CHAPTER XXII
Rebirth
and Other Worlds; Karma,
the Soul and Immortality
He passes in his departure from this world to the
physical Self;
he passes to the Self of life; he passes to the
Self of mind; he
passes to the Self of knowledge; he passes to the
Self of bliss;
he moves through these worlds at will.
Taittiriya Upanishad.1
They say indeed that the conscious being is made of
desire. But of
whatsoever desire he comes to be, he comes to be
of that will, and
of whatever will he comes to be, he does that action,
and whatever
his action, to (the result of) that he
reaches.... Adhered to by his
Karma, 2 he goes in his subtle body to
wherever his mind cleaves,
then, coming to the end of his Karma, even of
whatsoever action
he does here, he returns from that world to this
world for Karma.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.3
Equipped with qualities, a doer of works and creator of
their
consequences, he reaps the result of his actions; he is
the ruler of
the life and he moves in his journey according to his
own acts;
he has idea and ego and is to be known by the
qualities of his
intelligence and his quality of self. Smaller
than the hundredth
part of the tip of a hair, the soul of the living being
is capable of
infinity. Male is he not nor female nor neuter, but is
joined to
whatever body he takes as his own.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.4
Mortals, they achieved immortality.
Rig Veda5
Our first conclusion on the
subject of reincarnation has been that the rebirth of the soul in successive terrestrial
bodies is an inevitable consequence of the original significance and process of
the manifestation in earth-nature; but this conclusion leads to farther
problems and farther results which
¹ III. 10.
5.
²
Action,
karma. In the view expressed in this verse of the Upanishad the Karma or action
of this life is exhausted by the life in the world beyond in which its results
are fulfilled and the soul returns to earth for fresh Karma. The cause of birth
in this world, of Karma, of the soul's passage to other-world existence and its
return here is, throughout, the soul's own consciousness, will and desire.
³IV. 4.
5, 6. 4V. 7-10. 5 I. 110. 4.
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it is necessary to elucidate.
There arises first the question of the process of rebirth; if that process is
not quickly successive, birth immediately following death of the body so as to
maintain an uninterrupted series of lives of the same person, if there are
intervals, that in its turn raises the question of the principle and process of
the passage to other worlds, which must
be the scene of these intervals, and the return to earth-life. A third question
is the process of the spiritual evolution itself and the mutations which the
soul undergoes in its passage from birth to birth through the stages of its
adventure.
If the physical
universe were the sole manifested world, or if it were a quite separate world,
rebirth as a part of the evolutionary process would be confined to a constant
succession of direct transmigrations from one body to another; death would be
immediately followed by a new birth without any possibility of an interval,—the
passage of the soul would be a spiritual circumstance in the uninterrupted
series of a compulsory, mechanical, material procedure. The soul would have no
freedom from Matter; it would be perpetually bound to its instrument, the body,
and dependent on it for the continuity of its manifested existence. But we have
found that there is a life on other planes after death and before the
subsequent rebirth, a life consequent on the old and preparatory of the new
stage of terrestrial existence. Other planes co-exist with ours, are part of
one complex system and act constantly upon the physical which is their own
final and lowest term, receive its reactions, admit a secret communication and
commerce. Man can become conscious of these planes, can even in certain states
project his conscious being into them, partly in life, presumably therefore
with a full completeness after the dissolution of the body. Such a possibility
of projection into other worlds or planes of being becomes then sufficiently
actual to necessitate practically its own realisation,
immediately and perhaps invariably following on human earth-life if man is from
the beginning endowed with such a power of self-transference, eventual if he
only arrives at it by a gradual progression. For it is possible that at the
beginning he would not be sufficiently developed to carry on his life or his
mind into larger Life-worlds
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or Mind-worlds and would be
compelled to accept an immediate transmigration from one earthly body to
another as his only present possibility of persistence.
The necessity
for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises
from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental
and the vital being in man's composite nature due to their affinity with these
levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for
assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what has to be
discarded, a preparation for the new embodiment and the new terrestrial
experience. But this need of a period of assimilation and this attraction of
other worlds for kindred parts of our being may become effective only when the
mental and vital individuality has been sufficiently developed in the
half-animal physical man; until then they might not exist or might not be
active: the life experiences would be too simple and elementary to need assimilation
and the natural being too crude to be capable of a complex assimilative
process; the higher parts would not be sufficiently developed to lift
themselves to higher planes of existence. There can be, then, in the absence of
such connections with other worlds, a theory of rebirth which admits only of a
constant transmigration; here the existence of other worlds and the sojourn of
the soul in other planes are not an actual or at any stage a necessary part of
the system. There can be another theory in which this passage is the obligatory
rule for all and there is no immediate rebirth; the soul needs an interval of
preparation for the new incarnation and new experience. A compromise between
the two theories is also possible; the transmigration may be the first rule
prevailing while the soul is yet unripe for a higher world-existence; the
passage to other planes would be the subsequent law. There may even be a third
stage, as is sometimes suggested, in which the soul is so powerfully developed,
its natural parts so spiritually alive that it needs no interval, but can
immediately resume birth for a more rapid evolution without the retardation of
a period of intermittence. In the popular ideas which derive from the religions
that admit reincarnation, there is an inconsistency which, after
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the manner of popular beliefs,
they have been at no pains to reconcile. On the one hand, there is the belief,
vague enough but fairly general, that death is followed immediately or with
something like immediateness by the assumption of another body. On the other
hand, there is the old religious dogma of a life after death in hells and
heavens or, it may be, in other worlds or degrees of being, which the soul has
acquired or incurred by its merits or demerits in this physical existence; the
return to earth intervenes only when that merit and demerit are exhausted and
the being is ready for another terrestrial life. This inconsistency would
disappear if we admit a variable movement dependent on the stage of evolution
which the soul has reached in its manifestation in Nature; all would then turn
on the degree of its capacity for entering a higher status than the earthly
life. But in the ordinary notion of reincarnation the idea of a spiritual
evolution is not explicit, it is only implied in the fact that the soul has to
reach the point at which it becomes capable of transcending the necessity of
rebirth and returning to its eternal source; but if there is no gradual and
graded evolution, this point can be as well reached by a chaotic zigzag
movement of which the law is not easily determinable. The definitive solution
of the question depends on psychic inquiry and experience; here we can only
consider whether there is in the nature of things or in the logic of the evolutionary
process any apparent or inherent necessity for either movement, for the
immediate transition from body to body or for the retardation or interval
before a new reincarnation of the self-embodying psychic principle.
A sort of half
necessity for the life in other worlds, a dynamic and practical rather than an
essential necessity, arises from the very fact that the different
world-principles are interwoven with each other and in a way interdependent and
the effect that this fact must have upon the process of our spiritual
evolution. But this might be counteracted for a time by the greater pull or
attraction of the earth or the preponderant physicality of the evolving nature.
