Josephus states that it was accepted among the Jews, and relates the story of a captain who encouraged his soldiers to fight to the death by reminding them of their return to earth. In The Wisdom of Solomon it is stated that coming into an undefiled body wins the reward of 'being good'. Virgil and Ovid take it for granted. The ritual composed by the. The Neo-Platonic schools accepted it, and Origen, the most learned of the Christian Fathers, declared that 'every man received a body according to his deserts and his former action'.
Though condemned by a Roman Catholic Council, the heretical sects preserved the old tradition. And it comes to us in the Middle Ages from a learned son of Islam: When did I grow less by " dying? I shall die out of the man and shall become an angel. Goethe in his old age looked joyfully forward to his return; Hume declared that it was the only doctrine of immortality a philosopher could look at, a view somewhat similar to that of our British Professor McTaggart, who, lately reviewing the various theories of immortality, came to the conclusion that reincarnation was the most rational.
I need not remind anyone of literary culture that Wordsworth, Browning, Rossetti and other poets believed it. The reappearance of the belief in reincarnation is not, therefore, an emergence of a belief of savages among civilised nations, but a sign of recovery from a temporary mental aberration in Christendom, from the de-rationalisation of religion which has wrought so much evil and has given rise to so much scepticism and materialism. To assert the special creation of a soul for every fresh body, implying that the coming into existence of a soul depends on the formation of a body, inevitably leads to the conclusion that with the death of the body the soul will pass out of existence; that a soul with no past.
Only a soul which is unborn can hope to be undying. The loss of the teaching of reincarnation—with its temporary purgatory for working out evil passions and its temporary heaven for the transmutation of experience into faculty—gave rise to the idea of a never-ending heaven for which no one is good enough, and a never-ending hell for which no one is wicked enough, confined human evolution to an inappreciable fragment of existence, hung an everlasting future on the contents of a few years, and made life an unintelligible tangle of injustices and partialities, of unearned genius and unmerited criminality, an intolerable problem to the thoughtful, tolerable only to blind and foundationless faith.
There are but three explanations of human inequalities, whether of faculties, of opportunities, of circumstances: Special creation by God, implying that man is helpless, his destiny being controlled by an arbitrary and incalculable will. Heredity, as suggested by science, implying an equal helplessness on man's part, he being the result of a past, over which he had no control. Reincarnation, implying that man can become master of his destiny, he being the result of his own individual past, being what he has made himself. Special creation is rejected by all thoughtful people as an explanation of the conditions round us, save in the most important conditions of all, the character with which and the environment into which an infant is born.
Evolution is taken for granted in everything except in the life of spiritual intelligence called man; he has no individual past, although he has an individual endless future. The character he brings with him—on which more than on anything else his destiny on earth depends—is, on this hypothesis, specially created for him by God, and imposed on him without any choice of his own; out of the lucky bag of creation he may draw a prize or a blank, the blank being a'doom of misery; such as it is, he must take it.
If he draw a good disposition, fine capacities, a noble nature, so much the better for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If he draw congenital criminality, congenital idiocy, congenital disease, congenital drunkenness, so much the worse for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If everlasting bliss be tacked on to the one and everlasting torment to the other the unfortunate one must accept his ill fate as he may.
Hath not the potter power over the clay? Only it seems sad if the clay be sentient. In another respect special creation is grotesque. A spirit is specially created for a small body which dies a few hours after birth. If life on earth has any educational or experimental value that spirit will be the poorer forever by missing such a life, and the lost opportunity can never be made good.
If, on the other hand, human life on earth is of no essential importance and carries with it the certainty of many ill doings and sufferings and the possibility of everlasting suffering at the end of it, the spirit that comes into a body that endures to old age is hardly dealt with, as it must endure innumerable ills escaped by the other without any equivalent advantage, and may be damned forever. The list of injustices brought about by special creation might be extended indefinitely, for it includes all inequalities, it has made myriads of atheists, as incredible by the intelligence and revolting to the conscience.
It places man in the position of the inexorable creditor of God, stridently demanding: The hypothesis of science is not as blasphemous as that of special creation, but heredity only explains bodies; it throws no light on the evolution of intelligence and conscience. The Darwinian theory tried to include these, but failed lamentably to explain how the social virtues could be evolved in the struggle for existence. Moreover, by the time the parents had acquired their ripest fruition of high qualities the period of reproduction was over; children are for the most part born in the hey-day of physical vigour while the intellectual and moral qualities of their parents are immature.
