Elementary Theosophy — Section 7, Chapter 9, Part 2
In the case of both physical growth by eating and mental growth by instruction there is no possible escape from the law of alternating periods of objective and subjective activity.
When the child has digested and assimilated a meal there is but one possible thing that can follow--return to his source of supply for another meal.
When the student has digested and assimilated the lesson given to him the only possibility of further mental growth lies in his return to the class-room for more material.
And so it is with the human soul in its work of evolving its latent powers and possibilities.
There is no other road forward but the cyclic one that brings it back to the physical life incarnation after incarnation, but always at a higher point than it previously touched.
The very hunger of the child that insures its return to the table for more food is analogous to the desire of the soul for sentient expression that brings it to rebirth.
These alternating periods with the element of constant return are found everywhere in the economy of nature.
All her evolutionary expressions are cyclic.
But the cyclic movement is not in closed circles.
It represents a spiral.
The "evolutionary ladder" that the soul climbs is a winding stairway.
In its upward progress it makes many rounds but it is always mounting and never returns to the same point.
In each cycle, that is made up of the journey from the heaven world through the astral plane, into the physical and then back through the astral plane into the heaven world, it touches each of them at a higher point, or in a higher state of development, than it had previously attained.
Each rebirth finds it abler here to gather a larger harvest of experience and each return to the mental plane, or heaven world, finds it abler to digest and assimilate its experiences, and to comprehend more of the realities of the life of its home plane.
This round, or cycle, through the physical, astral and mental regions, is a continuous progressive journey of the soul which began away back at the dawn of mind in man and will continue until he is the perfected mental and moral being.
At each incarnation here he gathers experience in proportion to his alertness and to the opportunities his previous lives have made for him.
He learns to help others, to be sympathetic, to be tolerant.
Such activities will give him pleasure in the astral life and joy and wisdom in the mental region, or heaven world.
But he also does some evil things.
He makes enemies, he generates hatred and he injures others.
This will give him distress in the astral life and no results for soul growth or general progress in the heaven world.
If he does an equal amount of good and harm his progress will be slow.
If he does much good and little evil his progress will be rapid and his existence happy.
If he is a man of great energy, and no very great moral development, and selfishly does much wrong, he will suffer much in the astral life.
It often puzzles the student of elementary theosophy to be told that the soul passes through the purgation of the astral plane and goes on into the heaven world only to return to another incarnation and later to again enter the astral purgatory.
Why, it is asked, must one who has thus been purified be again purified?
The astral reactions are the results of the blunders made in each incarnation.
Each of us in any given incarnation creates by his wrong doing the purgatory that awaits him after death.
If he does no wrong there cannot possibly be any reaction.
As a matter of occult fact the average good man will find the astral plane life a happy existence and will soon pass on to the blissful heaven world.
As for the evil doer the suffering relates only to his evil deeds.
Let us say he has committed murder.
When the reaction of the evil force he has generated is over and he passes on into the heaven plane it does not mean that he is incapable of future evil.
It means that he has probably learned thoroughly the lesson that it is very foolish to take life.
But there are many other lessons he has not learned.
When he passes into the heaven world he leaves all evil behind him.
He is as one who puts his shoes aside to enter a temple.
The astral body, like the physical, has perished and it is the freed soul that enters the heaven world.
But when he returns through the astral plane to reincarnation he is clothed again in astral matter and this new astral body is exactly representative of his attainments in evolution.
In his coming incarnation he will have other physical plane experiences and learn other lessons.
The next time probably he will not kill, but perhaps he will cheat and steal or be a drunkard.
These errors will react upon him in the astral life that follows.
In a coming incarnation he will be wise enough to be temperate and neither cheat nor steal; but perhaps he will be a gossip and work much evil through slander.
This in turn will bring its pain.
And so in time he will learn to generate no evil force at all but to live in good will and helpfulness toward everybody.
Then his progress will be rapid indeed, his life on all planes will be happy and the painful part of human evolution will be over.
The purpose of evolution is no less obvious than the fact of evolution.
Evolution is an unfolding process in which the latent becomes the active and the inner life is more and more fully expressed in outer form.
The development and improvement in form keeps pace with the necessities of the unfolding life.
In the lowest levels of the animal kingdom the form is but a cell.
But as the life comes into fuller and fuller expression, limbs for locomotion and, in due course, the organs for hearing, and seeing, and the other mechanism of the developing consciousness, are evolved.
In the human kingdom the vehicle of consciousness comes to its highest possible form and then evolution goes on in the perfecting of the physical form.
