Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00076)

OCEAN10.TXT  ~The Ocean of Theosophy~ - W.Q.Judge

CHAPTER X

UNLESS WE DENY THE immortality of man and the existence of soul,
there are no sound arguments against the doctrine of
preexistence and rebirth save such as rest on the dictum of the
church that each soul is a new creation. This dictum can be
supported only by blind dogmatism, for given a soul we must
sooner or later arrive at the theory of rebirth, because even if
each soul is new on this earth it must keep on living somewhere
after passing away, and in view of the known order of nature
will have other bodies in other planets or spheres. Theosophy
applies to the self, the thinker, the same laws which are seen
everywhere in operation throughout nature, and those are all
varieties of the great law that effects follow causes and no
effect is without a cause. The soul's immortality, believed in
by the mass of humanity, demands embodiment here or elsewhere,
and to be embodied means reincarnation. If we come to this earth
for but a few years and then go to some other, the soul must be
embodied there as well as here, and if we have travelled from
some other world we must have had there too our proper vesture.
The powers of mind and the laws governing its motion, its
attachment, and its detachment as given in theosophical
philosophy show that its reembodiment must be here, where it
moved and worked, until such time as the mind is able to
overcome the forces which chain it to this globe. To permit the
involved entity to transfer itself to another scene of action
before it had overcome all the causes drawing it here and
without its having worked out its responsibilities to other
entities in the same stream of evolution would be unjust and
contrary to the powerful occult laws and forces which
continually operate upon it. The early Christian Fathers saw
this, and taught that the soul had fallen into matter and was
obliged by the law of its nature to toil upward again to the
place from which it came. They used an old Greek hymn which ran:

Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark,
Through this thin vase of clay,
Athwart the waves of chaos dark
Emits a timorous ray.
This mind enfolding soul is sown,
Incarnate germ in earth:
In pity, blessed Lord, then own
What claims in Thee its birth.
Far forth from Thee, thou central fire,
To earth's sad bondage cast,
Let not the trembling spark expire;
Absorb thine own at last!

Each human being has a definite character different from every
other human being, and masses of beings aggregated into nations
show as wholes that the national force and distinguishing
peculiarities go to make up a definite and separate national
character. These differences, both individual and national, are
due to essential character and not to education. Even the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest should show this, for
the fitness cannot come from nothing but must at last show
itself from the coming to the surface of the actual inner
character. And as both individuals and nations among those who
are ahead in the struggle with nature exhibit an immense force
in their character, we must find a place and time where the
force was evolved. These, Theosophy says, are this earth and the
whole period during which the human race has been on the planet.

So, then, while heredity has something to do with the difference
in character as to force and morale, swaying the soul and mind a
little and furnishing also the appropriate place for receiving
reward and punishment, it is not the cause for the essential
nature shown by every one.

But all these differences, such as those shown by babes from
birth, by adults as character comes forth more and more, and by
nations in their history, are due to long experience gained
during many lives on earth, are the outcome of the soul's own
evolution. A survey of one short human life gives no ground for
the production of his inner nature. It is needful that each soul
should have all possible experience, and one life cannot give
this even under the best conditions. It would be folly for the
Almighty to put us here for such a short time, only to remove us
just when we had begun to see the object of life and the
possibilities in it. The mere selfish desire of a person to
escape the trials and discipline of life is not enough to set
nature's laws aside, so the soul must be reborn until it has
ceased to set in motion the cause of rebirth, after having
developed character up to its possible limit as indicated by all
the varieties of human nature, when every experience has been
passed through, and not until all of truth that can be known has
been acquired. The vast disparity among men in respect to
capacity compels us, if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or
to God, to admit reincarnation and to trace the origin of the
disparity back to the past lives of the Ego. For people are as
much hindered and handicapped, abused and made the victims of
seeming injustice because of limited capacity, as they are by
reason of circumstances of birth or education. We see the
uneducated rising above circumstances of family and training,
and often those born in good families have very small capacity;
but the troubles of nations and families arise from want of
capacity more than from any other cause. And if we consider
savage races only, there the seeming injustice is enormous. For
many savages have good actual brain capacity but still are
savage. This is because the Ego in that body is still savage and
undeveloped, for in contrast to the savage there are many
civilized men with small actual brain force who are not savage
in nature because the indwelling Ego has had long experience in
civilization during other lives, and being a more developed soul
has power to use the brain instrument to its highest limit.

