Theos-Talk Archives (June 2004 Message tt00079)

Nay 14 2004
Dear Friends and S:

Re: DO WE REMEMBER?


William Henry West Betty was born in England in 1791. He appeared on
the stage at the age of eleven in adult parts, and at twelve he was
playing Shakesperian roles in London to overcrowded houses. It is of
record that the English Parliament actually adjourned on one occasion
so that its members might attend a performance in which this
precocious youngster played the role of Hamlet.

------------------------------------------

When children come to visit me, they love to dress up in my clothes,
and “play lady.” One day, Betty May had spent an unusually long time
in my room, and finally came out in a long dress, with a scarf wound
round her head.

She said, “Look, Grannie! This is the way we dressed when we were
Indians.”

“Oh, were you an Indian?” I queried innocently.

She looked at me with surprise in her eyes, and said, “Of course. And
you too, Grannie. Don’t you remember? What is the name of that country
where we lived when we were Indians?”

I asked if it were India, maybe, but she said, no, that wasn’t the
right name.

Then I asked, “Were the babies Indians, too?”

Quickly she answered, “Oh, no. Not Jackie. Jackie was another kind of
man. Jackie looked like this” — and she drew herself up very straight
and folded her arms across her chest.

“How about Jim and Sue? Were they Indians ?“

She looked very serious for a minute, and then said, “I don’t
remember, Grannie.”

Then someone came in, and we were never able to pick up the thread
again, until several weeks later when she told me,


“Mother doesn’t know all the things we know, Grannie.”

“Why doesn’t she, dear?” I said.

“Because, she hasn’t been to our country.”

“But how do you know, Betty May?” I asked.

The only answer I could get was, “You know, Grannie.”

And then we say, we don’t “remember.”


* * * *


When Baby Carla was six weeks old, she saw her Uncle Hal for the first
time. A twinkle came in her eyes, she smiled, and put out her tongue
at him! Ever after, that was her sign of welcome to him, though
sometimes she ex tended the greeting to others especially favored. 

Between her and Uncle Hal there seemed to be always some inner secret
bond of delight and companionship, so that just as soon as she began
to say “Mama” and “Papa,” she also began to use a name for Uncle Hal.
“Pak-kar,” she called him. 

Her parents were mystified. What strange freak made that word, like
nothing anyone had ever heard before? There was no variation in it at
any time. It was always clear and distinct—unmistakable. 

Before the little one had reached the age of two, however, Uncle Hal
died suddenly. Carla appeared to know nothing about it, except that
several times in the next few weeks, and very contrary to her usual
sunny awakening from sleep, she woke crying, as if her heart were
broken. When her mother soothed her and asked her why she cried, she
said, “Pak-kar’s gone !“ She never again greeted anyone with little
tongue thrust out.

Two years after this, while Carla’s mother was reading one of
Breasted’s histories, she came to a chapter in which was discussed the
similar roots of words in old languages. Across the page sprang into
her view this line, giving the ancient forms of our word, father:
Greek Latin Teutonic Sanscrit Tibetan pater, pitar, vater, pakkar.

It was four years later when Carla’s father brought home from the
library a book of travel on Tibet, in which was illustrated the
Tibetan greeting, first used by Carla at the age of six weeks!

* * * *

Little Robert was the sunniest, happiest, most lovable little
four-year-old boy anyone ever knew! Not only was he cherished by all
those in his family, including aunts and uncles and cousins, but
friends — even strangers — found him “different” from other little
ones, and with a strange power to lighten their hearts. But, one day a
terrible disease struck him swiftly, and he died.

Little Robert’s parents knew about reincarnation, and their sorrow was
more bearable because they had also heard that when a child dies under
the age of seven years, the same Ego might reincarnate again in the
same family. 

Two years later, a little brother was born to them, so closely
resembling little Robert that they could not help giving the babe the
same name. As he grew, old familiar ways were recognized, and the two
babes seemed blended in this one. They began to speak of the first
little Robert as “the other one.”

Meantime, some of the families of cousins had moved far away, and had
never seen the second Robert. One day, when he was three years old,
one of these girl cousins came to the house on a surprise-visit. She
entered the room where the little fellow was playing on the floor with
his blocks, and stood quietly for a moment. 

