A, B, C, etc., are successional segments of the total field
of consciousness, dipping into, and conferring temporary
consciousness upon, the brain of each life. The total memories
of these lives are thrown into the common [Page 5] field
for devâchanic assimilation. The segments differ in
size according to the amount of himself a man can draw into
his brain consciousness, and learning thus the facts of each
life, on being liberated from that life, pours its knowledge
into the common stock in the middle. When the time comes
for the man to be born again, the sphere revolves a little,
and dips a new clean segment into the new brain of an infant,
which then becomes conscious. But that new segment B knows
nothing of the doings of the old segment A, though the total
mind does. This total mind is, however, not in the brain,
but only a little of it. When we say "I", we mean
only a small segment of the true or total "I", that
segment that is in this temporary brain, and which, therefore,
knows nothing of former lives, though the true divine "I" does
know and remember. That space of time which lapses between
leaving one life and beginning the next is spent in, as it
were, entering into the ledger of the eternal or total mind
the day-book items of the evanescent segmentary and partial
mind of the past life, in drawing from that life any lessons
that may be of use for the next. The lesser mind has entered
into the inheritance of the vast stores of the greater. Now,
Hypnotism does something like this. It partially frees the
lesser mind or Ego from the limitations of brain by paralyzing
the brain. Therefore, to the extent that Hypnotism is real
and deep is the memory expanded. A servant-girl, under the
care of Braid, the Manchester surgeon, and a re-discoverer
of Hypnotism, while hypnotized, recited long passages of
Hebrew, of which, in her waking state, she did not know one
word, because many years before she had lived with a Hebrew
scholar as his servant. A patient of Charcot's recognised
at once, when hypnotized, and correctly named, a physician
whom she had not seen since she was two years old, and then
only for a short time, during which she was under his care.
There is, of course, not now time for the narration of anything
like a series of cases, but only for one or two as types.
Dr. Richie's great work and the volume already mentioned
will give data of any desired fulness, showing that the grasp
of real memory upon even the smallest fact is never relaxed.
For the memory of waking life is only an infinitesimal fraction
of the memory of our entire Ego. Can we get any idea of what
the Soul, the Ego, the globe overhead is doing while we are
eating, and thinking, and making love in our daily ordinary
mind ? Let us advance the hypothesis that while we, knowing
two facts, laboriously reason to the third, it knows all
three at once; that while we, barely remembering the facts
of last year, totally forget our infancy, it knows all the
facts of our preceding lives; that therefore its judgment,
if we could only get it, would, from the range of its knowledge,
be of infinitely greater value than our own. [Page 6] Suppose we look at our consciousness during a whole day, and see what elements we can find in it. Lowest of all are the animal emotions, hunger, desire to get money, the impulse to fall in love, sleepiness, etc. ; next above these comes thinking proper, reasoning, deductions of a third fact from two others. Without any other conscious elements than these two sets, we should simply spend life in reasoning as to the best way to gratify our own wishes, to obtain any pleasure and avoid all pain, But on a higher level than either of these two comes an impulse to do duty at any cost, regardless of pleasure or pain, and in the face often of the protests of the reasoning faculty. Assuming brain to be the organ of reason, this call to the performance of duty evidently does not come from brain, but from outside or above it. The hypothesis suggests itself that this call to duty comes from that upper self or globe. Possessing the sum of experiences of all former lives, it judges of our best course in life quite independently of the short-sighted wishes of its limited segment, and what we call obedience to duty is obedience to the course it suggests as in the long run the best for our real evolution. Duty, then, is an impulse whose reason we cannot know. So it remains to prove that outside of ourselves there is an actor, a thinker, a memory, not known to us in our ordinary consciousness, yet a part of ourselves, and occasionally forcing its thoughts upon us and compelling us to act apparently without reason. It cannot be proved, but in a study of Hypnotism we can find strong reason for thinking that this is so. I have to quote two more experiments from the Salpetrière record. A patient being hypnotized was made to promise that in a given number of days, I think as many as 140 after waking, and at a certain hour, she would come in, take up a knife on the table, and stab a doctor in the room. She awoke and departed as usual without memory of the promise. But nevertheless at the appointed time she appeared, entered the room, took up a wooden paper knife and tried to stab the doctor present. Asked to explain her conduct, she stated that she wanted to see how he would look, or gave some other trifling reason, but note that during all that time there must have been in activity that in her which had promised an activity not in her consciousness, but of which she was the tool, and which at the appointed time compelled of her the fulfilment of its promise. To explain to herself her own conduct, her brain-mind is obliged to go to work and invent a reason, not the true one. In the next experiment, during the sleep, words were traced on the patient's arm with the blunt end of a probe, and the order issued or promise extracted that on the following day, at four o'clock, blood would issue along the lines of the tracing. At the time named, minute bleeding took place in the prescribed manner, and the words stood dotted out in points of blood. In this case, [Page 7] the power called into activity within the patient, yet not within the field of his waking consciousness, exceeded any that he could in his normal state have used, since no man can control his blood flow, yet it nevertheless acted punctually and exactly. So Hypnotism