Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX.

EVOLUTION, REBIRTH, AND KARMA

The spiral sweep of Madame Blavatsky's grandiose cosmology carries with it an elaborate rationale of human life. Life is a continuum, says Theosophy, and reincarnation is its evolutionary method, Karma its determinant.

Theosophists feel that in fostering the renaissance in modern Western thought of the idea of rebirth they are presenting a conception of evolution which makes Darwinism but an incident in a larger process. It becomes but a corollary of a more general truth. Darwinism, according to Theosophy, conceives of the evolution of a species or class through the successive advances of a line of individuals, who live and die in the effort to carry some new development forward for their successors. For themselves, they reap no reward--save the precarious satisfaction, while living, of having fought the good fight and kept the line intact.

But reincarnation makes evolution significant for the only thing that does evolve--the individual. The race does not evolve, as it is nothing but a mental figment, and has no permanent organic individuality. It does not exist apart from its individual constituents. The latter are the real and, for Theosophy, permanent existences, and hence, if evolution is to have solid relevance, it must appertain to the continuing life of the conscious units or Monads. It is a conclusion that can be deduced from empirical observation that growth at any stage leads to conditions out of which continued growth springs in the future. In short, the effect of growth, and its significance, is--just more growth.1 The entire program of universal activity is just the procedure of
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1 "Growth is regarded as having an end instead of being and end. . . . In reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth."--John Dewey: Democracy and Education.

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endless growth. with halts and rests at relay stations, but with no termini. The meaning of present growth only comes to light in the products of later growth. But it is a matter of infinite importance whether the growth accruing from the individual's exertions in his life span are effects for him or for another. It is not growth--if one struggle only to die. How can race history have significance if the history of the individuals in it has none? Under Madame Blavatsky's thesis the evolutionary reward of effort will go to the rightful party.

Theosophists base their endorsement of the reincarnation theory upon a number of dialectical considerations.

First there is the "argument from justice." Briefly, this holds that the concept of justice as applicable to mundane affairs can not be upheld on the basis of the data furnished by a one-life existence of human beings, and that if justice is to be predicated of the mundane situation, reincarnation is dialectically a necessary postulate to render the concept tenable. Looking at the world we see conditions that force us to admit the presence of inequalities which, on the theory of but one life spent here, must be interpreted as inequities or iniquities. If the single life here is the entirety of mortal existence, then the cosmos is socially unjust. The concept of justice must go, if, with but one chance for happiness, two persons are placed by forces beyond their control in conditions so flagrantly at variance. The vaunted Love and Justice that are alleged to rule at the heart of Nature become a travesty of even human fair play. No meanest man could wreak such a havoc of injustice in the world; no tyrant could so pitilessly outrage the fitness of things.

But, one may ask the Theosophists, how is it that obvious inequities can become reconstrued as equities, how can cosmic wrongs be turned to cosmic righteousness, merely by admitting additional existences? A wrong today is not made right simply because more days are to follow. Because, the reincarnationist replies, that event which when seen in its isolated setting in the one day's activities, takes on the appearance of injustice, when viewed in its relation to former

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days' doings is discerned to be a sequential event, proper in its time and nature, and fulfilling the requirements of justice in an enlarged scope of reactions. By mounting the hill of this evolutionary hypothesis, one becomes able to locate the grounds of justice over a wider area, to discover them, perhaps, entirely outside the bounds of the one-only life that was observable from the lowlands. The causes of all that one life unfolds for us can not in most cases be found in the occurrences of that life. The assumption that events in life come raw and uncolored ethically is only tenable if we are willing to regard many occurrences as unrelated and uncaused. Holding the theorem that every event in the world's history is a link in a chain of cause and effect, and that no occurrence stands alone as an absolute cause or final effect, modern moral theory (postulating but one life) arbitrarily breaks this continuum in illogical fashion in its assumption that the fortunes of a single life are not exactly the resultants of antecedents adequate to account for them. The vague and uncertain "laws of heredity" are dragged in to adjust the uneven balance of accounts. But they are found incompetent. Nothing can be found in Shakespeare's parents, or in Mozart's, or in Lincoln's to explain the flowering of power and genius in their progeny, or again the sterility of their descendants. Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind? Did Mozart learn to play the organ or his parents, that he could render a sonata on the pipe organ at four? Biological science stands in perplexity before the problems thus presented, and ethical science stands equally baffled by anomalous situations where right and wrong are apparently unaccountable. Theosophy says the difficulty here is that modern theory is trying to understand Chapter XV of the Book of Life without knowing that fourteen chapters have preceded it. The acts and the predicament of an individual today are inexplicable because he has had a long past, which is not known, but which, were it known, would enable us to say: nature is just after all; he has earned his present lot. What the reincarnation program offers is the identification of causation and justice. Things are