Our belief in the birth of an ascending soul into the human form and its repeated
rebirth in that form, without which it cannot complete its human evolution,
rests,
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from the point of view of the
reasoning intelligence, on the basis that the progressive transit of the soul into
higher and higher grades of the earthly existence and, once it has reached the
human level, its repeated human birth compose a sequence necessary for the
growth of the nature; one brief human life upon earth is evidently insufficient
for the evolutionary purpose. In the early stages of a series of human
reincarnations, during a period of rudimentary humanity, there is a certain
possibility at first sight of an often repeated immediate transmigration,—the
repeated assumption of a new human form in a fresh birth mmediately
the previous body has been dissolved by a cessation or expulsion of the organised Life-energy and the consequent physical
disintegration which we call death. But what necessity of the evolutionary
process would compel such a series of immediate rebirths? Evidently, it could
only be imperative so long as the psychic individuality,—not the secret
soul-entity itself but the soul-formation in the natural being,—is little
evolved, insufficiently developed, so insufficiently formed that it could not
abide except by dependence upon the uninterrupted continuance of this life's
mental, vital and physical individuality: unable as yet to persist in itself,
discard its past Mind-formation and Life-formation and build after a useful
interval new formations, it would be obliged to transfer at once its
rudimentary crude personality for preservation to a new body. It is doubtful
whether we should be justified in attributing any such entirely insufficient
development to a being so strongly individualised that
it has got as far as the human consciousness. Even at his lowest normality the
human individual is still a soul acting through a distinct mental being,
however ill-formed his mind may be, however limited and dwarfed, however
engrossed and encased in the physical and vital consciousness and unable or
unwilling to detach itself from its lower formations. Yet we may suppose that
there is a downward attachment so strong as to compel the being to hasten at
once to a resumption of the physical life because his natural formation is not
really fit for anything else or at home on any higher plane. Or, again, the
life-experience might be so brief and incomplete as to compel the soul to an
immediate
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rebirth for its continuance.
Other needs, influences or causes there may be in the complexity of
Nature-process, such as a strong will of earthly desire pressing for fulfilment, which would enforce an immediate transmigration
of the same persistent form of personality into a new body. But still the
alternative process of a reincarnation, a rebirth of the Person not only into a
new body but into a new formation of the personality, would be the normal line
taken by the psychic entity once it had reached the human stage of its
evolutionary cycle.
For
the soul personality, as it develops, must get sufficient power over its own
nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental and vital
individuality to persist without the support of the material body, as well as
to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the physical plane and the
physical life: it would be sufficiently evolved to subsist in the subtle body
which we know to be the characteristic case or sheath and the proper
subtle-physical support of the inner being. It is the soul-person, the psychic
being, that survives and carries mind and life with it on its journey, and it
is in the subtle body that it passes out of its material lodging; both then
must be sufficiently developed for the transit. But a transference to planes of
Mind-existence or Life-existence implies also a mind and life sufficiently
formed and developed to pass without disintegration and exist for a time on
these higher levels. If these conditions were satisfied, a sufficiently
developed psychic personality and subtle body and a sufficiently developed
mental and vital personality, survival of the soul-person without an immediate
new birth would be secured and the pull of the other worlds would become
operative. But this by itself would mean a return to earth with the same mental
and vital personality and there would be no free evolution in the new birth.
There must be an individuation of the psychic person itself sufficient for it
not to depend on its past mind and life formations any more than on its past
body, but to shed them too in time and proceed to a new formation for new
experience. For this discarding of the old and preparation of new forms the
soul must dwell for some time between two births somewhere else than on the
entirely material plane in which we now move; for here there would be no
abiding place
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for a disembodied spirit. A brief
stay might indeed be possible if there are subtle envelopes of the
earth-existence which belong to earth but are of a vital or mental character:
but even then there would be no reason for the soul to linger there for a long
period, unless it is still burdened with an overpowering attachment to the
earth-life. A survival of the material body by the personality implies a supraphysical existence, and this can only be in some plane
of being proper to the evolutionary stage of the consciousness or, if there is
no evolution, in a temporary second home of the spirit which would be its
natural place of sojourn between life and life,—unless indeed it is its
original world from which it does not return into material Nature.
Where
then would the temporary dwelling in the supraphysical
take place? what would be the soul's other habitat? It might seem that it ought
to be on a mental plane, in mental worlds, both because on man the mental being
the attraction of that plane, already active in life, must prevail when there
is not the obstacle of the attachment to the body, and because the mental plane
should be, evidently, the native and proper habitat of a mental being. But this
does not automatically follow, because of the complexity of man's being; he has
a vital as well as a mental existence,—his vital part often more powerful and
prominent than the mental,—and behind the mental being is a soul of which it is
the representative. There are, besides, many planes or levels of
world-existence and the soul has to pass through them to reach its natural
home. In the physical plane itself or close to it there are believed to be
layers of greater and greater subtlety which may be regarded as sub-planes of
the physical with a vital and a mental character; these are at once surrounding
and penetrating strata through which the interchange between the higher worlds
and the physical world takes place. It might then be possible for the mental
being, so long as its mentality is not sufficiently developed, so long as it is
restricted mainly to the more physical forms of mind and life activity, to be
caught and delayed in these media. It might even be obliged to rest there
entirely between birth and birth; but this is not probable and could only
happen if and in so far as its attachment to the earth-forms of its activity
was so great as
Page 798
to preclude or hamper the
completion of the natural upward movement. For the post-mortal state of the
soul must correspond in some way to the development of the being on earth,
since this after-life is not a free upward return from a temporary downward
deviation into mortality, but a normal recurrent circumstance which intervenes
to help out the process of a difficult spiritual evolution in the physical
existence. There is a relation which the human being in his evolution on earth
develops with higher planes of existence, and that must have a predominant
effect on his internatal dwelling in these planes; it
must determine his direction after death and determine too the place, period
and character of his self-experience there.
It
may be also that he may linger for a time in one of those annexes of the other
worlds created by his habitual beliefs or by the type of his aspirations in the
mortal body. We know that he creates images of these superior planes, which are
often mental translations of certain elements in them, and erects his images
into a system, a form of actual worlds; he builds up also desire-worlds of many
kinds to which he attaches a strong sense of inner reality: it is possible that
these constructions may be so strong as to create for him an artificial
post-mortal environment in which he may linger. For the image-making power of
the human mind, its imagination, which is in his physical life only an
indispensable aid to his acquisition of knowledge and his life-creation, may in
a higher scale become a creative force which would enable the mental being to
live for a while amid its own images until they were dissolved by the soul's
pressure. All these buildings are of the nature of larger Life-constructions;
in them his mind translates some of the real conditions of the greater mental
and vital worlds into terms of his physical experience magnified, prolonged, extended
to a condition beyond physicality: he carries by this translation the vital joy
and vital suffering of the physical being into supraphysical
conditions in which they have a greater scope, fullness and endurance. These
constructive environments must therefore be considered, so far as they have any
supraphysical habitat, as annexes of the vital or of
the lower mental planes of existence.
