The Theosophical Society,
Reincarnation
From
A Textbook of Theosophy
By
C
This
life of the ego in his own world, which is so glorious and so fully satisfying
for the developed man, plays but a very small part in the life of the ordinary
person, for in his case the ego has not yet reached a sufficient stage of development
to be awake in his causal body. In obedience to the law of nature
he has withdrawn into it, but in doing so he has
lost the sensation of vivid
life, and restless desire to feel this once more
pushes him in the direction of
another descent into matter.
This
is the scheme of evolution appointed for man at the present stage – that he
shall develop by descending into grosser matter, and
then ascend to carry back
into himself the result of the experiences so
obtained. His real life, therefore, covers millions of years, and what we are
in the habit of calling a life is only one day of this greater existence.
Indeed, it is in reality only a small part of one day; for a life of seventy
years in the physical world is often succeeded by a period of twenty times that
length spent in higher spheres.
Every
one of us has a long line of these physical lives behind him, and the
ordinary man has a fairly long line still in
front of him. Each of such lives is a day at school. The ego puts upon himself
his garment of flesh and goes forth into the school of the physical world to
learn certain lessons. He learns them, or does not learn them, or partially
learns them, as the case may be, during his school day of earth life; then he
lays aside the vesture of the flesh and returns home to his own level for rest
and refreshment. In the morning of each new life he takes up again his lesson
at the point where he left it the night before. Some lessons he may be able to
learn in one day, while others may take him many days.
If
he is an apt pupil and learns quickly what is needed, if he obtains an intelligent
grasp of the rules of the school, and takes the trouble to adapt his conduct to
them, his school life is comparatively short, and when it is over he goes forth
fully equipped into the real life of the higher worlds for which all this is
only a preparation. Other egos are duller boys who do not learn so quickly;
some of them do not understand the rules of the school,
and through that ignorance are constantly breaking them; others are wayward,
and even when they see the rules they cannot at once bring themselves to act in
harmony with them. All of these have a longer school life, and by their own
actions they delay their entry upon the real life of the higher worlds.
For
this is a school in which no pupil ever fails; every one must go on to the
end. He has no choice as to that; but the length of
time which he will take in
qualifying himself for the higher examinations is
left entirely to his own
discretion. The wise pupil, seeing that school life
is not a thing in itself, but only a preparation for a more glorious and far
wider life, endeavors to comprehend as fully as possible the rules of his
school, and shapes his life in accordance with them as closely as he can, so
that no time may be lost in the learning of whatever lessons are necessary. He
co-operates intelligently with the Teachers, and sets himself to do the maximum
of work which is possible for him, in order that as soon as he can he may come
of age and enter into his kingdom as a glorified ego.
Theosophy
explains to us the laws under which this school life
must be lived,
and in that way gives a great advantage to its
students. The first great law is that of evolution. Every man has to become a
perfect man, to unfold to the fullest degree the divine possibilities which lie
latent within him, for that unfoldment is the object
of the entire scheme so far as he is concerned. This law of evolution steadily
presses him onward to higher and higher achievements.
The
wise man tries to anticipate its demands – to run ahead of the necessary
curriculum, for in that way he not only avoids all
collision with it, but he obtains the maximum of assistance from its action.
The man who lags behind in the race of life finds its steady pressure
constantly constraining him – a pressure which, if resisted, rapidly becomes
painful. Thus the laggard on the path of evolution has always the sense of
being hunted and driven by fate, while the man who intelligently co-operates is
left perfectly free to choose the direction in which he shall move, so long as
it is onward and upward.
The
second great law under which this evolution is taking place is the law of
cause and effect. There can be no effect without its
cause, and every cause must
produce its effect. They are in fact not two but
one, for the effect is really part of the cause, and he who sets one in motion sets the other
also. There is in Nature no such idea as that of reward or punishment, but only
of cause and
effect. Any one can see this in connection with
mechanics or chemistry; the
clairvoyant sees it equally clearly with regard to
the problems of evolution.
The
same law obtains in the higher as in the lower worlds; there, as here, the
angle of reflection is always equal to the angle of
incidence. It is a law of
mechanics that action and reaction are equal and
opposite. In the almost infinitely finer matter of the higher worlds the
reaction is by no means always
instantaneous; it may sometimes be
spread over long periods of time, but it
returns inevitably and exactly.
Just
as certain in its working as the mechanical law in the physical world is the
higher law, according to which the man who sends out a good thought or does
a good action receives good in return, while the
man who sends out an evil
thought
or does an evil action receives evil in return with equal accuracy – once more,
not in the least as a reward or punishment administered by some external will,
but simply as the definite and mechanical result of his own activity. Man has
learnt to appreciate a mechanical result in the physical world, because the
reaction is usually almost immediate and can be seen by him. He does not invariably
understand the reaction in the higher worlds because that takes a wider sweep,
and often returns not in this physical life, but in some future one.
The
action of this law affords the explanation of a number of the problems of
ordinary life. It accounts for the different
destinies imposed upon people, and
also for the differences in the people themselves.
If one man is clever in a certain direction and another is stupid, it is
because in a previous life the clever man has devoted much effort to practice
in that particular direction, while the stupid man is trying it for the first
time. The genius and the precocious child are examples not of the favoritism of
some deity but of the result produced by previous lives of application. All the
varied circumstances which surround us are the result of our own actions in the
past, precisely as are the qualities of which we find ourselves in possession.
We are what we have made ourselves, and our circumstances are such as we have
deserved.
There
is, however, a certain adjustment or apportionment of these effects.
