Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00652)

Part II

JUSTICE: REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

Mere entry into life is no fit foundation for any reward or
punishment.

Reward and punishment must be the just desert for prior conduct.
Nature's law of justice is not imperfect, and it is only the
imperfection of human justice that requires the offender to know
and remember in this life a deed to which a penalty is annexed.

In the prior life the doer was then quite aware of what he did,
and nature affixes consequences to his acts, being thus just. We
well know that she will make the effect follow the cause whatever
we wish and whether we remember or forget what we did.

If a baby is hurt in its first years, so as to lay the ground for
a crippling disease in after life, as is often the case, the
crippling disease will come although the child neither brought on
the present cause nor remembered aught about it. But
reincarnation, with its companion doctrine of Karma, rightly
understood, shows how perfectly just the whole scheme of nature
is.

Memory of a prior life is not needed to prove that we passed
through that existence, nor is the fact of not remembering a good
objection. We forget the greater part of the occurrences of the
years and days of this life, but no one would say for that reason
we did not go through these years. They were lived, and we retain
but little of the details in the brain. But the entire effect of
them on the character is kept and made a part of ourselves. The
whole mass of detail of a life is preserved in the inner man to
be one day fully brought back to the conscious memory in some
other life when we are perfected. And even now, imperfect as we
are, and little as we know, the experiments in hypnotism show
that all the smallest details are registered in what is for the
present called the “sub-conscious” mind. The theosophical
doctrine is that not a single one of these happenings is
forgotten in fact, and at the end of life when the eyes are
closed and those about say we are dead, every thought and
circumstance of life flash vividly into and across the mind, and
are transferred to the inner, the astral and the spiritual man
which are now leaving the body.


SOME MEMORIES OF PAST LIVES

Many persons do, however, remember that they have lived before.
Poets have sung of this, children know it well, until the
constant living in an atmosphere of unbelief drives the
recollection from their minds for the present. All are subject
to the limitations imposed upon the Ego by the new brain in each
life.

This is why we are not able to keep the pictures of the past,
whether of this life or the preceding ones.

The brain is the instrument for the memory of the soul, and,
being new in each life with but a certain limited capacity, the
Ego is only able to use it for the new life up to that capacity.
That capacity will be fully availed of, or the contrary, just
according to the Ego's own desire and prior conduct, because such
past living will have increased or diminished its power to
overcome the forces of material existence.

By living according to the dictates of the Soul, the brain may at
least be made porous to the Soul's recollections. If the
contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds
obscure that reminiscence. But as the presently organized brain
did not live as such in the life last lived, it is in general
unable to remember. And this is a wise law, for we should be very
miserable if the deeds and scenes of our former lives were not
hidden from our view, until by discipline, we become able to bear
a knowledge of them.


CHANGES IN WORLD POPULATION

It is claimed by some objectors that under the doctrine of
reincarnation it is not possible to account for the increase of
the world's population. It is true that so far as concerns this
globe the number of Egos belonging to it is definite; but no one
knows what that quantity is, nor what is the total capacity of
the earth for sustaining them.

This objection assumes that we know that its population has
increased, as compared to many centuries in the past, and in
antiquity, and, we are well informed of its fluctuations.

But it is not certain that the total number of the inhabitants of
the globe has increased, and, further, vast numbers of people are
annually destroyed of whom we know nothing. In China, for
instance, or in Africa, year after year many thousands have been
carried off by flood, famine or disease. Statistics of famines
and other cataclysms in the past, have not been made. We do not
know by how many thousands the deaths in Africa exceed the births
in any year. The statisticians of to day are chiefly in the
West, and their tables embrace a small section of the history of
man. They cannot say how many persons were incarnated on the
earth at any prior date, hence the total quantity of egos willing
or waiting to be reborn is unknown today.

A good example has been advanced: The inhabited globe resembles
a hall in a town which is filled, wholly or partially, from the
population of the whole town. The number in the hall at any one
time, may vary, but there is a constant source of supply from
the town. The Masters of theosophical knowledge say that the
total number of such egos is vast, and for that reason the supply
of those for the occupation of bodies to be born over and above
the number that die is sufficient. Then too it must be remembered
that each ego varies the length of stay in the post-mortem states
by the nature of its last lived life. There have been cycles
when the Earth held many inhabitants and others when there were
significantly fewer.

