Reincarnation and Past Lives

It was 2005, I had just boarded a midnight train in India. I glanced down at the the cover of the Indian Trains at a Glance Guide and saw a cartoon of two people sitting on a train with the words: "Your diverse and fascinating trip through India begins with the people you meet on the train." 

But up until this point I had met a less than fascinating group of men flinging questions at me. "So, what is your good name? What do you do? What is your salary? How many children do you have? How much do you weigh?" (No question is too personal in India.)

My answers would define me in their eyes, who I was, my core essence. (I toyed with imaginative answers.)  

But this time my cabin mate did not disappoint. He introduced himself as Dr. Rawat, the leading Indian paranormal researcher on the subject of reincarnation and rebirth. (Alright, now we're getting somewhere!) 

He was, at the time, one of five people in the world who spent his time investigating cases of alleged reincarnation, verifying or disclaiming evidence of children who claim to be the recipient of a recycled soul. 

He had my attention.  

Let Me Begin By.... 

I'd like to begin this blog by talking about karma in relation to reincarnation, and the choices we make while we reside here on Earth..  

Oh, hang on. I changed my mind.  

Let me start over.  

Starting Over 

There are times when I would like to start over. When I'm going through some tough healing work and I'm wondering why in the world I chose to have "this"  to deal with. But the truth is, we choose everything. 

Before we come to Earth we have it all planned out.  We have all the major milestones in our life planned, and the people we will encounter to help us get there.  

We choose everything before we come here. We choose our parents. We choose our circumstances. We choose where we will live, what country, what conditions. As souls, we make contracts with all the details of our future earthly incarnations spelled out. 

It's all in an effort to learn more about ourselves.  We come into these 3D bodies in order to heal the issues that our soul has been carrying from lifetime to lifetime.  

Because parents and family are the foundation of our lives, they have a huge influence on how our life pans out.

Our parent's guidance is what lays the foundation for how we perceive ourselves and  how we view others. They help dictate the choices we make throughout our lives. 

Souls choose their parents because it's imperative for their mission on earth.  

The parents and family members we choose will be the most aligned with our purpose on Earth. 

Life experiences are the reason we come to earth again and again. Sometimes it's necessary for a soul to be born into a specific region or community to have the experiences needed for its growth.  

Remember, as a soul you don't view things as good or bad. You see them as experiences. So you choose a parent based on a lesson and a growth opportunity.

You may choose challenging or difficult parents as a way to accelerate your personal growth and development through overcoming adversity. 

I chose this? Yes, you did.  

Hardships faced during childhood can lead to profound spiritual awakenings. They can lead to a deeper understanding of compassion and empathy. Choosing your parents is about positioning yourself to progress towards spiritual enlightenment.  

In the planning stage, you are not looking at the discomfort of a parent that doesn't pay attention to you. You are saying, “Wow, yeah, I want to experience that! I want to know how that feels so I can understand my own reactions to it. Then I can develop Independence and self-reliance.  I want to understand the importance of seeking support from others.”

"Yeah yeah, I'm going to forget I wanted this when I get down there, but that's the whole point. This is going to be so great!" 

Your Higher Self will never give you a challenge in life that you are not ready to face.  

You are stronger than you believe. And, you are equipped to handle any of the challenges you encounter.

Challenges are essential for personal growth. They are part of our larger spiritual plan, and we possess the inner strength to overcome them. Our soul knows this.

We choose those challenges which are aligned with our spiritual evolution. We are given the necessarily tools and strengths to navigate them. Soul contracts never present challenges beyond our capacity.

YOU may be baffled, but your SOUL knows it's purpose.  

What About Free Will?

Just because our life is already planned before our birth, it doesn't mean that we do not have free will.

As human beings we are capable of deciding what's good for our well-being. We can decide to move away from any relationship that is not allowing us to move forward in our life purpose.  

There's no place like Earth.There's actually a waiting line to get here.

Remember that everything happens for a reason, even if it doesn't seem to make sense to you right now. 

