Comprehensive approach towards reincarnation. Part-2.
Now, to generalize from our individual emotions is as rare a gift as to originate a philosophy from the particular thoughts which we gain about things. Yet it is this generalization from particular emotions that is characteristic of a poet, and the more universal are his generalizations, the greater is he as a poet. Why then should an individual here and there have this wonderful ability of seeing particular men as representatives of types, and particular emotions as expression of universal emotions? We say that such a man is a genius, but the word genius merely describes but does not explain. There are geniuses in every department of life - religion, poetry, art, music, statesmanship, the drama, in war and in commerce, and in many other phases of life. These geniuses are characterized by many abnormal qualities; they are always men of the future and not of their day and each genius is a lawgiver to future generations in his own department of activity; and above all, they live emotionally and mentally in wide generalizations. Whence comes this wonderful ability?
One explanation offered is Heredity. But how far does heredity really explain genius? According to the ordinarily accepted theory of heredity, each generation adds a little to a quality brought from the generation before, and then transmits it to the next; this in turn adds a little, and passes on the total of what it has received, plus its own contribution; and so on generation after generation, till we arrive at a particular generation, and to one individual of it, in whom the special quality in some mysterious way gets concentrated, and that individual is thereby a genius. According to this popular theory, some remote ancestor of Shakespeare had a fraction of Shakespeare’s genius, which he transmitted through heredity to his offspring; this offspring then, keeping intact what was given him by his parent, added to the stock from his own experiences, and then passed on both to his child; and so on in successive generations, each generation treasuring what was given to it from all previous generations, and adding something of its own before transmitting it to the next. Shakespeare then is as the torrent from a reservoir which has slowly been dammed up, but bursts its sides when the pressure has passed beyond a certain point.
Such a conception of heredity is based upon the assumption that what an individual acquires of faculty, as a result of adaptability to his environment, is passed on to his offspring. Such indeed is the conclusion that the Darwinian school of biologists came to, from their analysis of what happens in Nature. But biological research during the last twenty-five years, has been largely directed to testing the validity of the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics. Not only has not one indisputable instance been found, but all experiments in breeding and crossing, on the other hand, accumulate proofs to the contrary.
The new school of biologists known as the Mendelians have therefore come to theories about heredity which are not only novel but startling. According to them, structural characteristics, upon which must depend the mental and moral capacities of an individual, exist, in every ancestor in their fulness; and further, they must all have been in the first speck of living matter. Nothing has been added by evolution to this original stock of capacities in protoplasm. Every genius whom the world has known or will know existed potentially in it, though he had to wait millions of years before there arose the appropriate arrangement of the “genetic factors” to enable him to appear as a genius on the evolutionary stage. Nature has not evolved the complex brain structure of Shakespeare out of the rudimentary brains of the mammals; that complexity existed “in a pin-head of protoplasm”. Nature has not evolved the genius; she has merely released him from the fetters which bound him in the primordial protoplasm, by eliminating, generation after generation, such genetic factors as inhibited his manifestation. Bateson sums up these modern theories when he says:
“I have confidence that the artistic gifts of mankind will prove to be due not to something added to the makeup of an ordinary man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit the development of these gifts. They are almost beyond doubt to be looked upon as – “releases” – of powers normally suppressed. The instrument is there, but it is stopped down.” (Presidential Address, British Association, 1914).
Time alone will show how far the Mendelian conception will need to be modified by later discoveries; but it is fairly certain already that the older Darwinian conception of heredity is untenable, and that if a man is a genius he owes very little to the intellectual and emotional achievements of his ancestors. If, however, we admit with the Mendelians that a genius is “released” merely by the removal of the inhibiting factors, and is not the result of slow accumulations, we still leave the original mystery unsolved, and that is to explain the synthetic ability of the genius. We are therefore no nearer really explaining the nature of genius along Mendelian lines than along the Darwinian; the theories of science merely tell us under what conditions genius will or will not manifest, but nothing more.
