And yet the fact does not disturb us at all. We know that we are the result of this experience we have come through; that our identity is the same with that of the infant, the school boy, the youth, the over-confident young man, the earnest, wiser one of middle life, the tranquil, saddened one of old age. Through it all the use of memory, being so largely physical, has been to link results together rather than incidents; to enable us to benefit by the past rather than to be able to remember each particular portion of it.

This is the surest memory - the knowledge that the crystallized results of what we have experienced are fully and completely expressed in what we are now. Are we prone to anger, and find it difficult to control fits of passion? Here is the memory of many a deed of violence done under the dominance of our lower nature long ago. Do we turn with horror away from injustice or extortion? Be assured we are remembering the time when we ourselves were the sufferers from similar unjust acts. And so on through all the most delicate intricacies of our being. We are the creation of our past; and the nature we have evolved is its memory. If we have gathered wisdom from the experiences of our lives, it is enough; in just what the experience consisted is of little moment. We may feel sure that under the guidance of the divine law of Karma no experience has touched or ever can touch us which we have not deserved in some capacity, either in our individual, our family, our racial, or our national relations with our fellow-men.

Even before death, if we live to be old, nature anticipates the process by which she prepares us for new experiences, and we become again as little children. Our life work is done. All the knowledge which we can assimilate in this incarnation has been acquired, and so we return to the devachanic condition of childhood; and the mystery of involution, or the assimilating of the net results of experience, begins because the time for it has come and death has temporarily passed us by.

Another objection made from a purely emotional standpoint is that reincarnation separates us forever from those we have loved in this life. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this, for exactly the opposite occurs. Reincarnation, in common with every other phenomenon in nature, proceeds under the law of karma, or cause and effect, and we ourselves set up the causes whose effects are our rebirth not only in regard to time, but also as to those with whom we will find ourselves associated. These causes are largely, if not wholly, mental, and originate in the acts, emotions, and thoughts of our daily life. They, therefore, relate us karmically to those with whom we are thus daily associated, who are the subjects or objects of such thoughts or acts, and in exact proportion to the intensity of our feeling toward each of these, be that feeling either of love or of hatred. We can not set up causes which will bind our future life to those whom we have never met, nor have even known of mentally. This would be an absurd view to take of the law.

We are, therefore, bound to those - and to those only - with whom we are most closely associated in either the bonds of love or hatred, for attraction and repulsion are but opposite poles or modes of motion of the same impersonal force, and are of equal strength. Therefore, the impersonal law of cause and effect will bring together those bound by bonds of hatred as surely as it will those related by ties of affection. This fact fully explains the otherwise inexplicable appearance of a single black sheep in an otherwise unblemished family, or those so-called "unnatural" hatreds between children and parents, or those which appear in any of the closely related ties of consanguinity.

The attraction thus set up between individuals by their associations and mental attitudes towards each other is as potent - and as patent - as that which binds atoms into the stable elements, so far beneath the mental plane. It is but another illustration of the unity of law upon all the planes of the Cosmos. So powerful is it that it can both draw souls to or from material existence, else its results would of necessity fail in uniting those karmically bound. We see its action in taking souls from the earth in those common cases where either the wife or husband quickly follows the other to the grave without apparent physiological reason. But more notable, because more opposed to the normal course of nature, are the numerous instances where a mother's death has been followed by so plain a loosening of its hold upon life by her young babe that even ignorant observers have recognized the fact that she was "drawing" it after her.

Of course, such cases are exceptions because out of the usual course of nature; but they are just those exceptions which prove the rule. For in the normal instances those associated would be likely to have subjective or devachanic lives of about the same duration. Therefore, if in a group of karmically associated souls one were drawn by karma and the closing of its subjective cycle to reincarnate, the center of attractive force thus transferred to the material plane would be amply powerful to draw to it others whose devachanic cycles were also closing; and the close union, as in marriage, of certain of these might easily set up a center of attraction sufficiently powerful to bring to a close the Devachan of any Ego whose karma demanded its association with such Egos thus incarnated. Were this not the case a Devachan extending over 1,500 years would eternally separate, as far as material associations are concerned, an Ego from one whose spiritual nature entitled it to but 1,200 years in the same state, however close the ties of affection might have been during life on earth.

As the length of life upon the earth is very greatly modified by association with others, so is Devachan subject to similar modifications. Racial or national karma may subject us to a death by war, pestilence, or famine which would not have been necessitated by our purely personal karma; and the sanitary conditions of communities, even, shorten or lengthen the lives of the units grouped in such karmic relations. Especially is this so in large cities. San Francisco, for instance, has a certain percentage of deaths due entirely to corrupt governments having permitted peculation and dishonest work in its sewer system. Scores of lives are cut short yearly as a direct karmic result of this community karma. On the other hand, scores and hundreds of lives are lengthened by wise sanitary measures - especially in times of pestilence or epidemics.

If life be thus subject to modification on the material plane, it is also subject to the same in Devachan, under the axiom that the action of any law must be universal. It is at least plain that there is nothing in the nature of Devachan to preclude the after association of individuals upon earth, but, on the contrary, that such associations are certain to continue so long as there is any attraction or repulsion between incarnated souls.

This - attraction and repulsion - is an infinitely wiser provision for human happiness than any merely physical ties of consanguinity. It ensures association so long as we desire it; it cuts us loose when we have become indifferent to any personality - thus grouping souls by their higher natures rather than upon a phys ical basis. Were the physical ties paramount, each child would demand an eternal association with its parents, they in turn with theirs, and so on back to some antediluvian ancestor, for whom the whole vast throng, except his immediate progeny, would feel the most profound indifference, as they also would for each other, except in a similar exceedingly limited relation. But soul attraction brings to each Ego its own; and as each parent, for instance, returns to incarnation attracting to it those children it really loved, these in turn, after paying their karmic debt, will attract their beloved, and so the links of human affection will remain forever unbroken until indifference or development in some new direction severs all old attractions.

A further objection to reincarnation, sometimes urged, is that it is unjust for us to suffer in this life the consequences of acts done in past ones which we have forgotten. To answer this it is only necessary to point out the absurdity of supposing that the mere forgetting of any act or crime absolves one from its consequences. Under this strange ethical view, it would be only necessary for a murderer to forget the crime he had committed to be relieved from all moral and legal responsibility. Could he not succeed in this himself it would only require that a hypnotizer should interpose, and the criminal thus made unconscious of his crime could be dragged off the very gallows itself. The law of cause and effect is impersonal, and, as far as we can conceive of consciousness, acts unconsciously. Often physical diseases are the result of causes set in action during the unconsciousness of sleep, yet the law inflicts the full penalty nevertheless. But the objection does not really deserve the recognition of an answer.

All possible objections to reincarnation must likewise disappear under the light of philosophy and logic, and it is only necessary that such objections be thus examined for the proof that this is an universal factor in nature and the method by means of which evolution proceeds to dawn upon the mind as clearly and convincingly as though one had set himself deliberately to prove its truth; for evolution and reincarnation are but aspects of the one eternal process in nature - infinite change.