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justly caused. The modern eye can not see this because it has refused to view things in their true perspective, and instead sees them as partial, isolated, and out of their context; yet justice reaches its fulfilment in the individual

"Today or after many days."2

One life does not give Nature time to arrange her trial, hear the evidence, and render a verdict. The law of compensation must for the most part await the slow grinding of the mills of God, until its adjustments can be nicely achieved. When we give up the exaggerated mediaeval view of man's importance, and cease to limit to a few thousand years the time allotted the divine plan to work out our salvation, we may be open to the persuasion that to crowd the whole procedure of the law of compensation, with its millions of entangled situations, into the span of a human life, is as egregious an absurdity as that of trying to cram into the Biblical six thousand years the entire evolution of mankind, on a planet which has been fitted for habitation for millions of years. Theosophy affirms that man's life will never be properly interpreted until the whole long course of its unfoldment on the globe is envisaged. The individual is the cumulative product of a long experience, the fruits of which have passed into his subjective life and character, whence, though invisible, they will function as the causes of action. His relation to the past is the most substantial part of his constitution. His present can be explained only in the light of his past, and if our gaze is foreshortened to the scant confines of a single incarnation, the materials for understanding will be wanting.

The protagonist of rebirth attacks the one-life theory also with the argument that it defeats the attempt of the mind to read "meaning" into the terms of the life experience. To be sure, he admits, nobody perhaps can tell just what this consists of, or in what particular aspect of experience it is to be found.3 Ultimate "meaning" of world events is doubt-
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2 Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia.

3 See Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning.

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less another of those abstract finalities which we reach only by a process of infinite regress to sheer negation, like ultimate being and ultimate reality, or ultimate substance. But it is permissible to employ the term for the purposes of the argument in its commonly accepted sense of the later outcome, result or eventuation of a set of conditions at any time prevalent, in accordance with the design of some directing intelligence. In this general sense the term is more or less equivalent to effect or consequence, now hidden but eventually revealed. The present or past comes to meaning in the future. The reincarnationist, of course, casts his "meanings" in the stream of an assumed teleological evolution-process.

But if "meaning" is thus assumed to be discoverable within the constant flow of things, the difficulty arises that it proves to be an ever-receding entity like a shadow. When we try to stabilize or grasp it, it has moved forward out of reach. The Theosophist's solution is, of course, that the ultimate and stable meaning of things in a temporal sequence is to be found only in that higher level of consciousness in which past, present, and future are gathered up in one eternal Now. The meaning of events in their three-dimensional aspects of time, space, and causality must be located in a four-dimensional world of consciousness, where the extended life history of the series appears as a unit. As all directions merge into one in the center of a circle, or at the pole of the earth, so all relations merge into a fixity of character in the center of consciousness. Down (or out) here, says the Theosophist, we are in a realm of relativity; we can not look for absolute meaning. All significance is relative, to the past, as cause, to the future, as effect. No event can have meaning if lifted out of the continuum and viewed by itself alone. An occurrence is the product of its precedents and the cause of its consequents. A single life, therefore, has meaning, only when scanned as one of a series. It is admittedly but a fragment of the life of the race; Theosophy adds that it is but a fragment of the life of the individual.

By this line of reasoning the occultist arrives at his grand

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conclusion: it is meaningless, first from man's viewpoint, for him to live but one physical life on Earth or any planet; it would be equally meaningless, from the viewpoint of a Cosmic Mind (if the laws of logic, the connotations of "meaning," are laws of all mind) to have man live but one such life. For a Deity to send us down here but once would be without logic or sense--as senseless as for a parent to send the child to school for one day only, or one term. Thus Theosophic argument sees the one-life theory reduced to absurdity.

