We have looked at the “death” of our emotional bodies”; now let us look at its rebirth. After the causes that carried the monad into the Mental World, also known as Devachan, are exhausted and the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, the monad begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can be gratified only on the physical plane. That thirst is known by the Hindus as trishna. It may be considered, first, as a desire to express oneself and second, as a desire to receive those external impressions, which alone enable one to feel oneself alive. This is the law of evolution. Trishna appears to operate through kama or emotional matter, which, for the individual as for the Cosmos, is the primary cause of reincarnation.
During the devachanic rest in the causal envelope, the monad has been free from all pain and sorrow. Still, the karma it accumulated in its past life has been in a state of suspended animation. The seeds of past negative tendencies germinate as soon as the new persona forms itself for the latest incarnation. The monad has to take up the burden of the past, the germs or seeds coming over as the harvest of the past life. This is called skandhas by the Buddhists. Kama, the Emotional World, with its army of skandhas, thus waits at the threshold of devachan when the monad re-emerges to assume a new incarnation. The skandhas consist of material qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of the mind and mental powers.
The process is brought about by the monad turning its attention, first to the mental unit located in the 47:4 permanent molecule, which immediately resumes its activity and then to the emotional permanent atom (48:1), into which it puts its will. The tendencies, which we have seen are in a condition of suspended animation, are thrown outwards by the monad as it returns to rebirth and draws around itself, first, matter of the mental plane and elemental essence present on the mental plane. These express the mental development that the monad had gained at the end of its last heaven-life on the mental plane. The following presentation will discuss what is happening during this Mental World stay. The monad thus begins in this respect exactly where it left off. This is why there is no point in calling it quits in this incarnation. All you are doing is putting a marker in your book of life to be resumed later.
Next, the monad draws around itself matter from the Emotional World and elemental essence of the Third Elemental Kingdom, thus obtaining the materials out of which its new emotional body will be built and causing the reappearance of the appetites, emotions and passions that it brought over from its past lives. The emotional matter is gathered by the monad descending to rebirth, not consciously, but automatically, thanks to you know who.
This material is an exact reproduction of the matter in the monad’s emotional body at the end of its” last emotional life. Thus, the monad resumes life in each world where it left it last time. This is all possible because the permanent atom, 48:1, has an indelible memory of all that is experienced on the emotional plane. For this reason, the persona is lost at the end of each incarnation. There is no permanent atomic or molecular structure to store the memories of the persona itself. If memory is kept, it becomes part of the workings of karmic law, a process we need not discuss in this presentation. Each incarnation is inevitably, automatically and justly linked with the preceding lives, so the whole series forms a continuous, unbroken chain; scary thought.
The emotional matter thus drawn around the monad has yet to be formed into a definite emotional body. In the first place, it takes the shape of an ovoid, the nearest expression we can realise of the actual shape of the causal body (47:1-3). As soon as the baby’s physical body is formed, the physical matter exerts a violent attraction for the emotional matter, which previously was relatively evenly distributed over the ovoid and, in this manner, concentrates the great bulk of it within the periphery of the physical body. As the physical body grows, the emotional matter follows its every change, 99 per cent of it being concentrated within the periphery of the physical body and only about 1 per cent filling the rest of the ovoid and constituting the aura, as we mentioned in a previous presentation.
Gathering matter around the emotional nucleus (48:1) sometimes occurs rapidly and sometimes causes long delays. When it is completed, the monad stands in the karmic vesture it has prepared for itself, ready to receive from the agents of the Lords of Karma the etheric double, into which, as into a mould, the new physical body will be built. Your physical appearance, with all its attributes, is more a reflection of your karma than they are of your genes.
The monad’s qualities are thus not at first in action: they are simply the germs of qualities that have secured a possible field of manifestation in the new bodies. Whether they develop in this life into the same tendencies as in the last one will depend mainly upon the encouragement, or otherwise, given to them by the child’s surroundings during its early years. Any one of them, good or bad, maybe readily stimulated into activity by encouragement or, on the other hand, starved out for lack of that encouragement. If stimulated, it becomes a more powerful factor in the person’s life this time than it was in its previous existence; if starved out, it remains merely as an unfertilised germ, which then atrophies and dies out and does not make its appearance in the succeeding incarnation at all. I was fortunate in my early childhood that my mother flooded my world with all things esoteric; this explains a lot. The child cannot be said to have a definite mental or emotional body, but it has the matter out of which these are to be built around and within it.
