(J) Desire for other forms of earthly experience can only be
extinguished by undergoing them. It is obvious that any one of
us, if now translated to the unseen world, would feel regret that
he had not tasted existence in some other situation or
surroundings. He would wish to have known what it was to possess
rank or wealth or beauty, or to live in a different race or
climate, or to see more of the world and society. No spiritual
ascent could progress while earthly longings were dragging back
the soul, and so it frees itself from them by successively
securing and dropping them. When the round of such knowledge has
been traversed, regret for ignorance has died out.

(g) Reincarnations give scope for exact justice to every man.
True awards must be given largely on the plane whereon they have
been incurred, else their nature is changed, their effects are
impaired, and their collateral bearings lost. Physical outrage
has to be checked by the infliction of physical pain, and not
merely by the arousing of internal regret. Honest lives find
appropriate consequence in visible honor. But one career is too
short for the precise balancing of accounts, and many are needed
that every good or evil done in each may be requited on the earth
where it took place.

(h) Reincarnations secure variety and copiousness to the
discipline we all require. Very much of this discipline comes
through the senses, through the conditions of physical life, and
through psycho-physiological processes -- all of which would be
absent from a postmortem state. Considered as training or as
penal infliction for wrong done, a repeated return to earth is
needful for fullness of discipline.

(i) Reincarnations ensure a continuous advance in the successive
races of men. If each new-born child was a new soul-creation,
there would be, except through heredity, no general human
advance. But if such child is the flower of many incarnations,
he expresses an achieved past as well as a possible future. The
tide of life thus rises to greater heights, each wave mounting
higher upon the shore. The grand evolution of richer types
exacts profusion of earth-existences for its success.

These points illustrate the universal maxim that "Nature does
nothing by leaps." She does not, in this case, introduce into a
region of spirit and spiritual life a being who has known little
else than matter and material life, with small comprehension even
of that. To do so would be analogous to transferring suddenly a
ploughboy into a company of metaphysicians. The pursuit of any
topic implies some preliminary acquaintance with its nature,
aims, and mental requirements; and the more elevated the topic,
the more copious the preparation for it.

It is inevitable that a being who has before him an eternity of
progress through zones of knowledge and spiritual experience ever
nearing the central Sun should be fitted for it through long
acquisition of the faculties which alone can deal with it. Their
delicacy, their vigor, their penetrativeness, and their
unlikeness to those called for on the material plane show the
contrast of the earth-life to the spirit-life. And they show,
too, the inconceivability of a sudden transition from one to the
other, of a policy unknown in any other department of Nature's
workings, of a break in the law of uplifting through Evolution.
A man, before he can become a "god", must first become a perfect
man; and he can become a perfect man neither in seventy years of
life on earth, nor in any number of years of life in which human
conditions are absent.

The production of a pure, rich, ethereal nature through a long
course of spiritualizing influence during material surroundings
is illustrated in agriculture by the cotton plant. When the time
arrives that it can bear, the various vitalities of sun and air
and ground and stalk culminate in a bud which bursts apart and
liberates the ball within. That white, fleecy, delicate mass is
the outcome of years of adhesion to the soil. But the sunlight
and the rain from heaven have transformed heavy particles into
the light fabric of the boll. And so man, long rooted in the
clay, is bathed with influences from above, which as they
gradually pervade and elevate him, transmute every grosser
element to its spiritual equivalent, purge and purify and ennoble
him, and when the evolutionary process is complete, remove the
last envelope from the perfected soul and leave it free to pass
forever from its union with the material.

It is abundantly true that "except a man be born again he cannot
see the kingdom of God." Rebirth and re-life must go on until
their purposes are accomplished. If, indeed, we were mere
victims of an evolutionary law, helpless atoms on which the
machinery of Nature pitilessly played, the prospect of a
succession of incarnations, no one of which gave satisfaction,
might drive to mad despair.

Theosophy thrusts on us no such cheerless exposition. It shows
that reincarnations are the law for man because they are the
condition of his progress, which is also a law, but tells him
that he may mould them and better them and lessen them. He
cannot rid himself of the machinery, but neither should he wish
to.

Endowed with the power to guide it for the best, prompted with
the motive to use that power, he may harmonize both his
aspirations and his efforts with the system that expresses the
infinite wisdom of the Supreme, and through the journey from the
temporal to the eternal tread the way with steady feet, braced
with the consciousness that he is one of an innumerable
multitude, and with the certainty that he and they alike, if they
so will it, may attain finally to that sphere where birth and
death are but memories of the past.

__________________
The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.
- Jack Handy