Saturday, December 18, 2010

A Reincarnation Perspective or How to Outrun Evoluti


And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 
(Joh 9:2-3)
In this passage, we learn that there are three causes of suffering we are born with: ancestral or gene karma, past life karma, and intentional suffering for the sake of others.  Unfortunately, most church doctrines deny or have nothing to say about reincarnation, even though, according to a 2003 Harris poll, 20% of Christians believe in reincarnation.
The Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
This is also true to an extent in the spiritual life.  God has mercifully arranged it so that we carry the essence of our learning from past lives and are not burdened with memories we can’t handle such as old betrayals, old prejudices, or painful memories forming fears or avoidances.  But Ann Ree acknowledges that if we are evolved enough, remembering past lives can be a tremendous help.  She says,
One who recovers the records of his former lives through his own direct experience has access to an unusual mental vitality garnered from the lessons learned in past lives.  As a rule, he would find it unnecessary to repeat mistakes of previous lives ... And he could evaluate the present life situations with an eternal perspective.
This eternal perspective is what I would like to talk about.
It is partly karma and partly mercy that we receive an almost fresh start each life.  Even memories of past successes, past loves, past friends can narrow our orbit if we have a tendency to stay only with things we are good at and stay only with people we are familiar with.  We would become clannish and enclosed if not pushed to widen our orbit.  Ann Ree told one member that she was an accomplished pianist in her last life.  This person told me that she had no desire whatsoever to play the piano in this life.  Evidently her soul was prompting her to strike out in new areas and expand her versatility.
For most of us, the past is perhaps an even greater determiner of our present than our supposed choice and free will.  The people we meet in life, our interests, our families, our jobs, our tastes, all rest on the still present energy of our past lives.
Solomon said, in Ecclesiastes (1:9-11)
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?  it hath been already of old time, which was before us.  There is no remembrance of former things.
We are free in our choices today only to the degree that we step out of habits we have built in this life and most probably long before this life.  Yet few people make the effort to understand themselves or the basic questions, “Who am I?  Where do I come from?  Where am I going?”
Perhaps it is something that happens with getting older, but I am finally pausing to consider just what I want to carry with me into my next life and just why I repeatedly fall the victim to angers, procrastination, and weakness.
Like many who had the grace to speak with Ann Ree, I learned of several past lives.  In one it was said that I would get so angry that I would fall to the ground in apoplexy, so completely unaware of my surroundings that I would actually be chewing at the straw on the ground while trying to speak.  In this life, I had a mother with an explosive anger.  While I loved her dearly, and could hardly deny I had a share in causing her frustration and anger, I would often rebel against the seeming injustice of the magnitude of her outbursts and seethed over these incidents for years afterwards.  Now I chalk it all up not only to Moon square Mars, but to my past deeds as well.
It helps to think that by being restrained in my emotional reaction, and giving reflection a chance, I am slowly undoing what I built over many lives.
A reincarnation perspective gives knowledge that we need lifetimes to learn certain lessons.  When we know that God understands our errors and the nature of the initiatory process, we can work on our problems with patience without getting discouraged and quitting.
One example very close to us as Niscienes is mastering the restless mind.  We have built the restless mind by many lives of following the senses, drowning out the voice of the soul.  It would be easy to say after meditating for weeks, months, or perhaps even years, “This doesn’t work.”  We could have angers that are so much of an automatic reflex and to which we just shrug and say, “That’s just the way I am.”  Ann Ree assures us that even a little effort if kept steady will slowly chip away at our problems.
There is a wonderful parable about patience, discouragement, and reincarnation in the Kurma Purana.
There was a great god-sage called Narada ... He travelled everywhere, and one day he was passing through a forest, and he saw a man who had been meditating until the white ants had built a huge mound round his body, so long had he been sitting in that position.  he said to Narada, “Where are you going?”  Narada replied, “I am going to heaven.” “Then ask the God of Heaven when he will be merciful to me, when I shall attain freedom.”  Further on Narada saw another man.  He was singing and dancing, and he said, “O Narada, where are you going?”  Narada said, “I am going to heaven.”  “Then ask when I shall attain freedom.”
So Narada went on.  In the course of time he came upon the old man and said, “God told me that you would attain freedom in four more births.” ... The man began to weep and wail, and said, “I have meditated until an ant-hill has been raised around me, and I have to endure four more births yet!”
Narada went to the other man.  “Did you ask about me?” “O yes.  Do you see this tamarind tree?  I have to tell you that as many leaves as there are on that tree, so many times you will be born, and then you will attain freedom.”  Then the man began to dance for joy, and said, “After so short a time I shall be free!”
