How We Remember Our Past Lives by C. Jinarajadasa

How We Remember Our Past Lives

and Other Essays on Reincarnation

by C. Jinarajadasa

The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai(Madras), India 600 020

First Edition Published in 1915

TO

THE CAPTAIN OF OUR SALVATION

IN FULFILMENT OF A PROMISE

Full moon of Chaitra, 1912

1

HOW WE REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES

Page 1

2

THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT

Page 31

3

THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION

Page 52

4

THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE

Page 60

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How We Remember Our Past Lives by C. Jinarajadasa

HOW WE REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES

Among the many ideas which have lightened the burden of men, one of the most serviceable has been

that of Reincarnation. It not only explains why one man is born in the lap of luxury and another in poverty,

why one is a genius and another an idiot, but it also holds out the hope that, as men now reap what they

have sown in the past, so in future lives the poor and wretched of today shal have what they lack, if so

they work for it, and that the idiot may, life after life, build up mentality which in far-off days may flower as

genius.

When the idea of reincarnation is heard of for the first time, the student naturally supposes that it is a

Hindu doctrine, for it is known to be a fundamental part of both Hinduism and Buddhism. But the strange

fact is that reincarnation is found everywhere as a belief, and its origin cannot be traced to Indian

sources. We hear of it in far-off Australia ( See The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, by Baldwin

Spencer & F.G. Gillen, 1904, page 175, et seq. ) and there is a story on record of an Australian aborigine

who went cheerfully to the gal ows, and replied on being questioned as to his levity :”Tumble down black-

fel ow, jump up white fellow, and have lots of sixpences to spend!” It was taught by the Druids of ancient

Gaul, and Julius Caesar tel s us how young Gauls were taught reincarnation, and that as a consequence

they had no fear of death. Greek philosophers knew of it; we have Pythagoras tel ing his pupils that in his

past lives he had been a warrior at the siege of Troy, and later was the philosopher Hermotimus of

Galzomenae. It is not utterly unknown to Christian teaching, if we take the simple statement of Christ,

when questioned whether John the Baptist was Elijah or Elias reborn: “If ye will receive it, this is Elias

which was for to come,” and He fol ows up the statement with the significant words: “He that hath ears to

hear, let him hear.” In later Jewish tradition, the idea is known, and the Talmud mentions several cases of

reincarnation.

There are many to whom reincarnation appeals forcibly, and Schopenhauer does but little exaggerate

when he says: “I have also remarked that it is at once obvious to everyone who hears of it for the first

time”. Some believe in the idea immediately; it comes to them like a flash of light in thick darkness, and

the problem of life is clearly seen with reincarnation as the solution. Others there are who grow into

belief, as each doubt is solved and each question answered

There is one, and only one, objection which can logically be brought against reincarnation, if correctly

understood as Theosophy teaches it. It lies in the question: “If, as you say, I have lived on earth in other

bodies, why don’t I remember the past?”

Now if reincarnation is a fact in Nature, there surely will be enough other facts which will point to its

existence. No one fact in Nature stands isolated, and it is possible in divers ways to discover that fact.

Similarly it is with reincarnation; there are indeed enough facts of a psychological kind to prove to a

thinker that reincarnation must be a fact of Nature and not a theory.

In answering the question why we do not remember our past lives, surely the first necessary point is to

ask ourselves what we mean by “memory”. If we have some clear ideas as to the mechanism of memory,

perhaps we may be able to understand why we do not (or do) “remember” our past days or lives. Now,

briefly speaking, what we usual y mean by memory is a summing up. If I remember today the incidents of

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How We Remember Our Past Lives by C. Jinarajadasa

my cutting my finger yesterday, there will be two elements in my memory: first the series of events which

went to produce the pain - the misadventure in handling the knife, the cut, the bleeding, the sensorial

reaction in the brain, the gesture and so on; and second, the sense of pain. As days pass, the causes of

the pain recede into the periphery of consciousness, while the effects, as pain, stil hold the centre.

Presently, we shal find that even the memory of the pain itself recedes into the background, leaving

behind with us not a direct memory as an event, but an indirect memory as a tendency – a tendency to

be careful in the handling of all cutting implements. This process is continually taking place; the cause is

forgotten (though recoverable under hypnosis from the subconscious mind), while the effect, transmuted

into tendency, remains.

It is here that we are specially aided by the brain. We are apt to think of the brain as a recorder of

memory, without realizing that one of its most useful functions is to wipe out memories. The brain plays

the dual function of remembering and forgetting. But for our ability to forget, life would be impossible. If

each time we tried to move a limb, we were to remember al our infantile efforts at movement, with the

hesitation and doubt and perhaps even pain involved, our consciousness would be so overwhelmed by

memories that the necessary movement of the limb would certainly be delayed, or not made at all.

Similarly, it is with every function now performed automatically, which was once consciously acquired; it is

because we do forget the process of acquiring, that we can utilize the faculty resulting therefrom.

This is what is continuously taking place in consciousness with each one of us. There is a process of

exchange, similar to copper coins of one denomination being changed to silver coins of smal er bulk

representing them, then into gold coins of smaller weight still, and later bank notes representing their

value, and last of all to a piece of paper, a cheque, whose intrinsic worth is nil. Yet we have but to write

our signature on the cheque, to put into operation the whole medium of exchange. It is a similar process

which takes place with all our memories of sensations, feelings and thoughts. These are several y

grouped into categories, and transmuted into likes and dislikes, and finally into talents and faculties.

Now we know that as we manifest a like or dislike, or exhibit any capacity, we are remembering our past,

though we cannot remember one by one in detail the memories which contributed to originate the

emotions or faculty. As I write these words in English on this page, I must be remembering the first time I

saw each word in a reading book, and looked up its meaning in a dictionary as I prepared my home

lessons; but it is a kind of transmuted memory. Nevertheless, I do remember, and but for those memories

being somewhere in my consciousness (whether in touch with some brain cells or not is not now the

point ) I should not be able to think of the right word to express my thought, nor shape it on this paper so

that the printer will recognize the letters to set them up in print. Furthermore, we know as a fact that we

do forget these causative memories one by one; it would be foolish if, as I write a particular word, I were

to try to cal up the memory of the first time I saw it. The brain is a recording instrument of such a kind

that, though it registers, it does not obey consciousness when it desires to unrol the record, except in

certain abnormal cases. The desire to remember is not necessarily followed by remembrance, and we

have to take this fact as it is.

Here it is that Bergson has very luminously pointed out that “we think with only a smal part of the past;

but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act.” Clearly

then it would be useless to try to remember our past lives by the mere exercise of the mind; though

thought can remember something of the past, it is only a fraction of the whole. But on the other hand, let

us but feel or act, and then at once our feeling or action is the resultant of al the forces, of the past which

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How We Remember Our Past Lives by C. Jinarajadasa

have converged on our individuality. If, therefore, we are to trace the memories of our past lives in our

present normal consciousness, we must note how we feel and act, expecting to recover little of such

memories in a mere mental effort to remember.

Every feeling and act, then, can be slowly traced to its component parts of impressions from without and

reactions from within. So much is this the case with each one of us, that we can construct for ourselves

what has been another's past, as we watch that other feel and act, provided he does both in an average

fashion. But if he manifests a mode that is not the average mode of thought or feeling, then he becomes

incomprehensible to us and needs explanation. Since, then, the average feelings and actions can be

readily explained as the result of average experiences, unusual feeling and actions must be explained as

having an unusual causation. If the present writer were to deliver a lecture in English in India, where so

many can speak English, each of his listeners would take for granted that he had been to school and

college, without perhaps enquiring further when and where. But were he, instead of speaking English, to

speak Italian, than at once each listener would be curious to know how and when that faculty of speaking

Italian had been grown. Furthermore, if an Italian were present in the audience, then judging from the

speaker’s phrasing and intonation, he would know that the speaker must have lived in Italy, or must have

spent a considerable time among Italians. Wherever there is any manifestation of feeling or action — as

indeed, too, of some expressions of thought — which has something of the quality of the expert, then we

must postulate for that faculty a slow growth through experiences, which are the result of experiments

along that particular line.

Now each one of us has many qualities of an average kind, as also a few of an expert kind. The former

we can account for by experiences common to al . Let us examine some of the latter, and see if we can

account for them on any other hypothesis than that of reincarnation.

Now one of the principal things which characterizes men is their likes and dislikes. Sometimes these

might be called rational, that is, they are such likes and dislikes as an average individual of a particular

type might be said normally to possess at his stage in evolution. We can account for these normal likes

and dislikes, because they are such as we ourselves manifest under similar conditions. But suppose we

take the case of an extraordinary liking, such as is termed “love at first sight.” Two people meet in the

seeming fortuitous concourse of human events, sometimes, it may be, coming from the ends of the earth.

They know nothing of each other, and yet ensues the curious phenomenon that as a matter of fact the do

know a great deal of each other. Life would be a happy thing if we could go out with deep affection to al

whom we meet; but we know we cannot, for it is not in our nature. Why then should it be in our nature to

“fal in love” with a particular individual? Why should we be ready to sacrifice all for this person whom, in

this life at least, we have met but a few times? How is it that we seem to know the inner workings of his

heart and brain from the little which he reveals at our conventional intercourse at the beginning? “ Falling

in love” is indeed a mysterious psychological phenomenon, but the process is far better described as

being dragged into love, since the individual is forced to obey and may not refrain.

Now there are two logical explanations possible: one is the ribald one of the scoffer, that it is some form

of hysteria or incipient insanity, due it may be to “complexes”; the other is that, in this profound going

forth of one individual as an expert in feeling towards another, we have not at first meeting but the last of

many, many meetings which took place in past lives. Where or when were these meetings is of little

consequence to the lovers; indeed Rudyard Kipling has suggested in his “Finest Story in the World” that

it is only in order that we might not miss the delicious sensation of falling in love with our beloved, that the

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kindly Gods have made us drink of the river of forgetfulness before we returned to life on earth again.

The principal thing to note, in this emotional mood of being in love, is that the friendship is not as one that

begins, but as one that is continued; and in that psychological attitude of the two lovers we have the

remembrance of past lives, when they met and loved and sacrificed for each other.

Not dissimilar to this unusual liking which constitutes falling in love, is the unusual disliking which is not

so very rare in human experience. Certain normal dislikes we can readily account for; but take the case

of two individuals meeting for the first time, it may be knowing nothing even by hearsay of each other,

and then we have sometimes the striking phenomenon of one of the two drawing back from the other, not

outwardly by gesture, but inwardly by a feeling or an intuition. In al such cases of drawing back, the

curious thing is that there is no personal feeling; it is not a violent feeling of “I do not like you”, but far

more an impersonal state of mind where almost no feeling manifests, and which may be paraphrased

into “It is wise to have little to do with you.” Sometimes we follow this intuition, but usual y we brush it

aside as unjust, and then turn to understanding our acquaintance with the mind. Not infrequently, it then

fol ows that we begin to like him, perhaps even love him.