But there are
also the true vital worlds,—original construc-
Page 799
tions, organised developments, native habitats of the universal
Life-principle, the cosmic vital Anima, acting in its own field and in its own
nature. On his internatal journey he may be held
there for a period by force of the predominantly vital character of the
influences which have shaped his earthly existence,—for these influences are
native to the vital world and their hold on him would detain him for a while in
their proper province: he may be kept in the grasp of that which held him in
its grasp even in the physical being. Any residence of the soul in annexes or
in its own constructions could be only a transitional stage of the
consciousness in its passage from the physical to the supraphysical
state; it must pass from these structures into the true worlds of supraphysical Nature.
It may enter at
once into the worlds of other-life, or it may remain first, as a transitional
stage, in some region of subtle-physical experience whose surroundings may seem
to it a prolongation of the circumstances of physical life, but in freer
conditions proper to a subtler medium and in some kind of happy perfection of
mind or life or a finer bodily existence. Beyond these subtle-physical planes
of experience and the life-worlds there are also mental or spiritual-mental
planes to which the soul seems to have an internatal
access and into which it may pursue its internatal
journey; but it is not likely to live consciously there if there has not been a
sufficient mental or soul development in this life. For these levels must
normally be the highest the evolving being can internatally
inhabit, since one who has not gone beyond the mental rung in the ladder of
being would not be able to ascend to any supramental
or overmental state; or if he had so developed as to
overleap the mental level and could attain so far, it might not be possible for
him to return so long as the physical evolution has not developed here an organisation of an overmental or supramental life in Matter. But, even so, the mental worlds
are not likely to be the last normal stage of the after-death passage; for man
is not entirely mental; it is the soul, the psychic being, and not the mind,
that is the traveller between death and birth, and
the mental being is only a predominant element in the figure of its
self-expression. There must then be a final resort to a plane of pure psychic
existence in which the soul would await rebirth; there it could
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assimilate the energies of its
past experience and life and prepare its future. Ordinarily, the normally
developed human being, who has risen to a sufficient power of mentality, might
be expected to pass successively through all these planes, subtle-physical,
vital and mental, on his way to his psychic habitation. At each stage he would
exhaust and get rid of the fractions of formed personality-structure, temporary
and superficial, that belonged to the past life; he would cast off his mind-sheath
and life-sheath as he had already cast off his body-sheath: but the essence of
the personality and its mental, vital and physical experiences would remain in
latent memory or as a dynamic potency for the future. But if the development of
mind were insufficient, it is possible that it would not be able to go
consciously beyond the vital level and the being would either fall back from there,
returning from its vital heavens or purgatories to earth, or, more
consistently, would pass at once into a kind of psychic assimilative sleep
co-extensive with the internatal period; to be awake
in the highest planes a certain development would be indispensable.
All this,
however, is a matter of dynamic probability, and that, though amounting in
practice to a necessity, though justified by certain facts of subliminal
experience, is still for the reasoning mind not in itself quite conclusive. We
have to ask whether there is any more essential necessity for these internatal intervals, or at least any of so great a dynamic
power as to lead to an irresistible conclusion. We shall find one such
necessity in the decisive part played by the higher planes in the earth-evolution
and the relation that it has created between them and the evolving
soul-consciousness. Our development takes place very largely by their superior
but hidden action upon the earth-plane. All is contained in the inconscient or the subconscient,
but in potentiality; it is the action from above that helps to compel an
emergence. A continuance of that action is necessary to shape and determine the
progression of the mental and vital forms which our evolution takes in material
nature; for these progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or
sufficiently develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or inert and ignorant
Page 801
material Nature except by a
constant though occult resort to higher supraphysical
forces of their own character. This resort, the action of this veiled alliance,
takes place principally in our subliminal being and not on the surface: it is
from there that the active power of our consciousness emerges, and all that it realises it sends back constantly into the subliminal being
to be stored up, developed and re-emerge in stronger forms hereafter. This
interaction of our larger hidden being and our surface personality is the main
secret of the rapid development that operates in man once he has passed beyond
the lower stages of Mind immersed in Matter.
This resort must
continue in the internatal stage; for a new birth, a
new life is not a taking up of the development exactly where it stopped in the
last, it does not merely repeat and continue our past surface personality and
formation of nature. There is an assimilation, a discarding and strengthening
and rearrangement of the old characters and motives, a new ordering of the
developments of the past and a selection for the purposes of the future without
which the new start cannot be fruitful or carry forward the evolution. For each
birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical
continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is
the machinery of an evolutionary process. Part of this rearrangement, the
discarding especially of past strong vibrations of the personality, can only be
effected by an exhaustion of the push of previous mental, vital, physical
motives after death, and this internal liberation or lightening of impedimenta
must be put through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be
discarded or otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that
nature; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the activities
which have to be exhausted and rejected from the consciousness so that it can
pass on to a new formation. It is probable also that the integrating positive
preparation would be carried out and the character of the new life would be
decided by the soul itself in a resort to its native habitat, a plane of
psychic repose, where it would draw all back into itself and await its new
stage in the evolution. This would mean a passage of the soul
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progressively through subtle-physical,
vital and mental worlds to the psychic dwelling-place from which it would
return to its terrestrial pilgrimage. The terrestrial gathering up and
development of the materials thus prepared, their working out in the earth-life
would be the consequence of this internatal resort,
and the new birth would be a field of the resultant activity, a new stadium or
spiral curve in the individual evolution of the embodied Spirit.
For when we say
that the soul on earth evolves successively the physical, the vital, the
mental, the spiritual being, we do not mean that it creates them and that they
had no previous existence. On the contrary, what it does is to manifest these principles
of its spiritual entity under the conditions imposed by a world of physical
Nature; this manifestation takes the form of a structure of frontal personality
which is a translation of the inner self into the terms and possibilities of
the physical existence. In fact we must accept the ancient idea that man has
within him not only the physical soul or Purusha with
its appropriate nature, but a vital, a mental, a psychic, a supramental,
a supreme spiritual being;1 and either the whole or the greater
presence or force of them is concealed in his subliminal or latent and
unformulated in his superconscient parts. He has to
bring forward their powers in his active consciousness and to awake to them in
its knowledge. But each of these powers of his being is in relation with its
own proper plane of existence and all have their roots there. It is through
them that there takes place the subliminal resort of the being to the shaping
influences from above, a resort which may become more and more conscious as we
develop. It is logical then that according to the development of their powers
in our conscious evolution should be the internatal
resort which this nature of our birth here and its evolutionary object and
process necessitate. The circumstances and the stages of that resort must be
complex and not of the crudely and trenchantly simple character which the
popular religions imagine: but in itself it can be accepted as an inevitable consequence
of the very origin and nature of the soul-life in the body. All is a closely woven
web, an evolution
1 Taittiriya Upanishad.
Page 803
and an interaction whose links
have been forged by a Conscious-Force following out the truth of its own
motives according to a dynamic logic of these finite workings of the Infinite.
