PSI Annual Journal 2000

Many people are intrigued by the subject of Reincarnation and a surprising number believe in the possibility of having more than one life, which is what it implies. Translated from the Latin word carnus (flesh) which we recognize from such familiar words as carnal, carnivorous, and chili con carne, incarnation means in flesh and reincarnation therefore means in flesh again.

We read in the Bible that the word was made flesh – manifested itself – and took form as the living person of Jesus Christ. As a Theosophist, I believe that we are all manifestations of the Word but that the great teacher, Jesus, is more spiritually evolved than the rest of us. I say "is" (not "was") because it is another theosophical belief, or at least one that I hold, that all souls are in an ongoing state of development. Some of you, I know, believe that after the death of the physical body all further development goes on beyond the veil. I happen to believe in reincarnation and the need for frequent returns to earth life and in this address I hope to tell you why.

Jesus physically existed and was therefore incarnate. We are told that his corporeal body disappeared from the tomb and that he was later seen as a living person in a substantial body of flesh which was not recognizable at first to those who had known him intimately. His appearance was evidently not of the same unearthly quality as that of the angel who announced "He is not here but risen" because Jesus was mistaken for a gardener by his close friend, Mary Magdaline, who had seen the angel. Jesus was also seen as an unidentified ordinary man, walking along the road to Emmaus, by some of the disciples. To be unmistakably dead for some days then live again in flesh was surely miraculous in the case of Jesus but he was also able to bring other back to life, notably Lazarus who had been dead four days. We are told that Jesus resurrected and presumably this was true of Lazarus who was restored to his original body of flesh and not in another.

The Christian doctrine of resurrections says that, after being in Purgatory for three days Jesus was elevated to Heaven where He has since been placed at God's right hand. We are told that when the rest of us die we have to remain asleep until some distant future date when, as the last trump, all the dead will be revived simultaneously and judged – each, I think, in the same body they had in their one and only life. So we could be asleep for a very long time with our bodies preserved somewhere in limbo if we are going to appear in them again, and all those people who lived before us will have waited even longer for the Day of Resurrection. One might ask will all the primitive beings who preceded us in the evolutionary chain be included? Or is there some arbitrary starting point, a mere two thousand years ago, which excludes them? If so, why should this be? Did Jesus only save those who came after Him?

These remarks about resurrection are meant to be objective and in no way trivial. I make them to demonstrate that those people who scoff at reincarnation may not be clearly looking at the inconsistencies in other theories. It is not generally known that theologians play down the fact that in the early church there was a strong belief in reincarnation and what the ardent believer aimed for was not to be saved from Hell but from perpetual returns to existence in the flesh, so that they could finally return and stay in their spiritual home. That view is shared by most present-day theosophists who believe we stop returning to Earth when we are sufficiently advanced and ready to progress to other spiritual dimensions.

Apart from strengthening their case for redemption, one of the reasons for dropping reincarnation theory from Christianity was that the church fathers thought that people would not sufficiently exert themselves to improve if they knew they had more than one life in which to do it; but abolishing the doctrine of reincarnation has had a counterproductive effect in that people are discontented. Believing in only one life and seeing unfairness around them they consequently lack incentives for good behavior. This has led to the general hopelessness and materialistic self-indulgence of our present age.

Reincarnation is logical, economical and hopeful. It literally means being in flesh again. And it quite definitely does not mean being in the same body of flesh. This poses a problem for many people who strongly identify with their present bodily form. They think that when it disappears their existence ceases, but a snake does not cease to be when it casts off its skin nor does a caterpillar when it changes into the entirely different body of a butterfly. The essence of the forms previously taken is now inside other coverings. Corpses are left behind from which their particular life force has departed because those forms were too constricting and they limited further growth.

When we die the discarded bodies, which are alive in their own right, break down into particles which in turn change into something else. Similarly, when a plant "dies back" in winter we will in Spring see entirely new leaves yet we know it is the same plant. When we see a tree in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, in youth and age, we do not think of it as a succession of different trees but as the same tree bare or in bloom. Why can't this be true of man to have an essential, lasting inner self as well as various outward guises?

