Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Understanding, Accepting and Overcoming the Reincarnation Cycle

Understanding, Accepting and Overcoming the Reincarnation Cycle



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During my research into the nature of reality and the meaning of life, there was one puzzle piece that kept arising - and harshly conflicting with my Western cultural upbringing - but eventually I had to face it head-on. That puzzle piece was the subject of reincarnation and how it fits into the development of the (seemingly human) spirit through a cycle of human lives. It seemed reincarnation cleanly answered so many 'why' and 'how' questions that I had, but still I did not want to accept the validity of the concept of reincarnation. First, because of that mental block I had from my Western cultural upbringing and its heavy influence from (recent interpretations of) the Christian religion. And second, because I did not want to experience the pain of humanity again; thus, in my stubborn mindset if I did not believe it was true then maybe it wouldn't be. That's one lure of modern Western religious teachings: life sucks but you (supposedly) only have to experience it once.
Let's face it, the human experience is fraught with trial, challenges and pain, but as it turns out, this is by design - the grand design. Getting through childhood can be tough; then young adulthood has its own set of challenges as does parenthood, middle age and retirement, one's career, love life, etc. It seems that once we're finally able to manage one challenge and move on, there is only a short respite before the next challenge hits us head-on. Sometimes that respite might last a week, or a day, or merely an hour. If you could step out of your life for a moment and observe it as an external, impartial observer, you might notice how comical this pattern seems to re-occur: trial, crescendo, resolution, rest -- and repeat. The cycle itself can be exhausting. When will real rest, without a subsequent challenge, finally occur? Is it no wonder then that the thought that even death does not serve as a real rest, because we merely 

recycle
 into another life and a new set of challenges, is quite unappealing - at least to Westerners?
From a strictly human point of view, I did not want to accept that this rollercoaster ride would not end once I reached my well-deserved 'final' rest at the end of my life. If I managed the trials in this life successfully, what was to guarantee I'd do any better in the next life? In fact, all evidence pointed to a conclusion that only the most experienced souls accepted the hardest lives on earth - whether that be one of extreme poverty or physical handicap, etc. - and since I had neither experience in my current life, I was likely not at the end of my cycle of human lives; so assuredly I was destined to return and experience more pain. Once I finally accepted this fact - that reincarnation was real and I was 'doomed' to return - I broke down and cried out of self-pity for a few minutes.
Then the logical side of me kicked in and I realized the only way off the reincarnation rollercoaster was to 'graduate:' to learn the lessons that life has to impart and get it 'right' so I can be done with it. My research now had a new goal in mind and I had new energy to devote to the problem set. I'll share a few of these findings with you here to help you also get off the rollercoaster of life:
The first is quite simply to re-read the words and life of Jesus from a new vantage point; the vantage point of how to live your life as Jesus lived. Jesus was purposely the model of human perfection. He lived his life to show us the way off the cycle of reincarnation by showing us how to get it right during your current life - not your next life, but this life(!) because meaningful change can happen today if you follow His model. As blasphemous as this may sound, do not read the gospels with the interpretation that Jesus 'died on the cross for your sins,' because that interpretation tends to remove the need for personal change - which was not Jesus' intended message or goal. Read instead with an open mind that Jesus' words tell you what you need to know about the nature of reality and the meaning of life in order to get off the reincarnation cycle; and do not limit yourself to the four 'approved' gospels. Check out the other 'forbidden' gospels as well - most especially the Gospel of Thomas. There's a reason those gospels were not included in the Bible: Jesus' message, as recorded in them, was not conducive to the Church's objective of control over the masses. Any message that humans can change through self initiative, and their success on the path of life is very much due to personal responsibility for their own actions, does not help the Church fathers' message that only they can provide for our salvation because of their unique relationship with the 'Savior.' Thus, those gospels advocating independence of thought and action had to be declared as heresy and were ruthlessly purged from society.
Next, please realize that you are not the 'you' that you look at every day in the mirror. You are not your body. Instead, realize you have a body. That body is merely a tool that the real you - your soul - needed to achieve a goal: to impart specific life lessons in this particular human existence. When those lessons are complete, you will shed the body your conscious mind has grown to associate with you and the 'real you,' the soul within, will reunite with that other part of you (your oversoul) that could not fit inside your human body. (Too much soul energy would have destroyed the human body from excessive energy overload, so only a small portion of your true soul can occupy your human form.) Again, your body is a tool. Protect it, honor it and use it for its purpose, but don't grow too attached to it or you will fear losing it.
