Have We Been Here Before? Clark Ford, Guest Speaker

My own spiritual journey began in traditional Christianity, something that I tried hard to embrace up through high school.   I remember having a New Testament bible “Good News for Modern Man” from which I enjoyed reading the passages about Jesus.  Like so many, I suffered a crisis of faith from which I actually never recovered.  I could not wrap my head around the vengeful God of the Old Testament any more than I could around a mafia boss seeking revenge (or a President for that matter).  What would Jesus Do?

I have always been attracted to spirituality, to the mystics, to Extrasensory Perception, Intuition, Life after death, spiritual guidance.  But the next part of my journey, atheism, required that I give that all up for what it surely must be: coincidence, hallucination, or wishful thinking!

Instead, I embraced evolution as a guiding principle of the Universe.  This made a lot of sense to me and still does – the spiraling in and out of galaxies, life forms, seasons, each part of the universe obeying the laws of thermodynamics, of cause and effect.   No miracles, here, just natural selection of chance changes in DNA producing human evolution.  In fact no need for a God at all.  At least not like the one in the Bible.

But wait a minute - not so fast!  I couldn’t shake the strong feeling that spirituality was also part of this natural universe.  That spirit pervades the universe like an energy form (THE FORCE!) that we may or may not detect with our human senses.  When we do detect spirit, we go deep inside, we use our feelings, our intuition, our right brain – all things that I realize are suspect in the Patriarchal culture we live in: real men don’t trust their feelings!  Also, if it smacks of Eastern Religions, Western Culture doesn’t understand it or trust it!

Embracing spirituality meant I had to give up strict Atheism.  But I still don’t embrace the Judeo-Christian God.  That God was the product of a strongly patriarchal and medieval culture of powerful men who controlled kingdoms and who dominated women, communities, and resources in the name of the very God that they themselves created.  Very convenient!

Well, wait a minute.  If there is no God, then who created the universe?  Good question.  I embrace the idea that the universe IS, without beginning or end.  E= MC² describes how energy is never lost, it just gets converted into matter and back again to energy.  Likewise spirit IS, without beginning or end.   Kind of the way other people describe God…

So what does any of this have to do with Reincarnation?  What if, as a Christian, you were part of a Christian community that embraced Reincarnation?  Such a community existed in ancient Alexandria.  Origen was an early church leader who embraced reincarnation.  Why would he do such a thing? 

Perhaps it is because he believed that spirit IS, without beginning and without end.  Therefore, not created at birth for an individual, and not perishing with that individual.  Christians can buy that last part – spirit lives on, but only AFTER life.  Why not before also?  Christians believe that the spirit of God always was and always will be, and likewise for Jesus.  So why would it not be true for humans?  And if our spirit exists before birth, what is it doing?  Hanging around waiting for a human body to be born?

Before Copernicus, humans were happy believing they were the center of the universe.  This is clearly hubris. God created humans specially, in HIS image, according to Biblical beliefs.  But there was no understanding of the vastness of the Universe, the billions of stars, moons, and planets, or of the age of the known universe.  And that’s just the material plane.  What if there are other realms of existence unknown entirely to our common senses?  What if we are not so special after all?  What if our soul is on a journey, and the life we are aware of is just a small part of that journey, a facet of a greater whole that includes experiences and knowledge far surpassing our human life and the material plane?
 
Being fascinated by spirituality, I was drawn to the book “Many Lives, Many Masters” that tells of a respected Psychiatrist in Miami who decided to do some pro bono work for one of the janitors in the clinic that he worked who had some severe phobias.  One of the psychiatrist’s tools was hypnotic regression, presumably to a childhood trauma, to explain the phobias. 

In hypnotic regression with this patient, as they were going back in time, they went too far, and suddenly it became clear that that they had gone into a past life.  This was a revelation to the skeptical psychiatrist. Eventually, multiple past lives were revealed, all very traumatic, that did explain the janitor’s phobias.  But BETWEEN those past lives, now the patient was no longer an unschooled janitor or a simple peasant from a past life, but an ASCENDED SPIRITUAL MASTER who knew everything about the life of the psychiatrist, although of course had never been told.  So the janitor was in this life an unschooled worker with phobias, but between lives was a spiritual master.  MAYBE WE ALL ARE!