In the process of continually changing the matter of the body it is possible for the brain to be constantly improved and the whole body to grow more and more sensitive and gradually to become a better and truer expression of the evolving life within.
In each incarnation the physical body thus improves.
The evolution of life and form keep pace.
Ultimately perfection of form, as well as perfection of intellect and morality, will be reached and human evolution will be finished.
The purpose of evolution, then, is clear.
Man is a god in the making--not actually, but only potentially a god, a being to whom all wisdom, perfect compassion and unlimited power are possible; and by the process of evolution he changes the latent into the active.
He is at first only an individualized center of consciousness within the All-Consciousness, a mere fragment of the divine life.
His relationship to God is something like that of a seed to its plant, a product of it that has latent within it all the characteristics of the plant and the power to become a plant.
It is not a plant and neither is man a god; but when it has sent out a sprout and taken root in the soil it is a plant in the making; and when the human being has begun to evolve his latent spiritual qualities he is a god in the making.
The theosophical view is that man is essentially divine.
Critics sometimes ask why, if man is originally divine, it is necessary for him to pass through any evolutionary process.
Divinity here indicates merely the essential nature of the human being, not his possession of either knowledge or power or any degree of spiritual perfection.
It is as though we should say that the infant son of a great king is royal.
The word "royal," like the word "divine," indicates a relationship.
The baby royalist is not a king.
But he is a king in the making.
He has much to learn.
He must be educated in statecraft and he must evolve diplomacy.
After much experience and development he will, in time, be capable of ruling an empire.
At present this helpless infant bears little resemblance to a king.
Nevertheless, on the day of his birth he was as much royal as he will ever be.
In the same sense the divinity of man represents potential possibilities rather than an obvious fact of the moment.
Man is an embryo god and, in time, he shall evolve faculties and powers that his present limited consciousness can not even comprehend.
He is not an ephemeral creature of physical origin that lives a brief span to catch a glimpse of immortality and perish, but the deathless son of the living God, and by right divine he walks the upward way of eternal life.
Some people appear to accept evolution as a matter of course, in a general way, but they appear unwilling to admit that the race has really made any evolutionary progress.
Even scientific men have sometimes expressed doubt whether the world is growing better.
In a newspaper interview an English scientist was quoted as saying a few years ago that the race is just as wicked today as at any time within recorded history.
But if he was correctly reported it must have been a hasty expression of opinion which a little deliberation would have led him to revise.
It is true that things are still bad enough but they are certainly enormously better than they were some centuries ago.
To say that the world is full of crime and violence proves nothing; nor does even the fact that a civilized nation has reverted to the wartime practices of savage life furnish real ground for a pessimistic view.
What we have to do in determining whether there has been any racial progress in morality is to take as our standard of measurement something that tests the collective conscience.
How does the world of today view war and how did the world in the day of Caesar regard it?
There is plenty to shock us now but the very fact that it does shock us is the best evidence of moral progress.
Atrocities were expected and taken as a matter of course some centuries ago.
They are not the rule now but the rare exception and those guilty of them are likely to make their name a by-word among nations.
Well within the era of recorded history the usages of nations' condemned prisoners of war to become slaves for life.
Now the rule is to feed and clothe them and at the close of the conflict to send them home.
A simple thing like public sports may be used as a measure of public morals.
They show what the collective conscience approves.
In these days there is very little of brutality in public sports.
Professional pugilism still lingers, but barely lingers, in the most enlightened nations.
In less progressive countries like Spain and Mexico bull fighting is popular.
That is about all we can say against modern popular entertainment.
But if we look backward to the Roman period we find a cruelty in public sports that is comparatively shocking.
Gladiators were compelled to fight to the death and offenders were devoured by starving wild beasts and it all made a Roman holiday.
Such "sports" would, of course, be utterly impossible anywhere in the world today.
But at that time they were matters of course in the life of the world's greatest empire.
The fact that the race has evolved morally and that the collective conscience marks a higher point on the ethical thermometer than in the past is too obvious for argument.
Now, how is that evolutionary progress to be accounted for?
It will not do to say that the Christian religion has wrought the change because, splendid as are the teachings of the Christ, the world has not accepted them and shaped its civilization by them.
If it had done so the world war would have been impossible.
Not only have the so-called Christian nations wrangled and fought over commercial spoils through all their history but class has been arrayed against class and every gain in either personal liberty or economic improvement has been wrested by force from those who profited by the misfortunes of others.