Fear is the primary inhibitor and protagonist of human life. All human trials are based on some form of fear (safety, hunger, competition, jealousy, anger, greed, death, isolation, loss of loved one, etc), and it is the path of overcoming those fears that eventually leads to freedom from the cycle of reincarnation. Jesus' message in this regard was quite simple and yet so complex and difficult to follow: (paraphrased) Fear not, for if the Lord of Hosts will care for the birds of the sky, who have not a care in the world, how much more will He care for you, His precious children.
The human body serves a specific purpose for soul development: as a vehicle, seemingly separated from God, which then creates an environment of fear. We 'need' fear because fear provides the fuel necessary to learn from new experiences and thereby gain the skills to overcome those fears through either good or poor life choices. Repeating fear-based scenarios (usually via new lives) allows us to repeat this process until we finally make the (hard) right choice.
Every life is thus a class that plays out like a drama-filled play - and YOU are the main actor. The challenges that you experience in life were meant to happen - they were preordained(!) - because they provide you a means to test your ability to overcome challenges with either the right response, or the wrong response (because free will must be allowed). Life would not be a test if you were born knowing your intended purpose for that life, such as needing to overcome anger management issues, or if you already knew the answer about how to accomplish a given challenge. It also wouldn't be a test if you knew what was coming next in life - challenges must be surprises - or why the particular challenge was happening, or didn't have to work hard to pass the challenge. Unfortunately, while you can move on from a test in this life after choosing the 'wrong' answer, your soul cannot move on until you finally answer the challenge correctly in a subsequent life.
Jealousy might be a good example. Virtually everyone experiences some form of jealousy very early in life - say as a result of a teenage crush. Many people quickly overcome this issue, but some are stuck and remain jealous throughout most/all of their life. It's an issue they'll have to deal with continually until they can eventually learn how to overcome it. Anger is another good example, as is greed and so many other common human traits. Unfortunately, common life challenges tend to repeat in virtually every life so if you can't overcome jealousy until age 60 in this life, you may well have a hard time overcoming jealousy in the next life too, but eventually this challenge will become a simple matter to master and you'll be ready to move onto significantly harder challenges. Those who have lived many (hundreds of) lives, might be able to quickly overcome common life challenges, but make no mistake, they are still fighting their own issues or they would not have been born this time around. If there is any consolation to this hard truth, it is that no one is challenged more than their soul is prepared to accept. However, the truth of this matter is hard to see from the human vantage point, especially during catastrophes, and only becomes evident when discussing the matter with the person's subconscious via hypnosis.
So the deeper question then is, "Why do we need a life with trials, pain, loss, challenge and hardship?" Quite 'simply,' because everything is energy. If everything is energy, then everything both seen and unseen is energy. Your soul is naught but pure energy, while mass - like your body, your chair, your car, and the entire earth - is simply very dense, relatively stable energy. Einstein proved this point with his very important finding: E= mc²; which showed mass (m) has an equivalency to a certain amount of energy (E).
There is an important implication from this discussion on energy that can help you overcome fear and find a way out of the reincarnation cycle. That point is that energy can never be destroyed; it merely changes form. If nothing else in this article can provide you relief, it should be this point. In other words, your soul, which is pure energy, can never die because energy cannot be destroyed. You came from God, i.e. the Source of All energy (and actually are still inside of God because nothing exists outside of All That Is), and you will return to the 'heart' of God when your mission on Earth is done. But the real you cannot 'die.' It merely sheds its human form once the need for that form has been expended and moves onto the next stage of development. Indeed, the act of dying is universally reported during past-life hypnotic regression to be a pleasant relief - quite unlike the birthing process as reported by soul memories of being born anew, so this knowledge could help a strong person realize new potential as one who is completely fearless. After all, what can harm you? In truth, nothing can harm you but yourself, or more accurately your own intentions, interpretations and expectations of your own future life challenges. But I digress.
So why is it important to have trials in life if everything is energy? It is because earth serves as a very effective training school for handling energy. Again, physical reality is comprised of very dense energy while the spirit realm is comprised of very dynamic (fluid-like) energy that is highly responsive to change from no more external input that one's own thoughts and intentions. If you were in the spirit form, for example, you could think 'big, blue castle,' and a big, blue castle would immediately form in accordance with your intentions. Energy on earth does not respond in a similar manner. Changes on earth occur very slowly, but can be effected similarly. It's like the power of positive thinking. When you expect a good thing to happen in your life, you can make an assertion that the good item will occur, and then take specific actions to help that item manifest. Doing so, you can literally change your own reality according to your intention, but that change happens much more slowly than merely the speed of thought.