It is understandable that death frightens people who have no belief in an afterlife. Immature mankind seeks certainty in a constantly changing environment and we cling to what we think we know – our own bodies – the source of joy – the source of pain – but at least they are familiar to us and it is reassuring to believe that we are in charge of this one thing at least. But we are born helpless and dependent. We do not learn control immediately or even in one life. We are immature even in adulthood with varying degrees of control over our bodies, emotions and intellects, so life after life is needed to develop proper control and the full use of all our potentials.

There are those who think that a belief in reincarnation is wishful thinking – a desire to escape the finality of certain death. But is it wishful thinking? Reincarnation theory is not an easy opt out because along with it goes solemn responsibility for everything we do. This rests on several laws. The first of these, and they are not in order of importance, is the law of cycles. Everything has periods of rest and activity which alternate in a rhythmical sequence. This may be hard to observe in some things, but if our examining instruments were powerful enough we would realize an amazing truth that there is ceaseless life which is sometimes active and sometimes dormant. One phase depends on the other just as waking depends on sleeping and Spring depends on Winter. All live as part of a greater life and every smallest part is a hologram containing the totality.

Lives live within lives. The human body for instance is more than the components of flesh and blood. It contains millions of creatures dependent on us for their existence or upon which we depend for our existence – most of them working in harmony we hope! We may eventually find that many of the germs we endeavor to wipe out both in our bodies and in the wider environment have useful functions when rightly understood or harnessed. Through painful trial and error we found out years ago that the antibiotics given to treat infection on other parts of the body adversely affect the micro-organisms which are vital to the health of the bowels and it is more than likely we will find that in attempting to heal ourselves with manmade products we abort the natural restorative processes. So, by extension, we have this responsibility not just for developing ourselves but for being in harmonious alignment with everything else that exists.

The body we have today is not the same as the one we had yesterday or will have tomorrow or next year. It looks basically the same but unless we change the pattern it will continually renew and adapt itself to our unconscious master plan until such time as the life force departs from it. And in so doing it may faithfully reproduce faulty methods of behaving and responding which have not been corrected due to our ignorance of their existence. Or, worse, because we believe that they are correct methods of behaving and responding!

The changing nature of our bodies is not accidental. It means we have a choice to be whole or incomplete. My body and your body are a temporary container which fluctuates in their substance and energies, but the consciousness we have is cumulative and everlasting. Even when disease processes affect the container and we seem to be out of touch that is only because consciousness has become limited in its expression by malfunctioning physical equipment. Ancient wisdom tells us that even the dying person in deep coma is at some time very much aware of his surroundings and can either be helped or disturbed by what goes on around him. I wish more people knew this and behaved accordingly in the presence of death. The dying person gradually and deliberately withdraws awareness from the outside world and concentrates effort on the various processes involved in separating from the physical container. What happens after that would take a whole lecture to describe. Sudden deaths, of course, have different mechanisms operating which are documented in the appropriate literature.

Perhaps you are skeptical about what I am saying. Unitarians are noted for it! But I hope I am right in thinking that most of us are in this room today because we believe in the existence of spirit. To me it is a privilege to know that we can never die or be separated from those dear to us – not just those we remember from this life but our spiritual brothers and sisters on other planes and in other worlds from which we are temporarily separated.

It is a pity that so many people are preoccupied and obsessed with their physical bodies. Why do we cling so pathetically and possessively to these outer garments and to the bodies of those we love? Relationships have been given to us to widen our experience. We are told that those treasured physical contacts will eventually transform into spiritual rapport which will far exceed anything we can imagine on earth. But – we are here in the flesh, we are greedy and we cling to those things which give us pleasure. Like a young, self-absorbed child we want everything now. We want nothing good to be taken away (although things which we perceive as bad must be got rid of immediately!) and we are suspicious of "pie in the sky." We would rather have "a bird in the hand" than "two in the bush."

We will, of course, think differently when reincarnation becomes universally known. Eyes will eventually be opened to the truth that we have to pay the full price for everything and however long it takes we must harvest the fruits of our own actions for good or ill. The reckoning, however, is entirely just and is agreed to by our spiritual Selves even though our temporal brains may not recognize this whilst we are in flesh.

One of the most important laws influencing reincarnation is that of Cause and Effect. What is put into action must work itself out – we reap what we sow. What a difference it makes to behavior when people appreciate that in the long run the wicked do not prosper and that virtue must be rewarded! Let us be clear though, that virtue does not mean sanctimony. Some religious people who have passed over have been shocked to find that their dogmatic standards are of less worth than a kindly, well-intentioned heart. Our ideas regarding vice and goodness often need drastic revision. Doing our duty with grudging or dubious motives is no real credit to us. Ancient wisdom tells us that every tiniest action is recorded on the universal substance which can be likened to a celestial video recorder.

