But, it is said, if we reïncarnate how is it that we do not remember
the other life; and further, as we cannot remember the deeds for which
we suffer is it not unjust for that reason? Those who ask this always
ignore the fact that they also have enjoyment and reward in life and
are content to accept them without question. For if it is unjust to
be punished for deeds we do not remember, then it is also inequitable
to be rewarded for other acts which have been forgotten. Mere entry
into life is no fit foundation for any reward or punishment. Reward
and punishment must be the just desert for prior conduct. Nature’s
law of justice is not imperfect, and it is only the imperfection of
human justice that requires the offender to know and remember in this
life a deed to which a penalty is annexed. In the prior life the doer
was then quite aware of what he did, and nature affixes consequences
to his acts, being thus just. We well know that she will make the
effect follow the cause whatever we wish and whether we remember or
forget what we did. If a baby is hurt in its first years by the nurse
so as to lay the ground for a crippling disease in after life, as is
often the case, the crippling disease will come although the child
neither brought on the present cause nor remembered aught about it.
But reïncarnation, with its companion doctrine of Karma, rightly
understood, shows how perfectly just the whole scheme of nature is.
Memory of a prior life is not needed to prove that we passed through
that existence, nor is the fact of not remembering a good objection.
We forget the greater part of the occurrences of the years and days of
this life, but no one would say for that reason we did not go through
these years. They were lived, and we retain but little of the details
in the brain, but the entire effect of them on the character is kept
and made a part of ourselves. The whole mass of detail of a life is
preserved in the inner man to be one day fully brought back to the
conscious memory in some other life when we are perfected. And even
now, imperfect as we are and little as we know, the experiments in
hypnotism show that all the smallest details are registered in what
is for the present known as the subconscious mind. The theosophical
doctrine is that not a single one of these happenings is forgotten in
fact, and at the end of life when the eyes are closed and those about
say we are dead every thought and circumstance of life flash vividly
into and across the mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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