Metempsychosis

“ I say an eternal element, because, regarded philosophically, the belief in metempsychosis seems a kind of unconscious anticipation of the principle now known as ‘Conservation of Energy.’ Nothing that has ever existed can be lost, either in life or by death. All is but change; and hence souls do not perish, but return again and again in ever-changing forms. Moreover, later developments of metempsychosis, especially as conceived by Lessing, can without difficulty be harmonised with the modern idea of evolution from lower to higher forms.”
“That’s all,” Julius whispered, looking round at me. ”

“ I will be bald on top and will wear eyeglasses like little thick ashtrays. I will give lectures to young things about human destiny and the metempsychosis of Plato." "What's a metempsychosis?" asked the monster hungrily. Jeremy was four and could afford to be patient. "A metempsychosis is a thing that happens when a person moves from one house to another." ”

“ And in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, and this the early part of the Twentieth Century, the general public has been made familiar with the idea of Metempsychosis, under the name of Re-incarnation, by means of the great volume of literature issued by The Theosophical Society and its allied following. No longer is the thought a novelty to the Western thinker, and many have found within themselves a corroborative sense of its truth. ”

“ The doctrine of metempsychosis is founded on the consciousness of gradation between beasts and men. The belief in a soul-endowed animal world was present among the ancients, and the laws of intelligence and instinct were misconstrued, or were regarded as a puzzle, which no man might solve. ”

“ If the motion of metempsychosis were true, might we not say that debauch, represented by Circe, changes men really and materially into swine, for the chastisement of vices would on this hypothesis be a lapse into those animal forms which correspond to them? Now metempsychosis, which has been frequently misunderstood, has a perfectly true side. Animal forms communicate their sympathetic imprints to the astral body of man and are soon reflected on his features, according to the force of his habits. A man of intelligent and passive mildness assumes the ways and inert physiognomy of a sheep ”

“ Transmigration of souls, a metempsychosis, deals solely with the passing of the soul after death into another mortal form. Lycanthropy confines itself to the metamorphosis of physical man to animal form only during man's physical lifetime.
Metempsychosis is a change of condition dependent on the principle of evolution (i.e. evolution upward and retrogressive) . Lycanthropy is a change of condition relative to a property, entirely independent of evolution. The one is wholly determined by man's spiritual state at the time of his physical dissolution ”

“ THE TENTH LESSON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. One of the things that repel many persons who have had their attention directed to the subject of Metempsychosis for the first time, is the idea that they have evolved as a soul from individual lowly forms, for instance that they have at one time been an individual plant, and then an individual animal form, and then an individual higher animal form, and so on until now they are the particular individual human form contemplating the subject. ”

“ The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at death the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body or into a lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been used considerably in English fiction. ”

“ The metempsychosis does not end when the soul goes to heaven; on the contrary, it is in heaven that it is fated to undergo the strangest and most diverse transformations; from the heroic form we have seen it pass into that of a quadruped and a biped. ”

“ The apparent inner absurdity of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls arises mainly from our inability to grasp and realise the two propositions which it presupposes—viz., that there is no such thing as time outside of the human mind, and therefore no past or future; and, secondly, that soul is but individualised will momentarily illumined by the intellect which is a function of the brain. Metempsychosis was originally no more than a symbol. ”

“ Metempsychosis, properly so-called, that is to say, the passing of a human soul into the body of a brute, did however exist during the infancy of the human race, when highly developed animal souls were becoming fit to enter the human kingdom. The bodies of these newly-born human souls were coarse and rudimentary in their nature, showing scarcely any difference in form and organic function from the bodies of the higher animals of that period, for these instruments were very similar to one another. ”

“ The sum of the desires of a soul regulate its re-birth. Those who have become sickened of all that earth has for them at this stage of its evolution, may, and do, rest in states of existence far removed from earth scenes, until the race progresses far enough to afford the resting soul the opportunities and environments that it so earnestly craves.
And more than this, when Man reaches a certain stage, the process of Metempsychosis no longer remains unconscious, but he enters into a conscious knowing, willing passage from one life to another. ”

“ It is used to designate a transmigration separated by intervals, a process which is not continuous. In the first kind of metempsychosis there is, properly speaking, no rebirth, for the soul does not leave the earth, but there unceasingly accomplishes its circular journey through the living world. ”

“ From these we learn that he espoused the despised doctrine of metempsychosis as an article of creed, and that from looking into a man’s face, he could tell whether the individual possessed a new soul from the celestial world of spirits, or whether he had an old soul which has been migrating from body to body and has still to accomplish its purity before its return to rest in its heavenly home. ”

“ Thus the soul changes its body only gradually and by degrees, so that it is never deprived of all its organs at once. There is often a metamorphosis in animals, but never metempsychosis nor transmigration of souls. There are also no entirely separate souls, nor genii without bodies. God alone is wholly without body. ”

“ Metempsychosis is not an uncommon trait of their minds, especially among the better classes; thus, for instance, the soul of the dead man is sometimes supposed to enter the body of a bird, in which case the relatives carefully build a semi-circular stone railing round the mound, so that the winged successor of the deceased may have whereon to perch. ”

