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 “Do you mean,” I asked, “that a man would be reborn as a woman, and a woman as a man?”

“Yes,” he replied, “because desire is creative, and the desire of either sex is towards the other.”

“And how many men,” I said, “would want to be reborn as women?”

“Probably very few,” he answered. “But the doctrine that desire is creative does not imply that the individual longing creates its own satisfaction,—quite the contrary. The true teaching is that the result of every selfish wish is in the nature of a penalty, and that what the wish creates must prove—to higher knowledge at least—the folly of wishing.”

“There you are right,” I said; “but I do not yet understand your theory.”

“Well,” he continued, “if the physical conditions of human rebirth are all determined by the karma of the will relating to physical conditions, then sex would be determined by the will in relation to sex. Now the will of either sex is towards the other. Above all things else, excepting life, man desires woman, and woman man. Each individual, moreover, independently of any personal relation, feels perpetually, you say, the influence of some inborn feminine or