Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Our Relation to Children
By C. W. Leadbeater
The Child and Reincarnation
18. Now, if we want to understand our duty towards the child we must first consider how he came to be what he is — that is to say, we must trace him back in thought to his previous incarnation. Fifteen hundred years ago or so your child was perhaps a Roman citizen, perhaps a philosopher of Alexandria, perhaps an early Briton; but whatever may have been his outward circumstances, he had a definite disposition of his own — a character containing various more or less developed qualities, some good and some bad.
19. In due course of time that life of his came to an end; but remember that whether that end came slowly by disease or old age, or swiftly by some accident or violence, its advent made no sudden change of any sort in his character. A curious delusion seems to prevail in many quarters that the mere fact of death will at once turn a demon into a saint — that, whatever a man's life may have been, the moment he dies he becomes practically an angel of goodness. No idea could possibly be further from the truth, as those whose work lies in trying to help the departed know full well. The casting off of a man's physical body no more alters his disposition than does the casting off of his overcoat; he is precisely the same man the day after his death as he was the day before, with the same vices and the same virtues.
20. True, now that he is functioning only on the astral plane he has not the same opportunities of displaying them; but though they may manifest themselves in the astral life in quite a different manner, they are none the less still there, and the conditions and duration of that life are their result. On that plane he must stay until the energy poured forth by his lower desires and emotions during physical life has worn itself out — until the astral body which he has made for himself disintegrates; for only then can he leave it for the higher and more peaceful realm of the heaven-world. But though those particular passions are for the time worn out and non-existent for him, the germs of the qualities in him, which made it possible for them to exist in his nature, are still there. They are latent and ineffective, certainly, because desire of that type requires astral matter for its manifestation; they are what Madame Blavatsky once called 'privations of matter', but they are quite ready to come into renewed activity, if stimulated, when the man again finds himself under conditions where they can act.
21. An analogy may perhaps, if not pushed too far, be of use in helping us to grasp this idea. If a small bell be made to ring continuously in an airtight vessel, and the air be then gradually withdrawn, the sound will grow fainter and fainter, until it becomes inaudible. The bell is still ringing as vigorously as ever, yet its vibration is no longer manifest to our ears, because the medium by means of which alone it can produce any effect upon them is absent. Admit the air into the vessel, and immediately you hear the sound of the bell once more just as before.
22. Similarly, there are certain qualities in man's nature which need astral matter for their manifestation, just as sound needs either air or some denser matter for its vehicle; and when, in the process of his withdrawal into himself after what we call death, he leaves the astral plane for the mental, those qualities can no longer find expression, and must therefore perforce remain latent. But when, centuries later, on his downward course into reincarnation he re-enters the astral plane, these qualities which have remained latent for so long manifest themselves once more and become the tendencies of the next personality.
23. In the same way there are qualities of the mind which need for their expression the matter of the lower mental levels; and when, after his long rest in the heaven-world the consciousness of the man withdraws into the true ego upon the higher mental levels, these qualities also pass into latency.
24. But when the ego is about to reincarnate, it has to reverse this process of withdrawal — to pass downward through the very same planes through which it came on its upward journey. When the time of its outflow comes, it puts itself down first on to the lower levels of its own plane, and seeks to express itself there as far as is possible in that less perfect and less plastic matter.
25. In order that it may so express itself and function upon that plane it must clothe itself in the matter of the plane, just as an entity at a spiritualistic séance, when it wishes to move physical objects, materializes a temporary physical hand with which to do it, or, at any rate, employs physical forces of some kind to produce its results. It is not at all necessary that such a hand should be materialized sufficiently to be visible to our dull, ordinary sight. But to produce a physical result there must be materialization to a certain extent — as far as etheric matter, at any rate.
26. Thus the ego aggregates around itself matter of the lower mental levels — the matter which will afterwards become its mind-body. But this matter is not selected at random; on the contrary, out of all the varied and inexhaustible store around him he attracts to himself just such a combination as is perfectly fitted to give expression to his latent mental qualities. In precisely the same way, when he makes the further descent on to the astral plane, the matter of that plane which is by natural law attracted to him to serve as his vehicle in that world, is exactly that which will give expression to the desires which were his at the conclusion of his last birth. In point of fact, he resumes his life on each plane just where he left it last time.
27. Observe that those are not as yet in any way qualities in action; they are simply the germs of qualities, and for the moment their only influence is to secure for themselves a possible field of manifestation, by providing suitable matter for their expression in the various vehicles of the child. Whether they develop once more in this life into the same definite tendencies as in the last one, will depend very largely upon the encouragement or otherwise given to them by the surroundings of the child during its early years. Any one of them, good or bad, may be very readily stimulated into activity by encouragement, or on the other hand may be, as it were, starved out for lack of that encouragement. If stimulated, it becomes a more powerful factor in the man's life this time than it was in his previous existence; if starved out, it remains all through the life merely as an unfructified germ, and does not make its appearance in the succeeding incarnation at all.
28. This then is the condition of the child when first he comes under his parent's care. He cannot be said to have as yet a definite mind-body or a definite astral body, but he has around and within him the matter out of which these are to be built.
29. He possesses tendencies of all sorts, some of them good and some of them evil, and it is in accordance with the development of these tendencies that that building will be regulated. And this development in turn depends almost entirely upon the influences brought to bear upon him from outside during the first few years of his existence.
