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The interesting thing is that, after the second, the possibilities of recurrence greatly diminish. Before one comes into contact with C influence, they look unlimited, but after this contact the possibility of recurrence is reduced. If we understand that, we will be able to speak about recurrence with a certain amount of reason and profit; otherwise, if we take everything on the same plane, it will be just theoretical talk and quite useless. Q. Do you mean that after coming in contact with C influences the number of chances diminishes? A. Yes, because C influence cannot be wasted. B influences are practically unlimited; this means they are thrown into life and one can take or not take them; they do not diminish. But C influence is limited. Try to answer this question for yourselves and you will understand why the possibility of receiving C influence must be limited, because if one does not make use of it, what is the good of wasting it? Q. Does it mean if we worked in the right way our chances would increase? A. No, it does not mean that at all. It merely means that if we do not work in the right way we will lose the possibility of these chances recurring. Without this additional feature I have just mentioned it is quite useless to speak about recurrence even as a theory. In thinking about recurrence, it is useful to think about what is possible and what is impossible; what can happen and what cannot happen. Generally people either do not accept this idea, or do not know about it, or do not understand it, or else accept too much, put too much into it. So it is useful to think in what relation we stand to it, and for this we must have a basis from which to start. For instance, it refers to 'remembering'. People often ask about remembering past lives, but they forget that without the work of higher centres they cannot. Very often you hear people say, chiefly in connection with what they call 'reincarnation', that they can remember their lives in previous reincarnations, and they write books about what they were before. This is pure fantasy. You must understand that in our ordinary state we cannot remember past lives—there is nothing to remember with. In our mind and centres, it is all new. What may pass from one life to another is essence. So one can have only such vague sensations, instead of definite recollections, that it is hard to suppose that anyone can remember anything concrete. Only in the first years of life is it really possible, but then one generally does not notice this feeling, or if one does, it creates imagination. Q. What is the difference between the theory of reincarnation and the theory of recurrence? A. The idea of reincarnation is a kind of adaptation of the idea of recurrence to our ordinary understanding, because, as a theory, the idea
of recurrence is much more difficult for us—it needs quite a new understanding of time. Even educated people need a certain amount of mathematical knowledge to understand the idea of return. Recurrence is in eternity, but reincarnation is in time. It supposes that time exists apart from us and that we continue to exist in this time after death. For instance, in Buddhism they take it that a man dies and is immediately born again, so that one life follows another, because this is easier to understand for ordinary people. But we have no evidence of the existence of time beyond our life. Time is life for each person, and it includes in itself all time, so that when life ends, time ends. So reincarnation is a less scientific theory than recurrence—too much is taken for granted. Q. But where do all these lives take place? A. We do not speak about the place, but about recurrence. If you say that you remember that you lived in Rome, for instance, how can you find proof? It is impossible. So each theory can exist on different planes. The theory of recurrence can exist on a certain plane which requires a certain knowledge and a certain understanding, and then it can be distorted and brought down to lower and lower planes. This can happen with every theory and sometimes in the process it can even become its own opposite. But you must always remember that we cannot prove anything and cannot insist on any particular theory. Only, we must understand each theory within its own limits and its own cycle and see what is possible and what is impossible from the point of view of this theory. If you take a theory and proceed to add one thing and to take away another, that would be wrong. In each theory one must study what it includes, and nothing must be omitted. So if we find a theory that is philosophically possible, we can look for conditions in which it would cease to be a theory and would become a fact. Q. Am I wrong in assuming that you yourself are not convinced in the reality of the theory of eternal recurrence? A. I tried to explain that you cannot be convinced of these theories. If you think you can be convinced, it will be just belief. There are whole series of questions and problems about which all we can do is to form theories, without ever being really convinced that one theory is better than another. As a theory I would say that the theory of recurrence is better than the theory of reincarnation, but we have no real evidence as to whether it is nearer to facts or not. And we cannot have evidence because of our state of consciousness. The only possibility, from the point of view of work, is to hope that perhaps, if we change our state of consciousness, our possibilities of observation will increase. In our present state we can have nothing but theories about such things. We are limited by the state of our being, and the state of being of man 1, 2 and 3 is such that we cannot know these things for certain. Q. Did you say that one could not possibly remember a former life?
