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- Sai Susarla.
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The Life Divine
by Sri Aurobindo
Book 2 - Part 2 - Chapter 2-22
Rebirth and Other Worlds;
Karma; The Soul and Immortality
This chapter contains some material from the Arya
(March 1917)
but much that is entirely re-written in 1939 for the 1940 edition
He passes in his departure from
this world to the physical Self; he passes to the Self of life; he
passes to the Self of mind; he passes to the Self of knowledge; he
passes to the Self of bliss; he moves through these worlds at will.
Taittiriya Upanishad
III. 10. 5
They say indeed that the conscious being is made of
desire. But of whatsoever desire he comes to be, he comes to be of that
will, and of whatever will he comes to be, he does that action, and
whatever his action, to (the result of) that he reaches... Adhered to
by his Karma(a) he goes in his subtle body
to wherever his mind cleaves, then, coming to the end of his Kama, even
of whatsoever action he does here, he returns from that world to this
world for Karma.
Brihadaranyaka UpanishadIV. 4. 5,6
(a)-Action,
karma. In the view expressed in this verse of the Upanishad the Karma
or action of this life is exhausted by the life in the world beyond in
which its results are fulfilled and the soul returns to earth for fresh
Karma. The cause of birth in this world, of Karma, of the soul's
passage to other-world existence and its return here is, throughout,
the soul's own consciousness, will and desire.
Equipped with qualities, a doer of works and creator
of their consequences, he reaps the result of his actions; he is the
ruler of the life and he moves in his journey according to his own
acts: he has idea and ego and is to be known by the qualities of his
intelligence and his quality of self. Smaller than the hundredth part
of the tip of a hair, the soul of the living being is capable of
infinity. Male is he not nor female nor neuter, but is joined to
whatever body he takes as his own.
Swetaswatara UpanishadV. 7-10
Mortals, they achieved immortality.
Rig Veda1. 110. 4
Our first conclusion on the subject of reincarnation has been that the
rebirth of the soul in successive terrestrial bodies is an inevitable
consequence of the original significance and process of the
manifestation In earth-nature; but this conclusion leads to farther
problems and farther results which it is necessary to elucidate. There
arises first the question of the process of rebirth, if that process is
not quickly successive, birth immediately following death of the body
so as to maintain an uninterrupted series of lives of the same person,
if there are intervals, that in its turn raises the question of the
principle and process of the passage to other worlds, which must be the
scene of these intervals, and the return to earth-life. A third
question is the process of the spiritual evolution itself and the
mutations which the soul undergoes in its passage from birth to birth
through the stages of its adventure.
If the physical universe were the
sole manifested world, or if it were a quite separate world,
rebirth as a part of the evolutionary process would be confined to a
constant succession of direct transmigrations from one body to another;
death would be immediately followed by
a new birth without any possibility of an interval, - the
passage of the soul would be a spiritual circumstance in the
uninterrupted series of a compulsory, mechanical, material procedure. The soul would have no freedom from Matter;
it would be perpetually bound to its instrument, the body, and
dependent on it for the continuity of its manifested existence. But we
have found that there is a life on other planes after death and before
the subsequent rebirth, a life consequent on the old and preparatory of
the new stage of terrestrial existence. Other planes co-exist with
ours, are part of one complex system and act constantly upon the
physical which is their own final and lowest term, receive its
reactions, admit a secret communication and commerce. Man can become
conscious of these planes, can even in certain states project his
conscious being into them, partly in life, presumably therefore with a
full completeness after the dissolution of the body. Such a possibility
of projection into other worlds or planes of being becomes then
sufficiently actual to necessitate practically its own realisation,
immediately and perhaps invariably following on human earth-life if man
is from the beginning endowed with such a power of self-transference,
eventual if he only arrives at it by a gradual progression. For it is
possible that at the beginning he would not be sufficiently developed
to carry on his life or his mind into larger Life-worlds or Mind-worlds
and would be compelled to accept an immediate transmigration from one
earthly body to another as his only present possibility of persistence.
The necessity for an interregnum
between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a
double cause: there is an attraction
of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's
composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and
there is the utility or even the need
of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience,
a working out of what has to be discarded, a preparation for the new
embodiment and the new terrestrial experience. But this need of a
period of assimilation and this attraction of other worlds for kindred
parts of our being may become effective only when the mental and vital
individuality has been sufficiently developed in the half-animal
physical man; until then they might not exist or might not be active:
the life experiences would be too simple and elementary to need
assimilation and the natural being too crude to be capable of a complex
assimilative process; the higher parts would not be sufficiently
developed to lift themselves to higher planes of existence. There can
be, then, in the absence of such connections with other worlds, a
theory of rebirth which admits only of a constant transmigration; here
the existence of other worlds and the sojourn of the soul in other
planes are not an actual or at any stage a necessary part of the
system. There can be another theory in which this passage is the
obligatory rule for all and there is no immediate rebirth; the soul
needs an interval of preparation for the new incarnation and new
experience. A compromise between the two theories is also possible; the
transmigration may be the first rule prevailing while the soul is yet
unripe for a higher world-existence; the passage to other planes would
be the subsequent law. There may even be a third stage, as is sometimes
suggested, in which the soul is so powerfully developed, its natural
parts so spiritually alive that it needs no interval, but can
immediately resume birth for a more rapid evolution without the
retardation of a period of intermittence.
In the popular ideas which derive
from the religions that admit reincarnation, there is an inconsistency
which, after the manner of popular beliefs, they have been at no pains
to reconcile. On the one hand, there is the belief, vague enough but
fairly general, that death is followed immediately or with something
like immediateness by the assumption of another body. On the other
hand, there is the old religious
dogma of a life after death in hells and heavens or, it may be, in
other worlds or degrees of being, which the soul has acquired or
incurred by its merits or demerits in this physical existence;
the return to earth intervenes only when that merit and demerit are
exhausted and the being is ready for another terrestrial life. This inconsistency would disappear if we admit a
variable movement dependent on the stage of evolution which the soul
has reached in its manifestation in Nature; all would then turn
on the degree of its capacity for entering a higher status than the
earthly life. But in the ordinary notion of reincarnation the idea of a
spiritual evolution is not explicit, it is only implied in the fact
that the soul has to reach the point at which it becomes capable of
transcending the necessity of rebirth and returning to its eternal
source; but if there is no gradual and graded evolution, this point can
be as well reached by a chaotic zigzag movement of which the law is not
easily determinable. The definitive solution of the question depends on
psychic inquiry and experience; here we can only consider whether there
is in the nature of things or in the logic of the evolutionary process
any apparent or inherent necessity for either movement, for the
immediate transition from body to body or for the retardation or
interval before a new reincarnation of the self-embodying psychic
principle.
