The
Great Orme Tramway
Llandudno,
The
Writings of
Ernest
Egerton Wood
Is Reincarnation
True?
By
Ernest Egerton Wood
First Published 1914
THERE is a
curious tendency, which springs up now and again in our ranks, to criticize
occasionally the early writings of Madame Blavatsky, and to
take a a delight in finding therein a certain of what might be called error.
And yet the last few decades have taught us, again and again, that where Madame Blavatsky seemed
wrong, it was not really so, but that we were wrong in misunderstanding what
she wrote. Our present leaders have cleared up one by one many of the
obscurities of her writings and doctrine, and now present them to us in
pre-digested
form, in simple terminology since invented and perfected. We are beginning to
learn that Madame Blavatsky
was face to
face, in her attempt to launch, as gently as possible, the Ancient Wisdom once
more upon the world, with the stupendous difficulty of conveying accurately to
other minds, in a language almost unknown to her, many unfamiliar things which
she knew to be true.
That she could
have been less in error than many suppose is evident from her words in a little
article 'My Books', which she wrote in Lucifer shortly before her passing from
the body. There she says, with reference to
comes from our
eastern Masters, and many a passage in it has been written by me under their
dictation.
And speaking
of the proof "corrections' that were often made in her absence, she
adds:Witness the word 'plane' for 'cycle' as originally written, corrected by
some unknown hand (I.347), a 'correction' which shows Buddha teaching that
there is no rebirth on this planet (!!) when the contrary is asserted on
page 346, and
the Lord Buddha is said to teach how to 'avoid' reincarnation; the use of the
word 'planet' for plane, of 'monas' for manas; and the sense of the ideas
sacrificed to grammatical form, and changed by the substitution of wrong words
and erroneous punctuation, etc.
Sir Thomas
More and the Nilgiri Master, who are spoken of in Man: Whence, How and Whither
as Adepts, are both said to have taken part in the writing of Isis Unveiled,
and they certainly understood what they were about, and most surely knew what
they were attempting to describe. And without deification on the one hand or
irreverence on the other, we may say that Madame Blavatsky was at least
this much advanced, that she could not deliberately pretend to knowledge where
she had none. Yet sometimes smaller minds, unable to leap the obstacles of
terminology that her unusual difficulties of exposition involved, and unable to
intuit the meaning behind her words, strike their heads against the barriers,
and blame her for the carelessness, ignorance or pretension with which they
have hurt themselves. Let us rather find what foothold we can in the heap of
rubbish that our imperfect language has raised in our path, so that presently
we may reach the top and, peeping over, obtain a glimpse of the realms of truth
that she had explored.
Perhaps in no
subject more than that of Reincarnation has Madame Blavatsky been so
misunderstood. Again and again we hear it said that Madame Blavatsky denied the truth
of reincarnation when she wrote
the Indian beliefs
on the subject is ridiculous, when she speaks of them so definitely in the same
work. But did she say that reincarnation was not a fact? If so, then in the
sense in which she was using the word, she spoke truly. Let us see what she has
to say on the subject in
We now present
a few fragments of this mysterious doctrine of reincarnation - as distinct from
metempsychosis - which we have from an authority. Reincarnation, i.e., the
appearance of the same individual, or rather of his astral monad, twice on the
same planet [plane], is not a rule in nature; it is an exception, like the
teratological phenomenon of a two-headed infant.
Here she
indicates that the doctrine of reincarnation is a mysterious one, that it is not
the same thing as metempsychosis, that she has it from an authority, and that
she is prepared to give only a few fragments of it. What does she mean here by
reincarnation? The appearance of the same astral monad, that is to say, of the
same ego working in the same astral body; and this, twice on the same plane, is
not a rule in Nature.
Does this
disagree with the highly philosophical conception of reincarnation that we have
at the present day? First of all we have the man living in what we call the causal
body, on the higher mental plane. When he is ready for birth he puts forth a
ray ( a minute fragment of himself) into the lower mental world.
That ray draws
round itself the matter of that world or plane until it has gathered enough to
form the mental auric egg for its new earth-life After the short stay necessary
for this purpose, the ray of consciousness, not the whole ego, descends still
further into the astral world, and again stays long enough to draw round itself
enough matter of that plane to form its astral auric egg.
Once more the
ray of consciousness descends on to the earth-plane, as it attaches itself to a
body that is being prepared for birth, so that presently this centre of
consciousness, this 'I' within the body, is born and it looks forth and says:
'This am I', and it identifies itself with the body in which it sees and feels
and thinks and moves. Then, as it grows in experience, it builds a
new
personality round the 'I', and, as its body grows, its counterpart also appears
in the middle of the astral and the mental auric eggs. This personality, when
complete,manifests in its life its triple capacity of acting, feeling and
thinking, all three of which ought to be developed in the course of the life,
and to be to
some extent harmonized as the personality grows to old age.
Then the man
dies. He loses this physical body. But the counterpart remains on the astral
plane, and on that he finds himself living, feeling and thinking just as
before, though he can no longer move the dense physical objects of the world
that he has
left. In other words, such part of him as is fitted to exist in the astral
world as a conscious being survives, and he lives on for some time according to
his desires. Then comes the death of the astral body, and the person now lives
on the mental plane, in the devachanic state.