Robert looked up at her, smiled radiantly, flung out his arms and
called, “Ong !“ This was the name the first Robert had given her—a
name which had never been used by anyone, save him!

--------------------------------------------


A GREEK LESSON

I stopped short; I flung down the book. “It is a lie,” I cried
bitterly, “a cruel, hateful lie,”

I almost shouted, — and the whole class stared at me in amazement.

A strange outburst was that for the dingy, drowsy Greek-room of the
little New England college. I was as much surprised as any; I stood
confused at myself. For then it was that I remembered.

The passage which I was translating seemed innocent enough—to all the
rest. We were reading at sight — the professor’s particular hobby; and
he was exploiting upon us the Twelfth Oration of Lysias. .

But I had been paying scant attention to what they were reading. Greek
was easy to me always, and the halting drone with which they turned
the sweet Attic into their class-room jargon wearied my ears. And my
thoughts had drifted far away into I know not what regions of
day-dreams, under a bright sky buttressed on purple hills, when I
heard the incisive voice of the professor:

“Leonard, you may read now, beginning with the seventy-eighth
section.” It cut through the mists of cloud land like the flash of a
searchlight.

I started to my feet, found the place and began:

“‘And although he has been the author of all these and still other
disasters and disgraces, both old and new, both small and great, some
dare to profess themselves his friends; al though it was not for the
people that Theramenes died, but because of his own villainy—’Then I
choked and stopped. Tears swam in my eyes, and a hot flash scalded my
cheeks. For in that instant first I understood; and in that instant it
seemed to me that they all understood.

But the professor, rather mortified at my unwonted hesitation, began
to prompt:

“Go on, Leonard, — go on, it is not so hard

— ‘and no less justly would he have died under the democracy, which he
twice enslaved’ — why, Leonard!”.
“It is a lie,” I burst forth. “A cruel, hateful lie.” Those words
which he uttered so calmly had stung me like the lashes of a scourge,
— so malignant, so artful, so utterly unjust. And the whole world had
read them—this had been believed for centuries, with none to
contradict!

“To say it when a man was dead !“ I went on. “And Lysias! for Lysias
to say it!” I had quite forgotten the class; I saw only the foppish,
waspish little orator, declaiming before the people with studied
passion and hot indignation well memorized. But the people had never
accepted it They knew me better. . .

“They would not listen to such as Lysias; they would make an uproar
and rise from the benches. How dared that alien 
accuse the best blood of Athens!” Yet I could scarcely have told you
why I said it.

My classmates were too much astonished to laugh. The professor laid
down his book; mine I flung on the floor. My blood was boiling; my
soul a tumult.

“What does this mean, Leonard?” I heard the voice; I could not clearly
see the speaker.

“I will not read it—I will not read another line,” I cried. .

For the past had opened like a darkness lightning-cleft; all in one
moment I felt the injustices of ages; the shame of an aeon of
scorn—and they asked me to read against my self the lying record. I
would die again sooner than read it. I could not realize that they did
not comprehend.

It was not often that Professor Lalor was at a loss for words, but
there was a long pause before he spoke.

“Young man,” he said slowly, “I always like my students to manifest a
living interest in what they read, and this trait I have especially
commended in you heretofore. But there is measure, Leonard, in all
things, as the Greeks themselves have taught us; and this exceeds—
this certainly exceeds. One would fancy you contemporary authority.” .
.

Again I had choked, but anger gave me back my speech.

“Lysias an authority!” I exclaimed. “Lysias !“

My sight had cleared. The class sat quiet, startled out of their
laughter; the professor looked pained and puzzled.
“There is a degree of truth in what you seem to imply,” he said. “It
may be conceded that Lysias was somewhat lacking in the judicial
quality. And as to Theramenes, Aristotle has expressed a very
different estimate of him. Yet Lysias—”

“He was no better than a sycophant,” I broke in.

“Go to your room, Leonard. You forget yourself.” But the truth was, I
had remembered myself.

After that they nicknamed me Theramenes: I was nicknamed after myself,
and none suspected.

