RUDYARD KIPLING

RUDYARD KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling was a great writer of the 19th and 20th centuries. His stories have been made into Hollywood movies. He was well-traveled but lived in India mostly, and in England and some time in New England. He did not like America in the early 1900's although I think he married an American Caucasian woman. He lived in Vermont but left after a while and never came back to North America again, preferring to live in India. The point of this passage is that Kipling is a reincarnationist; he believed in reincarnation. He borrowed his faith from Christian and Hindu beliefs in a mixture, believing in Christian principles and the New Covenant, on the one hand, but adopting influences from Hindu faith and melding Christianity with Hinduism together. Among Kipling‘s collected works there is at least one short story he wrote that addresses reincarnation directly. The story is about a sort of analyst who has a client that goes in to semi-conscious spells in which he vividly recalls past historical events in the role as various protagonists or witnesses to history. And then the client recovers from the spell and cannot recall anything that transpired and has no particular historical knowledge. It happens over the course of weeks or months while the analyst is visiting from far away in to London. The client is just an ordinary office clerk in his 20's who is not in any way particularly distinguished. Kipling writes, "the door is shut" to describe this experience. And he means that in moving from death to rebirth there is a "blackout" period in the cyclical transformation at which all memories are evidently wiped out before beginning again. And the analyst's patient was a very rare case of one exhibiting limited access to the past lives. That otherwise the door is shut to the past and we begin anew with a blank slate. And this is how Kipling came to see things with life and the story describes his belief system about the cyclicity of life with a blackout period between lives.