Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 67

REBIRTH
accurately “read' by those whose spiritual powers have been developed, and it is by this power to contact the Akashic Records that the Buddha, for example, could describe at length the details of his own past lives. But though the average person remembers nothing of the past, there arc thousands who, through a lower psychic development, occasionally recall their own past lives and speak of it. But the psychic world in which these chance impressions are picked up by the receptive mind is a world of illusion. Only the trained disciple of a master of nature's forces can speak with accuracy of these things, and it would be part of his training not only to dare' and 'to do' but also to keep silent'. Moreover, few of those who complain that they do not remember would be brave enough to do so were they suddenly given the power. The obscuring of memory (writes Owen Rutter) is surely merciful. The remembrance of all the wrongs we have done and all the wrongs which have been done to us, throughout our chain of lives, would be an intolerable burden. Most of us have enough to contend with in this life without burdening ourselves with the recollection of the dangers, the fears and the hates of other lives.1 All that we hate and despise in the acts of others we ourselves have sometime done, and paid for, or are paying now. Would it help our present striving up the mountain side to learn of the loathsome acts and thoughts and feelings of our own dead selves? The Law is wise, and it is well that the brain, the newly created instrument of each rebirth, has only its present folly to remember. As it is, we remember but a tithe of the last week's happenings, and only a thousandth part of the year before. The inner mind is garnering all the time what it needs of the lessons of experience, and the wise man knows that though it is sometimes right to remember, it is often wise to forget. The second objection usually raised is the injustice of our
1 The Scales of Karma.
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