We forget our “first impression”, or we put it aside as mere irrational impulse. Now there are many such

revulsions that are purely irrational impulses, but there is a residue of cases where after-events show that

the dislike was not an impulse but an intuition. For it may happen, after years have passed of intercourse

with out friend, that suddenly without any warning he, as it were, stabs us in the back and deals us a

mortal blow; and then in our grief and humiliation we remember that first impression of ours, and wish

that we had followed it.

Whence came this first impression? Reincarnation offers a solution, which is that the injured had suffered

in past lives at the hands of his injurer, and that it is the memory of that suffering which flashes into the

mind as an intuition.

More striking stil are those cases where there exist at the same time both like and dislike, both love and

resentment. I well remember a lady describing her attitude to a friend to whom she was profoundly

attached in the following words : “I love him, but I despise him!” I wonder how many wives say this daily

of their husbands, or husbands of their wives. Why should there be this incomprehensible jumble of

contradictory feelings?

The clue is strikingly given by W.E. Henley in his well-known poem:

Or ever the knightly years were gone

With the old world to the grave,

I was a king in Babylon,

And you were a Christian slave.

The poet goes on to tell us how the king “saw and took,” and toyed with the maid and, as is a man’s way,

finally cast her aside. Yet she loved him well, but, heart-broken at his treatment, committed suicide. Now

it is obvious that the girl dies full of both love and resentment, and since what we sow we reap, each of

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the two in the rebirth reaps in emotional attitude the result of past causes. For, this time the man loves

again, and desires to possess her; she too loves him in return, and yet does not permit him to have his

heart’s desire. So the lover cries out :

The pride I trampled on is now my scathe,

For it tramples me again;

The old resentment last like death,

For you love, and yet you refrain;

I break my heart on your hard unfaith,

And I break my heart in vain.

Henley sees with is poetic vision that the present situation between the two cannot remain the same

throughout eternity; there must be a true loving and understanding of each other at the long last; and so

the poem ends with the man’s pride in his past, and resignation in the present, with a hint of some good

from a past which need not be “undone” as of no worth at al .

Yet not for an hour do I wish undone

The deed beyond the grave

When I was a king in Babylon

And you were a virgin slave.

There can only be one ending, that of the fairy tale, since it needs must be a universe where there is but

One who loves, that,

Journey’s end in lover’s meeting.

Every wise man’s son doth know.

We have been so far been considering the manifestations of an individual’s emotional nature, and it is

obvious that, because of his own experiences, he will be able to understand the emotions of others, so

long as such emotions are in the main like what he has known. But what of those individuals who

thoroughly understand such experiences as have not come to them? Shakespeare understands the

working of a woman's heart and mind, and, too, al the intricate mental and emotional processes of the

traitor ; Dickens knows how the murderer feels after committing the crime.

Furthermore, some gifted men and women, when experiencing emotions, generalize from them to what

is experienced by al , while one not so gifted, though “once bitten” is not “twice shy”, nor is made

appreciably wiser by the same experience coming to him over and over again. The gifted few, on the

other hand, will fathom the universal quality in a single experience, and they will anticipate from it many

experiences of like nature; for themselves, and sometimes for others too, they will state their

experiences, reducing them as it were to algebraical formulae, and each formula including one general

statement al particular cases. Their thoughts and feelings are like aphorisms, with the transmutation of

many experiences into one Experience.

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Now, to generalize from our individual emotions is as rare a gift as to originate a philosophy from the

particular thoughts which we gain about things. Yet it is this generalization from particular emotions that is

characteristic of a poet, and the more universal are his generalizations, the greater is he as a poet. Why

then should an individual here and there have this wonderful ability of seeing particular men as

representatives of types, and particular emotions as expression of universal emotions? We say that such

a man is a genius, but the word genius merely describes but does not explain. There are geniuses in

every department of life - religion, poetry, art, music, statesmanship, the drama, in war and in commerce,

and in many other phases of life. These geniuses are characterized by many abnormal qualities; they are

always men of the future and not of their day and each genius is a lawgiver to future generations in his

own department of activity; and above all, they live emotionally and mentally in wide generalizations.

Whence comes this wonderful ability?

One explanation offered is Heredity. But how far does heredity really explain genius? According to the

ordinarily accepted theory of heredity, each generation adds a little to a quality brought from the

generation before, and then transmits it to the next; this in turn adds a little, and passes on the total of

what it has received, plus its own contribution; and so on generation after generation, til we arrive at a

particular generation, and to one individual of it, in whom the special quality in some mysterious way gets

concentrated, and that individual is thereby a genius. According to this popular theory, some remote

ancestor of Shakespeare had a fraction of Shakespeare’s genius, which he transmitted through heredity

to his offspring; this offspring then, keeping intact what was given him by his parent, added to the stock

from his own experiences, and then passed on both to his child; and so on in successive generations,

each generation treasuring what was given to it from all previous generations, and adding something of

its own before transmitting it to the next. Shakespeare then is as the torrent from a reservoir which has

slowly been dammed up, but bursts its sides when the pressure has passed beyond a certain point.

Such a conception of heredity is based upon the assumption that what an individual acquires of faculty,

as a result of adaptability to his environment, is passed on to his offspring. Such indeed is the conclusion

that the Darwinian school of biologists came to, from their analysis of what happens in Nature. But

biological research during the last twenty-five years, has been largely directed to testing the validity of the

theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics. Not only has not one indisputable instance been

found, but all experiments in breeding and crossing, on the other hand, accumulate proofs to the

contrary.

The new school of biologists known as the Mendelians have therefore come to theories about heredity

which are not only novel but startling. According to them, structural characteristics, upon which must

depend the mental and moral capacities of an individual, exist, in every ancestor in their fulness; and

further, they must all have been in the first speck of living matter. Nothing has been added by evolution to

this original stock of capacities in protoplasm. Every genius whom the world has known or will know

existed potentially in it, though he had to wait millions of years before there arose the appropriate

arrangement of the “genetic factors” to enable him to appear as a genius on the evolutionary stage.

Nature has not evolved the complex brain structure of Shakespeare out of the rudimentary brains of the

mammals; that complexity existed “in a pin-head of protoplasm”. Nature has not evolved the genius; she

has merely released him from the fetters which bound him in the primordial protoplasm, by eliminating,

generation after generation, such genetic factors as inhibited his manifestation. Bateson sums up these

modern theories when he says:

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“I have confidence that the artistic gifts of mankind will prove to be due not to something

added to the makeup of an ordinary man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal

person inhibit the development of these gifts. They are almost beyond doubt to be looked

upon as – “releases” – of powers normally suppressed. The instrument is there, but it is

stopped down.” (Presidential Address, British Association, 1914).

Time alone will show how far the Mendelian conception will need to be modified by later discoveries; but

it is fairly certain already that the older Darwinian conception of heredity is untenable, and that if a man is

a genius he owes very little to the intel ectual and emotional achievements of his ancestors. If, however,

we admit with the Mendelians that a genius is “released” merely by the removal of the inhibiting factors,

and is not the result of slow accumulations, we stil leave the original mystery unsolved, and that is to

explain the synthetic ability of the genius. We are therefore no nearer real y explaining the nature of

genius along Mendelian lines than along the Darwinian; the theories of science merely tell us under what

conditions genius will or will not manifest, but nothing more.

The only rational theory of genius, which accepts scientific facts as to heredity and also explains what

genius is, comes from the conception of reincarnation. If we hold that an individual is a soul, that is an

imperishable and evolving Ego, and manifests through a body appropriate to his stage of growth and to a

work which he is to do in that body, then we see that his emotional and mental attributes are the results

of experiences which he has gained in past lives. But since he can express them only through a suitable

body and brain, these must be of such a kind as Nature has by heredity selected for such use. The

manifestation of any capacity, then, depends on two indispensable factors; first, an Ego or consciousness

who has developed the capacity by repeated experiments in past lives; and second, a suitable

instrument, a physical body of such a nature structurally as makes possible the expression of that

capacity. When therefore we consider the quality of genius, if on the one hand the genius has not a body

fashioned out of such genetic factors as do not inhibit his genius, he is “stopped down”, to use Bateson’s

simile, and his genius is unreleased. But on the other hand, if Nature were to produce a thousand bodies

that were not “stopped down”, we should not ipso facto have a thousand geniuses. Two lines of evolution

must therefore converge, before there can manifest any quality that is not purely functional. The first is

that of the evolution of an indestructible Consciousness, which continually experiments with life and

slowly becomes expert thereby; and the second is the evolution of the physical structure, which is

selected by heredity to respond to a given stimulus from within.

If with this is clue as to what is happening in Nature, we examine the various geniuses whom the world

has produced, we shal see that they are remembering their past lives as they exhibit their genius. Take

for instance, such a genius as the young violinist, Mischa Elman, who a few years ago began his musical

career; he was then but a lad, and yet even at that age he manifested marvellous technical ability. Now

we may perhaps legitimately account for this technical ability along Mendelian lines, as being due to a

rare confluence of genetic factors; but by no theory of physical heredity can we explain what surprised

the most exacting of musical critics - Mischa Elman’s interpretation of music. For it is just in this

interpretation that a music lover can see the soul of the performer, whether that soul is a big one or a

little, whether the performer has known of life superficial y or has touched life's core. Now Mischa

Elman’s interpretation, absolutely spontaneous as it was, and un-imitated from a teacher, was that of a

man and not that of a boy. Little wonder that many a critic was puzzled, or that the musical critic of the

London Daily Telegraph should write as follows:

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“Rain beat noisily upon the roof and thunder roared and rattled, but Mischa Elman went calmly

on with his prescribed Paganini and Bach and Wieniawski. Calmly is the word, be it noted, not

stolidly. We have had stolid wonder-children on our musical platforms; Mischa is not one of

them. Upon his face, as he plies the bow, rests a great peace, and only now and then, with a

more decided expression, does he lower his cheek upon the instrument, as though he would

receive from it the impulse of its vibrations and to it communicate his own soul-beats. The

marvel of this boy does not lie in his execution of difficult passages. If it did, perhaps we

should award it but perfunctory notice, seeing that among the children of our generation there

are so many who play with difficult passages much as their predecessors did with marbles. We

have gone beyond mere dexterity with bowing and fingering, and can say, in the spirit of one

of old time, that from the babe and suckling comes now the perfection of such praise as lies

within the compass of a violin.”

Asked to account for this — to explain why Mischa Elman laying cheek to wood, reveals the

insight and feeling of a man who has risen to the heights and plumbed the depths of human

life — we simply acknowledge that the matter is beyond us. We can do no more than

speculate, and, perhaps, hope for a day in which the all-embracing science of an age more

advanced than our own shall discover the particular brain formation, or adjustment, to which

infants owe the powers that men and women vainly seek. Those powers may be the

Wordsworthian “clouds of glory”, brought from another world. If so, what a brilliant birth must

that of Mischa Elman have been! The boy was heard in a work by Paganini and another

Wieniawski, both good things of their meritricious kind, and both irradiated, as we could not

but fancy, by the unconscious genius which shines alike on the evil and the good, making the

best of both. Upon the mere execution of these works we do not dwell, preferring the charm of

the moments in which the music lent itself to the mysterious emotion of the youthful player,

and showed, not the painted visage of a mountebank, but the face of an angel!