Each man feels and knows that he has an individuality of his
own, a personal identity which bridges over not only the gaps
made by sleep but also those sometimes supervening on temporary
lesions in the brain. This identity never breaks from beginning
to end of life in the normal person, and only the persistence
and eternal character of the soul will account for it.

So, ever since we began to remember, we know that our personal
identity has not failed us, no matter how bad may be our memory.
This disposes of the argument that identity depends on
recollection, for the reason that if it did depend alone on
recollection we should each day have to begin over again, as we
cannot remember the events of the past in detail, and some minds
remember but little yet feel their personal identity. And as it
is often seen that some who remember the least insist as
strongly as the others on their personal identity, that
persistence of feeling must come from the old and immortal soul.

Viewing life and its probable object, with all the varied
experience possible for man, one must be forced to the
conclusion that a single life is not enough for carrying out all
that is intended by Nature, to say nothing of what man himself
desires to do. The scale of variety in experience is enormous.
There is a vast range of powers latent in man which we see may
be developed if opportunity be given. Knowledge infinite in
scope and diversity lies before us, and especially in these days
when special investigation is the rule. We perceive that we have
high aspirations with no time to reach up to their measure,
while the great troop of passions and desires, selfish motives
and ambitions, war with us and among themselves, pursuing us
even to the door of death. All these have to be tried,
conquered, used, subdued. One life is not enough for all this.
To say that we have but one life here with such possibilities
put before us and impossible of development is to make the
universe and life a huge and cruel joke perpetrated by a
powerful God who is thus accused, by those who believe in a
special creation of souls, of triumphing and playing with puny
man just because that man is small and the creature of the
Almighty. A human life at most is seventy years; statistics
reduce this to about forty; and out of that little remainder a
large part is spent in sleep and another part in childhood. Thus
in one life it is perfectly impossible to attain to the merest
fraction of what Nature evidently has in view. We see many
truths vaguely which a life gives us no time to grasp, and
especially is this so when men have to make such a struggle to
live at all. Our faculties are small or dwarfed or weak; one
life gives no opportunity to alter this; we perceive other
powers latent in us that cannot possibly be brought out in such
a small space of time; and we have much more than a suspicion
that the extent of the field of truth is vastly greater than the
narrow circle we are confined to. It is not reasonable to
suppose that either God or nature projects us into a body simply
to fill us with bitterness because we can have no other
opportunity here, but rather we must conclude that a series of
incarnations has led to the present condition, and that the
process of coming here again and again must go on for the
purpose of affording us the opportunity needed.

The mere fact of dying is not of itself enough to bring about
development of faculties or the elimination of wrong tendency
and inclination. If we assume that upon entering heaven we at
once acquire all knowledge and purity, then that state after
death is reduced to a dead level and life itself with all its
discipline is shorn of every meaning. Some of the churches teach
of a school of discipline after death where it is impudently
stated that the Apostles themselves, well known to be ignorant
men, are to be the teachers. This is absurd and devoid of any
basis or reason in the natural order. Besides, if there is to be
such subsequent discipline, why were we projected into life at
all? And why after the suffering and the error committed are we
taken from the place where we did our acts? The only solution
left is in reincarnation. We come back to earth because on it
and with the beings upon it our deeds were performed; because it
is the only proper place where punishment and reward can be
justly meted out; because here is the only natural spot in which
to continue the struggle toward perfection, toward the
development of the faculties we have and the destruction of the
wickedness in us. Justice to ourselves and to all other beings
demands it, for we cannot live for ourselves, and it would be
unjust to permit some of us to escape, leaving those who were
participants with us to remain or to be plunged into a hell of
eternal duration.

