The Idea of Re-birth E-Book

Francesca Arundale

• Herausgeber: Francesca Arundale
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

No subject claims more earnest attention from religious thinkers in the present day than the doctrine which this volume is designed to defend and interpret. The recognition of the all-important truth that the evolution of the human soul is carried on by means of successive experiences of life, will, when completely established, bring the essential principles of religion into line with our scientific appreciation of other natural laws. It will also rescue the spiritual aspirations of cultivated minds from the deadly burden of incredible dogmas, with which they have been encumbered during the growth of modern religious systems — dogmas that have gradually degraded, almost out of resemblance to its original aspect, the true Oriental teaching of the Founder of Christianity.

Leseprobe

The Idea of Re-birth

Francesca Arundale

First digital edition 2016 by Anna Ruggieri

INDEX

Preface

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

PREFACE

No subject claims more earnest attention from religious thinkers in the present day than the doctrine which this volume is designed to defend and interpret. The recognition of the all-important truth that the evolution of the human soul is carried on by means of successive experiences of life, will, when completely established, bring the essential principles of religion into line with our scientific appreciation of other natural laws. It will also rescue the spiritual aspirations of cultivated minds from the deadly burden of incredible dogmas, with which they have been encumbered during the growth of modern religious systems — dogmas that have gradually degraded, almost out of resemblance to its original aspect, the true Oriental teaching of the Founder of Christianity. The genesis of the German essay that has given rise to the treatise before us is interesting, to begin with, for the light it throws on the progress of intelligence in Germany in reference to the great law which governs the spiritual evolution of humanity. Especially acknowledging the force of passages explaining the principle of Reincarnation in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's "Erziehung des Menschengeschlects" (Education of the Human Race), Herr Privatmann August Jenny of Dresden recently established a trust fund to be employed in the promotion and dissemination of these ideas. He endowed it with a sum of ￡ 500, and the trustees proceeded to offer to public competition a prize for the best essay having for its object the maintenance of the idea of Re-birth. The essay which Miss Arundale has translated stands first among five — out of thirty-seven received — which the judges considered to be highly meritorious. Prizeessays in this country are rather out of date, but the scholarship of German professors may be gently submissive to the system none the less. At all events, Herr Heckel's composition exhibits a deep and extensive familiarity with the Oriental literature of the subject, and a useful service has been rendered by Miss Arundale to English students of spiritual science by the translation of his erudite pages. For if European readers can be induced to look into the matter sufficiently to realise, in the first instance, the position which Herr Heckel so effectually establishes — that the law of Reincarnation is unequivocally accepted by the ancient writers of India, and, secondly, that these ancient writers have claims on our intellectual respect second to none that can be advanced in favour of more recent philosophers with whom Western scholarship has kept in touch, — then a good deal will have been done towards dissipating the ignorance which constantly leads otherwise instructed persons of our own time to suppose that Reincarnation is the recent whim of an eccentric modern sect. Religious teaching which leaves Reincarnation out of account is in reality, as compared with that of a more deeply spiritual age, the blundering of a later epoch. The conceit of the nineteenth century, springing from circumstances that buried ancient wisdom for a time in oblivion, has led recent generations to believe with honest naiveté, that before their arrival on the scene intellectual chaos prevailed. Man may have been on the earth, it is perhaps conceded, since he left his flints in the drift some hundreds of thousands of years ago, but till the Christian era got into its teens he is assumed to have been a savage and a fool. Historical records only carry us back a couple or three thousand years at most. As for previous time, as we know nothing about it, there could have been nothing to know! Egyptian remains may be puzzling, Mexican antiquities curious, but modern culture has always been gifted with a sublime aplomb in cutting the acquaintance of inconvenient facts. Now by degrees as Sanskrit literature has been introduced to European society a good deal of Indian philosophy that has thus come over for our inspection is calculated to startle intelligent readers out of many long unchallenged assumptions. Perhaps some rubbish from the storehouses of the past has been tumbled out before us together with really valuable writing, but enough Indian philosophy has now been translated into European tongues to establish a few important conclusions beyond the reach of rational dispute. These writings arose among a people whose leading thinkers, at least, must have been men of profound metaphysical subtilty. We need not here go into disputed questions as to the period at which the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and the Upanishads were first composed, but assuredly their origin dates back far behind the beginnings of European civilisation. In the opinion of modern native scholars in India, their antiquity is immeasurably greater than that assigned to them by Western professors; but either way we find Hindoo philosophy concerned with the discussion of intricate spiritual problems before European civilisation was born. We need not go further in order to discredit the theory that the human mind only began to work in a reasonable manner when its guidance was undertaken by regularly endowed universities at Oxford and other seats of