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Reincarnation: A Study of the Human Soul
By J.A. Anderson
The Personality
ALTHOUGH considered at some length in the preceding jPY chapter, the lower self, or the man of earthly sor- rows, woes, ambitions, appetites and desires, which all of us are while encased in these material vestments, may still, perhaps, be examined profitably as a separate study. The Personality is, as we have seen, the lower Quaternary, or the Man-animal, intellectualized by the incarnation of the Higher Ego, from one point of view, and the Higher Ego itself, benumbed, paralyzed, and its consciousness suppressed or distorted and discolored by the imperfect sense organs of its body, from another. To disentangle and define just what the relation of the Personality to the Higher, Reincarnating Ego is, constitutes one of the most difficult of tasks, and one, perhaps, impossible until man's reasoning faculties are quickened and corrected by intuition. The theory which follows is submitted for consideration, only. It has no authority except that it seems a reasonable hypothesis, in view of the many phenomena it explains.
We have seen that reincarnation is an universal law; that it obtains on every plane and in every kingdom of nature. It has also been shown that it is always specific, and occurs under the law that not only do causes produce their inevitable effects, but that like causes produce like effects. In other words, the cause must not only be equal to the effect, but must correspond to this effect in essence or nature. Material causes can not originate
conscious effects, and vice versa. For this reason, all re- incarnation must be specific; each class conserving its own differentiation of consciousness. An animal must reincarnate in the animal kingdom, and in some species like to itself in character.
Thus the conscious center of a tiger, for example, must reincarnate in an animal having similar characteristics. The condition of these animal centers of conscious- ness between incarnations bears also upon the problem. It has been stated that they become latent; but this is a vague term. It must not be understood that they lose their identity as conscious centers. The term "latency" is used to distinguish their state from the devachanic one of the human soul. In the latter, consciousness does not cease to function, but only transfers the scene of its activities to inner or subjective planes. In animal souls, the consciousness becomes a potentiality only; it ceases to exist as an active potency even on subjective planes.
That consciousness is capable of this cessation of activity, or change of the mode of its manifestation, is abundantly shown by analogous phenomena on the physical plane. Thus, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined as water, cease to exist as gases, without at all losing the potentiality of again returning to gaseous states when their as- sociation as water is terminated. This mysterious ability to retain a primal potentiality throughout infinite sequences of later correlations and associations is another key to the mystery of evolution, and the manner in which everything in the Universe may philosophically and ac- tually have its source in Absolute Unity. For if hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water, so, also, can water be decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen
again. It is, therefore, evident that not only can everything in the Universe arise out of Unity, but that the re- verse is also true that all things can be resolved back into Unity with equal certainty.
This latent condition of animal centers, then, is a re- tiring of such centers into states where, though their identity disappears as a potency, it is preserved as a potentiality. It is the state to which all mineral, all vegetable, and most animal conscious centers retire. It is as near an approach to the primal monadic consciousness as the evolution of these centers will permit. But, as all planes of consciousness pass gradually into those above and below, so, also, in the higher animals are there evi- dences of the beginnings of subjective states. Dogs, canaries, etc., undoubtedly dream, and this ability must include the power to maintain a subjective existence for brief periods after death. In other words, many, if not most, animals have a stage in their life cycle corre- sponding, in a lower degree, to that of Kama Loca in man.
It will now have become apparent to what all this leads. Since animals have a subconscious center, or " elemental," which persists as an entity not only through latent states, but also through real subjective ones as well, it is plain that the human animal also has such an " elemental," only of higher degree. This " human elemental" is, evidently, the source to which we have to look for the next humanity, in a becoming which is necessarily infinite in duration. It is this nascent human center which flames up under the intellectualization of its animal desires into the larger portion of that which we recognize as the " personality." When the rationalizing presence of the lower Manas is withdrawn by death, it is this entity which runs
riot during the brief period of its ability to maintain a subjective existence in Kama Loca, both before and after the Higher Ego passes into the tranquillity of Devachan. It is its still raging desires which at first disturb and prevent the devachanic rest of the soul. It, also, is able to flame up again under the influence of the Lower Manas of a " medium." when, of course, it may often give cor- rectly facts concerning its past life, and especially those so powerfully impressed upon it by the manner of the death of its body.
