by
[2nd edition]
1932
THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE, CHENNAI (ADYAR),
This essay
was written from a report of a lecture given in S. Andrew's Hall, Glasgow, in
March, 1912, with the Lord Provost of
1.
THERE is probably no
man now living in the scientific world who does not regard the theory of
physical evolution as beyond dispute; there may be many varieties of opinion
with regard to details and methods of evolution, but on the fundamental fact,
that forms have proceeded from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, there is
complete harmony of educated opinion. Moreover, the evolutionary idea dominates
all departments of thought, and is applied to society as much as to the
individual. In history it is used as the master-key wherewith to unlock the
problems of the growth of nations, and, in sociology, of the progress of
civilisations. The rise, the decay, the fall of races are illuminated by this
all-pervading idea, and it is difficult now for anyone to throw himself in
thought back into the time when law gave way to miracle, and order was replaced
by fortuitous irregularity.
2.
In working up to the
hypothesis of evolution small indications were searched for, as much as long
successions were observed. Things apparently trifling were placed on record,
and phenomena apparently trivial were noted with meticulous care. Above all,
any incident which seemed to conflict with a recognised law of nature was
minutely observed and repeatedly scrutinised, since it might be the indication
of some force as yet undiscovered, of some hidden law working along lines as
yet unknown. Every fact was observed and recorded, challenged and discussed,
and each contributed something to the great pyramid of reasons which pointed to
evolution as the best hypothesis for explanation of the phenomena of nature.
Your dog turned round and round on the hearthrug before composing himself to sleep ; was he not governed by an unconscious memory from
the times when his ancestors thus prepared a comfortable depression in the
jungle for their repose? Your cat pressed her fore-paws on the ground, pushing
outwards repeatedly; was it not an unconscious memory which dominated her from
the need of her larger predecessors encircled by the tall grass of the forest
hiding-place, to flatten out a sufficient bed for luxurious rest? Slight, in
truth, are such indications, and yet withal they make up, in their
accumulation, a massive argument in favour of unconscious memories of past
lives being wrought into the very fabric of the animal body.
3.
But there is one line
of questions, provocative of thought, that has not yet
been pursued with industry equal to that bestowed on the investigation of
bodily movements and habits. The questions remain unanswered, either by
biologist or psychologist. Evolution has traced for us the gradual building of
our now complex and highly organised bodies; it has shown them to us evolving,
in the long course of millions of years, from a fragment of protoplasm, from a
simple cell, through form after form, until their present condition has been
reached, thus demonstrating a continuity of forms, advancing into greater perfection
as organisms! But so far science has not traced a correlative continuity of
consciousness - a golden thread on which the innumerable separated bodies might
be threaded — a consciousness inhabiting and functioning through this
succession of forms. It has not been able to prove — nay, it has not even
recognised' the likelihood of the possibility - that consciousness passes on
unbroken from body to body, carrying with it an ever-increasing content, the
accumulated harvest of innumerable experiences, transmuted into capacities,
into powers.
4.
Scientists have
directed our attention to the splendid inheritance that has come down to us
from the past. They have shown us how generation after generation has
contributed something to the sum of human knowledge, and how cycle after cycle
manifests a growth of average humanity in intellectual power, in extent of
consciousness, in fineness and beauty of emotion. But if we ask them to explain
the conditions of this growth, to describe the passing on of the content of one
consciousness to another ; if we ask for some method, comparable to the methods
observed in the physical world, whereby we may trace this transmission of the
treasures of consciousness, may explain how it made its habits and accumulates
experiences which it transforms into mental and moral capacities, then science
returns us no answers, but fails to show us the means and the methods of the
evolution of consciousness in man.
5.