The only rational theory of genius, which accepts scientific facts as to heredity and also explains what genius is, comes from the conception of reincarnation. If we hold that an individual is a soul, that is an imperishable and evolving Ego, and manifests through a body appropriate to his stage of growth and to a work which he is to do in that body, then we see that his emotional and mental attributes are the results of experiences which he has gained in past lives. But since he can express them only through a suitable body and brain, these must be of such a kind as Nature has by heredity selected for such use. The manifestation of any capacity, then, depends on two indispensable factors; first, an Ego or consciousness who has developed the capacity by repeated experiments in past lives; and second, a suitable instrument, a physical body of such a nature structurally as makes possible the expression of that capacity. When therefore we consider the quality of genius, if on the one hand the genius has not a body fashioned out of such genetic factors as do not inhibit his genius, he is “stopped down”, to use Bateson’s simile, and his genius is unreleased. But on the other hand, if Nature were to produce a thousand bodies that were not “stopped down”, we should not ipso facto have a thousand geniuses. Two lines of evolution must therefore converge, before there can manifest any quality that is not purely functional. The first is that of the evolution of an indestructible Consciousness, which continually experiments with life and slowly becomes expert thereby; and the second is the evolution of the physical structure, which is selected by heredity to respond to a given stimulus from within.
If with this is clue as to what is happening in Nature, we examine the various geniuses whom the world has produced, we shall see that they are remembering their past lives as they exhibit their genius. Take for instance, such a genius as the young violinist, Mischa Elman, who a few years ago began his musical career; he was then but a lad, and yet even at that age he manifested marvellous technical ability. Now we may perhaps legitimately account for this technical ability along Mendelian lines, as being due to a rare confluence of genetic factors; but by no theory of physical heredity can we explain what surprised the most exacting of musical critics - Mischa Elman’s interpretation of music. For it is just in this interpretation that a music lover can see the soul of the performer, whether that soul is a big one or a little, whether the performer has known of life superficially or has touched life's core. Now Mischa Elman’s interpretation, absolutely spontaneous as it was, and un-imitated from a teacher, was that of a man and not that of a boy. Little wonder that many a critic was puzzled, or that the musical critic of the London Daily Telegraph should write as follows:
“Rain beat noisily upon the roof and thunder roared and rattled, but Mischa Elman went calmly on with his prescribed Paganini and Bach and Wieniawski. Calmly is the word, be it noted, not stolidly. We have had stolid wonder-children on our musical platforms; Mischa is not one of them. Upon his face, as he plies the bow, rests a great peace, and only now and then, with a more decided expression, does he lower his cheek upon the instrument, as though he would receive from it the impulse of its vibrations and to it communicate his own soul-beats.
Asked to account for this — to explain why Mischa Elman laying cheek to wood, reveals the insight and feeling of a man who has risen to the heights and plumbed the depths of human life — we simply acknowledge that the matter is beyond us. We can do no more than speculate, and, perhaps, hope for a day in which the all-embracing science of an age more advanced than our own shall discover the particular brain formation, or adjustment, to which infants owe the powers that men and women vainly seek. Those powers may be the Wordsworthian “clouds of glory”, brought from another world. If so, what a brilliant birth must that of Mischa Elman have been! The boy was heard in a work by Paganini and another Wieniawski, both good things of their meritricious kind, and both irradiated, as we could not but fancy, by the unconscious genius which shines alike on the evil and the good, making the best of both. Upon the mere execution of these works we do not dwell, preferring the charm of the moments in which the music lent itself to the mysterious emotion of the youthful player, and showed, not the painted visage of a mountebank, but the face of an angel!
If along the lines of reincarnation we suppose that Mischa Elman is a soul who in his past lives has in truth "risen to the heights and plumbed the depths of human life”, then we have a reasonable explanation for his genius. There is reflected in each interpretation the summing up of his past experiences, and he can through his music tell us of a man’s sorrow or a man’s joy, because as a man in past lives he has experienced both, and retains their memory in emotional and intellectual generalizations. This explanation further joins hands with science, because the reincarnation theory of genius implies the need by the musical soul of a body with a musical heredity, which has been “selected” by evolution and built up by appropriate genetic factors.
Reincarnation alone explains another genius who must remain a puzzle according to all other theories. Keats is known in English poetry as the most “Greek” of all England's poets; he possessed by nature that unique feeling for life which was the treasure of the Greek temperament. If he had been a Greek scholar and steeped in the traditions of Greek culture, we might account for this anima naturaliter Graeca of the Greek-less Keats.” But when we consider that Keats had “little Latin and less Greek,” and began life as a surgeon’s apprentice and a medical student, we may well wonder why he sings not as a Christian poet should, but as some Greek shepherd born on the slopes of Mount Etna. The wonder, however, at once ceases if we presume that Keats is the reincarnation of a Greek poet, and that he is remembering his past lives as he reverts to Greek ways of thought and feeling.