If this view of
rebirth and the soul's temporary passage into other planes of existence is
correct, both rebirth and the after-life assume a different significance from
the colour put on them by the long-current belief
about reincarnation and the after-death sojourn in worlds beyond us. Reincarnation
is commonly supposed to have two aspects, metaphysical and moral, an aspect of
spiritual necessity, an aspect of cosmic justice and ethical discipline. The
soul,—in this view or for this purpose supposed to have a real individual
existence,—is on earth as a result of desire and ignorance; it has to remain on
earth or return to it always so long as it has not wearied of desire and
awakened to the fact of its ignorance and to the true knowledge. This desire
compels it to return always to a new body; it must follow always the revolving
wheel of birth till it is enlightened and liberated. It does not, however,
remain always on earth, but alternates between earth and other worlds, celestial
and infernal, where it exhausts its accumulated store of merit or demerit due
to the enactment of sin or virtue and then returns to the earth and to some
kind of terrestrial body, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes even vegetable.
The nature of this new incarnation and its fortunes are determined
automatically by the soul's past actions, Karma; if the sum of past actions was
good, the birth is in the higher form, the life happy or successful or
unaccountably fortunate; if bad, a lower form of Nature may house us or the
life, if human, will be unhappy, unsuccessful, full of suffering and
misfortune. If our past actions and character were mixed, then Nature, like a
good accountant, gives us, according to the pitch and values of our former
conduct, a well-assorted payment of mixed happiness and suffering, success and
failure, the rarest good luck and the severest ill-fortune. At the same time a
strong personal will or desire in the past life may also determine our new
avatar. A mathematical aspect is often given to these payments of Nature, for
we are supposed to incur a precise penalty for our misdeeds, undergo or return
the replica or equivalent
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of what we have inflicted or
enacted; the inexorable rule of a tooth for a tooth is a frequent principle of
the Karmic Law: for this Law is an arithmetician with his abacus as well as a
judge with his code of penalties for long-past crimes and misdemeanours.
It is also to be noted that in this system there is a double punishment and a
double reward for sin and virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in hell and
afterwards afflicted for the same sins in another life here and the righteous
or the puritan is rewarded with celestial joys and afterwards again pampered
for the same virtues and good deeds in a new terrestrial existence.
These are very
summary popular notions and offer no foothold to the philosophic reason and no
answer to a search for
the true significance of life. A
vast world-system which exists only as a convenience for turning endlessly on a
wheel of Ignorance with no issue except a final chance of stepping out of it,
is not a world with any real reason for existence. A world which serves only as
a school of sin and virtue and consists of a system of rewards and whippings,
does not make any better appeal to our intelligence. The soul or spirit within
us, if it is divine, immortal or celestial, cannot be sent here solely to be
put to school for this kind of crude and primitive moral education; if it
enters into the Ignorance, it must be because there is some larger principle or
possibility of its being that has to be worked out through the Ignorance. If,
on the other hand, it is a being from the Infinite plunged for some cosmic
purpose into the obscurity of Matter and growing to self-knowledge within it,
its life here and the significance of that life must be something more than
that of an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways; it must be a growth
out of an assumed ignorance towards its own full spiritual stature with a final
passage into an immortal consciousness, knowledge, strength, beauty, divine
purity and power, and for such a spiritual growth this law of Karma is all too
puerile. Even if the soul is something created, an infant being that has to
learn from Nature and grow into immortality, it must be by a larger law of
growth and not by some divine code of primitive and barbaric justice. This idea
of Karma is a construction of the smaller part of the human vital mind
Page 805
concerned with its petty rules of
life and its desires and joys and sorrows and erecting their puny standards
into the law and aim of the cosmos. These notions cannot be acceptable to the
thinking mind; they have too evidently the stamp of a construction fashioned by
our human ignorance.
But the same
solution can be elevated to a higher level of reason and given a greater
plausibility and the colour of a cosmic principle.
For, first, it may be based on the unassailable ground that all energies in
Nature must have their natural consequence; if any are without visible result
in the present life, it may well be that the outcome is only delayed, not
withheld for ever. Each being reaps the harvest of his works and deeds, the
returns of the action put forth by the energies of his nature, and those which
are not apparent in his present birth must be held over for a subsequent
existence. It is true that the result of the energies and actions of the
individual may accrue not to himself but to others when he is gone; for that we
see constantly happening,—it happens indeed even during a man's lifetime that
the fruits of his energies are reaped by others; but this is because there is a
solidarity and a continuity of life in Nature and the individual cannot
altogether, even if he so wills, live for himself alone. But, if there is a
continuity of his own life by rebirth for the individual and not only a
continuity of the mass-life and the cosmic life, if he has an ever-developing
self, nature and experience, then it is inevitable that for him too the working
of his energies should not be cut off abruptly but must bear their consequence
at some time in his continuous and developing existence. Man's being, nature,
circumstances of life are the result of his own inner and outer activities, not
something fortuitous and inexplicable: he is what he has made himself; the past
man was the father of the man that now is, the present man is the father of the
man that will be. Each being reaps what he sows; from what he does he profits,
for what he does he suffers. This is the law and chain of Karma, of Action, of
the work of Nature-Energy, and it gives a meaning to the total force of our
existence, nature, character, action which is absent from other theories of
life. It is evident on this principle that a man's past and present Karma must
determine his future birth and its happenings and circumstances; for these too
must be the
Page 806
fruit of his energies: all that
he was and did in the past must be the creator of all that he now is and
experiences in his present, and all that he is and is doing in the present must
be the creator of what he will be and experience in the future. Man is the
creator of himself; he is the creator also of his fate. All this is perfectly
rational and unexceptionable so far as it goes and the law of Karma may be
accepted as a fact, as part of the cosmic machinery; for it is so
evident,—rebirth once admitted,—as to be practically indisputable.