If along the lines of reincarnation we suppose that Mischa Elman is a soul who in his past lives has in

truth "risen to the heights and plumbed the depths of human life”, then we have a reasonable explanation

for his genius. There is reflected in each interpretation the summing up of his past experiences, and he

can through his music tell us of a man’s sorrow or a man’s joy, because as a man in past lives he has

experienced both, and retains their memory in emotional and intel ectual generalizations. This

explanation further joins hands with science, because the reincarnation theory of genius implies the need

by the musical soul of a body with a musical heredity, which has been “selected” by evolution and built up

by appropriate genetic factors.

Reincarnation alone explains another genius who must remain a puzzle according to all other theories.

Keats is known in English poetry as the most “Greek” of al England's poets; he possessed by nature that

unique feeling for life which was the treasure of the Greek temperament. If he had been a Greek scholar

and steeped in the traditions of Greek culture, we might account for this anima naturaliter Graeca of the

Greek-less Keats.” But when we consider that Keats had “little Latin and less Greek,” and began life as a

surgeon’s apprentice and a medical student, we may well wonder why he sings not as a Christian poet

should, but as some Greek shepherd born on the slopes of Mount Etna. The wonder, however, at once

ceases if we presume that Keats is the reincarnation of a Greek poet, and that he is remembering his

past lives as he reverts to Greek ways of thought and feeling.

With reincarnation as a clue, it is interesting to see how a little analysis enables us to say where in the

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past an individual must have lived. In the culture of Europe and America, there are three main types of

“reversion,” to Rome, to Greece, and to India. Anyone who has studied Roman institutions and the

Roman conception of life finds little difficulty in noting how the English temperament is largely that of

ancient Rome in a modern garb; the values, for instance in writing history, of such historians as Gibbon,

Macaulay, Hume, are practically the same as those of Roman historians, Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and the

rest; whereas if we take the French historians we shal find them scarcely at all Roman in temperament,

and far more akin to Greek. The equation Tennyson = Virgil is certainly not far-fetched to those who know

the quality of both poets.

We find the reversion to Greece very clearly in such writers as Goethe, Schiller and Lessing. Why should

these writers have proclaimed to Germany with unbounded enthusiasm the message of “back to

Greece”, except that they knew from their own experience in past lives what Greek culture had still for

men? For what is enthusiasm but the springing forward of the soul to experience a freshness and a

delight in life which it has known elsewhere, and whose cal it recognizes again? These men of

enthusiasm, these pioneers of the future, are otherwise than sports or freaks of Nature; let us but think of

them as reincarnated souls remembering in their enthusiasm their past lives, and they become not sports

but the first-fruits of a glorious humanity that is to be.

Who that has studied Platonism has not been reminded of Platonic conceptions when reading Emerson?

Though Emerson has not the originality nor the daring of Plato, yet he is truly “Greek”; it does not require

such a great flight of the imagination to see him as some Alexandrian fol ower of Plato. How natural then

too, that Emerson, after entering the Christian ministry to give his message, should find himself unable to

do it as a Christian minister, and should strike out a path for himself as an essayist to speak of the World-

Soul! And who that has studied Indian philosophies does not recognize old Vedantin philosophers in

Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and a Buddhist philosopher in Schopenhauer, all reverting to their philosophic

interests of past lives, and uttering their ancient convictions more brilliantly than before?

Wherever the deeper layers of a man’s being are offered to the world in some creation through

philosophy, literature, art or science, there may we note tendencies started in past lives. For the pageant

of the man’s life is not planned and achieved in the few brief years which begin with his birth, and he that

knows of reincarnation may note readily enough where the parts of the pageant were composed.

Reincarnation, as it affects large groups of individuals, is a fascinating study to one with an historical bent

of mind. I have mentioned that the English race as a whole is largely a reincarnation of the ancient

Roman; but here and there we find a sprinkling of Greeks in men like Byron, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold,

and in those Englishmen and women who have the Greek feel for life, and hemmed in by English

tradition are as strangers in a strange land. Let such a return Greek, wherever he be born this life, but go

to South Italy or to Greece, and he will begin to remember his past life in the instinctive familiarity which

he will feel with the hidden spirit of tree and lake and hill. As none but a Greek can, he will find a joy in

the sunshine, in the lemon groves and vineyards and waterfalls, which in a Greek land give the message

of Nature as in no other land.

Others there are who, born last life in the Middle Ages somewhere in Europe, perhaps in Italy or Spain of

Germany, where they re-visit the land of their former birth, will have a strange familiarity with the things

that pass before them. In striking ways, they read into the life of the people, and understand the why of

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things. To some, this mysterious sense of recol ection may be strongest in Egypt, or India, or Japan; but

wherever we have the intuitive understanding of foreign people, we have one mode of remembering our

past lives.

It is in the characteristic intellectual attitude of the French that we see the reincarnation of much that was

developed in later Greece. The French intellectual clarity and dispassionate keenness to see things “as

they are” (whether they bring material benefits or not) are typical y Greek. And perhaps, could we know

more fully of the life of the Phoenicians, we should see them reborn in the Germans of today. Then the

commercial rivalry between England and Germany for the capture of the markets of the East would be

but the rebirth of the ancient rivalry between Rome and Carthage for the markets of the Mediterranean.

An eruption of Greek egos is fairly evident in the United States of America. On the Pacific Coast

especially, there are many men and women of the simple Greek temperament of the pre-Periclean age,

and yet their ancestors were not infrequently New England Puritans. It is in America too, that we have the

Sophists of Greece in full strength in the “New Thought” writers who spring up in that land month after

month. In them we have the same characteristics as had the Sophists of Greece whom Plato denounced

— much sound sense and many a useful wrinkle, an independence of landmarks and traditions, an

unbounded confidence in their own panacea, and a giving of their message of the Spirit “for a

consideration.” The lack of distinction in their minds, when in Greece, between Sophism and Wisdom

returns in the twentieth century as a confusion between the New Thought ideas of the Divine Life and the

real life of the Spirit. Let us hope that as the Sophists helped to bring in the Golden Age of Greece, so the

“New Thought-ers” are the forerunners of that True Thought that is to dawn, which is neither old nor new.

Here and there in India we find one who is distinctly not Hindu. For the most part, the modern Hindus

seem scarce to have been in other lands in their late incarnations; but now and then a man or woman is

met with for whom the sacrosanct institutions of orthodoxy have no meaning, and who takes up western

ideas of progress with avidity. Some of these are “England-returned,” in this present incarnation, and we

can thus account for their mentality. But when we find a man who has never left India, who was reared in

strict orthodoxy, and yet fights with enthusiasm for foreign ways of thought, surely we have here a

“Europe-returned” ego, from Greece or Rome or from some other of the many lands of the West.

We must not forget to draw attention to the egos from Greece who have returned to Europe to usher in

the age of art. To one familiar with Greek sculpture and architecture, it is not difficult to see the Greek

artists reborn in the Italian masters of painting and architecture. The cult is no longer that of Pallas

Athene and the Gods; there is now the Virgin Mary and the saints to give them their heavenly crowns.

Whence did the Italian masters gain their surety of touch, if not from a past birth in Greece? It is striking,

too, how the Romans, who excelled in portraiture, should be reborn in the English school of portrait

painters, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence and the rest.

Nor must we forget the band of Greeks who like an inundation swept over the Elizabethan stage,

Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Peele, Johnson, and the rest - are they not pagans thinly veiled in English

garb? They felt life in un-English modes; they felt first and then thought out the feeling. The Greek, is

ever the Greek, whatsoever the language which is given him to speak, and his touch in literature and art

is not easily veiled.

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Strong impressions made on the consciousness in a past life often appear in the present in some curious

mood or feeling. Sometimes, fears of creeping things, fires, cutting implements, etc., are thus to be

accounted for, though sometimes these “phobias” may only be sub-conscious reminders of this life. In the

cases where we have no sub-consciousness of the present body appearing, there is sure to have been

some shock, resulting it may be, in a violent death, in a past life. The after effects appear now in some

uncontrol able fear, or in discomfort in the presence of the object which caused the shock. More strange

is the attitude of one individual towards another which is brought over from a past life. Sometimes one

sees the strange sight of a girl of ten or twelve taking care of her mother in a maternal way, as though the

positions were reversed, and almost as if she had the onerous duty of bringing up her mother in the way

she should go. Of a deeper psychological nature is it when, as sometimes happens, a wife mated to a

husband who causes her suffering, finds charity towards him possible only when she looks on him not as

her husband but as her son. Here we have a reminiscence of a life when he was indeed her child, and

his better nature came out towards her in the relation which he bore to her then.

A rather humorous instance of a past recol ection is found when there has been between the last life and

this a change of sex of the body. In the West especial y, where there is a more marked differentiation

temperamental y between the sexes than in the East, not infrequently the girl who dislikes playing with

dolls, who delights in boy’s games, and is a pronounced tomboy, is really an ego who has just taken up a

body of the sex opposite to that with which he has been familiar for many lives. Many a girl has resented

her skirts, and it takes such a girl several years before she finally resigns herself to them. Some women

there are, on whose face and mode of carriage the last male incarnation seems stil fairly visibly

portrayed. A similar thing is to be seen in some men, who bring into this life traces of their habits of

thought and feeling when last they had women's bodies.

A consideration of the many psychological puzzles I have enumerated will show us that, as a matter of

fact, people do remember something of their past lives. Truly the memory is indirect, only as a habit or a

mood, but it is nevertheless memory of the past. Now most people who are willing to accept reincarnation

as a fact in life naturally ask the question: “But why don’t we remember ful y ?” To this there are two

answers, the first of which is: “It is best for us not to remember directly or fully, till we are ready for the

memories”.

We are not ready for remembrance so long as we are influenced by the memories of the past. Where for

instance, the memory is of a painful event, up to a certain point the past not only influences our present

but also our future, and both in a harmful way; and therefore, so long as we have not gone beyond the

sphere of influence of the past, our characters are weakened and not strengthened by remembrance. Let

us take an extreme case, but one typical nevertheless. Suppose that in the last life a man has committed

suicide as the easiest way out of his difficulties. As he dies, there will be in his mind much mental

suffering, and especial y he will lack confidence in his ability to weather the storm. The suicide does not

put an end to his suffering, for after death it will continue for some time more acutely still, till it slowly

exhausts itself. There will be a purification through his great suffering, and when it ends there will be in

him a keener vision and a ful er response to the promptings of his higher nature. When, then, he is

reborn, he will be born with a stronger conscience, as the result of his sufferings. But he will still retain

the lack of confidence in his ability, because nothing has happened after his death to alter that.