With reincarnation as a clue, it is interesting to see how a little analysis enables us to say where in the past an individual must have lived. In the culture of Europe and America, there are three main types of “reversion,” to Rome, to Greece, and to India. Anyone who has studied Roman institutions and the Roman conception of life finds little difficulty in noting how the English temperament is largely that of ancient Rome in a modern garb; the values, for instance in writing history, of such historians as Gibbon, Macaulay, Hume, are practically the same as those of Roman historians, Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and the rest; whereas if we take the French historians we shall find them scarcely at all Roman in temperament, and far more akin to Greek. The equation Tennyson = Virgil is certainly not far-fetched to those who know the quality of both poets. 
We find the reversion to Greece very clearly in such
Wherever the deeper layers of a man’s being are offered to the world in some creation through philosophy, literature, art or science, there may we note tendencies started in past lives. For the pageant of the man’s life is not planned and achieved in the few brief years which begin with his birth, and he that knows of reincarnation may note readily enough where the parts of the pageant were composed.
Reincarnation, as it affects large groups of individuals, is a fascinating study to one with an historical bent of mind. I have mentioned that the English race as a whole is largely a reincarnation of the ancient Roman; but here and there we find a sprinkling of Greeks in men like Byron, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and in those Englishmen and women who have the Greek feel for life, and hemmed in by English tradition are as strangers in a strange land. Let such a return Greek, wherever he be born this life, but go to South Italy or to Greece, and he will begin to remember his past life in the instinctive familiarity which he will feel with the hidden spirit of tree and lake and hill. As none but a Greek can, he will find a joy in the sunshine, in the lemon groves and vineyards and waterfalls, which in a Greek land give the message of Nature as in no other land.
Others there are who, born last life in the Middle Ages somewhere in Europe, perhaps in Italy or Spain of Germany, where they re-visit the land of their former birth, will have a strange familiarity with the things that pass before them. In striking ways, they read into the life of the people, and understand the why of things. To some, this mysterious sense of recollection may be strongest in Egypt, or India, or Japan; but wherever we have the intuitive understanding of foreign people, we have one mode of remembering our past lives.
It is in the characteristic intellectual attitude of the French that we see the reincarnation of much that was developed in later Greece. The French intellectual clarity and dispassionate keenness to see things “as they are” (whether they bring material benefits or not) are typically Greek. And perhaps, could we know more fully of the life of the Phoenicians, we should see them reborn in the Germans of today. Then the commercial rivalry between England and Germany for the capture of the markets of the East would be but the rebirth of the ancient rivalry between Rome and Carthage for the markets of the Mediterranean.
An eruption of Greek egos is fairly evident in the United States of America. On the Pacific Coast especially, there are many men and women of the simple Greek temperament of the pre-Periclean age, and yet their ancestors were not infrequently New England Puritans. It is in America too, that we have the Sophists of Greece in full strength in the “New Thought” writers who spring up in that land month after month. In them we have the same characteristics as had the Sophists of Greece whom Plato denounced — much sound sense and many a useful wrinkle, an independence of landmarks and traditions, an unbounded confidence in their own panacea, and a giving of their message of the Spirit “for a consideration.” The lack of distinction in their minds, when in Greece, between Sophism and Wisdom returns in the twentieth century as a confusion between the New Thought ideas of the Divine Life and the real life of the Spirit. Let us hope that as the Sophists helped to bring in the Golden Age of Greece, so the “New Thought-ers” are the forerunners of that True Thought that is to dawn, which is neither old nor new. 
Here and there in India we find one who is distinctly not Hindu. For the most part, the modern Hindus seem scarce to have been in other lands in their late incarnations;but now and then a man or woman is met with for whom the sacrosanct institutions of orthodoxy have no meaning, and who takes up western ideas of progress with avidity. Some of these are “England-returned,” in this present incarnation, and we can thus account for their mentality. But when we find a man who has never left India, who was reared in strict orthodoxy, and yet fights with enthusiasm for foreign ways of thought, surely we have here a “Europe-returned” ego, from Greece or Rome or from some other of the many lands of the West.