A sort of half necessity for the life in other worlds, a dynamic and
practical rather than an essential necessity, arises from the very fact
that the different world-principles are interwoven with each other and
in a way interdependent and the effect that this fact must have upon
the process of our spiritual evolution. But this might be counteracted
for a time by the greater pull or attraction of the earth or the
preponderant physicality of the evolving nature. Our belief in the
birth of an ascending soul into the human form and its repeated rebirth
in that form, without which it cannot complete its human evolution,
rests, from the point of view of the reasoning intelligence, on the
basis that the progressive transit of the soul into higher and higher
grades of the earthly existence and, once it has reached the human
level, its repeated human birth compose a sequence necessary for the
growth of the nature; one brief human life upon earth is evidently
insufficient for the evolutionary purpose. In the early stages of a
series of human reincarnations, during a period of rudimentary
humanity, there is a certain possibility at first sight of an often
repeated immediate transmigration, - the repeated assumption of a new
human form in a fresh birth immediately the previous body has been
dissolved by a cessation or expulsion of the organised Life-energy and
the consequent physical disintegration which we call death. But what
necessity of the evolutionary process would compel such a series of
immediate rebirths? Evidently, it
could only be imperative so long as the psychic individuality, -
not the secret soul-entity Itself but the soul-formation in the natural
being, - is little evolved,
insufficiently developed, so insufficiently formed that it could not
abide except by dependence upon the uninterrupted continuance of this
life's mental, vital and physical individuality: unable as yet
to persist in itself, discard Its past Mind-formation and
Life-formation and build after a useful interval new formations, it
would be obliged to transfer at once its rudimentary crude personality
for preservation to a new body. It Is doubtful whether we should be
justified in attributing any such entirely insufficient development to
a being so strongly individualised that it has got as far as the human
consciousness. Even at his lowest normality the human individual is
still a soul acting through a distinct mental being, however ill-formed
his mind may be, however limited and dwarfed, however engrossed and
encased in the physical and vital consciousness and unable or unwilling
to detach itself from its lower formations. Yet we may suppose that
there is a downward attachment so strong as to compel the being to
hasten at once to a resumption of the physical life because his natural
formation Is not really fit for anything else or at home on any higher
plane. Or, again, the life-experience might be so brief and incomplete
as to compel the soul to an immediate rebirth for its continuance. Other needs, influences or causes
there may be in the complexity of Nature-process, such as a strong will of earthly desire
pressing for fulfilment, which would enforce an immediate transmigration
of the same persistent form of personality into a new body. But still the
alternative process of a reincarnation, a rebirth of the Person not
only into a new body but into a new formation of the personality, would
be the normal line taken by the psychic entity once it had reached the
human stage of its evolutionary cycle.
For the soul personality, as it develops, must get sufficient power
over its own nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental
and vital individuality to persist without the support of the material
body, as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the
physical plane and the physical life: it would be sufficiently evolved
to subsist in the subtle body which we know to be the characteristic
case or sheath and the proper subtle-physical support of the inner
being. It is the soul-person, the
psychic being, that survives and carries mind and life with it on its
journey, and it is in the subtle body that it passes out of its
material lodging; both then must be sufficiently developed for
the transit. But a transference to planes of Mind-existence or
Life-existence implies also a mind and life sufficiently formed and
developed to pass without disintegration and exist for a time on these
higher levels. If these conditions were satisfied, a sufficiently
developed psychic personality and subtle body and a sufficiently
developed mental and vital personality, survival of the soul-person
without an immediate new birth would be secured and the pull of the
other worlds would become operative. But this by it self would mean a
return to earth with the same mental and vital personality and there
would be no free evolution in the new birth. There must be an
individuation of the psychic person itself sufficient for it not to
depend on its past mind and life formations any more than on its past
body, but to shed them too in time and proceed to a new formation for
new experience. For this discarding of the old and preparation of new
forms the soul must dwell for some time between two births somewhere
else than on the entirely material plane in which we now move; for here
there would be no abiding place for a disembodied spirit. A brief stay
might Indeed be possible if there are subtle envelopes of the
earth-existence which belong to earth but are of a vital or mental
character: but even then there would be no reason for the soul to
linger there for a long period, unless it is still burdened with an
overpowering attachment to the earth-life. A survival of the material
body by the personality implies a supraphysical existence, and this can
only be in some plane of being proper to the evolutionary stage of the
consciousness or, if there is no evolution, in a temporary second home
of the spirit which would be its natural place of sojourn between life
and life, - unless indeed it is its original world from which it does
not return into material Nature.
Where then would the temporary dwelling in the supraphysical take
place? what would be the soul's other
habitat? It might seem that it ought to be on a mental plane, in
mental worlds, both because on man the mental being the attraction of
that plane, already active in life, must prevail when there is not the
obstacle of the attachment to the body, and because the mental plane
should be, evidently, the native and proper habitat of a mental being.
But this does not automatically follow, because of the complexity of
man's being; he has a vital as well as a mental existence, - his vital
part often more powerful and prominent than the mental, - and behind
the mental being is a soul of which it is the representative. There
are, besides, many planes or levels of world-existence and the soul has
to pass through them to reach its natural home. In the physical plane
itself or close to it there are believed to be layers of greater and
greater subtlety which may be regarded as sub-planes of the physical
with a vital and a mental character; these are at once surrounding and
penetrating strata through which the interchange between the higher
worlds and the physical world takes place. It might then be possible
for the mental being, so long as its mentality is not sufficiently
developed, so long as it is restricted mainly to the more physical
forms of mind and life activity, to be caught and delayed in these
media. It might even be obliged to rest there entirely between birth
and birth; but this is not probable and could only happen if and in so
far as its attachment to the earth-forms of its activity was so great
as to preclude or hamper the completion of the natural upward movement.
For the post-mortal state of the soul must correspond in some way to
the development of the being on earth, since this after-life is not a
free upward return from a temporary downward deviation into mortality,
but a normal recurrent circumstance which intervenes to help out the
process of a difficult spiritual evolution in the physical existence.
There is a relation which the human being in his evolution on earth
develops with higher planes of existence, and that must have a
predominant effect on his internatal dwelling in these planes; it must
determine his direction after death and determine too the place, period
and character of his self-experience there.