So you must realize that everything that occurs is for the purpose of learning how to utilize energy in a positive manner. Earth is our training ground where we can experience the use of energy in a manner that actually causes the least harm because thoughts and intentions do not immediately manifest in one's environment. (Imagine, if you will, the impact if thoughts were immediate during rush hour traffic! What would be the immediate and highly negative impact on the world? Would we all 'love thy neighbor' or would we wish the 'jerks' in front of us out of our way?) However, even secondary and tertiary effects of our earth-bound negative thoughts and actions do have consequences, and it is those consequences that result in a karmic cycle of fixing our prior mistakes so we can learn how to use energy positively instead of negatively. It's not quite as bad or literal as the Old Testament's appellations of 'an-eye-for-an-eye' or 'live by the sword, die by the sword,' but negative karma has the same implication: you will have to face and fix your prior mistakes before you can move on.
While energy can be used negatively - what humans might think of as 'the devil made me do it' - not all negative examples of energy are quite so definitive or drastic. There is righteous anger, for example, but anger is one of those danger zones that can be quite difficult for almost all humans to manage. Still, a failure is a failure. When someone makes you mad, you could: get mad right back, yell, curse, strike at, and/or kill the person. While in the human sense, some of these responses are more acceptable than others, but from the spiritual sense of learning how to constructively use energy, all of these responses were failures and will only result in more anger-generating trials occurring in the soul's future (in current or subsequent lives) until a proper response is finally tendered.
One might wonder then, what a proper response - one that has a constructive use of energy - looks like? Again, Jesus showed us the answer through the example of His own life. How did He instruct us to behave towards those who wanted to do us harm? Paraphrased: If they strike the right cheek, give them also the left. If they want to take your shoes, give them also your cloak. Love not just your family and friends, but love also your enemies and those who would do you harm; forgive them and curse them not. This response is the 'hard right' vice the 'easy wrong,' and one of the reasons why it takes us normal humans so many hundreds of lives before we can finally accept and implement this truth to get off the reincarnation wheel.
Anger is one of the most common negative responses we utilize to overcome day-to-day challenges in our lives. But why do humans meet anger with anger, vice love and forgiveness? If we're honest with our self and examine the issue deeply, it's because we are afraid. If we were not afraid for our continued, unimpeded survival, free from competition or challenge, etc, then we would not be afraid. But remember that relieving truth that Einstein provided us - highlighted in part 1 of this series - i.e. our survival is already guaranteed. Now granted, it might be survival as a soul vice a physical human body - the body can and will die - but our soul has absolutely no reason to fear for its perfect, unimpeded, continued survival. If you can accept this fact and understand what you must do to 'win' your trials as a human, then you must be willing to follow Jesus' life example, which includes being willing to be persecuted, defiled, cursed, beat, and killed - all without resistance - and indeed even loving and forgiving towards those who would do these horrible things to you. If you can meet this challenge, then your trials as a human will come to an end and you will graduate off the karmic cycle of reincarnations.
But until you can accept this very difficult fact, you'll have to deal with all of the negative karma (i.e. negative energy response issues) that you have generated from the multitude of life trials you've experienced - in this life and many previous lives; of which you are likely not even aware. Fortunately, if you're willing to do the work, you don't have to be aware of anything you may have done wrong in the past, you just have to be willing to make the right responses (the 'hard right') for all engagements moving forward. The past quite literally does not matter in the spiritual realm where time does not exist. Only the present matters. You live now and forever in the present so only your decisions right NOW matter.
If you make the right decisions from this point forward until the end of your life you can work off any and all negative karma you may have accumulated in the past. How? The universe will send you challenge after challenge, allowing you to make decisions - either right or wrong - and guaranteed those challenges will get progressively more difficult when you make the right choice (by spiritual rules) until the day your life ends. It might not be a pleasant prospect but Jesus did not lie when He said you could reach Heaven by following Him in His footsteps. Those footsteps ended in persecution, torture and a tragic death because He lived His life at such odds from conventional society. If you are really willing to make every 'hard right' choice, you will and you must position yourself at odds with society because society does not, by current convention, love unconditionally. You will be different than society at large, and society tends to persecute those who behave differently. Thus, you guarantee that you will attract challenges to yourself, potentially allowing yourself to wipe away all past negative karma if you choose to change immediately and live according to Jesus' dictates. (Beware, however, that even those claiming to be 'Christians' are not living according to Jesus. Perhaps ironically, one might look rather to the example of Tibetan monks for a better model to follow, though even they are not without fault or sin.)