Later studies have, however, shown that acquired qualities are not transmissible, and that the higher the type the fewer the offspring. Intelligence and reproductive power vary inversely; the lower the parents the more prolific are they. With the discovery that acquired qualities are not transmissible science has come up against a dead wall. It can offer no explanation of the facts of high intelligence and saintly life.
The child of a saint may be a profligate; the child of a genius may be a dolt. Genius 'comes out of the blue'. This glory of humanity, from the scientific standpoint, seems outside the law of causation. Science does not tel1. She does not threaten us with an arbitrary will, but she leaves us without explanation of human inequalities. She tells us that the drunkard bequeaths to his children bodies prone to disease, but she does not explain why some unhappy children are the recipients of the hideous legacy.
Reincarnation restores justice to God and power to man. Every human spirit enters into human life a germ, without knowledge, without conscience, without discrimination. By experience, pleasant and painful, man gathers materials, and as before explained, builds them into mental and moral faculties. Thus the character he is born with is self-made, and marks the stage he has reached in his long evolution. The good disposition, the fine capacities, the noble nature are the spoils of many a hard-fought fight, the wages of heavy and arduous toil. The reverse marks an early stage of growth, the small development of the spiritual germ.
The savage of today is the saint of the future; all tread a similar road; all are destined to ultimate human perfection. Pain follows on mistakes and is ever remedial; strength is developed by struggle; we reap, after every sowing, the inevitable result; happiness growing out of the right, sorrow out of the wrong. The babe dying shortly after birth pays in the death a debt owing from the past, and returns swiftly to earth, delayed but for brief space and free of his debt to gather the experience necessary for his growth.
Social virtues, though placing a man at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, perhaps even leading to the sacrifice of his physical life, build a noble character for his future lives and shape him to become a servant of the nation. Genius inheres in the individual as the result of many lives of effort, and the sterility of the body it wears does not rob the future of its services, as it returns greater on every re-birth. The body poisoned by a father's drunkenness is taken by a spirit learning by a lesson of suffering to guide its earthly life on lines better than those followed in the past.
And so in every case the individual past explains the individual present, and when the laws of growth are known and obeyed a man can build with a sure hand his future destiny, shaping his growth on lines of ever-increasing beauty until he reaches the stature of the Perfect Man. No question is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: First of all, let us note the fact that we forget more of our present lives than we remember.
Many people cannot remember learning to read; yet the fact that they can read proves the learning.
- Disneys My First Songbook - Volume 4.
- Le vrai trésor du curé de Rennes le château (French Edition);
- The riddle of "life," a biologist's critical view..
- The riddle of "life," a biologist's critical view..
Incidents of childhood and youth have faded from our memory, yet they have left traces on our character. A fall in babyhood is forgotten, yet the victim is none the less a cripple. And this, although we are using the same body in which the forgotten events were experienced. These events, however, are not wholly lost by us; if a person be thrown into a mesmeric trance, they may be drawn from the depths of memory; they are submerged, not destroyed. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a language known in childhood and forgotten in.
Much of our subconsciousness consists of these submerged experiences, memories thrown into the background but recoverable. If this be true of experiences encountered in the present body, how much more must it be true of experiences encountered in former bodies, which died and decayed many centuries ago. Our present body and brain have had no share in those far-off happenings; how should memory assert itself through them? Our permanent body, which remains with us throughout the cycle of reincarnation, is the spiritual body; the lower garments fall away and return to their elements ere we can become reincarnated.
The new mental, astral and physical matter in which we are reclothed for a new life on earth receives from the spiritual intelligence, garbed only in the spiritual body, not the experiences of the past, but the qualities, tendencies and capacities which have bee"n made out of those experiences. Our conscience, our instinctive response to emotional and intellectual appeals, our recognition of the force of a logical argument, our assent to fundamental principles of right and wrong, these are the traces of past experience. A man of a low intellectual type cannot 'see' a logical or mathematical proof; a man of low moral type cannot 'feel' the compelling force of a high moral ideal.
When a philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art is mastered without study, memory is there in power, though past facts of learning are forgotten; as Plato said, it is reminiscence. When we feel intimate with a stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a friend of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another stranger,. These affinities, these warnings, come from the undying spiritual intelligence which is ourself; we remember, though working in the brain we cannot impress on it our memory.
The mind-body, the brain, are new; the spirit furnishes the mind with the results of the past, not with the memory of its events. As a merchant, closing the year's ledger and opening a new one, does not enter in the new one all the items of the old, but only its balances, so does the spirit hand on to the new brain his judgments on the experiences of a life that is closed, the conclusions to which he has come, the decisions at which he has arrived.
