Esoteric Buddhism

the principle of life from the original first cause of the Cosmos, we find the soul as an entity emerging from the animal kingdom and passing into the earliest human forms, without /being at that time ripe for the higher intellectual life with which the present state of humanity renders us familiar. But through successive incarnations in forms whose physical improvement, under the Darwinian law of evolution, is constantly fitting them to be its habitations at each return to objective life, it gradually gathers that enormous range of experience which is summed up in its higher development. In the intervals between its physical incarnations, it prolongs and works out, and finally exhausts or transmutes into so much abstract development, the personal experiences of each life. This is the clue to that apparent difficulty which besets the cruder form of the theory of re-incarnation, which independent speculation has sometimes thrown out. Each man is unconscious of having led previous lives, therefore he contends that subsequent lives can afford him no compensations for this one. He overlooks the enormous importance of the intervening spiritual condition, in which he by no means forgets the personal adventures and emotions he has just passed through, and in which he distills them into so much cosmic