The meaning of human life. What is the purpose of reincarnation?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Reincarnation is a form of the very salvation of the world, the self-development of each person through the alternate acceptance of bodily shells. The human stage of development is not the final stage of the evolution of man as a whole, it is only a certain intermediate phase, the purpose of which is the development of a quality called self-consciousness,

The method of evolution at work in the human kingdom is called reincarnation. It is in this form that this law appears from time to time in the human world. Its essence is that in the process of a long series of incarnations in the physical body we develop the very properties that we need at this stage of human development in accordance with the evolutionary plan.

The mechanism that ensures that a person learns on the basis of acquired experience and does not endlessly commit the same mistakes is called the law of karma.

The case for reincarnation

“As far as I can remember, I have always unconsciously turned to experiences from past lives … When in my past reincarnation I was a shepherd in Assyria, the stars looked at me the same way they look at me now, when I live in New England … And I also remember how in the old heroic days we walked with Hawthorne along the coast of Scamander, strewn with the remains of chariots and heroes."

You have probably heard or read this kind of revelation before. And, most likely, you rejected them, considering it an invention of some dreamer or another oriental guru. Of course, materialists cannot believe that they once lived in another body and that they are able to remember these lives. But this is not the delirium of a madman or the pseudophilosophical nonsense of a drug addict. These are the words of a man of a lively mind and quite sane.

It is safe to say that no concept has existed for so long and under such different guises as the idea that after the death of the physical body, human life does not end. In the ancient world, it was almost universally believed that all living beings, including invisible inhabitants of other worlds, existed in one form or another before, and that they did not cease to be reborn in the future. Even in ancient times, people tenaciously clung to belief in a future life, refusing to believe that a person's existence ended after his death.

Through myths and legends, through sacred texts and rituals, the belief in the continuity of existence has reached us, "all-knowing" wise men. According to the famous anthropologist Sir James Fraser, people in primitive societies believed in their immortality as much as they believed in the reality of their conscious existence.

The early Christians, who lived before the Second Church-Imperial Council in Constantinople in 553 AD, believed in rebirth - a doctrine that confirmed the idea of the ancient Gnostics that angels can become humans or demons, and the latter turn into humans or angels.

Belief in reincarnation, if not in rebirth, is not at all alien to modern Christian and Jewish confessions. Dr. Leslie Witherhead, who served for nearly thirty years as Abbot of the London City Temple, noted that Jesus never denied it, and in his time, reincarnation was universally believed, and it was also an essential part of the teaching of the Essenes.

It is important to understand that rebirth cannot always lead upward: we degrade as quickly as we develop. Do not forget that the subsequent life of an individual is not always a step up. If a person created negative causes and conditions in a past life, over time they will mature, and this will lead to the movement of this person to a much lower step on the ladder of life. Taking into account the limited perception of the world inherent in most people, in order to develop into a fully matured individual, it is very difficult and painful to continue doing what is supposed to.

What we think we desire is only a reflection of our superficial desires. Our innermost aspirations push us on a subconscious level to what we really need - even if it is not at all what we think we want. Oscar Wilde summed it up wonderfully when he said that there are two types of unhappiness in the world: not getting what you want and getting what you don't want.

A person who truly knows his true nature - and this is available to any of us - already knows what he or she needs to do. Such a state is quite often accompanied by the strength necessary in order to overcome the pain and difficulties accompanying self-development.

Law of attraction

There is another element here as well. It's called the Law of Attraction - like attracts like. People feel most comfortable with those who share their views and values: an artist enjoys interacting with another artist, a musician enjoys being in the company of people who are inclined to play music, and spiritually developed people will maintain relationships with those who share their interests. On the other hand, a thief connects with individuals from the underworld, a drinker with alcoholics, a drug addict with drug dealers … Both on a conscious and subconscious level, we create our own environment by our mere participation in it. It is impossible to live a life full of fear, anger and pain-producing actions, and then, at the moment of death, be saved from karmic retribution with one "good" thought.

The subsequent reincarnation of such a person will be due to the fear of retribution in a new life. Accordingly, he can be born as an agarophobe or psychologically too squeezed, or a closed, timid individual who is afraid of his own shadow. But in any case, he will be reborn. Fear is attachment to what we are afraid of: strangely, it is this attachment that ends with the fact that we get what we fear or would like to avoid.

Unexplained fears

There are a large number of cases when people from early childhood experienced serious and inexplicable fears. Some children, for example, have an aversion to certain objects and phenomena, which borders on hysteria. One mother told about her child that from infancy he was frightened by huge volumes of water. In the bath, he felt quite normal, but if they went to rest on the beach, he began to scream in such horror that they were forced to return home. Now he is already a teenager, but to this day he does not like to be near a large accumulation of water, although his fear is no longer manifested as clearly as in childhood.

How would you explain this phenomenon? If you look at the problem from the angle of rebirth, then it may well be that in his past life the young man died at sea and transferred this fear of death from water to a new life. Of course, there may be other interpretations of such fears, but they are very rare - if ever considered by traditional psychoanalysts.

Past life memory

Some believe that if reincarnation actually existed, they would remember at least something about their past lives. But this is complete nonsense. Do you remember all the little things you did and learned in high school, or even college? And, nevertheless, you know that you were there. How many people remember all the events of their childhood, not to mention their very birth? Not at all. And yet no one doubts that he was once born. Since the memory of different people in their ability to describe and restore what is memorized is quite different, it cannot be particularly relied on. Memory is only superficial and insufficient evidence of past events.