A. Yes. Only essence can remember, and since in ordinary man essence is unorganized and not separated from personality, we do not remember. At the same time, the fact that one person has one kind of essence and another another kind is one of the strongest arguments for pre-existence, because essence cannot be born out of nothing—it is too definite. But the system takes man only from birth to death. Q. Where does the part of us which recurs come from? A. It is you. When we speak about recurrence, we think about our recurrence. Where this part comes from we do not know, and we can spend our whole life on theoretical definitions, but it will not change anything or help our psychological understanding of the idea. I am now trying to establish certain principles which will give us a practical understanding of it. We could find many words, but words will not lead anywhere. Have you found the answer, why C influences cannot be wasted? Think about that. If you answer this question, you will answer many other questions. And this you do know—put two and two together. Q. Is it because if such a thing would be liable to recur, again and again you waste it? A. This is implied, but it is not the answer. Certainly, if it is wasted, and again wasted, what is the use? But there is something you do not see in all this, and yet it is the key to the whole thing. It is very simple, there is nothing mysterious. It is not a puzzle, it is merely a question of thinking. Try to think like this: take an ordinary school. A boy goes to school and every year begins to learn the same thing. He studies something for a whole year, then goes home and forgets everything, and has to learn the same thing all over again. Again he studies it for a whole year, and again goes home and forgets, and again comes back and learns the same thing. What will they say to him at school? This is why schools are not repeated, why there is no recurrence for schools. And this is what people want, they want to learn the same thing again. But next time you must be in a higher school. If you cannot go to a higher school there will be no other school on this level, because you have already passed it. Q. Would you meet a school through C influence? A. School means C influence. You meet the school through B influences. Q. You cannot go into a higher class unless you pass an examination? A. Quite right, but you can pass the examination and forget everything; it happens very often. Q. But, to a certain extent, you have learnt how to learn? A. Sometimes, and sometimes not. You learn how to learn and you learn how to forget. Q. It seems to me from what you have said that this C influence is transmutation, the power to transmute, and anything less than that is not C influence.
A. Quite right. You are very near, but you can also take C influence simply as a certain amount of knowledge. Q. Knowledge that can be used? A. No, that again is a definition. I said knowledge; definitions will not help. It is strange that you do not see it, that you do not catch what it means simply. Transmission of knowledge means C influence, it means a certain work, it does not happen by itself, it means somebody's work, and somebody's work cannot be wasted. If it brings results, it can be continued, but if it brings no result, then naturally it will stop. This explains why the possibility of recurrence must be limited. If one comes to a school and does not profit by being in the school, naturally one cannot come again and again to learn the same thing; one must make something of it. Try to understand it, because without understanding these principles it is impossible to speak about recurrence. All ordinary talks, based on mathematics or anything else, make it too uniform, and recurrence cannot be uniform. You remember we spoke about materiality of knowledge and about the fact that one has very little chance even to begin, because many favourable circumstances are necessary for that. But you must understand that when one begins to get a certain knowledge, chances become smaller and smaller, because if one does not use it, it will be more and more difficult to get, quite naturally. And the same thing applies to every day, every year, to all our life—this is what must be understood. The idea of recurrence is useful because it refers to this life. If we do not do something to-day, how can we expect to do it to-morrow? If we can do it to-day, we must; nobody can put it off till to-morrow, because to-morrow we could do something else. We always think we have time. Q. Does it mean that if we do not listen to what you say to-day, we will not hear it again? A. Or maybe you will be here, but I will not be here—how can you know? Q. Can we only make progress through you? A. No, you are quite free to find some other place—you are not bound at all. If you know somebody else with whom you can make progress, certainly you must use him. One must not lose any opportunity if one has an opportunity. Q. I meant—are you the only medium here? A. No, nobody can be the only one. If you know another way, there is another opportunity, but if you do not know of another opportunity, if you know nobody but me, then you must try to get it from me; if you know somebody else, you can get it from somebody else. Is it quite clear? Only remember one thing—it cannot be a theoretical study, we must learn in practice how to do the most important things for us. Q. Are opportunities always there, only we are too asleep to notice or use them?