It may be also that he may linger for a time in one of those annexes of
the other worlds created by his habitual beliefs or by the type of his
aspirations in the mortal body. We know that he creates images of these
superior planes, which are often mental translations of certain
elements in them, and erects his images into a system, a form of actual
worlds; he builds up also desire-worlds of many kinds to which he
attaches a strong sense of inner reality: it is possible that these
constructions may be so strong as to create for him an artificial
post-mortal environment in which he may linger. For the image-making power of the human mind,
its imagination, which is in his physical life only an
indispensable aid to his acquisition of knowledge and his
life-creation, may in a higher scale
become a creative force which would enable the mental being to live for
a while amid its own images until they were dissolved by the soul's
pressure. All these buildings are of the nature of larger
Life-constructions; in them his mind translates some of the real
conditions of the greater mental and vital worlds into terms of his
physical experience magnified, prolonged, extended to a condition
beyond physicality: he carries by this translation the vital joy and
vital suffering of the physical being into supraphysical conditions in
which they have a greater scope, fullness and endurance. These
constructive environments must therefore be considered, so far as they
have any supraphysical habitat, as annexes of the vital or of the lower
mental planes of existence. But there
are also the true vital worlds, - original constructions,
organised developments, native
habitats of the universal Life-principle, the cosmic vitalAnima,
acting In its own field and in its own nature. On his internatal
journey he may be held there for a period by force of the predominantly
vital character of the influences which have shaped his earthly
existence, - for these influences are native to the vital world and
their hold on him would detain him for a while in their proper
province: he may be kept in the grasp of that which held him in its
grasp even in the physical being. Any residence of the soul in annexes
or in its own constructions could be only a transitional stage of the
consciousness in its passage from the physical to the supraphysical
state; it must pass from these structures into the true worlds of
supraphysical Nature. It may enter at once into the worlds of
other-life, or it may remain first, as a transitional stage, in some
region of subtle-physical experience whose surroundings may seem to it
a prolongation of the circumstances of physical life, but in freer
conditions proper to a subtler medium and in some kind of happy
perfection of mind or life or a finer bodily existence. Beyond these
subtle-physical planes of experience and the life-worlds there are also
mental or spiritual-mental planes to which the soul seems to have an
internatal access and into which it may pursue its internatal journey;
but it is not likely to live consciously there if there has not been a
sufficient mental or soul development in this life. For these levels
must normally be the highest the evolving being can internatally
inhabit, since one who has not gone beyond the mental rung in the
ladder of being would not be able to ascend to any supramental or
overmental state; or if he had so developed as to overleap the mental
level and could attain so far, it might not be possible for him to
return so long as the physical evolution has not developed here an
organisation of an overmental or supramental life in Matter.
But, even so, the mental worlds are not likely to be the last normal
stage of the after-death passage; for man is not entirely mental; it is the soul, the psychic being, and not
the mind, that is the traveller between death and birth, and the mental
being is only a predominant element in the figure of its
self-expression. There must then be a final resort to a plane of
pure psychic existence in which the soul would await rebirth; there it
could assimilate the energies of its past experience and life and
prepare its future. Ordinarily, the normally developed human being, who
has risen to a sufficient power of mentality, might be expected to pass
successively through all these planes, subtle-physical, vital and
mental, on his way to his psychic habitation. At each stage he would
exhaust and get rid of the fractions of formed personality-structure,
temporary and superficial, that belonged to the past life; he would cast off his mind-sheath and
life-sheath as he had already cast off his body-sheath: but the essence
of the personality and its mental, vital and physical experiences would
remain in latent memory or as a dynamic potency for the future.
But if the development of mind were insufficient, it is possible that
it would not be able to go consciously beyond the vital level and the
being would either fall back from there, returning from its vital
heavens or purgatories to earth, or, more consistently, would pass at
once into a kind of psychic assimilative sleep co-extensive with the
internatal period; to be awake in the highest planes a certain
development would be indispensable.
All this, however, is a matter of dynamic probability, and that, though
amounting in practice to a necessity, though justified by certain facts
of subliminal experience, is still for the reasoning mind not in itself
quite conclusive. We have to ask
whether there is any more essential necessity for these internatal
intervals, or at least any of so great a dynamic power as to
lead to an irresistible conclusion. We shall find one such necessity in
the decisive part played by the higher planes in the earth-evolution
and the relation that it has created between them and the evolving
soul-consciousness. Our development takes place very largely by their
superior but hidden action upon the earth-plane. All is contained in the inconscient or the
subconscient, but in potentiality; it is the action from above that
helps to compel an emergence. A continuance of that action is
necessary to shape and determine the progression of the mental and
vital forms which our evolution takes in material nature: for these
progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or sufficiently
develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or
inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though occult
resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This
resort, the action of this veiled alliance, takes place principally in
our subliminal being and not on the surface: it is from there that the
active power of our consciousness emerges, and all that it realises it
sends back constantly into the subliminal being to be stored up,
developed and re-emerge in stronger forms here after. This interaction
of our larger hidden being and our surface personality is the main
secret of the rapid development that operates in man once he has passed
beyond the lower stages of Mind immersed in Matter.
This resort must continue in the internatal stage; for a new birth, a new life is not a taking up of the
development exactly where it stopped in the last, it does not merely
repeat and continue our past surface personality and formation
of nature. There is an assimilation, a discarding and strengthening and
rearrangement of the old characters and motives, a new ordering of the
developments of the past and a selection for the purposes of the future
without which the new start cannot be fruitful or carry forward the
evolution. For each birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the
past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a
progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.
Part of this rearrangement, the discarding especially of past strong
vibrations of the personality, can only be effected by an exhaustion of
the push of previous mental, vital, physical motives after death, and
this internal liberation or lightening of impedimenta must be put
through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be discarded or
otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that
nature; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the
activities which have to be exhausted and rejected from the
consciousness so that it can pass on to a new formation. It is probable
also that the integrating positive preparation would be carried out and
the character of the new life would be decided by the soul itself in a
resort to its native habitat, a plane of psychic repose, where it would
draw all back into itself and await its new stage in the evolution.
This would mean a passage of the soul progressively through
subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds to the psychic dwelling-place
from which it would return to its terrestrial pilgrimage. The
terrestrial gathering up and development of the materials thus
prepared, their working out in the earth-life would be the consequence
of this internatal resort, and the new birth would be a field of the
resultant activity, a new stadium or spiral curve in the individual
evolution of the embodied Spirit.
For when we say that the soul on earth evolves successively the
physical, the vital, the mental, the spiritual being, we do not mean
that it creates them and that they had no previous existence. On the
contrary, what it does is to manifest these principles of its spiritual
entity under the conditions imposed by a world of physical Nature; this
manifestation takes the form of a structure of frontal personality
which is a translation of the inner self into the terms and
possibilities of the physical existence. In fact we must accept the
ancient idea that man has within him not only the physical soul or
Purusha with its appropriate nature, but a vital, a mental, a psychic,
a supramental, a supreme spiritual being [Taittiriya
Upanishad]; and either the whole or the greater presence or
force of them is concealed in his subliminal or latent and unformulated
in his superconscient parts. He has to bring forward their powers in
his active consciousness and to awake to them in its knowledge. But
each of these powers of his being is in relation with its own proper
plane of existence and all have their roots there. It is through them
that there takes place the subliminal resort of the being to the
shaping influences from above, a resort which may become more and more
conscious as we develop. It is logical then that according to the
development of their powers in our conscious evolution should be the
internatal resort which this nature of our birth here and its
evolutionary object and process necessitate. The circumstances and the
stages of that resort must be complex and not of the crudely and
trenchantly simple character which the popular religions imagine: but
in itself it can be accepted as an inevitable consequence of the very
origin and nature of the soul-life in the body. All is a closely woven
web, an evolution and an interaction whose links have been forged by a
Conscious-Force following out the truth of Its own motives according to
a dynamic logic of these finite workings of the Infinite.
