Soul Light
REINCARNATION is “one of the most important issues faced by philosophy, religion, and science that have very significant implications for the understanding of human life,” says the Reincarnation Research website.
Theosophy Watch agrees. “Reincarnation used to be a subject confined to religion,” the site notes. “Since the 20th century, however, the inquiry has moved into the field of science.
This comes about “as a result of ground-breaking researches about people, particularly children, whose memories of previous lives have been validated by independent investigations,” the site reports.
“Many of these cases involved birthmarks or physical characteristics at birth that matched the manner of death of the claimed previous life. Some of them also could speak an unlearned language but which corresponded to the language learned in the claimed previous life.
“The concept of reincarnation, however, goes against the mainstream doctrines of a number of major religions. This has created conflicts and has led to raging debates on the pros and cons of reincarnation.”
Butterfly Girl
H. P. Blavatsky and her Adept Teachers, Founders of the modern Theosophical Movement, were fully committed to the prime directive of introducing Western civilization to the monumental twin doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma.
The importance of their directive can be seen in H. P. Blavatsky’s Letter 3 to the 4th Annual American Convention in April 1890, where she declared:
We are outwardly creatures of but a day; within we are eternal. Learn, then, well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races.
The Reincarnation Recall
of Mandy Seabrook
This is an extraordinary story of past life recall that led to evidence one wouldn’t expect to find. Mandy recalled a past life from the time she was young enough to talk. Later she would take her mother and researchers on an evidence discovery mission.
How Rebirth Works
“There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer. Regarding the first, due to ignorance negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. This is the way ordinary beings circle incessantly through existence like the turning of a wheel.”
Dalai Lama lecture at the Theosophical Society, Wheaton, Ill.
“In order to accept reincarnation or the reality of Tulkus, we need to accept the existence of past and future lives. Sentient beings come to this present life from their previous lives and take rebirth again after death. This kind of continuous rebirth is accepted by all the ancient Indian spiritual traditions and schools of philosophy, except the Charvakas, who were a materialistic movement. . . . Therefore, as long as you are a Buddhist, it is necessary to accept past and future rebirth.”
(Excerpts from The Dali Lama on reincarnation)
The Dalai Lama
Dharamsala
September 24, 2011
Edward Austrian: The Past Life Memory that Healed Him
“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process, and if some people don’t understand certain things it is either because they have not got to that point in their other lives, or because no glimmer of memory has yet come.”
– William Q. Judge
(Letters That Have Helped Me, Vol. 2, Letter 5)
Spiritual Evolution
William Quan Judge was an important figure of the early theosophical movement. In 1875, at the age of 24, he was a co-founder of the Theosophical Society with H. P. Blavatsky and Henry S. Olcott. In his article, The Synthesis of Occult Science Judge noted that even theosophists wondered why Mme. Blavatsky “laid so much stress on doctrines like Karma and Reincarnation.”
Spiritual Evolution
“It is not alone because these doctrines are easily apprehended and beneficent to individuals, not only because they furnish, as they necessarily do a solid foundation for ethics or all human conduct,” he explained,
but because they are the very key-notes of the higher evolution of man.
“Without Karma and Reincarnation, evolution is but a fragment; a process whose beginnings are unknown, and whose outcome cannot be discerned — a glimpse of what might be, a hope of what should be.
Higher Evolution
“But in the light of Karma and Reincarnation evolution becomes the logic of what must be. The links in the chain of being are all filled in, and the circles of reason and of life are complete. Karma gives the eternal law of action, and Reincarnation furnishes the boundless field for its display.”
More Proof
“I’ve come to the point with regard to reincarnation that I think, not only is it a worthy subject of investigation, that the evidence strongly suggests that it may in fact be true. Well over fifty percent of the Earth’s inhabitants believe in some form of reincarnation. So it’s very widespread.”
- Tom Harpur, Canadian biblical scholar, columnist, and broadcaster, and ordained Anglican priest.
A Mysterious Power
– William Q. Judge
“There is a mysterious power in these doctrines of karma and reincarnation which at last forces them upon the belief of those who take them up for study.
Each person is the concentration and result of karma, and is compelled from within to believe.
“It is due to the fact that the soul is itself the experiencer of rebirth and karma, and has within a clear recollection of both — and rejoices, as it were when it finds the lower mind taking them up for study.”
Compelled from within.
More explanations of the chameleon-like ‘Manas’ [Sanskrit ‘Mind], the Reincarnating Ego, see H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy – here.
“The re-incarnating Principle, or that which we call the divine [person], is indestructible throughout the life cycle: indestructible as a thinking Entity, and even as an ethereal form. The “reflection” is only the spiritualized remembrance during the Devachanic [after-death dream] period, of the ex-personality, Mr. A. or Mrs. B. — with which the Ego identifies itself during that period.”
“There was a day when we had so thoroughly identified our own personality with that of the ideal in our mind — especially if it was that of a living being — that the former was entirely merged and lost in the latter. Can it be said of a man of fifty that he is the same being that he was at twenty? The inner person is the same; the outward living personality is completely transformed and changed.”