A. Opportunities may be different: there are different degrees. If one has not come to the work, one has the opportunity to accumulate knowledge, material, tendencies. They may be not very strong, but they may all lead in the same direction, or they may lead in opposite directions. Then, in what we call 'work', which means influence C or direct knowledge, direct study, opportunities are different, and real opportunities begin only from the moment one uses them. Q. In the idea of recurrence things happen again. But do schools necessarily appear in the same places? Perhaps in my last recurrence this system never came to England? A. This is the difficulty about recurrence, because when people hear about it and begin to think, they think in the ordinary formatory, that is, logical way, or very often they think quite illogically, or worse. But even if they think logically, they have not enough material, they do not know enough to think about it. It is necessary to understand first of all that we are speaking about a theory, and secondly, that this theory must be sufficiently full—there must be sufficient material in it. When we think about recurrence, we think that everything repeats, and this is exactly what spoils our approach to it. The first thing to understand about recurrence is that it is not eternal. It sounds absurd, but actually it is so, because it is so different in different cases. Even if we take it theoretically, if we take purely people in mechanical life, even their lives change. Only certain people, in quite frozen conditions of life, have their lives repeating in exactly the same way, maybe for a long time. In other cases, even in ordinary mechanical life, things change. If people are not so definitely governed by circumstances, like great men who have to be great men again and nobody can do anything about it, there are variations, but again not for ever. Never think that anything is for ever. It is a very strange thing, but it seems as though people who have no possibilities, either owing to certain conditions, or to their own insufficient development, or to some pathological state, can have their lives repeating without any particular change, whereas in the case of people with theoretical possibility, their lives can reach certain points at which they either meet with some possibility of development or they begin to go down. It is either one or the other; they cannot go on remaining for ever in the same place, and from the moment they meet with some real possibility, they either recognize the possibility of doing something or they lose it and then go down. Just think about it and perhaps you will be able to formulate some questions. Q. Does the ability to recognize the possibilities depend on change of being, which can only be achieved after a long period of small efforts? A. There are two things we must understand about this. Things are in a different relationship to possibilities: some things, although they have not yet happened and although it may seem to us that they can happen in one
way or in another way, are in reality predestined. Nothing can be changed, because such big causes are moving these things that, although they have not yet happened, they can happen only in one way. In relation to some other things the repetition is not so strict. There are many gradations and, side by side with things that can happen only in one way, there may be other things, which are still to come, which can happen this way or that way. It is necessary to understand this as a principle, to understand why things are different and what is different about them. Take to-day. Certain things have to happen to-morrow because their causes lie in last year or in ten or twenty years ago. But if the cause of certain things that will happen to-morrow lies in to-day, then they can happen differently to-morrow if something is done differently to-day. So it is a question of the nature of the causes and of where they are. You can look at it like this: suppose you see things going on in exactly the same way for a long time—then you cannot expect a sudden change without some particular reason. Other things may be comparatively new—a certain tendency has just appeared and so it may easily disappear. But if the tendency has been going on in the same direction for a long time it is difficult to see a possibility of change. That is the only way we can discuss it, for we cannot know anything definite about these things. You must remember one principle in relation to this—things are not the same. If you say that some things can be changed and apply it to everything, you will be wrong, because things are never in the same relationship to the possibility of change. Q. May the possibility of variation in people's recurrences mean that people born in one recurrence might not be born in the next? A. This is possible only in some cases, but we cannot go into details of this kind. What I want you to understand definitely is that as long as people are quite mechanical, things can repeat and repeat almost indefinitely. But if people become more conscious, or if the possibility of becoming conscious appears, their time becomes limited. They cannot expect an unlimited number of recurrences if they have already begun to know something or to learn something. The more they learn, the shorter becomes their time. People always forget that there is only a very limited number of chances for everybody, so if one loses a possibility in one life, then next life one will lose it more easily. The closer one comes to the possibility of change, the smaller the number of chances becomes, and if one finds a chance and does not use it, one may lose it altogether. It is the same principle as that which applies to one life. You remember, it was said that in the work, in relation to one life, time is counted, and the more seriously people work, the more strictly is their time counted. If you want to work for two months and sleep for ten months, it is counted that you worked for twelve months, even though you actually worked for only two. But the requirements or conditions are for twelve months, and the more one works the more those requirements grow. If one works
