Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Reincarnation: A Study of the Human Soul
By J.A. Anderson
Ethical Conclusions
The truth of the reincarnation of the human soul carries with it as necessary corollaries most important ethical conclusions. It establishes a philosophic and legitimately scientific basis for human conduct something that the world has not had since the perversion of the teachings of Christ, during the second and third centuries of this era. Even at that time the real gnosis underlying Christ's tenets was only trusted in the hands of an inner circle of disciples, and by no means given to the world at large. " Cast not your pearls before swine," taught this Master, which reservation may have afforded the very opportunity for perversion by prohibiting the giving out of the real truth when erroneous teachings began to creep in through the ignorance of the Church Fathers. Certainly, not within the records of modern history has there been such an unveiling of Isis, such light thrown upon the problems ^of human life, as in the writings of Madame H. P. Blavatsky, which goes to prove that human necessity must have been very urgent for the Custodians of the Archaic Wisdom to have permitted this profuse giving out of sacred and secret teachings.
At any rate, enough light has been thrown upon man's relation to his fellow-men and to nature to afford a sound basis for human ethics. As a part of the great Whole, as an emanation from a higher Logos, and constituting himself a lower one, a knowledge of these relations is of infinite importance in its determining influence upon not only his highest hopes, aspirations, ambitions, but also upon his every thought and act in his daily life. Knowing this life to be but a school for preparing him for a higher and happier one, and that this happier existence cannot be attained by any sycophantic adulation, cajoling of or forgiveness by an imaginary Jehovah, but must be won under the iron law of cause and effect; and, further, that, like pupils in our public schools, he will be kept in this grade of sin and suffering by continually reincarnating until he himself earns his promotion to a higher one man cannot but begin to examine his motives more closely, to pay some attention to the debtor and creditor account of a karma as accurate as it is inevitable. Under the short-sighted Western conception of but one existence upon this earth, the numerous and grossly palpable failures in justice, in human affairs, have exerted a most pernicious influence upon human ethics. Solomon, indeed, declared that he had never " seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread"; but the very reverse obtains under our social system, in which, as caustically remarked by Madame Blavatsky, we have made of vice an art and of selfishness a basis for ethics. We loudly claim that " honesty is the best policy," while thousands of millionaires who have come dishonestly by every penny of their hoards not only go down to peaceful and honored graves, but with the assurance signed, sealed, executed, and the " cash " equivalent receipted for of eternal happiness in the future.
Under the broader view, all these apparent failures in justice are recognized as only apparent, and not real, human self-respect is restored ; and the intuitive belief that honesty is the best policy, obscured by the one-life hori zon, becomes magnificently demonstrated as these hori- zons are seen to stretch away into an infinite perspective. Recognizing that we ourselves have made the bitter pres- ent by an unwise past, that we have not been unjustly and causelessly born into this sphere of existence the helpless victims of fate or of accident, we can set ourselves cheerfully to right by the light of the broader conception, environments, both physical and mental, which we know to be but the meting out of exact and impersonal justice to us. By the light of Reincarnation and Karma, we perceive that the social injustices with which our civilization is now cursed are rooted too deeply to be plucked out by merely changing our laws. Human desires and motives must be radically changed, and this can only be done by making man aware of his true nature and god-like destiny. Then he will recognize that all the evils which now threaten to engulf humanity in a sea of anarchy and bloodshed arise wholly out of yielding to the dominance of the animal portion of his being are on the animal plane and that all appeals to force or violence can only still further arouse and strengthen those brutal elements to control and spiritualize, which (s the chief reason for incarnation upon this earth.
Social and political reform must proceed, like every other process in nature, from within without; and when the inner desire to act justly shall have arisen, the outer act will quickly conform. Meanwhile, no effort to show the real unity and solidarity of humanity is of as great importance as the popularizing of the teachings of Reincarnation, which distinguishes the true man and his necessities from the false one with his illusionary ambitions, and Karma, which shows that social as well as all other evolution takes place under the law of cause and effect, and cannot but act justly.
Aside from social and political considerations, the twin truths of Reincarnation and Karma, when once clearly comprehended, satisfy the religious element which is, or ought to be, so deeply engrafted in every human heart. It has been well and truly said that " religion is for the wise, and superstition for the ignorant"; and within these teachings only is to be found that food which will supply the need of rational and philosophical men for a scientific and philosophical religion. Therefore, from the religious standpoint, this inquiry into the nature and functions of the soul is amply justified. Blind faith alone fails ; creeds are but idle patterings and empty sounds; man must know his destiny, or the incentive to upward exertion is largely paralyzed. Reason teaches us that death cannot transport us where we are not now; cannot act as a kind of moral filter, that in some miraculous way will remove the impurities of our lower nature, and fit us for habitation in some high or " heavenly " sphere, nor, failing this, transport us to some inconceivably horrible hell. The chain of life is formed of continuous links.