If this view of rebirth and the soul's temporary passage into other
planes of existence is correct, both rebirth and the after-life assume
a different significance from the colour put on them by the
long-current belief about reincarnation and the after-death sojourn in
worlds beyond us. Reincarnation is commonly supposed to have two
aspects, metaphysical and moral, an aspect of spiritual necessity, an
aspect of cosmic justice and ethical discipline. The soul, - in this
view or for this purpose supposed to have a real individual existence,
- is on earth as a result of desire and ignorance; it has to remain on
earth or return to it always so long as it has not weal-led of desire
and awakened to the fact of its ignorance and to the true knowledge.
This desire compels it to return always to a new body; it must follow
always the revolving wheel of birth till it is enlightened and
liberated. It does not, however, remain always on earth, but alternates
between earth and other worlds, celestial and infernal, where it
exhausts Its accumulated store of' merit or demerit due to the
enactment of sin or virtue and then returns to the earth and to some
kind of terrestrial body, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes
even vegetable. The nature of this new incarnation and its fortunes are
determined automatically by the soul's past actions. Karma: if the sum
of past actions was good, the birth is in the higher form. the life
happy or successful or unaccountably fortunate; if bad, a lower form of
Nature may house us or the life. If human, will be unhappy,
unsuccessful, full of suffering and misfortune. If our past actions and
character were mixed, then Nature, like a good accountant, gives us,
according to the pitch and values of our former conduct, a
well-assorted payment of mixed happiness and suffering, success and
failure, the rarest good luck and the severest ill-fortune. At the same
time a strong personal will or desire in the past life may also
determine our new avatar. A
mathematical aspect is often given to these payments of Nature, for we
are supposed to incur a precise penalty for our misdeeds,
undergo or return the replica or equivalent of what we have inflicted
or enacted; the inexorable rule of a
tooth for a tooth is a frequent principle of the Karmic Law: for
this Law is an arithmetician with his abacus as well as a judge with
his code of penalties for long-past crimes and misdemeanours. It is
also to be noted that in this system there is a double punishment and a
double reward for sin and virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in
hell and afterwards afflicted for the same sins in another life here
and the righteous or the Puritan is rewarded with celestial joys and
afterwards again pampered for the same virtues and good deeds in a new
terrestrial existence.
These are very summary popular notions and offer no foothold to the
philosophic reason and no answer to a search for the true significance
of life. A vast world-system which
exists only as a convenience for turning endlessly on a wheel of
Ignorance with no issue except a final chance of stepping out of it, is
not a world with any real reason for existence. A world which
serves only as a school of sin and virtue and consists of a system of
rewards and whippings, does not make any better appeal to our
intelligence. The soul or spirit
within us, if it is divine, immortal or celestial, cannot be sent here
solely to be put to school for this kind of crude and primitive moral
education; if it enters into
the Ignorance, it must be because there is some larger principle or
possibility of its being that has to be worked out through the
Ignorance. If, on the other hand, it is a being from the
Infinite plunged for some cosmic purpose into the obscurity of Matter
and growing to self-knowledge within it, its life here and the
significance of that life must be something more than that of an infant
coddled and whipped into virtuous ways; it must be a growth out of an
assumed ignorance towards its own full spiritual stature with a final
passage into an immortal consciousness, knowledge, strength, beauty,
divine purity and power, and for such a spiritual growth this law of
Karma is all too puerile. Even if the soul is something created, an
infant being that has to learn from Nature and grow into immortality,
it must be by a larger law of growth and not by some divine code of
primitive and barbaric justice. This
idea of Karma is a construction of the smaller part of the human vital
mind concerned with its petty rules of life and Its desires and
joys and sorrows and erecting their
puny standards into the law and aim of
the cosmos. These notions cannot be acceptable to the thinking
mind; they have too evidently the stamp of a construction fashioned by
our human ignorance.
But the same solution can be elevated to a higher level of reason and
given a greater plausibility and the colour of a cosmic principle. For,
first, it may be based on the
unassailable ground that all energies In Nature must have their natural
consequence; if any are without visible result in the present
life, it may well be that the outcome is only delayed, not withheld for
ever. Each being reaps the harvest of his works and deeds, the returns
of the action put forth by the energies of his nature, and those which
are not apparent in his present birth must be held over for a
subsequent existence. It is true that the result of the energies and
actions of the individual may accrue not to himself but to others when
he is gone; for that we see constantly happening, - it happens indeed
even during a man's lifetime that the fruits of his energies are reaped
by others; but this is because there is a solidarity and a continuity
of life in Nature and the individual cannot altogether, even If he so
wills, live for himself alone. But, if there is a continuity of his own
life by rebirth for the individual and not only a continuity of the
mass-life and the cosmic life, if he has an ever-developing self,
nature and experience, then it is inevitable that for him too the
working of his energies should not be cut off abruptly but must bear
their consequence at some time in his continuous and developing
existence. Man's being, nature,
circumstances of life are the result of his own inner and outer
activities, not something fortuitous and inexplicable: he is
what he has made himself; the past man was the father of the man that
now is, the present man is the father of the man that will be. Each
being reaps what he sows; from what he does he profits, for what he
does he suffers. This is the law and chain of Karma, of Action, of the
work of Nature-Energy, and it gives a meaning to the total force of our
existence, nature, character, action which is absent from other
theories of life. It is evident on this principle that a man's past and
present Karma must determine his future birth and its happenings and
circumstances; for these too must be the fruit of his energies: all
that he was and did in the past must be the creator of all that he now
is and experiences in his present, and all that he is and is doing in
the present must be the creator of what he will be and experience in
the future. Man is the creator of himself; he is the creator also of
his fate. All this is perfectly rational and unexceptionable so far as
it goes and the law of Karma may be accepted as a fact, as part of the
cosmic machinery; for it is so evident, - rebirth once admitted, - as
to be practically indisputable.