This is for our benefit – not for some avenging angel to smite us with. The recordings, which are stored, are made available to us between lives so that we can see in full detail what we have done, what we have learned, and what we need to correct.

Even whilst we are still alive we can often recognize that our apparent misfortunes have been blessings in disguise and that things we have regarded as vital to our well-being have actually retarded our progress spiritually. Think about people whose personalities have richly developed as the result of some awful calamity and then think of those whose characters have deteriorated with fame, fortune and self-indulgence.

Reincarnation is about learning what matters in the rediscovery of our own divinity. It is not about resurrecting with someone who has taken all the responsibility for our sins and who pardons us at the last minute of a wicked life because we repent. That high Master of wisdom, Jesus Christ, showed us how we might redeem ourselves through cleansing our thoughts and actions and like Him, rising above our animal nature. He reminded us that each one of us is a spiritual creature with a duty to the Creator and to all forms of life. We are not here just to eke out a meaningless existence. There is a purpose to our living and our dying and we do both many times.

We reincarnate as often as it is necessary for our consciousness to fully develop through experience to that of highly advanced beings such as Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and other great souls who are ahead of us on the evolutionary path but who started from the same position as each one of us. I again emphasize that I speak of these great Masters in the present tense. When I spoke earlier about the prospects of those who died prior to Christ's resurrection I had in mind the possibility that all of us have actually been that common stock not descended from it, and have lived in many different ages if not in every century – which would mean that Christ is relevant to us all in exactly the same way.

Sometimes we are in manifestation and sometimes we are not, depending on our soul's choice of experiences to be gained. Many people make the mistake of equating physical development with spiritual development. Ideally that should be so but in many cases it is not. Children are thought to be less advanced in this respect than adults but we all know individuals who, at an early age show signs of considerable spirituality and others who late in life, have made little progress. The speed of development is up to us. We have free will and how we use it determines the relative success or failure of each of our successive lives on earth. So many people are unaware of their divine origins and their divine potentials but, the good news it that as each one of us progresses from life to life we inevitably gain spiritual insight – not least because of periods of contemplation and instruction between lives when we exist in other states of being but with our consciousness intact.

People who strongly identify with the body are skeptical of this. They imagine that their thoughts and feelings are totally contained within that limited space and that they cannot operate outside it. They fail to see that the magnificent human brain is only a piece of computer equipment which we use as a temporary container for our thoughts in order to orchestrate them with the actions and reaction of our organs and limbs. That is why, when we leave our physical body behind at death and take our thoughts with us there is no more opportunity for physical indulgence until we are in human flesh again. Those who are greatly attached to material pleasures or possessions must thereby suffer for a time after death, but the desire for those things soon leaves them as our Higher Selves guide us toward spirituality, which is the destination of each one of us whether we realize it or not.

When the body is left behind and progress is made beyond desire, tears and suffering are no longer experienced in the heavenly realms. Our deceased loved ones may be saddened and drawn back to us at first because of a wish to comfort the bereaved but in seeking comfort for ourselves we may deprive them of an earlier entry to heavenly rest and joy so we should respect their entitlement to that.

There are high entities, however, who have a mission to contact us and we have to recognize the difference between them and souls whose development is not very advanced. Some of us are fairly certain that before long, communication between our world will be a scientific fact and death will be less of a mystery. Tuning-in to those wireless frequencies is being mastered, but there are dangers, as many of us know. Not only that, but there is organized resistance from those who genuinely see contact with spirits as the work of the Devil – which only goes to show the spiritual limitations of such people.

Those of us who believe in the eternal nature of consciousness and of the soul's choice as to the hour and its departure (barring accidents and murder which may also be chosen for Karmic reasons) are not dismayed by funerals, burials or cremations. Of course we mourn the permanent loss of dear ones whose physical presence is sorely missed but we know that the vital part of them still exists and can even be felt at times when they endeavor to bring us comfort at some cost to themselves. It takes a great deal of energy to bridge the gap between our world and theirs, even though all worlds are intermingled, but we must bear in mind the different rates of vibration which have to be adjusted to make contact. Each kingdom in nature has its own special rate and there are rules governing the interchange between them.

