Reincarnation / by Annie Besant.

  • Besant, Annie, 1847-1933.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reincarnation / by Annie Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be gathering store of materials and never fabricating from them goods; or than a man can always be eating food and never digesting it and assimilating it to build up the tissues of his body. This, with the rest needed between periods of activity by all forms of being, makes Devachan an absolute necessity, and rebukes the impatience with which ill-instructed Theosophists chafe against the idea of thus “wasting time.” The rest itself is a thing, be it remembered, that we cannot do without. “The tired and worn- out Manu (thinking Ego)” needs it, and it is only “the now-rested Ego”* that is ready and fit for Re- incarnation. We have not the energy needed for taking up the burden of the flesh again until this period of refreshment has enabled the forces of life mental and spiritual to store themselves up once more in the .spiritual man. It is only at the approaching close of the cycle of rebirths that the Ego, grown strong bv his millenniums of experience, is able to gird 'himself for the awful strain of his last swiftly recurring lives, “without Devachanic break,” scaling those last seven steps of the ladder of existence with the tireless muscles hardened by the long ascent that lies behind. One kind of progress—outside the necessary process of as.similation just spoken of, which is a condition of further progress—may be made in Devachan. H. P. Blavatsky says: In one sense, we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal things, such as music, painting, poetry, etc., since Devachan is merely an idealized and subjective continuation of earth-life.t • Key to Theosophy, pp. 139, 141. r Ibid., p. 156.