The Writings of Annie Besant
(1847 -1933)
The Law of Rebirth
REINCARNATION
IN THE PAST
THERE is,
perhaps, no philosophical doctrine in the world that has so magnificent an
intellectual ancestry as that of reincarnation-the unfolding of the human
spirit through recurring lives on earth, experience being gathered during the
earth life and worked up into intellectual faculty and conscience during the
heaven-life, so that a child is born with his past experiences transmuted into
mental and moral tendencies and powers. As Max Muller truly remarked, the
greatest minds humanity has produced have accepted reincarnation. Reincarnation
is taught and illustrated in the great epics of the Hindus as an undoubted fact
on which morality is based, and the splendid Hindu literature, which is the
admiration of European scholars, is permeated with it. The Buddha taught it and
constantly spoke of his past births. Pythagoras did the same, and Plato
included it in his philosophical writings. Josephus states that it was accepted
among the Jews, and relates the story of a captain who encouraged his soldiers
to fight to the death by reminding them of their return to earth. In The Wisdom
of Solomon it is stated that coming into an undefiled body wins the reward of
'being good'. The Christ accepted it, telling His disciples that John the
Baptist was Elijah. Virgil and Ovid take it for granted. The ritual composed by
the learning of
The
reappearance of the belief in reincarnation is not, therefore, an emergence of
a belief of savages among civilised nations, but a
sign of recovery from a temporary mental aberration in Christendom, from the
de-rationalisation of religion which has wrought so
much evil and has given rise to so much scepticism
and materialism. To assert the special creation of a soul for every fresh body,
implying that the coming into existence of a soul depends on the formation of a
body, inevitably leads to the conclusion that with the death of the body the
soul will pass out of existence; that a soul with no past
THE LAW OF
RE-BIRTH
should have an everlasting future is as incredible as
that a stick should exist with only one end. Only a soul which is unborn can
hope to be undying. The loss of the teaching of reincarnation-with its
temporary purgatory for working out evil passions and its temporary heaven for
the transmutation of experience into faculty-gave rise to the idea of a
never-ending heaven for which no one is good enough, and a never-ending hell
for which no one is wicked enough, confined human evolution to an inappreciable
fragment of existence, hung an everlasting future on the contents of a few
years, and made life an unintelligible tangle of injustices and partialities,
of unearned genius and unmerited criminality, an intolerable problem to the
thoughtful, tolerable only to blind and foundationless faith.
REINCARNATION
AND ITS NECESSITY
There are
but three explanations of human inequalities, whether of faculties, of
opportunities, of circumstances: 1. Special creation by God, implying that man
is helpless, his destiny being controlled by an arbitrary and incalculable
will. II. Heredity, as suggested by science, implying an equal helplessness on
man's part, he being the result of a past, over which he had no control. III.
Reincarnation, implying that man can become master of his destiny, he being the
result of his own individual past, being what he has made himself.
Special
creation is rejected by all thoughtful people as an explanation of the
conditions round us, save in the most important conditions of all, the
character with which and the environment into which an infant is born.
Evolution
is taken for granted in everything except in the life of spiritual intelligence
called man; he has no individual past, although he has an individual endless
future. The character he brings with him-on which more than on anything else
his destiny on earth depends-is, on this hypothesis, specially created for him
by God, and imposed on him without any choice of his own; out of the lucky bag
of creation he may draw a prize or a blank, the blank being a'doom
of misery; such as it is, he must take it.
If he draw
a good disposition, fine capacities, a noble nature, so much the better for
him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If he draw congenital criminality,
congenital idiocy, congenital disease, congenital drunkenness, so much the
worse for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If everlasting bliss be
tacked on to the one and everlasting torment to the other the unfortunate one
must accept his ill fate as he may. Hath not the potter power over the clay?
Only it seems sad if the clay be sentient.