We have become what we are by an infinite series of past lives; we have to work out our future destiny by an infinite series of lives to come. Here, where we are struggling in the bonds of matter, is our only " hell," the law of cause and effect our sole punisher, and " heaven " our release from sensuous existence either temporarily by death, or wholly through our evolving beyond sensuous necessities. The warning voice of conscience is but the voice of our Higher Ego, speaking as the result of actual experience and wisdom. And because the seat of conscience is, of necessity, in the Higher Ego, it therefore seems to us as though it came from some outside source, when it is in reality our true self, vainly endeavoring to guide and control the coarse and unwieldly physical machine, to which it finds itself karmically attached, and with which it is therefore so closely inter-related that the one must ever react upon the other. Out of this action and reaction grows the real battle of life; the tide turning now this way and now that. Knowing all this, man will rest secure in the Divine law of cause and effect, which neither punishes nor rewards, but wisely, justly, and inexorably adjusts each cause to its corresponding effect.
Knowing himself to be the arbiter of his own destiny, he will cease to complain; cease to attribute his sorrows and sufferings to the ways of a mysterious providence; and recognizing that nothing has come nor can come to him which is not his own by virtue of having created or caused it, he will begin the warfare against his lower nature with a strength of purpose and determination to succeed impossible before this realization. The worlds, the stars, and suns will no longer be created solely for him, but rather he for them. Even the strife in nature, the cruel struggle for existence, will not seem so dreadful when he realizes that nothing is really slain; that "he who slays and he who thinks himself slain are alike deceived." Nor will he longer trust to forms and creeds, but instead will retire to the inner chamber of his own heart and worship silently that which is equally at the basis of his soul as it is at the base of the flower or stone, the Unknowable, Inconceivable Causeless Cause. Realizing through these teachings the actual, dynamic brotherhood of mankind ; that the fall of one proportionately hurts and retards the advancement of the race; and that the attainment of the goal of assured immortality by but one faithful, unselfish, sacrificing soul shortens in some degree the weary path to be trod by his brother men he will merge all merely selfish longings in the realization of the help to others thus afforded by his own toil, and patiently and tranquilly work for Humanity, unterrified by life and undismayed by death. Rightly comprehended, then, Reincarnation comes to us as a message of hope, of love, and of Divine encouragement. To those who so pitifully cling to youth and the pleasures of the young, it holds the promise of renewed youth, life after life. To him who has been conquered in the battle of life, it offers other opportunities for further and more efficient battling.
To all it promises that no effort shall be lost, nor without its reward; that the aspirations unable to be realized now shall find full fruition then ; that the very loved ones of this life, so rudely torn from us by death, will be again attracted by and drawn to us in our next earth-life, to renew the interrupted associations. But the great, the all-important lesson Reincarnation teaches is that our powers are infinite, our opportunities eternal, and our goal god-liice. Our progress is illimitable, and death but a brief rest in a way-side inn, as we journey along. After each death, upon reincarnating, we take up our earth life at the precise point we laid it aside; thus ever increasing our wisdom through continuous experience. A perfect knowledge of earth limitations requires, as we have seen, that each man should undergo every possible phase of human experience; should subdue every variety of human passion, and resist every form of temptation. Only by reincarnation is it possible to do this; to round out and develop patience, fortitude, pity, benevo lence, and a host of other god-like attributes; all of which have to be refined out of the crucible of actual experience and suffering.
One life is all too short for the lessons of sympathy and love we have to learn, ere we develop compassion for the woes of others from the fires of our own purification, from the ashes of our sacrificed passions. One life is all too short for us even to approximate that condition of spirituality which would permit us to exist for a moment on planes where earthly concerns and desires are utterly unknown. After the great deep had brought forth life in its waters, it took ages for the water- breathing vertebrates to so accustom themselves to the purer, rarer air that life in its thin gases became possi- ble for them. So with man's spiritual nature. How absurd, how impossible, to fancy him as capable of living under spiritual conditions before he has developed the spiritual power! He must conquer every earthly passion, subdue every mortal desire, and keenly realize the unsatisfying nature, the instability, of material life, before he can hope to attain to the life spiritual. At present manis little more than a savage in his instincts, appetites, and passions. Let him first become a MAN, with all the magnificent meaning and prophecy in the word, before he as- pires to the Elysean fields of the Gods. Yet these fields are surely his, both by birthright and as the meed of toil and suffering, if he but persist in the warfare, if he but prove faithfnl to the one talent placed in his keeping during this life; renewing his courage and hope in the knowledge that greater and still greater opportunities will be afforded him in future lives by the return of his soul to earth through the golden gate of REINCARNATION.
