Continuing his teaching about the journey of the soul, Hazrat Inayat Khan offers a deeply philosophical consideration of the question of reincarnation. The first post in the series is here.
The soul on its journey to the infinite cannot turn back halfway; and when it reaches that goal, it experiences only the light, the wisdom, the love of God, and it loses two things: it loses all the marks of the experiences and thoughts of its manifestation, and it gradually loses its individuality and merges in the infinite, divine Consciousness.
If an earthen thing is thrown into the water it has a tendency to go to the bottom, to its own element. If water is accompanying fire on its journey as steam, its watery part still drips down. When fire travels with the air its smoke is taken a certain distance but in its higher spheres the air gets rid of the fire. When ether turns into spirit it drops its contact with the air element. Thus it is with the soul; on its return journey it gives back all these properties to their own sources, thus lightening its load on its way towards its own element. The earthly body goes to earth, its water part to the world of waters, its heat to the kingdom of heat, its air to the spheres of the air, its ether into the ethereal regions. Its impressions, thoughts, feelings, merits, qualities go as far as they can reach, and remain there wherever they are meant to be. Then it is the soul in its own essence that is left, merging into the ocean of consciousness where nothing of its previous properties remains.
Our personality is just like a little bubble in the water. There is as little probability of a bubble once merged in the sea coming out again composed of the same portion of water, as there is of the soul once merged in the ocean of consciousness coming out again formed of the self-same portion of consciousness. The bubble may come back in the same place with the same portion of water, or it may be another portion of water. There may be half of the first drop of water in the second bubble, there may be a small part, or there may be some other portion of water added to it.
If one bubble comes, and we call that bubble John, and then we call another Jacob and a third Henry, yet they are all the same water, and if we call the water John then they are all the same John. All is the same spirit, the same life, involving itself into all the forms and the names. From this point of view there no I, no you, no he, no she, no it, in the light of reality; all are but the differences of a moment.
Every bubble loses both reflections and any properties it possessed during its existence as soon as it merges into the water, and even if in one of a thousand chances it should come formed of the self-same portion of water, it would not retain its previous property. In the same way supposing, as a mere assumption, that the self-same portion of consciousness, which in any case is not so substantial and stable as water, could possibly appear again on the surface without any addition or deduction, it is utterly impossible that it should still possess its past qualities and impressions, for it has been absolutely purified by sinking into the consciousness. If even a drop of ink loses its ink property in the sea, why should not the ocean of consciousness purify its own element from all elements foreign to itself?
As Hinduism teaches the doctrine that bathing once in the Sangam at the confluence of the two rivers can purify man from all life’s sins, how can it deny that this bath of the soul, sinking into the consciousness even once, purifies the soul from all the properties it has gathered during its previous life? In the first place, the nature of absorption into the Spirit is itself purification from the material state of being, and the very nature of manifestation is for the soul to arrive new and fresh.
Suppose we granted that cream was the reincarnation of milk, and butter was the third step of the reincarnation of milk, and its fourth reincarnation could be called ghee; then the question would arise, of what was milk the reincarnation? Milk is composed of several chemical substances, and its chemical arrangement changes the name, savor, smell, and effect. Butter cannot be called milk, nor is ghee cream. If there is anything which seems to exist through all the manifestations of the milk, it is the inner ruling current which groups and scatters atoms, compelling them to change, and which may be likened to the soul.
Also, if Jack has reincarnated as John, or John has reincarnated as Jack, what were both in the beginning? Were they two or one? If one became two, then one could become thousands, millions, and still he is one only.
To be continued…