Soul Mates: an Irresistible Past Life Impulse

Blake: Reunion of Soul and Body

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” the Sages taught, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

It is endless in effect as the force of love, according to the ancients. (SD 1:43)

To Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important information, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the effect of its predecessor.

Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.” Instead of only one Big Bang, the usual dogma for the origin of the universe, there must have been multiple efforts this new theory suggests.

“There was not just one bang,” say Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe.

Now science is being compelled to consider the importance nad necessity of the law of cycles.

The appearance of our universe, it is proposed, “was not the beginning of time, but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” A purely Theosophical doctrine.

The Great Breath

The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”

Cycles may be a good start. But unlike an infinite cycle of titanic collisions, Theosophy offers a kinder, gentler solution tied to the cosmology of ancient seers. It declares that the universe and everything in it is alive, and sustained by a perpetual rhythmic breathing.

Childhood Memories of Having Lived Before

KRISHNA assures an uncertain Arjuna that he has lived many lives on Earth.

“Both I and thou have passed through many births,” the Master tells his disciple (Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 4:31):

“Mine are known unto me, but thou knowest not of thine.”

The fact is most people don’t recall their past lives, because in every rebirth the immortal soul must endure a new body and astral body, a new personality and a new physical brain. 

Being handed an empty photo album is a challenge to the incoming soul, hindering it finding a conscious connection to prior experiences and knowledge. Thus “the new ‘personality,'” Blavatsky wrote (Key to Theosophy, Ch. 8), “is no better than a fresh suit of clothes.”

Being so, yet “the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive,” H. P. Blavatsky continues, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him.” In such a state he was able, she says, “to retrospectively trace the lines of all his lives.”

“This proves to you that the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc., attach themselves to the immortal Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was.”

The mind doesn’t fully incarnate until age seven, (Key to Theosophy Section 9). Thus, a child doesn’t feel the full weight of life and karma right away. As such, they are like karma-less “little Buddhas.” If not pressured to conform by parents and society, it is possible for them to express memories of their former life (s), i.e. experience “intimations of immortality” for an extended period.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

It was Plotinus who said that “our body is the true river of Lethe, for ‘souls plunged into it forget all’ — our terrestrial body is like Lethe” (the “river of forgetfulness” in the Hades of Greek mythology.) Using a modern analogy, a new computer cannot be expected to recall the data stored on the discarded one, unless the old data is preserved and reinstalled in the new machine.

But this is what sometimes happens with children who die at an early age from accidents or illness, if they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral pattern body is not disintegrated as with normal death.

The still vital and alive astral matrix is attracted back into the soul’s new body, with all its memories preserved intact.Thus in many cases such children are said to be born with two astral bodies, one new, the other old.

Separation Syndrome: Letting Go of Disposability Consciousness

HUMANITY is divided into thousands of  languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects and political ideologies.

The website Ethnologue currently contains information on 7,106 known living human languages.

Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on others.

How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood?

A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for ages. Poets, artists, philosophers and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.

But they have not succeeded, because of  personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.

In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote. “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often,” she insisted. “It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.”

One Life Many Lights

“If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.”

“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”