We must not forget to draw attention to the egos from Greece who have returned to Europe to usher in the age of art. To one familiar with Greek sculpture and architecture, it is not difficult to see the Greek artists reborn in the Italian masters of painting and architecture. The cult is no longer that of Pallas Athene and the Gods; there is now the Virgin Mary and the saints to give them their heavenly crowns. Whence did the Italian masters gain their surety of touch, if not from a past birth in Greece? It is striking, too, how the Romans, who excelled in portraiture, should be reborn in the English school of portrait painters, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence and the rest.
Nor must we forget the band of Greeks who like an inundation swept over the Elizabethan stage, Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Peele, Johnson, and the rest - are they not pagans thinly veiled in English garb? They felt life in un-English modes; they felt first and then thought out the feeling. The Greek, is ever the Greek, whatsoever the language which is given him to speak, and his touch in literature and art is not easily veiled.
Strong impressions made on the consciousness in a past life often appear in the present in some curious mood or feeling. Sometimes, fears of creeping things, fires, cutting implements, etc., are thus to be accounted for, though sometimes these “phobias” may only be sub-conscious reminders of this life. In the cases where we have no sub-consciousness of the present body appearing, there is sure to have been some shock, resulting it may be, in a violent death, in a past life. The after effects appear now in some uncontrollable fear, or in discomfort in the presence of the object which caused the shock. More strange is the attitude of one individual towards another which is brought over from a past life. Sometimes one sees the strange sight of a girl of ten or twelve taking care of her mother in a maternal way, as though the positions were reversed, and almost as if she had the onerous duty of bringing up her mother in the way she should go. Of a deeper psychological nature is it when, as sometimes happens, a wife mated to a husband who causes her suffering, finds charity towards him possible only when she looks on him not as her husband but as her son. Here we have a reminiscence of a life when he was indeed her child, and his better nature came out towards her in the relation which he bore to her then.
A rather humorous instance of a past recollection is found when there has been between the last life and this a change of sex of the body. In the West especially, where there is a more marked differentiation temperamentally between the sexes than in the East, not infrequently the girl who dislikes playing with dolls, who delights in boy’s games, and is a pronounced tomboy, is really an ego who has just taken up a body of the sex opposite to that with which he has been familiar for many lives. Many a girl has resented her skirts, and it takes such a girl several years before she finally resigns herself to them. Some women there are, on whose face and mode of carriage the last male incarnation seems still fairly visibly portrayed. A similar thing is to be seen in some men, who bring into this life traces of their habits of thought and feeling when last they had women's bodies.
A consideration of the many psychological puzzles I have enumerated will show us that, as a matter of fact, people do remember something of their past lives. Truly the memory is indirect, only as a habit or a mood, but it is nevertheless memory of the past. Now most people who are willing to accept reincarnation as a fact in life naturally ask the question: “But why don’t we remember fully ?” To this there are two answers, the first of which is: “It is best for us not to remember directly or fully, till we are ready for the memories”
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We are not ready for remembrance so long as we are influenced by the memories of the past. Where for instance, the memory is of a painful event, up to a certain point the past not only influences our present but also our future, and both in a harmful way; and therefore, so long as we have not gone beyond the sphere of influence of the past, our characters are weakened and not strengthened by remembrance. Let us take an extreme case, but one typical nevertheless. Suppose that in the last life a man has committed suicide as the easiest way out of his difficulties. As he dies, there will be in his mind much mental suffering, and especially he will lack confidence in his ability to weather the storm. The suicide does not put an end to his suffering, for after death it will continue for some time more acutely still, till it slowly exhausts itself. There will be a purification through his great suffering, and when it ends there will be in him a keener vision and a fuller response to the promptings of his higher nature. When, then, he is reborn, he will be born with a stronger conscience, as the result of his sufferings. But he will still retain the lack of confidence in his ability, because nothing has happened after his death to alter that. Confidence can be gained only by mastering circumstance, and it is for that very purpose that he has returned. Now sooner or later, he will be confronted with a situation similar to that before he failed in the last life. As difficulties crowd around him in the new life, once more there will be the old struggle.
