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modern theory is trying to understand Chapter XV of the Book of Life without
knowing that fourteen chapters have preceded it. The acts and the predicament of
an individual today are inexplicable because he has had a long past, which is
not known, but which, were it known, would enable us to say: nature is just
after all; he has earned his present lot. What the reincarnation program offers
is the identification of causation and justice. Things are justly caused. The
modern eye can not see this because it has refused to view things in their true
perspective, and instead sees them as partial, isolated, and out of their
context; yet justice reaches its fulfilment in the individual
"Today or after many days."2
One life does not give Nature time to arrange her trial, hear the evidence, and
render a verdict. The law of compensation must for the most part await the slow
grinding of the mills of God, until its adjustments can be nicely achieved. When
we give up the exaggerated mediaeval view of man's importance, and cease to
limit to a few thousand years the time allotted the divine plan to work out our
salvation, we may be open to the persuasion that to crowd the whole procedure of
the law of compensation, with its millions of entangled situations, into the
span of a human life, is as egregious an absurdity as that of trying to cram
into the Biblical six thousand years the entire evolution of mankind, on a
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planet which has been fitted for habitation for millions of years. Theosophy
affirms that man's life will never be properly interpreted until the whole long
course of its unfoldment on the globe is envisaged. The individual is the
cumulative product of a long experience, the fruits of which have passed into
his subjective life and character, whence, though invisible, they will function
as the causes of action. His relation to the past is the most substantial part
of his constitution. His present can be explained only in the light of his past,
and if our gaze is foreshortened to the scant confines of a single incarnation,
the materials for understanding will be wanting.
The protagonist of rebirth attacks the one-life theory also with the argument
that it defeats the attempt of the mind to read "meaning" into the terms of the
life experience. To be sure, he admits, nobody perhaps can tell just what this
consists of, or in what particular aspect of experience it is to be found.3
Ultimate "meaning" of world events is doubtless another of those abstract
finalities which we reach only by a process of infinite regress to sheer
negation, like ultimate being and ultimate reality, or ultimate substance. But
it is permissible to employ the term for the purposes of the argument in its
commonly accepted sense of the later outcome, result or eventuation of a set of
conditions at any time prevalent, in accordance with the design of some
directing intelligence. In this general sense the term is more or less
equivalent to effect or consequence, now hidden but eventually revealed. The
present or past comes to meaning in the future. The reincarnationist, of course,
casts his "meanings" in the stream of an assumed teleological evolution-process.
But if "meaning" is thus assumed to be discoverable within the constant flow of
things, the difficulty arises that it proves to be an ever-receding entity like
a shadow. When we try to stabilize or grasp it, it has moved forward out of
reach. The Theosophist's solution is, of course, that the ultimate and stable
meaning of things in a temporal sequence is to be found only in that higher
level of consciousness in which past, present, and future are gathered up in one
eternal Now. The meaning of events in their three-dimensional aspects of time,
space, and causality must be located in a four-dimensional world of
consciousness, where the extended life history of the series appears as a unit.
As all directions merge into one in the center of a circle, or at the pole of
the earth, so all relations merge into a fixity of character in the center of
consciousness. Down (or out) here, says the Theosophist, we are in a realm of
relativity; we can not look for absolute meaning. All significance is relative,
to the past, as cause, to the future, as effect. No event can have meaning if
lifted out of the continuum and viewed by itself alone. An occurrence is the
product of its precedents and the cause of its consequents. A single life,
therefore, has meaning, only when scanned as one of a series. It is admittedly
but a fragment of the life of the race; Theosophy adds that it is but a fragment
of the life of the individual.
By this line of reasoning the occultist arrives at his grand conclusion: it is
meaningless, first from man's viewpoint, for him to live but one physical life [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]