Anyone who has experienced the sudden death of a loved one knows that it is sometimes very difficult to remember the events that occurred immediately after such a death. At such a moment, life seems to freeze and everything around has a vague and vague outline; the person may be in a state of shock. How much more difficult it is to remember the circumstances of your own death and subsequent rebirth! It should also be borne in mind that after death the energy of consciousness passes into an intermediate state in which sensory sensations are not recorded as clearly as during the physical state.

Edgar Cayce

The American Edgar Cayce, arguably the most famous and gifted medium of the 20th century, is an example of someone who has seen not only his own past lives, but also the past lives of others. His "readings", fully confirming the operation of the law of causation and rebirth, became famous all over the world.

Edgar was born in 1877 on a farm in Kentucky and raised by fanatical Christian parents. Although he finished only 9 years of school, at the age of 21 he discovered the ability to medical clairvoyance through a kind of self-hypnosis. After 22 years of healing strangers, sometimes thousands of miles away, Casey discovered that he could not only heal, but also see the past lives of his patients.

In the beginning, these “readings of life,” as they began to be called, caused mental anguish in the humble and insecure Casey, because it seemed to him that the doctrine of reincarnation contradicted a literal reading of the Church-Jewish Bible. But, having reconciled these two points of view, he immediately began to help other people to trace and link their current misfortunes and failures with their certain behavior in their past life. In this way, he helped many thousands of people.

A large number of cases of this kind, in all details, are presented in the book of the psychologist Gina Serminara "The Many Mansions". This book also includes the story of a man who suffered from anemia since birth; in one of his past lives, he seized political control over the state and shed a lot of human blood at the same time.

Casey explained the chronic illness of the digestive tract in another man by the fact that in his 2 past lives he indulged in gluttony. In another case, the poverty and misery of a woman was caused by the fact that in another life, as a member of the French royal family, she abused power and wealth.

Why are memories of past lives needed?

Examples from the practice of Zen master Philippe Kaplo.

“One of my students, who had many similar memories, told me that she was happy when the memories began to fade gradually, allowing her to concentrate on what needs to be done in this life.

Suicide

What happens to a person if his departure from the physical world was caused not by natural death, but by suicide?..

• But these memories can sometimes help. Another student told me this story. For many years, she and the young man they worked with had a very hostile relationship. No matter how she tried to overcome her negative feelings towards him, she did not succeed. Once, while meditating, she suddenly saw herself in unusual clothes. She knew she was somewhere in 13th century middle Europe. (She told me the exact location and date.)

Then she saw how she tilts the cradle with her hand and looks at her little boy, and in horror realizes that he is blind and deaf and dumb. After that, she sees that she is strangling the child and feels his hatred directed at her. Remembering this, she was filled with horror and self-disgust. In a moment she saw how in her next life she was sentenced to death at the stake. And this is done by the one she killed in her past life. She looked at this man with disgust and hatred and suddenly discovered that this was the very man with whom she did not get along well in this life in the twentieth century.

Soon after these painful memories - and she told me that she cried for several hours in a row, recreating in her memory the terrible things she had done - she decided to tell her enemy about everything. She told me:

“I was very afraid to tell John such things. It seemed to me that he would consider me an idiot and our relationship would get worse. But I felt that this was our only chance to change the terrible karma we were creating with him. When I told him these stories, he began to cry. I also cried. He later told me, jokingly, “Well, Morne, I think we have a lot to find out. But now that we know how our actions in the past affect our relations today, it will be easier for us to "bury the hatchet of war." From that time on, we became close friends.

• Another case concerned a husband and wife who were going through a painful divorce. The wife was especially unhappy, who believed that her husband was not only cheating on her, but also mentally insulting. Once this woman came to me and said that she remembered that in her past life she had already lived with her husband, but not as his wife, but as a woman who wanted to marry him. When he refused to marry her, she went berserk and tried to poison him. Recalling these events, she told me later, she felt that, apparently, she had to pay her husband a karmic debt, and that it was precisely because of this that their real relationship was so bad.

She also added that it is necessary to resolve this problem in this life, or the negative karma they have created will unfold in future lives. It should be noted that today she has a rather warm relationship with her ex-husband.

Forget the old life

Larvy

Entities are living beings from another dimension who …

• It is a blessing for people that they do not remember their previous lives. I'll tell you about an incident that happened about 15 years ago. Somehow a young man came to our center, with a not quite stable psyche, but felt the need for spiritual practice and tried to meditate persistently. One day, a friend convinced him to meet with a medium.

Since then, he disappeared and appeared a few years later - disheveled, tattered, with seriously damaged mental health. As it turned out, the medium told him that in a past life he was a fascist responsible for the death of many people. This information, coupled with several other events, traumatized his soul to such an extent that it led to serious psychological depression, from which he could not recover. Of course, this is an extreme case, but it is not at all unique."

• Stevenson mentions one case where a woman's memories of a suicide she committed in a previous life kept her from committing suicide again in a new life. The realization that, having committed such an act, she would not achieve anything and in the next life she would still have to face the same problems, was a strong enough argument in favor of making her reconsider and change her life.

Many people will be amazed to learn about the monstrous things they have done in their past lives. And until they understand and find ways to atone for their evil deeds committed in the past, they will be plagued by illness or depression. Even Emerson warned against disturbing the "memory of death."

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