Hazrat Inayat Khan continued to describe the effects of impression and heredity on the soul coming into manifestation. The previous post in the series is here.
When the Bible speaks of ‘the son of God,’ and the ‘son of man,’ it means that he is a son of God who has recognized the eternal spirit as his parent, and that he is a son of man who has recognized himself as the son of his parents who are as limited as he. We recognize our father and mother as our origin. The parents claim the child as their own, and so delude themselves; its origin is the universal spirit, and in this we are all brothers and sisters, without distinction of high or low, of race or caste, of creed or religion.
Each soul is like a ray of the sun or of any light. Its work is to project itself, to go forth as far as it can. It is creative and responsive. It creates its means, its expression, and it is impressed by whatever comes before it, in proportion to its interest in that. The soul goes always to what appears to it beautiful and radiant, and so it goes on and on and finds different qualities and different experiences and collects them round it, until at last it finds the mother’s womb.
A child may or may not inherit the qualities and defects of its parents. If the impressions previously received by the soul are stronger, it does not inherit them. Very wicked parents may have a very saintly child, and very good parents may have a very bad child.
The mental attributes of the parents are inherited by impression on the mental plane. The thought, the feeling of the parents are inherited by the child as a quality. If the father is engaged in thinking, ‘I should build an orphanage,’ the child will have a philanthropic disposition. If the father is thinking, ‘This person is my enemy, I should revenge myself on him,’ the child will have a vindictive disposition. If the mother admires something very much, for instance flowers, the child will have that love of beauty in its nature. Also the qualities and features of the relations and of other persons of whom one of the parents thinks a great deal are impressed on the child. To explain the relation between heredity and environment, one may say that heredity is the foundations of the house, and environment is the building itself; and from this one may conclude which has the more importance.
Often a child is like an uncle or aunt of the father or mother; why is this? It has two aspects: it may be either that the father or the mother has the qualities of this relation, although in them they have not fully developed, and those qualities develop in the child; or it may be that the grandmother or grandfather or other relation is so much attached to his descendants that his spirit watches and impresses with his qualities the child that is born in his family. Heredity is a matter of vibrations. There must be harmony in the number of vibrations, in the same way that color and sound are made by the harmony of vibrations. Thus a person may more like his grandfather than his father. If the grandfather has been a poet, the grandson may again be a poet if the number of the vibrations corresponds, even when the son is not one.
It is true that genius is transmitted by heredity and develops at every step, but it is sometimes found that the child of a very great person happens to be most ordinary, and sometimes the child of a most worthy person proves to be most unworthy. This may be explained in the following manner: every manifestation of genius has three stages, Uruj, Kamal, and Zaval, ascent, climax, and decline. When the genius is in the ascendant it develops more and more in every generation; when it reaches its climax it surpasses all previous manifestations of genius in that family; when it is in the decline it shows gradually or suddenly the lack or loss of genius. It is thus with families, nations, and races.
To be continued…