The race's one sure verdict about this life is that it wants completeness and self-sufficiency. To what larger experience is it then related? And if related in some way to a hidden history of infinite reach and significance, where is the logic of the relation which brings us out of that infinite sea of other being for only one brief dip into the life of matter? Certain metaphysical schools of thought would answer that we go on progressing infinitely in the ethereal worlds. That very affirmation, says the occultist, makes the one life here infinitely illogical: on what imaginable basis can one mundane life be necessarily related to an infinite spiritual existence? Even were it whole, successful, and well-rounded, it would stand as but one moment somehow postulated as determining eternity. But suppose that one dies in infancy, or has every effort to live well thwarted?--the necessary inclusion of one physical life in a totality of indefinite being is empirically shown as invalid. To get a logical picture, in the Theosophist's view, you must trace a long series of short life-lines at intervals along your line of infinite being, and only then does the possibility arise of discerning logical structure, interrelation, and the "meanings" hidden in successive stages of growth.

Occultism points to another irrationality in the mundane situation if one life is predicated. It says briefly that we are only beginning to learn wisdom and the art of life, when we are torn away from the arena where those fruits of our experience can best be exploited. What irrationality possesses Nature that she exerts a tremendous effort to evolve in us gifts, faculties, and knowledge only to throw her mechanism

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away when she is just about to get us in shape for some good? Nature is thus convicted of being a prodigious spendthrift--unless she has a means of conserving the fruits of our present experience and putting them into practice in a later cycle. Unless we live again to profit by what we have learned, Nature is seen to create values only to destroy them. The only logical alternative is to believe that we reincarnate to carry on with the values and the capacities we have developed in our former turns at the earthly chores. Then Nature does not waste her products, but uses them as tools for further operations.

Again, Theosophy declares that philosophy in the West will find no place in which to deposit value unless it accepts the rebirth idea. Philosophy--the attempt to locate reality and permanent value--has been baffled in its effort because the organism in which it has presumed to find the value of evolution localized persists in dying under its eye. It has nowhere to place value except in the race, the components of which are constantly vanishing. Value can not be located in any structure which will continue to hold it. The race is a fiction, at any rate, and if the individual can not hold his gains, Nature can not be said to have achieved any progress that will be permanent. If the individual can not reap what he has sown, there is chaos in the counsels of evolution. If experience is to head up somewhere so as to become capital, Theosophy says it must do so in the individual. The very reason, affirms the esotericist, that the Greeks, that all races, "lost their nerve," lost their zest for earth life and turned away from it to an hypothecated heaven as a compensation for its unbearable hardships, was that in the face of death, at the relentless approach of what appeared to spell the doom of all one's efforts and one's loves, they were not fortified with the saving knowledge that the good done in this life was "made safe for permanency."

The Theosophist's case for reincarnation may be concluded with a quotation from L. Adams Beck,4 popular publicist of Orientalism, as follows:
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4 Article in The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1926.

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"Therefore the logic of the Orient has seen as necessary the return of man to the area of experience . . . and if the truth of that law be denied, I have never heard from either priest or prophet any explanation of the mysteries or the apparent injustices of life. Seen by its light they are set at once in luminous clarity. That the earliest Christianity was itself imbued with belief in this fundamental law there can be no doubt, though it was soon overlaid with the easier, less individually responsible and more primitive teaching of interference by angry or placated Deity, and of the general supernatural order of things which commends itself to more primitive man and places his interests in the hands of intercessors or priests. It is much simpler as well as more comfortable to believe that intercession can obliterate a life's transgressions affecting millions of men or events, and a moment's penance fix an eternal destiny. So the Western churches set aside the great stream of philosophy and shut their eyes to its implications."

Here, alleges the Theosophist, was the real loss of nerve on the part of the human race. And it was the Christian theology that caused it. The Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins is regarded by the Orientals as a cheap and tawdry device of a cowardly spirit. The readoption of the rebirth hypothesis, avers the Theosophist, would yield for humanity the immense boon of a restored faith in the universal law of causality. Because our concept of inviolable law in every realm of life has been shattered, or left to stand unsupported by cosmic fact, we have reaped the natural harvest of a lawless age. The idea of salvation has taught us that law can be shirked, evaded, bought off.