There are,
however, two riders to this first proposition which are less general and
authentic and bring in a doubtful note; for though they may be true in part,
they are overstated and create a wrong perspective, because they are put
forward as
the whole sense of Karma. The
first is that as is the nature of the energies so must be the nature of the
results,—the good must bring good results, the evil must bring evil results:
the second is that the master word of Karma is justice and therefore good deeds
must bear the fruit of happiness and good fortune and evil deeds must bear the
fruit of sorrow, misery and ill-fortune. Since there must be a cosmic justice
which is looking on and controlling in some way the immediate and visible operations
of Nature in life, but is not apparent to us in the facts of life as seen by
us, it must be present and evident in the totality of her unseen dealings; it
must be the subtle and hardly visible, but strong and firm secret thread that
holds together the otherwise incoherent details of her dealings with her
creatures. If it be asked why actions alone, good or bad deeds alone, should
have a result, it might be conceded that good or evil thoughts, feelings,
actions have all their corresponding results, but since action is the greater
part of life and the test and formulated power of a man's values of being,
since also he is not always responsible for his thoughts and feelings, as they
are often involuntary, but is or must be held responsible for what he does, as
that is subject to his choice, it is mainly his actions that construct his
fate; they are the chief or the most forceful determinants of his being and his
future. This is the whole law of Karma.
But we have
first to observe that a law or chain of Karma is only an outward machinery and
cannot be elevated to a greater
Page 807
position as the sole and absolute
determinant of the life-workings of the cosmos, unless the cosmos is itself
entirely mechanical in its character. It is indeed held by many that all is Law
and Process and there is no conscious Being or Will in or behind the cosmos; if
so, here is a Law and Process that satisfies our human reason and our mental
standards of right and justice and it has the beauty and truth of a perfect
symmetry and a mathematical accuracy of working. But all is not Law and
Process, there is also Being and Consciousness; there is not only a machinery
but a Spirit in things, not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit,
not only a process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural
creature. If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field
for a law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and
not mechanical, it must be ourself, our soul that
fundamentally determines its own evolution, and the law of Karma can only be
one of the processes it uses for that purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be
greater than its Karma. There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom. Law
and Process are one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer mind,
life and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of Nature. But
even here their mechanical power is absolute only over body and Matter; for Law
becomes more complex and less rigid, Process more plastic and less mechanical
when there comes in the phenomenon of Life, and yet more is this so when Mind
intervenes with its subtlety; an inner freedom already begins to intervene and,
the more we go within, the soul's power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul, the
Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumant\=a, and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a
witness and concede an automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the master
of its nature, Ishwara.
It is not
conceivable that the Spirit within is an automaton in the hands of Karma, a
slave in this life of its past actions; the truth must be less rigid and more
plastic. If a certain amount of results of past Karma is formulated in the
present life, it must be with the consent of the psychic being which presides
over the new formation of its earth-experience and assents not merely to an
outward compulsory process, but to a secret Will and Guidance.
Page 808
That secret Will is not
mechanical, but spiritual; the guidance comes from an Intelligence which may
use mechanical processes but is not their subject. Self-expression and
experience are what the soul seeks by its birth into the body; whatever is
necessary for the self-expression and experience of this life, whether it
intervenes as an automatic outcome of past lives or as a free selection of
results and a continuity or as a new development, whatever is a means of
creation of the future, that will be formulated: for the principle is not the
working out of a mechanism of Law, but the development of the nature through
cosmic experience so that eventually it may grow out of the Ignorance. There
must therefore be two elements, Karma as an instrument, but also the secret
Consciousness and Will within working through the mind, life and body as the
user. Fate, whether purely mechanical or created by ourselves, a chain of our
own manufacture, is only one factor of existence; Being and its consciousness
and its will are a still more important factor. In Indian astrology which considers
all life-circumstances to be Karma, mostly predetermined or indicated in the
graph of the stars, there is still provision made for the energy and force of
the being which can change or cancel part or much of what is so written or even
all but the most imperative and powerful bindings of Karma. This is a
reasonable account of the balance: but there is also to be added to the
computation the fact that destiny is not simple but complex; the destiny which
binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does
not intervene. Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical
outcome of our being; but behind our surface is a freer Life-power, a freer
Mind-power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it
in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we
become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel
the graph of our physical fate. Karma, then,—or at least any mechanical law of
Karma,—cannot be accepted as the sole determinant of circumstances and the
whole machinery of rebirth and of our future evolution.
But this is not
all; for the statement of the Law errs by an over-simplification and the
arbitrary selection of a limited principle. Action is a resultant of the energy
of the being, but this
Page 809
energy is not of one sole kind;
the Consciousness-Force of the Spirit manifests itself in many kinds of
energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of desire,
passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the body, a pursuit of
truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit of ethical good or evil, a
pursuit of power, love, joy, happiness, fortune, success, pleasure,
life-satisfactions of all kinds, life-enlargement, a pursuit of individual or
collective objects, a pursuit of the health, strength, capacity, satisfaction
of the body. All this makes an exceedingly complex sum of the manifold
experience and many-sided action of the Spirit in life, and its variety cannot
be set aside in favour of a single principle, neither
can it be hammered into so many sections of the single duality of ethical good
and evil; ethics, the maintenance of human standards of morality, cannot,
therefore, be the sole preoccupation of the cosmic Law or the sole principle of
determination of the working of Karma. If it is true that the nature of the
energy put forth must determine the nature of the result or outcome, all these
differences in the nature of the energy have to be taken into account and each
must have its appropriate consequence. An energy of seeking for truth and
knowledge must have as its natural outcome,—its reward or recompense, if you
will,—a growth into truth, an increase in knowledge; an energy used for
falsehood should result in an increase of falsehood in the nature and a deeper
immersion in the Ignorance. An energy of pursuit of beauty should have as its
outcome an increase in the sense of beauty, the enjoyment of beauty or, if so
directed, in the beauty and harmony of the life and the nature. A pursuit of
physical health, strength and capacity should create the strong man or the
successful athlete. An energy put out in the pursuit of ethical good must have
as its outcome or reward or recompense an increase in virtue, the happiness of
ethical growth or the sunny felicity and poise and purity of a simple and
natural goodness, while the punishment of opposite energies would be a deeper
plunge into evil, a greater disharmony and perversion of the nature and, in
case of excess, a great spiritual perdition, mahatī vinastih. An energy put forward
for power or other vital ends must lead to an increase of the capacity for
commanding these results or to the development of a vital strength and
plenitude.
Page 810
This is the ordinary disposition
of things in Nature and, if justice be demanded of her, this surely is justice
that the energy and capacity put forward should have in its own kind its
fitting response from her. The prize of the race is assigned by her to the swift,
the victory in battle to the brave and strong and skilful, the rewards of
knowledge to the capable intellect and the earnest seeker: these things she
will not give to the good man who is sluggish or weak or skilless
or stupid merely because he is righteous or respectable; if he covets these
other powers of life, he must qualify for them and put forward the right kind
of energy. If Nature did otherwise, she could well be accused of injustice;
there is no reason to accuse her of injustice for this perfectly right and
normal arrangement or to demand from her a rectification of the balance in a
future life so that the good man may be given as a natural reward for his
virtue a high post or a large bank-balance or a happy, easy and well-appointed
life. That cannot be the significance of rebirth or a sufficient basis for a
cosmic law of Karma.
