Reincarnation: The Rhythm Of Life

VII

REINCARNATION:

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

Only he who has become wise through love is freed from the cross of cause and effect to which he was nailed by ignorance. Only love ends the cycle of re-births. -

Hans Sterneder, The Song of the Eternal

EARLIER IN THIS book the law of polarity was discussed. We observed how every pole presupposes a counter-pole and how, from the constant oscillation between two poles arises rhythm, the basic pattern of all that lives. Thousands of years ago, in the Kymbalion, the wise men put it this way:

Nothing is at rest, everything moves, everything is vibration. Everything flows out and in. There is a time for all things, and all things rise and fall. The swing of the pendulum is visible everywhere. The extent of the rightward swing is the measure of the leftward swing. Rhythm always compensates.

Modern physics, too, would hardly object to the contention that “everything is vibration”. The manifold phenomena of the universe are all subject to the same law of vibration and are distinguished only by their degree of vibration. Let us take the rhythm of breathing as a case in point. We can then translate the laws that we observe here analogically on to a somewhat larger type of rhythm: the rhythm of waking and sleeping. Just as breathing in is inevitably followed by breathing out, so the waking state is with equal certainty followed by sleep. By the same toke sleep in due course gives way to its opposite pole, waking, and likewise the outbreath gives way to a new inbreath.

A popular saying has it that “sleep is death's little brother”, a dictum which reveals a certain ability to think in vertical chains of analogy. Life and death are also a rhythm, just like breathing in and breathin out, waking and sleeping. It is just that the larger dimension makes it difficult for human beings to take an overall view. Here also the experience confirms the law that a pole always gives way to its opposite: life gives way to death. Death follows life with the same certainty that the outbreath follows the inbreath.

Yet according to the same law death inevitably brings forth life. Thus we see that the change from life to death and back to life evinces the same rhythm as the change from waking to sleeping and back to waking. Life and death are polarities which, through their ceaseless alternation, fall in with the rhythm of all things. All phenomena obey this law of rhythm: the tides of the sea, the seasons of the year, electrical current, the periods of war and peace, the times of day – everywhere we observe the same rhythmic alternation between the poles. Why, of all polarities, should that of life and death be an exception? Why should a law which is discernible everywhere stop short of the phenomenon of life?

This rhythmic movement of the soul between life and death has, since time immemorial, been called transmigration of souls or reincarnation (literally a “re-entry into flesh”). Plato knew about it just as Goethe did. I deliberately say “knew” and not “believed”, for reincarnation is not a matter of belief but rather a matter of philosophical insight. Everyone is free to believe in something other than reincarnation, but it should be borne in mind that any hypothesis without reincarnation has the stamp of absurdity, since only reincarnation is in harmony with all universal laws.

How astonishing it is to hear people again and again demanding proofs of reincarnation. Reality needs no outward proof since it proves itself by its very existence. The kind of functional, outward proof, that has been made into he keystone of scientific argument, is, in fact, the greatest enemy of true knowledge, for it seeks to enforce belief. To say “I have proved it” is in essence tantamount to saying “You must believe me”. But reality does not require proof because it is not a matter of belief. Reality is perceived through the individual's experience, and thereby generates knowledge.

If one knows something one does not need to believe it and one is free of the need for proofs. A statement such as “death is the end of everything” does require proof because this statement forms no part of reality and therefore cannot be experienced. In no area of reality can one point to a process of nature that ends abruptly in nothingness.