- H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy
Lotus Seed Pod
Dr. Jim Tucker:
Children Who Remember Previous Lives
In this video, Dr. Jim Tucker, author of Return to Life and Life Before Life, and director of the UVA The Division of Perceptual Studies presents his research regarding small children who remember details of a previous life. He also offers some history about the founding of the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA by Dr. Ian Stevenson.
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SPIRIT, MIND, BODY
KARMA and REINCARNATION
- William Q. Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy, Chapter 7
(Excerpts):
“The inner Ego, who reincarnates, taking on body after body, storing up the impressions of life after life, gaining experience and adding it to the divine Ego, suffering and enjoying through an immense period of years, is the ‘fifth principle’ ―Manas [Permanent Mind]―not united to Buddhi [Spiritual Soul].
“This is the permanent individuality which gives to every man the feeling of being himself and not some other; that which through all the changes of the days and nights from youth to the end of life makes us feel one identity through all the period; it bridges the gap made by sleep; in like manner it bridges the gap made by the sleep of death.
Jill Bolte Taylor, the human brain
“It is this, and not our brain, that lifts us above the animal.
The depth and variety of the brain convolutions in man are caused by the presence of Mind, and are not the cause of mind.
“And when we either wholly or now and then become consciously united with Buddhi, the Spiritual Soul, we behold God, as it were.
“This is what the ancients all desired to see, but what the moderns do not believe in, the latter preferring rather to throw away their own right to be great in nature, and to worship an imaginary god made up solely of their own fancies and not very different from weak human nature.
Many human civilizations
“This permanent individuality in the present race has therefore been through every sort of experience, for Theosophy insists on its permanence and in the necessity for its continuing to take part in evolution.
It has a duty to perform, consisting in raising up to a higher state all the matter concerned in the chain of globes to which the earth belongs.
“We have all lived and taken part in civilization after civilization, race after race, on earth, and will so continue throughout all the rounds and races until the seventh is complete. At the same time, it should be remembered that the matter of this globe and that connected with it has also been through every kind of form, with possibly some exceptions in very low planes of mineral formation.
Matter in Space
“But in general all the matter visible, or held in space still unprecipitated, has been molded at one time or another into forms of all varieties, many of these being such as we now have no idea of. The processes of evolution, therefore, in some departments, now go forward with greater rapidity than in former ages because both Manas and matter have acquired facility of action.
“Especially is this so in regard to man, who is the farthest ahead of all things or beings in this evolution. He is now incarnated and projected into life more quickly than in earlier periods when it consumed many years to obtain a ‘coat of skin.'”
Question: How does our past or present karma, ‘stored in Manas or Mind, manifest to us in each life. By what means is it transferred from storage into our daily life, circumstances and relationships?
See Mark Wolynn’s work below which helps explain how the effects download the physical plane of our body:
Mark Wolynn: Becoming Aware of Inherited Family Trauma
Mark Wolynn is the director of The Family Constellation Institute, The Inherited Trauma Institute, and The Hellinger Institute of Northern California. His book It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle was a Silver Nautilus award-winner in 2016.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Mark about inherited trauma and how it can be the source of unexplained illnesses. Click on the arrow below:
Mark explains how the effects of deep trauma ripple across generations, citing the evidence of epigenetic changes following traumatic events. Mark and Tami discuss the work of Roger Woolger and the possibility of trauma descending from past lives.
Finally, they talk about what it means to honor our ancestors’ pain while also healing and moving forward with our own lives. (70 minutes)
The Ocean of Theosophy (Cont’d):
“This coming into life over and over again cannot be avoided by the ordinary man because Lower Manas is still bound by Desire, which is the preponderating principle at the present period. Being so influenced by Desire Manas is continually deluded while in the body, and being thus deluded is unable to prevent the action upon it of the forces set up in the lifetime. These forces are generated by Manas, that is, by the thinking of the lifetime.
connected by innumerable electrical magnetic threads to earth by reason of the thoughts of the last life [or childhood]
“and therefore by desire, for it was desire that caused so many thoughts and ignorance of the true nature of things. An understanding of this doctrine of man being really a thinker and made of thought will make clear all the rest in relation to incarnation and reincarnation.”
Birth of Venus ~ Sandro Botticelli
“The body of the inner person is made of thought, and this being so it must follow that if the thoughts have more affinity for earth-life than for life elsewhere a return to life here is inevitable.
At the present day, Manas is not fully active in the human race, as Desire still is uppermost. In the next cycle of the human period, Manas will be fully active and developed in the entire race.
“Hence the people of the earth have not yet come to the point of making a conscious choice as to the path they will take; but when in the cycle referred to, Manas is active, all will then be compelled to consciously make the choice to right or left, the one leading to complete and conscious union with Atma [The Higher Self], the other to the annihilation of those beings who prefer that path.”
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CONTINUED:
The Healing Power of Reincarnation and Karma, Part 2
Reincarnating Soul
Theosophy Watch 