There are, however, two riders to this first proposition which are less
general and authentic and bring in a doubtful note; for though they may
be true in part, they are overstated
and create a wrong perspective, because they are put forward as
the whole sense of Karma. The first is
that as is the nature of the energies so must be the nature of the
results, - the good must bring good results, the evil must bring evil
results: the second is that the master word of Karma is justice
and therefore good deeds must bear the fruit of happiness and good
fortune and evil deeds must bear the fruit of sorrow, misery and
ill-fortune. Since there must be a cosmic justice which is looking on
and controlling in some way the immediate and visible operations of
Nature in life, but is not apparent to us in the facts of life as seen
by us, it must be present and evident in the totality of her unseen
dealings; it must be the subtle and hardly visible, but strong and firm
secret thread that holds together the otherwise incoherent details of
her dealings with her creatures. If it be asked why actions alone, good
or bad deeds alone, should have a result, it might be conceded that
good or evil thoughts, feelings, actions have all their corresponding
results, but since action is the greater part of life and the test and
formulated power of a man's values of being, since also he is not
always responsible for his thoughts and feelings, as they are often
involuntary, but is or must be held responsible for what he does, as
that is subject to his choice, it is mainly his actions that construct
his fate; they are the chief or the most forceful determinants of his
being and his future. This is the whole law of Karma.
But we have first to observe that a
law or chain of Karma is only an outward machinery and cannot be
elevated to a greater position as the sole and absolute determinant of
the life-workings of the cosmos, unless the cosmos Is itself
entirely mechanical in its character. It is indeed held by many that
all is Law and Process and there is no conscious Being or Will in or
behind the cosmos; if so, here is a Law and Process that satisfies our
human reason and our mental standards of right and justice and it has
the beauty and truth of a perfect symmetry and a mathematical accuracy
of working. But all is not Law and Process, there is also Being and
Consciousness; there is not only a machinery but a Spirit in things,
not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit, not only a
process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural creature.
If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field for
a law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual
and not mechanical, it must be
ourself, our soul that fundamentally determines its own evolution, and
the law of Karma can only be one of the processes it uses for that
purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be greater than its Karma.
There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom. Law and Process are
one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer mind, life
and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of Nature. But
even here their mechanical power is absolute only over body and Matter;
for Law becomes more complex and less rigid. Process more plastic and
less mechanical when there comes in the phenomenon of Life, and yet
more is this so when Mind intervenes with its subtlety; an inner
freedom already begins to intervene and, the more we go within, the
soul's power of choice is increasingly felt: for prakriti is the field
of law and process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the
sanction, anumantÁ, and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a
witness and concede an automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the
master of its nature, Ishwara.
It is not conceivable that the Spirit within is an automaton in the
hands of Karma, a slave in this life of its past actions; the truth
must be less rigid and more plastic. If a certain amount of results of
past Karma is formulated in the present life, it must be with the
consent of the psychic being which presides over the new formation of
its earth-experience and assents not merely to an outward compulsory
process, but to a secret Will and Guidance.
That secret Will is not mechanical, but spiritual; the guidance comes
from an Intelligence which may use mechanical processes but is not
their subject. Self-expression and
experience are what the soul seeks by its birth into the body;
whatever is necessary for the self-expression and experience of this
life, whether it intervenes as an automatic outcome of past lives or as
a free selection of results and a continuity or as a new development, whatever is a means of creation of the
future, that will be formulated: for the principle is not the
working out of a mechanism of Law, but the development of the nature
through cosmic experience so that eventually it may grow out of the
Ignorance. There must therefore be two elements, Karma as an
instrument, but also the secret Consciousness and Will within working
through the mind, life and body as the user. Fate, whether purely
mechanical or created by ourselves, a chain of our own manufacture, is
only one factor of existence; Being and its consciousness and its will
are a still more important factor. In
Indian astrology which considers all life-circumstances to be Karma,
mostly predetermined or indicated in the graph of the stars, there is still provision made for the
energy and force of the being which can change or cancel part or
much of what is so written or even all
but the most imperative and powerful bindings of Karma. This is
a reasonable account of the balance: but there is also to be added to
the computation the fact that destiny is not simple but complex; the
destiny which binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far
as a greater law does not intervene. Action belongs to the physical
part of us, it is the physical outcome of our being; but behind our
surface is a freer Life-power, a freer Mind-power which has another
energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the
primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become
consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel
the graph of our physical fate. Karma, then, - or at least any mechanical law of Karma, - cannot be
accepted as the sole determinant of circumstances and the whole
machinery of rebirth and of our future evolution.
But this is not all; for the statement of the Law errs by an
over-simplification and the arbitrary selection of a limited principle.
Action is a resultant of the energy of the being, but this energy is
not of one sole kind; the
Consciousness-Force of the Spirit manifests itself in many kinds of
energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of
desire, passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the
body, a pursuit of truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit
of ethical good or evil, a pursuit of power, love, Joy, happiness,
fortune, success, pleasure, life-satisfactions of all kinds,
life-enlargement, a pursuit of individual or collective objects, a
pursuit of the health, strength, capacity, satisfaction of the body.
All this makes an exceedingly complex sum of the manifold experience
and many-sided action of the Spirit in life, and its variety cannot be set aside in favour
of a single principle, neither can it be hammered into so many
sections of the single duality of ethical good and evil; ethics, the maintenance of human standards of
morality, cannot, therefore, be
the sole preoccupation of the cosmic Law or the sole principle
of determination of the working of Karma. If it is true that the nature
of the energy put forth must determine the nature of the result or
outcome, all these differences in the nature of the energy have to be
taken into account and each must have its appropriate consequence. An
energy of seeking for truth and knowledge must have as its natural
outcome, - its reward or recompense, if you will, - a growth into
truth, an increase in knowledge; an
energy used for falsehood should result in an Increase of falsehood in
the nature and a deeper immersion in the Ignorance. An energy of
pursuit of beauty should have as its outcome an increase in the sense
of beauty, the enjoyment of beauty or, if so directed, in the beauty
and harmony of the life and the nature. A pursuit of physical health, strength and
capacity should create the strong man or the successful athlete.
An energy put out in the pursuit of ethical good must have as its
outcome or reward or recompense an increase in virtue, the happiness of
ethical growth or the sunny felicity and poise and purity of a simple
and natural goodness, while the punishment of opposite energies would
be a deeper plunge into evil, a greater disharmony and perversion of
the nature and, in case of excess, a great spiritual perdition, mahatÆ vinaÜÞiÄ. An energy put forward for power or other
vital ends must lead to an increase of the capacity for commanding
these results or to the development of a vital strength and plenitude. This is the ordinary disposition of things
in Nature and, if justice be demanded of her, this surely is
justice that the energy and capacity put forward should have in its own
kind its fitting response from her. The
prize of the race is assigned by her to the swift, the victory in
battle to the brave and strong and skilful, the rewards of knowledge to
the capable intellect and the earnest seeker: these things she will not
give to the good man who is sluggish or weak or skilless or stupid
merely because he is righteous or respectable; if he covets these other
powers of life, he must qualify for them and put forward the right kind
of energy. If Nature did otherwise, she could well be accused of
injustice; there is no reason to accuse her of injustice for this
perfectly right and normal arrangement or to demand from her a
rectification of the balance in a future life so that the good man may
be given as a natural reward for his virtue a high post or a large
bank-balance or a happy, easy and well-appointed life. That cannot be
the significance of rebirth or a sufficient basis for a cosmic law of
Karma.
