Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual into materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to stimulation, the least.
Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in materiality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of incarnation. When this occurs en masse there transpires that hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep lasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death—in the interval between one life and the next—the specific memories of the personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This center of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly—perhaps retributively—bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.