There is indeed
in our life a very large element of what we call luck or fortune, which baulks
our effort of result or gives the prize without effort or to an inferior energy:
the secret cause of these caprices of Destiny,—or causes, for the roots of
Fortune may be manifold,—must be no doubt partly sought for in our hidden past;
but it is difficult to accept the simple solution that good luck is a return
for a forgotten virtuous action in a past life and bad luck a return for a sin
or crime. If we see the righteous man suffering here, it is difficult to
believe that this paragon of virtue was in the last life a scoundrel and is
paying, even after his exemplary conversion by a new birth, for sins he then
committed; nor, if the wicked triumphs, can we easily suppose that he was in
his last life a saint who has suddenly taken a wrong turn but continues to
receive a cash-return for his previous virtue. A total change of this kind
between life and life is possible though not likely to be frequent, but to
saddle the new opposite personality with the rewards or punishments of the old
looks like a purposeless and purely mechanical procedure. This and many other
difficulties arise, and the too simple logic of the correlation is not so strong
as it claims to be; the idea
Page 811
of retribution of Karma as a
compensation for the injustice of life and Nature is a feeble basis for the
theory, for it puts forward a shallow and superficial human feeling and
standard as the sense of the cosmic Law and is based on an unsound reasoning;
there must be some other and stronger foundation for the law of Karma.
Here,
as so often, the error comes by our forcing a standard which is the creation of
our human mind into the larger, freer and more comprehensive ways of the cosmic
Intelligence. In the action attributed to the law of Karma two values are selected
out of the many created by Nature, moral good and evil, sin and virtue, and
vital-physical good and evil, outward happiness and suffering, outward good
fortune and ill-fortune, and it is supposed that there must be an equation
between them, the one must be the reward or punishment of the other, the final
sanction which it receives in the secret justice of Nature. This collocation is
evidently made from the viewpoint of a common vital-physical desire in our
members: because happiness and good fortune are what the lower part of our
vital being most desires, misfortune and suffering what it most hates and
dreads, it proceeds, when it accepts the moral demand upon it for the curbing
of its propensities, for self-restraint from doing evil and self-exertion
towards doing what is good, to strike a bargain, to erect a cosmic Law which
will compensate it for this strenuous self-compulsion and help it by the dread
of punishment to adhere to its difficult path of self-denial. But the truly
ethical being does not need a system of rewards and punishments to follow the
path of good and shun the path of evil; virtue to him is its own reward, sin
brings with it its own punishment in the suffering of a fall from his own law
of nature: this is the true ethical standard. On the contrary, a system of
rewards and punishments debases at once the ethical values of good, turns
virtue into selfishness, a commercial bargain of self-interest, and replaces
the right motive of abstinence from evil by a baser motive. Human beings have
erected the rule of reward and punishment as a social necessity in order to
restrain the doing of things harmful to the community and encourage what is
helpful to it; but to erect this human device into a general law of cosmic
Nature or a law of the
Page 812
supreme Being or the supreme law
of existence is a procedure of doubtful value. It is human, but also puerile,
to impose the insufficient and narrow standards of our own Ignorance on the
larger and more intricate operations of cosmic Nature or on the action of the
supreme Wisdom and supreme Good which draws or raises us towards itself by a
spiritual power working slowly in ourselves through our inner being and not by
a law of temptation and compulsion upon our outer vital nature. If the soul is
passing through an evolution by a many-sided and complex experience, any law of
Karma or return to action and output of Energy, if it is to fit itself into
that experience, must also be complex and cannot be of a simple and exiguous texture
or rigid and one-sided in its incidence.
At
the same time, a partial truth of fact, not of fundamental or general
principle, may be admitted for this doctrine; for although the lines of the
action of energy are distinct and independent, they can act together and upon
each other, though not by any rigidly fixed law of correspondence. It is
possible that in the total method of the returns of Nature there intervenes a strand of connection
or rather of interaction between vital-physical good and ill and ethical good
and ill, a limited correspondence and meeting-point between divergent dualities
not amounting to an inseparable coherence. Our own varying energies, desires,
movements are mixed together in their working and can bring about a mixed
result: our vital part does demand substantial and external rewards for virtue,
for knowledge, for every intellectual, aesthetic, moral or physical effort; it
believes firmly in punishment for sin and even for ignorance. This may well
either create or else reply to a corresponding cosmic action; for Nature takes
us as we are and to some extent suits her movements to our need or our demands
on her. If we accept the action of invisible Forces upon us, there may be also
invisible Forces in Life-Nature that belong to the same plane of
Consciousness-Force as this part of our being, Forces that move according to
the same plan or the same power-motive as our lower vital nature. It can be
often observed that when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its
way without restraint or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises
a
Page 813
mass of reactions against itself,
reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may have their result now
or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature.
It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to be used were exhausted;
the very forces that the ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its
purpose rebel and turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and
receive power for his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against
the throne of Necessity and is dashed to pieces or the lame foot of Punishment
reaches at last the successful offender. This reaction to his energies may come
upon him in another life and not at once, it may be a burden of consequence he
takes up in his return to the field of these Forces; it may happen on a small
as well as a large scale, to the small vital being and his small errors as well
as in these larger instances. For the principle will be the same; the mental
being in us seeking for success by a misuse of force which Nature admits but
reacts in the end against it, receives the adverse return in the guise of
defeat and suffering and failure. But the promotion of this minor line of
causes and results to the status of an invariable absolute Law or the whole
cosmic rule of action of a supreme Being is not valid; they belong to a middle region
between the inmost or supreme Truth of things and the impartiality of material
Nature.
In any case the
reactions of Nature are not in essence meant as reward or punishment; that is
not their fundamental value, which is rather an inherent value of natural
relations and, in so far as it affects the spiritual evolution, a value of the lessons
of experience in the soul's cosmic training. If we touch fire, it burns, but there
is no principle of punishment in this relation of cause and effect, it is a
lesson of relation and a lesson of experience; so in all Nature's dealings with
us there is a relation of things and there is a corresponding lesson of
experience. The action of the cosmic Energy is complex and the same Forces may
act in different ways according to circumstances, to the need of the being, to
the intention of the cosmic Power in its action; our life is affected not only
by its own energies but by the energies of others and by universal Forces, and
all this vast interplay cannot be determined in its results solely by the one
factor of an
Page 814
all-governing moral law and its
exclusive attention to the merits and demerits, the sins and virtues of
individual human beings. Nor can good fortune and evil fortune, pleasure and
pain, happiness and misery and suffering be taken as if they existed merely as
incentives and deterrents to the natural being in its choice of good and evil.