The second great argument for reincarnation is "the argument from cyclic law." This is a deduction from a known process of nature, and not the postulate of a procedure in nature. Nature's activity is said to be but the play of the one Energy, manifesting to our eyes in countless modifications of the same general laws. There are not many laws in nature, but one law, taking on a variety of modes in adaptation to varying conditions and instruments. In a certain deep sense, then, all natural processes are analogous, the occultist tells us. Life knows but the one Law and all its manifestations typify it. On this generalization the Theosophists have justi-

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fied their employment of the law of analogy, which figures so extensively in the cosmology and methodology of the cult. The principle is stated in Theosophic terminology in the phrase, "As above so below." As in the macrocosm so in the microcosm. As in heaven (ideally), so on earth (physically). As in the universe at large, so in man, its image. Conceiving this principle as substantiated by empirical observation of the universe itself, the Theosophist proceeds to look at nature, and there observes in her mechanics a certain modus. She works by methods which suggest the terms periodic, cyclic, rhythmic. In the fields of natural science such processes are to be noted with considerable frequency. Chemistry, physics, music, biology, astronomy, and physiology yield instances. It was the thought of many an ancient philosophy that life runs in ever-revolving cycles. It has been affirmed that rhythmic pulsation is nature's invariable law. All life processes exhibit some form or other of the wave-motion principle. Inorganic nature shows it no less than organic. The atom itself displays an orbital swing; the stars gyrate in cycles. All force flows out in the form of a rhythmic or periodic beat in the pulse of energy. Vibration appears to be the very essence of such things as light, color, sound, music, electricity, magnetism, heat, pressure, radio wave, X, N, alpha, beta, gamma, and the cosmic rays. Next the process of plant life, with startling clearness, reveal the same orderly periodicity of function. The pulse, the breathing, alternation of work and rest, of expenditure and repair, of intermittent fevers, are some of the more pronounced and observable evidences of this law, in the realm of the bodily mechanism. Life appears to be vibrational.

The Theosophist, too, points to each day as a miniature cycle, representative of the larger cycle of a life. It exemplifies the endless succession of active life and (comparative or partial) death for the human personality, in which respect the latter is seen as reflecting the nature of the Absolute Being, Brahm. Each day, furthermore, is to a degree an

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actual reincarnation; for the soul returns not to the same body, but to one vastly changed in cell structure and component elements throughout. The same soul takes up its life in a renewed body each day! Why, then, argues Theosophy, should the idea of reincarnation seem so bizarre and objectionable to the mind, when it is the recognized daily law of our being?

Outside the life of man, in the life of nature, the same procedure is revealed on an even larger scale. The life, the soul, of the vegetable kingdom (and of even large portions of the animal kingdom) reincarnates each springtime. The life energies of the plant world come to being in new forms. When these end their cycle, life withdraws into immaterial status for the winter. But it sleeps only to wake again. There is no commoner fact than reincarnation, the Theosophist reminds us; it is all about us and within us. And so we are asked: Does nature omit human life in its universal law of rhythmic progression? If so, it is the only place in the entire life of the cosmos, where periodical repetition of process is not found.

If it be objected that this is mere reasoning from analogy, the occultist rejoins that it is more: it is the application of a law seen to be applicable everywhere else in the universe to a particular portion of the universe. It is again, as in the argument from justice, the postulation of law for an area of experience to which we--in the West--do not believe or know that the law applies. The Oriental covers all life with his blanket of law; we segregate a portion of life from the rest and make it lawless. He says that history is rhythmic, racial life is rhythmic, planetary life is rhythmic, solar life is rhythmic and that even the life of God, Brahm, the Absolute, is rhythmic. Is the life of man then the only thing not rhythmic? A single life from this point of view seems to be a weird anomaly.

If one asks the Theosophist,--How does the individual survive and carry forward his values?--he advances an elaborate scheme based on knowledge allegedly obtained from the Supermen.

