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Martinus answers

About reincarnation and immortality - the principle of the cycle


Question
What arguments are there for reincarnation as a scientific fact?

Answer
Since one by the term “reincarnation” understands the living being's existence through a continuous chain of physical earthly lives, in which each of these lives constitutes merely a single link, a logical explanation of a realisation of this acceptable to the intelligence could be manifested only through an examination of whether there is a law or a basic principle in existence that can provide grounds for this, the individual's continuous chain of lives or rebirth. We must first look at such an earthly life. We then see that it can be divided into four known stages or epochs: childhood, youth, maturity and old age. A closer observation of these four stages shows that these together constitute a fundamental basic principle that recurs in all creation, in absolutely everything that comes under the terms movement, substance or material. It is thus not merely in the living being's physical life that this basic principle is present. It is so overwhelmingly proliferated and present in all other circumstances of life, indeed, in everything that can at all be experienced that the developed researcher cannot possibly deny it as the very basic principle in life's structure for creating and experiencing. In addition to the fact that this basic principle regulates and forms our physical earthly life in the above-mentioned four epochs, it also, in principle, forms all other manifestations in the same four epochs. It is this principle that gives rise to the fact that we see the day divided into midnight, morning, noon and evening, and the year into winter, spring, summer and autumn. These epochs form a kind of whole in which they each constitute a locality. When such a whole with its four epochs has passed, it repeats itself, and so on continuously. It is this repetition that marks time in the form of days, years and earthly lives.

But it is, as previously mentioned, not only in the day, the year and the earthly life that we see this principle of repetition or of cycles revealed. We are witness to the fact that water, for example, is by turns a puddle of sewage, runs through the layers of soil and here becomes filtered once more, becomes crystal-clear drinking water, becomes the fresh air we breathe, indeed contributes to creating the blue sky as well as the red glow of sunrise and sunset in order again to become rain, a pool of sewage and again to become the pure air and sunlit sky, and so on continuously.

Are not all the various phases of substances likewise to be divided into the four interchangeable stages in Nature's great cycle, which we term the solid, the liquid, the gaseous and the ray-formed? Does one believe that there is any substance that does not pass through these stages? Nature is thus so abundantly filled with or penetrated by the principle of cycles or of repetition that no manifestation can take place without being a detail or a link in a cycle. This holds true in the microcosmos and macrocosmos as well as in the mesocosmos. We understand therefore that we are surrounded by cycles or manifestations of repetition of dimensions so huge that a mere single detail in these constitutes a space of time or a lifetime in relation to which the existence of our own present earthly life can only be regarded as an imperceptible fraction of a second. Equally there are of course cycles or manifestations of repetition of such imperceptible smallness that our own three score years and ten in relation to this must be regarded as an eternity. We become thus here witness to the fact that the universe's entire release of energy or process of creation is organised and controlled by an eternal principle of repetition and cycles making life or existence and ocean of manifestations of repetition or cycles. Of these cycles the ones we know best are of course those that are shorter than our own cycle, that is, our present earthly life. We are thus in a position entirely directly, with our physical senses, to follow, among other cycles, the day cycle and the year cycle, and here document that these repeat themselves in continuous succession, and that every single day and every single year is a link in a chain of repetitions. With this we have reached the fixed point on which logical grounds for the immortality of the living being can be affirmed. When all the cycles that we, with our physical earthly life, are able to outlive and experience with a one-hundred-per-cent perfect faculty to perceive, show themselves for us as merely a link in a chain of repetitions, why should the same not be the case for all the cycles that stretch further than the existence of our present earthly life, cycles that we cannot therefore take in directly physically? Since our present physical earthly life can likewise with one-hundred-per-cent certainty be perceived as a cycle, why should this cycle, which expresses the existence of a living being, deviate from the rule and not be a link in a chain of repetitions? The entire universe's special energy structure or law of cycles thus confirms immortality and makes reincarnation the highest intellectual realisation for the as-yet uninitiated being, who has access to cosmic enlightenment only by theoretical means.

First published in Contact Letter no. 9/1950
Translation: Mary McGovern, 1990
Published in the English edition of Kosmos no 2/1990

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