Egos do not reincarnate at any fixed or same interval, but,
according to their individual Karma, come out of the states
after death at different rates. It is also observed that
whenever there occurs a great number of deaths by war,
pestilence, or famine, there soon is a rush of souls to
incarnation, either in the same place or in some other place.







SOUL EXISTENCE: IS IT A FACT ?




Unless we deny the immortality of man and the existence of the
eternal Soul, there are no sound arguments against the doctrine
of pre-existence and re-birth save such as rest on the dictum of
the church that each soul is a new creation.

Theosophy applies to the Self -- the Thinker -- the same laws
which are seen everywhere in operation throughout nature, and
those are all varieties of the great law that effects follow
causes, and no effect is without a cause.

The Soul's immortality -- believed in by the mass of humanity --
demands embodiment here or elsewhere, and to be embodied means
reincarnation.

Some have fancied that if we come to this earth for but a few
years, and then go to some other, the soul must be re-embodied
there as well as here, and if we have traveled from some other
world we must have had there too our proper vesture.

The powers of mind and the laws governing its motion, its
attachment, and its detachment as given in theosophical
philosophy show that its re-embodiment must be here. Tis, our
Earth, is where it moved and now works, until such time as the
mind is able to overcome the forces which chain it to this globe.

To permit the involved entity to transfer itself to another scene
of action before it had overcome all the causes drawing it here
and without its having worked out its responsibilities to other
entities in the same stream of evolution would be unjust and
contrary to the powerful occult laws and forces which continually
operate upon it.

There is an old Greek hymn:

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


CHARACTER: INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL

Each human being has a definite character different from every
other human being. And masses of beings aggregated into nations
show as a whole that there is not only a communal force, but
there is also a national force. Its distinguishing
peculiarities go to make up a definite and separate national
character.

These differences, both individual and national, are due to
essential character and not to education. Even the doctrine of
the “survival of the fittest” should show this, for the fitness
can not come from nothing but must show itself, as coming to the
surface of the actual inner character. Both individuals and
nations exhibit an immense force in their character, we must find
a place and time where the force was evolved. These, Theosophy
says, are this Earth and the whole period during which the human
race has been on the planet.

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

But all these differences, such as those shown by babes from
birth, and by adults as character, and by nations in their
history, are due to long experience gained during many lives on
earth.

They are the outcome of the soul's own evolution.


ONE LIFE IS INSUFFICIENT

A survey of one short human life gives no ground for the
production of a man’s inner nature.

It is needful that each soul should have all possible experience,
and one life cannot give this even under the best conditions. It
would be folly, as for instance, for the “Almighty,” to put us
here for such a short time, only to remove us just when we had
begun to see the object of life and the possibilities in it. The
mere selfish desire of a person to escape the trials and
discipline of life is not enough to set nature's laws aside.

The Soul must be reborn until it has ceased to set in motion the
cause of rebirth, after having developed character up to its
possible limit as indicated by all the varieties of human nature,
when every experience has been passed through, and not until all
of truth that can be known has been acquired.

The vast disparity among men in respect to capacity compels us,
if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or to God, to admit
reincarnation and to trace the origin of the disparity back to
the past lives of the Ego.

For people are as much hindered and handicapped, abused and made
the victims of seeming injustice because of limited capacity, as
they are by reason of circumstances of birth or education. We see
the uneducated rising above circumstances of family and training,
and often those born in good families have very small capacity;
but the troubles of nations and families arise from want of
capacity more than from any other cause.


SAVAGERY

If we consider ”savage races” only, there the seeming injustice
is enormous. For many savages have good actual brain capacity but
still are savage. This is because the Ego in that body is still
inexperienced and undeveloped.

And yet we see those with “savage” tendencies alive in the cities
and centers of our civilization. In contrast to the savage,
there are many men and women living in civilized environments
with small actual brain force. But they are not savage in
nature, because the indwelling Ego has had long experience in
civilization during other lives, and being a more developed soul,
those have the power, if they will, to use the brain instrument
to its highest limit.