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The peregrinations of the individual unit of consciousness through the worlds is but a minor detail in a vastly larger mechanism. Theosophy elaborates Platonic psychology by teaching that we have at least three principles lower than the spiritual one which survives. At any rate the outer part of us is but a temporary construction; the inner or subjective part of us is in truth the real "we." The body and several etheric or semi-material "souls" are but the temples, for a period, of the immortal spirit. If we may use St. Paul's language again, when the "natural body" disintegrates, we still have a "spiritual body" in which our unit of spirit functions and retains its identity. The Theosophist calls this underlying vehicle his "causal body," because in it are gathered up the effects of the causes he has generated in his various earth lives. That more ethereal vesture is the principle or part of the principle, that links the individual Ego to the permanent home of the human entity.

Man in his real inner nature is a unit portion of (originally) undifferentiated cosmic Being. He is a fragment of God, but plunged now in conditions described as material, for the purpose, as often stated, of lifting the blank spiritual consciousness of the Monad to acute spiritual self-consciousness. He must have traversed the whole vast gamut of the systems to make his experience complete. For the purposes of this varied experience he must clothe himself in garments of the matter composing the plane of life on which he finds himself; and as matter subsists in varying grades of density, as solid, liquid, gaseous, etheric, he must be provided with a garment of each type of material. This makes him a multiple being. Each garment of matter becomes his instrument of contact with the life of that plane. He thus expresses himself in a different capacity on each plane. In the world in which he now is he has his permanent body, the causal, and three temporary vestures through which he reacts to the vibrations of sensation (through his physical body),

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emotion (through his astral or kamic body), and thought (through his mental body). The Ego, the lord of the body, can project his attention, or his focus of force, into any one of the three. He is the animating principle of all. He himself dwells aloft and surveys the results of his contact with the three worlds below. These contacts constitute his experience. No touch of experience is ever lost or forgotten. It is the postulate of Theosophy that on the substrate ether of nature there is an indelible record of every impression. Each one has inscribed his own history ineradicably on the Astral Light or Akasha. The causal body, like the brain in the nervous system, receives the inner and ultimate impress of each stimulus from the outer world and records it there in perpetuity. So equipped, both for time and for eternity, man makes his début upon the earth level again and again, and takes back into himself each time a harvest of experience. But what becomes of him after physical death? He lives on in his causal body on its own plane--Devachan, the "heaven world"--after having dropped first his physical body, then his astral and finally his lower mental. It is the soul's time for rest, for assimilation, for renewal. The soul is not omniscient in its own right, except potentially. Its experiences in the lower worlds are calculated to unfold its latent powers. Normally the spirit of man, on these sublimated levels of the immaterial world, does not have full cognizance of its every act while in the lower realms. Our sojourn on earth is in a manner an exile from our true home. The difference in vibration rate between the two levels of life makes it impossible either for the fragment of the soul in flesh to remember its former high condition, except in flashes, or for the higher Ego in the supernal regions to know what its lower counterpart is doing. However there are moments when a line of communication is established. During earth life the lower fragment is occasionally elevated to a momentary rapport with its higher Self, and in that instant receives a whole volume of helpful instruction, advice, or inspiration. These are the experiences that change the whole view and alter a life. On the other

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hand the higher principle at least twice during the sojourn of its lower self in the causal body is put in touch with its earthly life. Just after the conclusion of each earth period, and again just before the commencement of the next, the soul is granted a view of its total history, retrospective in the first case and prospective in the second. The first of these experiences may occur while the soul is still in the body just before death, or, most commonly, in the finer sheaths just after it.5 It is an elevation of normal consciousness to a high pitch and covers a complete survey of the whole past life, with emphasis on the inner moral value of its acts.6 The Ego, in the light of this panoramic retrospect, is put in position to reflect over its past, note its progress, evaluate its record in relation to total evolutionary requirements, and is thus enabled to fix permanently the gain made, the faculty sharpened, the insight deepened, the poise established, and the capacity developed.

In similar fashion, just preceding its outgoing upon another mundane adventure the Ego, aided by higher and more resourceful beings known as the Lords of Karma, is shown in a summary manner the situation in which he stands in relation to cosmic evolution, the stage he has reached, the next succeeding problems to be met, the ground to be covered, and the possibilities of a variety of careers open to him in his next dip into concrete experience. In view of the most important considerations involved in this manifold situation, the Ego himself makes the choice of his next environment and personality! It is the man himself who prearranges the main outlines of his coming life on earth, and the great Lords of Karma aid him to carry his chosen plan into execution. We ourselves preside over our next-life
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5 The instantaneous (from our point of view) retrospect of our whole past life in elaborate detail recounted by thousands of persons who had drowned or suffocated or fallen or been struck a blow, and lived to tell the tale, are, say Theosophists, instances of the vision falling this side of death. Nor is the phenomenon wanting with persons who pass out peacefully on their beds. The rapturous prevision of heaven usually includes elements of a life review.