will prove that the consciousness of the waking man does not show him anything like the range of his memory or of his powers, and inasmuch as Hypnotism proves that both are existent in hitherto undreamed-of perfection, may we not venture to suggest that some other process so far not known to us might bring into consciousness the immeasurable ranges of past lives, and place in our hands powers like those assigned to saints and seers of the past ? This is the hypothesis of Theosophy. That there exists in man a real and eternal centre, Ego, or Soul, not omniscient, but still learning, not omnipotent, but still acquiring new powers, and that for these purposes it continuously dips into, or mixes itself with matter; in other words, incarnates or lives. It is the actor who, in successive dramas, or lives, plays successive parts, becoming thereby a better actor, and earning time after time the right to greater parts. We in our ordinary selves are the parts it plays, and mistake the few yards of stage for a real world, and the stage furniture properties and scenery for real and desirable things. These are not in themselves of value, but only as training for the actor. We have, therefore, to recognise that we are not the person of the drama, but the actor who plays it. Suppose the actor while playing his part fell into the delusion that the part was the reality, lived in his dramatic and stagey personality, and could not be waked out of it. He would have lost the lesson in acting that the part could give, he would be fit for no other, and, lapsing into an asylum, he would cease to exist as an actor. The strictly materialist hypothesis is that consciousness, and the sensation of " I-ness " is a bundle or succession of impressions coming in from the world without; not that consciousness or the man, the Ego, receives those impressions, but that it consists of them; that the mind is a succession of changes without anything changed. Mivart presents us with a humorous analogy. Suppose that we could only conceive of a man as sitting down or standing up. The materialist, being asked what is a man, defines him as a succession of sittings down and standings up ? We hold that the materialist has got only part of the matter. The real reincarnating soul projects a little of itself into the bodily brain that it may thus receive impressions from the outer world. Our everyday thinking, then, is a succession of changes or impressions which we call mind, or ourselves. Part of those impressions come from external objects through the senses, part from the body (the bodily desires and sensations), and a part, very few (the impulses to unselfishness and duty), from the true Soul above. [Page 8] But this Soul is the thing impressed, and the substance whose impressed changes constitute mind. The theory then is this: the parents of a child produce its physical body only, after the pattern of either one or of a combination in different proportions of the two. The body thus produced becomes animated by an Ego or Soul, whose tendencies in its past lifetime were such as entitled it to that particular body and environment. The consciousness of the being thus compounded being due to the union of its brain-cells with a portion or segment of the complete Soul is on a lower plane, less in quantity and darker in quality than the pure light of the Soul, since this Soul can only function through the crude and inert brain matter. Hence the brain, though sufficiently animated by the soul to think and know the outer qualities of nature, is unable to know of the past lives of that Soul, and were the facts of those past lives to be photographed into its cells, they would have no room to register the facts of the present life, and we should fool away life in dreams of the past. Hence this brain does not remember the past brain since it does not register its facts. Inaccurately calling the brain the man, we say the man does not remember his past life. Let us therefore keep strictly in mind that the man of one life is only an aspect, a segment of the complete man. Suppose we call the man of the past life A, the man of this life B, and the total man or Soul of which they are parts AB. Then, though it seems unjust that B should suffer for the sins of another man A, whom he never knew, and therefore does not remember, yet there is no real injustice, for the aim of nature is not exactly to educate, by suffering, A or B, but AB. The real actor, the individuality, grows and learns by the efforts and pains of its temporary fragments, its personalities, of which our present lives are one. Take the case of a man who in his last lifetime habitually over-ate and over-drank. The child-body into which a man is reborn is that which is in correspondence with the tendencies of his past life. The man in question, the glutton and drunkard, will therefore be attracted towards and animate that infant which has inherited from its parents a diseased liver or weak digestion. With these drawbacks it therefore goes crippled through life, with the habit of melancholy, the clouded brain, that they produce, fails in business, and ends perhaps with suicide. He thinks himself hardly used, but he is the natural outcome of the former man. The real self behind both, the producer of both, which in the first lifetime did so little to elevate its offspring, was so drawn to material enjoyment, is in the next life condemned to an inadequate and heavy vehicle. Hard, perhaps, for that conscious vehicle, but a vitally just and important lesson for the Soul. A man in his boyhood may be an infamous glutton, grow out of it as he gets older, and by old age have forgotten all about it, but his forgetting will not prevent his dyspepsia, the hard penalty of forgotten foolishness. So even in [Page 9] one lifetime we may get punished for forgotten deeds, and do not then think it unjust. Why should it be more unjust because the life in which the deeds were committed is forgotten ? And there are few who would grumble at the injustice of being rewarded for good deeds in lives past. A brain well-used will be followed by a better one; a brain totally unused or blotted out by drink will be followed by that of an idiot. This is the law that Theosophists call Karma, and in it is the explanation of the diversities and qualities, the abilities and imbecilities of men. We are our own creators, we spend