When, in dealing with
animals, science points to the so-called inherited instincts, it does not offer
any explanation of the means whereby an intangible self-preserving instinct can
be transmitted by an animal to its offspring. That there is some purposive and
effective action, apart from any possibility of physical experience having been
gained as its instigator, performed by the young of an animal, we can observe
over and over again. Of the fact there can be no question. The young of
animals, immediately after coming into the world, are seen to play some trick
whereby they save themselves from some threatening danger. But science does not
tell us how this intangible consciousness of danger can be transmitted by the
parent, who has not experienced it, to the offspring who has never known it. If
the life-preserving instinct is transmissible through the physical body of the
parent, how did the parent come to possess it ? If the
chicken just out of the shell runs for protection to the mother-hen when the
shadow of a hawk hovering above it is seen, science tells us that it is
prompted by the life-preserving instinct, the result of the experience of the
danger of the hovering hawk, so many having thus perished that the seeking of
protection from the bird of prey is transmitted as an instinct. But the
difficulty of accepting this explanation lies in the fact that the experience
necessary to evolve the instinct can only have been gained by the cocks and
hens who were killed by birds of prey; these had no chance thereafter of
producing eggs, and so could not transmit their valuable experience, while all
the chicks come from eggs belonging to parents who had not experienced the
danger, and hence could not have developed the instinct. (I am assuming that
the result of such experiences in transmissible as an instinct an assumption
which is quite unwarranted.) The only way of making the experiences of
slaughtered animals reappear later as a life-preserving instinct is for the
record of the experience to be preserved by some means, and transmitted as an
instinct to those belonging to the same type. The Theosophist points to the
existence of matter finer than the physical, which vibrates in correspondence
with any mood of consciousness — in this case the shock of sudden death. That
vibration tends to repeat itself, and that tendency remains, and is reinforced
by similar experiences of other slaughtered poultry; this, recorded in the
"group-soul", passes as a tendency into all the poultry race, and
shows itself in the newly hatched chick the moment the danger threatens the new
form. Instinct is " unconscious memory",
"inherited experience", but, each one who possesses it takes it from
a continuing consciousness, from which his separate lower consciousness is
derived. How else can it have originated, how else have been transmitted
?
6.
Can it be said that
animals learn of danger by the observation of others who perish
? That would not explain the unconscious memory in our newly-hatched
chicken, who can have observed nothing. But apart from this, it is clear that
animals are curiously slow either to observe, or to learn the application to
themselves of the actions, the perils, of others. How often do we see a
motherly hen running along the side of a pond, clucking desperately to her
brood of ducklings that have plunged into the water to the manifest
discomposure of the non-swimming hen; but she does the same thing brood after
brood; she never learns that the ducklings are able to swim and that there is
no danger to be apprehended when they plunge into the water. She calls them as
vigorously after ten years of experience as she did after the first brood, so
that it does not look as if instinct originated in careful observation of petty
movements by animals who then transmit the results of
their observations to their offspring.
7.
The whole question of
the continuity of consciousness — a continuity
necessary to explain the evolution of instinct as much as that of intelligence
— is insoluble by science, but has been readily solved by religion. All the
great religions of the past and present have realised the eternity of the
Spirit: " God," it is written in a Hebrew
Scripture, " created man to be the image of His own Eternity", and in
that eternal nature of the Spirit lies the explanation alike of instinct and of
intelligence. In the intellect-aspect of this Spirit all the harvests of the
experiences of successive lives are stored, and from the treasures of the
spiritual memory are sent down assimilated experiences, appearing as instincts,
as unconscious memories of past lives, in the new-born form. Every improved
form receives as instincts and as innate ideas this wealth of reminiscence:
every intellectual and moral faculty is a store of reminiscences, and education
is but the awakening of memory.
8.
Thus religion
illuminate that which science leaves obscure, and gives us a rational, an
intelligible theory of the growth of instinct and of intellect; it shows us a
continuity of a consciousness ever increasing in content, embodying itself in
forms ever increasing in complexity. The view . that
man consists not only of bodies in which the working of the law of heredity may
be traced, but also is a living consciousness, growing, unfolding, evolving, by
the assimilation of the food of experience — this theory is an inevitable
pendant to the theory of physical evolution, for the latter remains
unintelligible without the former. Special creation, rejected from the physical
world, cannot much longer be accepted in the psychical, nor be held to explain
satisfactorily the differences between the genius and the dolt, between the
congenital saint and the congenital criminal. Unvarying law, the knowledge of
which is making man the master of the physical world, must be recognised as
prevailing equally in the psychical. The improving bodies must be recognised as
instruments to be used for the gaining of further experiences by the
ever-unfolding consciousness.
