VIII. ON RE-INCARNATION OR REBIRTH.

WHAT IS MEMORY ACCORDING TO THEOSOPHICAL TEACHING?

ENQ. The most difficult thing for you to do, will be to explain and
give reasonable grounds for such a belief. No Theosophist has
ever yet succeeded in bringing forward a single valid proof to
shake my scepticism. First of all, you have against this theory of
re-incarnation, the fact that no single man has yet been found to
remember that he has lived, least of all who he was, during his
previous life.

THEO. Your argument, I see, tends to the same old objection; the loss
of memory in each of us of our previous incarnation. You think it
invalidates our doctrine? My answer is that it does not, and that
at any rate such an objection cannot be final.

ENQ. I would like to hear your arguments.

THEO. They are short and few. Yet when you take into consideration
(_a_) the utter inability of the best modern psychologists to
explain to the world the nature of _mind_; and (_b_) their
complete ignorance of its potentialities, and higher states,
you have to admit that this objection is based on an _a priori_
conclusion drawn from _primâ facie_ and circumstantial evidence
more than anything else. Now what is “memory” in your conception,
pray?

ENQ. That which is generally accepted: the faculty in our mind of
remembering and of retaining the knowledge of previous thoughts,
deeds and events.

THEO. Please add to it that there is a great difference between the
three accepted forms of memory. Besides memory in general you have
_Remembrance_, _Recollection_ and _Reminiscence_, have you not?
Have you ever thought over the difference? Memory, remember, is a
generic name.

ENQ. Yet, all these are only synonyms.

THEO. Indeed, they are not—not in philosophy, at all events. Memory is
simply an innate power in thinking beings, and even in animals,
of reproducing past impressions by an association of ideas
principally suggested by objective things or by some action on our
external sensory organs. Memory is a faculty depending entirely on
the more or less healthy and normal functioning of our _physical_
brain; and _remembrance_ and _recollection_ are the attributes
and handmaidens of that memory. But _reminiscence_ is an entirely
different thing. “Reminiscence” is defined by the modern
psychologist as something intermediate between _remembrance_
and _recollection_, or “a conscious process of recalling past
occurrences, but _without that full and varied reference_ to
particular things which characterises _recollection_.” Locke,
speaking of recollection and remembrance, says: “When an _idea
again_ recurs without the operation of the like object on the
external sensory, it is _remembrance_; if it be sought after by
the mind, and with pain and endeavour found and brought again into
view, it is _recollection_.” But even Locke leaves _reminiscence_
without any clear definition, because it is no faculty or
attribute of our _physical_ memory, but an intuitional perception
apart from and outside our physical brain; a perception which,
covering as it does (being called into action by the ever-present
knowledge of our spiritual Ego) all those visions in man which
are regarded as _abnormal_—from the pictures suggested by genius
to the _ravings_ of fever and even madness—are classed by science
as having no _existence_ outside of our fancy. Occultism and
Theosophy, however, regard _reminiscence_ in an entirely different
light. For us, while _memory_ is physical and evanescent and
depends on the physiological conditions of the brain—a fundamental
proposition with all teachers of mnemonics, who have the
researches of modern scientific psychologists to back them—we call
_reminiscence_ the _memory of the soul_. And it is _this_ memory
which gives the assurance to almost every human being, whether he
understands it or not, of his having lived before and having to
live again. Indeed, as Wordsworth has it:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar.”

ENQ. If it is on this kind of memory—poetry and abnormal fancies, on
your own confession—that you base your doctrine, then you will
convince very few, I am afraid.

THEO. I did not “confess” it was a fancy. I simply said that
physiologists and scientists in general regard such reminiscences
as hallucinations and fancy, to which _learned_ conclusion they
are welcome. We do not deny that such visions of the past and
glimpses far back into the corridors of time, are abnormal, as
contrasted with our normal daily life experience and physical
memory. But we do maintain with Professor W. Knight, that “the
absence of memory of any action done in a previous state cannot
be a conclusive argument against our having lived through it.”
And every fair-minded opponent must agree with what is said in
Butler’s _Lectures on Platonic Philosophy_—“that the feeling of
extravagance with which it (pre-existence) affects us has its
secret source in materialistic or semi-materialistic prejudices.”
Besides which we maintain that memory, as Olympiodorus called it,
is simply _phantasy_, and the most unreliable thing in us.[31]
Ammonius Saccas asserted that the only faculty in man directly
opposed to prognostication, or looking into futurity, is _memory_.
Furthermore, remember that memory is one thing and mind or
_thought_ is another; one is a recording machine, a register which
very easily gets out of order; the other (thoughts) are eternal
and imperishable. Would you refuse to believe in the existence of
certain things or men only because your physical eyes have not
seen them? Would not the collective testimony of past generations
who have seen him be a sufficient guarantee that Julius Cæsar once
lived? Why should not the same testimony of the psychic senses of
the masses be taken into consideration?