Though
the law is a natural law and mechanical in its operation, there are
nevertheless certain great Angels
who are concerned with its administration.
They
cannot change by one feather weight the amount of the result which follows upon
any given thought or act, but they can within certain limits expedite or delay
its action, and decide what form it shall take.
If
this were not done there would be at least a possibility that in his earlier
stages the man might blunder so seriously that the results of his blundering
might be more than he could bear. The plan of the Deity is to give man a
limited amount of freewill; if he uses that small amount well, he earns the
right to a little more next time; if he used it badly, suffering comes upon him
as the result of such evil use, and he finds himself restrained by the result
of his previous actions. As the man learns how to use his free will, more and
more of it is entrusted to him, so that he can acquire for himself practically
unbounded freedom in the direction of good, but his power to do wrong is
strictly restricted. He can progress as rapidly as he will, but he cannot wreck
his life in his ignorance. In the earlier stages of the savage life of
primitive man it is natural that there should be on the whole more of evil than
of good, and if the entire result of his actions came at once upon a man as yet
so little developed, it might well crush the newly evolved powers which are still
so feeble.
Besides
this, the effects of his actions are varied in character. While some of
them produce immediate results, others need much
more time for their action, and so it comes to pass that as the man develops he
has above him a hovering cloud of undischarged
results, some of them good, some of them bad. Out of this mass (which we may
regard for the purposes of analogy much as though it were a debt owing to the
powers of nature) a certain amount falls due in each of his successive births;
and that amount, so assigned, may be thought of as the man’s destiny for that
particular life.
All
that it means is that a certain amount of joy and a certain amount of suffering
are due to him, and will unavoidably happen to him; how he will meet this
destiny and what use he will make of it, that is
left entirely to his own option. It is a certain amount of force which has to
work itself out. Nothing can prevent the action of that force, but its action
may always be modified by the application of a new force in another direction,
just as is the case in mechanics. The result of past evil is like any other
debt; it may be paid in one large check upon the bank of life – by some one
supreme catastrophe; or it may be paid in a number of smaller notes, in minor
troubles and worries; in some cases it may even be paid in the small change of
a vast number of petty annoyances. But one thing is quite certain – that, in
some form or other, paid it will have to be.
The
conditions of our present life, then, are absolutely the result of our own
action in the past; and the other side of that
statement is that our actions in
this life are building up conditions for the next
one. A man who finds himself
limited either in powers or in outer circumstances
may not always be able to
make himself or his conditions all that he would
wish in this life; but he can
certainly secure for the next one whatever he
chooses.
Man’s
every action ends not with himself, but invariably affects others around
him. In some cases this effect may be comparatively
trivial, while in (Page 104)
others it may be of the most serious character. The
trivial results, whether
good or bad are simply small debits or credits in
our account with Nature; but
the greater effects, whether good or bad, make a
personal account which is to be settled with the individual concerned.
A
man who gives a meal to a hungry beggar, or cheers him by a kindly word, will receive
the result of his good action as part of a kind of general fund of
Nature’s
benefits; but one who by some good action changes the whole current of another
man’s life will assuredly have to meet that same man again in a future
life, in order that he who has been benefited may
have the opportunity of
repaying the kindness that has been done to him.
One who causes annoyance to
another will suffer proportionately for it
somewhere, somehow, in the future,
though
he may never meet again the man whom he has troubled; but one who does serious
harm to another, one who wrecks his life or retards his evolution, must certainly
meet his victim again at some later point in the course of their
lives, so that he may have the opportunity, by kindly
and self-sacrificing
service, of counterbalancing the wrong which he
has done. In short, large debts
must be paid personally, but small ones go into the
general fund.
In
every nation there exist an almost infinite number of diverse conditions,
riches and poverty, a wide field of opportunities or a total lack of them,
facilities for development or conditions under which development is difficult
or well-nigh impossible. Amidst all these infinite possibilities the pressure
of the law of evolution tends to guide the man to precisely those which best
suit his needs at the stage at which he happens to
be.
But
the action of this law is limited by that other law of which we spoke, the law
of cause and effect. The man’s actions in the past may not have been such as to
deserve (if we may put it so) the best possible opportunities; he may have set
in motion in his past certain forces the inevitable result of which will be to
produce limitations; and these limitations may operate to prevent his receiving
that best possible of opportunities, and so as the result of his own actions in
the past he may have to put up with the second-best. So we may say that the
action of the law of evolution, which if left to itself would do the very best
possible for every man, is restrained by the man’s own previous actions.
An
important feature in that limitation – one which may act most powerfully for
good or for evil – is the influence of the group of
egos with which the man has
made definite links in the past – those with whom he
has formed strong ties of
love or hate, of helping or of injury – those souls
whom he must meet again
because of connections made with them in days of
long ago. His relation with
them is a factor which must be taken into
consideration before it can be
determined where and how he shall be reborn.
The
will of the Deity is man’s evolution. The effort of that nature which is an
expression of the Deity is to give the man whatever
is most suitable for that
evolution; but this is conditioned by the man’s
deserts in the past and by the
links which he has already formed. It may be assumed
that a man descending into incarnation could learn the lessons necessary for
that life in any one of a
hundred positions. From half of these or more
than half he may be debarred by the consequences of some of his many and varied
actions in the past.
Among
the few possibilities which remain open to him, the choice of one
possibility in particular may be determined by the
presence in that family or in
that neighborhood of other egos upon whom he has a
claim for services rendered, or to whom he in his turn owes a debt of love.
The Theosophical Society,