9.
A definite opinion on
this, matter can only be gained by personal study, investigation and research.
Knowledge of the great truths of nature is not a gift, but a prize to be won by
merit. Every human being must form his own opinions by his own strenuous
efforts to discover truth, by the exercise of his own reasoning faculties, by
the experiences of his own consciousness. Writers who
garb their readers in second-hand opinions, as a dealer in second-hand clothes
dresses his customers, will never turn out a decently costumed set of thinkers;
they will be clad in misfits. But there are lines of research to be followed,
experiences to be gone through and analysed, by those who would arrive at truth
— research which has led others to knowledge, experiences which have been found
fruitful in results. To these a writer may point his readers, and they, if they
will, may follow along such lines for themselves.
10.
I think we may find in
our consciousness — in our intelligence and our emotional nature — distinct
traces from the past which point to the evolution of our consciousness, as the
recurrent laryngeal nerve and the embryonic reptilian heart point to the
ancestral line of evolution of our body. I think there are memories forming
part of our consciousness which justify belief in previous existences, and
point the way to a more intelligent understanding of human life. I think that,
by careful observation, we may find memories in ourselves, not only of past events,
but of the past training and discipline which have made us what we are,
memories which are embedded in, which form even the very fabric of our
consciousness, which emerge more clearly as we study them, and become more
intelligible the more carefully we observe and analyse them.
11.
But for a moment we
must pause on the theory of Reincarnation, on the broad principle of
consciousness in evolution.
12.
This theory posits a
Spirit, a seed or germ of consciousness planted in matter, and ultimately,
after long ages of growth, becoming ready to enter an undeveloped human body,
connected by its material with three worlds, the worlds of mind, of desire and
of action, otherwise called the heavenly, intermediate and physical worlds. In
the physical world this growing Spirit gathers experiences of varied kinds,
feels pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows, health and illness, successes and
disappointments, the many changing conditions which make up our mortal life. He
carries these on with him through death, and in the intermediate world
experiences the inevitable results of desires which clashed with the laws of
nature, reaping in suffering the harvest of his blundering ignorance. Thus he
shapes the beginnings of a conscience, the recognition of an external law of
conduct. Passing on to the heavenly world, be builds his mental experiences
into mental faculties until, all the food of experience being assimilated, he
begins again to hunger, and so returns to earth with the elements of a
character, still enveloped in many-folded ignorance, but starting with a little
more content of consciousness than he had in his previous life. Such is his
cycle of growth, the passing through the three worlds over and over again, ever
accumulating experience, ever transmuting it into power. That cycle is repeated
over and over again, until the savage grows into the average man of our time,
from the average man, to the man of talent, of noble character; then onwards to
the genius, to the saint, to the hero; onwards still to the Perfect Man; onwards
yet, through ever-increasing, unimaginable splendours, vanishing into blinding
radiance which veils his further progress from our dazzled eyes. Thus every man
builds himself, shapes his own destiny, is verily self-created ; no one of us
is what we are save as we have wrought out our own being ; our future is not
imposed on us by an arbitrary will or a soulless necessity, but is ours to
fashion, to create. There is nothing we cannot accomplish if we are given time,
and time is endless. We, the living consciousnesses, we pass from body to body,
and each new body takes the impress made upon it by its tenant, the ever-young
and immortal Spirit.
