In his talk, "What Reincarnates?" printed in The Friendly Philosopher, Mr. Crosbie observes, "What reincarnates is a mystery to many minds because they find a difficulty in understanding such a permanency as must stand behind repeated incarnations." If we ask a question at all about whether we lived before, and whether we are going to live again in this body after death, we are implying that there is something permanent, which is capable of existing, apart from this body—or even apart from the personality. In The Key to Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky distinguishes between the Individuality and the Personality. She remarks that when you say, "I am," that is your sense of being an Individual. But, if you say, "I am Mr. Brown," that is a complex idea—it is really the "I" wrapped up in a particular temperament and personality. Mr. Crosbie comments: "Theosophy presents a larger view in showing that a man is not his body, because the body is continually changing; that man is not his mind, because he is constantly changing his mind; that there is in man a permanency, which is the identity throughout all kinds of embodiments." We observe that the child practically doubles its weight in the first six months, but that doesn't mean its identity has changed.
This idea of "all kinds of embodiments" is very interesting. Mr. Judge writes in The Ocean of Theosophy that the world is made up of Consciousness and Substance—Spirit and Matter. When they combine, the same Spirit is being embodied in various forms of matter. Matter is indestructible, but not the forms. Matter persists, although the particular form crumbles. But the same matter is used to make another form and this is called reembodiment. Mr. Judge writes, "Now the moment we postulate a double evolution, physical and spiritual, we have at the same time to admit that it can only be carried on by reincarnation." For alone in the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation is the answer to all the problems of life and the force that will make man pursue what they convey in theory.
If there is anything other than matter in man, then the question arises, how are the two linked together? In the early centuries of the Christian era, there was a great argument in the Western world about the doctrine of preexistence—i.e., the doctrine of existence of the soul before it is born. Opinion was divided on this matter. Five hundred years after Jesus, in the Council of Constantinople, the doctrine of reincarnation was anathematized.
If one regards a human being as essentially his body—and considers the feelings, the mind, etc., as a kind of by-product of biological processes—then the only logical belief he can hold is that he has neither lived before nor will he live after death. But anyone who thinks the mind, the consciousness, the soul are independent of body, may ask the question, "What is their nature?" The philosophers observe that by its nature consciousness must be continuous and not liable to be interrupted or ended. If there are only two aspects to this universe—consciousness and matter—and if we do not accept that consciousness is the result of matter, then there is nothing to restart consciousness if it is interrupted. Since matter cannot restart consciousness, it is only logical to conclude that consciousness cannot be interrupted—even by death. However, for most of us, death does interrupt something else—it interrupts memory. There are different aspects to memory—some of them depend on the physical body and brain as the apparatus.
Mr. "X" becomes so in virtue of particular tendencies and characteristics that are assembled for this birth—the Buddhist philosophers call it skandhas, while the modern scientists describe it as genetic inheritance. Naturally this apparatus cannot tell anything about what happened before the birth of that body. However, there is something, the real "I" or the individuality, which uses certain instruments and vestures at one time and other instruments and vestures at another time. Mme. Blavatsky uses the simile of an actor performing many roles, to explain the relationship between the individuality and the personality. During one lifetime you appear as a particular kind of person and that is like performing one role. A good actor, immersed in the performance of his role, may almost forget that he is Mr. So-and-So. Mme Blavatsky remarks that in our lives unfortunately this ignorance of who we really are, is but too real. We get so involved in performing the role, which is our personality in this life, that we simply have forgotten what we really are—independently of this particular personality.
The whole question of "Have we lived before?" depends on whether we believe in the existence of an identity apart from the personality. As Mr. Crosbie points out, we change at the level of body, mind and emotions. We speak of a person as having mellowed as he grew older and having been very rough and temperamental as a young man. What keeps changing is not exactly our identity; we use it; it is closely associated with us. Anyone who has practised meditation, knows that the first step is to withdraw from identification with the physical body. The Buddha taught that what you call "yourself" is really a stream of changing conditions and not a lasting entity. Once we grasp this, we are able to see that the death of the physical body is not the end, because the body is not the whole of the man. When a person loses weight or gains weight, we do not say he is another person. If a young man goes abroad and acquires many degrees, do his friends and relations think he has become somebody else? Well, no! So there is this underlying permanence, and at the same time there is a constant change on the visible level which has to be understood.
Thus, we may postulate a real being who exists even before the body is born, and who enters the body and assumes a personality like an actor putting on the costume for the performance of a particular role.
