Part III
THE EXISTENCE AND THE MEMORY OF
PAST LIVES
THOSE who have immediate access to the supersensible truths concerning the life of the soul and its reincarnation know, through their unclouded perception, that so-called birth is only an incarnation of the individualised soul in the gross sphere. Incidents of birth and death The unbroken continuity of the life of the reincarnating soul is punctuated by birth and death, both of which are comparable to gateways in the stream of life as it advances from one type of existence to another. Both are equally necessary in the greater life of the soul, and the interval between death and birth is as necessary as the interval between birth and death.
Demands of intuition As is true of those who consider death to be the termination of individual existence, so those who consider the birth of a body to be its beginning are also confronted with a conflict between their false assumptions and the claims of rationalised intuition. From the standpoint of individual justice, the uneven distribution of good and bad in relation to material happiness or pros-
perity seems seriously to impugn the rationality and justification of the entire scheme of the universe. To see the virtuous at times suffering deeply and the vicious possessing the amenities of pleasure, creates insurmountable difficulties for anyone who prefers to look upon life as being meant to fulfill an eternal and divine purpose.
Unless there is some deeper explanation forthcoming, the human mind is riddled with agonising perplexities that tend to embitter a man’s general outlook on life and foster a callous cynicism which, in many ways, is even worse than the deepest personal sorrow which death may cause. Tendency to accept deeper explanations But in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the human mind has in it an inborn tendency to try to restore to itself a deep and unshakable faith in the intrinsic sanity and value of life. Except where artificial resistances are created, it finds acceptable those explanations which are in conformity with this deeper law of the spirit.
Those who have direct access to the truth of reincarnation are even fewer than those who have direct access to the truth of the immortality of the individual soul. Effect of changing brain The memories of all past lives are stored and preserved in the mind-body of the individual soul, but they are not accessible to the consciousness of ordinary persons because a veil is drawn over them. When the soul changes its physical body it gets a new brain, and its normal waking consciousness functions in close association with the brain processes. Under ordinary circumstances, only the memories of the present life can appear in consciousness because the new brain acts as a hindrance to the release of the memories of those experiences which had to be gathered through the medium of other brains in past lives.