This is the stock handed on to the new life, the mental furniture for the new dwelling—a real memory. Rich and varied are these in the highly evolved man; if these are compared with the possessions of the savage, the value of such a memory of a long past is patent. No brain could store the memory of the events of numerous lives; when they are concreted into mental and moral judgments they are available for use; hundreds of murders have led up to the decision 'I must not kill'; the memory of each murder would be a useless burden, but the judgment based on their results, the instinct of the sanctity of human life, is the effective memory of them in the civilised man.
Memory of past events, however, is sometimes found; children have occasional fleeting glimpses of their past, recalled by some event of the present; an English boy who had been a sculptor recalled it when he first saw some statues; an Indian child recognised a stream in which he had been drowned as a little child in a preceding life, and the mother of that earlier body. Many cases are on record of such memory of past events. Moreover, such memory can be gained. But the gaining is a matter of steady effort, of prolonged meditation, whereby the restless mind, ever running outwards, may be controlled and rendered quiescent, so that it may be sensitive and responsive to the spirit and receive from him the memory of the past.
Only as we can hear the still small voice of the spirit may the story of the past be unrolled, for the spirit alone can remember and cast down the rays of his memory to enlighten the darkness of the fleeting lower nature to which he is temporarily attached. Cinder such conditions memory is possible, links of the past are seen, old friends are recognised, old scenes recalled, and a subtle inner strength and calm grows out of the practical experience of immortality. Present troubles grow light when seen in their true proportions as trivial and transient events in an unending life; present joys lose their brilliant colours when seen as repetitions of past delights; and both alike are equally accepted as useful experiences, enriching mind and heart and contributing to the growth of the unfolding life.
Not until pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity can the crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they have thus been seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced that on his return to earth-life he would be washed clean of his memories, and lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new life on its way, enriched with the results, but unburdened with the recollections of its past.
To the great majority of us life presents a series of tangles and puzzles—tangles we cannot unravel, puzzles we cannot solve. Why are people born differing so widely in mental and in moral capacity? Why has one infant a brain denoting great intellectual and moral power, while another has a brain which marks him out as one who will be an idiot or a criminal? Why has one child good and loving parents and favourable circumstances, while another has profligate parents who detest him, and is reared amid the foulest surroundings?
Why is one 'lucky' and another 'unlucky'? Why does one die old and another die young? Why is one person prevented by 'accidents' from catching a steamer or a train that is wrecked, while scores or hundreds of others perish unaided? Why do we like one person the moment we see him, while we as promptly dislike another? Questions like these are continually arising, and are as continually left unanswered, and yet answers are within reach; for all these seeming incongruities and injustices, these apparently fortuitous events, are merely the results of the working out of a few simple and fundamental natural laws.
An understanding of these underlying laws makes life intelligible, thereby restoring our confidence in the divine order and endowing us with strength and courage to meet the vicissitudes of fortune. Troubles which strike us like. The first principle that must be firmly grasped ere we can begin to apply it to the solving of life's problems is that of reincarnation. Man is essentially a spirit, a living and self-conscious individual, consisting of this self-conscious life in a body of very subtle matter; life cannot work without a body of some kind; that is, without a form of matter, however fine and subtle the matter may be, which gives it separate existence in this universe; bodies are often therefore spoken of as vehicles, that which carries the life, making it individual.
This spirit, when he comes into the physical world by the gateway of birth, puts on a physical body as a man puts on an overcoat and hat to go out into the world beyond his own home; but the physical body is no more the man than the overcoat and hat are the body which wears them. As a man throws away worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so does the spirit cast off a worn-out body and take to himself another Bhagavad-Gitd. When the physical body is outworn the man passes through the gateway of death, dropping the physical vesture and entering the 'unseen' world. After a long period of rest and refreshment, during which the experiences of the past life on earth are assimilated, and thus increase the powers of the man, he returns again to the physical world through the gateway of birth and takes on a new physical body, adapted for the expression of his increased capacities.
When spirits which were to become human came into the world millennia ago, they were but embryos, like seeds, knowing neither good nor evil, with infinite possibilities of development—as being the. All the powers latent within them had to be roused into active manifestation by experiences undergone in the physical world. By pleasure and pain, by joy and suffering, by success and failure, by fruition and disappointment, by successive choices well and badly made, the spirit learns his lessons of laws that cannot be broken, and manifests slowly one by one his capacities for mental and moral life.
After each brief plunge into the ocean of physical life—that period generally spoken of as 'a life'—he returns to the invisible world laden with the experiences he has gathered, as a diver rises from the sea with the pearls he has riven from the oyster-bed. In that invisible world he transmutes into moral and mental powers all the moral and mental materials he has gathered in the earth-life just closed, changing aspirations into capacity to achieve, changing the results of efforts that failed into forces for future success, changing the lessons of mistakes into prudence and foresight, changing past sufferings into endurances, changing errors into repulsions from wrong doings, and the sum of experience into wisdom.