learning. The truth rather is that the intelligence of modern generations having been concentrated with great intensity on the study and development of material life, the faculties of the nineteenth century have been blunted in regard to metaphysical problems as compared with the qualifications in this respect of some earlier races. The best forces of modern culture have been directed to the investigation of physical Nature. Theologians all through the Middle Ages dissuaded original thinkers from applying their powers to the examination of spiritual science, by burning them alive whenever they attempted to do so. Later on, when civilisation, more powerful than the Church, put out its fires, the most brilliantly gifted representatives of the age had already become indifferent to the exercise of the spiritual liberty won for them with so much difficulty. They had become enamoured of the physical aspect of Nature, and ceased to take any interest in problems concerning a life that by the hypothesis would be cut off from the objects of sense. Our modern religious philosophy has thus remained stranded on the intellectual shoals of mediaeval interpretation, and men of first-rate intelligence for the most part declare themselves too busy in other ways to engage in the infinitely troublesome task of floating it off again. One cannot easily believe, however, that a very acute and cultivated generation will go on much longer neglecting the substance for the shadow,—neglecting the realities of Nature, which have to do with human consciousness, and are permanent, for the transitory phenomena of physical existence, which for each person in turn can only be one single phase of existence, and according to one favorite Oriental figure is only a reflection — a very imperfect and partial reflection — of consciousness in the mirror of materiality. Certainly knowledge concerning the magnificent congeries of laws governing that reflection, i.e., physical science, is intensely interesting and instructive (for those who can appreciate its analogies), but if each separate human being has destinies that outrun his association with matter in any one physical life, and if any definite knowledge concerning those destinies can be procured, surely it is frivolous and unpractical conduct to confine our attention exclusively to the laws of physical Nature. No patience and effort are grudged by the leaders of modern thinking when the result to be secured is the advancement of physical knowledge ever so little along any of its appointed paths. But when the question is no longer how material molecules are controlled, but how the human soul evolves, that subject is left by modern culture, with a smile of good-humoured indifference, to the formal exposition of the professional clergy, guided by creeds about on a level, for the purposes of real enlightenment, with Ptolemaic astronomy as compared with the conceptions of Greenwich. And though the professional clergy may in the present age set their contemporaries the example of good lives, they are fettered in too many ways to be in a position to take fresh departures in the interpretation of spiritual science. Nature, as people who think at all in the present day of super-physical problems will surely feel, must be a unity with coherent purposes running through both its physical and superphysical manifestations. But the spiritual science which has been confined for centuries within the limits of a Church catechism is not likely to furnish explanations in harmony with the geology or the astronomy of the Royal Society. The mere fact that it is of relatively ancient origin would be no condemnation of it, but the fact that it is stereotyped while presented as comprehensive is enough to discredit its claims. Some great truths derived from spiritual science may have been conveyed to the world at periods of fabulous antiquity, but revelations that have been properly understood have never been represented as complete. The pretence of having summed up in its own formularies all that it is necessary for man to know, and all that it lies within the scheme of Providence that he should be allowed to know while living on earth, is the sure sign of a spurious revelation or of a dishonest Church. The spiritual science that is worthy of respect is bound to advance as the human race advances and improves. Not that the truth of things need be supposed to change. The laws of physical Nature unveiled by modern science were in force before they were understood; and the laws of spiritual evolution have been operating, even while the growth of European civilisation has engaged intellectual activity with other subjects. But if there is any advance going on in the capacities or conquests of the human mind, there must be a corresponding expansion, reconstruction, and development of its creeds, — of the statements which sum up its knowledge of spiritual things for the time being. And thus the rigidity of creeds, and the servitude of the clergy in charge of them, to ideas which must be out of date if the spiritual enlightenment of the race is improving, is from the outset a fatal condemnation of their contents. As already suggested, however, a time must come when the leading minds of the age will concern themselves again — as in former ages of the world — with the development of knowledge concerning the states of human consciousness which link this life to others. It is only while a condition of non-belief in the whole structure of religious affirmation prevails with the highly educated laity that the task of defining what is held to be known in reference to superphysical existence, will be left, as heretofore, contemptuously to the care-takers of the Churches. When, somehow or other, people who have hitherto been content to pay an idle lip-homage to a conventional body of assertion may become alive to the possibility that real knowledge may be obtainable in reference to the origin and existence of man, the whole subject can hardly fail to spring into enormously greater popularity. To do them justice, the cultivated students of physical science neglect the other branches of natural research, rather because they profoundly disbelieve in the possibility of getting any knowledge that way, than because they are consciously