Chapter 25The Psychic Being and the Progression from · Unimportance of Past-Life Experience in Yoga

and change. But these formations [the vital fragments of a dead person] are different, they are things that do not leave the earth and do not possess but simply attach themselves to some human and therefore does not object to or resist their inclusion.

* The fragments [of a dead person] are not of the inner being (who goes on his way to the psychic world) but of his vital sheath which falls away after death. These can join for birth the vital of some other Jiva who is being born or they can be used by a vital being to enter a body in process of birth and partly possess it for the satisfaction of its propensities. The junction can also take place after birth.

There is a vital connection generally — the psychic is comparatively rare. It is something in past lives usually that determines these connections in this one, but the connection in this life is seldom the same as that of the past which determined it.

As far as I know, the births follow usually one line [of sex] or the other and do not alternate — that, I think, is the Indian tradition also, though there are purposeful exceptions like Shikhandi’s. If there is a change of sex, it is only part of the being that associates itself with the change, not the central being.

* Not sex exactly [is present in the psychic being], but what might be called the masculine and feminine principle. It is a difficult question [whether a man can be reborn as a woman or a woman as a man]. There are certain lines the reincarnation follows and so far as my experience goes and general experience goes, one follows usually a single line. But the alteration of sex cannot