It is for experience, for growth of the individual being that the soul enters
into rebirth; joy and grief, pain and suffering, fortune and misfortune are
parts of that experience, means of that growth: even, the soul may of itself
accept or choose poverty, misfortune and suffering as helpful to its growth,
stimulants of a rapid development, and reject riches and prosperity and success
as dangerous and conducive to a relaxation of its spiritual effort. Happiness
and success bringing happiness are, no doubt, a legitimate demand of humanity;
it is an attempt of Life and Matter to catch a pale reflection or a gross image
of felicity: but a superficial happiness and material success, however
desirable to our vital nature, are not the main object of our existence; if
that had been the intention, life would have been otherwise arranged in the
cosmic ordinance of things. All the secret of the circumstances of rebirth centres around the one capital need of the soul, the need
of growth, the need of experience; that governs the line of its evolution and
all the rest is accessory. Cosmic existence is not a vast administrative system
of universal justice with a cosmic Law of recompense and retribution as its
machinery or a divine Legislator and Judge at its centre. It is seen by us
first as a great automatic movement of energy of Nature, and in it emerges a
self-developing movement of consciousness, a movement
therefore of Spirit working out its own being in the motion of energy of
Nature. In this motion takes place the cycle of rebirth, and in that cycle the
soul, the psychic being, prepares for itself,—or the Divine isdom
or the cosmic Consciousness-Force prepares for it and through its
action,—whatever is needed for the next step in ts
evolution, the next formation of personality, the coming nexus of necessary
experiences constantly provided and organised out of
the continuous flux of past, present and future energies for each new birth,
for each new step of the Spirit backward or forward or else still in a circle,
but always a step in the growth
Page 815
of the being towards its destined
self-unfolding in Nature.
This brings us
to another element of the ordinary conception of rebirth which is not
acceptable, since it is an obvious error of the physical mind,—the idea of the
soul itself as a limited personality which survives unchanged from one birth to
another. This too simple and superficial idea of the soul and personality is
born of the physical mind's inability to look beyond its own apparent
self-formation in this single existence. In its conception, what returns in the
reincarnation must be not only the same spiritual being, the same psychic
entity, but the same formation of nature that inhabited the body of the last
birth; the body changes, the circumstances are different, but the form of the
being, the mind, the character, the disposition, temperament, tendencies are
the same: John Smith in his new life is the same John Smith that he was in his
last avatar. But if that were so, there would be no spiritual utility or
meaning at all in rebirth; for there would be the repetition of the same little
personality, the same small mental and vital formation to the end of Time. For
the growth of the embodied being towards the full stature of its reality, not
only a new experience, but a new personality is indispensable; to repeat the
same personality would only be helpful if something had been incomplete in its
formation of its experience which needed to be worked out in the same cadre of
self, in the same building of mind and with the same formed capacity of energy.
But normally this would be quite otiose: the soul that has been John Smith
cannot gain anything or fulfil itself by remaining
John Smith for ever; it cannot achieve growth or perfection by repeating the
same character, interests, occupations, types of inner and outer movements for
ever. Our life and rebirth would be always the same recurring decimal; it would
be not an evolution but the meaningless continuity of an eternal repetition.
Our attachment to our present personality demands such a continuity, such a
repetition; John Smith wants to be John Smith for ever: but the demand is
obviously ignorant and, if it were satisfied, that would be a frustration, not
a fulfilment. It is only by a change of outer self, a
constant progression of the nature, a growth in the spirit that we can justify
our existence.
Personality is
only a temporary mental, vital, physical
Page 816
formation which the being, the
real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface,—it is not the
self in its abiding reality. In each return to earth the Person, the Purusha, makes a new formation, builds a new personal
quantum suitable for a new experience, for a new growth of its being. When it
passes from its body, it keeps still the same vital and mental form for a time,
but the forms or sheaths dissolve and what is kept is only the essential
elements of the past quantum, of which some will but some may not be used in
the next incarnation. The essential form of the past personality may remain as
one element among many, one personality among many personalities of the same
Person, but in the background, in the subliminal behind the veil of the surface
mind and life and body, contributing from there whatever is needed of itself to
the new formation; but it will not itself be the whole formation or build anew
the old unchanged type of nature. It may even be that the new quantum or
structure of being will exhibit a quite contrary character and temperament,
quite other capacities, other very different tendencies; for latent potentials
may be ready to emerge, or something already in action but inchoate may have
been held back in the last life which needed to be worked out but was kept over
for a later and more suitable combination of the possibilities of the nature.
All the past is indeed there, with its accelerated impetus and potentialities
for the formation of the future, but all of it is not ostensibly present and
active. The greater the variety of formations that have existed in the past and
can be utilised, the more rich and multitudinous the
accumulated buildings of experience, the more their essential result of
capacity for knowledge, power, action, character, manifold response to the
universe can be brought forward and harmonised in the
new birth, the more numerous the veiled personalities mental, vital,
subtle-physical that combine to enrich the new personality on the surface, the
greater and more opulent will be that personality and the nearer to the
possible transition out of the completed mental stage of evolution to something
beyond it. Such a complexity and gathering up of many personalities in one
person can be a sign of a very advanced stage of the individual's evolution
when there is a strong central being that holds all together and works towards harmonization
Page 817
and integration of the whole
many-sided movement of the nature. But this opulent taking up of the past would
not be a repetition of personality; it would be a new formation and large
consummation. It is not as a machinery for the persistent renewal or
prolongation of an unchanging personality that rebirth exists, but as a means
for the evolution of the spiritual being in Nature.
It becomes at
once evident that in this plan of rebirth the false importance which our mind
attaches to the memory of past lives disappears altogether. If indeed rebirth
were governed by a system of rewards and punishments, if life's whole intention
were to teach the embodied spirit to be good and moral,—supposing that that is
the intention in the dispensation of Karma and it is not what it looks like in
this presentation of it, a mechanical law of recompense and retribution without
any reformatory meaning or purpose,—then there is evidently a great stupidity
and injustice in denying to the mind in its new incarnation all memory of its
past births and actions. For it deprives the reborn being of all chance to realise why he is rewarded or punished or to get any
advantage from the lesson of the profitableness of virtue and the unprofitableness of sin vouchsafed to him or inflicted on
him. Even, since life seems often to teach the opposite lesson,—for he sees the
good suffer for their goodness and the wicked prosper by their wickedness,—he
is rather likely to conclude in this perverse sense, because he has not the
memory of an assured and constant result of experience which would show him
that the suffering of the good man was due to his past wickedness and the
prosperity of the sinner due to the splendour of his
past virtues, so that virtue is the best policy in the long run for any
reasonable and prudent soul entering into this dispensation of Nature. It might
be said that the psychic being within remembers; but such a secret memory would
seem to have little effect or value on the surface. Or it may be said that it realises what has happened and learns its lesson when it
reviews and assimilates its experiences after issuing from the body: but this
intermittent memory does not very apparently help in the next birth; for most
of us persist in sin and error and show no tangible signs of having profited by
the teaching of our past experience.