There is indeed in our life a very large element of what we call luck
or fortune, which baulks our effort of result or gives the prize
without effort or to an inferior energy: the secret cause of these
caprices of Destiny, - or causes, for the roots of Fortune may be
manifold, - must be no doubt partly sought for in our hidden past; but
it is difficult to accept the simple solution that good luck is a
return for a forgotten virtuous action in a past life and bad luck a
return for a sin or crime. If we see the righteous man suffering here,
it is difficult to believe that this paragon of virtue was in the last
life a scoundrel and is paying, even after his exemplary conversion by
a new birth, for sins he then committed; nor, if the wicked triumphs,
can we easily suppose that he was in his last life a saint who has
suddenly taken a wrong turn but continues to receive a cash-return for
his previous virtue. A total change of this kind between life and life
is possible though not likely to be frequent, but to saddle the new
opposite personality with the rewards or punishments of the old looks
like a purposeless and purely mechanical procedure. This and many other
difficulties arise, and the too simple logic of the correlation is not
so strong as it claims to be; the
idea of retribution of Karma as a compensation for the injustice of
life and Nature is a feeble basis for the theory, for It puts forward a
shallow and superficial human feeling and standard as the sense of the
cosmic Law and is based on an unsound reasoning; there must be
some other and stronger foundation for the law of Karma.
Here, as so often, the error comes by
our forcing a standard which is the creation of our human mind into the
larger, freer and more comprehensive ways of the cosmic Intelligence.
In the action attributed to the law of Karma two values are selected
out of the many created by Nature, moral good and evil, sin and virtue,
and vital-physical good and evil, outward happiness and suffering,
outward good fortune and ill-fortune, and it is supposed that there
must be an equation between them, the one must be the reward or
punishment of the other, the final sanction which it receives in the
secret justice of Nature. This collocation is evidently made from the
viewpoint of a common vital-physical desire in our members: because
happiness and good fortune are what the lower part of our vital being
most desires, misfortune and suffering what it most hates and dreads,
it proceeds, when it accepts the moral demand upon it for the curbing
of its propensities, for self-restraint from doing evil and
self-exertion towards doing what is good, to strike a bargain, to erect
a cosmic Law which will compensate it for this strenuous
self-compulsion and help it by the dread of punishment to adhere to its
difficult path of self-denial. But the
truly ethical being does not need a system of rewards and punishments
to follow the path of good and shun the path of evil; virtue to him is
its own reward, sin brings with it its own punishment in the suffering
of a fall from his own law of nature: this is the true ethical standard.
On the contrary, a system of rewards and punishments debases at once
the ethical values of good, turns virtue into selfishness, a commercial
bargain of self-interest, and replaces the right motive of abstinence
from evil by a baser motive. Human
beings have erected the rule of reward and punishment as a social
necessity in order to restrain the doing of things harmful to the
community and encourage what is helpful to it; but to erect this
human device into a general law of cosmic Nature or a law of the
supreme Being or the supreme law of existence is a procedure of
doubtful value. It is human, but also puerile, to impose the
insufficient and narrow standards of our own Ignorance on the larger
and more intricate operations of cosmic Nature or on the action of the
supreme Wisdom and supreme Good which draws or raises us towards itself
by a spiritual power working slowly in ourselves through our inner
being and not by a law of temptation and compulsion upon our outer
vital nature. If the soul is passing through an evolution by a
many-sided and complex experience, any law of Karma or return to action
and output of Energy, if it is to fit itself into that experience, must
also be complex and cannot be of a simple and exiguous texture or rigid
and one-sided in its incidence.
At the same time, a partial truth of fact, not of fundamental or
general principle, may be admitted for this doctrine; for although the
lines of the action of energy are distinct and independent, they can
act together and upon each other, though not by any rigidly fixed law
of correspondence. It is possible that in the total method of the
returns of Nature there intervenes a strand of connection or rather of
interaction between vital-physical good and ill and ethical good and
ill, a limited correspondence and meeting-point between divergent
dualities not amounting to an inseparable coherence. Our own varying
energies, desires, movements are mixed together in their working and
can bring about a mixed result: our vital part does demand substantial
and external rewards for virtue, for knowledge, for every intellectual,
aesthetic, moral or physical effort; it believes firmly in punishment
for sin and even for ignorance. This may well either create or else
reply to a corresponding cosmic action; for Nature takes us as we are and to some
extent suits her movements to our need or our demands on her. If
we accept the action of invisible Forces upon us, there may be also
invisible Forces in Life-Nature that belong to the same plane of
Consciousness-Force as this part of our being. Forces that move
according to the same plan or the same power-motive as our lower vital
nature. It can be often observed that
when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without
restraint or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises a
mass of reactions against itself, reactions of hatred,
antagonism, uncase in men which may have their result now or hereafter,
and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her
willingness to be used were exhausted; the very forces that the
ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and
turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power
for his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against the
throne of Necessity and is dashed to pieces or the lame foot of
Punishment reaches at last the successful offender. This reaction to
his energies may come upon him in another life and not at once, it may
be a burden of consequence he takes up in his return to the field of
these Forces; it may happen on a small as well as a large scale, to the
small vital being and his small errors as well as in these larger
instances. For the principle will be the same; the mental being in us
seeking for success by a misuse of force which Nature admits but reacts
in the end against it, receives the adverse return in the guise of
defeat and suffering and failure. But
the promotion of this minor line of causes and results to the status of
an invariable absolute Law or the whole cosmic rule of action of
a supreme Being is not valid;
they belong to a middle region between the inmost or supreme Truth of
things and the impartiality of material Nature.