6 Persons who have slept but ten seconds of clock time have told of the richness and vividness of this type of consciousness, in which the events of a lifetime are reviewed, weighed, and morally judged in a moment.

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destiny. But we make that choice, not at random, but in strictly logical relation to the total retrospective view. Being shown in a moment of vivid lucidity what we have next to learn, we make our selection of ways and means to meet the immediate requirements of the situation. Our choice is not entirely free, for we must choose with reference to past obligations and karmic encumbrances, which must be liquidated. The soul with vision opened in the world of causes, sees oftentimes that salvation, progress, lies in no other course. The lower entity would not so choose, to be sure, but the higher Ego sees better what is good for its lower self to undergo. An outwardly untoward condition may provide the requisite setting for the working out of some particular moral advance. So he chooses his own parents, the race, nation or locale of his next life, the type of physical personality he will animate, the specific phases of character he will seek to build up. It is likely that he will aim to concentrate his experience upon the development of some one virtue which he has sadly lacked hitherto, and will choose a situation with a view to its influence in that direction. He must acquire all the virtues one after another.

His choice once made, the veil of Lethe is again drawn over his vision, the two elements of his being are again drawn apart into their separate spheres, and the lower man descends into the world of matter for another trial at life. But he is now oblivious of the fact that it was his own wish to be thrown into the habitat where he finds himself. He may either wonder at the fortunate fate that has befallen him, or rebel against a seeming injustice. He seeks happiness in diverse ways, but is seldom satisfied with what he gets. What he is sure to get, however, in whatever direction he may seek, is experience. And this is the one thing that evolution is concerned about. Growth, not happiness (except incidentally), is the goal of his life. Under the illusion that happiness may be found in this condition or in that, he will plunge into all sorts of experiences, which will prove educative.

There is much detail in connection with the methods used

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by nature to effect the transition of the soul into and out of the successive bodies. At death the Ego drops first the physical vehicle, which goes back to its mineral components. For a brief time thereafter it has for its outermost and densest sheath the etheric double, pictures of which have been caught in photography, and the material of which is the ectoplasm of the Spiritualists. All the finer bodies, be it understood, interpenetrate the physical and each other in turn, as solid, liquid, gas, and ether might be put into the same earthly vessel. The dropping of the outermost leaves the others intact and capable of freer activity. The occasional appearance of the etheric double, which while it lasts, has an affinity for the physical body, gives us the basis for ghost stories. It is not usually discernible by normal vision, but can be seen by sensitives. After a few weeks at most this body likewise disintegrates, and the astral body is then the peripheral envelope. It keeps the Ego within the realm of emotional vibrations, and in this world the experiences which the Ego shared of this sort must be digested. The consciousness of the Ego must tarry on this plane until the strength of his desire and passional nature wears itself out, and he is purged of gross feeling. After months or a few years the astral in turn disintegrates. This leaves but one of the "onion-peels" to be thrown off before the soul is released finally from the interests and tendencies that held it on earth. This is the lower manas, or lower mental body, whose material responds to the energies of thought. As the physical body is absent, the forces going into concrete thought expend themselves, so to say, in thin air, until this body of "mind-stuff" eventually dissolves, like the others. The soul is then housed only in its spirit body, in which it abides until, after a long rest, it feels again the urge for additional physical experience.