But if a
constant development of being by a developing
Page 818
cosmic experience is the meaning
and the building of a new personality in a new birth is the method, then any
persistent or complete memory of the past life or lives might be a chain and a
serious obstacle: it would be a force for prolonging the old temperament,
character, preoccupations, and a tremendous burden hampering the free
development of the new personality and its formulation of new experience. A
clear and detailed memory of past lives, hatreds, rancours,
attachments, connections would be equally a stupendous inconvenience; for it
would bind the reborn being to a useless repetition or a compulsory
continuation of his surface past and stand heavily in the way of his bringing
out new possibilities from the depths of the spirit. If, indeed, a mental
learning of things were the heart of the matter, if that were the process of
our development, memory would have a great importance: but what happens is a
growth of the soul-personality and a growth of the nature by an assimilation
into our substance of being, a creative and effective absorption of the
essential results of past energies; in this process conscious memory is of no
importance. As the tree grows by a subconscient or inconscient assimilation of action of sun and rain and wind
and absorption of earth-elements, so the being grows by a subliminal or intraconscient assimilation and absorption of its results
of past becoming and an output of potentialities of future becoming. The law
that deprives us of the memory of past lives is a law of the cosmic Wisdom and
serves, not disserves its evolutionary purpose.
The absence of
any memory of past existences is wrongly and very ignorantly taken as a
disproof of the actuality of rebirth; for if even in this life it is difficult
to keep all the memories of our past, if they often fade into the background or
fade out altogether, if no recollection remains of our infancy, and yet with
all this hiatus of memory we can grow and be, if the mind is even capable of
total loss of memory of past events and its own identity and yet it is the same
being who is there and the lost memory can one day be recovered, it is evident
that so radical a change as a transition to other worlds followed by new birth
in a new body ought normally to obliterate altogether the surface or mental
memory, and yet that would not annul the identity of the soul or
Page 819
he growth of the nature. This
obliteration of the surface mental memory is all the more certain and quite
inevitable if there is a new personality of the same being and a new
instrumentation which takes the place of the old, a new mind, a new life, a new
body: the new brain cannot be expected to carry in itself the images held by
the old brain; the new life or mind cannot be summoned to keep the deleted
impressions of the old mind and life that have been dissolved and exist no
more. There is, no doubt, the subliminal being which may remember, since it
does not suffer from the disabilities of the surface; but the surface mind is
cut off from the subliminal memory which alone might retain some clear
recollection or distinct impression of past lives. This separation is necessary
because the new personality has to be built up on the surface without conscious
reference to what is within; as with all the rest of the superficial being, so
our surface personality too is indeed formed by an action from within, but of
that action it is not conscious, it seems to itself to be self-formed or
ready-made or formed by some ill-understood action of universal Nature. And yet
fragmentary recollections of past births do sometimes remain in spite of these
almost insuperable obstacles; there are even a very few cases of astonishingly
exact and full memory in the child-mind. Finally, at a certain stage of
development of the being when the inner begins to predominate over the outer
and come to the front, past-life memory does sometimes begin to emerge as if
from some submerged layer, but more readily in the shape of a perception of the
stuff and power of past personalities that are effective in the composition of
the being in the present life than in any precise and accurate detail of event
and circumstance, although this too can recur in parts or be recovered by
concentration from the subliminal vision, from some secret memory or from our inner
conscious-substance. But this detailed memory is of minor importance to Nature
in her normal work and she makes small or no provision for it: it is the
shaping of the future evolution of the being with which she is concerned; the
past is put back, kept behind the veil and used only as an occult source of
materials for the present and the future.
This conception
of the Person and Personality, if accepted,
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must modify at the same time our
current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist
on the soul's undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a
definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same
throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial “I” of the moment, evidently
regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we
demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is
extravagant and cannot be conceded; the “I” of the moment can only merit
survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else,
greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded
in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the
divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in
us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity
within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that
we are; but the “I” of this moment, the “I” of this life is only a formation, a
temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of
our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass
beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness
and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists
before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless
Spirit into the terms of Time.
What our normal
demand of survival asks for is a similar survival for our mind, our life, even
our body; the dogma of the resurrection of the body attests to this last
demand,—even as it has been the root of the age-long effort of man to discover the
elixir of immortality or any means magical, alchemic or scientific to conquer
physically the death of the body. But this aspiration could only succeed if the
mind, life or body could put on something of the immortality and divinity of
the indwelling Spirit. There are certain circumstances in which the survival of
the outer mental personality representative of the inner mental Purusha could be possible. It could happen if our mental
being came to be so powerfully individualised on the
surface and so much one with the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the
progressive action of the Infinite
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that the soul no longer needed to
dissolve the old form of mind and create a new one in order to progress. A
similar individualisation, integration and openness
of the vital being on the surface would alone make possible a similar survival
of the life-part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the inner
life-being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen
then is that the wall between the inner self and the outer man would have
broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental
and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would govern the
life. Our mind-nature and our life-nature could then be a continuous
progressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of successive formations
preserved only in their essence. Our mental personality and life-personality
would then subsist without dissolution from birth to birth; they would be in
this sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in their sense of
identity. This would be evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life
over the Inconscience and the limitations of material
Nature.
But such a
survival could only persist in the subtle body; the being would still have to
discard its physical form, pass to other worlds and in its return put on a new
body. The awakened mental Purusha and vital Purusha, preserving the mind-sheath and the life-sheath of
the subtle body which are usually discarded, would return with them into a new
birth and keep a vivid and sustained sense of a permanent being of mind and
life constituted by the past and continuing into the present and future; but
the basis of physical existence, the material body, could not be preserved even
by this change. The physical being could only endure, if by some means its
physical causes of decay and disruption could be overcome and at the same time
it could be made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its
functioning that it would answer to each change demanded of it by the progress
of the inner Person;1 it must be able to keep pace
1 Even if Science,— physical Science or occult
Science, — were to discover the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite
survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become
a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some
way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical
causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is
the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being.
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with the soul in its formation of
self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity
and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine mental or spiritual
existence. This consummation of a triple immortality,—immortality of the nature
completing the essential immortality of the Spirit and the psychic survival of death,—might
be the crown of rebirth and a momentous indication of the conquest of the
material Inconscience and Ignorance even in the very
foundation of the reign of Matter. But the true immortality would still be the
eternity of the Spirit; the physical survival could only be relative,
terminable at will, a temporal sign of the Spirit's victory here over Death and
Matter.
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