very little, one may remain in the same relation to a certain idea for a year or two years; one may misunderstand something and not lose much through it because there is still a third year. But if a man has already begun to work in earnest he cannot have three years, because every day is an examination and he must pass one examination in order to come to another examination. That must be understood, and the same principle can be applied to recurrence. Q. Is it that if we are completely mechanical we must recur in exactly the same way, but if we are less mechanical, our recurrences are fewer? A. It is not exactly like that. As I said, there are many different categories of people. There are people whose lives repeat automatically in exactly the same way. Other people may have different small changes and modifications, all on the same level. Then a third category, to put it very roughly, may have some possibility in the sense that the changes that happen in their lives are not quite aimless, but are nearer and nearer to some B influence. Then the fourth category come nearer to the possibility of meeting a school. The thing to understand is that people are not equal in relation to these possibilities. And, of course, those who have already found some possibility and have discarded it, prove themselves incapable of development. Q. I still do not understand why time should be limited for anyone who has worked but not for one who has not? A. For one who has not begun to awake, time is not counted because it does not exist. Everything repeats, always the same thing, again and again. You can take it like this: knowledge is limited, but since such people do not take any knowledge, for them it is not limited. Then, as I said, you can draw a comparison with an ordinary school: it is not possible always to remain in the same class—one must either make progress or go. Certain demands are made, and if people do not fulfil these demands they may lose the possibility. So if one has begun to work, one must go on. Suppose someone begins to work and then fails. This shows his inability to work, and then what is the meaning of his existence? Try to think about it from this point of view. Q. Is everyone given access to one of the ways in some cycle or other? A. I do not know and we cannot know such things; we can speak only about ourselves. We have a chance, that is all we know, so we must think about ourselves. Q. The future in the work seems like walking on a tight-rope. Can one hope to attain another level of stability later? A. Every state has many different forms, and so has the state of sleep. There may be sleep with possibility of awakening, sleep with less possibility of awakening and sleep without any possibility of awakening. Q. To have memory of another recurrence is it necessary to change something in essence?
A. No, it is necessary to become conscious in this life. You have only this life. You can say to yourself: 'If I lived before, I do not remember it. This means that if I live again, again I will not remember.' If you become conscious in this life, you will remember, and you will remember as much as you remember now. If you do not remember yourself now, then next time again you will not remember yourself, so it will be the same. The possibility of change starts only with the possibility of beginning to remember yourself now. All other things are just words. Q. If personality dies with us, what effect can attempts to weaken it have in future recurrence? A. There is no need to be very dogmatic about it; when we speak about recurrence, we speak of 'something' that recurs, and this 'something' keeps in itself traces of all the created tendencies. If the tendency of weakening personality has been created, it will continue; and if the opposite tendency has been created, a tendency to strengthen personality, again it will continue. It is quite right that personality dies, but if this 'something' recurs, then the same causes will produce the same effects. If certain new tendencies have been created, they too will have their effect. So a man who showed a real love of sleep from childhood may fall asleep even earlier. Q. Then the only thing we can keep is the change, if any, that we make in essence? A. No, first you must make changes in personality. Q. But that will not last! A. It is the only thing we can do. Only very few people can work on essence. It is not exactly an advantage to the people who can, because working on essence is very difficult; but it may happen. Generally we work on personality, and it is the only work we can do. And if we really work it will bring us somewhere. Sometimes tendencies are in essence and sometimes in personality, but I would not formulate it as 'essence' and 'personality'. I would simply say we have to weaken certain tendencies and strengthen others, weaken mechanical tendencies and strengthen conscious tendencies. That is the only formulation possible; everything else would be out of place. Q. It seems to me that personality, physical body and appearance are too impermanent to recur. A. Yes, but they were all created by certain causes and, since causes will be the same, they will naturally produce the same effects. One is born in the same circumstances, the same house, from the same parents, and everything will grow the same. There may be some deviations, but in the end it comes to the same thing. Suppose one is born in a certain town and then one moves out of it for a time. Then, later, one comes back and finds oneself in the same situation as before, as though one had not been