Confidence can be gained only by mastering circumstance, and it is for that very purpose that he has

returned. Now sooner or later, he will be confronted with a situation similar to that before he failed in the

last life. As difficulties crowd around him in the new life, once more there will be the old struggle. The fact

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of committing suicide will now come as a tendency to suicide once again, as a resignation to suicide as

the easiest way. But on the other hand, the memory of the suffering after the last suicide will also return

in a stronger urge of conscience that this time the solution must not be through suicide. In this condition

of mental strain, when the man is being pulled on one side by his past and on the other by his future, if

he were to know, with vivid memory, how he had committed suicide in the past in a like situation, the

probabilities are that he would be influenced by his past action, and that his lack of confidence would be

intensified, with suicide as a result once again. Forgetfulness of the nerve-racking details of the past

enables him to fight now more manful y. We little realize how we are being domineered over by our past.

It is indeed a blessing for most of us that the kindly Gods draw a veil over a record which, at our present

stage of evolution, cannot be anything but deplorable in many ways.

Only so long as we identify ourselves with our past, that past is hidden from us, except in indirect modes

as faculties and dispositions. But the direct memory will come, if we learn to dissociate our present

selves from our past selves. We are ever the Future, not the past: and when we can look at our past —

of this life first, and after, of that of other lives — without heat, impersonal y, in perspective as it were, like

a judge who has no sense of identity with the facts before him for judgment, then we shall begin to

remember, directly, the past in detail– but till then, as Tennyson truly says :

We ranging down this lower track

The path we came by, thorn and flower,

Is shadow’d by the growing hour.

Lest life should fail in looking back.

The second reason for our not directly remembering our past lives is this : – the “ I “ who asks the

question, “Why don’t I remember?” has not lived in the past. It is the Soul who has lived, not this “ I “ with

all its limitations. But is not this “ I “ that Soul? With most people not at all, and this fact will be evident if

we think over the matter.

The average man or woman is scarcely so much a Soul as a bundle of attributes of sex, creed, and

nationality. But the Soul is immortal, that is, it has no sense of diminution or death; it has no idea of time,

which deludes it to think that it is young, wastes away, and grows old; it is neither man nor woman,

because it is developing in itself the best qualities of both sexes; it is neither Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor

Christian, nor Muslim, because it lives in One Divine Life and assimilates that Life according to its

temperament; it is not Indian, nor English, nor American, for it belongs to no country, even though its

outermost sheath, the physical body, belongs to a particular race; it has no caste nor class, for it knows

that al partake of One Life, and that before God there is neither Brahmin nor Shudra, Jew nor Gentile,

aristocrat nor plebeian.

It is this Soul which puts out a part of itself, a Personality, for the period of a life, “as a mere subject for

grave experiment and experience”. Through a persona, a “mask” of a babe, child, youth or maid, man or

woman, bachelor, spinster or householder, old man or old woman, it looks out into life, and, as it

observes, eliminates the distorting bias which its outer sheath gives. Its personalities in the past have

been Lemurian or Atlantean, Hindu or Roman or Greek, and it selects the best out of them al and

discards the rest. All literatures, sciences, arts, religions and civilizations are its school and playground,

its workshop and study. Its patriotism is for an indivisible Humanity, and its creed is to co-operate with

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“God’s plan, which is Evolution.”

It is this Soul who has had past lives. How much of this Soul are we, the men and women who ask the

question, “Why don’t we remember our past lives?” The questioner is but the personality. The body of

that personality has a brain on whose cel s the memories of a past life have not been impressed ; those

memories are in the Divine Man who is of no time, of no creed, and of no land. To remember the Soul’s

past lives, the brain of the personality must be made a mirror onto which can be reflected the memories

of the Soul. But before those memories can come into the brain, one by one the various biases must be

removed — of mortality, of time, of sex, of color, of caste.

So long as we are wrapped up in petty thoughts of an exclusive nationalism, and in narrow beliefs of

creeds, so long do we retain the barriers which exist between our higher selves and our lower. An

intellectual breadth and a larger sympathy, “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color,” must

first be achieved, before there breaks, as through clouds, flashes of our true consciousness as Souls.

There is no swifter way to discover what we are as Immortals out of time than by discovering what is our

Work in time.

Let but a man or woman find that Work for whose sake sacrifice and immolation are serenest

contentment, then slowly the larger consciousness of the Soul descends into the brain of the personality.

With that descent begins the direct memory of past lives. As more and more the personality presses

forward, desiring no light but what is sufficient for the next step on his path to his goal of work, slowly one

bias after another is burnt away in the fire of purification. Like as the sun dissipates more clouds the

higher it rises, so it is for the life of the personality; it knows then, with such conviction as the sun has

about its own nature when it shines, that “the soul of man is immortal, and its future is the future of a

thing whose growth and splendor have no limit.”

Then come back the memories of past lives. How they come those who live the life know. There are

many kinds of knowledge useful for man, but none greater than the knowledge “that evolution is a fact,

and that the method of evolution is the constant dipping down into matter under the law of adjustment.”

This knowledge is for al who seek, if they will but seek rightly; and the right way is to be a Brother to all

men, “without distinction of race creed, sex, caste or color.

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THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT

The history of humanity is the history of ideas, and the stages through which men have risen from

savage to civilized are distinguishable one from the other by the influence of certain great doctrines.

Among these teachings which have moulded civilizations, the idea of Evolution stands out as heralding a

new era in the world of thought. Considered at first as of mere academic interest, soon it was recognized

as of practical value, today it is known as necessary in the understanding of every problem in every

department of being.

Nevertheless it is a fact that the doctrine of evolution is a theory after al . No one has lived long enough to

see sufficient links in the evolutionary chain to attest that the charges postulated as having taken place

did so actual y occur, and that the chain is not a fancy but a fact. Yet evolution is accepted by all as a

dynamic idea, for like a magic wand it performs wonders in the world of thought. It marshals the

heterogeneous organisms of nature into orderly groups, and from inanimate atom to protoplasm, from

unicellular organism to multi-cellular, from invertebrate to vertebrate, from ape to man, one ascending

scale of life is seen; –

And striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through al the spires of form

Yet none can say that evolution is an agreeable fact to contemplate, for there is a ruthlessness in

Nature’s methods which is appalling. Utterly cruel and wasteful she seems, creating and perfecting her

creatures only to prey on each other, generating more than can live in the fierce struggle for existence.

“Red in tooth and claw with ravin”, she builds and un-builds and builds again, one-pointed only in this,

that a type shal survive, reckless of the pleasure or pain to a single life. Men themselves, proud though

they be in a fancied freedom of thought and action, are nothing but pawns in a game she plays. The

more fully evolution is understood from such facts as scientists have so far gathered, the more justifiably

can men say, with Omar, of their birth, life and death:

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,

Nor Whence, like Water - willy-nilly flowing,

And out of it, like Wind along the Waste

I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Of course this attitude does not represent that of the majority of men. Millions of men believe in a

Creator, and that “God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world!” But it is no exaggeration to say that their

optimism continually receives rude shocks. No man or woman of sensibility can look about him and not

agree with Tennyson's comparison of life to a play :–

Act first, this Earth, a stage to gloom’d with woe

You all but sicken at the shifting scenes

And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show

In some fifth Act what this wild drama means.

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Both the idea of Evolution and the idea of Divine Guidance, as each is at present conceived, fail to satisfy

ful y the needs of men for an inspiring view of life. The former indeed shows a splendid pageant of

Nature, but it has no message to individual man, except to make the most of his brief day of life, and

stoically resign himself to extinction when Nature shall have no further use for him. The latter speaks to

men's hearts in al uring accents of a power that maketh for righteousness, but it sees God as existing

only in the gaps of that pitiless cosmic order which science reveals. It is obvious, therefore, that any

philosophy which postulates an inseparable relation, between God and evolution, between Nature and

man, is worthy of examination, and this is the view of life which Theosophy propounds, in the light of one

great idea.

This idea is that of the Evolution of Life. Just as modern science tel s us of a ceaseless change of forms

from protoplasm to man, so Theosophy asserts that there is, pari passu, a changing, growing life. This

life does not originate in the forms, though we see it associated with them; and of it Theosophy says that

first, it is indestructible, and second, that it evolves.

It is indestructible, in the sense that when an organism is destroyed, nevertheless al is not destroyed, for

there remains a life which is stil conscious. If a rose fades and its petals crumble and fall to dust, the life

of that rose has not therefore ceased to be; that life persists in Nature, retaining in itself all the memories

of al the experiences which it gained garbed as a rose. Then in due course of events, following laws

which are comprehensible, that life animates another rose of another spring, bringing to its second

embodiment the memories of its first. Whenever, therefore, there seems the death of a living thing,

crystal or plant, animal or man, there always persists an indestructible life and consciousness, even

though to all appearance the object is lifeless, and processes of decay have begun.

Further, this life is evolving, in exactly the same way that the scientist says that an organism evolves. The

life is at first amorphous, and responds but little to the stimuli from without; it retains only feeble

memories of its experiences which it gains through its successive embodiments. But it passes from stage

to stage, through more and more complex organisms, til slowly it becomes more definite, more diverse in

its functions. As the outer form evolves from protoplasm to man, so evolves too the life ensouling it. All

Nature, visible and invisible, is the field of an evolution of life through successive series of evolving forms.

The broad stages of this evolving life are from mineral to vegetable, from vegetable to animal, and from

animal to man.

The doctrine of a life that evolves through evolving forms answers some of those questions which puzzle

the biologist today. Many a fact hitherto considered outside the domain of science is seen as illustrative

of new laws, and existing gaps are bridged over to make the doctrine of evolution more logical than ever.

It further shows Nature as not wasteful, and only seemingly cruel, for nothing is lost, since every

experience in every form which was destroyed, in the process of natural selection, is treasured by the life

today. The past lives in the present, to attest that Nature’s purpose is not death crushing life, but life ever

triumphant over death to make out of stocks and stones immortal men.

In each human being is seen this same principle of an imperishable evolving life. For man is an individual

life and consciousness, an immortal soul capable of living apart from the body which we usual y call “the

man.” In each soul, the process of evolution is at work. At his entrance on existence as a soul, he is

feeble and chaotic in his consciousness, vague and indefinite in his understanding of the meaning of life,

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and capable only of a narrow range of thought and feeling. But he too evolves, from indefinite to definite,

from simple to complex, from chaos to order.

Man’s evolution is by successive manifestations in bodies of flesh, passing at the death of one body to

begin life once more in another new one. In this passage, he carries with him the memory of all

experiences which he has gained in the past behind him. This aspect of the evolution of life as it affects

men is called Reincarnation.

As al processes of Nature are intelligible on the hypothesis of an evolution of organisms, so al that

happens to men becomes comprehensible in the light of reincarnation. As evolution links all forms by

species and genus, family and order, class and group, sub-kingdom and kingdom, into one unbreakable

chain, so reincarnation binds all human experiences into one consistent philosophy of life. How

reincarnation explains the mysteries around us and inspires us, we shal now see.

Imagine with me that existence is symbolized by a mountain, and that millions are climbing to its summit.