There are so many different reasons that we come back to Earth lifetime after lifetime. It could be to fulfill a mission, to correct a past mistake, to evolve spiritually and morally, to resolve karma, to heal from past experiences.

And while it's not mandatory to come back to Earth, we do it to allow our soul to spiritually grow and progress toward a state of enlightenment. 

Sometimes we come down here into the same situation that our parents and grandparents came into. They were unable to break the pattern that was necessary for their own soul development, and now we've come here to become self-aware and finally end the pattern. You can free the pattern for yourself, for your ancestors, and for future generations.  

Earth is the perfect playground. A 3D material world with both positive and negative energies. There's a plethora of choices on the Earth menu.

Some of us come back for the full course of human experience with all kinds of social roles and nationalities inorder to  experiences as much as possible.

Others just come back for a quick taste. Ultimately though, each soul progresses step by step to higher levels of awareness until it awakens to its true nature and merges back into the one divine consciousness.  

Reincarnation Versus Karma 

First it's important to understand what karma is. 

 Karma refers to a sequence of actions and subsequent reactions. It's known as the law of cause and effect.

In other words, anything that happens in the universe will have a resulting consequence. (It's our ego that wants to label karma as  good or bad.) 

There's no such thing as good or bad karma. Karma is  neutral. 

Karma influences what happens to each soul. The karma that was created in a person's life, and in their past lives, affects the experience that a soul encounters in their next life on earth.

The soul's karma is simply what needs to happen based on universal laws.  

Karma is a fundamental law of the universe.   

The Karmic Path 

Living on the karmic path refers to living your life of experiences through the prescription of your five senses.

Instead of taking a broader viewpoint of a situation, you give it a label and define it based on how it makes you feel, and how it affects you personally. Then you get triggered and you react to it.  

Somebody cuts you off in traffic and it results in a fender bender, and you take this personally.  You experience it through your senses with anger or frustration or any number of emotional triggers.

You see it is a bad thing with a whole host of consequences that you now need to deal with. In the heat of the moment it may be difficult to see this as a neutral experience that was put in your path in order to help you learn about yourself and your triggered reactions.  

Living on the karmic path and learning about yourself is a lifetime process, perhaps several lifetimes.

You go through a series of highs and lows, different events that teach and show you things about yourself, and you learn from them.

It's effective, but slow. 

Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives? 

There's a natural amnesia that comes when we reincarnate into a new body. When we incarnate back on Earth we have a new set of circumstances.

We get caught up and identify with these circumstances and don't realize that our true nature as a soul is part of the absolute consciousness.

We mistakenly believe that we are whatever body we are born into.  

If we were to remember all of our past lives, it would be an overwhelming weight of unresolved emotions attachments and memories to wade through. We would be crushed by the emotional load. With having no memory of it, we can focus fully on the lessons of this life. 

Reincarnation is the soul's journey of remembering, refining and returning to its true self.  

As evolution progresses, our soul will start to see through this misconception that we are separate from source, and eventually realize it's true self.

This realization comes from refining its self awareness. Until then, it will keep reincarnating into different forms, learning and maturing. 

Why Do Some Children Remember?  

Despite the fact that we go through a veil of amnesia before birth  (where we forget our previous lives in order to focus our energies on learning within the current lifetime)  there is a percentage of children who do remember their former lives. 

In these cases, it usually involves dying violently or suddenly. Supposedly, the trauma of this left a deep imprint on their soul that survived even through their next birth, thus allowing these children to access former life memories.  

From what I learned from Dr. Rawat, this remembering usually fades after the age of four. 

How Can We Improve if We Don't Remember the Mistakes of Our Past?  

Because it's not about the person it's about the soul. Our soul is constantly being refined as it passes through different lifetimes. It's learning how to recognize itself as an absolute consciousness.  

On the karmic path, you improve through the experiences in your current life. And those experiences were specifically chosen, by you, and influenced by your past incarnations.

The impact of a past life is not dependent on memory, but rather on your soul's journey and what it seeks to learn. You are here to focus on your present life, and the experiences and lessons that it offers.  

One way to understand what those personal lessons are is to look at your nightly dreams.

