To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

32 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
as a species? There is a great deal of confusion in our current
thinking, largely because we have alienated ourselves
from our source, our god-essence. We need to know with
certainty that our roots go deeper than this one life, and
that a part of us endures beyond death. We need to find
meaning in su¤ering and behind the frightening injustices
inflicted upon children, animals, and millions of innocent
victims of ruthless crimes and senseless accidents when there
is no apparent cause in this life.
Solid knowledge today about these matters that ought
most to concern us is appallingly slight, not because it is
unavailable — there is a fund of teaching and practical wisdom
in the world’s religions, in myth, legend, aboriginal
tradition, and fairy tale — but because we have forgotten
how to apply the universal keys that are waiting to be used
intelligently and with altruistic motive.
The concept of reincarnation is, of course, very old, and
the cyclic return of the human soul for learning purposes
and expansion of awareness was as widely understood
throughout the ancient pagan world as it still is in much of
the Orient. Several early Church Fathers, versed in Platonic
and Pythagorean thought, accepted it, among them Origen,
who wrote of the soul’s preexistence and of its taking birth
again in a body according to its merits and former deeds;
and, further, that ultimately, when bodies and material
things will su¤er ruin and disappear, all spirits will be
united in one.
For centuries these and other doctrinal theses of Origen
were considered as having been oªcially condemned and
banned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council called by Emperor