All of this points toward a need for humanity to develop a new mindset; one that focuses on responsibility for one's own decisions and actions. It might be easier to blame our actions on others: 'Jim' made me do it; 'everyone' is doing it; or the Devil (or God) did this bad thing to me. What we perceive as evil is actually only energy being used or expressed in a negative way, most likely out of fear. What we perceive as bad circumstances (damage from an earthquake, volcano, or tornado for example) is simply our life plan being played out to present us challenges that our soul agreed to - even desired to - experience originating from before our life even began. Both of these examples point out the fact that there is no bad luck; there is no evil overlord/no Devil; there is no Hell. There is only ENERGY. That energy is creating experiences for you to learn from. When you understand what that negative event is trying to teach you (e.g. forgiveness, love, self sufficiency, dependability, hard work, persistence, etc.) then the lesson is over and you will move on with your life experience to the next challenge.
Sometimes the fastest way to move ahead, as counter-intuitive as it may seem in the face of darkness, is to thank the Universe for presenting you that challenge, accept the challenge for the lessons and opportunity it presents, love all those involved who were involved in presenting you that challenge, and forgive them - and yourself - for any perceived wrongs or shortcomings. Sometimes the latter can be the hardest of all because our mind gets stuck replaying events over and over, trying to analyze what just happened and why. We need to move beyond the past because there is no growth in the past; only in the present, looking forward. So we must forgive and accept our self. You see, we must love and be proud of who we are because we are a piece of God/All That Is.
Thus, the easiest way to repay karma and get off the wheel of reincarnation is to forgive. This action follows the words of Jesus when He instructed us to forgive and love our enemies. In order to forgive, we must be able to put fear aside by realizing that we have nothing to fear. We are as eternal as God because we are a part of the Unified Source of All Energy. Everything is Energy. If you are energy and energy cannot be destroyed then nothing can hurt you - the REAL you; your soul. Physical life is but an illusion our immortal consciousness has created for our own (developmental) benefit. So if you cannot be hurt and any negative experiences in physical reality were actually part of your life experience contract that was decided upon before you even entered this life, then really there is no reason to feel anger, resentment, or hurtful towards anyone who has done you wrong. This is a tough concept to believe, accept or implement, but if you can, then it is no problem to forgive even the worst offender who has seemingly done you wrong. They were part of your life contract for that particular experience, and they played their role according to that agreed upon contract. They did you a service - from the soul perspective - no matter how painful that action was towards your human perspective and how seemingly mean that contract required them to be towards you or yours.
If you can forgive and love them unconditionally, as Jesus commanded, then karma and the cycle of life have no more control over you and your mission in physical reality is complete. You'll be off to your next adventure but one can only speculate about what comes next in the development cycle of the immortal soul. Very few souls, if any, have graduated from the cycle of humanity and returned. If they did return, they weren't focused on telling us about what comes next - what would be the point? Rather, their guidance was the same as this article on reincarnation - teaching us how to graduate from our extended experience as humans. That's the concern for today and the only one for which we need to focus. Tomorrow will worry about itself.
I'll close with one final point. In the long run, it doesn't really matter if you believe any of this advice or not. We accept only that metaphysical and spiritual information that we are ready to accept, and our waking conscious purposely resists accepting any information or beliefs that would circumvent the experience that comes from living a series of human lives; whether 10, 100 or 1,000 lives, it makes no difference. Some people are relatively new to their human experience and need to live dozens or hundreds more lives to fully integrate the lessons on energy manipulation that the soul requires. From that point of view, the pragmatic answer is that you'll get off the cycle when you're ready to get off the cycle. If you're not ready, then you're not ready; no worries. You simply have more lessons to learn. Therefore, it really doesn't matter if you believe this article or not, or you believe it but are not ready to follow any of the advice in it. You'll incorporate only those lessons into your life that you're ready to receive, and the rest will follow in its own due time. The lessons of life are not about a race or a competition. We compete with no one but our self, and eventually everyone graduates. However, we all graduate on our own timeline, so we don't need to stress out about what the future holds in store for us. It'll all work itself out in the long run. That's the beauty of the human experience. Everything happens for a reason, whether we realize it or not. So incorporate what you want or what you can, and try not to take life too seriously. It's an amazing and unique opportunity from the soul's point of view so simply try to enjoy the ride.
Wade is the author of The Hidden Truth: A logical path through compelling evidence to discover the nature of reality and the meaning of life, available at Amazon. The first half of the book can be downloaded for free at http://www.thehiddentruth.us and http://www.free-ebooks.net.


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