I have spoken of the three stages of the life-cycle, each belonging to a
definite world; it must be noted that in the physical stage of the life-period,
we are living in all the three worlds, for we are thinking and desiring as well
as acting, and our body, the vehicle of consciousness, is triple. We lose the
physical part of the body at death, and the desire-part at a later period, and
live in the mental body — in which all good thoughts and pure emotions have
their habitat — while in the heavenly world. When the heaven life is over, the
mental body also disintegrates, and there remains but the spiritual body whereof
S. Paul speaks, "eternal in the heavens"..
Into that, the lasting clothing of the Spirit, are woven all the pure results
of experiences gathered in the lower worlds. In the building of the new triple
body for the new life-cycle in the lower worlds, a new apparatus comes into
existence for the use of the spiritual consciousness and the spiritual body;
and the latter, retaining within itself the conscious memory of past events,
imprints on the lower — its instruments for gathering fresh experience — only
the results of the past, as faculties, mental and emotional, with many traces
of past experiences which have been outgrown and remain normally in the
sub-consciousness. The conscious memory of past events being present only in
the spiritual body, the consciousness must be functioning in that in order to
"remember"; and such functioning is possible through a system of
training and discipline — yoga — which may be studied by anyone who has
perseverance, and a certain amount of innate ability for this special kind of
work.
13.
But in addition to
this there are many unconscious memories, manifesting in faculty, in emotion,
in power, traces of the past imprinted on the present, and
discoverable by observations on our-selves and others. Hence, memories
of the past may be clear and definite, obtained by the practice of yoga, or
unconscious but shown by results, and closely allied in many ways to what are
called instincts, by which you do certain things, think along certain lines,
exercise certain functions, and possess certain knowledge without having
consciously acquired it. Among the Greeks, and the ancients generally, much
stress was laid upon this form of memory. Plato's phrase: "All knowledge
is reminiscence", will be remembered. In the researches of psychology
today, many surges of feeling, driving a man to hasty, unpremeditated action,
are ascribed to the sub-consciousness, i.e., the consciousness which shows
itself in involuntary thoughts, feelings and actions; these come to us out of
the far-off past, without our volition or our conscious creation. How do these
come, unless there be continuity of consciousness ?
Any who study modern psychology will see how great a part unconscious memory
plays in our lives, how it is said to be stronger than our reason, how it
conjures up pathetic scenes uncalled-for, how at night it throws us into
causeless panics. These, we are told, are due to memories of dangers
surrounding savages, who must ever be on the alert to guard themselves against
sudden attacks, whether of man or beast, breaking into the hours of repose,
killing the men and women as they slept. These past experiences are said to
have left records in consciousness, records which lie below the threshold of
waking consciousness but are ever present within us. And some say that this is
the most important part of our consciousness, though out of sight for the
ordinary mind.
14.
We cannot deny to
these the name of memory, these experiences out of the past that assert
themselves in the present. Study these traces, and see whether they are
explicable save by the continuity of consciousness, making the Self of the
savage the Self which is yourself today, seeing the
persistence of the Individual throughout human evolution, growing, expanding,
developing, but a fragment of the eternal "I am".
15.
May we not regard
instincts as memories buried in the sub-conscious, influencing our actions,
determining our "choices" ? Is not the moral
instinct Conscience, a mass of interwoven memories of past experiences,
speaking with the authoritative utterance of all instincts, and deciding on
" right" and " wrong " without argument, without reasoning?
It speaks clearly when we are walking on well-trodden ways, warning us of
dangers experienced in the past, and we shun them at sight as the chicken shuns
the down rush of the hawk hovering above it. But as that same chicken has no
instinct as regards the rush of a motor-car, so have we no "voice of
Conscience" to warn us of the pitfalls in ways hitherto unknown.
16.
Again, innate faculty
— what is it but an unconscious memory of subjects mastered in the past ? A subject, literary, scientific, artistic, what we
will, is taken up by one person and mastered with extraordinary ease; he seizes
at sight the main points in the study, taking it up as new, apparently, but so
rapidly grasping it that it is obviously an old subject remembered, not a new
subject mastered. A second person, by no means intellectually inferior, is
observed to be quite dense along this particular line of study ; reads a book
on it, but keeps little trace of it in his mind; addresses himself to its
understanding, but it evades his grasp. He stumbles along feebly, where the
other ran unshackled and at ease. To what can such difference be due save to
the unconscious memory which science is beginning to recognise
? One student has known the subject and is merely remembering it; the
other takes it up for the first time, and finds it difficult and obscure.