devoted to the theory that the whole is less — and of less consequence — than its parts. Let them once realise that something is to be learned, and they will not — not all of them, at any rate — remain indifferent to the prospect. What is likely then to be the course of research in the domain of spiritual science when it is fairly opened up ? Educated opinion must first of all realise what is at present fully realised only by students of psychic phenomena, that observation can really get into contact with other states of consciousness besides that of which the physical body is the vehicle. We cannot be far from the period at which this all-important state of the facts will be generally recognised, because the materialistic theory that intelligence is a function of highly-organised matter has broken down in so many directions of late years. The enormous mass of testimony, for one thing, that has been furnished by the Psychic Research Society has contributed to change popular conviction in regard to many phenomena of consciousness "out of the body", even while the shallow intelligence of farceurs is ignobly employed on the attempt to convert its information to the service of conventional buffoonery. Mesmerism again, rising from the slough of misrepresentation and ignorance under which it has lain buried for the greater part of the present century, has at last reasserted its claims, and is now acknowledged for a fact, in some of its lowest aspects, so widely that all long-experienced students of its mysteries must foresee as inevitable in a near future a general recognition of the facilities it affords us in investigating the spiritual faculties latent in man. As evidencing the new sentiment which prevails now, as compared with that prevalent fifty or only twentyfive years ago, we have only to look round at the literature of imagination in the present day. It is bubbling all over with incidents drawn from the region of what has foolishly been called the supernatural. And now, instead of finding such incidents associated with materialistic explanations intended to cast discredit on the theory of supernaturalism, we find them all referred, more or less clumsily, to current theories of psychic science. For a long time to come we must still expect to hear a good deal of jeering at this change. To people who have encouraged themselves to believe that flesh is the seat and the skin the boundary of human consciousness, a more spiritualized view of the subject is very offensive. Such persons are more intuitive than they imagine in resenting it, for the laws of spiritual evolution are such as to involve in much ulterior discomfort the permanent soul-consciousness of those who cling too passionately to their own manifestation in flesh. Persons who, in sheer hatred of spiritual views of life, fight with the weapons either of ridicule or petty persecution against the progress of psychic science, are even more to be pitied than despised. But anyhow they are no longer able to withstand that progress. Its momentum has now been acquired, and the break-down of all barriers in its way is merely a question of time. I repeat the question, then. What is likely to be the course of the inquiry, when it becomes apparent to the great majority of leading thinkers that psychic phenomena constitute a field of practical research ? One characteristic of that inquiry seems tolerably certain. From the coincidence between modern psychic discovery and ancient mystic teaching, intelligent inquirers will at once rise to the perception of the fact that our modern discoveries in this field are re-discoveries of knowledge that has undeniably been in the possession of mankind at very early periods of human history. One of the necessary preliminaries of the great research in which future students of psychic science will engage, will thus be sought for in a résumé of the ancient teaching, which has been altogether neglected during the growth of European civilisation. That teaching is for the most part obscured in an all but impenetrable disguise; but the tangled symbology of old Oriental literature is gradually yielding to the influence of some recently discovered Rosetta stones. And at all events, foremost among the root ideas that will be detected as running through the spiritual philosophy of the past will be found that wide-reaching and luminous doctrine of Reincarnation that is the subject of the present exposition. Certainly it will not be because attention will necessarily be turned, in the way I have indicated, to ancient Oriental philosophers, that their doctrines will be accepted en bloc by modern psychic inquirers. I have not the least intention of implying anything of the kind. But they must come forward for consideration, and it will be impossible for people who get any genuine touch with Oriental theosophy to avoid taking them into consideration with a grave consciousness of their claims to respect. These claims will be the more readily conceded in proportion as inquirers take the trouble to understand the theories of Oriental theosophy with precision. These are often talked about on the basis of a very imperfect apprehension, and it sometimes happens that no sufficiently careful distinction is made between popular presentations of Oriental doctrine, and the doctrine in its purity as imbedded in philosophical writings of authority. In this way people are sometimes found repudiating a caricature of some esoteric tenet, under the impression that they are dealing with the tenet itself. Without going for the moment into the many possibilities of such misapprehension that the subject affords, I will attempt at all events to guard readers of the present volume from making that particular mistake about the subject it especially treats. The real Eastern doctrine of Reincarnation, as understood by the cultivated students of esoteric wisdom, is not, to begin with, the doctrine of metempsychosis or the return of a consciousness once established on the human level of evolution, into animal forms. That idea is one of the caricatures of the real doctrine served up for popular use in consequence of the severe restrictions which were put in ancient times on the exposition of spiritual science. Never mind for the moment whether those