The fact of committing suicide will now come as a tendency to suicide once again, as a resignation to suicide as the easiest way. But on the other hand, the memory of the suffering after the last suicide will also return in a stronger urge of conscience that this time the solution must not be through suicide. In this condition of mental strain, when the man is being pulled on one side by his past and on the other by his future, if he were to know, with vivid memory, how he had committed suicide in the past in a like situation, the probabilities are that he would be influenced by his past action, and that his lack of confidence would be intensified, with suicide as a result once again. Forgetfulness of the nerve-racking details of the past enables him to fight now more manfully. We little realize how we are being domineered over by our past. It is indeed a blessing for most of us that the kindly Gods draw a veil over a record which, at our present stage of evolution, cannot be anything but deplorable in many ways.
Only so long as we identify ourselves with our past, that past is hidden from us, except in indirect modes as faculties and dispositions. But the direct memory will come, if we learn to dissociate our present selves from our past selves. We are ever the Future, not the past: and when we can look at our past — of this life first, and after, of that of other lives — without heat, impersonally, in perspective as it were, like a judge who has no sense of identity with the facts before him for judgment, then we shall begin to remember, directly, the past in detail– but till then, as Tennyson truly says :
We ranging down this lower track
The path we came by, thorn and flower,
Is shadow’d by the growing hour.
Lest life should fail in looking back.
The second reason for our not directly remembering our past lives is this : – the “ I “ who asks the question, “Why don’t I remember?” has not lived in the past. It is the Soul who has lived, not this “ I “ with all its limitations. But is not this “ I “ that Soul? With most people not at all, and this fact will be evident if we think over the matter.
The average man or woman is scarcely so much a Soul as a bundle of attributes of sex, creed, and nationality. But the Soul is immortal, that is, it has no sense of diminution or death; it has no idea of time, which deludes it to think that it is young, wastes away, and grows old; it is neither man nor woman, because it is developing in itself the best qualities of both sexes; it is neither Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Christian, nor Muslim, because it lives in One Divine Life and assimilates that Life according to its temperament; it is not Indian, nor English, nor American, for it belongs to no country, even though its outermost sheath, the physical body, belongs to a particular race; it has no caste nor class, for it knows that all partake of One Life, and that before God there is neither Brahmin nor Shudra, Jew nor Gentile, aristocrat nor plebeian.
It is this Soul which puts out a part of itself, a Personality, for the period of a life, “as a mere subject for grave experiment and experience”. Through a persona, a “mask” of a babe, child, youth or maid, man or woman, bachelor, spinster or householder, old man or old woman, it looks out into life, and, as it observes, eliminates the distorting bias which its outer sheath gives. Its personalities in the past have been Lemurian or Atlantean, Hindu or Roman or Greek, and it selects the best out of them all and discards the rest. All literatures, sciences, arts, religions and civilizations are its school and playground, its workshop and study. Its patriotism is for an indivisible Humanity, and its creed is to co-operate with “God’s plan, which is Evolution.”
It is this Soul who has had past lives. How much of this Soul are we,
So long as we are wrapped up in petty thoughts of an exclusive nationalism, and in narrow beliefs of creeds, so long do we retain the barriers which exist between our higher selves and our lower. An intellectual breadth and a larger sympathy, “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color,” must first be achieved, before there breaks, as through clouds, flashes of our true consciousness as Souls. There is no swifter way to discover what we are as Immortals out of time than by discovering what is our Work in time.
Let but a man or woman find that Work for whose sake sacrifice and immolation are serenest contentment, then slowly the larger consciousness of the Soul descends into the brain of the personality. With that descent begins the direct memory of past lives. As more and more the personality presses forward, desiring no light but what is sufficient for the next step on his path to his goal of work, slowly one bias after another is burnt away in the fire of purification. Like as the sun dissipates more clouds the higher it rises, so it is for the life of the personality; it knows then, with such conviction as the sun has about its own nature when it shines, that “the soul of man is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendor have no limit.”
Then come back the memories of past lives. How they come those who live the life know. There are many kinds of knowledge useful for man, but none greater than the knowledge “that evolution is a fact, and that the method of evolution is the constant dipping down into matter under the law of adjustment.” This knowledge is for all who seek, if they will but seek rightly; and the right way is to be a Brother to all men, “without distinction of race creed, sex, caste or color.
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