XXV
THE REBIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

 

I THINK Stephen's rebirth idea proved hardest of all for me to understand. It seemed at first wholly bizarre. And then, too, I was not yet fully adjusted to the phenomenon of mental communication.

 

For weeks I had been accustomed to address a question into the air and have it answered on the ouija-board; the performance had ceased to be bewildering. But to say, "Stephen, what about this?" or, "How about that, Stephen?" and have Joan herself answer, was a different matter, especially as Joan's own personality seemed, as I touched her wrist, to fade away, giving place to that of an unseen some one else.

 

It may be that the atmosphere of the rebirth discussion and of the conversations that followed it would be more faithfully reported if I dropped the old phrases, "Stephen said" and "Stephen answered," and adopted instead "Joan said, speaking for Stephen." I do not do so for the reason that before many evenings had passed what might be called the Joan Stephen became as much a matter of course as the ouija-board Stephen had been. Indeed, had I been able by closing my eyes to have forgotten Joan's presence, I might well have fancied, even during the rebirth discussion, that Stephen himself was sitting beside me. But just at first such forgetfulness was not possible; Joan's assumption of personality not her own was still too novel.

"Rebirth is not in any sense what you know as reincarnation," Stephen began. "It is true, as I once told you, that in the reincarnation idea there lies a glimpse. But this Buddhistic thought is on the whole an emotional hypothesis. Dismiss once and for all any possibility of my meaning by rebirth what the world has meant by reincarnation."

"Very well, Stephen," I said, "the thought is dismissed. I never lived individually prior to my present existence, and never after my death shall I live here on earth again. That is what you would have me first understand, is it not?"

"Absolutely," he answered.

"But," cried I, "what is there about mortal other than himself to be reborn?"

"A part of his consciousness is reborn, not once, but many times," Stephen replied.

"What part?" I demanded.

"I have already told you that the quality of consciousness is reborn."

"Is, then, a man's consciousness divisible?"

"But, Darby," Stephen replied, "cannot a thing give of its quality without being itself divided?"

"Absurd!" I said. "How can my individual consciousness go forward after death and at the same time the quality of my consciousness return to this world?"

 

Before my words were finished Stephen was answering.

 

"Listen!" he said. "Let us in imagination visit a phonograph company's laboratory. Everything is in readiness for the making of a record. The singer lifts her voice. In the days that follow records of the song find their way into thousands of homes, where at the push of a lever the soprano's voice is heard over and over again. Now does it follow that, because the quality of that soprano's voice has lent itself to the phonographic record, the soprano herself, or her voice, has ceased to exist? Absurd!"

 

But Stephen's thought was beyond me.

 

"Do you understand, Joan?" I asked.

"This is Stephen talking," came the reply. "Suppose you touch Joan's wrist, then read her your notes."

 

Stephen vanished, Joan at my touch returning. She listened attentively to the words she had just spoken, quite as though she had never heard them before.

 

"I cannot understand this rebirth notion," I said.

"Why," said she, "it's not so obscure. You express your thoughts, yet you continue. What happens in the case of the phonograph happens in another way every time you give me an idea. I don't know that I actually understand what Stephen calls the rebirth of quality, but I can conceive its possibility. The phonograph illustration simply applies the law of parallels."

 

I was dogged. It seemed to me, I said, that in the present case the only parallel amounting to anything more than a mere analogy must lie between natural birth and whatever it was Stephen called rebirth.

 

"Well, you and Stephen fight it out," said Joan. "Frankly, I'm glad I don't have to listen to the argument."

 

I touched her wrist again—silence a moment then Stephen.

 

"Just so," he said. "Birth and rebirth are parallels. Take an oak-tree. In season it puts forth its acorn. And the acorn ripens and falls to earth. It is a bit of what you call matter. Chemical analysis can determine just what elements and just what combinations of

those elements go to make up that material acorn. This quantitative analysis presents no difficulty whatever to the earth scientist.

