take it for granted. The ritual composed by
the learning of Egypt inculcated it. The Neo-Platonic schools accepted it, and
Origen, the most learned of the Christian Fathers, declared that 'every man
received a body according to his deserts and his former action'. Though
condemned by a Roman Catholic Council, the heretical sects preserved the old
tradition. And it comes to us in the Middle Ages from a learned son of Islam: '
died out of the stone and I became a plant; I died out of the plant and became
an animal; died out of the animal and I became a man; why should I fear to die?
When did I grow less by " dying? I shall die out of the man and shall
become an angel.' In later time we find it taught by Goethe, Fichte, Schelling,
Lessing, to name but some among the German philosophers. Goethe in his old age
looked joyfully forward to his return; Hume declared that it was the only
doctrine of immortality a philosopher could look at, a view somewhat similar to
that of our British Professor Mc. Taggart, who, lately reviewing the various
theories of immortality, came to the conclusion that reincarnation was the most
rational. I need not remind anyone of literary culture that Wordsworth,
Browning, Rossetti and other poets believed it. The reappearance of the belief
in reincarnation is not, therefore, an emergence of a belief of savages among
civilised nations, but a sign of recovery from a temporary mental aberration in
Christendom, from the de-rationalisation of religion which has wrought so much
evil and has given rise to so much scepticism and materialism. To assert the
special creation of a soul for every fresh body, implying that the coming into
existence of a soul depends on the formation of a body, inevitably leads to the
conclusion that with the death of the body the soul will pass out of existence;
that a soul with no past should have an everlasting future is as incredible as
that a stick should exist with only one end. Only a soul which is unborn can
hope to be undying. The loss of the teaching of reincarnation—with its
temporary purgatory for working out evil passions and its temporary heaven for
the transmutation of experience into faculty—gave rise to the idea of a
never-ending heaven for which no one is good enough, and a never-ending hell
for which no one is wicked enough, confined human evolution to an inappreciable
fragment of existence, hung an everlasting future on the contents of a few
years, and made life an unintelligible tangle of injustices and partialities,
of unearned genius and unmerited criminality, an intolerable problem to the
thoughtful, tolerable only to blind and foundationless faith.
REINCARNATION
AND ITS NECESSITY
There
are but three explanations of human inequalities, whether of faculties, of
opportunities, of circumstances: I. Special creation by God, implying that man
is helpless, his destiny being controlled by an arbitrary and incalculable
will. II. Heredity, as suggested by science, implying an equal helplessness on
man's part, he being the result of a past, over which he had no control. III.
Reincarnation, implying that man can become master of his destiny, he being the
result of his own individual past, being what he has made himself.
Special
creation is rejected by all thoughtful people as an explanation of the
conditions round us, save in the most important conditions of all, the
character with which and the environment into which an infant is born Evolution
is taken for granted in everything except in the life of spiritual intelligence
called man; he has no individual past, although he has an individual endless
future. The character he brings with him—on which more than on anything else
his destiny on earth depends—is, on this hypothesis, specially created for him
by God, and imposed on him without any choice of his own; out of the lucky bag
of creation he may draw a prize or a blank, the blank being a'doom of misery;
such as it is, he must take it.
If
he draw a good disposition, fine capacities, a noble nature, so much the better
for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If he draw congenital
criminality, congenital idiocy, congenital disease, congenital drunkenness, so
much the worse for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If everlasting
bliss be tacked on to the one and everlasting torment to the other the
unfortunate one must accept his ill fate as he may. Hath not the potter power
over the clay? Only it seems sad if the clay be sentient.
In
another respect special creation is grotesque. A spirit is specially created
for a small body which dies a few hours after birth. If life on earth has any
educational or experimental value that spirit will be the poorer forever by
missing such a life, and the lost opportunity can never be made good. If, on
the other hand, human life on earth is of no essential importance and carries
with it the certainty of many ill doings and sufferings and the possibility of
everlasting suffering at the end of it, the spirit that comes into a body that
endures to old age is hardly dealt with, as it must endure innumerable ills
escaped by the other without any equivalent advantage, and may be damned
forever.
