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? A warning to those who want to retrace their past lives out of curiosity. Some of you who may have seen fragments of their past lives in dreams seek understanding. The past is veiled in complete mystery and secrecy for a reason. You may have amassed a mountain of bad karma from past indiscretions and knowing this could paralyze your willpower with despair. The past is kept from you for other reasons as well mainly to keep you free from past attachments to previous mates, parents, friends and enemies. However only a true master can see our past lives in detail but they will never reveal them to you unless they have an inner prompting from God and only for a good reason.
Think of the sorrows and troubles you have had in this life and now think of your many past lives. Do you think for one moment that you have not had similarly painful or worse experiences in past lives? Who would want to remember many troubled past experiences from the time they were created? No one. To remember would so discourage and depress you that you would have no will or strength to keep going. for example, imagine in your last life you died of cancer. What good would it do to remember the suffering now? You could become paralyzed with fear that might produce the same condition in this life. Suppose you committed murder in a past life you would worry the rest of your life thinking you may be murdered yourself and a hundred other what if’s.
I do not know anyone who would want to be haunted from the past to remember unpleasant or evil things. This is the reason nature obscures our memory with amnesia from lifetime to lifetime. On the other hand, if you were wonderful in your last incarnation, you might want to remember. That is why people run to physics, clairvoyants, or fortune tellers to feel better and be flattered. They want to be told they were special or famous. 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 un-awakened 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 true that some psychics or hypnotists may be able to see glimpses of past lives or even regress you under hypnotherapy. This is not advisable to do and could be dangerous and never let oneself be fooled or open to messages from so called mediums or Ouija boards coming from disincarnate souls which is an ideal opportunity for possession from lower forms of tramp spirits seeking experience and expression in human transports.
Consider, when someone dies and they are reborn as a neighbor to his prior home, his previous dearly loved family would look and treat him as a stranger who moved in next door. These are the lessons and mysterious workings of reincarnation. You are binding your soul with Samskaras. What does that really mean? Any deep-seated desires in earthly life linked with relationships, race or country are bonds that leave traces in your subconscious mind that bind you to come back to this world in your next incarnation with specific tendencies toward that race or country and you will be born in a family within that country.
A deeper meaning is family’s are imposed upon us, but Gods family is chosen according to our own souls discretion. Who is my father, mother, brother, sister, but who loves God? Our human relationships unless spiritual are forgotten in future and become meaningless. Our divine relationship with our families or divine families become immortal. All of us are guests of this world, but you have caused yourself to be an unsuitable guest by taken possession of a tiny chunk of it as you very own. This is my house, my children, my husband and my wife. But the instant your body drops, your money, your home, your family, and everything else disappear! Why should you wait? Learn this lesson about attachment before death comes.
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.”
Why should any of us be interested in reincarnation?
Don’t you think that a single lifetime is enough to be
concerned about? To think we only live once is good in one sense, and if it be
true, we must live every hour beautifully and splendidly.
How can you know if something is true without direct
perception? Comparatively speaking if we are born only once why do we observe
in nature a heartbreaking and iconoclastic process. We see babies die after a
short time or are stillborn totally deprived of an opportunity to enjoy life.
Heinous crimes are committed by villainous souls that cause afflictions to
their fellow human beings and invisible virulent microorganisms silently move
around our environment lurking like ravenous insects causing illness, injury,
the terrible pain of disease and premature death. Bacteria, parasites,
pathogens, plagues and viruses threaten to clean out the harvest of human
beings.
Plants and animals with no karma or free choice of their own
are infested and infected by countless diseases. Death by famine, floods and
cataclysms where tens of millions of people are destroyed it seems impossible
that bad karma could have caused this many sufferings and for this many to be
wiped out at one time. There is no guarantee with life.
Look what happened in the past with Detroit when every year new car models came out, there was always some that came with mechanical defects which we call lemons. Is life this way as well that somehow in the course of life some souls are, by accident, born with strong minds and bodies and some with deficient brains and feeble bodies? Are we essentially just factory assembled with no control over what comes to pass? If this is just the beginning of the end then you can say it is a horrible unfairness and this is nothing but God’s zoo if He intentionally made specimens that have poor mentality and some have amazing talent or are good looking or beautiful while others are born malformed. If that is the case, there is no justice and no use for religion.
Some Say I’m Never Coming Back To This Earth Plane
We hear people say that. That’s what they think. Even the
spiritually advanced must come back here if they have any attachments. Desires,
attachments, likes and dislikes will bind you to this creation. You love things
that feel and taste good but if you don’t control your five senses, they will
make you explore the very things that are not good for you creating habits and
attachments. Do you constantly fight with yourself when you want to indulge in
something that is bad for you? Strength of will and reason has been given to us,
but few use it.
Do you think this world will be responsible for your actions
or have your back when you are in trouble or overindulge? Don’t give all your
energy and time to this world and earthly pursuits. Close your eyes and stop
viewing the little puppet-show of this world and dive behind the toy show of
inner darkness with a deeper effort to meditate. Your primary responsibility is
to please God first, not this world or those in it. The hardest things to get
rid of are the things you think you cannot do without. Can you pass that kind
of test? You can classify yourself and measure your level of detachment.
There are people who refuse to let themselves be swung back and forth by the pendulum of emotion and moods of likes and dislikes. It is very difficult for those who allow themselves to be swung backward and forward with these emotions to understand the steadfastness of those who have the state of mental poise that stay in the middle and are in this world but not of it. What does that mean? You do your part in this creation as more of an observer and are less affected by it. All the spiritually advanced do exactly that. Start by doing this a little at a time and you will feel better handling disappointments. From the SRF teachings of Yogananda.
