Now, for a moment, put yourselves by imagination in the position of one of those infant races, hearing the words of the Teacher, and willing to learn. "If," said the Teacher, "you follow that course of conduct, misery will result." You may remember the words of the Lord Buḍḍha, that "as the wheels of a cart follow on the heels of the ox, so misery follows on the commission of evil. As the wheels of the cart follow the heels of the ox, so happiness follows on the commission of right." And why? because, as we shall see to-morrow, right is harmony with law, and wrong is discord with it. And, as the law cannot be broken, as the law itself is inviolable, the man who dashes himself against it is like the ship that dashes against a rock; the rock remains unmoving, but the ship is shattered into pieces. So is it with the law, the expression of the Divine Nature.
Now the recognition of law was helped by those declarations of the Teachers. For when a man, disobedient and careless, committed a wrong act, he suffered; and then he said: "I was told that I should suffer; after all, the Teacher was right; I have made myself miserable by disobeying the law." And the earlier lessons of man ran along these lines.
Let us see how it worked out. A savage. His passions are his guides. He knows none other. He wants and takes; he desires and grasps; but he is living among others who also want and take, who also desire and grasp, and, there is a conflict between the desires of one man and another. We will follow one man: He sees his neighbour's wife; desires her; he takes her; perhaps, kills the husband—he is quite a savage, remember. He sees in his neighbour's tent food that he wants; he strikes the man down, and takes away the food. And he thinks: "I have done well; I am happy; I have gained a beautiful woman; I have gained food; I am no longer hungry. This is the path of happiness for me." But he has made enemies. The friends of those whom he may have struck down in his licentiousness, they are his enemies, and presently he has to die, perhaps is killed in revenge. But, what we call Death is only the striking away of the body in which the Spirit eternal is dwelling, and this ignorant creature, when the body is struck away, finds himself in the midst of people whom he robbed and murdered during his life on earth. He is surrounded by enemies; he finds on the other side antagonism and hatred; and he learns in the other world—the world we call Preṭaloka or Kāmaloka—he learns there that to do these things means sorrow, and that pain is the ultimate result of the desire unjustly satisfied. It makes a little impression upon him. But during his life, he has not only robbed and murdered: he has loved; perhaps he has loved the woman he stole; perhaps he has loved the child that was born of her. Those little seeds of love remain. The Spirit carries them with him as he passes out of the body, and when he has suffered in Preṭaloka the result of the evil he has done, he passes on to Piṭṛloka and to Svarga, to enjoy the good that he has accomplished; and the seed of love, selfish probably, desiring gratification, finds in Piṭṛloka satisfaction, and the power to love increases. And where there has been a seed of unselfish love, perhaps where the wife was ill, and the husband sat up at night, tending and nursing her although she was no longer a source of pleasure, but only a source of trouble and annoyance; that unselfishness grows out of love, even the animal love, or lust of the possessor, that remains as a little bit of unselfish seed to bear flower in Svarga. When he reaches Svarga, and finds there again the wife and the child he loved, then that little seed of love begins to grow, and grows through the life, the heavenly life, of happiness that he leads, and that is transmuted into a greater power of loving, which he brings back with him to his next birth, so that he finds himself on a higher plane of emotion than that he lived on in the last.
Now in the savage the growth is very slow. Hundreds of lives sometimes pass and little change is seen. But where the Sages I spoke of are present, there the growth is more rapid, for there comes in the recognition of the law, and the understanding of the sequence of events. The man comes back again for many births, until he comes back as an average common-place semi-civilised man. As a savage, he has hardly any power of thought; through the lives that pass the power of thought has grown. And now, you come to a man who, in a comparatively civilised country, is born as an ordinary mediocre man—"the man in the street," we often call him. Now his experience is more varied. He has many loves and hates, many unjust desires, but also some higher aspirations; and as he goes through a life, the result of his own past, he gathers together fresh experiences, whereof presently more faculty will be manufactured. Just as a sea-gull, sweeping through the air, sweeps down into the ocean, catches a fish, comes up again and flies away to feed upon the fish, so does the human being, out of the great expanse of life in the higher world, sweep down into physical existence to gain the food of experience there. He carries it away through the gateway of death, and feeds upon it in the worlds on the other side of death. Again, more fully and more subtly than in the early stages of life, he reaps the result of the evil that he has done; but his mind is now larger, his mind is more intelligent, he traces the evil act bringing about the suffering, and that is imprinted on the tablet of the mind. Then he goes on into Svarga, and there turns over the good experience he has gained. The experience in love-emotion, that turns into higher powers of loving, greater desire to serve, greater recognition of the claims of others upon him, until he has formed a better and higher love-emotion, ready to return with him to his next experience of life. But he has also gathered much thought; he has gained experience in knowledge; he has exerted mental faculties. He gathers up all the mental experiences and these he works up into intellectual faculties. Is it not written that man is created by thought, and what a man thinks upon that he becomes? The life of Svarga is a life of changing experience into faculty. Every experience that you are making now, intellectual experience, you will weave into mental power on the other side of death. Whatever you may have gained, whatever knowledge you have acquired, that you carry with you through the gateway of death, and you work it up into mental power during your life in Svarga. You may have been weak in some faculty, in judgment, we will say, and you made many errors in judgment here: you suffer for them on the other side of death. You remember them in Svarga, and you build up that experience into an increased power of judgment, and you bring that back with you as an innate quality, and it shows itself in your childhood as part of your intellectual equipment. And, so with every faculty, with reason, with memory, with logic, with the power of understanding; not one of your efforts here is wasted; they all come back to you as food-experience in your heavenly life. You brood over them, you change them into faculty, and that faculty is yours for evermore. For that passes on into the intellectual side of the Spirit, as the emotions pass on into the moral, which is the wisdom side; and so, you come back to earth with higher intellectual power, with greater moral faculty. That continues, on and on, life after life, and when you are born into the world with high ability, it only means the many lives you have studied, the many lives you have laboured in, the many after-death periods during which you have assimilated.
See how the process resembles your life here, which is, indeed, its reflection on the physical plane. You take food; you are satisfied. That food passes down, and is digested. The nutritive part of that is assimilated, and your brain, your muscles, your nerves, all grow by the assimilated nourishment; and when it is assimilated you begin to feel hungry again. You have used up what you took, and you are hungry for more food, in order that you may grow again; and then, you have again another meal, and the whole process is repeated.
So in your spiritual life also. You take the food of experience; you digest it; you assimilate the nutritive part of it, and by that you unfold the hidden powers of the Spirit, and, when you have assimilated all, when nothing remains to be transmuted, then in the heavenly world you are hungry for more experience, and your hunger brings you back to birth in the world in which that hunger can be satisfied. That is the Law. That is the Law of Reincarnation.
As you grow more and more in stature, your growth becomes more rapid. And at last, a time comes, when you say: "I have had enough of this; I no longer care for power—it ends in disappointment; I no longer care for wealth—it is a burden rather than a joy; I no longer care for the things that break in the enjoyment; I no longer care for the things that perish in the using." And then there sets in the discontent with the transitory goods of this world; there sets in that which is called Vairāgya—dispassion. The objects no longer attract; and then the man that has this Divine discontent within him begins to seek for the permanent, begins to look for that which will satisfy; and there is nothing that can satisfy the Divine Spirit in man save God Himself, the Illimitable Life and Love. And so, as an English poet wrote—an old-fashioned poet:
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
Let me, He said, pour on him all I can;