The second part of my title, “How to outrun evolution,” addresses the subject of being proactive versus reactive.  Most of us are driven by the whip of necessity.  We react only when long deviation and habits eventually produce their karmic effects.  For example, smoking may take years to catch up with us, as may overeating, lack of exercise, or living off others.  At the last hour we find our motivation of avoiding pain.
The laws of evolvement see to it that we always have a baseline progression through pain.  But eventually we become quickened and run ahead of the processes of karma that rule the lesser evolved.  We develop will and volition, and discover the true source of happiness and move away from the lower and temporary pleasures that result in eventual pain.  The joy of a spiritual kind then moves us beyond the alternates of lower pleasure and pain.
Yogananda wrote,
To surmount maya was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets ... Those that cling to the cosmic illusion must accept its essential law of polarity: flow and ebb, rise and fall, day and night, pleasure and pain, good and evil, birth and death.  This cyclic pattern assumes a certain anguishing monotony, after man has gone through a few thousand human births; he begins to cast a hopeful eye beyond the compulsions of maya.
Great Teachers such as Ann Ree show us how to increase the pace of learning and shorten the process of trial and error through a higher willng.  Meditation, prayer, working for the benefit of others, marking and tracking, dream research, confession, fasting, giving, creation, movement ... all are priceless gifts of instruction yet so ill-appreciated and neglected by those wanting quick answers.
How do people who do not believe in reincarnation progress?
Ann Ree writes in Draughts of Remembrance,
Whether a person is aware or unaware of his past lives, his life is colored and stimulated by the draughts of remembrance occurring in regular cyclic intervals throughout each life.
While most of us have no direct conscious memory of past life events, we are aware of tendencies we are born with, and we all have reactions to persons, places, and things on meeting them for the first time in this life.  As far as I can tell from talking to people, most of them remember the first time they met a person who later became significant in their life - for good or ill.  One can attribute that to past life memories.  I vividly remember the time I met Ann Ree and many friends or enemies.  Visiting certain countries provoked immediate reactions.
In her talk titled, “Reincarnation Research,” Ann Ree said that when we open a past life, we have gone 2/3 of the way toward overcoming the samskaras (seed tendencies) of that life.  To go beyond compulsions, where karma pulls us along, into freedom, where we step ahead of the slow processes of the world into quickened self-directed action is the prompting of the soul.
It is a victory for a person that it even occurs to him to look honestly at himself and accept that there is eternal justice in seemingly unjust present circumstances.  Then comes the analysis of himself, and then his first steps toward his soul directives and away from karmic enslavements.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Humility

Christmas 2008


Though a familiar image after centuries of telling, it is still a wonder that the Saviour of the World was born and placed into a manger or fodder crib.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 
(Luk 2:4-7)
And so it was that the greatest being born into the world was also born into the most humble circumstance.  This very first image of the world’s redemption points to the first place that humility has in the spiritual life.  Ann Ree calls modesty, a related virtue, the first virtue, and the first requirement of the spiritual path.
It is also appropriate that the first moment we make our re-entry into this world, we are born helpless, innocent, and with, temporarily at least, a clean slate, not yet knowing or remembering fully how to walk or speak - and totally dependent on our mother.
As the tail and head of the serpent join to form the circle of completion, so do we after the end of our life journey return again to our humble beginnings to renew the first virtue.
It has long been recognized that persons who are proud and have bravado have some inner doubt, feeling of inadequacy, or shame they are covering up.  Otherwise they would have no need to build up such a false exterior.  They could simply be themselves.    Likewise, persons with a seeming inferiority complex have an unconscious cocksureness and fear of making it known.
It is the aim of all decent people to escape from a false duplicitous role, to not be the fugitive running away from truth and having continually to put on a pretense, to have people accept them as they are instead of always living a lie to coerce love and respect.  For honors gained from a false life are ephemeral no matter how fiercely we clutch at them.
So what, then, is the nature of that ego that subverts our genuine longings, that stares our honest assessments in the face, and yet continues in its own vain strivings to excel for the sake of self-aggrandizement so it can say, “Great self?”
In her talk, The Inward Path, Ann Ree gave a detailed analysis of ego cravings and its sabotaging methods.  I quote from part of the talk.
At some time or other, a fixed or one-pointed thought will place us into a circumstance or condition which we have obsessively held on to for all of our lives and possibly past lives ...
