CHAPTER XII
REINCARNATION
There is a good deal of talk indulged in, on the subject of Reincarnation—talk of a rather cheap character. One does not quite see what is the use of saying that the ego will be reincarnated again some day, unless one has some sort of idea what one means by the ego, and unless one has some understanding of the sense in which the word “reincarnation” is used. If it is meant that your local and external self, approximately as you and your friends know it to-day—including dress, facial outline, professional skill, accomplishments, habits of mind and body, interests and enthusiasms—is going to repeat itself again in five or five hundred years, or has already appeared in this form in the past; one can only say “impossible!” and “I trust not!” For all these things depend on date, locality, heredity, surrounding institutions, social habits, current morality, and so forth, which—though they have certainly played their part in the spirit’s growth—must infallibly be different at any other period (short of the whole universe repeating itself). And anyhow to have them repeated again da capo at some future time would be terribly dull. But if you say “Of course I don’t mean anything so silly as that,” it becomes incumbent on you to say what you do mean.
Supposing, for instance, you had been planked down a baby in the Arabian desert, and grown up to maturity or middle age there, instead of where you are, would any of your present-day friends recognize you? Where would be your charming piano-playing, your excellent cricket, your rather sloppy water-color painting, your up-to-dateness in the theatrical world? Where your morality (with three wives of course) or your religion (something about “Christian dogs”), or where your British sang froid and impeccability? And if it is obvious that in such a case as this you would, owing to the changed conditions, be changed out of all recognition, much more—one might say—would this be the case if you had been born five hundred years ago, or were to be born again five hundred years hence. Your whole outlook on life, and its whole impress on you, would be different.
Of course I am not meaning, by these remarks, to say that reincarnation is in itself impossible or absurd; that would be prejudging the question. All I mean at present is that if we are going to study this subject, or theorize upon it, it is really necessary to define in some degree the terms which we use. I do not say that you, the reader, might not be reincarnated, but I think it is clear that if you were, we should have a good deal of trouble in following and finding you! It is clear that the you, so reappearing, would not be your well-known local and external self, but some deep nucleus, difficult perhaps for your best friend to recognize, and possibly even unknown or unrecognized by yourself at present. And similarly of some friend that you love for a thousand little tricks and ways. We all have such friends, and at times cherish a sentimental romance of their being restored to us in some future æon habited in their old guise and with their well-worn frocks and coats. But surely it is no good playing at hide-and-seek like that. The common difficulties about the conventional heaven—the difficulty about meeting your old friend who used to be so good at after-dinner stories, about meeting him with a harp in his hand and sitting on a damp cloud—is no whit the less a difficulty whatever future world may be the rendezvous. He would be changed (externally) and we should be changed, and it might well happen that if we did seem to recall any former intimacy we should both feel like strangers, and be as shy and tentative in our approaches to each other as school-children.
What do we mean by the letter “I”? and what do we mean by the word Reincarnation? These two questions wait for a reply.
The first is a terribly difficult question. It lies (though neglected by the philosophers themselves) at the root of all philosophy. Perhaps really all life and experience are nothing but an immense search for the answer. What do we mean by the Ego? It is a sort of fundamental question, which it might be supposed would precede all other questions, but which as a matter of fact seems to be postponed to all others, and is the last to be solved. All we can at the outset be sure of in the way of answer is the enormous extent and depth of the being we are setting out to define. We sometimes think of the ego as a mere point of consciousness, or we think of the ordinary self of daily life as a fragile and ephemeral entity bounded by a few bodily tissues and a few mental views and habits. But even the slight discussion of the subject in former chapters of this book (chapters vi., vii., and so forth) has revealed to us the vast underlying stores and faculties which must be included—the wonderful powers of memory, the subtle capacities of perception at a distance, or without the usual organs of sight and hearing, the power of creating images out of the depths of one’s mind, and of impressing them telepathically upon others, the faculty of clairvoyance in past and future time, and so forth. The more we try to fathom this ego, with which we supposed ourselves so familiar, the more we are amazed at its labyrinthine profundity, and the more we are astonished to think that we should ever have ventured to limit it to such a petty formula and conventional symbol as we commonly do—not only in our judgment of friends, but even in our estimate of ourselves.