There he has
all that is the outcome of the higher emotions and thoughts that he had during
earth-life, and he has lost only the power to move the objects of the lower
planes and the ability to be swayed by lower feelings and emotions. And, once
more, he loses his mental body on the mental plane, and all that is left of him
is with the ray of the man which was put forth at the beginning of this cycle
of necessity. Just as a swimmer, diving from a high bank into a lake with
cliffs on one side and a sandy beach on the other, must swim to the low shore
on the
opposite side
or be drowned; so must the soul, the ego, the man, having plunged a ray of
himself into birth, permit that ray to pass through the cycle of necessity of
that birth, through the mental to the astral and then to the physical; through
the physical to the astral and then to the mental, and through
that back to
its true parent - or else lose that birth altogether.
Then, when the
personality has finished this cycle of necessity, and the ray is thus indrawn
again, then the personality, having left to it only such part of itself as is
pure enough to live in that high state - all that is noble and true and wise,
and is fit to be immortal - will enter into that immortal life of the true man,
and will never come forth again, but enjoy for ever the immortality of
the spiritual
life. Yet the same man, thus enriched, will again put forth a ray to enrich
himself with still further experience; but it will be another ray, not the same
one, for that is joined with its parent and can never be reincarnated again.
The immortal man thus does not reincarnate; the personal man does not
reincarnate;
but the immortal man puts forth from time to time a slender ray from himself,
until he no more needs or seeks further experience or traffic with the earth.
He is then free from any desire for worldly objects, having fully realized the
greater value of the things of his spiritual life; he no longer needs
successive births; he is an Arhat and, as Madame Blavatsky says: 'At his
death the Arhat is never reincarnated' - unless, of course, he chooses to
descend.
So then, was
not Madame Blavatsky
right in saying that reincarnation, in the sense in which she used the word, is
not the rule, but the exception? Let us see how this bears out the rest of her
statement on the subject:
It
(reincarnation) is preceded by a violation of the laws of harmony of Nature,
and happens only when the latter, seeking to restore its disturbed equilibrium,
violently throws back into earth-life the astral monad which had been tossed
out of the circles of necessity by crime or accident. Thus, in cases of
abortion,of infants dying before a certain age, and of
congenital and
incurable idiocy, Nature's original design to produce a perfect human being has
been interrupted. Therefore, while the gross matter of each of these several
entities is suffered to disperse itself at death through the vast realm of
being, the immortal spirit and astral monad of the individual - the latter
having been set apart to animate a frame, and the former to shed its divine
light on the corporeal organization - must try a
second time to
carry out the purpose of the creative intelligence.
It is
perfectly clear that the writer is here referring to the reincarnation of the
man in the same astral body. She gives some of the reasons for what she here
calls reincarnation - what we usually now call rebirth from the astral plane.
We can easily
see that unless there is in the personality at least some fragment of
experience which is good enough for immortality, for union with the immortal
man, the whole birth will be a failure, and that this something can only be
gained when the three principles of bodily experience, feeling and thought work
together, or are to some extent harmonized. If the earthly body is injured or
destroyed before the intelligence has thus harmonized itself with the lower
principles, a new attempt must be made to reincarnate with the same astral
body, so that the ray may come back enriched. Madame Blavatsky interprets the
words of the Christ as given in the Gospel story in exactly the same manner,
emphasizing the divine man within as a worker through bodies on earth, and
denying any recurrent incarnations of the personal man, the illusive and essentially
decaying personal self. In The Secret Doctrine, III. 66 she writes:
The most
suggestive of Christ's parables and 'dark sayings' is found in the explanation
given by him to his apostles about the blind man: 'Master, who did sin, this
man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered: 'Neither hath this
[blind, physical] man sinned nor his parents; but that the works of [his] God
should be made manifest in him.' Man is the 'tabernacle', the 'building' only,
of his God; and of course it is not the
temple but its
inmate - the vehicle of 'God' (the conscious Ego, or Fifth Principle, Manas,
the vehicle of the divine Monad or 'God' - that had sinned in a previous
incarnation, and had thus brought the karma of cecity upon the new building.
Thus Jesus spoke truly; but to this day his followers have refused to
understand the words of wisdom spoken. The Saviour is shown by his followers as
though he were paving, by his words and explanation, the way to a preconceived
programme that had to lead to an intended miracle.
For such is
the true sense of the words 'that the works of God should be made manifest in
him', in the light of theological interpretation, and a very undignified one it
is, if the esoteric explanation is rejected
Returning once
more to the text of
If reason has
been so far developed as to become active and discriminative, there is no
reincarnation on this earth, for the three parts of the trine man have been
united together, and he is capable of running the race.
To the words
'there is no reincarnation on this earth', we must add 'for this personality'.