Let many days be needed before a traveler comes to his goal. Then, as he climbs day after day, the

perspective of things below him and above him will change; new sights will greet his eyes, new airs will

breathe around him; his eyes will adjust themselves to new horizons, and step by step objects will

change shape and proportion. At last, on reaching the summit, a vast panorama will extend before him,

and he will see clearly every part of the road which he climbed, and why it dipped into this valley and

circled that crag. Let this mountain typify existence, and let the climbers up its sides be men and women

who are immortal souls.

Let us now think for a moment of travelers at the mountain’s base, who are to climb to its summit. We

know how limited must be their horizon, and how little they can see of the long path before them. Let

such travelers typify the most backward of our humanity, the most savage and least intelligent men and

women we can find today. According to reincarnation, these are child-souls, just entering into existence,

in order to undergo evolution and to be made into perfect souls. To understand the process of evolution

let us watch one of them stage by stage as he climbs the mountain.

The first thing which we shall note is that this child-soul manifests a duality. For he is soul and body; as a

soul he is from God, but as a body he is from the brute.

The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of man

And man said, “Am I your debtor?”

And the Lord – “Not yet: but make it as clean as you can,

And then I will let you a better.”

The body which he occupies has ingrained in it a strong instinct of self-preservation stamped upon it by

the fierce struggle for existence of its animal progenitors; he himself, as a soul coming from God, has

intuitions as to right and wrong, but as yet hardly any will. The body demands for its preservation that he

be self-assertive and selfish; lacking the will to direct his evolution, he acts as the body impels.

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THE VISION OF THE SEPARATED SELF

Hence at this earliest stage of the soul, his vision of life as he climbs is that of the separated self. “Mine,

not yours” is his principle of action; greed rules him, and a thirst for sensation drives him on, and he little

heeds that he is unjust and cruel to others as he lives through his nights and days of selfishness and self-

assertion. He seems strong-willed, for he is able to crush the weaker before him. But in reality he has no

will at al , for he is but the plaything of an animal heredity which he cannot control. He has no more

freedom of will than the water-wheel which turns at the bidding of the descending stream. He is but the

tool of a “will to live” which accomplishes a purpose not his own.

Millions of men and women around us are at this first stage. Their craftiness, hardly deserving the name

of intellect, is that of Falstaff for whom “the world is mine oyster which I with sword will open.” In their

least animal phases, comfort is their aim in life: “They dressed, digested, talked, articulated words; other

vitality showed they almost none.” The universe around them is meaningless, and they are scarce

capable of wonder: “Let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a creation of the world happen twice , and it

ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy or noticeable”. The centre of the circle of the cosmos is in

themselves, and they neither know nor care if another truer centre is possible.

Yet when we recognize that each of these souls is immortal, and that his future is “the future of a thing

whose growth and splendour have no limit,” we begin to understand why, at this early stage, selfishness

plays such a prominent part in his life. For in stages to come, he must be capable of standing alone firm

on the basis of a coherent individuality; now is the time for him to develop initiative and strength. He is

quick to retaliate, but the germs of swift decision are grown thereby; he is domineering and cruel, but the

seeds of intelligent enterprise result from the animal cunning which he displays. Every evil which he does

must some time be paid back in laborious service to his victims; yet on the whole the evil which he does

at this stage is less in quantity and in force, for all its seeming, than that done in later stages, where

intelligence is keener and emotion more powerful. At a certain period in human evolution, selfishness has

its place in the economy of things, for selfishness too is a force used to build the battlements of heaven.

These souls, whose youth alone is the cause of their selfishness, are in their essence divine. There is in

them no evil of a positive kind ; their vices are but the result of the absence of virtues, ad their evil “is null,

is naught, is silence implying sound”. Each is a “good man” who, deep down within him, has a knowledge

of “the one true way” though in his attempts to tread it he seems to retrograde rather than to evolve. Like

plants in a garden, they are all tended by Him from whom they come; He knows the perfect souls that He

will make out of them by change and growth as the ages pass by.

Though stil confused his service is unto Me,

I soon shall lead him to a clearer morning.

Sees not the gardener, even while he buds his tree,

Both flower and fruit the future years adorning?

Life after life, these souls come to birth, now as men and now as women; they live a life of selfishness,

and they die, and hardly any change will be noticeable in the character ; but slowly there steals into their

lives a dissatisfaction. The mind is too dul to grasp the relation of the individual to the whole, and the

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imagination is too feeble to realize that “man doth not live by bread alone”. Hence it is that “the thousand

natural shocks that flesh is heir to” are duly marshaled and employed to ruffle their self-centered

contentment. Old age and death cast over them shadows which have no power to sadden a philosophic

mind; disease and accident lie in wait for them to weight down their spirits and make them rebel against a

fate they do not understand. Til their hearts shal enshrine a divine purpose, a Hound of Heaven pursues

them, and “naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”

Thus are they made ready to pass on to the next stage; the foundations of abilities have been laid, and

the individual is firm on a basis built through selfishness. Now has come the time to begin the laborious

work of “casting out of the self” and so there opens before the soul’s gaze the vision of the next stage.

According to the type of soul, this vision is either the Vision of the Mind or the Vision of the Emotions.

There are in life two main types of souls, the one in whom intelligence controls emotion, and the other in

whom emotion sways the mind. One type is not more evolved than the other ; they are both stages to

pass through in order to grow a higher faculty, that of Intuition. The vision of the third stage is the Vision

of the Intuition, but to it souls come from the first stage either through intellect or through emotion. Let us

first consider those souls whose evolution is by way of intellect.

THE VISION OF THE MIND

We shall see in the past of these souls that much intel igence has been developed in the first stage ; their

selfishness has made them quick and cunning to adapt opportunities to minister to their comfort. This

intelligence is now taken up by the unseen Guides of evolution, and the soul is placed in environments

that will change mere animal cunning into true intellect. The past good and evil sown by him will be

adjusted in its reaping, so as to give him occupations and interests that will force him to think of men and

things around him apart from their relation to himself. Instead of weighing experiences in terms of

personal comfort, he begins to group them in types and categories ; little by little he begins to see a

material and moral order in the cosmos which is more powerful than his will. Each law of Nature, when

first seen, is feared by him, for it seems to exist only to thwart him. But later, with more experience of

their working, he begins to trust laws and to depend upon them to achieve his aim. A love of learning

appears in him, and Nature is no longer a blank page ; he has ceased to be “a pair of spectacles behind

which there is no eye”.

At this stage, we shal see that the selfishness stil in him will warp the judgments of his mind. He will be

a doctrinaire, a pedant, combative and ful of prejudice ; for all his intel ect, his character will show

marked weaknesses, and he will often see and propound principles of conduct which he will not be able

to apply to himself. Again and again he will fail to see how little he understands the world, since the world

is the embodiment of a life which is more than mind, and whoso understands it with mind alone will

always misunderstand. Excess of intel ect will become in him defect of intelligence, and he will see all

things as through a glass darkly.

Many a life will pass while he slowly gains experiences through the mind, and assimilates them into a

truer conception of life. By now he will have begun to take part of the intellectual life of the world and

when he is on the threshold of the next stage, we shal find him as a worker of science, philosophy or

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literature. But his intel ect has too great a personal bias stil , and it must be made impersonal and pure

before the next vision, that of the intuition, can be his. Once again, we shal see that there enters into his

life a dissatisfaction. The structure which he builds so laboriously, as the results of years of work, will

crumble one by one, because Nature reveals new facts to show the world that his generalizations were

only partly true. The world for which he toiled will forget him, and younger workers will receive the honors

which are his due. He will be misunderstood by his dearest friends, and “he is now , if not ceasing, yet

intermitting to eat his own heart, and clutches round him outwardly on the Not-me for wholesomer food”.

But this suffering, though the reaping of sad sowings of injustice to others through prejudice, brings in its

train a high purification sooner or later. At last the soul learns the great lesson of working for work’s sake

and not for the fruit of action. Now he knows the joy of altruistic dedication of himself to the search for

truth. A student of philosophies but slave of none, he now watches nature “as it is” and in a perfect

impersonality of mind solves her mysteries one by one. Of him now can it be said with Sextus the

Pythagorean that “a great intellect is the chorus of divinity.” Thus dawns for him the Vision of Intuition.

THE VISION OF THE EMOTIONS

I mentioned when describing the transition from the first stage to the second, that there were in the world

two main types of souls — those who pass from the Vision of the Separated Self to the Vision of the

Intuition by way of the mind, and those others who develop along a parallel path and pass from the

emotions to the Intuition. We have just seen how souls are trained through the intellect to cast out the

self ; we shall now see how the same result is achieved for those in whom emotions sway the mind. <

As the intellectual type showed in the first stage a marked development of intelligence of a low kind, so

similarly shal we find that the souls whom we are going to consider show during the same stage a great

deal of feeling. Not that this feeling will be refined or unselfish ; indeed it will be mostly be lust and

jealousy, with perhaps a little crude religious emotion thrown in. But the character will be obviously easily

swayed by emotions, and this trait in the soul is now taken up, and worked upon to enable him to pass to

the next stage.

Fol owing his emotional bent, and selfish and oblivious of the feelings of those around him, the soul will

compel others weaker than himself to be the slaves of his desires. But the passion and the sense of

possession which he has of those who minister to his lusts will link him to them life after life, til slowly he

begins to feel that they are necessary to his emotional life, and not dispensable at will. Gradually his

impure passions will be transformed into purer affections, and then he will be brought again and again

into contact with them, so that his emotions shall go out impulsively towards them. But the evil which he

wrought them in the past will now cast a veil over their eyes, and make them indifferent to him. He will be

forced to love on, to atone for past evil by service, but despair will be his only reward. When in

resentment he tries to break the bond which ties him to them, he will find he cannot. He will curse love,

only to return again and again to love’s altar with his offerings.

Though life now becomes full of disappointment and despair, in his serener moments he will

acknowledge that, in spite of the suffering entailed, his emotional life has slowly opened a new sense in

him. He catches now and then glimpses of an undying youth in al things, and the world that seems

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dreary and aging will reappear under certain emotional stress as he knew it before life became a tragedy.

These glimpses are transitory at first, lasting indeed only so long as the love emotion colors his being;

but there is for him a time, — `

When al the world is young, lad,

And al the trees are green,

And every goose a swan, lad,

And every lass a queen.

Life after life, fostered by his transitory loves, this sense will grow in him till it blossoms into a sense of

wonder. The Nature reveals in all things in life new values, whose significance he can henceforth never

wholly forget. While love sways his being, each blade of grass and leaf and flower has to him a new

meaning ; he sees beauty now where he saw none before. Everything beautiful around him — a face, a

flower, a sunset, - will link him in mysterious ways to those he loves; the world ceases to be a blank

page.

Love wakes men once each lifetime each.

They lift their heavy lids and look;

And lo! What one sweet page can teach.

They read with joy, then close the book

And some give thanks, and some blaspheme.

And most forget. But either way,

That and the child's unheeded dream

Is all the light of all their day.