"Yet imagine that acorn picked up by a chemist who had never seen a seed before. Such a chemist, for all his quantitative analysis, would scarcely recognize the acorn as anything differing greatly from a chip of wood. If, however, he dropped that acorn in a fitting soil, there would spring from it another oak-tree. Then he would become aware of the acorn's essential quality, of its potential treeness.

"How, now, did the acorn come by its quality of treeness?"

"Why," I said, "from the parent tree, of course."

"Granted your answer were wholly correct," replied Stephen, "would it follow that the parent tree is any less an individual tree because it gave to the acorn its own quality?"

"Well, no," I admitted, "I suppose not."

"Neither," said Stephen, "is the individual on my plane, whose quality of consciousness is born back into your plane, thereby rendered any less an individual.

"In bodily form are not you a man and Joan a woman? Were your parents any the less corporeal men and women for having endowed you, in the process of natural birth, with human form? Now, in a fashion quite parallel to that birth— endowment of body, rebirth from my plane gave you your qualitative endowment. Birth and rebirth operate under parallel laws."

"But, Stephen," I said, "why is it not reasonable to suppose that the parent endows its offspring not only with bodily form, but quality of consciousness as well? Why must a qualitative rebirth be conjured up to explain what simple natural birth might as easily account for?"

"Listen!" Stephen answered. "Go back to the making of the phonograph record. If natural birth were all, if there were no rebirth of consciousness out of my qualitatively free plane into yours, which is qualitatively determined, there would be no evolution. The phonographic record is but a replica.

"Natural birth implies reproduction only, the endless passing on from parents to offspring of identically that which the parents received from their parents. It is rebirth from out the qualitatively free plane into the qualitatively fixed plane that makes of simple reproduction the actuality of evolution. I have given you this thought before; it is a distinct contribution to scientific truth.

"Certain it is that the only creation which ever was or ever will be is the evolution of consciousness out of lower degrees into higher. Yet development on your plane is quantitative only. Whence, then, the qualitative advance that your evolutionist has noted? Do you not see, Darby, the necessity of a qualitatively free mode of being? Such a plane must be postulated by the evolutionist himself. He will be forced into the hypothesis just as soon as he recognizes the qualitatively fixed character of all consciousness of the so-called natural world. Except for rebirth out of the plane of qualitative development could there be any evolution? What I tell you is reasonable."

"It would seem so, Stephen," I said. "But, tell me, whose quality of consciousness lives again in me?"

"The quality of certain artists and philosophers," Stephen answered.

 

And with that we were again plunged into misunderstanding; for I had gathered that, though the quality of the individual and not the individual himself is reborn, each person here represents the quality of some certain other person there. When Stephen stated that the quality of many had been reborn into me, I found myself again groping.

 

"Listen, now!" he said, when I told him my difficulty. "Rebirth is the coming back into your world of a higher quality of consciousness which has before been in your world in a lower degree. Now this does not mean individual quality of consciousness.

 

To illustrate: The housewife has a tub of water. She dips out a pailful. That pail of water let us say, stands to the tub of water as the individual consciousness of a living man stands to the degree of consciousness from which at birth he was qualitatively endowed.

 

"Now the housewife puts a few drops of bluing into the pail and then turns its contents back into the tub. Whereupon it distributes its blueness throughout the water's whole.

"Next the housewife dips out another pailful. Is it not apparent that the second pailful may contain much, little, or possibly none of the water of the first pailful? So it is with rebirth."

"You make your point, Stephen," I said. "Degree quality, not individual quality, is reborn. But why complicate your illustration by introducing the bluing angle? The thing would have been quite as clear had you kept to just plain water."

"Because," answered Stephen, "I wanted to kill two birds with one stone. The bluing the housewife dropped into the first pail colors the whole of the tub. But the housewife wishes the entire tubful of water to be as blue as the pailful. Therefore, to her second pailful she adds more bluing, turning it, too, back into the tub, and thereby further intensifying the tubful's blue. And now she repeats this process over and over again until the desired shade is acquired by the tub's whole.

