Hazrat Inayat Khan now begins to explain the effect of impressions that a soul receives on its way to manifestation. The previous post in the series is here.
Souls which are passing through the sphere of the jinns towards the physical plane, and who do not stop in that sphere, meet with other travelers who are on their journey back home, and they learn from them a great many things. There is give and take, there is buying and selling, there is learning and teaching; but who teaches the most? The one with most experience, the one who is going back home.
This latter gives the map of the journey to the soul traveling towards manifestation. It is from this map that the traveling soul strikes his path rightly or wrongly. One soul may have one kind of instruction, another soul may have another kind; one soul may be clear, another may be confused. Yet they all go forward as the travelers of a caravan, taking with them all the precious information, all the things which they have learned from the others on the journey.
It is for this reason that every child born on earth possesses, besides what he has inherited from his parents and ancestors, a power and knowledge quite peculiar to himself and different from that which his parents and ancestors possessed; yet he knows not whence he received it, or who gave him the knowledge; but he shows from the beginning of his life on earth signs of having known things which he has never been taught.
One soul is more impressionable than another, one soul is perhaps more impressed by the angelic heavens, and that impression has remained more deeply with it throughout the whole journey; another is more impressed by the sphere of the jinns, and that impression lasts through the whole journey. Then there is another soul who is not deeply impressed with the angelic heavens or the world of the jinn, and that soul does not know of these worlds; he comes through blindly, and is only interested in things of the earth when he reaches it.
One generally finds among artists, poets, musicians, thinkers, as well as among philosophers, great politicians and inventors, souls of the world of the jinns, who have brought with them to the earth some deep impression which causes them in their lives to be what men term great geniuses. Impression is a great phenomenon in itself: as a man thinketh so is he.
And what does man think? He thinks of that with which he is most impressed; and whatever he is most impressed with he himself is. Do we not see in our life on earth that people, who are deeply impressed with a certain personality, wish, thought, or feeling, become in time the same? If this is true, what is man? Man is his impression. The soul impressed deeply in the world of the jinns by some personality coming back from the earth, an impression deeply engraved upon that soul, which it can never throw away, certainly becomes that personality with which it is impressed. Suppose a soul is impressed in the world of the jinn with the personality of Beethoven; when born on earth he is Beethoven in thought, feeling, tendency, inclination and knowledge. Only in addition to that personality he has the heritage of his parents and of his ancestors. As the son of a certain family is called by the name of that family, so the impression of a certain personality may rightfully be called by that name. Therefore if Shankaracharya claims to be the reincarnation of Krishna, there is every reason for his claim, and this theory stands in support of it. Life from the beginning to the end is a mystery. The deeper one dives in order to investigate the truth the more difficulty one finds in distinguishing what is called individuality. But it is not the aim of the wise to hold on to individuality. Wisdom lies in understanding the secret of individuality, its composition or its decomposition, which resolves in the end onto one individuality, the individuality of God. As it is written, ‘There is one God; none exists save He,’
To be continued…