Suppose a person was a drunkard in their past life: in kamaloka, they would have burnt out the desire for drink and be freed from it. However, although the desire itself is dead, the same weakness of character still remains, which makes it possible for them to be subjugated by it. In the person’s next life, their emotional body will contain matter capable of expressing the same desire, but the person is in no way bound to employ such matter in the same way as before. In the hands of careful and capable parents, trained to regard such desires as negative, the persona would gain control over them and repress them as they appear, and thus the emotional matter will remain unvivified and become atrophied due to lack of use. It will be recollected that the matter of the emotional body is slowly but constantly wearing away and being replaced, precisely as is that of the physical body, and as atrophied matter disappears, it is replaced by a matter of a more refined nature. In this manner, vices are finally conquered and made virtually impossible for the future, the opposite virtue of self-control having been established.
During the first few years of the monad’s life, it has limited hold over its vehicles, and it, therefore, looks to its parents to help it obtain a firmer grasp and provide it with suitable conditions. It is difficult to exaggerate the plasticity of these unformed vehicles. As it is possible to train a child in its early years to become a gymnast, far more can be done with the emotional and mental vehicles. They are thrilled in response to every vibration they encounter and are eagerly receptive to all influences, good or evil, emanating from those around them. Moreover, though in early youth they are susceptible and easily moulded, they soon set and stiffen and acquire habits which, once firmly established, can be altered only with great difficulty, as any parent with teenagers can attest to. Thus, to a far more significant extent than even the fondest parents realise, the child’s future is under their control.
Only the clairvoyant knows how much a child’s character would improve if only an adult’s character were better. There are many instances recorded where the brutality of a teacher irreparably injured a child’s body, making it impossible for the child to make the full progress that was hoped for in this life. So important is a child’s early environment that the life in which Adeptship is attained must have perfect surroundings in childhood.
In the case of (1) Young and (2) Community monads with powerful emotional bodies who reincarnate after a very short interval, it sometimes happens that the shade or shell left over from the last emotional life persists, and in that case, it is likely to be attracted to the new personality. When that happens, it firmly brings the old habits and modes of thought and sometimes even the actual memory of that past life.
Powell recounts a case of a man who has led such an evil life that his emotional and mental bodies were torn away from the monad after death, the monad having no body in which to live in the Emotional and Mental worlds. The only option was to quickly form new ones. When the latest emotional and mental bodies were formed, the affinity between them and the old ones had not disintegrated, asserting itself, and the old mental and emotional bodies became a terrible form of what is known as the “dweller on the threshold”.
In extreme cases, a man, returning to rebirth, who, due to vicious appetites or otherwise, may have formed a powerful link with an animal. He may be linked by magnetic affinity to the emotional body of the animal, whose qualities he has encouraged within himself. He is chained as a prisoner to the animal’s physical body. Thus chained, he cannot go onward to rebirth: he is conscious in the Emotional World. He has his human faculties but cannot control the animal body with which he is connected nor express himself through that body on the physical plane. The animal organism is thus a jailor rather than a vehicle. The animal soul is not ejected but remains its own body’s proper tenant and controller. Such imprisonment is not reincarnation, though it is easy to see that cases of this nature explain at least partially the belief often found in the Sub-Continent that a person may, under certain circumstances, reincarnate in an animal body.
In cases where the monad is not degraded enough for absolute imprisonment but in which the emotional body is strongly animalised, it may pass on normally to human rebirth. Still, the animal characteristics will be reproduced mainly in the physical body — as witnessed in the faces, which in appearance are sometimes repulsively animal, pig-faced, dog-faced, etc. The suffering entailed on the conscious human entity, thus temporarily cut off from progress and self-expression, is very significant, though, of course, reformatory in its action. It is somewhat similar to that endured by other monads, which are linked to human bodies with poorly functioning brains, though this type of mental impairment is the result of other karmic debts. Insanity is often the result of cruelty, especially when the cruelty is refined and intentional.
Ok, those are some problems a monad can incur as it reincarnates. The obvious question is how one controls one’s emotions so you don’t get into this mess in the first place. Find outing the next presentation.