As Edward Carpenter well wrote: When all that was gathered has been assimilated—the length of the heavenly life depending on the amount of mental and moral material that had been collected—the man returns to earth; he is guided, under conditions to be explained in a moment, to the race, the nation, the family, which is to provide him with his next physical body, and that body is moulded in accordance with his requirements, so as to serve as a fit instrument for his. In the new physical body, and in the life in the invisible world that follows its off-throwing at the death which destroys it, he re-treads on a higher level a similar cycle, and so again and again for hundreds of lives, until all his possibilities as a human being have become active powers, and he has learned every lesson that this human life can teach.
Thus the spirit unfolds from infancy to youth, from youth to maturity, becoming an individualised life of immortal strength and of boundless utility for divine service. The struggling and unfolding spirits of one humanity become the guardians of the next humanity, the spiritual intelligences that guide the evolution of worlds posterior to their own in time. We are protected, helped and taught by spiritual intelligences who were men in worlds older than our own, as well as by the most highly evolved men of our own humanity; we shall repay the debt by protecting, helping and teaching human races in worlds that are now in the early stages of their growth, preparing to become, untold ages hence, the homes of future men.
If we find around us many who are ignorant, stupid and even brutal, limited in both mental and moral powers, it is because they are younger men than we are, younger brothers, and hence their errors should be met with love and helpfulness instead of with bitterness and hatred. As they are, so were we in the past; as we are, so shall they be in the future; and both they and we shall go onward and onward through the everlasting ages.
This then is the first fundamental principle which renders life intelligible when applied to the conditions of the present; I can only work out from it in detail here the answer to one of the questions propounded. For the complete answering, however, we need to grasp also the twin principle of reincarnation—that of Karma, or the law of causation.
This may be stated in words familiar to all: If the mind dwells continually on one train of thought, a groove is formed into which the thought-force runs automatically, and such a habit of thought survives death, and, since it belongs to the ego, is carried over to the subsequent earth-life as a thought-tendency and capacity. Habitual study of abstract problems, to take a very high instance, will result, in another earth-life, in a well-developed power for abstract thinking, while flippant, hasty thinking, flying from one subject to another, will bequeath a restless, ill-regulated mind to the following birth into this world.
Selfish coveting of the possessions of others, though never carried out into active cheating in the present, makes the thief of a later earth-life, while hatred and revenge, secretly cherished, are the seeds from which the murderer springs. So again, unselfish loving yields as harvest the philanthropist and the saint, and every thought of compassion helps to build the tender and pitiful nature. The knowledge of this law of changeless justice, of the exact response of nature to every demand, enables a man to build his character with all the certainty of science, and to look forward with courageous patience to the noble type he is gradually but surely evolving.
The effects of our actions upon others mould the external circumstances of a subsequent earth-life. If we have caused widespread happiness we are born into very favourable physical surroundings or come into them during life, while the causing of widespread misery results in an unhappy environment. We make relationships with others by coming into contact with them individually, and bonds are forged by benefits and injuries, golden links of love or iron chains of hate. With these complementary ideas clearly in the mind, we can answer our question very easily.
Links between egos, between individualised spirits, cannot antedate the first separation of those spirits from the Logos, as drops may be separated from the ocean. In the mineral and vegetable kingdoms the life that expresses itself in stones and plants has not yet evolved into continued individualised existence.
The word 'group-soul' has been used to express the idea of this evolving life as it animates a number of similar physical organisms. Thus a whole order, say of plants, like grasses, umbelliferous or rosaceous plants, is animated by a single group-soul, which evolves by virtue of the simple experiences gathered through its countless physical embodiments. The experiences of each plant flow into the life that informs its whole order, and aid and hasten its evolution. As the physical embodiments become more.
In the animal kingdom this process of specialisation of the group-souls continues, and in the higher mammalia a comparatively small number of creatures is animated by a single group-soul, for nature is working toward individualisation. The experiences gathered by each are preserved in the group-soul, and from it affect each newly-born animal that it informs; these appear as what we call instincts, and are found in the newly-born creature. Such is the instinct which makes a newly-hatched chicken fly to seek protection from danger under the brooding wing of the hen, or that whicn impels the beaver to build its dam.
The accumulated experiences of its race, preserved in the group-soui, inform every member of the group. When the animal kingdom reaches its highest expressions, the final subdivisions of the group-soul animate but a single creature, until finally the divine life pours out anew into this vehicle now ready for its reception, and the human ego takes birth and the evolution of the self-conscious intelligence begins. From the time that a separated life animates a single body, links may be set up with other separated lives, each likewise dwelling in a single tabernacle of flesh.