The nature of the soul's life in the body of spirit is practically beyond the resources of human description. We can only conceive of it by making the effort to picture the play of immaterial vibrational energies apart from a mechanism. Its manifestations in terms of our cognitions are those of unimaginable bliss, buoyancy, elation, and vividness. It is

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the heaven world which all mystical religions have striven to depict. The tradition of its glories has served as the basic fact in all religions of post-modern compensation. Theosophy names it Deva-Chan, the home of the Devas. During the soul's residence there it bathes itself in the currents of finer energy, which serve to renew its vitality, somewhat depleted by its last contacts with the coarser vibrations of earth life. (The analogy with the nightly recuperation from the day's fatigues is obvious here.) The Theosophists and the Orientals have fixed the length of this interim roughly at 1,500 years, but analogy with human life would indicate a shorter duration. It is said, however, that the rest periods shorten as evolution proceeds, until finally an advanced Ego requires but a few years between incarnations. The less experienced souls require more rest.

However long or short, the soul's sleep, or life in the ethereal realms, comes to an end and the craving for another day's activities asserts itself. It is given the preliminary vision already spoken of, and then it begins its "descent" from a world of subtle to a world of coarse vibrations. A vibratory energy has the power to organize matter of appropriate constitution. The ideal forces of the Ego, emanating from the higher planes, contact in turn each lower plane, throw the matter of each plane into organization along the lines of magnetic radiation marked out by the subtle energies in play, and thus construct bodies shaped by their own inner nature. In this way the Ego builds up successively a lower mental, an astral, an etheric, and a new physical body. Taking possession of the last is a gradual process, which begins in reality about the age of seven and is not completed, we are told, until the later stages of youth. Before seven the infant body is said to be in control of an elemental entity or animal soul, a being quite distinct from the Ego himself. The Ego hovering over it, must make a gradual adaptation of its new home to its own nature, and the process is sometimes not easy. Sometimes the Ego realizes after a time of observation and trial that the young body is not capable of being properly used for a life period, and re-

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nounces its attempt to ensoul it. The body then languishes and is carried off by death.

With all its new vehicles gathered around it, the soul begins to function in the earth life once more. Its equipment is now complete for registering every type of contact, physical, emotional, and mental, and this activity constitutes its life. The new bodies are built on the model of the inner character, which as we have seen, has been preserved in germinal form within the depths of the spiritual organization, in a fashion analogous to the vegetable seed. All the bodies are thus the tell-tale indices of the inner nature. Our character comes to expressive form in our garments of flesh, feeling, and thought. The results of former practice, training, discipline, skill come to light as inherent ability, natural brilliancy, precocity, genius. We think these are the gifts of the child's parents. But the parents only furnish a fine body in which a fine soul may fitly incarnate. By the law of affinity a fine soul would not be drawn to a coarse body. Such a combination would also infringe the law of justice.

Naturally the question as to why we do not remember our former lives arises here. Theosophy explains, firstly, that many people have remembered their former lives, and, secondly, that the reason most of us do not is that the Ego, which does remember, can not easily impress its memories upon the new personality. At each rebirth the soul finds itself in a totally new body of flesh, and the old life must express itself through a new nervous mechanism, with a new brain. The lower personality does not have any memory of its former experiences, because they were strictly not its experiences. Those experiences were registered on another brain which is now mouldered away, and only the digest, the moral quintessence of those activities has been preserved, and even they have accrued to the higher Ego, not to the personality. As it is the purpose of our long evolution to effect the union between the lower and the higher personalities, we shall eventually come to the time when the Ego will be able to bring its accumulated memory of all its past through to the brain of the man on earth.

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The occult psychologist asserts that by hypnotic methods one can be made to catch glimpses of his past life or lives through the subconscious mind. Likewise Oriental Yoga claims that without hypnotism, resolute mental control will enable the consciousness to penetrate into this past field. Theosophists allege that their practiced clairvoyants can at will direct their vision upon a person's former lives, and many records of these investigations have been published.

Indissolubly connected with the idea of reincarnation is the doctrine of Karma. If reincarnation is the method by which the individual reaps what he has sown, Karma is the principle back of the method. Reincarnation is the technique of justice in the universe, and hence Karma is the ¢rc» or deterministic principle. It is the law of necessity that determines the play of forces in evolution; it is in plain terms the law of cause and effect, of the equivalence of action and reaction. The word in Sanskrit etymology means "action." Acts bind the actor to consequences. Actions produce movements in the currents of evolutionary forces. The law which guides these forces into their inevitable courses and eventuations, is the law of Karma. It is the law of equilibrium and balance, the law of compensation. Nature abhors a moral vacuum (which the Theosophist alleges exists in want of the rebirth hypothesis) as she does a physical one, and Karma is the pressure which she brings to bear about and upon a moral deficiency to remove it.