 

"In like fashion consciousness is qualitatively reborn into your world for the purpose of quantitative development; and each individual, bearing back his gift of quantity to the whole, leavens the whole, gives it greater potentiality for the development of quality with which to be reborn for the purpose of further quantitative development."

"Is reason reborn?" I asked.

"You know better," Stephen answered. "It is the quality of consciousness, not the attributes of consciousness, that is reborn. The potentiality of the attributes is, of course, present at birth, but they must be developed by each individual for himself. Each individual must himself develop his reason, his will, his memory, his perceptions. Otherwise, you can understand, rebirth would be of quantity as well as of quality."

After a minute or two of silence Stephen said: "Touch Joan's wrist. She is tired." Again he vanished.

"Is the argument over?" Joan asked. But, upon my reading her Stephen's words, she herself did a little groping. "Stephen once indicated," she said, "that people sometimes have glimpses of the previous existence of their quality. He said that the first time he visited England certain places seemed familiar to him. How could that be if the attribute of memory is not reborn? Ask him, Darby."

 

When communication was resumed Stephen answered: "Take three graduated men. One was a success in business, one in a profession, one in art, all to the same degree in their various lines. In other words, upon graduation they brought the same quantity here. But, inasmuch as their callings were different, their associations different, you know that wholly different experiences developed that quantity in those men; and naturally their quantities were colored by the attributes that served them. Now, while the attributes of these men are never reborn, yet the impress of those attributes is left on the quantity which their use developed and on the resulting quality. When, then, these men's degree of quality is given as an endowment to a child, that quality is colored by those former developing influences. There are things you speak of as knowing intuitively. Tell Joan—but do not disturb her now; the connection is good—that intuition so called is but the state or color of the individual's degree of quality."

 

"So then," I said, "what I do now is a concern not only of my own future development, but of the development of my entire degree as it is reborn into the world years after I have left the world."

 

"Unto the third and fourth generation," quoted Stephen, "and to their children's children.

"It is to be expected," he added, "that men will better understand the laws of heredity when they understand the truth of rebirth."

"Even as you spoke," I said, "I was thinking that the inevitableness of quality's rebirth reduces control of heredity to a rather sorry state. You say there are low degrees where you are. If I understand you rightly, these low degrees will be, in fact must be, reborn into this world.

"Surely," Stephen replied. "It is unconscious recognition of this truth that causes the world to show its wisdom in such reforms as birth control. A man and woman of inferior quality can give birth to an even lower degree than their own. Criminals can and are likely to produce greater criminals than themselves."

"That's the point," I urged. "What's the use in attempting to restrict such mating if low quality must be born back into the world?"

"Any form of birth control," answered Stephen, "that has as its object the restriction of the offspring of persons of very low degree shows the world's increasing wisdom. Two persons, both low, call to earth in the process of natural reproduction low quality, just as persons of high degree call high quality. That is true, and it is also true that quality must be reborn.

 

"But, listen! I have shown how the individual's gift of quantity leavens the whole of his degree. And have I not made it clear that there is at the same time a leavening of the great whole? Quality must be reborn, but can you not see that the leavening of the whole must ultimately raise the quality of the lower degrees here? Until that leavening is accomplished, low quality is served best by my world."

 

"Stephen," I said, "you have asserted that even protoplasm graduates to your plane and that forth from your plane its quality of consciousness is born back into this world of mine. Well, it follows, then, that all animals, all plants, die in my world to live in yours, and qualitatively to be reborn. Is this true?"

 

"But surely," Stephen replied. "And your only difficulty in grasping this thought will lie in the preconceived ideas you have of this world of mine. Naturally you can conceive of no form other than forms you have seen. I have a body, to be sure; and your body is a glimpse of mine. But my body is, to use St. Paul's word, a glorified body, a form beyond the reach of your ordinary perceptions, beyond your imagination.