In any case the reactions of Nature are not in essence meant as reward
or punishment; that is not their fundamental value, which is rather an
inherent value of natural relations and, in so far as it affects the
spiritual evolution, a value of the lessons of experience in the soul's
cosmic training. If we touch fire, it burns, but there is no principle
of punishment in this relation of cause and effect, it is a lesson of
relation and a lesson of experience; so
in all Nature's dealings with us there is a relation of things and
there is a corresponding lesson of experience. The action of the
cosmic Energy is complex and the same Forces may act in different ways
according to circumstances, to the need of the being, to the intention
of the cosmic Power in its action; our life is affected not only by its
own energies but by the energies of others and by universal Forces, and
all this vast interplay cannot be determined in its results solely by
the one factor of an all-governing moral law and its exclusive
attention to the merits and demerits, the sins and virtues of
individual human beings. Nor can good fortune and evil fortune,
pleasure and pain, happiness and misery and suffering be taken as if
they existed merely as incentives and deterrents to the natural being
in its choice of good and evil. It is
for experience, for growth of the individual being that the soul enters
into rebirth; joy and grief, pain and suffering, fortune and misfortune
are parts of that experience, means of that growth: even, the
soul may of itself accept or choose poverty, misfortune and suffering
as helpful to its growth, stimulants of a rapid development, and reject
riches and prosperity and success as dangerous and conducive to a
relaxation of its spiritual effort. Happiness and success bringing
happiness are, no doubt, a legitimate demand of humanity; it is an
attempt of Life and Matter to catch a pale reflection or a gross image
of felicity: but a superficial happiness and material success, however
desirable to our vital nature, are not the main object of our
existence; if that had been the intention, life would have been
otherwise arranged in the cosmic ordinance of things. All the secret of
the circumstances of rebirth centres around the one capital need of the
soul, the need of growth, the need of experience; that governs the line
of its evolution and all the rest is accessory. Cosmic existence is not a vast
administrative system of universal justice with a cosmic Law of
recompense and retribution as Its machinery or a divine Legislator and
Judge at its centre. It is seen by us first as a great automatic
movement of energy of Nature, and in it emerges a self-developing
movement of consciousness, a movement therefore of Spirit working out
its own being in the motion of energy of Nature. In this motion takes
place the cycle of rebirth, and in that cycle the soul, the psychic
being, prepares for itself, - or the Divine Wisdom or the cosmic
Consciousness-Force prepares for it and through its action, - whatever
is needed for the next step in its evolution, the next formation of
personality, the coming nexus of necessary experiences constantly
provided and organised out of the continuous flux of past, present and
future energies for each new birth, for each new step of the Spirit
backward or forward or else still in a circle, but always a step in the
growth of the being towards Its destined self-unfolding in Nature.
This brings us to another element of the ordinary conception of rebirth
which is not acceptable, since It is an obvious error of the physical
mind, - the idea of the soul itself as a limited personality which
survives unchanged from one birth to another. This too simple and
superficial idea of the soul and personality is born of the physical
mind's inability to look beyond its own apparent self-formation in this
single existence. In its conception, what returns in the reincarnation
must be not only the same spiritual being, the same psychic entity, but
the same formation of nature that inhabited the body of the last birth;
the body changes, the circumstances are different, but the form of the
being, the mind, the character, the disposition, temperament,
tendencies are the same: John Smith in his new life is the same John
Smith that he was in his last avatar. But if that were so, there would
be no spiritual utility or meaning at all in rebirth; for there would
be the repetition of the same little personality, the same small mental
and vital formation to the end of Time. For the growth of the embodied being
towards the full stature of its reality, not only a new experience, but
a new personality is indispensable; to repeat the same
personality would only be helpful if something had been incomplete in
its formation of its experience which needed to be worked out in the
same cadre of self, in the same building of mind and with the same
formed capacity of energy. But normally this would be quite otiose: the soul that has been John Smith cannot
gain anything or fulfil itself by remaining John Smith for ever; it
cannot achieve growth or perfection by repeating the same character,
interests, occupations, types of inner and outer movements for ever.
Our life and rebirth would be always the same recurring decimal; it
would be not an evolution but the meaningless continuity of an eternal
repetition. Our attachment to our
present personality demands such a continuity, such a
repetition; John Smith wants to be John Smith for ever: but the demand
is obviously ignorant and, if it were satisfied, that would be a
frustration, not a fulfilment. It is only by a change of outer self, a
constant progression of the nature, a growth in the spirit that we can
justify our existence. Personality is
only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the
real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface, -
it is not the self in its abiding reality. In each return to earth the Person, the
Purusha, makes a new formation, builds a new personal quantum suitable
for a new experience, for a new growth of its being. When it
passes from its body, it keeps still the same vital and mental form for
a time, but the forms or sheaths dissolve and what is kept is only the
essential elements of the past quantum, of which some will but some may
not be used in the next incarnation. The essential form of the past
personality may remain as one element among many, one personality among
many personalities of the same Person, but in the background, in the
subliminal behind the veil of the surface mind and life and body,
contributing from there whatever is needed of itself to the new
formation; but it will not itself be the whole formation or build anew
the old unchanged type of nature. It may even be that the new quantum
or structure of being will exhibit a quite contrary character and
temperament, quite other capacities, other very different tendencies;
for latent potentials may be ready to emerge, or something already in
action but inchoate may have been held back in the last life which
needed to be worked out but was kept over for a later and more suitable
combination of the possibilities of the nature. All the past is indeed
there, with its accelerated impetus and potentialities for the
formation of the future, but all of it is not ostensibly present and
active. The greater the variety of
formations that have existed in the past and can be utilised, the more rich and multitudinous the
accumulated buildings of experience, the more their essential
result of capacity for knowledge, power, action, character, manifold
response to the universe can be brought forward and harmonised in the
new birth, the more numerous the veiled personalities mental, vital,
subtle-physical that combine to enrich the new personality on the
surface, the greater and more opulent will be that personality and the
nearer to the possible transition out of the completed mental stage of
evolution to something beyond it. Such
a complexity and gathering up of many personalities in one person can
be a sign of a very advanced stage of the individual's evolution
when there is a strong central being that holds all together and works
towards harmonisation and Integration of the whole many-sided movement
of the nature. But this opulent taking up of the past would not be a
repetition of personality; It would be a new formation and large
consummation. It is not as a
machinery for the persistent renewal or prolongation of an unchanging
personality that rebirth exists, but as a means for the evolution of
the spiritual being in Nature.
It becomes at once evident that in this plan of rebirth the false
importance which our mind attaches to the memory of past lives
disappears altogether. If indeed rebirth were governed by a system of
rewards and punishments, if life's
whole intention were to teach the embodied spirit to be good and moral,
- supposing that that is the intention in the dispensation of Karma and
it is not what it looks like in this presentation of it, a mechanical
law of recompense and retribution without any reformatory meaning or
purpose, - then there is evidently a
great stupidity and injustice in denying to the mind in its new
incarnation all memory of its past births and actions. For it
deprives the reborn being of all chance to realise why he is rewarded
or punished or to get any advantage from the lesson of the
profitableness of virtue and the unprofitableness of sin vouchsafed to
him or inflicted on him. Even, since life seems often to teach the
opposite lesson, - for he sees the good suffer for their goodness and
the wicked prosper by their wickedness, - he is rather likely to
conclude in this perverse sense, because he has not the memory of an
assured and constant result of experience which would show him that the
suffering of the good man was due to his past wickedness and the
prosperity of the sinner due to the splendour of his past virtues, so
that virtue is the best policy in the long run for any reasonable and
prudent soul entering into this dispensation of Nature. It might be
said that the psychic being within remembers; but such a secret memory
would seem to have little effect or value on the surface. Or it may be
said that it realises what has happened and learns its lesson when it
reviews and assimilates its experiences after issuing from the body:
but this intermittent memory does not very apparently help in the next
birth; for most of us persist in sin and error and show no tangible
signs of having profited by the teaching of our past experience. But if a constant development of being by a
developing cosmic experience is the meaning and the building of a new
personality in a new birth is the method, then any persistent or
complete memory of the past life or lives might be a chain and a
serious obstacle: it would be a force for prolonging the old
temperament, character, preoccupations, and a tremendous burden
hampering the free development of the new personality and its
formulation of new experience. A clear and detailed memory of past
lives, hatreds, rancours, attachments, connections would be equally a
stupendous inconvenience; for it
would bind the reborn being to a useless repetition or a compulsory
continuation of his surface past and stand heavily in the way of his
bringing out new possibilities from the depths of the spirit.