In other words, the particular improvements that should have been brought about by religion were compelled, not freely volunteered.
All religious teaching helps but, allowing all we reasonably may for the influence of Christianity, we are still unable to account for the change in the common conscience of the race, an evolutionary gain that has been going steadily on since long, long before the coming of the Christ.
How then shall we account for it?
If the hypothesis of reincarnation is sound the progress of the race in morality becomes simple.
The majority of the great groups of souls that constituted the civilized nations in the time when Rome was mistress of the world have had several incarnations in that time and in each sojourn on the astral plane have had the severe lesson of the painful reaction from cruelty to others.
Thus does nature gradually change the cruel man to the merciful man.
In every incarnation the soul grows more humane as well as more intelligent.
All of the lessons learned in any incarnation are carried forward into the next life, and thus compassion grows until there is ultimately perfect sympathy with all suffering.
Both the progress of the soul and of the race are comprehensible from the viewpoint of reincarnation.
Except by that hypothesis how is it possible to explain such evolutionary progress?
Those who do not believe in the pre-existence of the soul and hold that it is in some way brought into being at the time of conception or birth, are put in the very illogical position of saying that the reason why the world is better now than it was in the Roman period is because it pleases God to create a better kind of souls now than he created then!
The tendency of large groups of people, tribes or nations, to act in a way that imitates, or nearly duplicates, what has been done centuries before by other tribes or nations, is such a common phenomenon that it has given rise to the declaration that history repeats itself.
The fact of reincarnation shows why it repeats itself.
A nation like the Romans, or the Carthaginians, are bound together in the subtle ties that are formed by the intimate relationships of constant association.
The group tends to persist and the members of it are largely drawn together and regrouped in the following incarnations.
All have evolved beyond the level of the previous centuries but the general traits and tendencies remain and the same general policies are likely to shape the national affairs.
There comes a time in the existence of the great group, or nation, when the old environment will no longer serve for its further collective evolution as well as some other country.
The majority then reincarnate elsewhere and the old country comes gradually to be inhabited by a different great group of souls.
Hence the remarkable difference in the people of a given nation in different periods.
Compare Rome in the time of Caesar to Rome late in the Middle Ages, or compare the mighty civilization of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt.
It is high-class egos that make a great nation and when a country has no more lessons to teach them, or rather when another country will serve as a better environment for their further progress, they return in rebirth to the more advantageous spot on the earth, and a different set of souls come into possession of the abandoned environment.
The valley of the Nile, that was once the home of an energetic people with a flourishing civilization would not now serve such a purpose.
The center of virile civilization has shifted to central and northern Europe because only that environment, in full touch with the great commercial stream of the economic world, can serve the purpose.
As the world is today what could a pushing, energetic, up-to-date group of souls do if born into Egypt?
Nothing but leave it.
So they are not reincarnated there, but other souls that are at the point in evolution where the primitive life of an isolated country will give the simpler lessons they must acquire, inherit the abandoned environment.
As an individual moves continually onward in each return to incarnation to professional and business environments that will enable him to put into effect all the new skill and wisdom he has gained, so a nation goes on to greater and greater opportunities.
Souls that made the greatness of Greece and Carthage and Rome are now making the greatness of Europe and America.
Such facts explain many things that have seemed puzzling.
How, for example, was it possible for the world's greatest civilization to spring up suddenly in Europe from barbarous peoples?
When Rome declined--declined because her people largely reincarnated elsewhere--Europe was inhabited by slightly civilized hordes.
To assume that since then, in a few centuries--a mere passing moment in the great lapse of time required for race evolution--the civilization today could arise, would be to ignore the fundamentals of evolution.
But when we understand that great groups of old souls incarnate in the strong physical bodies which the more primitive peoples could bring into the world, the mystery of the rapid rise of a great civilization in Europe is solved.
The principle of rebirth holds also with the animal kingdom at a high level in it.
The last phase of evolution in the animal kingdom is the individualizing of the consciousness.
A particularly intelligent cat or dog, for example, may be just finishing animal evolution and will be reborn at the lowest human level.
Previous to its individualization it evolves in a group with others of its kind, animated by a common ensoulment that has not reached the level of complete self-consciousness.
At that group-soul stage the experience of each animal in the group adds to the knowledge of all.
This theosophical teaching on one of nature's most interesting facts enables us to understand many things that would otherwise remain mysterious.
Instinct has never been explained by science.
Some of its best known expressions are altogether mysterious.
Why does a young wild animal hide from the enemies of its kind but not from friends, when it has never seen either?
