o true was this
that he was able to supply the "missing links" of the teaching, where
he had not access to the proper sources of information at the time, and
in each case he afterward found that he had stated the same correctly.
And this included many points of the Inner Teachings not generally
taught to the general public, but reserved for the few. Subsequent
contact with native Hindu teachers brought to light the fact that he had
already unraveled many tangled skeins of doctrine deemed possible only
to the "elect."

Many of these recollections of the past come as if they were memories of
something experienced in dreams, but sometimes after the loose end of
the thought is firmly grasped and mentally drawn out, other bits of
recollection will follow. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his diary in 1828:
"I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of
pre-existence, viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was said
for the first time; that the same topics had been discussed, and the
same persons had stated the same opinions on them." William Home, an
English writer, was instantly converted from materialism to a belief in
a spiritual existence by an incident that occurred to him in a part of
London utterly strange to him. He entered a waiting room, and to his
surprise everything seemed familiar to him. As he says: "I seemed to
recognize every object. I said to myself, what is this? I have never
been here before, and yet I have seen all this, and if so, there is a
very peculiar knot in that shutter." He then crossed the room, and
opened the shutter, and after examination he saw the identical peculiar
knot that he had felt sure was there. Pythagoras is said to have
distinctly remembered a number of his previous incarnations, and at one
time pointed out a shield in a Grecian temple as having been carried by
him in a previous incarnation at the siege of Troy. A well-known ancient
Hindu sage is said to have transcribed a lost sacred book of doctrine
from memory of its study in a previous life. Children often talk
strangely of former lives, which ideas, however, are generally
frightened out of them by reproof on the part of parents, and often
punishment for untruthfulness and romancing. As they grow older these
memories fade away.

People traveling in strange places often experience emotion when viewing
some particular scene, and memory seems to painfully struggle to bring
into the field of consciousness the former co