Egos, dwelling in physical bodies, come into touch with each other; perhaps a mere physical attraction draws together two egos dwelling respectively in male and female bodies.
They live together, have common interests, and thus links are set up. If the phrase may be allowed, they contract debts to each other, and there are no bankruptcy courts in. Death strikes away one body, then the other, and the two have passed into the invisible world; but debts contracted on the physical plane must be discharged in the world to which they belong, and those two must meet each other again in earth-life and renew the intercourse that was broken off.
The great spiritual Intelligences who administer the law of Karma guide these two into rebirth at the same period of time, so that their earthly lifetime may overlap, and in due course they meet. If the debt contracted be a debt of love and of mutual service, they will feel attracted to each other; the egos recognise each other, as two friends recognise each other, though each be wearing a new dress, and they clasp hands, not as strangers but as friends.
If the debt be one of hatred and of injury, they shrink apart with a feeling of repulsion, each recognising an ancient enemy, eyeing each other across the gulf of wrongs given and received. Cases of these types must be known to every reader, although the underlying cause has not been known; and indeed these sudden likings and dislikings have often foolishly been spoken of as 'causeless', as though, in a world of law, anything could be without a cause. It by no means follows that egos thus linked together necessarily re-knit the exact relationship broken off down here by the hand of death.
The husband and wife of one earth-life might be born into the same family as brother and sister, as father and son, as father and daughter, or in any other blood relationship. Or they might be born as strangers and meet for the first time in youth or in maturity, to feel for each other an overmastering attraction. In how brief a time we become closely intimate with one who was a stranger, while we live. Whence these strange affinities, if they are not the remembrances in the egos of the loves of their past? The egos know each other, though the bodies be strangers, and the old friends clasp hands in perfect confidence and understand each other; and this, although the physical brains have not yet learned to receive those impressions of memory that exist in the subtle bodies, but that are too fine to cause vibrations in the gross matter of the brain, and thus to awaken responsive thrills of consciousness in the physical body.
Ghastly family tragedies have their roots deep down in the past, and many of the awful facts recorded by such agencies as the Society for the Protection of Children, the torture of helpless children even by their own mothers, the malignant ferocity which inflicts pain in order to exult in the sight of agony—all this becomes intelligible when we know that the soul in that young body has in the past inflicted some horror on the one who now torments it, and is learning by terrible experience how hard are the ways of wrong.
The question may arise in the mind of some: It is our duty to relieve suffering wherever we meet it, rejoicing that the Good Law uses us as the almoners of mercy. Another question may come: Will not the torture inflicted forge a new bond, by which the cruel parent will hereafter be the victim, and the tortured child become the oppressor? But He breathed the secret of release when He continued: When the ego who has paid his debt of the past by the suffering of inflicted wrong is wise enough, brave enough, great enough to say, amid the agony of body or of mind: The links of love grow strong in every successive earth-life in which the linked two clasp hands, and they have the added advantage of growing stronger during the life in heaven, whereinto the links of hate cannot be carried.
Egos that have debts of hate between them do not touch each other in the heavenly land, but each works out such good as he may have in him without contact with his foe. When the ego succeeds in impressing on the brain of his physical body his own memory of his past, then these memories draw the egos yet closer, and the tie gains a sense of security and strength such as no bond of a single life can give; very deep and strong is the happy confidence of such egos, knowing by their own experiences that love does not die. Such is the explanation of affinities and repulsions, seen in the light of reincarnation and Karma.
THE word Karma simply means action. But the connotation of the word is far-reaching, for much more goes to the making of an action than the ordinary person might think. Every action has a past which leads up to it; every action has a future which proceeds from it; an action implies a desire which prompted it and a thought which shaped it, as well as a visible movement to which the name of 'act' is usually confined.
Each act is a link in an endless chain of causes and effects, each effect becoming a cause, and each cause having been an effect; and each link in this endless chain is welded out of three components, desire, thought and activity. A desire stimulates a thought; a thought embodies itself in an act. Sometimes it is a thought, in the form of a memory, that arouses a desire, and the desire bursts into an act.
But ever the three components—two invisible and belonging to consciousness, one visible and belonging to the body—are there; to speak with perfect accuracy, the act is also in consciousness as an image before it is extruded as a physical movement. Desire—or Will—Thought, Activity, are the three modes of consciousness. This relation of desire, thought and activity as 'action', and the endless interlinkings of such actions as causes and effects, are all included under the word Karma. Hence Karma may be Englished into causation, or the Law of causation.