our lives moulding and chiselling a statue, and in our next lives we are that statue, though it has forgotten its creator. Schopenhauer spoke only Theosophy when he said that the World was the product of Will and Idea, The Idea, arising in the eternal Mind, is willing to express itself in matter, is copied or clothed in matter. As a man lives he is unconsciously fashioning a statue. With every act in life he is chipping it into form. If his aims are high, and his efforts great, the statue will gradually become noble in aspect. If he have no aim, but follow the sensual suggestions of his body, his statue grows to be the picture and the work of his sensuality. It is the product of his acts, and as these are prompted by shifting ideas, it comes to represent the total idea or sum of ideas of his life. It is his idea of himself, he dies, and his brain, laden with the facts of life, perishes, but the statue remains. That statue, when he is reborn, he animates with his consciousness; he is his own statue. It has not the facts of his past life, it knows not the acts, but it is their essence, it is a compound of all the ideas and impulses that inspired them. So a man is the creator of his future self, and the continuation of his past. It is in a sense an error to say we do not remember our past lives, for only the facts are forgotten. A man has forgotten the efforts through which he learnt to walk, the falls and aches and bruises, but he has remembered the one important thing — the art of walking. So life is a process of learning, and its pains the cast-aside husk that holds the kernel of knowledge. Every individual of humanity is moving up through his succession of lives towards the perfect final state, moulded thereto by the law of justice called Karma. Into the sources of that law we cannot look as yet; we can only note its tendencies and results. It is strange that the idea of a fixed sum of life on earth has not occurred to many more than the few who have speculated upon it. It has been reckoned axiomatic that the world-population has always steadily increased. But the waste places of the earth are continually displaying the ruins of vast and populous civilisations whose voices have not even reached the beginnings of recorded history; in our own day races are dying down, and the tide that here is flowing is there upon its ebb. If it [Page 10] be objected that the future of the sun will not allow of time for such an evolution of humanity as Theosophy postulates, let it be remembered that science knows no more about the sun than about anything else. It knows neither the reason nor the amount of its heat. Pouillet gives its temperature as 1,461 degrees; Waterston as 9,000,000 degrees. As to the reason, there are as many theories as theorisers. Mr. S. Laing calls them all in question, and Comte regarded it as a for ever insoluble problem. Laing asks, "What is the material universe composed of? Ether, Matter, Energy". " Ether is a sort of mathematical substance which we are compelled to assume in order to account for some phenomena. "As to Matter“, Huxley says, "We know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is. "As to Energy“, he says, "It is an empty shadow of my imagination." It might almost be said that no scientific statement can ever have any truth. Mr. Edward Carpenter thus analyses two of them. We are told that the path of the moon is an ellipse. But owing to perturbations supposed due to the sun, it is a certain ellipse only for an instant, the next it is a portion of another ellipse. The path is, therefore, an irregular curve somewhat resembling an ellipse. But while the moon is going round the earth, the earth itself is moving round the sun, in consequence of which the path of the moon does not at all resemble an ellipse. The sun itself is in motion round the fixed stars, and they also are moving. So we have not the faintest idea what is the path of the moon. " It is true that if we ignore the perturbations produced by the sun, the planets and other bodies ignore the motion of the earth, the flight of the solar system through space, and the movement of any centre, round which that may be speeding, we may then say that the moon moves in an ellipse. But this has nothing to do with the facts". He then takes Boyle's law of the compressibility of gases. This is the law that under a constant temperature the volume of gas is inversely as to its pressure. How does it work ? Firstly, it is not accurate as to some gases, as hydrogen and carbonic acid Then all gases deviate from it when near their liquifying point, so it was concluded that it was true only for perfect gases. This involves the assumption that at a certain distance from their liquefying point gases reach at last a fixed and stable condition. Since then it is discovered that there is an ultra-gaseous state of matter, and that the change in the condition of matter from the solid to the ultra-gaseous states is perfectly continuous. Boyle's law, therefore, applies only at one point in this long ascending scale, one metaphysical point, and at all other points it is incorrect. " Therefore all we can say is that out of the innumerable different states that gases are capable of, we could theoretically find one state that would obey Boyle's law, and that if we could preserve a [Page 11] gas in that state (which we can't) Boyle's law really would be true. In other words the law is metaphysical, and has no real existence. This is the method of science. It begins by seizing some salient point, and forms a 'law' round that, neglecting apparently unimportant details. But these details are certain in time to arise and overpower the law thus formed. If you agree to take no account of gases that are approaching liquidity even in a remote degree, and if you agree to take no account of those that are approaching the ultra-gaseous state even in a remote degree, and if you choose your point between these two states with exact regard to the requirements of your problem, and if further you agree not to carry your experiments to great extremes of pressure or the reverse, you may thus by accepting limitation after limitation be able to say you have arrived at Boyle's law. But to represent that this 'law' in any way corresponds with a fact in nature is of course impossible. It is limitation which alone enables the intellect to grasp the situation."