“ The progress of the belief in Metempsychosis however has been greatly retarded by the many theories and dogmas attached to it by some of the teachers. Not to speak of the degrading ideas of re-birth into the bodies of animals, etc., which have polluted the spring of Truth, there are to be found many other features of teaching and theory which repel people, and cause them to try to kill out of the minds the glimmer of Truth that they find there. ”

“ But the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis with its doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity, and the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated by a similar idea; this is, that the manners of feeling and thinking of our progenitors are exercised by us. We carry their souls, not the individual, but the collective ones; we are the products of their sins and virtues; we have all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up, emotional tendencies, that they had; we have stamped on us our race, our nation, our religion. ”

“ The human soul with its consciousness seemed to be something already perfected in a pre-existing state, and, in the myth of metempsychosis, we trace the yearnings and gropings of the soul after the source whence its own consciousness was derived, counting its dreams and hallucinations as gleams of memory, recording acts which had taken place in a former state of existence. ”

“ Moreover, the fact that the soul is immediately self conscious—conscious of itself through itself—conclusively shows that in its essence the soul is quite independent of any physical accompaniment. The doctrine of metempsychosis implies, also, individual pre-existence. But supposing that the soul did exist before the body, it must have existed either as one or as many. The multiplicity of bodies is due to the multiplicity of material forms, and does not indicate the multiplicity of souls. ”

“ The belief that we shall recognize our friends in another world assumes that these characteristics are immortal, but it is hard to understand how they can be so, especially as it is also assumed that there is nothing immortal in a dog, which possesses affection and intelligence, but that there is something immortal in a new born infant which cannot be said to possess either.
In one way metempsychosis raises insuperable difficulties to the survival of personality, for if you become someone else, especially an animal, you are no longer yourself according to any ordinary use of language. ”

“ And while we believe that such efforts are praiseworthy for the reason that many persons must be first convinced in that way, still we feel that one must really feel the truth of the doctrine from something within his own consciousness, before he will really believe it to be truth. One may convince himself of the logical necessity of the doctrine of Metempsychosis, but at the same time he may drop the matter with a shrug of the shoulders and a "still, who knows?" ”

“ The intelligence which was manifest in the beasts bore such a close resemblance to that of man, in the childhood and youth of the world, that it is not to be wondered at, if our forefathers failed to detect the line of demarcation drawn between instinct and reason. And failing to distinguish this, they naturally fell into the belief in metempsychosis. ”

“ Granted that the transition from the mineral to the organism is gradual, and that from the vegetable to the animal still more gradual, the broad fact remains that, when we reach the higher forms of the realm of living matter, we definitely recognise many of the characteristics which are found in the human soul—will, emotion, impulse, even intellectual activities. Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and find it difficult to believe otherwise—as witness the totemistic systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. ”

“ Just as the young person feels within his or her body strange emotions, longings and stirrings, which betoken the passage from the child state into that of manhood or womanhood, so do these spiritual longings, desires and cravings betoken the passage from unconscious re-birth into conscious knowing Metempsychosis, when you have passed from the scene of your present labors. ”

“ It is true that the soul of one filled with earthly desires, and craving for material things, will by the very force of those desires be drawn back to earthly re-birth in a body best suited for the gratification of the longings, desires and cravings that it finds within itself. But it is likewise true that the earth-sick soul is not compiled to return unless its own desires bring it back. Desire is the key note of Metempsychosis, although up to a certain stage it may operate unconsciously. ”

“ It appears, however, that the soul had the option of returning to this life, and as I have said, generally entered the body of a female relative to form the soul of a coming infant. If the child resembled a deceased friend or relation, this reëmbodiment was at once recognized, and the name of the dead person was given to it. Metempsychosis does not appear to have been restricted to relatives only, for the Thlinkeets were often heard to express a desire to be born again into families distinguished for wealth and position, and even to wish to die soon in order to attain this bliss the earlier. ”

“ By "Reincarnation" we mean the repeated incarnation, or embodiment in flesh, of the soul or immaterial part of man's nature. The term "Metempsychosis" is frequently employed in the same sense, the definition of the latter term being: "The passage of the soul, as an immortal essence, at the death of the body, into another living body." The term "Transmigration of Souls" is sometimes employed, the term being used in the sense of "passing from one body into another." ”

“ It is just as absurd to say that kinetic manifestations would have been the same in the absence of metakinesis, as to say that the metakinetic manifestations, the thoughts and emotions, would have been the same in the absence of kinesis. It is just as absurd to say that the physical series would have been the same in the absence of mind, as to say that the mental series would have been the same in the absence of bodily organization. For on this view consciousness is no mere by-product of neural processes, but is simply one aspect of them. ”

“ Clifford used it to signify that particular kind of metakinesis which in the human brain rises to the level of consciousness. Not only is it not inconceivable, but it is a logical necessity on the hypothesis of monism, that answering to the kinetic rhythm of the universe there is a metakinetic rhythm; but unless the gyrations of the spheres have some kinetic resemblance to the dance of molecules in the human brain, the metakinesis cannot be inferred to be similar to the consciousness of man. ”