ENQ. But don’t you think that these are too fine distinctions to be
accepted by the majority of mortals?

THEO. Say rather by the majority of materialists. And to them we say,
behold: even in the short span of ordinary existence, memory is
too weak to register all the events of a lifetime. How frequently
do even most important events lie dormant in our memory until
awakened by some association of ideas, or aroused to function
and activity by some other link. This is especially the case
with people of advanced age, who are always found suffering from
feebleness of recollection. When, therefore, we remember that
which we know about the physical and the spiritual principles
in man, it is not the fact that our memory has failed to record
our precedent life and lives that ought to surprise us, but the
contrary, were it to happen.


WHY DO WE NOT REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES?

ENQ. You have given me a bird’s eye view of the seven principles; now
how do they account for our complete loss of any recollection of
having lived before?

THEO. Very easily. Since those “principles” which we call physical, and
none of which is denied by science, though it calls them by other
names,[32] are disintegrated after death with their constituent
elements, _memory_ along with its brain, this vanished memory of
a vanished personality, can neither remember nor record anything
in the subsequent re-incarnation of the EGO. Re-incarnation means
that this Ego will be furnished with a _new_ body, a _new_ brain,
and a _new_ memory. Therefore it would be as absurd to expect this
_memory_ to remember that which it has never recorded as it would
be idle to examine under a microscope a shirt never worn by a
murderer, and seek on it for the stains of blood which are to be
found only on the clothes he wore. It is not the clean shirt that
we have to question, but the clothes worn during the perpetration
of the crime; and if these are burnt and destroyed, how can you
get at them?

ENQ. Aye! how can you get at the certainty that the crime was ever
committed at all, or that the “man in the clean shirt” ever lived
before?

THEO. Not by physical processes, most assuredly; nor by relying on the
testimony of that which exists no longer. But there is such a
thing as circumstantial evidence, since our wise laws accept it,
more, perhaps, even than they should. To get convinced of the
fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in
_rapport_ with one’s real permanent Ego, not one’s evanescent
memory.

ENQ. But how can people believe in that which they _do not know_, nor
have ever seen, far less put themselves in _rapport_ with it?

THEO. If people, and the most learned, will believe in the Gravity,
Ether, Force, and what not of Science, abstractions “and working
hypotheses,” which they have neither seen, touched, smelt,
heard, nor tasted—why should not other people believe, on the
same principle, in one’s permanent Ego, a far more logical and
important “working hypothesis” than any other?

ENQ. What is, finally, this mysterious eternal principle? Can you
explain its nature so as to make it comprehensible to all?

THEO. The EGO which reincarnates, the _individual_ and
immortal—not personal—“I”; the vehicle, in short, of the
Atma-Buddhic MONAD, that which is rewarded in Devachan and
punished on earth, and that, finally, to which the reflection only
of the _Skandhas_, or attributes, of every incarnation attaches
itself.[33]

ENQ. What do you mean by _Skandhas_?

THEO. Just what I said: “attributes,” among which is _memory_, all of
which perish like a flower, leaving behind them only a feeble
perfume. Here is another paragraph from H. S. Olcott’s “Buddhist
Catechism”[34] which bears directly upon the subject. It deals
with the question as follows:—“The aged man remembers the
incidents of his youth, despite his being physically and mentally
changed. Why, then, is not the recollection of past lives brought
over by us from our last birth into the present birth? Because
memory is included within the Skandhas, and the Skandhas having
changed with the new existence, a memory, the record of that
particular existence, develops. Yet the record or reflection
of all the past lives must survive, for when Prince Siddhartha
became Buddha, the full sequence of His previous births were seen
by Him ... and any one who attains to the state of _Jhana_ can
thus retrospectively trace the line of his lives.” This proves to
you that while the undying qualities of the personality—such as
love, goodness, charity, etc.—attach themselves to the immortal
Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the
divine aspect of the man who was, his material Skandhas (those
which generate the most marked Karmic effects) are as evanescent
as a flash of lightning, and cannot impress the new brain of the
new personality; yet their failing to do so impairs in no way the
identity of the reincarnating Ego.

ENQ. Do you mean to infer that that which survives is only the
Soul-memory, as you call it, that Soul or Ego being one and the
same, while nothing of the personality remains?