A widespread idea has grown up among non-Theosophists that Karma means retributive punishment. This is essentially a misconception, though a certain measure of the law's operation may take a form roughly resembling that which punishment might take. But nature does not say to the culprit, "You have done wrong; now take that!" She says to him, "You have done wrong; now see what it has brought you." She does not hit back, even to redeem; she attaches consequences to acts.

There is much misunderstanding upon this point, even

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among Theosophists. It is a common expression among them, when some one is mentioned as having met with mishap, that it is the working out of his evil Karma. This may be crudely correct, yet it is more likely to be a misinterpretation of the doctrine. The educative value of experience may at times point to the future, and not always to the past. We live to learn, and we learn in order to move on to more expanded life. We can not be eternally paying off old scores. A strenuous ordeal may be the beginning of a new education, not the graduation from an old one. The Ego must be confronted with new problems and come into its heritage of evolved capacity through the solution of new difficulties. Much misconstrued "bad Karma" is simply our embroilment in new problems for our advanced lessons in the ars maius vivendi. It is thus difficult to dogmatize about the significance of karmic disabilities or predicaments. Strictly, in a sense, both past and future references are indicated in any experience. Karma links us all to the chain of cause and effect through the entire time process.

Not only are the causes set up by the individual persons bound to work out to fruition, but there is also what is called collective Karma. Wherever bodies or groups of people act together, as in a senate, a tribe, or a mob, their collective action must bear its fruit like any other action. Karma engendered aggregately must, of course, be carried aggregately. A nation or a race may be guilty of wrong on a colossal scale; reincarnation must reassemble these groups in order that the totality of responsible persons may pay the debt. A senate declares war: millions are killed; that senate, acting well or ill, must be brought within the sweep of the reaction later on. So there is community Karma, tribal Karma, national, racial, and other types of collective Karma. An organization such as the Church, the Government, even conventional social mentality, has its Karma, and not only the individual members of these groups, but more especially the single heads of them, must bear in themselves the brunt of nature's subsequent reactions.7
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7 On page 646 of Vol. I, our seeress makes what looks like a prophecy of the World

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We are now ready to ask what the goal of all this long evolutionary training of the individual or groups may be. What is the purpose and in what will it eventuate? Or will the law of spiral growth carry us round and round eternally? That the question is one of primary importance is indicated by the fact that the answers commonly advanced for it have given determinate shape to most of the Oriental religions. The point at issue has been the central theme of the great religious faiths, and a dominant consideration in their ethical systems.

The answer accepted by Theosophy is--Nirvana. In much Oriental thought mortal life is endured only because it leads to Nirvana. The Buddhist philosophies of escape contemplate the bliss of Nirvana as the eventual house of refuge from these existences in the conditions of time, relativity, and imperfection.

But the Oriental does not seek annihilation. The West has discovered, or is discovering, that the interpretations forced upon the term Nirvana by its early scholars and Orientalists have missed the point quite decidedly. Opinion has wavered for a long time but inclines now to believe that the concept behind the term does not connote total extinction of conscious being. Oldenburg contended that it meant "a state beyond the conception or reason," and that satisfies most Orientals. Theosophy has, with practical unanimity, taken the position that it implies in no sense an annihilation of being, but that it does quite definitely involve the extinction of the personality of man. The personality, Theosophy claims, is only a temporary shadow of the man anyway, and its eventual dispersion and annihilation is highly desirable as liberating the true Self from hampering obstruction in the exercise of his full capacities for life. This lower counterpart or representative of the inner Self is what the Buddhists and Theosophists declare is destined for annihilation, partly at the end of each life, completely at the end of the cycle. But the eradication of his personality permits
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War of 1914: "Europe in general is threatened with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm which her own cycle of racial Karma has led her to."

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him a grander, freer life than ever before. Many schools of Hindu thought regard Nirvana as a life of bliss. This is a postulate of Theosophy likewise. Nirvana, then, instead of being the extinction of consciousness, is the elevation of consciousness to a state of ineffable splendor and ecstasy. Feeling, thought, sensation are lost in the beatific vision.

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