restrictions were wise or unwise. That is a great question apart from the matter we have in hand. I think it can be shown that the restrictions were in the main wise, but to argue out the point would require too long a digression. The real theory of Reincarnation, now at all events made clear, is as follows: — The generation of human consciousness, with all its possibilities of exaltation above the level that we are for the moment familiar with, is the grand purpose of Nature in connection with the evolution of material worlds, — of that process described very comprehensively as the descent of spirit into matter. It is a purpose worked out by the development of the lower kingdoms of Nature in the first instance; and the existence of vegetable or animal life is a condition precedent to the development of human life. It is not meant that a definite vegetable is ever the nucleus of a soul, nor that a specific beast, bird, or reptile can be regarded as a potential man. But in the animal kingdom, in the very highest levels of the animal kingdom, consciousness at last becomes localised and individualised, and a new soul is launched on the vast ocean of cosmic progress. Stupendous intervals of time come into play between the individualisation of animal consciousness and the entrance of the new soul on its career of human development, and these even have a tendency, when dimly comprehended, to obscure the course of events. But we need not go into that point now. Once human, the new soul does not recede in the scale of Nature; that is the idea to keep hold of at this stage. Its advance may be very slow and gradual, and at first its career will carry it through primitive and savage races; but with these, as with races much further advanced on the path of progress, the method on which Nature works is the same. The focus of consciousness once developed as such, is spiritual in its permanent nature, though wholly unqualified at first by experience to exist out of the body in the full enjoyment of spiritual conditions. On the spiritual plane in the first instance it has a very dim consciousness, with a strong affinity for the material aspects of existence. To these it is drawn back over and over again through an enormously prolonged series of lives. Each in turn may have invested the spiritual Ego with some new capacities, and on each return to spiritual planes of existence, the growing Ego goes through a reverberation of all consciousness of a spiritual character passed through in the life just spent. To realise the process the more easily let us come down to our own period of evolution. Most lives in this race have some spiritual emotions blended with many others of a highly material character, for we may bear in mind that a "spiritual" emotion does not necessarily mean a gravitation towards the ecclesiastical piety of the period, whatever that may be, but is realised in every impulse of genuine affection, not to speak of the love of knowledge or abstract principles. Each permanent spiritual entity, therefore, when it has gone through an earth life, with all its complicated experiences and emotions, good and bad deeds, high and low aspirations, is plentifully stocked with interior seeds of consciousness capable of growth and expansion in spiritual conditions of existence. A very long time is spent by the Ego — practically identical, at this stage, with the man just deceased — on the spiritual planes of Nature, which include of course that state of felicity known as, and more or less caricatured by popular religions as Heaven. But finite causes have finite consequences. An earth life of sixty or seventy years is a finite cause, and however far beyond such a span of time its consequences on the spiritual plane may expand, they will ultimately be exhausted. That is to say, the specific memories of the last life will fade out, leaving the spiritual soul clear and colourless, once more — a mysterious centre of spiritual forces and affinities, ripe, as the familiar phrase goes, for Reincarnation. Then it reincarnates in accordance with the bent of its affinities, which are the growth, be it remembered, of the former life. But let it not be supposed that "affinities" mean "choice". The reincarnating soul is drawn, quite without volition on its part, to the newly forming body, the life circumstances of which will fairly, rightly, justly, — perhaps retributively, — bring its own tendencies and characteristics into objectivity. In the vast complexity and volume of human life on earth, the laws of heredity are constantly giving rise to the production of forms with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities required to meet the necessities of, perhaps to provide the required penalties or discipline for, the human spiritual entities, or, in rough common phrase, the souls, coming into incarnation. Let me conclude this rapid summary by noting a few corollaries deducible from the doctrine.

- 1. It is impossible that any human being in incarnation can remember the specific events of his last incarnation. He has not left the spiritual plane till he has forgotten that. The objection sometimes foolishly raised against the present teaching, that it cannot be true because we do not remember our last lives, is seen to be a mere confession that the central idea of the doctrine is not understood. On the other hand, as human faculties improve with the development of the race, powers are coming into play which enable some exalted persons to pick up the imperishable natural records of former lives. While the normal rule must be that people in the flesh again cannot remember former existences, exceptions will be found available, as time goes on, for the service of psychic students in no remote future.

- 2. The terrible inequalities of human life can be regarded in a light which promises to reconcile them with justice. This is an immense thought dangerously liable to be misunderstood. There can be very few lives the conditions of which are unjust. There may be some; but they would come under abnormal side influences, and in the long run Nature is absolutely certain to compensate man for her own accidents. But on the other hand, no incarnate man, in presence of suffering, can ever take refuge — as a device for excusin [...]