thought.”  But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part.  Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.

The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, here so sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamental propositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect is the unfolding of the cause in time.

To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connection with higher time would be to force a passage and then not follow where it leads.  The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideas of karma and reincarnation.  For what is karma but the return of time, the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago?  And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep into objective existence and out again, of which the alternation between waking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?

COLONEL DE ROCHAS’ EXPERIMENTS

During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that we never really forget anything.  We have rediscovered the memory of the subconscious mind.  It is generally known that in the mesmeric or somnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for the habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be.  It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way.  This but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past incarnations.

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the memory of past births.  Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West.  Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity.  Maeterlinck’s account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it.  He says: 

“First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned.  He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence.  He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood.  At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life.  He goes over the same events, with their joys and their sorrows.  If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery.