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.