In another
respect special creation is grotesque. A spirit is specially created for a
small body which dies a few hours after birth. If life on earth has any
educational or experimental value that spirit will be the poorer forever by
missing such a life, and the lost opportunity can
never be made good. If, on the other hand, human life on earth is of no
essential importance and carries with it the certainty of many ill doings and
sufferings and the possibility of everlasting suffering at the end of it, the
spirit that comes into a body that endures to old age is hardly dealt with, as
it must endure innumerable ills escaped by the other without any equivalent
advantage, and may be damned forever.
THE LAW OF
RE-BIRTH
The list of
injustices brought about by special creation might be extended indefinitely,
for it includes all inequalities, it has made myriads of atheists, as
incredible by the intelligence and revolting to the conscience. It places man
in the position of the inexorable creditor of God, stridently demanding: 'Why has thou made me thus?'
The
hypothesis of science is not as blasphemous as that of special creation, but
heredity only explains bodies; it throws no light on the evolution of
intelligence and conscience. The Darwinian theory
tried to include these, but failed lamentably to explain how the social virtues
could be evolved in the struggle for existence. Moreover, by the time the
parents had acquired their ripest fruition of high qualities the period of
reproduction was over; children are for the most part born in the hey-day of
physical vigour while the intellectual and moral
qualities of their parents are immature. Later studies have, however, shown
that acquired qualities are not transmissible, and that the higher the type the
fewer the offspring.
'Genius is
sterile', says science, and thus sounds the knell of human progress if heredity
be its motive power. Intelligence and reproductive power vary inversely; the
lower the parents the more prolific are they. With the discovery that acquired
qualities are not transmissible science has come up against a dead wall. It can
offer no explanation of the facts of high intelligence and saintly life. The
child of a saint may be a profligate; the child of a genius may be a dolt.
Genius 'comes out of the blue'
This glory
of humanity, from the scientific standpoint, seems outside the law of
causation. Science does not tell us how to build strong minds and pure hearts for
the future. She does not threaten us with an arbitrary will, but she leaves us
without explanation of human inequalities. She tells us that the drunkard
bequeaths to his children bodies prone to disease, but she does not explain why
some unhappy children are the recipients of the hideous legacy.
Reincarnation
restores justice to God and power to man. Every human spirit enters into human
life a germ, without knowledge, without conscience, without discrimination. By
experience, pleasant and painful, man gathers materials, and as before
explained, builds them into mental and moral faculties. Thus the character he
is born with is self-made, and marks the stage he has reached in his long
evolution. The good disposition, the fine capacities, the noble nature are the
spoils of many a hard-fought fight, the wages of heavy and arduous toil. The
reverse marks an early stage of growth, the small development of the spiritual
germ.
The savage
of today is the saint of the future; all tread a similar road; all are destined
to ultimate human perfection. Pain follows on mistakes
and is ever remedial; strength is developed by struggle; we reap, after every
sowing, the inevitable result; happiness growing out of the right, sorrow out
of the wrong. The babe dying shortly after birth pays in the death a debt owing
from the past, and returns swiftly to earth, delayed but for brief space and
free of his debt to gather the experience necessary for his growth. Social
virtues, though placing a man at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence,
perhaps even leading to the sacrifice of his physical life, build a noble
character for his future lives and shape him to become a servant of the nation.
THE LAW OF
RE-BIRTH
Genius
inheres in the individual as the result of many lives of effort, and the
sterility of the body it wears does not rob the future of its services, as it
returns greater on every re-birth. The body poisoned by a father's drunkenness
is taken by a spirit learning by a lesson of suffering
to guide its earthly life on lines better than those followed in the past.
And so in
every case the individual past explains the individual present, and when the
laws of growth are known and obeyed a man can build with a sure hand his future
destiny, shaping his growth on lines of ever-increasing beauty until he reaches
the stature of the Perfect
WHY OUR
PAST LIVES ARE FORGOTTEN
No question
is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: 'If I were here before,
why do I not remember it?' A little consideration of facts will answer the
question.
First of
all, let us note the fact that we forget more of our present lives than we
remember. Many people cannot remember learning to read; yet the fact that they
can read proves the learning. Incidents of childhood and youth have faded from
our memory, yet they have left traces on our character. A fall in babyhood is
forgotten, yet the victim is none the less a cripple. And
this, although we are using the same body in which the forgotten events were
experienced.
