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The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel

II. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE AND ITS SOLUTION

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But to Nicodemus He said unequivocally: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” and in the eleventh chapter of Matthew, the fourteenth verse, He said, speaking of John the Baptist: “_this __ is Elijah_,” in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew, the twelfth verse, He said: “Elijah has come already and they knew him not, but have done to him whatsoever they listed, ... then the disciples understood that he spoke to them of John the Baptist.”

Thus we maintain that the Doctrine of Rebirth offers the only solution to the problem of life which is in harmony with the laws of nature, which answers the ethical requirements of the case and permits us to love God without blinding our reason to the inequalities of life and the varying circumstances which give to a few the ease and comfort, the health and wealth, which are denied to the many.

The theory of Heredity advanced by Materialists applies only to the _form_, for as a carpenter uses material from a certain pile of lumber to build a house in which he afterwards lives, so does the spirit take the substance wherewith to build its house from the parents. The carpenter cannot build a house of hard wood from spruce lumber and the spirit also must build a body which is like those from which the material was taken, but the theory of Heredity does not apply upon the moral plane, for it is a notorious fact, that in the rogues galleries of America and Europe there is no case where both father and son are represented. Thus the sons of criminals, though they have the tendencies to crime, keep out of the clutches of the law. Neither will Heredity hold good upon the plane of the intellect, for many cases may be cited where a genius and an idiot spring from the same stock. The great Cuvier, whose brain was of about the same weight, as Daniel Webster’s, and whose intellect was as great, had five children who all died of paresis, the brother of Alexander the Great was an idiot, and thus we hold that another solution must be found to account for the facts of life.

The law of Rebirth coupled with its companion law, the law of Causation does that. When we die after one life, we return to earth later, under circumstances determined by the manner in which we lived before. The gambler is drawn to pool parlors and race tracks to associate with others of like taste, the musician is attracted to the concert halls and music studios, by congenial spirits, and the returning Ego also carries with it its likes and dislikes which cause it to seek parents among the class to which it belongs.

But then someone will point to cases where we find people of entirely opposite tastes living lives of torture, because grouped in the same family, and forced by circumstances to stay there contrary to their wills. But that does not vitiate the law in the slightest, in each life we contract certain obligations which cannot then be fulfilled. Perhaps we have run away from a duty such as the care of an invalid relative and have met death without coming to a realization of our mistake. That relative upon the other hand may have suffered severely from our neglect, and have stored up a bitterness against us before death terminates the suffering. Death and the subsequent removal to another environment does not pay our debts in this life, any more than the removal from the city where we now live to another place will pay the debts we have contracted prior to our removal. It is therefore quite possible that the two who have injured each other as described, may find themselves members of the same family. Then, whether they remember the past grudge or not, the old enmity will assert itself and cause them to hate anew until the consequent discomfort forces them to tolerate each other, and perhaps later they may learn to love where they hated.