INDIVIDUALITY: “I AM I”

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

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


OBJECT FOR LIVING AND INCARNATION

Viewing life, and its probable object, with all the varied
experience possible for man, one must be forced to the conclusion
that a single life is not enough for carrying out all that is
intended by Nature, to say nothing of what man himself desires to
do.

The scale of variety in experience is enormous. There is a vast
range of powers latent in man which we see may be developed if
opportunity be given.

Knowledge infinite in scope and diversity lies before us, and
especially in these days when special investigation is the rule.
We perceive that we have high aspirations with no time to reach
up to their measure, while the great troop of passions and
desires, selfish motives and ambitions, war with us and among
themselves, pursuing us even to the door of death. All these have
to be tried, conquered, used, subdued. Surely, one life is not
enough for all this.

To say that we have but one life here with such possibilities put
before us, and impossible of development, is to make the universe
and life a huge and cruel joke perpetrated by a powerful God --
who is thus accused, by those who believe in a special creation
of souls, of triumphing and playing with puny man just because
that man is small and the creature of the “Almighty.” This is
cruelty and injustice indeed.

A human life at most is seventy years; statistics reduce this to
about forty; and out of that little remainder a large part is
spent in sleep, and another part in childhood. Thus, in one life,
it is perfectly impossible to attain to the merest fraction of
what Nature evidently has in view.

We see many truths vaguely. And in the short time which a life
gives us, we have no time to grasp and develop and understand
them. Especially is this so when men have to make such a
struggle to live at all. Our faculties are small, dwarfed or
weak; and, one life gives little or no opportunity to alter this.

We perceive other powers latent in us that cannot possibly be
brought out in such a small space of time; and we have much more
than a suspicion that the extent of the field of truth is vastly
greater than the narrow circle we are confined to.

It is not reasonable to suppose that either God or nature
projects us into a body simply to fill us with bitterness because
we can have no other opportunity here, but rather we must
conclude that a series of incarnations has led to the present
condition, and that the process of coming here again and again
must go on for the purpose of affording us all the opportunity
needed to develop one’s capacities to Perfection.

We come back to earth, because on it and with the beings upon it
our deeds were performed; because it is the only proper place
where punishment and reward can be justly meted out; because here
is the only natural spot in which to continue the struggle toward
perfection, toward the development of the faculties we have and
the destruction of any wickedness in us. Justice to ourselves,
and to all other beings, demands it, for we cannot live for
ourselves, and it would be unjust to permit some of us to escape,
leaving those who were participants with us to remain or to be
plunged into a hell of eternal, or any duration.


WHY DO CIVILIZATIONS DIE OUT ?

The persistence of savagery, the rise and decay of nations and
civilizations, the total extinction of nations, all demand an
explanation found nowhere but in reincarnation.

Savagery remains because there are still Egos whose experience is
so limited that they are still “savage;” they will come up into
higher races when ready. Races die out because the Egos have had
enough of the experience that sort of race gives. So we find the
“Red Indian,” the Hottentot, the Polynesians, Australian
aborigines, and Easter Islanders, and others, as examples of
races deserted by high Egos; and, as those “race bodies” are
dying away, other souls who have had no higher life in the past,
enter into the bodies of the “dying race” to go on using them for
the purpose of gaining such experience as the race body will
give.

A race could not possibly arise and then suddenly die out. We
see that such is not the case, but science has no explanation; it
simply says that this is the fact, that nations decay. But in
this explanation no account is taken of the inner man, nor of the
recondite subtle and occult laws that unite to make a race.

Theosophy shows that the energy drawn together has to expend
itself gradually, and therefore the reproduction of bodies of the
character of that race will go on, though the Egos are not
compelled to inhabit bodies of that sort any longer than while
they are of the same level of development as the race bodies can
provide.

Hence a time comes when the whole mass of Egos which built up the
race leaves it for another physical environment more like
themselves, and more useful for their progress as a race. The
economy of Nature will not permit the physical race to suddenly
fade away, and so in the real order of evolution, other and less
progressed Egos come in and use the forms provided, keeping up
the production of new bodies, but, each century sees a decrease
in number.

These lower Egos are not able to keep up to the limit of the
capacity of the congeries of energies left by the other Egos, and
so while the new set gains as much experience as is possible, the
race, in time dies out after passing through its decay.

This is the explanation of what we may call descending savagery,
and no other theory will meet the facts.