Personal growth can occur without the need to understand your past lives. 

Does it Ever End?  

Yes, it ends when the soul reaches full self realization. When there is no karma left then there's no need for that soul to reincarnate. When it is fully self-aware then it can choose the next stage of it's evolution without the limitations of karma.

Some souls may choose to return to Earth, but in a higher states of consciousness inorder to help others energetically. But to do so, they do not require a body.  

The Dharmic Path 

You may have heard of the Dharmic path. This is another path you can take through life, which is less drawn out than the karmic path.

Living this way means living in the flow state. You still achieve your life mission, but you don't need to experience stress or relationships that cause stress in order to realize this mission.

The dharmic path is experienced in waves. 

On this path, you realize that everything is for your greater good and therefore there is no reaction to it.

There are no longer triggers because you don't need to be triggered in order to understand that everything is for your highest good.

On the dharmic path, you understand that the external world mirrors your internal world. And, because you no longer need to be triggered, you no longer bring events into your life that trigger you.  

Just as your dreams tell you that you're on the karmic path, your dreams will tell you when you are close to the dharmic path as well.

Your dreams lets you know that you need to be an active participant in letting your old habits go and balancing your masculine and feminine energies.

Your dreams will tell you how to commit to the nurture of your mind, body and spirit. 

Life is a Playground  

A dear friend of mine told me those words right before she passed. 

The idea that we are souls incarnating in order to better ourselves, can make it easy for us to think of life as a game.  

I believe that we should approach our lives with a sense of playfulness, creativity and authenticity.

In doing so, we uphold a sense of integrity  -  being true to ourselves, acting in accordance with our own values and beliefs - even when it's not convenient to do so.  

"Why is it amazing that I don't act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Your age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, it's something left for other people to ponder, but not for me. Why waste your time? I don't." 

~ Dick Van Dyke (age 99) 

It is easy to get attached to the things that happened to us in the past. We label them as good or bad. We run loops in our minds about all the wrongs that were done to us.

By believing in reincarnation, I don't have to get so worked up about the way people behave, because I know that their behavior is the result of a temporary life situation that's here to teach me something of value. 

Don't just follow the rules set by others. Live in alignment with your Higher Self. Make decisions that are congruent with who you are. Be authentic. 

By believing in reincarnation, I can live life with more integrity. I know that every event has a consequence.

So instead of getting what I want at the expensive of others, I can live my life  by seeing the interconnectedness of everything.

Just like there is interconnectiveness in nature, there is an interconnectiveness between all of us.

People are part of nature and we are  governed by the same laws whether we know it or not. This sense of playfulness and living with integrity is in  direct alignment with living on the dharmic path.  

Believe It or Not 

It's not up to me to tell you whether to believe in reincarnation. It's up to you to explore how your life might change if you embrace this theory.

Understanding that we return again and again to Earth to work towards self-awareness, may provide a deeper wisdom into the purpose and lessons you are here to navigate. 

The relationship between souls is so much more complex than we can begin to understand.

We usually take an ego based approach toward the subject of reincarnation, but I believe that the depths of the subject goes beyond what our minds may be able to comprehend.  

Remember that what you read here can never be fully verified, so take what you want and leave the rest behind. 

Everyone is on a unique path to finding his own personal truth. Even if someone could tell us his experiences in pre-birth, his truth wouldn't be everybody else's truth. 

Each soul is individual and unique.  

Back to Dr Rawat 

Dr Rawat relaxed back in his seat and stared at the ceiling as if getting ready to tell a bedtime story.

He told me fascinating incidents of young children who had detailed knowledge of people from another village. They could indicate through physical scars on their bodies exactly how they had died in their previous life.

They knew who their husband or wife had been, their children, and, in the case of murder, who had killed them. And those villagers still existed for Dr Rawat to corroborate the stories.  

Dr Rawat talked endlessly about reincarnating, recurring dreams, the incidents of shared dreams.

His wife eventually dozed of, snoring comfortably at his side. But this was Dr. Rawat's passion and he was in the flow.