Now, what is this race of which she speaks? For a clue to this we may turn to
pages 345 and 346 of the same volume:
This philosophy
teaches that Nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the first
attempt, she tries again. When she evolves a human embryo, the intention is
that a man shall be perfected - physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
His body is to grow mature, wear out, and die; his mind to unfold, ripen, and
be harmoniously balanced; his divine spirit to illuminate and blend easily with
the inner man. No human being completes its grand cycle, or the 'cycle of
necessity', until all these are
accomplished.
As the laggards in a race struggle and plod in their first quarter while the
victor darts past the goal, so, in the race of immortality, some souls
out-speed all the rest and reach the end, while their myriad competitors are
toiling under the load of matter, close to the starting point. Some
unfortunates fall out entirely, and lose all chance of the prize; some retrace
their steps and begin again. This is what the Hindu dreads above all things -
transmigration and reincarnation; only on other and inferior planets [planes],
never on this one.
That he is
capable of running the race means that he is capable of entering the immortal
life and sharing in that effort of the man within, who is at once his father
and himself, to gain that immortality which is called Arhatship. The average
Hindu greatly fears the opposite possibility, his sinking back into a
lower
condition of life, or becoming a bhuta or spook, an unwholesome class of
entities left severely alone by self-respecting believers; whereas the human
birth is regarded as giving an opportunity to reach Moksha or liberation
(truly,
Arhatship),
and thus to cease reincarnating.
Our author
does not say that when a man has united his three parts and has perfected or
completed his human or personal nature, he has finished the race and become an
Arhat, but that he is capable of running the race for the achievement of
perfect immortality. There is a vast field of growth between the
imperfection
of an idiot and the perfection of an Arhat, as we may see by her further
explanation:
But when the
new being has not passed beyond the condition of Monad, or when, as in the
idiot, the trinity has not been completed, the immortal spark which illuminates
it has to re-enter on the earthly plane, as it was frustrated in its first
attempt. Otherwise, the mortal or astral, and the immortal or divine, souls,
could not progress in unison and pass onward to
the sphere
[plane] above.
The Monad
which was imprisoned in the elementary being- the rudimentary or lowest astral
form of the future man - after having passed through and quitted the highest
physical shape of a dumb animal - say an orang-utan, or again an elephant, one
of the most intellectual of brutes - that Monad, we say, cannot skip over the
physical and intellectual sphere of the terrestrial man, and be suddenly
ushered into the spiritual sphere above.
Does not the
writer here show that the Monad which passes through the animal kingdom must
incarnate in the human kingdom, and that before that which is now in the lower
animals can do so, it must pass into and through the highest order of animals,
such as the orang-utan or elephant, and is this not what we now mean by
reincarnation? And does she not mean that the essence of which the personality
is built in the astral and lower mental planes cannot enter in to the spiritual
sphere above (the higher mental, the plane of immortality) then or at any other
time, without passing through the development of the intellect in
the human
kingdom? And she winds up with a strong statement in favour of reincarnation:
No need to
remark that even if [regarded as ] hypothetical, this theory is no more
ridiculous than many others considered as strictly orthodox.
One more
passage and we have done. On page 347 , we read:
This former
life believed in by the Buddhists, is not a life on this planet [cycle], for,
more than any other people, the Buddhistical philosopher appreciated the great
doctrine of cycles.
It is on this
paragraph that Madame Blavatsky
comments in the note to 'My Books':
Witness the
word 'planet' for 'cycle' as originally written, corrected by an unknown hand,
a 'correction' which shows Buddha teaching that there is no rebirth on this
planet (!!), when the contrary is asserted on page 346, and the Lord Buddha is
said to teach how to 'avoid' reincarnation.
And the cycle
that is here mentioned is again the cycle of necessity, which the ray must go
through in the course of one birth.
There is thus
more than enough to show that Madame Blavatsky, at the time of
writing Isis Unveiled, had nothing to say against the great truth of
reincarnation as we hold it today, and she certainly did know a great deal
about the cycle of birth. It is not clear that the writer desired most
emphatically to deny the doctrine of metempsychosis, but yet not launch
suddenly upon an
unprepared
world the full and staggering truth? Even more is this evident when we are told
by Colonel Olcott, in the midst of a mass of misunderstanding, that the
passages relating to the subject were approved, if not actually written, by one
of the Mahatmas. He writes in Old Diary Leaves, I, 288:
Why she and I
were permitted to put the misstatement into Isis, and, especially, why it was
made to me by the Mahatma, I cannot explain... They certainly did not teach us
what we now accept as the truth about Reincarnation; nor bid us keep silent
about it, nor resort to any vague generalities capable of being now twisted
into an apparent agreement with our present views; nor interpose to prevent us
from writing and teaching the heretical and unscientific idea that, save it in
certain few cases, the human
entity was
not, and could not be, reincarnated on one and the same planet.
Madame Blavatsky was not a tyro,
and surely the Mahatma was not ignorant for we read in C.W.Leadbeater's
Invisible Helpers that an Initiate of even the first degree is required to
learn, not theoretically but of his own certain and direct knowledge, of the
truth of reincarnation. The conclusion is obvious; Madame
Blavatsky was neither
deceiving nor deceived; but she was misunderstood in this, as in many other of
the teachings that she offered to an unprepared world.
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