Its scientific statement is: Karma is thus the expression of the divine nature in its aspect of law. Without these there could be no science, no certitude, no reasoning from the past, no presaging of the future. Human experience would become useless, and life would be a chaotic irrationality. What a man sows, he reaps. If he wants rice, he must sow rice. Useless to plant vines and to expect roses; idle to sow thistle-down and hope for wheat. In the moral and the mental worlds, law is equally changeless; useless to sow idleness, and hope to reap learning; to sow carelessness, and look for discretion; to sow selfishness, and expect love; to sow fear, and hope for courage.
This sane and true teaching bids man study the causes he is setting up by his daily desires, thoughts and actions, and realise their inevitable fruiting. It bids him surrender all the fallacious ideas of 'forgiveness', 'vicarious atonement', 'divine mercy', and the rest of the opiates which superstition offers to the sinner. It cries out as with a trumpet-blast to all those who thus seek to drug. But note the encouraging.
If there is law in the mental and moral world we can build our character; thought makes quality; quality makes character. So with purity, patience, unselfishness, self-control. Steady persevering thought sets up a definite habit of the mind, and that habit manifests itself as a quality in the character.
We can build our character as surely as a mason can build a wall, working with and through the law. Character is the most powerful factor in destiny, and by building a noble character, we can ensure a destiny of usefulness, of service to mankind. As by law we suffer, so by law do we triumph. Ignorance of law leaves us as the rudderless boat drifting on the current. Knowledge of law gives us a helm by which we can steer our ship whithersoever we will. TO the Greek there were three Fates who spun the cord of life. To the knower of the Wisdom there are three Fates also, each of them ever spinning a thread, and the three threads they spin are twisted into one, and form the strong cord of destiny which binds or loosens man's life on earth.
These three Fates are not the women of the Greek legend; they are the three powers of the human consciousness; the power to will, the power to think, the power to act.
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These are the Fates which spin the threads of human destiny, and they are within the man, not outside him. Man's destiny is self-made, not imposed upon him arbitrarily from without; his own powers, blinded by ignorance, spin and twist the cord that fetters him, as his own powers, directed by knowledge, liberate his limbs from the self-imposed shackles, and set him free from bondage. The most important of these three powers is his power to think; man means thinker; it is a Sanskrit root, and from this are derived the English man—identical with the Sanskrit root—the German mann, the French homme, the Italian uomo, etc.
The thread of thought is woven into mental and moral qualities, and these qualities in their totality form what we call character. In the Bible we read: The body follows the mind and imitates its changes; if we concentrate our thought, the eyes become fixed, the muscles tense; an effort to remember is accompanied with a frown; the eyes rove hither and thither, as we seek to recover a lost impression; anxiety, anger, love, impatience, have all their appropriate muscular accompaniments; the feeling which makes a man inclined to throw himself from a height is the inclination of the body to act out the thought of falling.
The first step towards a deliberate creation of character lies, then, in the deliberate choosing of what we will think, and then of thinking persistently on the quality chosen. Ere long there will be a tendency to show that quality; a little longer, and its exercise will have become habitual. We spin the thread of thought into our destiny, and find ourselves with a character bent to all noble and useful ends. As we have thought, we have become. The power to will is the second Fate, and spins a strong thread for the cord of destiny. Will shows itself as desire;.
The strong desire for wealth and success brings them into our grasp; what we will to have, steadily and persistently, that comes to us sooner or later. Fleeting, indeterminate, changing fancies, these have but little attractive force; but the man of strong will obtains that which he wills. This thread of will brings us objects of desire and opportunities for gaining them.
Will makes opportunities and attracts objects. The third thread is spun by the power to act, and this is the thread which brings into our destiny outward happiness or outward misery. As we act towards those around us. The man who spreads happiness round him feels happiness flowing in upon himself; he who makes others unhappy feels the reaction of unhappiness upon himself. Smiles beget smiles, frowns frowns; an irritable person arouses irritability in others. The law of the spinning of this thread is: Our actions affecting others cause a re-action of a similar nature on ourselves.
These are the threads which make destiny, for they make character, opportunity and environment; they are not cut short by death, but stretch onwards into other lives; the thread of thought gives us the character with which we are born into the world; the thread of will brings or withholds opportunities, makes us 'lucky' or 'unlucky'; the thread of act brings us favourable or unfavourable physical conditions.
As we are sowing, so shall we reap; as. Man is the creator of his future; man is the maker of his destiny; man is his own Fate. ONE of the most striking features of the present day is the recognition on all hands of the power of thought, the belief that a man can mould his character, and therefore his destiny, by the exercise of this power which makes him man.