If, indeed, a mental learning of things were the heart of the matter,
if that were the process of our development, memory would have a great
importance: but what happens is a growth of the soul-personality and a
growth of the nature by an assimilation into our substance of being, a
creative and effective absorption of the essential results of past
energies; in this process conscious memory is of no importance. As the
tree grows by a subconscient or inconscient assimilation of action of
sun and rain and wind and absorption of earth-elements, so the being
grows by a subliminal or intraconscient assimilation and absorption of
its results of past be coming and an output of potentialities of future
becoming. The law that deprives us of
the memory of past lives is a law of the cosmic Wisdom and serves, not
disserves its evolutionary purpose.
The absence of any memory of past
existences is wrongly and very ignorantly taken as a disproof of the
actuality of rebirth; for if even in this life it is difficult to keep
all the memories of our past, if they often fade into the
background or fade out altogether, if
no recollection remains of our infancy, and yet with all this hiatus of
memory we can grow and be, if the mind is even capable of total
loss of memory of past events and its own identity and yet it is the
same being who is there and the lost memory can one day be recovered,
it is evident that so radical a
change as a transition to other worlds followed by new birth in a new
body ought normally to obliterate altogether the surface or mental
memory, and yet that would not annul the identity of the soul or
the growth of the nature. This obliteration of the surfact mental
memory is all the more certain and quite Inevitable if there is a new
personality of the same being and a new instrumentation which takes the
place of the old, a new mind, a new life, a new body: the new brain
cannot be expected to carry in itself the images held by the old brain;
the new life or mind cannot be summoned to keep the deleted Impressions
of the old mind and life that have been dissolved and exist no more.
There is, no doubt, the subliminal being which may remember, since it
does not suffer from the disabilities of the surface; but the surface mind is cut off from the
subliminal memory which alone might retain some clear recollection or
distinct impression of past lives. This separation is necessary because
the new personality has to be built up on the surface without conscious
reference to what is within; as with all the rest of the
superficial being, so our surface personality too Is indeed formed by
an action from within, but of that action it is not conscious, it seems
to itself to be self-formed or ready-made or formed by some
ill-understood action ofuniversal Nature. And yet fragmentary
recollections of past births do sometimes remain In spite of these
almost insuperable obstacles; there are even a very few cases of
astonishingly exact and full memory in the child-mind. Finally, at a
certain stage of development of the being when the inner begins to
predominate over the outer and come to the front, past-life memory does
sometimes begin to emerge as if from some submerged layer, but more
readily in the shape of a perception of the stuff and power of past
personalities that are effective in the composition of the being in the
present life than in any precise and accurate detail of event and
circumstance, although this too can recur in parts or be recovered by
concentration from the subliminal vision, from some secret memory or
from our inner conscious-substance. But
this detailed memory is of minor importance to Nature in her normal
work and she makes small or no provision for It: it is the shaping of
the future evolution of the being with which she is concerned;
the past is put back, kept behind the veil and used only as an occult
source of materials for the present and the future. This conception of
the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time
our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally,
when we insist on the soul's undying existence, what is meant is the
survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and
will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial "I" of
the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not
worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to
survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and
cannot be conceded; the "I" of the moment can only merit survival if it
consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater,
better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the
eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of
the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us
which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic
entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is
the Person that we are; but the "I" of this moment, the "I" of this
life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person:
it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it
serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step
leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the
inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth;
for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our
timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.
What our normal demand of survival asks for is a similar survival for
our mind, our life, even our body; the dogma of the resurrection of the
body attests to this last demand, - even as it has been the root of the
age-long effort of man to discover the elixir of immortality or any
means magical, alchemic or scientific to conquer physically the death
of the body. But this aspiration could only succeed if the mind, life
or body could put on something of the immortality and divinity of the
indwelling Spirit. There are certain circumstances in which the survival of the outer mental personality
representative of the inner mental Purusha could be possible. It could happen if our mental being came to be
so powerfully individualised on the surface and so much one with
the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the progressive
action of the Infinite that the soul no longer needed to dissolve the
old form of mind and create a new one in order to progress. A
similar individualisation, Integration and openness of the vital being
on the surface would alone make possible a similar survival of the
life-part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the
inner life-being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen then is
that the wall between the Inner self and the outer man would have
broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the
mental and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would
govern the life. Our mind-nature and our life-nature could then be a
continuous progressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of
successive formations preserved only in their essence. Our mental
personality and life-personality would then subsist without dissolution
from birth to birth; they would be in this sense immortal, persistently
surviving, continuous in their sense of identity. This would be
evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life over the
Inconscience and the limitations of material Nature.
But such a survival could only persist in the subtle body; the being
would still have to discard its physical form, pass to other worlds and
in its return put on a new body. The awakened mental Purusha and vital
Purusha, preserving the mind-sheath and the life-sheath of the subtle
body which are usually discarded, would return with them into a new
birth and keep a vivid and sustained sense of a permanent being of mind
and life constituted by the past and continuing into the present and
future; but the basis of physical existence, the material body, could
not be preserved even by this change. The physical being could only
endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption
could be overcome and at the same time it could be made so plastic and
progressive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer
to each change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person [Even if Science,-physical Science or occult
Science,-were to discover the necessary conditions or means for all
indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt
itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner
growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new
incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole
or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity
for the evolution of a new being. Note of the author]; it
must be able to keep pace with the soul in its formation of
self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual
divinity and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine
mental or spiritual existence. This consummation of a triple
immortality, - immortality of the nature completing the essential
immortality of the Spirit and the psychic survival of death, - might be
the crown of rebirth and a momentous indication of the conquest of the
material Inconscience and Ignorance even in the very foundation of the
reign of Matter. But the true immortality would still be the eternity
of the Spirit; the physical survival could only be relative, terminable
at will, a temporal sign of the Spirit's victory here over Death and
Matter.