THE
LAW OF RE-BIRTH
The
list of injustices brought about by special creation might be extended
indefinitely, for it includes all inequalities, it has made myriads of
atheists, as incredible by the intelligence and revolting to the conscience. It
places man in the position of the inexorable creditor of God, stridently demanding:
'Why has thou made me thus?'
The
hypothesis of science is not as blasphemous as that of special creation, but
heredity only explains bodies; it throws no light on the evolution of
intelligence and conscience. The Darwinian theory tried to include these, but
failed lamentably to explain how the social virtues could be evolved in the
struggle for existence. Moreover, by the time the parents had acquired their
ripest fruition of high qualities the period of reproduction was over; children
are for the most part born in the hey-day of physical vigour while the
intellectual and moral qualities of their parents are immature. Later studies
have, however, shown that acquired qualities are not transmissible, and that
the higher the type the fewer the offspring.
'Genius
is sterile', says science, and thus sounds the knell of human progress if
heredity be its motive power. Intelligence and reproductive power vary
inversely; the lower the parents the more prolific are they. With the discovery
that acquired qualities are not transmissible science has come up against a
dead wall. It can offer no explanation of the facts of high intelligence and
saintly life. The child of a saint may be a profligate; the child of a genius
may be a dolt. Genius 'comes out of the blue'
This
glory of humanity, from the scientific standpoint, seems outside the law of
causation. Science does not tell us how to build strong minds and pure hearts
for the future. She does not threaten us with an arbitrary will, but she leaves
us without explanation of human inequalities. She tells us that the drunkard
bequeaths to his children bodies prone to disease, but she does not explain why
some unhappy children are the recipients of the hideous legacy.
Reincarnation
restores justice to God and power to man. Every human spirit enters into human
life a germ, without knowledge, without conscience, without discrimination. By
experience, pleasant and painful, man gathers materials, and as before
explained, builds them into mental and moral faculties. Thus the character he
is born with is self-made, and marks the stage he has reached in his long
evolution. The good disposition, the fine capacities, the noble nature are the
spoils of many a hard-fought fight, the wages of heavy and arduous toil. The
reverse marks an early stage of growth, the small development of the spiritual
germ.
The
savage of today is the saint of the future; all tread a similar road; all are
destined to ultimate human perfection. Pain follows on mistakes and is ever
remedial; strength is developed by struggle; we reap, after every sowing, the
inevitable result; happiness growing out of the right, sorrow out of the wrong.
The babe dying shortly after birth pays in the death a debt owing from the
past, and returns swiftly to earth, delayed but for brief space and free of his
debt to gather the experience necessary for his growth. Social virtues, though
placing a man at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, perhaps even
leading to the sacrifice of his physical life, build a noble character for his
future lives and shape him to become a servant of the nation.
Genius
inheres in the individual as the result of many lives of effort, and the
sterility of the body it wears does not rob the future of its services, as it
returns greater on every re-birth. The body poisoned by a father's drunkenness
is taken by a spirit learning by a lesson of suffering to guide its earthly
life on lines better than those followed in the past.
And
so in every case the individual past explains the individual present, and when
the laws of growth are known and obeyed a man can build with a sure hand his
future destiny, shaping his growth on lines of ever-increasing beauty until he
reaches the stature of the Perfect Man.
WHY
OUR PAST LIVES ARE FORGOTTEN
No question
is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: 'If I were here
before, why do I not remember it?' A little consideration of facts will answer
the question.
First
of all, let us note the fact that we forget more of our present lives than we
remember. Many people cannot remember learning to read; yet the fact that they
can read proves the learning. Incidents of childhood and youth have faded from
our memory, yet they have left traces on our character. A fall in babyhood is
forgotten, yet the victim is none the less a cripple. And this, although we are
using the same body in which the forgotten events were experienced.