Yet there is in it no " I am I," except it be reflected there. It has not evolved to this point by many cycles. That which each one feels as his " I am myself," if his consciousness be upon the material plane and concerned with sensuous desires, is only a reflection from the Higher Ego, faintly shining through the intellect of the humananimal. It is thus an illusion, and must remain so unless one can so hush the clamors of the senses as to permit his consciousness to rise to its own divine plane. Withdraw Manas, and the " brain-mind" collapses, all sense of " I am myself" disappears, and the human " elemental," after gathering itself together as the " spook" or "KamaRupa," for a brief period of uncanny subjective existence, becomes "latent"; retiring from even subjective thought planes until a new reincarnation enables it to become a potency by clothing itself once more in a human-animal form. Within this human-animal reside all sensuous passions, desires, and appetites; all those "qualities" of rage, greed, cunning, and hosts of others, which the Hindoo philosophers class as " rajas" and "tamas" Western theology would fain have us believe these lower "devilish" qualities
to be inherent in man's true or spiritual nature. They are a part of its conception of " original sin," and, truly, a " vicarious atonement" by an omnipotent god is necessary if these are really constituents of our spiritual being.
But the Eastern metaphysicians fall into no such error. These qualities are foreign to and impossible of existence upon the spiritual planes of the Higher Ego; so much so that they can not even be impressed upon its divine memory. They can only be experienced by proxy, as it were, or by the Higher Ego incarnating in an animal form where these have their normal plane of activity. From its own plane, the Higher Ego brings its own native powers. Intuition or direct perception of truth, justice and virtue; complete unselfishness; prophetic power; and so on, may be taken as types. It is also the source and plane of true self-consciousness.
By its simple presence it intellectualizes the lower rajasic appetites and passions, thus rendering them a thousand-fold more diffi- cult to subdue. The process is, as we have seen, similar to the contact of the magnet imparting magnetism to non-magnetic iron. But to intellectualize only is not its mission. It must spiritualize these lower qualities, and transmute the experience so acquired in the contest into a knowledge of their "opposites," which can be recorded and preserved on its own divine plane. All the "qualities," all the passions, desires, appetites, and intellectual powers, even, of purely animal man are to be found in varying degrees in the lower animals. As an animal, man in no way differs from other animals except in degree, and this degree, in many of the lower in- stincts, is relatively and actually lesser in him. If one were to attempt a diagrammatic illustration of the effect
except as reflected there by the presence of the Higher Ego, thus " clothed in a coat of skin," thus " crucified in the bonds of flesh," it is at once evident why there can be for it no immortality. The lower aspect which has flamed up under the vivifying presence of the Higher Ego, as the dimly burning flame of a night lamp might under the impetus of a jet of pure oxygen, fades into bare latency after death.
It can not endure even as a memory ; for its passionate cycle of existence is not nor can it be recorded in the memory of the Divine Inner Ego. The Higher Ego retires to subjective planes, and in Devachan assimilates the wisdom acquired in its last life on earth. All is gone the lower aspect of the Personality to the oblivion of latency, the higher to its source. How, then, is any immortality possible for the Personality ? Only in the memory of the Higher Ego of the period during which it spent a life cycle in such or such a body is any record preserved. The association is remembered as the memory of such or such a dwelling occupied by man during one life might be. Illumined by some noble act, some self-sacrificing deed, how the memory of all surroundings shines forth out of the obscurity of common-plac, selfish existence! Every detail remains vivid; the act and all its accessories of environment or circumstance are accurately preserved.
So with our Personalities. It is possible to so illumine our life with noble and unselfish deeds and thoughts that it shall remain a vivid and pleasant memory to our Higher Ego throughout eternal vistas. It is, also, possible to permit the consciousness of our divine Self to be so drowned in the clamor of the senses, to be so suppressed by a wicked, selfish, or even a vain or idle life, that
no record is preserved. Such a life is a day in which " nothing happened to us"; forgotten, not because of this, but rather because we permitted it to pass without making it live in our memory by some good deed done to our fellow-men. Such will be the fate of most of the Personalities now upon the human stage.
The biblical warning, " Behold, they are neither hot nor cold, therefore will I spew them out of my mouth," contains an occult truth it would be well to ponder. The memory of such lives will be taken to Devachan, to be dreamed over and their foolish fancies enacted in pleasant, illusory "-castles in the air," and the soul will then be returned to earth for renewed opportunities to live a higher, nobler life. But beyond Devachan such lives can not pass. There their cycle terminates forever as surely as that of the animal soul terminates in latency.