In this our modern ideas are coming into line with the religious teachings of the past. Thought is the parent of action; our nature sets itself to embody that which is generated by thought. Modern psychology states that the body tends to follow out the thought, and traces the inclination felt by some to throw themselves down from a height to the imagination picturing a fall, and the body acting out the picture. There being, then, a practically general appreciation of the power of thought, it becomes a matter of great moment to know how to use this power in the highest possible way and to the greatest possible effect.
This can best be done by the practice of meditation, and one of the.
The Riddle of Life - J. H. Bavinck : Eerdmans
Examining your own character, you pick some distinct defect in it. You then ask yourself, what is its exact opposite, the virtue which is its antithesis. It is the progression of spirit in time, and as we look about and note evolution in our three-dimensional universe, we cannot escape the obvious fact that its path is also three-dimensional, a spiral; each loop of the spiral is a cycle, and cycle follows cycle in unbroken progression, as the loops of the spiral succeed each other, each cycle being the improved product of the preceding and the basis of progress in the succeeding cycles.
A straight line is but the extension of a point, and analogous to the theories of the materialist and the theologians. The materialistic line of existence goes from birth to death; the theologian commences the lines at a point just previous to birth and carries it into the invisible beyond at death. There is no return. Existence thus lived would extract but a minimum of the experience from the school of life, such as might be had by one-dimensional beings incapable of broadening out or rising to sublime heights of attainment.
Everything in Nature has a purpose, the third dimension included. In order that we may live up to the opportunities of a three dimensional universe, the path of evolution must be a spiral. Everywhere in heaven and on earth all things are going onward, upward forever. The modest little plant in the garden and the giant redwood of California with its forty-foot diameter alike show the spiral in the arrangement of their branches, twigs, and leaves.
If we study the great vaulted arch of heaven and examine the spiral nebulae, which are worlds in the making, or the path of the solar systems, the spiral is evidently the way of progression. We find another illustration of spiral progression in the yearly course of our planet. In the spring she emerges from her period of rest, her wintry sleep. We see the life budding everywhere. All the activities of Nature are exerted to bring forth. Time passes; the corn and the grape are ripened and harvested, and again the silence and inactivity of winter take the place of the activity of the summer; again the snowy coverlet wraps the Earth.
But she will not sleep forever; she will wake again to the song of a new spring, and will then be a little farther progressed along the pathway of time. Shall the Earth wake each year from its wintry slumber; shall the tree and the flower live again, and man die? No, that is impossible in a universe governed by immutable law. The same law that wakes the life in the plant to new growth must wake the human being to further progress toward the goal of perfection. Therefore the doctrine of rebirth, or repeated human embodiment in gradually improving vehicles, is in perfect accord with evolution and the phenomena of Nature, when it states that birth and death follow each other in succession.
It is in full harmony with the law of alternating cycles which decrees that activity and rest, ebb and flood, summer and winter, must follow each other in unbroken sequence. It is also in perfect accord with the spiral phase of the Law of Evolution when it states that each time the Spirit returns to a new birth it takes on a better body, and as man progresses in mental, moral, and spiritual attainment in consequence of the accumulated experiences of past lives he comes into an improved environment.
When we seek to solve the riddle of life and death; to find an answer that shall satisfy both head and heart as to the difference in the endowment of human beings, and give a reason for the existence of sorrow and pain; when we ask why one is reared in the lap of luxury while another receives more kicks than crusts; why one obtains a moral education, but another is taught to steal and lie; why one has the face and figure of a Venus, while another has the head of a Medusa; why one has perfect health and another never knows a moment's rest from pain; why one has the intellect of a Socrates, and another can only count "one, two, many," as do the Australian aborigines, we receive no satisfaction from the materialist or the theologian.
Materialism gives the law of heredity as the reason for sickness, and in regard to economic conditions a Spencer tells us that in the animal world the law of existence is "eat, or be eaten"; in civilized society it is "cheat, or be cheated. Like begets like, so far as the FORM is concerned, but heredity does not account for the moral proclivities and mental trend, which differ in each human being.
Heredity is a fact in the lower kingdoms where all the animals of a certain species look nearly alike, eat the same kind of food, and act similarly in similar circumstances, because they have no individual will, but are dominated by a common Group Spirit. In the human kingdom it is different. Each man acts differently from others. Each requires a different diet. As the years of infancy and youth pass the indwelling Ego molds its instrument so that it reflects itself in the features.
