THE REINCARNATING INDIVIDUAL

 
The life of the reincarnating individual has many events and phases. The wheel of life makes its ceaseless rounds, lifting the individual to the heights or bringing him down from high positions. It thus contributes to the enrichment of his experience. Ideals left unattained in one life are pursued further in the next life; things left undone are finished; rough edges left by incomplete endeavor are rounded off; wrongs are eventually set right. The accounts of give-and-take between persons receive renewed adjustment by the repayment of karmic debts and the recovery of karmic dues. At last, out of the ripeness of experience and through the dissolution of the ego-mind, the soul enters into the sole unity of divine life. In this divine life there is neither the binding of giving nor the binding of taking, because the soul has completely transcended the consciousness of separateness or duality.

The drama of the continued life of the individual soul has many acts. From the standpoint of the worldly existence of the soul, a curtain may be said to be drawn over its life after the closing of each act. But no act yields its real significance if it is regarded as complete in itself. It has to be viewed from its wider context as being a link between the acts already performed and the acts still to come. Its meaning is entwined with the theme of the whole drama of which it is a part. The end of the act is not the end of the progressive theme. The actors disappear from the stage of earth only to reappear again in new capacities and new contexts.

The actors are so engrossed in their respective roles that they treat them as the be-all and end-all of all existence. For the major part of their continued lives (running into innumerable incarnations), they are unconscious of the closely guarded truth — that the Author of the drama, in His imaginative production, Himself became all the actors and played the game of hide and seek in order to come into full and conscious possession of His own creative infinity. Infinity has to go through the illusion of finitehood to know itself as Infinity; and the Author has to play the parts of all of the actors to know Himself as the Author of this greatest detective story, worked out through the cycles of creation.