It has been sometimes thought by ethnologists that the more
civilized races kill off the other, but the fact is that in
consequence of the great difference between the Egos inhabiting
the old race body and the energy of that body itself, the females
begin to be sterile, and thus slowly but surely the number of
deaths exceeds the births. China itself is said to be in process
of decay, she being now in the almost stationary stage, just
before the rush downward. Great civilizations like those of Egypt
and Babylon have gone because the souls who made them have long
ago reincarnated in the nations of Europe and the present
American continents. As nations and races they have been totally
reincarnated and born again for greater and higher purposes than
ever. Of all the old races, the Aryan Indian alone, yet remains
as the preserver of the old doctrines. It will one day rise again
to its old heights of glory.


GENIUS

The appearance of geniuses and great minds in families destitute
of these qualities, as well as the extinction from a family of
the genius shown by some ancestor, can only be met by the law of
re-birth.

Napoleon the First came in a family wholly unlike him in power
and force. Nothing in his heredity will explain his character. He
said himself, as found in the Memoirs of Prince Talleyrand, that
he was Charlemagne. Only by assuming for him a long series of
lives giving the right line of evolution or cause for his mind
and nature and force to be brought out, can we have the slightest
idea why he or any other great genius appeared at all.

Mozart when an infant could compose orchestral score. This was
not due to heredity, for such a score is not natural, but is
forced, mechanical, and wholly conventional, yet he understood it
without schooling. How? Because he was a musician reincarnated,
with a musical brain furnished by his family and thus not impeded
in his endeavors to show forth his musical knowledge.

But stronger yet is the case of Blind Tom, an African in America,
whose family could not by any possibility have a knowledge of the
piano, a modern instrument, so as to transmit that knowledge to
the atoms of his body, yet he had great musical power and knew
the present mechanical musical scale on the piano.

There are hundreds of examples like these among the many
prodigies who have appeared to the world's astonishment. In India
there are many histories of sages born with complete knowledge of
philosophy and the like, and doubtless in all nations the same
can be met with.

This bringing back of knowledge of past lives, also explains
instinct, for that is no more than recollection divisible into
physical and mental memory. It is seen in the child and the
animal, and is no more than the result of previous experience.
And whether we look at the new-born babe flinging out its arms
for self-protection, or the animal with very strong defensive and
other instinctual powers, or the bee building a cell on the rules
of geometry, it is all the effect of reincarnation acting either
in the mind or physical cell, for under what was first laid down,
as a Law of Evolution, no atom is devoid of life, consciousness,
and intelligence of its own.

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


INHERENT IDEAS

The fact that certain inherent ideas are common to the whole race
of mankind, is explained by the Sages as due to recollection of
such ideas, which were implanted in the human mind at the very
beginning of its evolutionary career on this planet by those
Elder Brothers and Dhyanis (the WISE), who learned their lessons
and were perfected in former aeons, on other worlds, and long
before the development of this globe began. No explanation for
inherent ideas is offered by science that will do more than say,
"they exist." These were actually taught originally to the mass
of Egos who are engaged in this earth's evolution; they were
imprinted or burned into their natures, and have, and are always
been recollected; they follow the Ego through the long pilgrimage
to final Perfection.

It has been often thought that the opposition to reincarnation
has been solely based on prejudice, when not due to a dogma which
can only stand when the free Mind is bound down and prevented
from using its own powers.

It is a doctrine the most noble of all, and with its companion
one of Karma, it alone gives the basis for ethics.



======================================


-----Original Message-----
From: dlux
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 5:50 AM
To: study@blavatsky.net
Subject: Re: bn-study digest: December 21, 2002

I have been reading bn-study digest for several months & have no
idea how
too reply to a post but will try this method.

In answer to the statement 'What is the responsibility of
Theosophists' I
suggest that Theosophists manifest loving & compassionate
thoughts & send
the waves on their journey. The four deaths that Gopi has
mentioned I will
take as a Truth because there is so much misinformation in the
media today
that you must read far into the darkness (or light) to work out
what is the
motivation, the angle for the so called 'news'. The media has so
many hidden
agendas that only a very small fraction of 'news' has any merit
at all.

We cannot change the past but we can influence the future by
being loving &
compassionate.

love & light to all

dlux







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