There are many kinds of memory. The simple physical memory in any case is very unreliable. After all, we do not really remember what we had for breakfast a year or two ago. But what we ate has gone into us and sustained our body and energy. As the little old hymn says, whatever Miss "T" eats becomes Miss "T." In that sense, the body remembers that old breakfast, but we have no conscious memory of it. However, there is another kind of memory called reminiscense—the memory of the Soul. Mme. Blavatsky argues that to get convinced of the fact of reincarnation and past lives one must put oneself en rapport with one's own permanent ego, not one's evanescent memory. The fact that we do not remember has nothing to do with whether the event took place or not, or whether something existed or not. But then if we do not remember, how do we know that it existed at all? This is the important thing. Here we must regard for a moment reincarnation as a necessary hypothesis, which arises out of the very nature of life.
Mme. Blavatsky writes in The Key to Theosophy (pp. 139-40):
When your modern philosophers will have succeeded in showing to us a good reason why so many apparently innocent and good men are born only to suffer during a whole lifetime; why so many are born poor unto starvation in the slums of great cities, abandoned by fate and men; why, while these are born in the gutter, others open their eyes to light in palaces....when this, and much more, is satisfactorily explained by either your philosophers or theologians, then only, but not till then, you will have the right to reject the theory of reincarnation.
Why do we have this strange amalgam of everything—of inborn qualities, appearance, health, circumstances in life, money, access to education, etc.? If we have not lived before, then all these seem to have been randomly acquired. For no reason at all, one man is intelligent and the other is a moron! One man has a comfortable home life and encouragement to study at school and college, while the other—perhaps possessed of a very high I.Q.—cannot get a decent education. To explain this, we must accept a preexistence, where causes had been set in motion.
Reincarnation has to be understood together with the twin doctrine of Karma. According to the doctrine of Karma, the previous actions of the permanent being—the soul within—lead the ego from one set of factors to the next. Thus:
That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields!
The sesamum was sesamum, the corn
Was corn. The Silence and the Darkness knew!
So is a man's fate born. (The Light of Asia)
That is the beaqutiful turn of poetic phrase. The silence and the darkness know—life is not random or accidental. In the silence and the darkness, the seed is beneath the earth, and the seed of sesasum is to grow up as a sesamum plant, it is not going to grow up as something else. How does it proceed?
No matter how tightly bound our present circumstances and position may be, what we do now will change it. Then from here we can move onwards. But when we live the life necessary, learning from life and doing good for evil, then comes a time when we do not have to take birth again.
Through the Gates of Gold speaks of the soul's desire for sensation in a technical sense. It is the desire for all forms of experience. Both pleasant and painful experiences form the raw material necessary for developing potential powers and faculties, which are there in every human soul. The true self within does not change—it watches, it learns. So long as this process is incomplete, there remains the desire for sensation and for experience in the outer world.
Acting in this world we create debts, towards others. As people say rather cynically, "There is no such thing as a free lunch." We are all interdependent. We cannot form a link at one time because it suits our needs and then drop that link when we please. People often do that. For instance, when they have risen in life, they want to drop old acquaintances who do not have the same standing in life. In the true sense, however, the relationships continue, whether we like it or not. What we owe, has to be paid back some time. But also, we shall get unexpected help and unexpected friendship. There is so much to our life that we do not understand. Our present life does not make sense. The twin doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma are simply a kind of unavoidable hypothesis to make sense of life itself.
To this purely theoretical structure, confirmation is given by some exceptional people. Some very great beings like Buddha have said unequivocally that they remembered their past lives. How is this possible? Ordinarily, the memory of the immortal soul and the memory of the personal man working in the brain, are not very well attuned to each other. But as spiritual discipline proceeds, man stops identifying himself with these changeable external factors. A time comes when the actor stops being preoccupied with the role he is playing. He can step back during the interval and remember that he is Sir Lawrence Olivier and not Hamlet. When the two levels come to an attunement, the immortal ego can impress its memory on the personal consciousness. At certain times in meditation such attunement takes place. When a person reaches a stage of Samma Sambodhi, he has the total memory of all his experiences in the manifested universe.
Mme. Blavatsky writes about life as seen in the light of these doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma, thus:
For logic, consistency, profound philosophy, divine mercy and equity, this doctrine of Reincarnation has not its equal on earth....From strength to strength, from the beauty and perfection of one plane to the greater beauty and perfection of another, with accessions of new glory, of fresh knowledge and power in each cycle, such is the destiny of every Ego, which thus becomes its own Saviour in each world and incarnation. (The Key to Theosophy, p. 152)
Confucius said, "The good man does not grieve that other people do not recognize his merits. His only anxiety is lest he should fail to recognize theirs."
—Analects