The persistence of savagery, the rise and decay of nations and
civilizations, the total extinction of nations, all demand an
explanation found nowhere but in reincarnation. Savagery remains
because there are still Egos whose experience is so limited that
they are still savage; they will come up into higher races when
ready. Races die out because the Egos have had enough of the
experience that sort of race gives. So we find the red Indian,
the Hottentot, the Easter Islanders, and others as examples of
races deserted by high Egos and as they are dying away other
souls who have had no higher life in the past enter into the
bodies of the race to go on using them for the purpose of
gaining such experience as the race body will give. A race could
not possibly arise and then suddenly go out. We see that such is
not the case, but science has no explanation; it simply says
that this is the fact, that nations decay. But in this
explanation no account is taken of the inner man nor of the
recondite subtle and occult laws that unite to make a race.
Theosophy shows that the energy drawn together has to expend
itself gradually, and therefore the reproduction of bodies of
the character of that race will go on, though the Egos are not
compelled to inhabit bodies of that sort any longer than while
they are of the same development as the race. Hence a time comes
when the whole mass of Egos which built up the race leaves it
for another physical environment more like themselves. The
economy of Nature will not permit the physical race to suddenly
fade away, and so in the real order of evolution other and less
progressed Egos come in and use the forms provided, keeping up
the production of new bodies but less and less in number each
century. These lower Egos are not able to keep up to the limit
of the capacity of the congeries of energies left by the other
Egos, and so while the new set gains as much experience as is
possible the race in time dies out after passing through its
decay. This is the explanation of what we may call descending
savagery, and no other theory will meet the facts. It has been
sometimes thought by ethnologists that the more civilized races
kill off the other, but the fact is that in consequence of the
great difference between the Egos inhabiting the old race body
and the energy of that body itself, the females begin to be
sterile, and thus slowly but surely the number of deaths exceeds
the births. China itself is in process of decay, she being now
in the almost stationary stage just before the rush downward.
Great civilizations like those of Egypt and Babylon have gone
because the souls who made them have long ago reincarnated in
the great conquering nations of Europe and the present American
continents. As nations and races they have been totally
reincarnated and born again for greater and higher purposes than
ever. Of all the old races the Aryan Indian alone yet remains as
the preserver of the old doctrines. It will one day rise again
to its old heights of glory.

The appearance of geniuses and great minds in families destitute
of these qualities, as well as the extinction from a family of
the genius shown by some ancestor, can only be met by the law of
rebirth. Napoleon the First came in a family wholly unlike him
in power and force. Nothing in his heredity will explain his
character. He said himself, as told in the Memoirs of Prince
Talleyrand, that he was Charlemagne. Only by assuming for him a
long series of lives giving the right line of evolution or cause
for his mind and nature and force to be brought out, can we have
the slightest idea why he or any other great genius appeared at
all. Mozart when an infant could compose orchestral score. This
was not due to heredity, for such a score is not natural, but is
forced, mechanical, and wholly conventional, yet he understood
it without schooling. How? Because he was a musician
reincarnated, with a musical brain furnished by his family and
thus not impeded in his endeavors to show forth his musical
knowledge. But stronger yet is the case of Blind Tom, a negro
whose family could not by any possibility have a knowledge of
the piano, a modern instrument, so as to transmit that knowledge
to the atoms of his body, yet he had great musical power and
knew the present mechanical musical scale on the piano. There
are hundreds of examples like these among the many prodigies who
have appeared to the world's astonishment. In India there are
many histories of sages born with complete knowledge of
philosophy and the like, and doubtless in all nations the same
can be met with. This bringing back of knowledge also explains
instinct, for that is no more than recollection divisible into
physical and mental memory. It is seen in the child and the
animal, and is no more than the result of previous experience.
And whether we look at the new-born babe flinging out its arms
for self-protection, or the animal with very strong instinctual
power, or the bee building a cell on the rules of geometry, it
is all the effect of reincarnation acting either in the mind or
physical cell, for under what was first laid down no atom is
devoid of life, consciousness, and intelligence of its own.

In the case of the musician Bach we have proof that heredity
counts for nothing if the Ego is not advanced, for his genius
was not borne down his family line; it gradually faded out,
finally leaving the family stream entirely. So, too, the coming
of idiots or vicious children to parents who are good, pure, or
highly intellectual is explained in the same way. They are cases
where heredity is set at nought by a wholly bad or deficient
Ego.

And lastly, the fact that certain inherent ideas are common to
the whole race is explained by the sages as due to recollection
of such ideas, which were implanted in the human mind at the
very beginning of its evolutionary career on this planet by
those brothers and sages who learned their lessons and were
perfected in former ages long before the development of this
globe began. No explanation for inherent ideas is offered by
science that will do more than say, "they exist." These were
actually taught to the mass of Egos who are engaged in this
earth's evolution; they were imprinted or burned into their
natures, and always recollected; they follow the Ego through the
long pilgrimage.

It has been often thought that the opposition to reincarnation
has been solely based on prejudice, when not due to a dogma
which can only stand when the mind is bound down and prevented
from using its own powers. It is a doctrine the most noble of
all, and with its companion one of Karma, next to be considered,
it alone gives the basis for ethics. There is no doubt in my
mind that the founder of Christianity took it for granted and
that its present absence from that religion is the reason for
the contradiction between the professed ethics of Christian
nations and their actual practices which are so contrary to the
morals given out by Jesus.

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