It can not be too strongly impressed that only truly spiritual or unselfish deeds survive in the eternities of the memory of the Higher Ego, for like causes can only produce like results. Animal, earthly, or kamic causes can not be followed by spiritual effects; the stream can not rise higher than its source. There is yet one aspect of the Personality which must be considered before we can fully, or even partially, grasp its entire functions and potencies. This is the possibility of its complete separation from the Higher go through deliberately choosing the low, sensuous plane of the Quaternary, and the cruel, conscienceless struggle for existence which there has its normal field of activity. By stifling the voice of the Higher Ego, or conscience; by allying itself to evil; by vice and crime committed with the full realization that they are vices and crimes there becomes possible for the Personality the fate of its utter and entire extinction. The rationale of this may be readily understood by what has already been explained as to its post-mortem history. We have seen how in- tensely the presence of the Thinking Principle, the Reincarnating Ego, rationalizes those which before were merely animal passions and desires. If, now, the Higher Manas fail entirely to spiritualize these, the " I am myself" of such a person is only that of an animal more cunning, more selfish, more conscienceless and more cruel, by a thousand fold, than if the Higher Ego had never incar- nated within it. The whole of the energy aroused and imparted by the latter is absorbed by the human animal. Instead of burning for a time in Kama Loca, like the smoking wick of a candle whose flame has been extinguished, this being enters this plane at death with all its potencies for evil in full activity. No Devachan is possible; and as all its desires rage furiously earthwards, their very force will carry it speedily to a new reincarnation, and we then have a Jesse Pomeroy, or a Deeming, horri- fying mankind by his atrocious crimes. So great may have been the impetus, so powerful the energy thus robbed from Manas, that a series of these human-animal incarnations may occur, each more soddenly brutal than the last, until an incarnation such as a jabbering idiot at the end prefaces the final plunge into animal latency. As a nascent center of human consciousness, the human-animal Personality can not be destroyed; but it is evident that it can so cut itself off from the Higher Ego upon one hand, and from the natural evolutionary activities of the upcoming animal monads upon the other, that it is quite separated from all chance of progress during incalculable
periods. For the same widening of the area of its evil nature which cut it off as unlike and unassimilable by the Higher Ego, also made it unlike and superior in evil to the kingdom below; and it can n jt, therefore, re-enter this. Of its fate, however, after it has lost all of its borrowed glory, and after it no longer recognizes itself as the man who had once the opportunity to become divine, it is useless to speculate. It is enough to know that the suffer- ings of such a Personality must be awful, indescribable. For whether he reincarnate, immediately, or whether, this reincarnation being for karmic reasons impossible, he obsesses poor "mediums," to their ultimate sharing of his fate, alike must he expiate to the full every crime or evil thing done during the time he forged the chains, which bound him to so terrible a destiny.
This is a fate which can overtake every human Personality, and the fact should be known as an evolutionary possibility. There are too many evident failures upon the purely physical plane too many infant deaths not to make it plain by correspondence and analogy that there may be also failures upon the mental plane. Let each one who considers himself too far over the line of danger pause, and seriously question himself as to whether his life is lighted by the pure flame of spirituality, or whether he is not, after all, living an unsuspected life of merely animal emotions, instincts and appetites, intellectualized to such a brilliancy that the glow may prove a false beacon light to the ultimate wreckage of his soul ; for it can not be too often nor too strongly insisted upon that no amount of mere intellectuality removes us from the animal plane to the safety of spiritual existence. Altruism is the law; compassion, the means; self-sacrifice, the surety, of existence upon the stable spiritual planes of being The monadic base upon which our center of conscious- ness rests is alone eternal and immortal. Our Higher Ego depends for its immortality upon rising to this monadic base in its conscious functioning. In a much greater degree is the personal Ego dependent upon the Higher for its promise of eternal life. All turns, as we have seen, -upon the plane in which the personal " I" habitually functions; upon how deeply it permits itself to be dragged below the Divine plane to that of mortal passions and desires. Meanwhile, as our Higher Ego gathers strength and expands its consciousness through this experience of many lives, its reflections in material incarnations, or personal " I am I's," become also stronger, and the loss of any one of them through having been over- come by sensuous attraction grows more serious, both to Higher Ego and lower personality. For the mutual re- action and interdependence of the (Higher) Ego free and the (lower) Ego incarnated, are very great, or successive incarnations under the iron law of cause and effect would not take place as they now inevitably do.