(now speaking of the initiate:)
And so when he finally reaches the time in his life to where he is ready to turn the inward path into that Self within and to learn of that Self, he must first encounter many selves because man has many aspects of the self and these are called the ego.
There is something about the outer nature that prevents us from understanding our own reflexes to life through the ego.  The ego is an accumulation of thoughts, an accumulation of habits, an accumulation of various aspects and attitudes which we have gathered up in a form of willing.
When I heard of this accumulation Ann Ree speaks of, I recalled a poem by Thoreau that somehow struck me years ago.  Rereading it, I think Thoreau, who may have been going through a period of mortification and demotion, must have been asking himself about these many selves and about his intuition of a greater and yet humbler Self, perhaps even reincarnation.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that ...
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
Given that most of us still identify with the ego, it is certain that we will be mortified so that the ego may take its place as a servant of the greater Self, that knows no pride and has no falsity.  Mortification is part of God’s culling that the overgrowth of vain strivings do not choke out the greater Self.
Mortification happens to great saints as well as the rest of us.  One difference is that the saint is accepting of mortification and even grateful, because he has gone through mortifications before to bring out the good he now manifests.
My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing ... A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted: But the rich, in that he is made low: because as the flower of the grass he shall pass away. 
(Jas 1:2-10)
And our dear Ann Ree wrote,
Souls entering the world who have been nurtured in the mortification-trials in previous lives accept discipline as a tonic and vitalizer for character and for spirit.  Only the strong have such acceptance of mortification.  The goal is purity, humility and modesty for all who would aspire to be in the Will of God.
Humility is no negation of ourselves - that is a false humility.  True humility acknowledges the greatness of God in us.  The “I” spoken of in Ann Ree’s beautiful mantrams is “I” we all aspire to be.  It is the “I” that God loves and sees throughout the ages.  It is what He Wills us to be, the future that is the unfolding of His Plan for us.  It is not the separate and singular “me” the ego desires to be, but the “I” that is the same in all human beings and can therefore appreciate all human beings low and high.
Love knows no arrogance or separateness, no repulsion toward any person.  Lahiri Mahasaya gave a wonderful example of a lesson he learned at the Kumba Mela festival,
As I wandered amidst the throng of monks and sadhus that had come from great distances to attend the holy festival, I noticed an ash-smeared ascetic who was holding a begging bowl.  The thought arose in my mind that the man was hypocritical, wearing the outward symbols of renunciation without a corresponding inward grace.
No sooner had I passed the ascetic than my astounded eye fell on Babaji.  He was kneeling in front of a matted-haired anchorite.
“Guruji!”  I hastened to his side.  “Sir, what are you doing here?”
“I am washing the feet of this renunciate, and then I shall clean his cooking utensils.”  Babaji smiled at me like a little child;  I knew he was intimating that he wanted me to criticize no one, but to see the Lord as residing equally in all body-temples, whether of superior or inferior men.
The great guru added, ‘By serving wise and ignorant sadhus, I am learning the greatest of virtues, pleasing to God above all others - humility.”
Our Lord was the greatest example of humility ever.  He did not come expecting to be treated well, nor to avoid any of the human indignities we are subjected to in this world.  He came, like all of us, totally dependent on His parents, needing his mother’s milk, his father’s providence, and the care and protection of others.  He was later subject to derision, false accusations, and even a lack of appreciation for some of the healings He manifested.  With His power, He could have avoided all of these, but chose to teach us through example.  Surely this is a great lesson for us to set aside our desire for rewards, approval, or appearance, and only to work for the sake of the good itself.
I once heard an aged black man interviewed about his grandfather who was a slave imported from Africa.  He recalled hearing that when the slaves heard of a Saviour who was subjected to whippings, torture, and derision, they listened in wonder.  Never before had they heard of a Saviour who was in as deplorable a condition as themselves.  This was why Christian churches were so prominent in the black community.
Although humility is the queen of the virtues, a teacher understands the powerful forces of the ego, its insecurities, fears, and pride.  Our dear Ann Ree knew that we came with pride, a desire for praise, and perhaps an overestimation of our competence, but she did not condemn.  If on rare occasion she gave a demotion to our egos it was with no joy and not to humiliate us, but to defeat the ego’s falsities for the elevation of the soul.
Jung related a story about a student who came to a rabbi and asked, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God.  Why don’t they any more?”  The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.”  Jung’s commentary: “One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.”
We must stand under to understand and find, that in the darkest time of the year, the light of the world is born.