Man has a special role in the cosmos as the link between kingdoms which are developing below us and those which have developed beyond us although, as I have just indicated, we should be wary of talking as if they are in separate slices.

The Divine Spark in each person has manifested in countless ways over millennia. It has passed through ever-increasing forms of consciousness from the least conscious manifestation of mineral life, to more aware plant and then sensate animal life to our present point of mental development.

Darwin's evolutionary theory only told the animal part of the story. The theosophical version, based on universal religious, philosophical and scientific knowledge, takes in the grander spiritual scope of man's origins and destiny which clearly states that man is a separate chain of development from the animal kingdom, and this is becoming obvious from human remains which predate anthropoids. Theosophy says that consciousness will keep on evolving until a process of involutions, as opposed to evolution – a return – to our divine source takes place. It is the Divine Speak, the MONAD, which alights on and moves through these different forms and presently finds us in this human manifestation. Rather like a divine bee collecting pollen from flower to flower and fertilizing them at the same time. The monad's work now is to prepare us for lives of increasing spirituality which will take us into the next kingdom of superhumanity where the Masters of Wisdom, mentioned earlier, have their existence. In that realm they work to help us here on Earth as well as on their own spiritual progression.

Whenever we rise to higher levels, we automatically lift others with us by something called the Law of Attraction. Service to humanity is part of our task. It is not sufficient for us as individuals to perfect ourselves and return to the Sublime. We must assist others to do the same or at least mark out that path for them, which has been marked out for us by those who have gone before. This is not favour we graciously bestow. It is an absolute duty for all those on the spiritual journey.

Reincarnation is the method by which we progress in the human kingdom and we can compare it with an education system in which we need to go to school at regular intervals to learn various lessons for which we become fitted by virtue of teaching and our previous experiences. No one expects an infant to take on the lessons of a college student or a kindergarten child to proceed immediately to university. It would be a complete waste of time unless the person was equipped and ready for that experience. Reincarnation allows us periodic returns to the classroom of life to seek for its meaning. We can study alone or in groups and we can help or hinder our fellows. We gradually learn how to modify our behavior and to build up vital knowledge and skills which will add to that pool of excellence we are storing up elsewhere. The Monad is perfect already on its own plane but we as its manifestation on earth are imperfect. Our Higher Selves have, as it were, put the major part of our spirituality on "hold" and we perhaps bring a different portion of it with us into each manifestation to subject it to material experience. One lifetime is simply not long enough to learn one lesson let alone a whole curriculum.

Death can therefore be regarded as a break – a return home at the end of the school day or a holiday following our exams in which we take much needed rest and absorb the material we have already been given. Then we can come back and resume the learning process refreshed and ready to tackle more complex issues or have another shot at the ones we failed last time.

Unfortunately it is not always possible for all members of the same group to go up to the next level. Some may have been lazy, or overwhelmed by their studies, some may have jumped to an even higher level because of greater merit. In some cases they may have been relegated to classrooms outside our cosmos. All the conditions which pertain to our earthy education system can be applied as analogies. One difference, however, is that we have no right to interfere with another soul's choice as to the speed of his or her progress. Even the Masters of Wisdom are not allowed to do this. We have been given free will for testing purposes. In our mental development the academic system dictates the order of subjects to be studied but in spiritual development we have to decide this for ourselves.

After death, having ruminated on any one lifetime, the body we occupied previously is no longer suited to our new needs – even if it was still available to us and hadn't been disintegrated. It may be that having been a man we need to experience being a woman or to be a member of a different social, racial or religious grouping which will give us understanding of how we have failed to related to such groups in the past. Or we may need to further develop our positive masculine or negative feminine qualities both of which are necessary for perfect balance. This can lead to problems if we too strongly identify with the sex we had last time and are unwilling to undergo the new experiences planned in our between-life status.

Occasion has also to be provided for retribution or rewards and it is important for us to allow others to help us as it may be part of their debt. Some people are eager to be helpers but are not keen to be helped and they thereby deny possible opportunities to others for restitution. It may, of course, happen that the restitution is not made directly to the person concerned but the balance is finely and precisely adjusted. The only condemnation we have is from our selves as we view our mistakes during or after earthly life so it is very important for us to realize that the whole process is educative and not punitive. Responsible and understanding adults do not severely punish errant children who act rashly and in ignorance of consequences which is how we act on Earth most of the time without realizing it. Making mistakes is one of the most painful but eventually effective ways of learning as we strive to overcome them.

