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Past Lives and the Psychic Being
MOST
people are not at all conscious of what is happening in them. Their
consciousness or being is a mixture of mental, vital and physical elements, a
kind of hotchpotch. There are a few, very few indeed, who are conscious –
conscious of what is beyond the three, viz, their psychic being. For it is only
that element which endures, persists through successive lives. Certain people
have known or learnt some rudiments of the matter – who believe in rebirth, but
conceive it in the most childish manner. Their idea is as if the person changed
his body like a robe. There are persons even who have written books describing
seriously all the lives they had passed through since the time they were
monkeys! As I have said, it is the psychic element alone that persists after death,
all the rest gets dissolved. And in 999 cases out of 1,000, the psychic is a
very small formation lying behind and taking little part in the actual life of
the person. I speak of the average man, not of the Yogi, that is to say, one
who has a developed psychic being to the extent that it is capable of
controlling and guiding the outer life. How often does an ordinary man get in
contact with his psychic being? Years and years pass for many or most to have
just a passing taste of this movement. It
is this moment that abides and is carried over to the next life, all
other things are simply effaced. At a given point of our life, there comes a
special circumstance, there is a call within, an absolute inner necessity that
brings forward the psychic and the contact is made perhaps for an instant. That
experience is preserved in the psychic memory. More than the outer
circumstances and the physical events, however, what is cherished in the
consciousness is the intimate emotion, the vibration that accompanied the
perception at the time. At the
Page – 405 a word said, a phrase heard, just a passing scene is all that is stored, net and clear, engraved as it were. But above all it is the soul's state that is the most important thing. I t is these scattered elements that serve as stepping-stones or sign-posts on the soul's forward journey. They are the constants that build up the personality of a man. On rare occasions there is a larger clearing, the circumstances preserved are sufficiently definite to point to a date and a historical person. Usually, however, one cannot say, "I was such a person, I lived in such a country or did such things." These psychic flashes, more in some cases, less in others, are the only genuine and authentic records of the story of a person's lives. It is a being who is completely identified with his psychic, who has organised his whole person, in all its parts, around this centre, in fact, a being of one piece, entirely and solely turned to the Divine that can alone remember or hold in his consciousness something like a totality of his personal history. For in his case even when the body drops, the other parts being integrated and taken up into the soul substance maintain their individual existence; the personality formed around the psychic continues to exist with its memory intact: even it can pass from one life to another without losing the consciousness. A psychic memory has a very definite character; it has a wonderful intensity. It stores the unforgettable moments of life, those when the consciousness was most luminous, most powerful, most active. They are the happiest and the most fortunate moments of life. But they cannot be spoken about. There
are people who say and perhaps believe too that they were such and such persons
and even give a detailed description of their past lives. There are also the
well-known sprit communications through a medium at spirit sitting. Someone
comes and tells you he was Napoleon, another was Shakespeare and so on. How
many Shakespeares and
Napoleons and Caesars have manifested in this way, there is no counting! There
are spirits who are extremely talkative and bewitch you with extraordinary
stories, many that seem so true and genuine on the face, many others, of
course, full of the grossest self-contradictions. The fact, however, is that
usually these spirits are small beings of the vital, often remnants of a dead
Page – 406 person, broken bits of his decomposed personality, desires that have persisted, coagulated imaginations set free that move about and seek to possess and settle upon a living person. The small spirits of the vital are often not of good disposition; they amuse themselves at the cost of the gullible human being, making a fool of him. In that world it is easy to read the mind of others: the spirit sees clearly what is there in your head even if you do not speak it out. That is how it reveals secrets known to you alone, even secrets you have totally forgotten. They can imitate other personalities. They know many other small tricks to confuse or astound you.
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