Reincarnation, as we have already said, can hardly be the reappearance, in a new life on earth (or even in some other sphere), of the very local and superficial traits which we know so well in ourselves and our friends—which are mainly a response to local and superficial conditions, and which mainly constitute what we call our personalities. If reincarnation does occur, it must obviously consist in the reappearance or remanifestation of some such very interior self as we have just spoken of—some deep individuality (as opposed to personality), some divine æonian soul, some offshoot perhaps of an age-long enduring Race-soul, or World-self—and in that sort of sense only shall I use the word in future.
In that sense the idea is feasible and illuminative. It explains the obvious limitations and localism of our personalities, as being more or less passing and temporary embodiments of our true selves; and it represents the latter as immense storehouses of experience from all manner of places and times, and similarly as centres of world-activity operating in different fields of time and space. At the same time, it presents various difficulties. For one thing, it poses the difficulty that for each of us this vast interior being is, as a rule, so deeply buried that both oneself and one’s friends are only faintly conscious—if at all—of its true outline. And if one does not recognize this being, of what use is it to us? It is true that we sometimes meet people who at first sight give us a strong impression of far-back intimacy; but this is only a vague impression and hardly sufficient to afford proof of pre-existence. The only way of meeting this difficulty seems to be to suppose, as residing in this inner being or true self, another order of consciousness, faint intimations of which we even now have, and by which, as it grows and develops, we may some day clearly recognize our true selves and true nature.
Another difficulty is that (as already said) for any satisfactory sense of survival continuity of memory is needed; and we should have to suppose that the memory of each earth-life was continued into and stored up in this deeper soul or æonian self. Memory would not normally pass from one embodiment or incarnation to another, but each stream would flow into the central self and there be stored. And I think we may admit that this is by no means impossible. Indeed there are not a few facts (some already mentioned) with regard to the recovery of memory which make the mater probable. Though any given earth-life in a given form could not be repeated, the memory of such an earth-life, fresh and clear, may survive for an indefinite time in the crystal mirror of the deeper consciousness.[[127]] And it is perhaps allowable to suppose that in this way, and with the lifting of the opaque veil of our present consciousness, we may some day come clearly into the presence of friends we have lost.
Here again, however, one has to be on one’s guard. The mere fact of remembering (or thinking one remembers), in this our terrestrial life and with our terrestrial consciousness, some detail or other of a previous terrestrial life proves little—for, for aught we know, quite apart from our psychic selves, a streak of memory of more physical origin from some ancestor may have come down even several generations, and may be surviving in one’s brain.[[128]] Indeed it is extremely probable that all organic matter carries memory with it, and not unlikely that inorganic matter does so too. If you thought, for instance, that you remembered seeing Charles the First beheaded—if you had a rather distinct picture in your mind of the scene at Whitehall, which you afterwards found by investigation to be corroborated in its details, you might at first jump to the conclusion that you had really lived at that time, and witnessed the scene. But after all it might merely be that an ancestor of yours had been there, and that the vividly impressed picture had somehow persevered in some subterranean channel of memory and emerged again in your mind. Even then you might contend that, since it was your memory, you must have been there—or at any rate some fraction of yourself in the ancestor, which now has become incorporated in your personality. There are a good many stories of this kind going about, which point to the possibility of the transmission of shreds of remembrance through hereditary channels, and suggest the idea of an active Race-memory, or Earth-memory, in itself continuous—a storehouse of experiences, but fed continually by the individuals of the race, and coruscating forth again in other individuals.[[129]] Indeed one can hardly withhold belief in the existence of such a larger life, or identity, ‘reincarnated’ if one likes to use the expression, in thousands or millions of individuals; but to be satisfactorily assured of the reincarnation of one distinct and individual person is another thing, and would almost demand that there should be forthcoming not only shreds and streaks of remembrance, but a pretty continuous and consistent memory of a whole former life.