It will happen that this sense of wonder is intermittent and that there comes periods when the world is

veiled ; but the veil is of his own making, and must be torn asunder if he is to possess the Vision of the

Intuition. Once more there enters into his life a dissatisfaction — a discontent that love itself is transitory

after al . Those whom he loves and who love him in return will be taken from him just when life seems in

flower ; friends he idealizes will shatter the ideals so lovingly made for them. Cruel as it all seems, it is

but the reaping of sad sowings in past lives. But the reaping has a meaning, now as always. He has so

far been loving not Love but its shadow, not the Ideal from which nothing can be taken away, but its

counterfeit which suffers diminution. He must now see clearer and see truer. The character must be

studied, so that it shal not rebound from enthusiasm to depression, nor be satisfied with a vague

mysticism, which prefers to revel in its own feelings rather than evaluate what causes them.

Hence the inevitable purification through suffering; the dross of self is burned away till there remains the

gold of divine desire. He then discovers that the truest feelings are only those which have in them the

spirit of offering. Now for him thus purified in desire, and for that other type of soul made impersonal in

intellect, there dawns the Vision of the Intuition.

THE VISION OF THE INTUITION

“Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its

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sensitiveness.” All souls who have come to this stage have learned by now the bitter lesson that “it is only

in Renunciation that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.” But they have also proved in their own

experience that what once seemed death was but a “repentance unto life.” They have now discovered

the meaning of life — that man is a child of God come forth to life to be a co-worker with his Father. It

matters not that a soul does not state to himself his relation to the whole in these terms ; it only matters

that he should have discovered that his part in existence is to be a worker in a Work, and that nothing

happening to himself matters, so long as that Work proceeds to its inevitable end. He knows that the end

of thought and feeling is action for his fellow-men, and that this action must be either dispassionate and

without thought of reward, or ful of a spirit of grateful offering.

He possesses now the faculty of intuition, which transcending both reason and emotion, yet can justify its

judgments to either. He grows past “common sense,” the criterion for common things, into an uncommon

sense; for life is ful of uncommon things, of whose existence others are not aware. In men and women,

he discerns those invisible factors which are inevitable in human relations, and hence his judgment of

them is “not of this world.” In all things, he see and feels One Life. Whatever unites attracts him ; if

intellectual, he will love to synthesize in science or philosophy; if emotional, he will dedicate himself to art

or philanthropy.

Now slowly for him Many become the One. The Unity will be known only in the vision of the next stage ;

but, preparing for it, science and art, religion and philosophy, will deduce for him eternal fundamental

types from the kaleidoscope of life. Types of forms, types of thought, types of emotions, types of

temperament — these he sees everywhere round him, and life in all its phases becomes transformed,

because it reflects as in a mirror Archetypes of a realm beyond time and space and mutability.

Everything of mortal birth

-Is but a type;

What was of feeble worth

-Here becomes ripe.

What was a mystery

-Here meets the eyes;

The Ever-womanly

-Draws us on high.

“The Ever-womanly” now shows him everywhere one Wisdom. Science tells him of the oneness of

Nature, and philosophy that man is a consciousness creating his world; art reveals in al things youth and

beauty, and religion whispers to his heart that Love broods over all. His sympathies go to al , as his will is

ever at their service.

Not far now is the time when for him shal dawn the Vision of the Spirit. But to bring him to its portal, a

dissatisfaction once more enters his soul. No longer can that dissatisfaction be personal ; the sad reaping

of sorrow for evil done is over, and “only the sorrow of others casts its shadow over me.” Nor is it caused

by any sense of the mutability of things, for, absolutely, without question, he knows his immortality, and

that, though al things change, there is behind them THAT which changes never. Yet he climbs to his

appointed goal, dissatisfaction must always be.

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It comes to him now, as a creator. For with intuition to guide him, he creates in that field of endeavor in

which he has trained himself in past lives. As poet, artist, statesman, saint, or scientist, he is one of the

world’s geniuses. But though his creations are a miracle to all, yet to him they are only partly true and

only partly beautiful, for he sees the ideal which he would fain bring down to men, and knows his failure

as none others can know. Life is teaching him “to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable.”

And thus he grows life after life, scientist, poet, artist and saint now merge into a new type of being who

sees with “larger, other eyes than ours.” He has regained his integrity of heart and his innocency of

hands, and is become “a little child”; “by pity enlightened”. He is now Parsifal, the “Pure Fool,” who enters

upon his heritage.

Then it is that at its threshold there meets him One who has watched him climbing for many a life, and all

unseen has encouraged him. This is the Master, one of that “goodliest fellowship of famous knights

whereof the world holds record”. In Him the soul sees in realization al those ideals which have drawn

him onward and upward. Hand in hand with this “Faith in God,” he now treads "the Way” while the Vision

of the Spirit is shown him by his Master. Who shall describe that Vision but those who have it, and how

may one less than a Master here speak with authority? And yet since Masters of the Wisdom have

moved among men, since Buddha, Krishna and Christ have shown us, in Their lives something of what

that vision is, surely from Their lives we can deduce what the vision must be.

In that Vision of the Spirit, the Many is One. “Alone within this universe he comes and goes; it is He who

is the fire, the water He pervadeth ; Him and Him only knowing, one crosseth over death; no other path at

all is there to go.”

Now for the soul who has come to the end of his climbing, each man is only “the spirit he worked in, not

what he did but what he became”. There is no high nor low in life, for in al he sees a ray from the Divine

Flame. As through the highest so through the lowest too, to him “God stooping shows sufficient of His

light for us in the dark to rise by.” Life is henceforth become a Sacrament, and he is its celebrant ; with

loving thoughts and deeds, he celebrates and at-ones man with God and God with man. He discerns,

purifies in himself, and offers to God “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn”. From God

on high, he brings to men what alone can satisfy that yearning.

He has renounced “the will to live,” and thereby has made its purpose his own; “Foregoing self, the

universe grows I.” Yet he knows with rapture that, that— “I“ is but a tiny lens in a great Light. Henceforth

he lives only in order that a Greater than he may live through him, love through him, act through him.

Evermore shal his heart whisper, in heaven or in hel , whithersoever his work may take him ; “him know

I, the Mighty Man, resplendent like the Sun, beyond the Darkness; Him and Him only knowing one

crosseth over death ; no other path at all is there to go.”

Thus do we, happy few, the precursors of a new age, see life in the light of reincarnation. As the

evolutionist sees al nature linked in one ladder of life, and sky and sea testify to him of evolution, so do

we all men linked in one common purpose, and their hopes and fears, their self-sacrifice and their

selfishness, testify to us of reincarnation. Life and its experiences have ceased to be for us—

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An arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

For ever and ever when I move.

No longer can the world be for us as the poet sang :

Act first this Earth, a stage so gloom’d with woe,

You all but sicken at the shifting scenes.

And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show

In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means.

The Fifth Act is here before your eyes. It is that Vision of the Spirit which is the heritage of every soul,

and thither al men are slowly treading, for “no other path at al is there to go.”

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THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION

The joy of life! Is it not everywhere? In plant and animal and man, do we not see an instinct for happiness

which impels al creation to rise from good to better, from better to best? Since God said, “Let there be

light!” are not all men seeking to step out of darkness into light – blindly, dimly feeling that happiness

must be their goal? Yet how few find happiness in life! It is easy to sing:—

God’s in his heaven,

All’s right with the world!

But to sing so for long, one must be blind to the facts. Life is a tragedy to many, and far more truly is it

described by Tennyson:—

Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloom’d with woe

You all but sicken at the shifting scenes,

And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show

In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means.

Nevertheless all feel that happiness must be the goal of life, and humanity never errs in its deepest

feelings. But then why should not the attainment of happiness be easier than it is ?

MAN AN EVOLVING SOUL

There is a philosophy of life which holds that man is an immortal soul, living not one life on earth but

many, growing through the experiences which he gains in them manifold capacities and virtues. This

philosophy further postulates that al men are the children of One father, who has created a universe, in

order that working therein His children may know something of Him, and come to Him in joy. According to

this theory, the purpose of life is not to achieve a stable condition of happiness for any individual, but

rather to train him to work in a Plan of an Ideal Future, and find in that work an ever-changing and ever-

growing contentment.

From the standpoint of the Theosophist, all men are indeed working for a foreordained ideal future ; but

they work at different stages, according to their differing capacities. A recognition of these stages, and the

laws of life appropriate to each, makes life less the riddle that it is. There are three broad stages on the

Path of Bliss which leads to the Highest Good, and they are happiness, renunciation, and transfiguration.

THE STAGE OF HAPPINESS

God calls upon all His children at this stage to co-operate with Him, by offering them happiness as the

aim of life. He has implanted in them a craving for happiness, and He provides work for them which shall

make them happy. Love of wife and child and friend, fame and the gratitude of men, success and ease —

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these are His rewards for them that serve Him. Many are the pleasant paths in life for the young souls at

this stage, to reap happinesses as they prove those pleasures.

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

Useful up to a point as men are in the Great Work at this stage, yet so long as a man deliberately seeks

happiness, his capabilities as a worker are soon exhausted. For soon he “settles down in life” ; the

precious gift of wonder slowly fades away, and his happiness ceases to be dynamic. Self-centred, he

calls on the universe to give. But the Path to Bliss is by work, and if he is to go ever on, he must fit

himself for a larger work than has so far fal en to his share. He must enter on the next stage, but for that

he must change utterly. Hither-to he has measured men and things by the standard of his little self;

henceforth the Great Self must be his measure. He must break the sway of himself, and realize that

evermore what is important in life is not he, nor his happiness, but a Work. Before this realization can

begin, there must be a conversion.

CONVERSION

In many ways are men converted from the interests of the little self to the work of the Great Self. Some,

loving Truth in religious garb, open their hearts to a Personality who dazzles their imagination.

Thenceforth they must serve Him, and be like Him, and gone forever is the standpoint of the little self.

Some study science and philosophy, and discover a magnificent plan of evolution, with the inevitable

result that they know that the individual is but a unit in a great Whole, and not the centre of the cosmos. If

they set to study rightly, they see, too, that there is a Wil at work, and that, cost what it may, they must

co-operate with that Wil . A few there are to whom comes some mysterious experience from the hidden

side of things, and life speaks to them a transforming message. Out of the invisible comes a “Saul, Saul,

why persecutest thou Me?” and a persecutor of Christians is changed into an Apostle of Christ. Manifold

are the ways of conversion, the same in all lands and in all faiths. One factor is common : the old

personality is disintegrated, and a new one is reintegrated in the service of a Work.

When, through conversion, the new personality is ready for a larger work, the tools which he uses must

be made pure. They are his thoughts and feelings, and slowly a process of purification is begun.

Disappointment and pain and grief are his lot – the sad harvest of a sowing of selfishness in the unseen

past of many lives, for we reap as we have sown. When the worker is ready, swift is Nature’s response to

free him from the burden of his past, in order that he may be fit to achieve the great work which she has

prepared for him.