17.
As an example, we may
take H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, a difficult book; it is said
to be obscure, diffuse, the style to be often unattractive, the matter very
difficult to follow. I have known some of my friends take up these volumes and
study them year after year, men and women, intelligent, quite alert in mind ; yet after years of study they cannot grasp its main
points nor very often follow its obscure arguments. Let me put against that my
own experience of that book. I had not read anything of the subject with which
it deals from the standpoint of the Theosophist; it was the first Theosophical
book I had read — except The Occult World — and it came into my hands,
apparently by chance, given to me to review by Mr. Stead, then Editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette. When I began to read that book, I read it right through day
after day, and the whole of it was so familiar as I read, that I sat down and
wrote a review which anyone may read in the Pall Mall Gazette of, I
think, February or March, 1889; and anyone who reads that review will find that
I had taken the heart out of the book and presented it intelligently to the
ordinary newspaper reader. That certainly was not from any special genius on my
part. If I had been given a book of some other kind, I might have stumbled over
it and made nothing of it at all; but as I read I remembered, and the
whole philosophy fell into order before me, although to this brain and in this
body it came before me for the first time. I allege that in cases like that we
have a proof of the accuracy of Plato's idea, mentioned already, that all
knowledge is reminiscence; where we have known before we do really remember,
and so master without any effort that which another, without a similar
experience, may find abstruse, difficult and obscure. We may apply this to any
new subject that anyone may take up. If he has learned it before, he will
remember and master the subject easily; if not, taken as a new thing, he must
learn step by step, and gradually understand the relation between the phenomena
studied, working it out laboriously because unknown.
18.
Let us now apply that
same idea of memory to genius, say to musical genius. How can we explain,
except by previous knowledge existing as memory, the mystery of a little child
who sits down to a piano and with little teaching, or with none, outstrips many
who have given years of labour to the art ? It is not
only that we marvel over children like the child Mozart in the past, but in our
own day we have seen a number of these infant prodigies, the limit of whose
power was the smallness of the child hand, and even with that deficient
instrument, they showed a mastery of the instrument that left behind those who
had studied music for many years. Do we not see in such child genius the mark
of past knowledge, of past power of memory, rather than of learning
?
19.
Or let us take the
Cherniowsky family; three brothers in it have been before the public for eleven
years, drawing huge audiences by their wonderful music; the youngest is now
only eighteen, the oldest twenty-two; they have not been taught, but have
taught themselves, i.e., they have unconsciously remembered. A little sister of
theirs, now five years old, already plays the violin, and since she was a baby
the violin has been the one instrument she has loved. Why, if she has no memory ?
20.
This precocious
genius, this faculty which accomplishes with ease that which others perform
with toil and difficulty, is found not only in music. We recall the boy Giotto,
on the hill-side with his sheep. Nor is it found only in art. Let us take that
marvelous genius, Dr. Brown, who as a little child, when he was only five or
six years old, had been able to master dead languages; who, as he grew older,
picked up science after science, as other children pick up toys with which they
are amused; who carried an ever-increasing burden of knowledge " lightly
as a flower" and became one of the most splendid of scientific geniuses,
dealing with problems that baffled others but that he easily solved, and
standing as a monument of vast constructive scientific power. We find him,
according to his father's account, learning at the age when others are but
babies, and using those extraordinary powers — memories of the past persisting
into the present.
21.
But let us take an
altogether other class of memory. We meet someone for the first time. We feel
strongly attracted. There is no outward reason for the attraction ; we know
nothing of his character, of his past; nothing of his ability, of his worth;
but an overpowering attraction draws us together, and a life-long, intimate friendship
dates from the first meeting, an instantaneous attraction, a recognition of one
supremely worthy to be a friend. Many of us have had experiences of that kind.