A quail a day old will fall upon its side with a chip or small stone or bit of grass firmly clutched in its tiny claws to hide its body, and remain perfectly motionless at the approach of a human being, but will take no alarm at the passing of a squirrel or a rabbit.
How does a young chick know the difference between a crow and a hawk?
And why, in remote places like the antarctic regions, are both young and old birds and animals unafraid of man?
The group-soul is a clear and simple explanation of all such phenomena.
The youngest have the knowledge of the oldest because they are attached to the same group-soul, or source of consciousness.
The young quails of this season come back to rebirth from the group-soul that is the storehouse of the experiences of the quails that were killed by men in past seasons, and thus all young things know the common enemy.
In the remote regions referred to the killing proclivities of the human being have not become known and there is no "instinct" to warn.
An excellent bit of evidence on the subject of the group-soul is the fact, often chronicled but not explained, that when telephone or telegraph lines are built in new countries the birds fly against the wires and are killed by thousands, the first season.
But when the next season's birds are hatched they are wise and avoid the wires!
If the group-soul were not a fact in nature it would naturally require a long time for wire education.
No such sudden adjustment would be possible.
Reincarnation represents continuous evolution with no waste of time or loss of energy.
Death is not the sudden break in the life program that the popular belief pictures it.
The common view of death is as erroneous as the common view of birth.
If death were what most people believe it to be it would constitute a blunder of nature--an irrational interruption of orderly development.
In nature's economy there is conservation of energy and no loss can arise through the change called death.
If the popular belief that at death we go far away to a totally different kind of existence were sound then death would usually mean an enormous waste.
A young man is educated for some particular work, engineering, architecture or statecraft, and graduates only perhaps to die soon afterward.
All that time and energy spent in getting such an education would be largely lost either if death ends all, or is the last he will know of the material world.
But nature does not thus blunder.
Her law of conservation is always operative.
All the skill and wisdom acquired will be brought back in rebirth and will be used in the future incarnations.
A child in school is a fair analogy for a soul in evolution.
The child cannot get an education in a term nor in a year.
He must return often to the same school, after the rest of regular vacations.
He may use new books with higher lessons but he returns periodically to the same environment.
Continuous attendance would be as unthinkable as finishing his education in a single term.
In evolution the soul returns periodically to the physical world, or plane, for the same reasons.
Continuous life here until all material experience is gained would be impossible.
Aside from the need of the double process of acquiring and digesting experience the physical body would become a hindrance to evolution.
Within certain limits the physical brain can respond to the requirements of the growing soul, but a new body is in time an absolute necessity to further evolution.
If we give a little thought to the evolutionary progress the ordinary person must make to raise him to mental and moral perfection, the absurdity of a single lifetime becomes apparent.
Consider, a moment, intellectual perfection.
It would mean a development of the mind to the point of genius in many directions.
If we combine into one mind the attainments of the mathematical genius, the musical genius, the inventive genius, the statecraft genius, and so on until every line of intellectual activity is included, we then have only the perfect mental man.
On the moral side we must add to that the combined qualities of the saints.
Then we have the perfected human being, with nothing more to be learned from incarnation here.
His further evolution belongs to superphysical realms.
In trying to comprehend the evolution of the soul, that slowly changes it life after life from the savage to the civilized state and finally raises it to perfection, it is helpful to observe how this great work corresponds to the smaller cycle of a single incarnation.
A great character in history begins with helpless infancy.
Steadily he progresses, unfolding new power at each step.
He passes through the graded schools, slowly acquiring elementary lessons.
College follows with higher and more difficult mental acquirements.
Then he enters professional life and begins to use his intellect with more and more initiative.
He moves on into public life with increased duties and responsibilities.
From one post of honor he rises to another with increasing ability and mastery, until at last he is the head of a nation and has become a world figure.
Even so it is in the evolution of the soul.
Life by life we rise, evolving new powers and virtues amidst every increasing opportunities and responsibilities.
In one incarnation we have conditions that evolve courage.
In another we are thrown into situations that develop tolerance.
In still another we acquire patience and balance.
In all of these incarnations we steadily evolve intellect and strengthen all previously acquired virtues.
In each life we find the new conditions that are necessary for the exercise of our added abilities and, ultimately, with the powers, the spiritual insight and the ripened wisdom of the gods themselves, we move forward to higher fields of evolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[J] "Life and Matter," Lodge, p. 119, 120. [K] Life and Matter.
--Lodge, p. 121. CHAPTER X.
