Besant A. - Reincarnation

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Reincarnation

Annie Besant

(English: Annie Besant, F.T.S., Reincarnation)

Publications:

• Lucifer, vol. 9, no. 54, February 1892, pp. 476-483

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Title for references: Besant A. - Reincarnation
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Annie Besant

Reincarnation

476

Introduction.

If it be difficult for a new truth to gain a hearing amid the strife of tongues that marks our modern civilisation, it is yet more difficult for a truth to make itself heard, which has become new only by force of age. If our eye could sweep over the intellectual history of the race, unrolled before us for centuries of millenniums, then a gap in the dominance of some world-wide idea, stretching over some few hundreds of years among a small number of the nations, would but slightly impress us. But when that gap – a mere partial fissure in an immemorial past – includes the intellectual development of Europe, and is scanned by Europeans, it assumes an importance quite out of proportion to its relative extent in time, its relative weight in argument. Great and valuable as is the contribution brought by Europe to the mental treasure-house of mankind, we Europeans are very apt to over-estimate it, and to forget that the very brief period of intellectual achievement in Europe cannot rationally be taken as outweighing the total mental fruitage of the non-European races, gathered over thousands of centuries. This looming large of our own recent past, until, as a plate held before our eyes shuts out the sun, it hides the past of the world from our mental gaze, is a danger against which we should be on our guard. Neither for individuals nor for nations is intellectual arrogance synonymous with intellectual stature; the feeling which makes the Englishman look on all dark-skinned races as inferior, and lump them comprehensively as “niggers”, from whom nothing can be learned, is a feeling essentially petty and parochial. The wise listen most readily to those whose habits of thought are most alien from their own, knowing that thus they may chance to catch a glimpse of some new aspect of Truth, instead of seeing once more the mere reflexion of the aspect already familiar. Men's racial habits, traditions, surroundings, are as coloured glasses through which they look at the sun of Truth; each glass lends its own tint to the sunbeam, and the white ray is transmitted as red, or blue, or yellow – what you will. As we cannot get rid of our glass and catch the pure uncoloured radiance, we do wisely to combine the coloured rays and so obtain the white.

Now Reincarnation is a truth that has swayed the minds of innumerable millions of our race, and has moulded the thoughts of the vast majority for uncounted centuries. It dropped out of the European mind during the Dark Ages, and so ceased to influence our mental and moral development – very much, be it said in passing, to the injury of that development. For 477 the last hundred years it has from time to time flashed through the minds of some of the greater Westerns, as a possible explanation of some of life's most puzzling problems: and during the last dozen years, since its clear enunciation as an essential part of the Esoteric Teaching, it has been constantly debated, and is as constantly gaining ground, among the more thoughtful students of the mysteries of life and of evolution.

There is, of course, no doubt that the great historical religions of the East included the teaching of Reincarnation as a fundamental tenet. In India, as in Egypt, Reincarnation was at the root of ethics. Among the Jews it was held commonly by the Pharisees, and the popular belief comes out in various phrases in the New Testament, as when John the Baptist is regarded as a reincarnation of Elijah, or as when the disciples ask whether the man born blind is suffering for the sin of his parents or for some former sin of his own. The Zohar, again, speaks of souls as being subjected to transmigration.

“All souls are subject to revolution (metempsychosis, a’leen b’gilgoolah), but men do not know the ways of the Holy One; blessed be it! they are ignorant of the way they have been judged in all time, and before they came into this world and when they have quitted it”.

The Kether Malkuth evidently has the same idea as that conveyed by Josephus, when it says:

“If she (the soul) be pure, then shall she obtain favour and rejoice in the latter day; but if she hath been defiled then shall she wander for a time in pain and despair”.

So also, we find the doctrine taught by eminent Fathers of the Church, and Ruffinus states that belief in it was common among the primitive Fathers. Needless to say that the philosophic Gnostics and Neo-Platonists held it as an integral part of their doctrine. If we glance to the Western Hemisphere we meet Reincarnation as a firmly-rooted belief among many of the tribes of North and South America. The Mayas, with their deeply interesting connexion in language and symbolism with ancient Egypt, to this day hold the traditional doctrine, as has been shown by the investigations of Dr. and Mme. Le Plongeon. To these, the name of many another tribe might be added, remnants of once famous nations, that in their decay have preserved the ancestral beliefs that once linked them with the mightiest peoples of the elder world.

