On reincarnation and personal growth
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I've read in several places (AC's works) that the degrees of the A.'.A.'. may take one or more entire lifetimes to complete; I've also seen references to an "individual" making "progress" from lifetime to lifetime, etc. Finally, I read somewhere (was it your book, Jim?) that the Exempt Adept was likely at least a Minor Adept in a previous life.
My point is: what exactly is reincarnating from life to life? If an Exempt Adept was a Minor Adept in a previous life, what exactly does that mean? The Adept's HGA is above the degree system anyway (or is an Ipsissimus), right? So it can't be the HGA that is a Minor Adept in one life and an Exempt Adept in another. If everything that is below the Abyss dies when the body dies, and the Supernals are eternal, what exactly is "making progress" from life to life in the way AC seems to reference but not explain? I do remember AC stating something like having experiences makes something "more than itself," but I don't really understand what he means.
I guess I'm just looking for "the typical" answer. I'm rather confused.
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@Ash said
"My point is: what exactly is reincarnating from life to life?"
As best I can tell, it's the Briatic component of a being. Observation shows that it's at least higher than Yetziratic, and if it were Atziluthic then it would be close to the level of the indistinguishable.
Identiftying it as Briatic also overlaps nicely with some other traditions that use quite different language and thinking about seemingly comparable phenomena. For example, in Buddhist language we could say that the skandas distinguish a Briatic manifestation.
"If an Exempt Adept was a Minor Adept in a previous life, what exactly does that mean? The Adept's HGA is above the degree system anyway (or is an Ipsissimus), right? So it can't be the HGA that is a Minor Adept in one life and an Exempt Adept in another."
Exactly.
"If everything that is below the Abyss dies when the body dies..."
Where did you get that idea? I don't think it's true at all.
The physical body may have found its continued existence through sexual reproduction. The Yetziratic aspect may survive through persistent astral phenomena, cast off shells, thoughts and feelings that may survive in someone's creations and be able to be reanimated in others. The Briatic aspect exists "simultaneously across time." Etc.
"...what exactly is "making progress" from life to life in the way AC seems to reference but not explain?"
The Yechidah (Haditness) is in continual motion and acquiring experience. (Crowley develops that very well in many places.) But the first layers denser than that have persistence across seemingly immeasurable periods of time and "learn lessons" (to use the casual way of talking about it) across that physical time. -
Well done! The question of "what exactly gets reincarnated" is too often swept under the carpet. At different times the Egyptians thought that there were four or seven elements to a human, of which only one got re-incarnated - none of them including memory or personality. Indian beliefs are similar.
In the west we have have a very large concept of the Self, in India it is tiny. People think that reincarnation means that all of them (except the body) gets reincarnated - so we can access "our" previous memories via occult techniques.
I'm not saying that the following is universally true, but from experience:
Forget who you were and what you were. First be what you are, and then become more, and let the future take care of itself.
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Sethur, your explanation is totally opposed to my understanding of the nature of incarnation and the Great Return. I would be interested to know your Egyptian and Indian sources that state memory is lost upon the point of death. How does that reconcile with the notion of the akashic record? Indeed if memory was lost, I imagine the reincarnation cycle would be far more unstable, random and less mechanical.
I start from the premise that being born causes a wiping of one’s memory. It’s not permanent amnesia and memories of previous lifetimes can be recovered through self-work. But noting how an intense dream fades from consciousness within 5 minutes of waking may given an inkling of how the bardo wipes memories of prior existences (in any case, note that Hypnos and Thanatos belong to the same family of Nix).
If you carefully study Books of the Dead (Egyptian, Tibetan etc) they are, in fact, intended to awaken a forgotten memory within the just-deceased soul to guide them on their journey. In the case of the Egyptians, it lies in recovering the already-justified Osiri-fragment within themselves, to commence the journey to the Western Lands. On the other hand I can believe the historically-derived personality is discarded upon death (or as Jim points out, it becomes a Yetziratic shell). Otherwise my research points to the opposite conclusion, that the post-mortem state is a gradually remembering of what was forgotten through the event of birth. To put it precisely, the Egyptian mortuary formulas contain a dual-process, one aimed at shedding the just-deceased personality and the other aimed at integration of the parts of the self and recovering something forgotten through the event of birth.