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Stories

Often boys and girls say: “Why, I don’t see how ever I can have lived
before in other bodies! I don’t remember anything about it!” Well, it
wouldn’t be so strange if we didn’t re member, when the brains we are
remembering through came new with these present bodies, and when we
have crammed them so full with the things of this life! Indeed, we
don’t re member half our days in these bodies! Certainly, not one of
us remembers the day we were born—but we must have been born!

Let us not be too sure people don’t remember, or even that we don’t
remember. Many, many children have been known to remember, on sight,
places they have lived in, in other lives, and even grown-up people,
in visiting places they never
saw before in this life, have recognized them by some special mark. It
is told of one American gentleman, on his first visit to London, that
while waiting in a lawyer’s office to keep an appointment, he began to
have a sense of familiarity of the room steal over him. The feeling
grew very strong, till finally he said to himself: “Well, if I ever
have been here before, there is a certain knot-hole in the panel of
that door over there—and if so, it is under that calendar hanging
there!” He walked over to the door and lifted the calendar. The
knot-hole was there, as he knew it would be.

But recognition on sight isn’t the only way of remembering. The surest
way of all is by feeling, and that doesn’t depend very much on the
brain. In fact, it is the feeling, which some sight arouses, we should
call truly remembering. Your brain does not tell you that you love
your mother. You know you love her, because you feel love for her. So,
we are really remembering the friends of other lives, when we see them
for the first time, and feel we have always known them and loved them;
we are also remembering, when for no reason in the world we can see,
we dislike so intensely an other person we meet. Is it hard to imagine
the kind of Karma-seed in other lives which makes such liking or
disliking in this one? What kind of seeds shall we plant now that will
bring us loving friends in lives to come? Yes, there are other ways
still of remembering. In deep sleep, we know all about our past lives,
and sometimes a dream about one or another may come through into our
brain, when we are almost awake.

Very young children, especially between three and six, “remember”
words of a language once they knew. In one family, the parents were
worried because their little girl was not learning to talk at the age
of two years. She was constantly “jabbering,” but not a word could
they understand. Then, one day, a soldier who had been in France came
to visit them. He began to pay attention to the little girl, and in
amazement he said to the parents, “Don’t worry about the little one’s
not talking. She is talking very good French !"


Have you ever noticed how some boys and girls seem never to have to
learn some particular thing? For instance, one boy knows how to use
tools without being taught; one girl doesn’t need to learn how to sew,
or to read; one boy can sing from the time he can speak, while most of
us are years in learning how; some girls love to write poetry, or can
imitate the ways of speech and manners of others, but more people
never can do it well in this life, however long and hard they try—even
with taking lessons. Well, all these facilities, or talents, are in
evidence now be cause there was a skill in these things in other
lives; or even a love for them, without much skill, — because it is
the feeling, again, of love to do these things, that lives, and goes
on from life to life. Perhaps you have noticed that sometimes, too,
people grow lazy with these talents, and they lose them. They must
love them enough to make them always more beautiful by working for
them, as a service to all, if they would keep them.

Suppose we could remember all about our past lives? Remember our
names, the names of our friends, all the things we did—both good and
bad? It really could do us no true service. It might not even make us
happy, for it isn’t pleasant to look back at our mistakes. We are, in
our characters, all that these things meant to us, and if we were to
stand looking back at those pictures, very long at a time, we might
forget the duties right now at our hand to do. Our “now” is made up of
our past, and our “now” is what makes the future, so it’s the “now”
that we must use aright. If flashes from the past come into the now,.
unbidden as a sweet odor, we can recognize them and smile, and know
them for what they are—messengers to say there are many houses of life
we have lived in, and we have yet to build for our souls still
statelier mansions. Such experiences aren’t to be talked about to
others, for only to the Experiencer do these “flashes” offer the
evidence that we have lived before. All Nature bears evidence of this
same law of reincarnation for all who can see. Each one must see for
himself and in himself all that belongs to him, now or in past lives.


---------------------------------


HE TOOK THE GATES


The following undoubtedly true story was written by a commercial
photographer of Minneapolis. She is the elder sister of little Anne,
and up to the time of the incident, neither she nor any of the family
believed in, or knew anything of, the doctrine of re-birth. The
article appeared in the American Magazine of July, 1915.