It could scarcely be expected that a teaching of such vast antiquity and such magnificent intellectual ancestry should fade out of the mind of mankind; and accordingly we find that the eclipse it suffered a few centuries ago was very partial, affecting only a small portion of the race. The ignorance that swamped Europe carried away belief in Reincarnation, as it 478 carried away all philosophy, all metaphysics, and all science. Mediæval Europe did not offer the soil on which could flourish any wide-sweeping and philosophical view of man’s nature and destiny. But in the East, which enjoyed a refined and gracious civilisation while Europe was sunk in barbarism; which had its philosophers and its poets while the West was densely illiterate; in the East, the great doctrine held undisputed sway, whether in the subtle metaphysics of the Brâhmans, or in the noble morality which finds its home under the shadow of Buddha and his Good Law.

But while a fact of Nature may in some part of the world for a time be ignored, it cannot be destroyed, and, submerged for a moment, it will again re-assert itself in the sight of men. This has been anew demonstrated in the history of the doctrine of Reincarnation in Europe, in its occasional reappearances, traceable from the founding of Christendom to the present time, in its growing acceptance to-day.

When Christianity first swept over Europe, the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, and in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigena and Bonaventura, its mediæval advocates. Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The best of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact with it. The younger Helmont, in De Revolutione Animarum, adduces in two hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favour of the return of souls into human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of English thinkers, the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudworth and Hume it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality. Glanvil’s Lux Orientalis devotes a curious treatise to it. It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. André Pezzani’s book on The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives works out the system on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation.

The reader of Schopenhauer will be familiar with the aspect taken by Reincarnation in his philosophy. Penetrated as was the great German with Eastern thought from his study of the Upanishads, it would have been passing strange had this corner-stone of Hindu philosophy found no place in his system. Nor is Schopenhauer the only philosopher from the intellectual and mystical German people, who has accepted Reincarnation as a necessary factor in Nature. The opinions of Fichte, of Herder, of Lessing, may surely claim to be of some weight in the intellectual world, and these men see in Reincarnation a solution for problems otherwise insoluble. It is true that the intellectual world is not a despotic State, and none may impose his opinion on his fellows by personal authority; none the less are opinions weighed there rather than counted, and the mightier and more instructed intellects of the West, though they be here in a small minority, 479 will command respectful hearing for that which they deliberately advance, from all whose minds are not so hide-bound by modern tradition as to be unable to appreciate the value of arguments addressed to the support of an unfashionable truth.

It is interesting to note that the mere idea of Reincarnation is no longer regarded in the West – at least by educated people – as absurd. It is gradually assuming the position of a possible hypothesis, to be considered on its merits, on its power of explaining puzzling and apparently unrelated phenomena. Regarding it myself as, to me, a proven fact, I am concerned rather to put it forward in these pages as a probable hypothesis, throwing more light than does any other theory on the obscure problems of man’s constitution, of his character, his evolution, and his destiny. Reincarnation and Karma are said by a Master to be the two doctrines of which the West stands most in need; so it cannot be ill done for a believer in the Masters to set forth an outline, for the ordinary reader, of this central teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy.

The Meaning of Reincarnation.

Let us start with a clear understanding of what is meant by Reincarnation. So far as the derivation of the word is concerned, any repeated entering into a physical, or fleshly, covering, might be included thereunder. It certainly implies the existence of something relatively permanent, that enters into, inhabits, successive somethings relatively impermanent. But the word tells us nothing of the nature of these relatively permanent and impermanent somethings, save that the impermanent habitations are of “flesh”. Another word, often used as synonymous with Reincarnation, the word Metempsychosis, suggests the other side of the transaction; here the habitation is ignored, and the stress is laid on the transit of the Psyche, the relatively permanent. Putting the two together as descriptive of the whole idea, we should have the entry of a Psyche or “soul” into successive “bodies” of flesh; and though the word “soul” is open to serious objections, from its looseness and its theological connotations, it may stand for the moment as representing in the minds of most people a form of existence which outlasts the physical frame with which it was connected during a life on earth.

In this general sense, apart from any special exoteric or esoteric teachings, Reincarnation and Metempsychosis are words which denote a theory of existence, according to which a form of visible matter is inhabited by a more ethereal principle, which outlives its physical encasement, and, on the death of the latter, passes on immediately, or after an interval, to dwell in some other frame. Never, perhaps, has this doctrine, in its loftiest form, been put more clearly or more beautifully than in the famous encouragement of Arjuna by Krishna, given in the Bhagavad Gîtâ:

These finite bodies, which envelope the souls inhabiting them, are said to belong to him, the eternal, the indestructible, unprovable spirit, who is in the body. . . . . 480 The man who thinketh that it is this spirit which killeth, and he who thinketh that it may be destroyed, are both alike deceived: for it neither killeth nor is it killed. It is not a thing of which a man may say, “It hath been, it is about to be, or is to be hereafter”; for it is without birth and meeteth not death; it is ancient, constant and eternal, and is not slain when this its mortal frame is destroyed. How can the man who believeth that it is incorruptible, eternal, inexhaustible, and without birth, think that it can either kill or cause to be killed? As a man throweth away old garments and putteth on new, even so the dweller in the body, having quitted its old mortal frames, entereth into others which are new. The weapon divideth it not, the fire burneth it not, the water corrupteth it not, the wind drieth it not away; for it is indivisible, inconsumable, incorruptible, and is not to be dried away: it is invisible, inconceivable, and unalterable.

In exoteric Brahmanism and Buddhism alike, the living reincarnating principle is said to pass from human to animal forms, and vice versâ, and may, indeed, pass from human bodies to dwell in minerals and vegetables. Belief in this form of metempsychosis is, and has been, very widely accepted, not only in the East, but among the followers of Pythagoras and Plato, and among the Neo-Platonists. This view is a travesty of the Esoteric Teaching, which does not admit – as will later be clearly seen – that the Human Ego can pass, against the general stream of evolution, backwards to the brute. While clearly postulating the unity of Life, and tracing that One Life in the gradual upward evolution through mineral, plant, and animal, to man, it denies that the individuality gained in man can be submerged again in the lower collective existence, for in man individual Reincarnation has replaced, as the method of evolution, the collective indwelling of the life in lower forms.

The theory of Reincarnation, then, in the Esoteric Philosophy, asserts the existence of a living and individualised Principle, which dwells in and informs the body of a man, and which, on the death of the body, passes into another body, after a longer or shorter interval. Thus successive bodily lives are linked together like pearls strung upon a thread, the thread being the living Principle, the pearls upon it the separate human lives.

What It Is That Reincarnates.

Having grasped the idea that Reincarnation is the indwelling of a living something in a succession of human bodies, we naturally make the enquiry: What is this living something, this persistent reincarnating Principle? As our understanding of the whole teaching hinges on our thorough understanding of the answer to this question, it will not be wasted time to dwell a little on the circumstances which led up to and surrounded the first incarnation of this living Principle in the human form. To make this incarnation thoroughly intelligible, we must trace the steps of the evolution of man. 481 Those who have read the preceding papers will remember that the Monad, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, is described as the “mainspring of all evolution, the impelling force at the root of all things”. Those to whom the technical name is unfamiliar will seize the idea conveyed by the name to the Theosophist, if they will think of the Universal Life, the Root of all that is, gradually evolving as its own manifestation the various forms which make up our world. We cannot here retrace our earth’s story in former stages of its æonian evolution; that will, I hope, be done in one of some following papers. But here we must be content to pick up the thread at the beginning of the present stage, when the germ of what was to become man had appeared, as the result of previous evolution, on our globe. H. P. Blavatsky, in the second volume of the Secret Doctrine, has drawn the evolution in detail, and to that work I must refer the earnest and thorough student. Let it suffice to say that the physical form of what was to be man was slowly and very gradually evolved, two great Races passing through their full development, and a third Race having run half its course, before humanity had reached completion so far as its physical, or animal, nature was concerned. This nature, rightly called animal, because it contains that which man has in common with the brute – a physical body, its ethereal double, its vitality, its passions, appetites and desires – this nature was builded up by terrestrial and other cosmic forces through millions of years. It was brooded over, enveloped in, permeated by, that Universal Life which is “the Force back of Evolution”, that life which men have in all ages called Divine.

An Occult Commentary, quoted in the Secret Doctrine, speaking of this stage of evolution, mentions the forms, technically called “astral doubles”, which had evolved into the physical bodies of men, and thus describes the situation at the point we have reached: this

rûpa (form) has become the vehicle of Monads (Seventh and Sixth Principles) that had completed their cycle of transmigration in the three preceding Kalpas (Rounds). Then, they (the astral doubles) became the men of the First Human Race of the Round. But they were not complete, and were senseless.

Here were, we may say, the two poles of the evolving Life-manifestation: the Animal with all its potentialities on the lower plane, but necessarily mindless, conscienceless, errant aimlessly over the earth, unconsciously tending onwards by reason of the impelling force within it, that drove it ever forward; this force, the Divine, itself too lofty in its pure ethereal nature to reach consciousness on the lower planes, and so unable to bridge the gulf that stretched between it and the animal brain it vivified but could not illume. Such was the organism that was to become man, a creature of marvellous potentialities, an instrument with strings all ready 482 to break into music; where was the power that should make the potentialities actual, where the touch that should waken the melody and send it forth thrilling into space ?