away at all. This illustrates what I mean by those deviations. One always returns to the same path. Q. What is it that wants recurrence so much and yet fears it? A. That I don't know—it is material for your own study. Certainly, one prefers the idea of recurrence to the ordinary idea of death. At the same time one fears it because, if one is really sincere with oneself, one realizes that things repeat themselves in this life. If one finds oneself, again and again, in the same position, making the same mistakes, one realizes that to be born again will not help if one continues to do the same things now. A change can only be the result of effort; no circumstances can produce a change. This is why all ordinary beliefs in the change of external circumstances never lead anywhere: circumstances may change, but you will be the same unless you work. It is the same in recurrence. People's lives may appear completely changed from the point of view of external circumstances, but the result will be the same—the relation of essence to personality will remain. Real change can happen only as a result of school work, or if for several successive lives one only grows the magnetic centre and does not meet a school, then change will be in the growth of magnetic centre. Q. Do you believe that those who attain a sufficiently high state are not under the obligation of recurring? A. You go too far. Certain religions begin from the idea of trying to stop this wheel of life. But we cannot speak seriously about it, because, as I said, the idea of recurrence is only a theory, so how can we stop what we are not sure exists? If you want to stop a train, you must know that the train is moving. What would be the point of trying to stop it if you are not sure it is moving? Q. Is the date of one's death predetermined? A. I cannot say; there are different theories. I think it is safer to say that it is predetermined from one point of view, only so many things enter into it that one's time can be shortened or prolonged; so although it is predetermined, it is not an absolute predetermination. Or it may be better to say that it changes every moment, although it is predetermined. Every moment can bring new factors and make one's life longer or shorter. If nothing happens, then it is predetermined. Q. Does school-work affect the length of one's life? A. Again you expect too much. Maybe after several incarnations you may find means to prolong your life; but if you expect it at once, you expect too much. In some cases it may be true, so I think it must be different in different cases. Q. Does it mean that I am living the same life again? Was I reborn in 1915 and will I again be born in 1915? A. Always in 1915—that is the only thing that cannot change. And certainly we are bound to have lived before—we could not have come
out of nothing, only we do not remember. Even those who think they remember something, remember only as children. But in most cases they forget. The study of recurrence must begin with children's minds, particularly before they begin to talk. If people could remember this time, they would remember very interesting things. Unfortunately, when they begin to talk, they become real children and after six months or a year they usually forget. People very seldom remember what they thought before that, at a very early age. But psychologically it is a fact that in very early memories of childhood—and sometimes people remember things at the age of a few months—they already have a mentality, a certain understanding of people, places and things. How can we expect children that have been born so recently to have all this material? Our mentality grows quite slowly, but some children have a grown-up mind. They are not children at all; then later they become children. If they remember their mentality of early infancy, they see that it is the same mentality as grown-up people have. That is what is interesting. Q. Do you know why a child should remember its grown-up mentality and not its previous child's mentality? A. We have so little material to judge about it. I speak only about the way it can be studied. Suppose we try to remember our own, trying not to let imagination come in; then, if we find something, that would be material. In literature you find very little, because people do not understand how to study it. But in my own experience I met with some very interesting things. Also some people I knew had very interesting re collections of the first years of life, and they all had the same impression, that their mentality was not a child's mentality or a child's psychology. Do you see what I mean? They had a ready mind, with quite grown-up reactions and a way of looking at people and recognizing them, such as could not be formed in the course of six months of unconscious life. Q. Why should it disappear when a child learns to talk? A. The child begins to imitate other children and to do exactly what grown-up people expect of him. They expect him to be a stupid child and he becomes a stupid child. Q. How is it possible to know what a baby remembers? I thought that one was born with one's centres completely blank and that one remembered with centres? A. That is the strange thing. As I said, some people who do not differ much from other people have strange and quite definite recollections even of their first months. They think they saw people as grown-up people do, not as children. They do not make compound pictures from separate elements, they have quite definite impressions of houses, people and so on. Q. I still do not see how it is possible to remember a previous recurrence.
