English
The Ijpika are sometimes described as the Lords of Karma, and in the minute delicacy with which they govern the destinies of man they realise with reference to his merit or desert as he returns to earth, life after life, the popular conception of Providence. Many popular conceptions in this way connected with religion will often be found as the occult student advances, vindicated rather than refuted by the more accurate knowledge he may be able to acquire—vindicated not as regards their materialistic outlines, but as to the inner significance of the idea. It is in this way then that the entity is launched at re-birth on the physical plane of existence in very much the same condition as regards his attri- butes, character, desires, tendencies, as when he left the earth plane last. 414 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. It is said truly that the personalities of each existence are impermanent and transient manifestations of the Ego, vanishing into nothingness with the physical body and the astral material of which they were composed ; but in the way just described each new personality in turn is built so exactly on the lines of its predecessor, that except for the varying external circumstances of its life, determined by Karma, it is to all intents and purposes a repetition of the previous personality, not the same but inspired by the same individual centre of consciousness, and in regard to its attributes and characteristics, created afresh from the storehouses of Nature and standing on the plane of earth once more very much the same being as on its last appearance there. These recurrent processes continue, the person- ality blundering about rather wildly at first, impressed, very imperfectly, with the voice of conscience, which is the expression on the physical plane of its own Higher Self, hardly even feeling this voice of conscience at all at the earlier stages of its career, except in regard to such departments of activity as have given rise during former existences to some permanent attribute absorbed into the Higher Self. But as we have been looking at the process we have been looking at it at a very early stage of human advancement. I,ong before humanity has attained the limits on which our contemporaries for the most part stand, many hundred successive lives have each contributed their little gift to the permanent. consciousness of the true Ego, and in this way the area over which its influence is extended in later lives has been expanded to a corresponding degree. The voice INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 415 of conscience and the inner intuition, which may some- times be a guide to action, even in matters where no definite problems of right and wrong are concerned, may have become active within the personality which represents the Ego on the physical plane of life, and in many ways its physical life is thus guided in a manner which contributes more and more abundantly to the development of the Ego,—to the growth of the soul. By this time a much more traversible channel, to use that metaphor, extends from the physical life to the spiritual plane in which the consciousness of the permanent Ego is seated, and through this more and more experience of life can be drawn when the in-drawing process recommences. As before, the personality may be born with much which it shed as it moved backward to itself through the higher planes of Nature, but there is more and more of it qualified to exist on the higher planes, and to express on the lower the charac- teristics of the individual Ego. In the very beginning, as I endeavoured to describe, the Ego has little or nothing to say to the doings of the permanent personality on this plane of life. A time comes when the two influences, those of the objective world around, and the interior consciousness within, are in equilibrium. A time comes beyond that when the interior consciousness is distinctly predominant, and when the relations of its personality with the external world become in this way coloured by the interests and loftier purposes for which it exists. Then the indrawing of itself after death is a far grander undertaking. Accumulations gathered round the personality in phy- 416 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. sical life are readily shed on the astral planes, the real entity feels itself to be that which is capable of activity on the spiritual regions of Nature. It eagerly returns to these and feels its true existence to be centred there. This condition of things is the case of the growing soul which has attained that period of its evolution when abnormal possibilities of more rapid growth begin to set in. What shape does this abnormal possibility take ? That is a view of things I have now to endeavour to make intelligible. The Ego, assuming his progress along the steps of the path leading to initiation to have been sufficiently successful to bring him into direct personal relations with one of the more exalted Adepts qualified to surround his ulterior progress with new conditions, may be regarded as a candidate for that treatment which is known to the occultist as immediate Re-incarna- tion. Supposing his last life to have been sufficiently dignified and blameless in its character to have left him tolerably free of unhappy responsibilities in his great account with the Tords of Karma, it is possible that the Master, in his case, may be permitted to fulfil, as regards him, for the next great stage of his career, the functions, if the phrase may be permitted, of Providence. ‘The Master has, by the hypothesis, become so entirely blended with the Divine idea ruling the world, as regards his own will, that the union has brought with it powers which are, in their nature, divine. It is possible for the Master to guide the soul of the neophyte into his next incarnation, and it is possible for him to do this without waiting for the neophyte to pass through INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 417 the usual Devachanic interlude. The soul can be arrested on the astral plane, where, of course, it has but little to shed, and turned back at once into renewed mani- festation in the physical world, so that it may continue the unbroken series of efforts in the direction of its own purification which have been the leading characteristics of the life just spent. When it has attained the second life, which may follow at the interval of a few years— conceivably, if circumstances happen to be favourable, of a few weeks after the close of the last—this second life is thus a complete continuation of the last, as regards all phases of interior consciousness, and the person so artificially Re-incarnated will, as soon as the new body with which he is associated has grown to be a mature instrument, be able within his waking conscious- ness to remember every detail of his former life, In the intervening period, before the new body has acquired maturity, he continues to function on the astral plane in complete consciousness in the appropriate vehicle bequeathed to him from his last life. The two exist- ences are blended in a very wonderful way, but there is no solution of continuity in the process. The old astral vehicle is not discarded until the new body has been sufficiently developed to have grown, so to speak, or gathered around it a new astral vehicle, which the entity can then make use of. The occult relationships he will have established remain unbroken. His inter- course with the Masters and with those surrounding him will never have been intermitted, and he will recover touch in the course of the new life on which he may be launched with others on his own level of DD 418 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. progress, themselves the subjects, like himself, of abnormal evolution. And thus it may ensue that in a period of time covered by a few centuries, if more than one immediate Re-incarnation takes place in connexion with his advancement, he may condense a progress which would otherwise have been protracted over twice as many millenniums. The mere economy of time, indeed, is not a matter of so much importance, from one point of view. If we leave certain consideza- tions out of account, it might be argued that the normal course of evolution would suit the neophyte just as well, and be in many respects more agreeable. He would then enjoy the intensely blissful and refreshing conditions of existence in very full consciousness on the higher spiritual planes ; each life as he came back to it would be one in which he would, by virtue of the normal process of evolution, pick up again the tendency to make further progress, with which he was animated at the close of the preceding life. What then after all—at the first glance an inquirer might ask—does the Neophyte gain by immediate Re-incarnation ? The answer is two-fold, intelligible enough in one of its aspects, highly recondite in another. In the intelligible aspect, the main point turns upon the relationship between the Neophyte and the Master to whom he is attached. Words derived from the ordinary friendships and relations of life fail to define the ardour of affection with which the pupil, arrived at the condi- tion in which he is able to have personal touch with a Being so exalted in nature as one of the higher Adepts, INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 419 will come to regard this Being as the supreme influence in his life. One of his most intense aspirations in con- nexion with occult progress at these earlier stages— and before an even loftier feeling, connected with the unification of his own will with that which rules all Nature, has come into play—will be his aspiration in the direction of freer intercourse, and, so to speak, companionship, with the Master.