These
events, however, are not wholly lost by us; if a person be thrown into a
mesmeric trance, they may be drawn from the depths of memory; they are
submerged, not destroyed. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a
language known in childhood and forgotten in maturity. Much of our subconsciousness consists of these submerged experiences,
memories thrown into the background but recoverable.
If this be
true of experiences encountered in the present body, how much more must it be
true of experiences encountered in former bodies, which died and decayed many
centuries ago. Our present body and brain have had no
share in those far-off happenings; how should memory assert itself through
them? Our permanent body, which remains with us throughout the cycle of
reincarnation, is the spiritual body; the lower garments fall away and return
to their elements ere we can become reincarnated.
The new
mental, astral and physical matter in which we are reclothed
for a new life on earth receives from the spiritual intelligence, garbed only
in the spiritual body, not the experiences of the past, but the qualities,
tendencies and capacities which have bee"n made
out of those experiences. Our conscience, our instinctive response to emotional
and intellectual appeals, our recognition of the force of a logical argument,
our assent to fundamental principles of right and wrong, these are the traces
of past experience. A man of a low intellectual type cannot 'see' a logical or
mathematical proof; a man of low moral type cannot 'feel' the compelling force
of a high moral ideal.
When a
philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art is mastered
without study, memory is there in power, though past facts of learning are
forgotten; as Plato said, it is reminiscence. When we feel intimate with a
stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a
friend of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another
stranger,
memory is there, the spirit's recognition of an
ancient foe.
These
affinities, these warnings, come from the undying spiritual intelligence which
is ourself; we remember, though working in the brain
we cannot impress on it our memory. The mind-body, the brain, are new; the spirit furnishes the mind with the results of
the past, not with the memory of its events. As a merchant, closing the year's
ledger and opening a new one, does not enter in the new one all the items of
the old, but only its balances, so does the spirit hand on to the new brain his
judgments on the experiences of a life that is closed, the conclusions to which
he has come, the decisions at which he has arrived. This is the stock handed on
to the new life, the mental furniture for the new dwelling-a real memory.
Rich and
varied are these in the highly evolved man; if these are compared with the
possessions of the savage, the value of such a memory of a long past is patent.
No brain could store the memory of the events of numerous lives; when they are
concreted into mental and moral judgments they are available for use; hundreds
of murders have led up to the decision 'I must not kill'; the memory of each
murder would be a useless burden, but the judgment based on their results, the
instinct of the sanctity of human life, is the effective memory of them in the civilised man.
Memory of
past events, however, is sometimes found; children have occasional fleeting
glimpses of their past, recalled by some event of the present; an English boy
who had been a sculptor recalled it when he first saw some statues; an Indian
child recognised a stream in which he had been
drowned as a little child in a preceding life, and the mother of that earlier
body. Many cases are on record of such memory of past events.
Moreover,
such memory can be gained. But the gaining is a matter of steady effort, of
prolonged meditation, whereby the restless mind, ever running outwards, may be
controlled and rendered quiescent, so that it may be sensitive and responsive
to the spirit and receive from him the memory of the past. Only as we can hear
the still small voice of the spirit may the story of the past be unrolled, for
the spirit alone can remember and cast down the rays of his memory to enlighten
the darkness of the fleeting lower nature to which he is temporarily attached.
Cinder such
conditions memory is possible, links of the past are seen, old friends are recognised, old scenes recalled, and a subtle inner
strength and calm grows out of the practical experience of immortality. Present
troubles grow light when seen in their true proportions as trivial and
transient events in an unending life; present joys lose their brilliant colours
when seen as repetitions of past delights; and both alike are equally accepted
as useful experiences, enriching mind and heart and contributing to the growth
of the unfolding life.
Not until
pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity can the
crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they have thus been
seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which
would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced
that on his return to earth-life he would be washed clean of his memories, and
lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new life on its
way, enriched with the results, but unburdened with the recollections of its
past.
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