When the hour had struck, the answer came from the mental or Mânasic plane. Whilst this double evolution above described, the Monadic and the Physical, had been going on upon our globe, a third line of evolution, which was to find its goal in man, had been proceeding in a higher sphere. This line was that of Intellectual Evolution, and the subjects of the evolution are the Sons of Mind (Mânasaputra), self-conscious intelligent Entities, as is implied by their name. These are spoken of under many different names; Lords of Light, Dhyân Chohans, Kumâras, Solar Pitris, Dragons of Wisdom, etc., etc., allegorical and poetical names, that become attractive and familiar to the student in the course of his reading, but which cause much trouble and confusion to the beginner, who cannot make out whether he is dealing with one class of beings or with a dozen. The one fact that the beginner needs to grasp is that, at a certain stage of evolution, there entered into, incarnated in men, certain self-conscious intelligent Entities, with a long past of intellectual evolution behind them, who found in physical man the instrument ready, and fitted, for their further evolution.

The coming of these Sons of Mind is given in poetical phrase in the Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan:

The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down . . . The Third [Race] were ready. “In these shall we dwell”, said the Lords of the Flame.

. . . The Third Race became the Vâhan [vehicle] of the Lords of Wisdom.

These Lords of Wisdom then are they who became the Reincarnating Egos of men: these are the Mind, or rather Minds, in men, the Manas, or Fifth Principle, sometimes described as the Human, or Rational, Soul. I prefer to speak of the Reincarnating Ego as the Thinker, rather than as the Mind, in man; for the word Thinker suggests an individual Entity, whereas the word Mind suggests a vague generality.

It is interesting and significant that the word man, running through so many languages, is related back to this Manas, to its root man, to think. Skeat gives the word in English, Swedish, Danish, German, Icelandish, Gothic, Latin (mas, for mans), deriving it from the Sanskrit root man, and therefore defining man as a “thinking animal”. So that whenever we say Man, we say Thinker, and are carried back to that period at which the Thinkers “came down”, i.e., became incarnate in the physical vehicle builded for their reception, when the senseless animal became the thinking being, by virtue of the Manas that entered into him and dwelt in him. It 483 was then that the Man became clothed in his “coat of skin”, after his fall into physical matter in order that he might eat of the Tree of Knowledge and thus become a “God”.

This man is the link between the Divine and the Animal, that we have viewed as essentially connected and yet held apart from close intercommunion. He stretches one hand upwards towards the Divine Monad, to the Spirit whose offspring he is, striving upwards, that he may assimilate that loftier nature, that his intelligence may become spiritual, his knowledge wisdom; he lays his other hand upon the Animal, which is to bear him to conquest of the lower planes, that he may train and subdue it to his own ends, and make it a perfect instrument for manifestation of the higher life. Long is the task that lies before him; no less than to raise the Animal to the Divine, to sublime Matter into Spirit, to lead up the ascending arc the life that has traversed the descending, and has now to climb upwards, bearing with it all the fruits of its long exile from its true home. Finally he is to re-unite the separated aspects of the One, to bring the Spirit to self-consciousness on all planes, Matter to be its perfect manifestation. Such his sublime task, for the accomplishment of which Reincarnation is to be his tool.

This Man, then, is our real Human Self, and we err when we think of our body as “I”, and too much exalt our temporary “coat of skin”. It is as though a man should regard his coat as himself, himself as a mere appendage of his clothes. As our clothes exist for us and not we for them, and they are only things rendered necessary by climate, comfort and custom, so our bodies are only necessary to us because of the conditions that surround us, and are for our service, not for our subjugation. Some Indians will never speak of bodily wants as theirs: they say, “my body is hungry”, “my body is tired” – not “I am hungry”, or “I am tired”. And though in our ears the phrase may sound fantastic, it is truer to facts than our self-identification with our body. If we were in the habit of identifying ourselves in thought not with the habitation we live in, but with the Human Self that dwells therein, life would become a greater and a serener thing. We should brush off troubles as we brush the dust from our garments, and we should realise that the measure of all things happening to us is not the pain or pleasure they bring to our bodies, but the progress or retardation they bring to the Man within us; and since all things are matters of experience and lessons may be learned from each, we should take the sting out of griefs by searching in each for the wisdom enwrapped in it as the petals are folded within the bud. In the light of Reincarnation life changes its aspect, for it becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development, the Man that “was and is and shall be, for whom the hour will never strike”.

Annie Besant, F.T.S.

(To be continued.)

Footnotes

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