Whence come they ? We may have had an equally strong
repulsion, perhaps quite as much outside reason, quite as much apart from
experience. One attracts and we love; the other repels and we shrink away. We
have no reason for either love or repulsion. Whence comes it save as a memory
from the past?
22.
A moment's thought
shows how such cases are explained from the standpoint of reincarnation. We
have met before, have known each other before. In the case of a sudden
attraction, it is the soul recognising an ancient friend and comrade across the
veil of flesh, the veil of the new body. In the case of repulsion it is the
same soul recognising an ancient enemy, one who wronged us bitterly, or whom we
have wronged; the soul warns us of danger, the soul warns us of peril, in
contact with that ancient foe, and tries to drag away the unconscious body that
does not recognise its enemy, the one whom the soul knows from past experience
to be a peril in the present. "Instinct" we say; yes, for, as we have
seen, instinct is unconscious, or sub-conscious, memory. A wise man obeys such
attractions and such repulsions; he does not laugh at them as irrational, nor
cast them aside as superstition, as folly; he realises that it is far better
for him to keep out of the way of the man concerning whom the inner warning has
arisen, to obey the repulsion that drives him away from him. For that repulsion
indicates the memory of an ancient wrong, and he is safer out of touch of that
man against whom he feels the repulsion.
23.
Do we want to
eradicate the past wrong, to get rid of the danger? We can do it better apart
than together. If to that man against whom we feel repulsion we send day after
day thoughts of pardon and of goodwill; if deliberately, consciously, we send
messages of love to the ancient enemy, wishing him good, wishing him well, in
spite of the repulsion that we feel, slowly and gradually the pardon and love
of the present will erase the memory of the ancient wrong, and later we may
meet with indifference, or even may become friends, when, by using the power of
thought, we have wiped out the ancient injury and have made instead a bond of
brotherhood by thoughts and wishes of good. That is one of the ways we may
utilise the unconscious memories coming to us out of our past.
24.
Again, sometimes we
find in such a first meeting with an ancient friend that we talk more intimately
to the stranger of an hour ago than we talk to brothers or sisters with whom we
have been brought up during all our life.
25.
There must be some
explanation of those strange psychological happenings, traces — I put it no
more strongly than that — worthy of our observation, worthy of our study; for
it is these small things in psychology that point the way to discoveries of the
problems that confront us in that science. Many of us might add to
psychological science by carefully observing, carefully recording, carefully
working out, all these instinctive impulses, trying to trace out afterwards the
results in the present and in the future, and thus gather together a mass of
evidence which may help us to a great extent to understand ourselves.
26.
What is the real explanation
of the law of memory of events, and this persistence in consciousness of
attraction or repulsion? The explanation lies in that fact of our constitution;
the bodies are new, and can only act in conformity with past experiences by
receiving an impulse from the indwelling soul in which the memory of those
experiences resides. Just as our children are born with a certain developed
conscience, which is a moral instinct, just as the child of the savage has not
the conscience that our children possess previous to experience in this life,
previous to moral instruction, so is it with these instincts, or memories, of
the intelligence, which, like the innate moral instinct that we call
conscience, are based on experience in the past, and hence are different in
people at different stages of evolution.
27.
A conscience with a
long past behind it is far more evolved, far more ready to understand moral
differences, than the conscience of a less well evolved neighbour. Conscience
is not a miraculous implanting; it is the slow growth of moral instinct,
growing out of experience, built by experience, and becoming more and more
highly evolved as more and more experience lies behind. And on this all true
theories of education must be based. We often deal with children as though they
came into our hands to be moulded at our will. Our lack of realisation of the
fact that the intelligence of the child, the consciousness of the child, is
bringing with it the results of past knowledge, both along intellectual and
moral lines, is a fatal blunder in the education of today. It is not a
"drawing-out", as the name implies — for the name was given by the
wiser people of the past. Education in these modern days is entirely a pouring
in, and therefore it largely fails in its object. When our teachers realise the
fact of reincarnation, when they see in a child an entity with memories to be
aroused and faculties to be drawn out, then we shall deal with the child as an
individual, and not as though children were turned out by the dozen or the
score from some mould into which they are supposed to have been poured. Then
our education will begin to be individual; we shall study the child before we
begin to educate it, instead of educating it without any study of its
faculties. It is only by the recognition of its past that we shall realise that
we have in the child a soul full of experience, traveling along his own line.