THE MEANING OF PAIN

With some, sorrow hardens the character, but with those who are ready to enter on the second stage, it

ever purifies. Does not the very texture and the flesh of a sufferer, who has in patience and resignation

borne his pain, seem luminous and pure, as though through every cel there gleamed the light of a

hidden fire? How much more so is it with mental suffering? Are we not irresistibly drawn to reverence one

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who has suffered much and nobly, and sometimes to love, too?

I saw my lady weep,

And Sorrow proud to be advanced so

In those fair eyes where al perfection keep.

Her face was full of woe: But such a woe (believe me) wins more hearts

Than Mirth can do with her enticing parts,

Sorrow was there made fair,

Passion wise ; tears a delightful thing;

Silence beyond all speech a wisdom rare.

She made her sighs to sing,

And all things with so sweet a sadness move

As made a heart at once both grieve and love.

THE STAGE OF RENUNCIATION

Life seems full of evil days to those who come to the end of the first stage, but its lesson is clear. That

lesson is, “Thou must go without, go without!” That is the everlasting song, which every hour, all our life

through, hoarsely sings to us. Truly does Carlyle voice the wisdom of the ages when he says, “The

Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening

your denominator. Nay, unless my algebra deceive me, unit divided by a zero will give infinity. Make thy

claim of wages a zero then ; thou hast the world under thy feet.”

THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION

All great workers know that the Law of renunciation is true, and that “it is only with renunciation that life,

properly speaking can be said to begin”. There are no great souls who are completely happy, can ever

be! Once more let the great apostle of Work speak to us: “the happy man was never yet created; the

virtuous man, tho’ clothed in rags and sinking under pain, is the jewel of the Earth, however I may doubt

it, or deny it in bitterness of heart. O never let me forget it! Teach me, tel me, when the Fiend of Suffering

and the base Spirit of the World are ready to prevail against me, and drive me from this last stronghold.”

Take whom you will who has done a great work, and he knows that renunciation is the law. In bitterness

of heart Ruskin cries out : “I have had my heart broken ages ago, when I was a boy, then mended,

cracked, beaten in, kicked about old corridors, and finally, I think, flattened fairly out”. But he persevered

in his work all the same. There is no greater name in the world of art than Michael Angelo, “this masterful

and stern, life-wearied and labor-hardened man”, whose history “is one of indomitable will and almost

superhuman energy, yet of will that had hardly ever had its way, and of energy continually at war with

circumstance”. It is the same with al who have been great.

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THE MEANING OF LIFE

But through renunciation the soul on the threshold of greatness discover’s life's meaning. If religious, he

will state it, “Thy will be done” ; if scientific or artistic he will say, “Not I, but a Work”. He is now as Faust

who sought happiness in knowledge, and failed ; sought it in the love of Marguerite, and reaped a

tragedy ; and only as he planned to reclaim waste lands for men, and lost himself in the dream of that

work, found that long-sought-for happy moment when he could say, “Ah, tarry a while, thou art so fair!”

So, renouncing live the souls of the second stage, lovers of a Work. Sad at heart they are; but if they are

loyal to their work, then comes to them in fleeting moments more than happiness ; it is the joy of creation.

Such wonders they now body forth that to themselves their masterpieces are enigmas. In fitful gleams

they see a Light, and know that now and then it shines through them to the world. Perfect masters of

technique they are now, in religion, in art, in science, in every department of life. But alas! Just as they

have discovered what it is to live, what it is to create, they are old, and life comes to a close, before it

seems hardly begun. Shal the path of renunciation bring nothing but despair?

Despair was never yet so deep.

In sinking as in seeming;

Despair is hope just dropp’d asleep

For better chance of dreaming.

THE STAGE OF TRANSFIGURATION

“Hope just dropp’d asleep for better chance of dreaming” – that, truly, is death. The great worker leaves

life but to return again, with every dream old and new nearer realization. He returns, with the inborn

mastery of technique of the genius, to achieve now where once he only dreamed. The joy of creation is

now his sure and priceless possession, that wondrous joy which only those who know can offer all gifts of

heart and mind, and stand apart from them, while a Greater than they creates through them. “Seeking

nothing, he gains al ; foregoing self, the universe grows I”. Now has he found that life which he lost in the

stage of renunciation ; henceforth, in all places and at al times is he become “a pillar in the temple of my

God, and he shall no more go out”.

THE PATH OF BLISS

So life gives of its best to all — happiness to some, renunciation to others, and, to a few, transfiguration.

What if now most of us, who love Truth, must “do without”? Let us but dedicate heart and mind to a Work,

and we shall find that renunciation leads to transfiguration. There is but one road to God , for al to tread.

It is the Path of Bliss. It has steps — happiness, renunciation, and transfiguration. Whoso will offer up al

that he is to a Work, though he “lose his life” thereby, yet shall he find it soon, and “come again rejoicing,

bringing his sheaves with him.”

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THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE

Never, in the history of mankind, has there been a time as to-day when it could be so truly said that,

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

It is true that “the man in the street” knows of no such great change ; life for him moves as of old in its

fixed grooves, and if the world’s progress has multiplied for him life’s conveniences, it has also multiplied

for him life’s needs. Change to him is largely a matter of a surplus of comforts over pains, and in this

regard the old order has changed but little for him. But the man in the library, the laboratory, the studio,

the pulpit, is aware of the great change, and he knows that it began with the work of Darwin and his

school.

The importance of the work of modern scientists lies in the fact that they have marshaled for us the

events of nature into an orderly pageant of evolution. What exoteric religion has not been able to do,

science has achieved, and that is to show Life as one. Technological trinities of Creator, Creation, and

Creature, or dualities of God and Man, have not unified life for us in the way science has done. Mysticism

alone, with its truth of the Immanence, has revealed to men something of that unified existence of all that

is, which is the logical deduction from modern evolutionary theories.

When we contemplate the pageant of nature, we see her at a work of building and un-building. From

mineral to bacterium and plant, from microbe to animal and man, nature is busy at a visible work, step by

step evolving higher and more complex structures. Though she may seem at first sight to work blindly

and mechanical y, she has in reality a coherent plan of action. Her plan is to evolve structures stage by

stage, so that the amount of time needed by a given creature for its self-protection and sustenance may

be less and less with each successive generation. The higher the structure is in its organization and

adaptability, the more time, and hence more energy, there is free for other purposes of life than

sustenance and procreation.

Two elements in life arise from the perfection of the structural mechanism which the higher order of

creatures reveals. First, they have time for play, for it is in play that such energy manifests as is not

required for gaining food and shelter. The second element manifests itself only when human beings

appear in evolution, and men begin to show a desire for adaptability. Adaptability to environment exists in

the plant and in the animal, but it is in them purely instinctive or mechanical; with man on the other hand

there is an attempt at conscious adaptability.

When this desire for adaptability increases, nature reveals a new principle of evolution. To the principle of

the survival of the fittest by a struggle for existence, she adds the new one of evolution by

interdependence. Therefore we find human units aggregating themselves into groups, and primitive men

organizing themselves into families and tribes.

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Once more this means a saving of labor and time in the material struggle for existence. Some of both is

now at nature’s disposal, to train men to discover new ways of life and action. To the play of the

individual, there is added a communal life which makes civilization possible. For civilization means that

some individuals in a community are dissatisfied with what contents al the others, and that therefore they

are burning with a zeal for reform, and the spirit of reform sooner or later is inevitable in evolution. The

survival of the fittest can only come about by that mysterious arrival of the fittest which no scientist can

explain. Nature now ushers in “the fittest” in the few who are planning for reform. For reform means that

organisms will consciously adapt themselves more and more to the exigencies of environment, for to

each successive change to greater adaptability nature has something new to give.

Thus individual men and women become nature’s tools; she works with their hearts and minds and

hands to create social and political activities. Religion and science and art appear among men; the

struggle for existence is no longer nature’s sole means for bringing to realization her aim ;

interdependence of units, and therewith reform, are the means which she uses now.

Then it is that nature proclaims to men that message which she has kept for them through the ages. It is

the joy of social service. Strange and unreal, as yet, to most men is the thought of such joy. But evolution

has only lately entered on this phase of her work, and ages must yet elapse before social service

becomes instinctive in men as are now self-assertion and selfishness. That day must inevitably be the

handful of reformers today are as the “missing links” of a chain which stretches forward from man to

superman. As, from the isolation and selfishness of the of the brute, nature has evolved the

interdependence of men, so too, is self-sacrifice the next logical step in her evolutionary Self-revelation.

A more inspiring picture there could hardly be than this, of nature at work on her building and un-building.

Yet there are not a few dark shadows in the picture. So long as the individual lives only the few brief

years of his life, so long as nothing of him remains as an individual after his death, there is a ruthlessness

about nature which is appalling. Where is today “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was

Rome”? Some day there must be an end to nature’s work, in this planet at least where we live. There are

dead suns in space, and some day our sun will die out, and every satellite of his will be a frozen world.

Careful of the type, nature truly builds form after form, and will build for many an age yet to come. There

is indeed a far-off event “to which the whole creation moves”, but it is to that state when living organisms

shall lack the warmth from the sun which they need for life.

So long as we contemplate nature’s visible work only, not the greatest altruist but must now and then feel

the shadow of great despair. That which alone makes life and self-sacrifice real and inspiring to great

souls — the thought and the feeling that their work will endure forever — is lacking when we consider

nature’s work in the light of modern science alone. Yet many an altruist would be content to die, and be

nothing thereafter, if he could but feel that nature had some pity for his fate. Well the poet voices the

feeling which arises from the conception of nature, or of a deity who is as passionless as nature; -

Life is pleasant, and friends may be nigh,

Fain would I speak one word and be spared ;

Yet I could be silent and cheerfully die,

If I were only sure God cared;

If I had faith and were only certain

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That light is behind that terrible curtain.

It is here that Theosophy steps in to continue the work of science, and explain the true significance of

nature’s manifestations. As modern science points to nature’s visible work, so Theosophy points to a

Hidden Work of Nature.

There is a hidden Light which reveals to men that nature is but one expression of a Consciousness at

work ; that this Consciousness is at work with a Plan of evolution; and that this Consciousness carries

out its plan through us and through us alone. The moment that we realize the significance of this

message of the Hidden Light, that men are immortal souls and not perishable bodies, we begin to see

that, while careful of the type, nature is not less careful of the single life too. For then we see that nature’s

latest phase, a fullness of life through social service, necessarily involves the recognition of men as

souls; for it would be useless for nature slowly to fashion a reformer, unless she could utilize his ability

and experience for greater reforms in the future.

That his specialized abilities shal not be dissipated would surely then be logical, in a nature for which we

postulate an aim which persists from age to age.

