Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: Albemarle Street London

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REBIRTH
guiding power behind. The.'three fires." whose burning craves for further fuel are hatred, lust and illusion. Hate is a powerful force, and draws the hater into perpetual close relation with the person hated until he learns that “hatred ceaseth not by hatred, hatred ceaseth but by love”; lust, or personal desire in every form, is an obvious cause of life after life on the Wheel of Rebirth, but the strongest force is illusion, the Maya of ignorance about this very truth of Anatta. For “the human mind discriminates itself from the things that appear to be outside itself without realizing that it has first created those very things within its own mind”, and one of the things which it has itself created is the separation between self and self. Hence the “Great Heresy” of Atravada, belief in thc separative self.
To sum up on this all-important matter of the nature of the thing reborn, there are three selves in man, or, more correctly, he functions at three main levels of consciousness. The mind on its lowest level is a discriminating mind; on this level it has the ability to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, to combine these sense concepts, to discriminate them, and to consider their relations. On a higher level it is an intellectual mind, where it has the ability to make the inward adjustments that are necessary to harmonize the reactions of the discriminating mind and to relate them to cach other and to a whole ego conception. On its highest level it is Universal Mind.1 These levels correspond exactly with the body, soul and spirit' of St. Paul, and it is at the middle level, that of the soul', that man, the potentially immortal Essence of Pure Mind, reincarnates unceasingly until the potential has become the actual and the 'dewdrop' has become the 'Shining Sea'. The New Body
The new life accords with the deserts, or part of them, of all preceding births. By the law of attraction the incoming man
1 From a Japanese Scripture.
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