Only when we recognise that, and instead of the class of thirty or forty, we
have the small class, where each child is treated individually, only then will
education become a reality among us, and the men of the future will grow out of
the wiser education thus given to the children. For the subject is profoundly
practical when you realise the potencies of daily life. .
28.
Much light may be
thrown on the question of unconscious memories by the study of memory under
trance conditions. All people remember something of their childhood, but all do
not know that in the mesmeric trance a person remembers much more than he does
in the waking consciousness. Memories of events have sunk below the threshold
of the waking consciousness, but they have not been annihilated, when the
consciousness of the external world is stilled, that of the internal world can
assert itself, as low music, drowned in the rattle of the streets, becomes
audible in the stillness of the night. In the depths of our consciousness, the
music of the past is ever playing, and when surface agitations are smoothed
away, the notes reach our ears. And so in trance we know that which escapes us
when awake. But with regard to childhood there is a thread of memory sufficient
to enable anyone to feel that he, the mature individual, is identical with the
playing and studying child. That thread is lacking where past lives are
concerned, and the feeling of identity, which depends on memory, does not
arise.
Colonel de Rochas once told me how he had succeeded, with mesmerised patients,
in recovering the memory of babyhood, and gave me a number of instances in
which he had thus pursued memory back into infantile recesses. Nor is the
memory only that of events, for a mesmerised woman, thrown back in memory into
childhood and asked to write, wrote her old childish hand. Interested in this
investigation, I asked Colonel de Rochas to see if he could pass backward
through birth to the previous death, and evoke memory across the gulf which
separates life-period from life-period. Some months later he sent me a number
of experiments, since published by him, which had convinced him of the fact of
reincarnation. It seems possible that, along this line, proofs may be gradually
accumulated, but much testing and repetition will be needed, arid a careful
shutting out of all external influences.
29.
There are also cases
in which, without the inducing of trance, memories of the past survive, and
these are found in the cases of children more often than among grown-up people.
The brain of the child, being more plastic and impressionable, is more easily
affected by the soul than when it is mature. Let us take a few cases of such
memories. There was a little lad who showed considerable talent in drawing and
modeling, though otherwise a somewhat dull child. He was taken one day by his
mother to the
30.
We may take an
instance from
31.
Not long ago, one of
the members of the Theosophical Society, Minister in an
32.
Memory of the past can
be evolved by gradually sinking down into the depths of consciousness by a
process deliberately and patiently practised. Our mind working in our physical
brain is constantly active, and is engaged in observing the world outside the
body. On these observations it reflects and reasons,
and the whole of our normal mental processes have to do with these daily
activities which fill our lives. It is not in this busy region that the
memories of the past can be evoked. Anyone who would unveil these must learn so
to control his mind as to be able, at will, to withdraw it from outer objects
and from thoughts connected with them, so as to be able to hold the mind still
and empty. It must be wide awake, alert, and yet utterly quiet and unoccupied.