Thus no two look exactly alike. Even twins who could not be distinguished in childhood grow to look different as the features of each express the thought of the Ego within. On the moral plane a like condition prevails. Police records show that though the children of habitual criminals generally possess criminal tendencies, they invariably keep out of the courts, and in the "rogues' galleries" of Europe and America it is impossible to find both father and son. Thus criminals are the sons of honest people, and so heredity is unable to account for moral proclivities. When we come to a consideration of the higher intellectual and artistic faculties we find that the children of a genius are mediocre and often even idiots.
Cuvier's brain was the greatest brain ever weighed and analyzed by science. His five children died of paresis. The brother of Alexander the Great was an idiot, and so cases could be cited ad lib. The Law of Attraction, which causes musicians to congregate in concert halls, and brings about meetings of literary people because of similarity of tastes; and the Law of Consequence, which draws one who has developed criminal tendencies into association with criminals, that he may learn to do good by beholding the trouble incident to wrong-doing, account more logically than heredity for the facts of associations and character.
The theologian explains that all conditions are made by the will of God, who in His inscrutable wisdom has seen fit to make some rich and poor; some clever and others dull, etc. But it is hard to look with love to the skies when one realizes that thence, according to divine caprice, comes all our misery, be it little or much, and the benevolent human mind revolts at the thought of a father who lavishes love, comfort, and luxury upon a few, and sends sorrow, suffering, and misery to millions.
Surely there must be another solution to the problems of life than this.
HEAR ABOUT
Is it not more reasonable to think that the theologians may have misinterpreted the Bible than to saddle such monstrous conduct upon God? The Law of Consequence is Nature's law of justice. It decrees that whatever a man sows, he reaps. What we are, what we have, all our good qualities are the result of our labor in the past, thence our talents. What we lack in physical, moral, or mental accomplishments is due to neglect of opportunities in the past or to lack of them, but sometime, somewhere, we shall have other chances, and retrieve the loss.
As to our obligations to others or their debts to us, the Law of Consequence also takes care of that. What cannot be liquidated in one life holds over to future lives. Death does not cancel our obligations any more than moving to another city pays our debts here. The Law of Rebirth provides a new environment, but in it are our old friends, and our old enemies. We know them, too, for when we meet a person for the first time, yet feel as if we had known him all our lives, that is but the recognition of the Ego who pierces the veil of flesh and recognizes an old friend.
When we meet a person who at once inspires us with fear or repugnance, it is again a message from the Ego, warning us of our old-time enemy. But in that larger life of the Ego, each day at school is a life on earth and the night which intervenes between two days at the child's school corresponds to the sleep of death in the larger life of the human Ego the Spirit in man.
In a school there are many grades. The older children who have attended school many times have very different lessons from the tots in the kindergarten. So in the school of life, those in high positions, endowed with great faculties, are our Elder Brothers, and the savages are but entering the lowest class. What they are we have been, and all will in time reach a point where they will be wiser than the wisest we know. Nor should it surprise the philosopher that the powerful crush the weak; the elder children are cruel to their younger brothers at a certain stage of their growth because they have not at that time evolved the true sense of right, but as they grow they learn to protect weakness.
Riddle of Life
So will the children of the larger life. Altruism is flowering more and more everywhere, and the day will come when all men will be as good and benevolent as are the greatest saints. There is but one sin--Ignorance; and but one salvation--Applied Knowledge. All sorrow, suffering and pain are traceable to ignorance of how to act, and the school of life is as necessary to bring out our latent capabilities as is the daily school which evokes those of the child.
It does not matter then what the conditions are in which we find ourselves, the knowledge that WE have made them helps us to bear them in patience; and, best of all, the glorious feeling that we are masters of our destiny and can make the FUTURE what we will, is of itself a power. It rests with us to develop what we lack. Of course we still have the past to reckon with, and perhaps much misfortune may yet accrue from wrong deeds, but if we will cease to do evil we may look with joy to every affliction as liquidating an old score and bringing the day nearer when we shall have a clear record.
It is no valid objection, that often the most upright suffer the greatest. The great intelligences who apportion to each man the amount of his past score which is to be liquidated in each life always help the man who pays the debts of his past without adding new delinquencies, by giving him as much as he can bear, to hasten the day of emancipation; and in that sense it is strictly true that "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. That has no foundation in Nature. It functions in the Desire World; and as distance does not exist there, it can thus influence its members, no matter where located.
These are two entirely different stages of evolution, and it is as impossible for man to incarnate in an animal body as for a Group Spirit to take human shape. But if we realize that we have an entirely new brain at each birth, and that the human Spirit is weak and engrossed in its new environment, so that it fails to make a full impression on the brain in the days of childhood, when it is most sensitive, it is not so surprising after all.