Hazrat Inayat Khan completes his explanation of the phenomenon of the soul, drawing a clear distinction between the impressions on the consciousness and the pure soul itself. In the second paragraph below the word ‘creative’ may be understood as meaning expressive. This post concludes the series; the previous post is here.

Much of the difference of understanding is the difference of words. If someone says that the soul is the world of impressions which the consciousness holds before it, and the spirit is the consciousness, then he may say that the soul returns.

When the child of unpoetic parents sings, making up words of its own, this shows that it has received the impression of some poetic soul. The soul that comes to the surface is more responsive than creative; it is not creative, because it has nothing to give. The soul on its return is creative; it imparts its experiences there. For example, an unused photographic plate takes the impression of the object before it, but the used plate reflects its impression onto the paper. Suppose, for instance, the soul of Vishnu meets a soul on its way to manifestation, this powerful soul may impress the other with its attributes. Then that soul may say, ‘I am Krishna, the reincarnation of Vishnu.’ The soul is impressed with whatever comes before it. Sometimes children of quite ordinary parents may be so impressed by a great person in whose presence they are that they themselves become great. And as man’s personality is nothing but an agglomeration of his thoughts and impressions, the inheritor of these may be called the reincarnation of the past one, though his soul is his own.

Sometimes a child appears to see and understand very much of what is going on around him from his infancy up. Sometimes a young man sees and understands more than an old person. Such people are supposed by the average person to be old souls, and the reincarnationists take it as proof of the doctrine of reincarnation. But in reality knowing and understanding do not depend upon learning; knowledge is the soul’s quality. The knowledge of the spirit has been man’s in all ages. An old person does not need to read many books in order to learn that he was once a little child, he knows it, it is his past experience. So the soul knows its own experience; it needs only a little awakening to make it conscious of itself.

When the Shah of Persia wished to have the history of Persia written by some literary person, no one could be found to do it until the mystic poet Firdausi said that he would write it. And he wrote, from his inner knowledge, Shahnama, the history of the Shahs of Persia. If he had this knowledge from the recollection of his own previous lives he must have reincarnated uninterruptedly in Persia and in Persia only, endowed each time with the same degree of intelligence, so as to have acquired and retained all this knowledge.

There is nothing which the soul cannot know, for the whole objective existence is made by the soul for its own use; and therefore it is not astonishing if man possesses great qualities that he has not inherited, and if he has knowledge of all things through revelation, not by learning. It is astonishing only when he lacks this, and that is owing to the globes upon globes of the objective world, covering the light of the soul.