If life is all about learning the lessons of love, as Jesus taught, then what better way than to keep going back to learn what you got wrong the first or 50^th time around?  Charles Fillmore said "Life is an ever-progressive upward spiral of conscious evolution..."  For some that may involve reincarnating as the very kind of person that they in a past life abused, ignored, or failed to empathize with.  The idea of karma is that you carry with you a spiritual record of what you did and who you were, regardless of what you got away with during your life.

Abusers in this life have apparently not learned the lesson of love, and through reincarnation are allowed to experience the abuse first hand in another life to really understand. 

This actually brings up a couple of points. Who decides what kind of life you will have, and what kind of situation you may experience in order to learn the lesson you need to learn?   I embrace the idea that our higher self, not our personality in this life, but our spiritually evolved higher self, as a spiritual master, decides.  So we, in essence, decide for ourselves what lessons we need. There is no self-delusion or lying to yourself in the spiritual realm!
 
The other point is that in all things we are called upon to be compassionate and loving, as much as possible.  Seeing a person who is suffering in any way is a call for loving compassion, not a judgement about them having so much bad karma they deserve the pain they are in!  Compassion is one of the first lessons of love.

You might ask:  What happened in the history of Christianity that the idea of Reincarnation was rejected instead of embraced, as it is in so many other religions?  One answer to that may be that the church of Rome came to control all of Christianity, and the Church of Rome was controlled by Constantine, who was scared to death of the idea of Reincarnation.  With reincarnation, he could look forward to life after life of pain and misery due to all the pain and misery he had inflicted on others in his life.  Much better was a doctrine of forgiveness of sins and a one-stop trip to Heaven.  If you read the Bible carefully, there are references to reincarnation, so it was a belief during biblical times. But the bible itself was also heavily edited, and in fact, the cannon itself determined, by the Church of Rome.

You might ask:  is life all about suffering, endlessly, as some religions teach?  I don’t embrace that notion.  Like Fillmore, I believe that life is on a path of spiritual growth, which to me may involve incarnation into a human body or some other form on this world, or on another plane of existence. 

Whatever, negative experiences are learning opportunities, chosen by our higher selves, on our spiraling path to higher consciousness, and eventually, no incarnations at all – just pure spirit!

In the end, I embrace Reincarnation because it makes sense to me, both intellectually and spiritually.  The notion of spirit only being infinite for God and Jesus but not for the rest of us does not compute.  The idea that cause and effect operate throughout the universe except where spirituality is concerned also does not compute.  I like the idea that spiritual growth may involve 5,000 hours of community service!

I believe in a higher self, in my higher self, and that my current personality is but a small part of my higher self.  Whether I am my own spirit guide or my own angel, or my own grandpa is immaterial.  Literally.  It’s not about me. I know I am more cut off from my higher self than I would like to be, and that gratitude for inspiration from my higher self or other guides is important.  I like the idea that we are so much more than the worst things we have ever done or said.  It gives me hope, and puts our lives in perspective to know that our earth personality is not the end-all-be-all, even of ourselves!

I don’t believe in a capricious god, modeled as the ultimate powerful king, who allows terrible things to happen to people and then just pardons the perpetrators (if they are believers!) without any further ado or spiritual growth.  I do believe in the laws of physics, cause and effect, evolution, justice, and love.  I like the idea that we are all on the path of spiritual growth together, that we are going  as a river instead of a drop of water.  Perhaps we collaborate with others to create learning experiences!

I allow that some things are unknowable, such as where did spirit come from, or where did the universe come from, or how exactly does reincarnation work.  Reincarnation, however, like evolution, makes sense of the world to me, and brings me peace despite the craziness all around.  I wish for you as well, the peace and love of spirit.