Then, slowly and gradually, within that mind, emptied of present thought, there
arises a fuller, stronger, deeper consciousness, more vivid, more intensely
alive, and this is realised as oneself; the mind is seen to be only an
instrument of this, a tool to be used at will. When the mind is thus mastered,
when it is made subservient to the higher consciousness, then we feel that this
new consciousness is the permanent one, in which our past remains as a memory
of events and not only as results in faculty. We find that being quiet in the
presence of that higher consciousness, asking it of its past, it will gradually
unroll before us the panorama through which it has itself passed, life after
life, and thus enable us to review that past and to realise it as our own. We
find ourselves to be that consciousness; we rise out of the passing into the
permanent, and look back upon our own long past, as before upon the memory of
our childhood. We do not keep its memories always in mind, but can recover them
at will. It is not an ever-present memory, but on turning our attention to it
we can always find it, and we find in that past others who are the friends of
today. If we find, as people invariably do find, that the people most closely
knit to us today have been most closely knit to us in the far-off past also,
then one after another we may gather our memories, we may compare them side by
side, we may test them by each other's rememberings, as men of mature age
remember their school-fellows and the incidents of their boyhood and compare
those memories which are common to them both; in that way we gradually learn
how we built up our character, how we have moulded the later lives through
which we have passed. That is within the reach of any one of us who will take
the trouble. I grant that it takes years, but it can be done. There is, so far
as I know, no other way to the definite recovery of memory. A person may have
flashes of memory from time to time, like the boy with the statues; he may get
significant dreams occasionally, in which some trace of the past may emerge;
but to have it under control, to be able to turn our attention to the past at
will and to remember — that needs effort, long, prolonged, patient,
persevering; but inasmuch as every one is a living soul, that memory is within
every one, and it is within our power to awaken it.
33.
No one need fear that the above practice will weaken the mind, or
cause the student to become dreamy or less useful in the "practical
world". On the contrary, such mastery of the mind much strengthens mental
grasp and mental power, and makes one more effective in the ordinary life of
the world. It is not only that strength is gained, but the waste of strength is
prevented. The mind does not "race," as does a machine which
continues to go without the resistance of the material on which it should work;
for when it has nothing useful to do, it stops its activity. Worry is to the
mind what racing is to the machine, and it wears the mind out where work does
not. To control the mind is to have a keen instrument in good condition, always
ready for work. Note how slow many people are in grasping an idea, how
confused, how uncertain. An average man who has trained his mind to obedience
is more effective than a comparatively clever one who knows naught of such
control.
34.
Further, the
conviction, which will gradually arise in the student who studies these
memories of the past, of the truth of his permanent Self, will revolutionise
the whole life, both individual and social. If we know ourselves to be
permanent living beings, we become strong where now we are weak, wise where now
we are foolish, patient where now we are discontented. Not only does it make us
strong as individuals, but when we come to deal with social problems we find
ourselves able to solve them. We know how to deal with our criminals, who are
only young souls, and instead of degrading them when they come into the grasp
of the law, we treat them as children needing education, needing training — not
needing the liberty they do not know how to use, but as children to be patiently
educated — helping them to evolve more rapidly because they have come into our
hands. We shall treat them with sympathy and not with anger, with gentleness
and not with harshness. I do not mean with a foolish sentimentality which would
give them a liberty they would only abuse to the harming of society ; I mean a
steady discipline which will evolve and strengthen, but has in it nothing
brutal, nothing needlessly painful, an education for the child souls which will
help them to grow. I have said how this knowledge would affect the education of
children. It would also change our politics and sociology, by giving us time to
build on a foundation so that the building will be secure. There is nothing
which so changes our view of life as a knowledge of the past of which the
present is the outcome, a knowledge how to build so that the building may
endure in the future. Because things are dark around us and the prospects of
society are gloomy ; because there is war where social
prosperity demands peace, and hatred where mutual assistance ought to be found;
because society is a chaos and not an organism; I find the necessity for
pressing this truth of past lives on the attention of the thoughtful, of those
willing to study, willing to investigate. Realising reincarnation as a fact, we
can work for brotherhood, work for improvement. We realise that every living
human being has a right to an environment where he can develop his abilities
and grow to the utmost of the faculties he has brought with him. We understand
that society as a whole should be as a father and a mother to all those whom it
embrace? as its children; that the most advanced have duties, have
responsibilities, which to a great extent they are neglecting today; and that
only by understanding, by brotherly love, by willing sacrifice, can we emerge
from struggle into peace, from poverty into well-being, from misery and hatred
into love and prosperity.