It does not require much profound thought or speculation to deduce from this view of nature’s work that

men live for ever as souls, and that, through reincarnation, they become fitter tools in nature’s hands to

achieve her purpose of evolution. Let but reincarnation be considered a part of nature’s plan, and at once

the tragedy of nature transforms itself into an inspiring and stately pageant. For then the future is

ourselves ; it is we who shall make the glorious utopias of dreams; we who painfully toil today to fashion

bricks for nature’s beautiful edifice in far-off days; we, and not others, shall see that edifice in its splendor,

and be its very possessors. Though the spirit of action of the best of us is ever a sic vos non vobis, “thus

ye work, but not for yourselves”, yet in reality, like bread cast upon the waters, our work shall greet us

ages hence, and we shall then be glad that we have toiled so well now.

So comes to us the message of the Hidden Light that nature is consciously going from good to better,

from better to best, and that she works out her splendid purpose through us, who may become her

ministers, or must be her slaves.

The spirit of reform, then, being a part of the evolutionary process, the next point to note is that in all

effective reform there are two elements: first the reform is brought about by individuals working as a

group, and second, the group has a leader. It is fairly easy to understand the grouping of individuals to

co-operate for a common aim as a part of nature’s evolutionary plan; their united action but expresses

the social instinct. But it is perhaps less easy to see that nature selects the leader, and sends him to a

particular group to crystallize its dreams and plans into organization and action. Yet this is the message

of the Hidden Light — that a leader does not appear by a mere concatenation of chance circumstances,

but only because he is selected for a particular work, and is sent to do it. For a leader does not come in

evolution as a “sport” – a passing variant produced nobody knows how; he is fashioned by a slow

laborious process lasting thousands of years. Life after life, in a process of rebirth, the would-be leader

must earn his future position by dedication to works of reform ; by little actions for reform as a savage, by

larger actions as a civilized man, he trains himself for the role which nature has written for him.

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If we look at reformers in the light of reincarnation, we shal see that their present ability to lead is simply

the result of work done in past lives. Since biologists are agreed that acquired characters are not

transmissible, we must look for that rare inborn capacity to lead, not in the heredity of the organism, but

in a spiritual heredity which is in the life and in the consciousness of the individual. This is exactly what

reincarnation says ; the individual acquired his ability to lead today only be endeavors to lead many a

past life, and by partial successes at least in so doing.

Furthermore, the Hidden Light reveals to us that each present movement for reform was rehearsed in

many a primitive setting long ago, with the present leaders and their coadjutors as actors. We need but

look at the reform movements for the amelioration of the lot of the working classes in Europe, to see how

the leaders of today in the various countries were tribunes of the Plebs in Rome, or “demagogues” in

Athens, or leaders of the masses in Carthage. Nay, furthermore, it is not difficult to note how some of the

politicians and statesmen of Greece and Rome and elsewhere, who worked to abolish abuses and to

free the oppressed, have changed sex in their present incarnations, and are with us today as leaders of

the various suffragist and feminine movements of the world. Where else but in past lives did these

women learn the tactical strategy and mastery of leadership which they evince in their campaigns for

reform? Why should certain men and women, and not all, labor and toil for their fellow-men, renouncing

all and coveting martyrdom, unless they had learnt by past experiences the glory of action for reform?

For the born leaders in every reform are geniuses in their way ; they go unerringly to an aim, with the

conviction of success ; where did they develop this faith in themselves? They are in reality the “missing

links” from men of today to the supermen of the future, and it is nature herself with her Hidden Work who

has so fashioned them life after life.

So nature plans and achieves, and the stately pageant moves on. But her purpose is not achieved slowly

and leisurely , adding change to change; she does not bring about a new order of things by an

accumulation of small changes. Nature goes by leaps, per saltum; and as in the biological world crises

appear, and nature makes a leap and ushers in new species, so too is it in the world of human affairs.

Though there is a slow steady upward movement for progress through reform, yet now and then there is

a crisis in the affairs of men. Then things happen, and after the crisis is over, there is, as it were, a new

species of human activity. Reform takes a new trend, and a whole host of new reforms are ushered in to

make life fuller and nobler.

One such crisis in human affairs came in Palestine, with the coming of Christ. For though men knew not

that it was a crisis, though Greece and Rome dreamed and planned of philosophy and dominion without

end, a dawn had begun of a new era, and an age was ushered in, in the heyday of which Greece and

Rome should be mere names. Christ ministered in Palestine, spoke to peasant and priest, and gave His

sermons “on the Mount”, and a few men knew not then that with his message He gave birth to new

species of idealism in action. But after two thousand years have elapsed, we of another generation can

see that when Christ lived in Palestine, and the Roman Empire was beginning its day of glory, then

indeed was the beginning too of the end of a world of thought and action — of that “glory that was

Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” – and that Christ gave His message not so much to the men of

His day as to those who were to come.

So too was it in India, six centuries before Christ ; another “dreamer” appeared, Siddhartha, Prince of the

Satya clan. Men listened to Him and loved Him and fol owed Him, but they little dreamed that He was in

reality building an Empire of Righteousness, which even after twenty-five centuries should embrace

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within it five hundred mil ions of souls. To the critics of His time, he was but another “Teacher”, one of

hundreds then living in India pointing out “The Way.” It is only after the lapse of centuries that later

generations knew that He was a teacher of teachers, a Flower on our human tree, the like of which had

never been.

Every so often, then, there is a climax in human affairs, and always such a climax is preceded by an age

when men “dream dreams.” In Palestine, prophet after prophet dreamed of “the great and dreadful day of

the Lord,” before Christ came, and proclaimed its coming and worked for it. In India, many a sage and

philosopher prepared the way with his solutions for the message of the Buddha.

In every such climax, small or great, the resolution of the crisis comes through the intermediary of a

Personality. For as nature weaves the tangled knot of human fate, “nowise moved except unto the

working out of doom,” she plans too the Solver of the knot. For every crisis which is of her planning, she

has prepared the Man who holds the solution in his heart and brain.

In this out twentieth century, men dream dreams as never heretofore. East and West, North and South,

the machinery of human life grates on the ear, and there is not a single man or woman of true

imagination who can say, “God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world!” De profundis clamari better

describes the wail of every nation. Millions are spent on armies and navies, while the poor are

clamouring for bread ; and statesmen themselves are wringing their hands that they cannot give a

nation’s wealth back to the nation in hospitals and schools and fair gardens and clean habitations. For

there are “wars and rumors of wars.” The spirit of charity grows year by year, but it seems as though

charity but added patches to a rotting garment, and the more the patches which are put on the more the

rents appear. Strife between capital and labor, race hatred between white and brown and yellow and

black, a deadlock between science and religion, and more than al else, the increasing luxury of the few

and the increasing misery of the many, these are but a few of the problems facing philanthropists today.

Every reformer realizes, in whatever department he works, that for lasting reform a complete

reconstruction is needed of the whole social structure, if poverty, disease and ignorance and misery shall

be as a nightmare that has been but shall never be again. Al are eager for reform ; thousands are willing

to co-operate. But none knows where to begin, in the true reconstruction. Each is indeed terrified, lest in

trying to pull one brick out of the social edifice, to replace it by a better, he may pull the whole structure

down, and so cause misery instead of joy.

This is the crisis present before our eyes, confronting not one nation, but all. “Out of the depths have I

cried unto Thee, O Lord,” is true today as never before.

Everywhere, in every department where men work for reform, mean are looking for a Leader. Where is

He whom nature has selected,in whose mind is the Plan, in whose is the spirit and in whose hand is the

Power? Let him but appear, let him but say, “This is how you shall work,” and thousands will flock to Him

in joy. And it is this message of the Hidden Light that He is ready, for when from the hearts of men a cry

goes forth, from the bosom of God a Son shall come. The world is in the birth throes once again for the

coming of the Son of Man, and the young men who see visions today shal in their prime find Him in their

midst, the Wonderful, the Councillor, the Prince of Peace.

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Never an age, when God has need of him,

Shall want its man, predestined by that need,

To pour his life in fiery word and deed,

The great Archangel of the Elohim.

When He, whom the world waits for, and whom nature has planned to come “unto this hour,” shall

appear, what will be His work? What but to carry on nature’s work one step further? The day is past when

men can go forward with competition as their cry of progress ; nothing lasting can now come for men

unless it is brought about by interdependence and co-operation. The best of men today see the inevitable

coming of this new age, when men shall be sons of God in deed and not merely in name; but their cry for

altruism and co-operation is as a voice cast in the teeth of the tempest. They can but gather round them

here an enthusiast and there a disciple ; but they accomplish little, for they lack the character which

compels the world to listen. Til comes that Personality who is not of one nation but of all, whose

message is not for this century alone but for al others to come ; till then the dawn of the new day will

drag its slow length along. But when He comes, then indeed what He says and what He does will be the

proof to us that it is He and not another, whom nature has planned to be the Shadow of God upon earth

to men, the Savior who is born unto them this day.

Then once more shall the Hidden Light be revealed to men, that Light that “shineth in darkness, and the

darkness comprehended it not.” Then science shall be our religion, and religion our art ; then shall we

cease to be nature’s slaves, and enter upon our heritage, and become her councillors and guides. Then

shall we know, not merely believe, that behind the seeming pitiless plan of nature there is a most pitiful

Mind, careful of the type and careful of the single life too. Nevermore shall our eyes be blinded by

passionate tears as we look at the misery of men, and feel the utter hopelessness of its effective

diminution ; for we shall know that nature but veils an Eye that sees, a Heart that feels, and a Mind that

plans, for One shall be with us to be a Martyros, a Witness, of that Light that shineth in darkness, even

when the darkness comprehends it not.

He will call on the many to co-operate in al good works “in His name and for the love of mankind”; He will

teach them the next lesson which nature has planned for them, the joy of neighbourly service. But to a

few He will give the cal to fol ow Him through the ages. For He comes to usher in a new age ; that age

must be tended and fostered decade after decade, century by century, till the seed becomes the tree and

the tree bears flowers, and by the perfecting of man comes the fulfil ment of God. As He is nature’s

husbandman, so will he need helpers in those fields from whence alone comes the Daily Bread for men.

The many will love Him for the peace and joy which He will bring ; but a few will answer the cal to follow

Him life after Life, toiling, toiling in a work seemingly without end. To these few alone will be it given to

know the inwardness of the message of the Hidden Light. It is that nature keeps her diadems not for

those who reap happiness in her pleasant fields and gardens, but for those who co-operate with her in

her Hidden Work, and try “to lift a little of the heavy karma of the world.” For this is Nature’s Hidden Work,

to weave a vesture out of the karmas of men which shal reflect the pattern given her from on high ; and

the weaving halts, unperfected, till through the actions of all men there shall shine one great Action.

When the perfect vesture is woven for him who desires it, and the karmas of all men act in unison, then,

and not before, will come “that day” when Nature can say to all men, as now to her God : “I am in my

Father, and ye in me and I in you.” Unto that hour she toils at her Hidden Work, and it is the Hidden Light

which reveals to men her process of evolution as she shapes in moulds of dust immortal Sons of God.

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Document Outline

- The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai(Madras), India 600 020

- HOW WE REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES

Table of Contents

HOW WE REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES

THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT

THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION

THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE

The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai(Madras), India 600 020