I thought that memory was dependent on the contents of centres which are in personality. How can personality remember recurrence? A. You cannot remember it if you do not remember yourself here, in this recurrence. We have lived before; many facts prove that. Why we do not remember is because we did not remember ourselves. The same is true in this life. If things are mechanical, we only remember that they happened; only with self-remembering can we remember details. Personality is always mixed with essence. Memory is in essence, not in personality, but personality can present it quite rightly if memory is sufficiently strong. Q. If we recur into the same circumstances, there seems very little opportunity of having something different at all in our life. A. In early life there is. We have a long life and in the course of it we can acquire something—knowledge, understanding—and this understanding can pass into essence. Then, if for the first years of our life we live in essence, this understanding may produce some impression on us, some recollections in essence. As a rule they disappear at a later age, but children sometimes have them for a fairly long time, till the age of eight or ten. Q. When I was about three or four I used to try and remember myself as a sort of game. A. It is quite possible; it may have remained. You may have tried to remember yourself in a previous life—I see nothing impossible in that. Q. In connection with the idea of recurrence, does it mean that if we make a bad mistake it goes on recurring? A. There may be different mistakes, but if there was something deliberate about this mistake, if you made it because you wished to make it, then most probably you will wish even more to make the same mistake again. Q. Do things like illnesses recur? A. They may or may not recur. This is connected with rather complicated things. It is necessary to divide illnesses, for they can belong to different categories. Some illnesses may affect essence, others not. Many contagious diseases open accumulators, so they may actually be useful. Then the accumulators may stay open or they may shut again. Such illnesses may play the role of shocks. They are accidental illnesses and they may repeat or not repeat. Then there are illnesses belonging to fate, constitutional illnesses. Q. I do not think I understand eternal recurrence. A. We speak about possibilities. This is a philosophical conversation; we have not enough material to speak even theoretically. You remember, to speak philosophically means to speak about possibilities. So, if there is recurrence, we speak about the way things could happen. Q. Is one then to consider the whole question as philosophical, or capable of verification? A. We cannot speak about verification. I think if some people find verification for themselves it will be very subjective. They will not be
able to transfer their realization to other people. Other people may or may not believe them, but it will not have the character of proof. But you can verify certain things about recurrence by observing things in this life. Q. What was the origin of the idea of recurrence? A. Psychologically, there will be one answer; mathematically, another answer; historically, a third answer. If you mean psychologically, I think it is the very persistent and very definite feeling that children sometimes have that 'it happened before'. For instance, they come to a new house or a new town and have a feeling that all this has been. Ordinary psychological explanations by a 'break in consciousness' as it is called and which we can describe much better as passing from one centre to another, are not sufficient, because they explain some cases but do not explain all cases. Q. Does it mean that the recurrence has occurred during the existence of that town? A. Yes, certainly. It is not the same line of time; it is parallel time. The idea of recurrence needs two dimensions of time. The need of three dimensions of time comes only with the idea of work. But the second dimension of time is really very elementary. There can be no doubt about its existence, particularly in modem mathematical and physical ideas. If we accept that the line of time is curved, then curvature has two dimensions, so there are two dimensions of time. Q. I do not understand rime being two-dimensional. A. Take a simple thing. You sail in a boat and you walk on deck while the boat goes along at the same rime. This is the second dimension of your movement. You have one movement—you walk yourself, and the second movement is the movement of the boat. Q. Then a spiral can lead us out of our present circle? A. I do not think we can speak about spirals from the point of view of the system. But if we do speak about them in relation to recurrence, then in ordinary recurrence there is no spiral at all, it is all on the same level. Recurrences may differ from one another in some details, one may be inclined one way and another more inclined another way— but it is only a small deviation and there is no spiral. The idea of spiral begins with escaping from constant repetition of the same things, or from the moment when something new is introduced. Q. Is the idea of eternal recurrence part of the system? A. No, the system can be understood without it, although later some things in the system will be easier to understand if you have some idea of recurrence. The system shows the way to develop but does not say what happens when we do. If we look at the question of survival after death from the point of view of time—only from the point of view of time—it is reasonable to suppose that man 1, 2, 3 and 4 has no life after death, that there is nothing permanent in him. He so lacks permanency that he cannot survive the shock of death. If he has something permanent, he