How would you like to find out who have you been and who you have turned out to be now and what your current karmic conditions are? Some of you have been told you were royalty in past lives and run to psychics, clairvoyants, fortune-tellers and astrologers to gather information on your past-lives and some of you have astrologers chart your future. However, when predictive sciences are practiced with unawakened intuition the resulting analysis is inexact. It is not uncommon for these householders to waste two-thirds of their precious life-time in fruit-less activities, fraternizing or indulging in idle and frivolous pursuits. Only God-realized, liberated souls, if they choose, can recall the previous performances of the roles these souls played in previous incarnations.
It is utterly unwise to pry into your past-lives. Even if you could pierce the veil to see the acting roles you played in previous incarnations beware, without the partitioning no one would be able to deal with his or her continually shifting from one set of relations to another set of identities and its relationships with others and their place in the karmic cause-and-effect happenings spinning around him. There would be a conflict beyond measure of the dizzying past-lives with their interpersonal associations occurring between people splitting off into their own never ending previous experiences and existences. That’s why the hard-drive of our mental computer and its countless video taping has been wiped clean, thereby giving us a fresh start to prevent mental paralysis of our free will or unduly influencing our new character in its latest dramatic role.
Do you remember the nine months of you embryonic existence or the first five or six months of babyhood? Your memory is not the test of living before in a past life. Just because we can not remember our past lives does not mean we did not have them. This life as it is, is a gladiatorial boot camp, a penitentiary colony for spiritually retarded people who lack mental, physical and spiritual development. It is best we do not remember the hard, brutal experiences from the school of past incarnations. Why feel discouraged at the thought of dealing with all these again.
Why does only one out of four businessmen ever fully succeed? It makes no difference how thirsty one is if the capacity of his stomach holds only so much therefore the degree of success can only be measured by capability and degree of focus and concentration. It doesn’t make a bit of difference how ambitious one is. The typical person counts on inherited inborn mental ability, talents and fate given opportunities to fully succeed. This is the reason only one in four make it.
Now comes the question if there is any Divine justice in this. Is it true all karmic goals have to be earned? Why do we see people who lack ambition and never worked a day in their lives have a silver spoon arrayed with advantages and good luck? The answer is somewhere in a previous life they attained enormous success and from very birth were adorned with accomplishment. According to the law of cause and effect these souls were permeated with the consciousness of wealth or wisdom which attracted prosperity or knowledge. Advantage and opulence requires a circumstanced environment. Thousands of mentally superior minds who are not in an encouraging auspicious environment obviously are not in a karmic induced surroundings and they will have to labor hard for many lives to come before the rule of economic development allows them the status of wealth.
What is a person supposed to do if they want to seek happiness and prosperity? The spiritual master tells us it is in our own interest to make life as it should be, positive, calm and happy. It need not be a setting of troubling worries. If you are serious then you must lead a balanced life first acquiring satisfaction through the achievement of all flourishing wisdom. You will be able then to acquire health and prosperity automatically. Many people pray foolishly and illogically for wealth and possessions they could not have during their time of maturity and when prayers are not answered because of false reasoning their belief turns to doubt. When in doubt to believe in and to constantly pray is not enough. Are you willing to pay the price to acquire wealth and prosperity? Some people do think faith and prayers are enough to change their bad habits, past and present karma to become wealthy when their existing karmic circumstances make it utterly impossible.
The environmental world unduly influences us to useless material wants and bad habits, but unfortunately the world does not have to answer for it. Every one of us is held accountable for the poisonous harvest of our actions. The world says good-bye to you when it’s your last moments at death, leaving only you to answer to your conscience at final judgment for the effects you carried out under its evil influence. Man’s days are fraught with life’s terrible uncertainties and one never knows when an accident, disease, financial failure or other disaster may strike as fears, unhappiness, worries and discontent are all consequences from an existence by unrestrained wisdom. The way the physically deceased are dead the spiritually dead are just as dead and don’t know it. Spiritually dead people are to be more pitied than the physically dead.
Wake up, rouse yourself and say “I haven’t much time left in this short span of life, I have wandered away from my true self and the meaning of life. I must and I will find God. I am His child and I was sent here to be thrilled and entertained by His drama of this continued existence, not to be caught up in its net.” From the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda.