These
events, however, are not wholly lost by us; if a person be thrown into a
mesmeric trance, they may be drawn from the depths of memory; they are
submerged, not destroyed. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a
language known in childhood and forgotten in maturity. Much of our sub-consciousness
consists of these submerged experiences, memories thrown into the background
but recoverable.
If
this be true of experiences encountered in the present body, how much more must
it be true of experiences encountered in former bodies, which died and decayed
many centuries ago. Our present body and brain have had no share in those
far-off happenings; how should memory assert itself through them? Our permanent
body, which remains with us throughout the cycle of reincarnation, is the
spiritual body; the lower garments fall away and return to their elements ere
we can become reincarnated.
The
new mental, astral and physical matter in which we are re-clothed for a new
life on earth receives from the spiritual intelligence, garbed only in the
spiritual body, not the experiences of the past, but the qualities, tendencies
and capacities which have been made out of those experiences. Our conscience,
our instinctive response to emotional and intellectual appeals, our recognition
of the force of a logical argument, our assent to fundamental principles of
right and wrong, these are the traces of past experience. A man of a low
intellectual type cannot 'see' a logical or mathematical proof; a man of low
moral type cannot 'feel' the compelling force of a high moral ideal.
When
a philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art is
mastered without study, memory is there in power, though past facts of learning
are forgotten; as Plato said, it is reminiscence. When we feel intimate with a
stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a
friend of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another
stranger, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of an ancient foe.
These
affinities, these warnings, come from the undying spiritual intelligence which
is ourself; we remember, though working in the brain we cannot impress
on it our memory. The mind-body, the brain, are new; the spirit furnishes the
mind with the results of the past, not with the memory of its events. As a
merchant, closing the year's ledger and opening a new one, does not enter in
the new one all the items of the old, but only its balances, so does the spirit
hand on to the new brain his judgments on the experiences of a life that is
closed, the conclusions to which he has come, the decisions at which he has
arrived. This is the stock handed on to the new life, the mental furniture for
the new dwelling—a real memory.
Rich
and varied are these in the highly evolved man; if these are compared with the
possessions of the savage, the value of such a memory of a long past is patent.
No brain could store the memory of the events of numerous lives; when they are
concreted into mental and moral judgments they are available for use; hundreds
of murders have led up to the decision 'I must not kill'; the memory of each
murder would be a useless burden, but the judgment based on their results, the
instinct of the sanctity of human life, is the effective memory of them in the
civilised man.
Memory
of past events, however, is sometimes found; children have occasional fleeting
glimpses of their past, recalled by some event of the present; an English boy
who had been a sculptor recalled it when he first saw some statues; an Indian
child recognised a stream in which he had been drowned as a little child in a
preceding life, and the mother of that earlier body. Many cases are on record
of such memory of past events.
Moreover,
such memory can be gained. But the gaining is a matter of steady effort, of
prolonged meditation, whereby the restless mind, ever running outwards, may be
controlled and rendered quiescent, so that it may be sensitive and responsive
to the spirit and receive from him the memory of the past. Only as we can hear
the still small voice of the spirit may the story of the past be unrolled, for
the spirit alone can remember and cast down the rays of his memory to enlighten
the darkness of the fleeting lower nature to which he is temporarily attached.
Cinder
such conditions memory is possible, links of the past are seen, old friends are
recognised, old scenes recalled, and a subtle inner strength and calm grows out
of the practical experience of immortality. Present troubles grow light when
seen in their true proportions as trivial and transient events in an unending
life; present joys lose their brilliant colours when seen as repetitions of
past delights; and both alike are equally accepted as useful experiences,
enriching mind and heart and contributing to the growth of the unfolding life.
Not
until pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity can
the crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they have thus
been seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which
would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced
that on his return to earth-life he would be washed clean of his memories, and
lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new life on its
way, enriched with the results, but unburdened with the recollections of its
past.
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