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Updated: June 21, 2025
If he is steadfast through countless rebirths, the slow turning wheel will bear him higher and higher until he begins to ascend the successive planes, discovering in each plane for which he has fitted himself a new wealth and reality of existence, until at last he is lost in the Infinite Existence and his struggle is ended. Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong.
In Bombay, though it proudly calls itself "the Western Gate of India" the glow of Hindu funeral pyres, divided only by a long wall from the fashionable drive which sweeps along Back Bay from the city, still called the Fort, to Malabar Hill, serves to remind one any evening that he is in an oriental world still largely governed as ever by the doctrine of successive rebirths, the dead being merely reborn to fresh life, in some new form according to each one's merits or demerits, out of the flames that consume the body.
"In this sacred City no pain may disturb the air, therefore you must wait outside in the chill and the dark. Think better, Princess! Also, he must pass through many rebirths, because he beheld the face of Beauty unveiled and knew her not. And when he comes he will be weary and weak as a new-born child, and no more a great King." And the Princess smiled;
"'Vasudeva said, "touching the feet of that sage, the Brahmana asked him some questions that were exceedingly difficult to answer. That foremost of all righteous persons then discoursed on those duties that were referred to. ""Kasyapa said, 'How does the body dissolve away, and how is another acquired? How does one become emancipated after passing through a repeated round of painful rebirths?
In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul after a more or less prolonged series of rebirths, determined for better or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of Maya.
Only that man who meets with grief in consequence of his own misdeeds, slays numerous creatures for the purpose of warding off that grief. In consequence of such sacrifices, the performers have to attain to rebirths and have necessarily to perform innumerable acts on every side.
At one time, when the two young men had lived among the Samanas for about three years and had shared their exercises, some news, a rumour, a myth reached them after being retold many times: A man had appeared, Gotama by name, the exalted one, the Buddha, he had overcome the suffering of the world in himself and had halted the cycle of rebirths.
Not only is it true that man's rebirths are in strict accordance with the law of Attraction and Desire, but it is also true that after he attains a certain stage of spiritual unfoldment he enters into the conscious stage of rebirth, and thereafter he is reborn consciously and with full foreknowledge.
Passing on to the third view, namely, that the soul is one of countless others which emanated from the Source of Being æons ago, equal in power, opportunities, etc., and which individual soul has worked its way up to its present position through many rebirths and lives, in which it has gained many experiences and lessons, which determine its present condition, and which in turn will profit by the experiences and lessons of the present life by which the next stage of its life will be determined we find what many have considered to be the only logical and possible explanation of the problem of life's inequalities, providing there is an "answer" at all, and that there is any such thing as a "soul," and a loving, just God.
As we have seen, it is the condition of the man who has escaped from the series of rebirths, and will never be born again. It is attained even in this life by the Arahat, in whom all desire and restlessness have come to an end. On the other hand, it is said of such an one that he enters Nirvana when he dies, as if it were a state not of this life, but of the period beyond.
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