Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG http://www.esonet.ORG 1

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
changes, perhaps considerably. Yet the new can be called the progeny of the old because
the accomplishments and the failures of the old leave a legacy of karma to the new. Karma
compels (or in a relatively few cases. Compassion impels) the formation of a new human
being, John, because Peter could not fulfill during his physical life the Wholeness of being
of which he was a fleeting manifestation.
So stated, the concept of "reincarnation" is far more complex than its popular
formulation. The latter is not only unsound and philosophically unsatisfying, but based on
a narrow and inhibiting psychological attitude. It arises from the spiritual materialism of a
culture whose exclusivistic scientific empiricism and worship of personal values makes it
nearly impossible for a man or woman to envision the wholeness of his or her being. The
word "reincarnation" recently has become a catchword — often financial bait —
conveniently used to attract people whose lives seem banal, confined, and empty.
Evidently it implies that a mysterious entity, the soul, is incarnated in a human organism;
that in some manner this soul survives the death of the physical organism and after a
period "re-incarnates" in an embryo developing in a woman's womb.
The basic problem is how to identify this soul, define its origin and nature, and outline
what can be understood and expected of its future. To solve this problem satisfactorily
requires explaining not only the relationship between the soul and the body in which it is
said to have incarnated, but also the relationship between the soul and the psychic and
mental components of the person as a whole. The solution requires going beyond the
particular person to the relationship between the soul, the person, and the culture and
society which have formed the person's character and basic approach to life experiences
and learned knowledge.
Religious and philosophical traditions of all cultures — and today Western science —
provide either general approaches or dogmatic answers to this problem. Neither the
traditional Christian-European approach nor that of the new psychology (in its various
forms purported to be founded on empirical and "scientific" research) provides truly
satisfying and wholesome foundations for today's much advertised "new age"
consciousness. What follows here is an alternative approach, not only to the problems
involved in the concept of reincarnation, but also to the still more basic one of what
constitutes, in the largest sense of the term, Man. In Part Two, the term was given an
abstract and universal meaning in terms of the whole cycle of being. Now I shall attempt,
first, to outline a picture of the basic factors entering into the total life-situation we call a
human beings — body, psyche, mind, spirit — then, to suggest what happens to each of
these factors after death, during the symbolic Night period of the entire human cycle, and
what is involved in the recombination of these factors into a new being.
96