rtly the result of social and individual development
conditioned by weakness, ignorance and sin, if we recognize that the
present reaps what the past has sown, if we recognize that we suffer for
the faults of others and that no one of us may hope to climb far until
his neighbour climbs with him, if we recognize that pain and suffering
are disciplinary, illuminating, educative, and finally, if we recognize
that we do possess the power to take all the more difficult elements in
experience and subdue them to an increased wealth of personality, we
have really all the elements in hand for the solution of the problem of
pain and sorrow in terms of action and understanding, and we do not need
a series of reincarnations to help us out.

Reincarnation really explains, as it claims to explain, neither the
exceptional individual nor the apparently unmerited sufferings of the
individual, and it has beside inescapable difficulties of its own. It
has to parallel the course of human existence with a range of supernal
existence for which there is absolutely no proof; it has to numerically
equalize birth and death--and these are not equal in an increasing
terrestrial population--or else it has to assume, as it does of course,
on other planes a storehouse of souls from which to draw. And more than
that, it involves itself in a perfect tangle of heavenly bookkeeping.
Here is the best Mrs. Besant can do to explain the difficulties of
reincarnation. "We have seen that man during his passage to physical
death loses, one after the other, his various bodies.... These are all
disintegrated and their particles remixed with the materials of their
several planes.... At this stage, then, only the man himself is left,
the labourer who has brought his harvest home and has lived upon it till
it is all worked up into himself. The dawn of a new life begins."[69]

[Footnote 69: "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 202--passim.]

To condense, he now proceeds to build up for himself a new body for his
coming life on the lower mental level. "This again exactly represents
his desire nature, faithfully reproducing the qualities he evolved in
the past; ... thus the man stands fully equipped for his next
incarnation.... Meanwhile action external to himself is being taken to
provide him with a physical body suitable for the expression of his
qualities.... All this is done by certain mighty spiritual Intelligences
often spoken of as the lords of Karma because it is their fu