THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20623, 12 August 1932, Page 4

THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

REINCARNATION AND EVOLUTION.

Mr L. Rogers, veteran journalist and a leader of the Theosophical movement in America, spoke to a large audience on this subject at the Theosophical Hall last night. Contrasting the view held by the materialist- that everything, including consciousness, had emanated from eternally existing matter —with that ok the theosophist—that everything was a manifestation of an eternally-existing consciousness—ho pointed out that while we knew quite definitely that consciousness did create form, there was not a particle of evidence to show that matter ever created anything. It was unreasonable to suggest that "matter, the slave, had produced mind, the master." When, however, the more spiritual hypothesis was assumed, the phenomena of life became vory much more understandable. Taking as an analogy the rain-drop and the ocean, the lecturer indicated that man as an apparently individual consciousness-was actually an integral part of an infinite and immanent consciousness, sharing in its potential perfection (vnd engaged in an evolutionary process of bringing out, stage by stage, this latent perfection into actual manifestation. Hence the necessity for reincarnation, a process which was in entire conformity with all the other processes of Nature as they were understood by science to-day. He instanced the reiterated alternations of periods of activity and passivity, these recurring eycteß contributing to an evolutionary unfolding in all phenomena. Lives and deaths were merely days and nights experienced by man. And man as a consciousness, being an aspect of an infinite consciousness, was in essence indestructible. A life-time was simply a dav at a school, in which there were many classes, the man commencing his elemont'iry lessons as a primitive savage, and eventually graduating as a genius, a saint, or a 6age,