People ask why we do not remember past lives. Is there any need when those memories have been condensed and carefully stored in our memory bank? I think it is more important to concentrate on where we are rather than on where or who we have been in the past lives. There is sometimes value in knowing why we suffer in particular ways but our progression is onwards and the past cannot be changed. It is not necessary to remember every single thing – which is registered in the cosmos anyway on finely vibrating material called akasha. We will access that at the appropriate time but during life we take what we think is needed and jettison the rest. This reduces our baggage to manageable proportions for ease of handling as too heavy a load hampers our journey. Sometimes, of course, we get rid of the wrong things in which case life has to provide us with that material again for us to reprocess and we may find ourselves asking "Why does this keep happening to me?" If it is a matter of importance it will continue to return until we deal satisfactorily with that issue – in this or in future lives.

Life is merciful in that too complete a memory would never allow us to forget mistakes and humiliations. The stupidities of one life are surely enough for us to bear! Another good thing about this temporary amnesia is that it allows us to make a fresh start with the bonus of retained skills, aptitudes and spirituality accumulated and salvaged from previous lives. Which is why I said that reincarnation is economical. Nothing good is wasted and rubbish is recycled into something useful. Both Cicero and Plato believed that infants learn quickly because they remember what was previously known. The mastery of language and intricate information is phenomenal in the very young, and in my view, cannot be attributed solely to a few days, months and years of postnatal existence. We see this more clearly in infant prodigies such as Mozart.

The investigator, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who has done much work on reincarnation experiences in children and adults, points out that the ability to remember past lives, particularly in children who have speedily reincarnated, seems to disappear as they grow and increasingly engage with the problems of their new lives. This is beautifully stated by the poet William Wordsworth in his ‘Ode to Intimations of Immortality'.

‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.'

Another English poet, John Masefield, said much the same thing:
‘I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise,
Another mother gives him birth,
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.'

I disagree with Masefield's assertion that the new soul would automatically have sturdier limbs and brighter brain because it might do more for our development if, having been whole, we were to experience what it feels like to be incomplete. We would also learn, and others would learn, a different set of relation ships in such a situation. There is a purpose to every manifestation and our job is to fathom it out.

It is really more frightening to be born than to die. Instead of being part of one harmonious whole we become separated, at birth, from our Source. The soul poises itself on the edge of completely unknown and challenging experiences which are designed to test its mettle. The old skills have, as it were, been taken out of mothballs ready for fresh action but we have to update them to meet the more demanding requirements of the ensuing ages into which we reincarnate and there can be vast periods of time between them.

In one case of natural death however, the soul plans its departure and looks forward to going home to a place of joyous familiarity and companionship – a place we have come from and have been to many times. After a short or long period of contemplation and refreshment, depending on how much there is to mull over in the way of spiritual content garnered in the past life, the soul enters a blissful state from which it emerges when it is drawn once more to earth by a hunger for material experience. This it builds up like the bee makes a honeycomb from the nectar it gathers.

Eventually this repetitive desire for existence – like all other desires – is satisfied, we overcome our earthly limitations and a glorious point of no return is reached. We are then liberated from the wheel of death and rebirth or the Cycle of Necessity as Reincarnation is sometimes called. It is an incredibly long and arduous process but its purpose is to fit us for union with and in the One Life which has no beginning and no ending. Time only exists here on Earth for purposes of comparative experience. Anyone who has lost themselves in deep meditation knows that time is an illusion. Everything exists now. The Source is in everything and it is timeless. A foretaste of this wonderful consummation can be experienced in deep meditation and one person has described it thus: "I was intensely aware of my body yet I felt suspended bodiless in a new height. Everything within me seemed to vibrate gently in golden light. There was utter stillness. I did not ‘feel the self fuse with the Absolute'. I felt the whole universe –everything that is – was in me, was me, for a fleeting forever."

I have experienced a moment like that and so I can never again concern myself unduly with the physical body or question the wonderful doctrine and purpose of Reincarnation. It is your prerogative to remain unconvinced but I hope you will look at what evidences there are before ruling reincarnation out of hand. Thank you for letting me share my views with you today.

Eileen Armstrong is a theosophist. She is a member of the Unitarian Church in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2000