“Anne, my little half-sister, younger by fifteen years, was a queer
little mite from the beginning. She did not even look like any member
of the family we ever heard of, for she was dark almost to
swarthiness, while the rest of us were all fair, showing our Scotch
Irish ancestry unmistakably.

“As soon as she could talk in connected sentences, she would tell
herself fairy stories, and just for the fun of the thing I would take
down her murmurings with my pencil in my old diary. She was my
especial charge — my mother being a very busy woman—and I was very
proud of her. These weavings of fancy were never of the usual type
that children’s fairy tales take; for, in addition to the childish
imagination, there were bits of knowledge in them that a baby could
not possibly have absorbed in any sort of way.

“Another remarkable thing about her was that everything she did she
seemed to do through habit, and, in fact, such was her insistence,
although she was never able to ex plain what she meant by it. If you
could have seen the roystering air with which she would life her mug
of milk when she was only three and gulp it down at one quaffing, you
would have shaken with laughter. This particularly embarrassed my
mother and she reproved Anne repeatedly. The baby was a good little
soul, and would seem to try to obey, and then in an absent-minded
moment would bring on another occasion for mortification. ‘I can’t
help it, mother,’ she would say over and over again, tears in her baby
voice, ‘I’ve always done it that way!’

“So many were the small incidents of her ‘habits’ of speech and
thought and her tricks of manner and memory that finally we ceased to
think anything about them, and she herself was quite unconscious that
she was in any way different from other children.

“One day when she was four years old she became very indignant with
Father about some matter and, as she sat curled up on the floor in
front of us, announced her intention of going away forever.

“‘Back to heaven where you came from?’ inquired Father with mock
seriousness. She shook her head.

“‘I didn’t come from heaven to you,’ she asserted with that calm
conviction to which we were quite accustomed now. ‘I went to the moon
first, but—you know about the moon, don’t you? It used to have people
on it, but it got so hard that we had to go.’

“This promised to be a fairy tale, so I got my pencil and diary.

“‘So,’ my father led her on, ‘you came from the moon to us, did you?’

“‘Oh, no,’ she told him in casual fashion. ‘I have been here lots of
times—sometimes I was a man and sometimes I was a woman!’

“She was so serene in her announcement that my father laughed
heartily, which enraged the child, for she particularly disliked being
ridiculed in any way.

“‘I was! I was!’ she maintained indignantly. ‘Once I went to Canada
when I was a man! I ‘member my name, even.’

“‘Oh, pooh-pooh,’ he scoffed, ‘little United States girls can’t be men
in Canada! What was your name that you ‘member so well?’

“She considered a minute. ‘It was Lishus Faber,’ she ventured, then
repeated it with greater assurance, ‘that was it—Lishus Faber.’ She
ran the sounds together so that this was all I could make of it—and
the name so stands in my diary today; ‘Lishus Faber.’

“‘And what did you do for a living, Lishus Faber, in those early
days?’ My father then treated her with the mock solemnity befitting
her assurance and quieting her nervous little body.

‘I was a soldier’—she granted the information triumphantly—’and Itook
the gates!’

“That was all that is recorded there. Over and over again, I remember,
we tried to get her to explain what she meant by the odd phrase, but
she only repeated her words and grew indignant with us for not
understanding. Her imagination stopped at explanations. We were living
in a cultured community, but al though I repeated the story to inquire
about the phrase—as one does tell stories of beloved children, you
know—no one could do more than conjecture its meaning.
“Some one encouraged my really going further with the matter, and for
a year I studied all the histories of Canada I could lay my hands on
for a battle in which somebody ‘took the gates.’ All to no purpose.
Finally I was directed by a librarian to a ‘documentary’ history, I
suppose it is—a funny old volume with the ‘s’ like f’s, you know. This
was over a year afterward, when I had quite lost hope of running my
phrase to earth. It was a quaint old book, interestingly picturesque
in many of its tales, but I found one bit that put all others out of
my mind. It was a brief account of the taking of a little walled city
by a small company of soldiers, a distinguished feat of some sort, yet
of no general importance. A young lieutenant with his small band—the
phrase leaped to my eyes—’took the gates.’ And the name of the young
lieutenant was ‘Aloysius Le Fêbre.’”

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Interesting?

Best wishes,

Dallas