The Idea of Reincarnation
(Next week we shall publish the last article in this series, by Dr. Annie Besant.—En. Spectator.) I NABILITY to remember having lived . before is -I- popularly supposed to discredit belief in pre-exist- ence, but really it does not ; for our Western Science has recently proved, as Eastern Science proved long ago, that subliminal memories are sub-conscious.
There is probably not one person in Europe or America —though there may be in India—who remembers having been born. How many of us, too, can recollect the personal events experienced on May Day of the third year after birth ? Or could any write out from memory a consecutive narrative of all thoughts and experiences which shaped his or her twenty-first year, or even a diary of the year 1926? For many of us, when we have attained extreme old age, the greater part of this life's' history will have been forgotten.
In the sub-consciousness, however, there seems to be a complete record of every conscious act and .of every thought-process ever experienced in the waking as well as in the sleeping or dreaming state. For pre- existing conditions to be remembered there must be continuity of association with present conditions. If such continuity exists, it exists in the sub-consciousness. And if it exists therein, then, in order to recall the memory of an anterior state of consciousness, it would be necessary to hold impressed upon the present physical brain and body a clear and continuous consciousness of the sub-consciousness.
In relation to our personal consciousness, apparently our greatest powers lie in our sub-consciousness, in embryonic sleep, waiting to be born into the con- sciousness of this world through the slow process . of evolutionary gestation. In the case of a Buddha, like Gautama, who on good historical authority is reported to have been able to recall past existences, this evolutionary process seems to have reached com- pletion. The Founder of Christianity, also—like other Wise Men of the East, including the Lord Krishna— is recorded as having been conscious of pre-existence, and as having power to lay down human life and to take it agani—John v. 30-43; xvii. 16, 18; x. 17-18.
The trend of psychological research in the realm of the sub-consciousness appears to be towards rather than away from the Great Teachers' doctrine that our actual incarnate existence is neither the first nor the last. Thus, certain dreams and phenomena of somnambulism suggest that man possesses innate memories eXtending backwards to prehistoric times. After much careful observation of the child-mind, Freud concludes that t! The ,child has its sexual impulses and activities from the beginning ; he brings them with him into the world "—American Journal of Psychology, xxi.- No. 2, pp. 207-8. Psychological analysis of habits, or of what Buddhists call "karmic propensities," as they unfold from childhood to maturity, leads to a like conclusion.
Again, individuals have 'seen a place or done a thing for the first time in this life and yet have felt that they had seen the place and done the thing previously. The study of -double personalities, and of amnesia wherein recollections return in inverse order to that in which they disappear, makes yet more plausible the hypothesis of pre-existent memories. BiolOgY 'contributes equally suggestive testimony, by showing that spontaneous' generation of life is impossible—that life cannot arisç. from non life, that in order to Manifest itself now life must have pre-existed. In accord with the law of the conservation of energy and indestructibility of matter,' whatsoever exists always has existed and always will exist: Embryology, again, demonstrates that the human embryo, beginning as a minute particle of protoplasm' reviews during its uterine existence the aeon-long history of organic evolution. At first it is like an amoeba. It afterwards develops gills and is like a fish. Thence it grows through mammalian forms until its ancient heredity, can carry it no further ; the initial microscopic bit of protoplasm is endowed with thought and human con- sciousness, with dominion over all the lower kingdoms through which,- by right of conquests in past lives, it, passed during the brief period of nine months. - . How else are we scientifically to explain such high, mental processes as judgment, reasoning, analysis and synthesis, and spatial perception, unless as resultants of: incalculable ages of experience in past conditions ? The number of well-authenticated cases of persons now living who by contact with the memory-content of their sub- consciousness remember. having lived before, is remarkably numerous, even in the West. The Burmese boy who is stirring Burma by lectures on Buddhist metaphysics (which normally no one comprehends without spending ; many years in exacting study) and who readily detects errors in classical Pali without having studied it in his present life, says that he clearly remembers his previous incarnation when he was the learned abbot of a well- known Buddhist monastery in Burma.
Modern Yogis teach—as did the Buddha—how the memory of past births may be recalled in a natural: manner, so as to know, rather than merely to believe the truth of the re-birth doctrine. Among ourselves, a few adventurous men of science, by employing the artificial method of mesmeric trance, claim to be able to recover • from the sub-consciousness of their subject not only' memories belonging to the subject's present life which have been forgotten, but memories seemingly unattach:. able to the present life and best explicable by the theory. of pre-existence.
Until declared heretical by the corrupt Second Council, of Constantinople, in A.D. 553, the doctrine of pre- ■ existence and rebirth was held by many Christians, - notably the followers of Origen, the best-informed and most authoritative of the Fathers of the Christian Church, who had expounded it three centuries earlier as implicit in well-known Biblical texts (De Principiis.I. ch. vii. 4 ; , II. ch. ix. 7 ; III. ch. i. 20, ch. iii. 5, ch. v. 4, ch. vi„ 8; W. ch. i. 28). The primitive Gnostic Christians, who were condemned—as Origen was, three centuries •. after he had died a good Christian—by heresy-hunting ecclesiastics, also held the doctrine. _ For a Modernist, neither bound by Church Conm*tils• nor 'hinited to the lamentably, incomplete account of the sayings and doings of Jesus compiled, as the exoteric New , Testament, and willing to accept as supplementary to it- certain esoteric Gnostic Gospels, the doctrine is now; as- it was before A.D. 558, orthodoxly Christian. In this view, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Taoists, Sufis, and some Christians are in fundamental agreement concerning the solution of the greatest of all human problems. Modern. . • science; as I have endeavoured to show, like the..lanciel4 science of the . Orient, appears to . sanction „sink ap..: agreement of the chief religions of the world. . - EVANS-WENTZ.
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