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the creature of its environment and the slave of the physical memory. Could
the former manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment, there
would be no longer men on earth, but we should all be gods.
Q. Still there ought to be exceptions, and some ought to remember.
A. And so there are. But who believes in their report? Such sensitives are
generally regarded as hallucinated hysteriacs, as crack-brained enthusiasts,
or humbugs, by modern materialism. Let them read, however, works on this
subject, preeminently Reincarnation, a Study of Forgotten Truth by E.D.
Walker, F.T.S., and see in it the mass of proofs which the able author
brings to bear on this vexed question. One speaks to people of soul, and
some ask "What is Soul?" "Have you ever proved its existence?" Of course it
is useless to argue with those who are materialists. But even to them I
would put the question:
Can you remember what you were or did when a baby? Have you preserved the
smallest recollection of your life, thoughts, or deeds, or that you lived at
all during the first eighteen months or two years of your existence? Then
why not deny that you have ever lived as a babe, on the same principle?
When to all this we add that the reincarnating Ego, or individuality,
retains during the Devachanic period merely the essence of the experience of
its past earth-life or personality, the whole physical experience involving
into a state of in potentia, or being, so to speak, translated into
spiritual formulae; when we remember further that the term between two
rebirths is said to extend from ten to fifteen centuries, during which time
the physical consciousness is totally and absolutely inactive, having no
organs to act through, and therefore no existence, the reason for the
absence of all remembrance in the purely physical memory is apparent.
Q. You just said that the Spiritual Ego was omniscient. Where, then, is that
vaunted omniscience during his Devachanic life, as you call it?
A. During that time it is latent and potential, because, first of all, the
Spiritual Ego (the compound of Buddhi-Manas) is not the Higher Self, which
being one with the Universal Soul or Mind is alone omniscient; and,
secondly, because Devachan is the idealized continuation of the terrestrial
life just left behind, a period of retributive adjustment, and a reward for
unmerited wrongs and sufferings undergone in that special life. It is
omniscient only potentially in Devachan, and de facto exclusively in
Nirvana, when the Ego is merged in the Universal Mind-Soul. Yet it rebecomes
quasi omniscient during those hours on earth when certain abnormal
conditions and physiological changes in the body make the Ego free from the
trammels of matter. Thus the examples cited above of somnambulists, a poor
servant speaking Hebrew, and another playing the violin, give you an
illustration of the case in point. This does not mean that the explanations
of these two facts offered us by medical science have no truth in them, for
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The Key To Theosophy - HP Blavatsky.txt
one girl had, years before, heard her master, a clergyman, read Hebrew works
aloud, and the other had heard an artist playing a violin at their farm. But
neither could have done so as perfectly as they did had they not been
ensouled by that which, owing to the sameness of its nature with the
Universal Mind, is omniscient. Here the higher principle acted on the
Skandhas and moved them; in the other, the personality being paralyzed, the
individuality manifested itself. Pray do not confuse the two.
-oOo-
On Individuality and Personality
Q. But what is the difference between the two?
A. Even Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of Esoteric philosophy, found
himself obliged to correct the mistakes of previous Orientalists who made no
such distinction, and gives the reader his reasons for it. Thus he says:
The successive appearances upon the earth, or "descents into generation," of
the tanhaically coherent parts (Skandhas) of a certain being, are a
succession of personalities. In each birth the personality differs from that
of a previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, the deus ex machina, masks
(or shall we say reflects?) itself now in the personality of a sage, again
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