THEO. Not quite; something of each personality, unless the latter was
an _absolute_ materialist with not even a chink in his nature for
a spiritual ray to pass through, must survive, as it leaves its
eternal impress on the incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual
Ego.[35] (See On _post mortem_ and _post natal_ Consciousness.)
The personality with its Skandhas is ever changing with every new
birth. It is, as said before, only the part played by the actor
(the true Ego) for one night. This is why we preserve no memory on
the physical plane of our past lives, though the _real_ “Ego” has
lived them over and knows them all.

ENQ. Then how does it happen that the real or Spiritual man does not
impress his new personal “I” with this knowledge?

THEO. How is it that the servant-girls in a poor farm-house could speak
Hebrew and play the violin in their trance or somnambulic state,
and knew neither when in their normal condition? Because, as every
genuine psychologist of the old, not your modern, school, will
tell you, the Spiritual Ego can act only when the personal Ego is
paralysed. The Spiritual “I” in man is omniscient and has every
knowledge innate in it; while the personal self is the creature of
its environment and the slave of the physical memory. Could the
former manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment,
there would be no longer men on earth, but we should all be gods.

ENQ. Still there ought to be exceptions, and some ought to remember.

THEO. And so there are. But who believes in their report? Such
sensitives are generally regarded as hallucinated hysteriacs, as
crack-brained enthusiasts, or humbugs, by modern materialism.
Let them read, however, works on this subject, pre-eminently
“Re-incarnation, a Study of Forgotten Truth” by E. D. Walker,
F.T.S., and see in it the mass of proofs which the able author
brings to bear on this vexed question. One speaks to people of
soul, and some ask “What is Soul?” “Have you ever proved its
existence?” Of course it is useless to argue with those who are
materialists. But even to them I would put the question: “Can you
remember what you were or did when a baby? Have you preserved
the smallest recollection of your life, thoughts, or deeds, or
that you lived at all during the first eighteen months or two
years of your existence? Then why not deny that you have ever
lived as a babe, on the same principle?” When to all this we add
that the reincarnating Ego, or _individuality_, retains during
the Devachanic period merely the essence of the experience of its
past earth-life or personality, the whole physical experience
involving into a state of _in potentia_, or being, so to speak,
translated into spiritual formulæ; when we remember further that
the term between two rebirths is said to extend from ten to
fifteen centuries, during which time the physical consciousness is
totally and absolutely inactive, having no organs to act through
and therefore _no existence_, the reason for the absence of all
remembrance in the purely physical memory is apparent.

ENQ. You just said that the SPIRITUAL EGO was omniscient. Where, then,
is that vaunted omniscience during his Devachanic life, as you call
it?

THEO. During that time it is latent and potential, because first of
all, the Spiritual Ego (the compound of Buddhi-Manas) is _not_ the
Higher SELF, which being one with the Universal Soul or Mind is
alone omniscient; and, secondly, because Devachan is the idealized
continuation of the terrestrial life just left behind, a period
of retributive adjustment, and a reward for unmerited wrongs
and sufferings undergone in that special life. It is omniscient
only _potentially_ in Devachan, and _de facto_ exclusively in
Nirvana, when the Ego is merged in the Universal Mind-Soul. Yet
it re-becomes _quasi_ omniscient during those hours on earth when
certain abnormal conditions and physiological changes in the body
make the _Ego_ free from the trammels of matter. Thus the examples
cited above of somnambulists, a poor servant speaking Hebrew, and
another playing the violin, give you an illustration of the case
in point. This does not mean that the explanations of these two
facts offered us by medical science have no truth in them, for
one girl had, years before, heard her master, a clergyman, read
Hebrew works aloud, and the other had heard an artist playing a
violin at their farm. But neither could have done so as perfectly
as they did had they not been ensouled by THAT which, owing to the
sameness of its nature with the Universal Mind, is omniscient.
Here the higher principle acted on the Skandhas and moved them;
in the other, the personality being paralysed, the individuality
manifested itself. Pray do not confuse the two.


ON INDIVIDUALITY AND PERSONALITY.[36]

ENQ. But what is the difference between the two? I confess that I am
still in the dark. Indeed it is just that difference, then, that
you cannot impress too much on our minds.

THEO. I try to; but alas, it is harder with some than to make them feel
a reverence for childish impossibilities, only because they
are _orthodox_, and because orthodoxy is respectable. To
understand the idea well, you have to first study the dual sets
of “principles”; the _spiritual_, or those which belong to the
imperishable Ego; and the _material_, or those principles which
make up the ever-changing bodies or the series of personalities of
that Ego. Let us fix permanent names to these, and say that:—