The Wheel Of Reincarnation.Wav

...is the wheel of reincarnation. And we're going to talk about the basic Qabalistic teaching and training regarding the whole reincarnational theory, as well as giving you a few examples to show you how it might work. Now, of course, we don't know if everyone present accepts the theory of reincarnation or not.

Strange as it may seem in actuality a person doesn't have to believe in reincarnation in order to achieve liberation though many may have told you they must it helps let's put it this way it makes it easier and the reason incidentally it isn't essential is because in essence according at least to qabalistic thought it isn't essential for us to believe in anything in order to achieve whatever it is we are destined to achieve. Once you believe in something, there is a tendency to become stagnant. You just sit back and you say such and such is so, so what, or what difference does it make? And you lose a certain kind of drive, a drive to find out, a drive to investigate, a drive to know. So that really, sometimes, it's much better not to believe at all. Of course, it's just as bad to very positively disbelieve, because when you're positively disbelieving anything, you're putting a wall in front of yourself you are refusing access to any possible new information so you're locking yourself away in a prison and the Qabalist is pretty much like what modern society has come to call the scientists only the scientific attitude is not new it's very old indeed it comes from that basic attitude of let Let us test this and see.

This is the way to find out, not to accept blindly or to have faith blindly.

Therefore, the first thing we want to ask you to do, if you have a tendency to self-flagellation, that is, hitting yourself over the head because of what you call your lack of faith or lack of belief, please stop doing it, won't you?

It isn't going to help the matter at all and it will really hurt rather than help your growth you can't knock faith into yourself nor will guilt complexes about it bring it to you nor should you expect to just believe something just because other people have told you to believe it if that were the case whatever religion you had been raised in you should firmly believe that religion and lock yourself away from other things because you should have your faith in it why if you couldn't believe in whatever religion you might have been raised in should you be expected to completely accept or swallow sometimes it's really swallow certain thoughts or ideas or beliefs until something in you your soul has reason to know to rise up in you and say yes this is so and very often the soul will not do this until there's been some experience sometimes the soul will do it with no outer experience it will do it because it has been heightened due to certain exercises however it is necessary to have an open mind it is very essential to be willing it is very essential to be willing to test and try certain ideas provided they appeal to your reason in that manner you can go along a great deal more rapidly you can gain verifications for certain theories which are taught in occultism and in time you may gain verification of reincarnation if you have not already done so now of course there are two ways of having what we might call reincarnational verification one is through experiencing your own memories that's one way but you see there's another way and that is through having reports given to you which you accept as true, as tested, of other people's memories. After all, when our scientists tell us that water is made up of two certain elements, you believe them, don't you? You don't feel you have to go out and test and take this element and that element in order to make sure that they know what they're talking about. And engine or that we have a certain type of flight like jet flight because of a certain kind of propulsion you don't have to go to some laboratory and demand the the testing apparatus in order to see whether this is really the way it is done in other words there are some things that we have to to accept because enough people have tested it and enough people have tested it who have the qualifications to test it so you see there are two ways to acquire as we said verifications you do not necessarily need to have it through your own experiences though eventually you will whether it's in this incarnation or another time will tell but we're not limited to that in the records in the libraries in the histories we have truly record upon record of verified memories of reincarnations I'm sure most of you if not all of you have read about the little Indian girl this is fairly recent it happened about 1926 I think or thereabouts this little Indian girl spoke about another name and another life and a group of scientists actually took this little girl along with the parents on a trip to the place where she claimed to have lived as the wife of another man who had two children and who died in childbirth she was taken there it was found to be completely true she ran to the man and called him by the endearment that a woman would call a husband this is a little child of about nine although she'd been talking about her memories since she was six and seven she recognized she took the group of scientists to the house she had lived in she recognized the children and she even ran to a place where she was supposed to hidden some money only it wasn't there but the father-in-law confessed that he had found it after she died and here she was a little girl with other parents now she happened to bring through memory the truth is many children bring through the memory but they forget they remember it in the very early years and then it's forgotten which is good you may think that it is that it is a very wonderful thing to remember past incarnations if it were your soul would have seen to it that you did but it really isn't because if you had memories of your past incarnations you'd be so upwumbled you'd be so full of emotional responses to a bunch of complexities that you couldn't do any growing at all you would in a sense almost explode apart from the tensions and especially when we consider that we are given certain ethical and moral codes as we grow up in the societies we live in which are absolutely essential if we had reincarnational memories and would remember all the immoral things we have done and thought and felt which we have those of us who are subject to guilt complexes and incidentally we all are some are just worse than others and that's why it runs away with it we would find then it would be a dangerous thing and interfere with our growth also if we remembered what our relationships were with each other in past incarnations it would be much more difficult to do something about reestablishing harmony we'd run up to a sister or a brother or a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband and say, why you so-and-so, you gave me poison back in 1700 and such and such. And perhaps he would answer back and say, well, it's too bad I couldn't have poisoned your soul along with it so I wouldn't have to be bothered with you again and wouldn't we have a wonderful time but maybe we do anyway except we don't remember and as we said it really it's merciful furthermore it's not necessary that we remember reincarnations in order to grow because there's another way of utilizing reincarnational memories which we do automatically but we can do it even more which we'll speak about in the latter part of this morning's talk. Right now let's consider a few more ideas regarding reincarnation. As we said, the first thing we'd like you to really consider, those of you who perhaps do not accept reincarnation, is the fact that there have been records. We gave you one of the little Indian girl, but this is just one in an almost infinite number of records which have been tested of memories which people have had about their own past lives there's a very similar case of a Japanese boy tested by scientists there's another case very similar about a little boy in this country who remembered himself as a Canadian a Canadian soldier and incidentally after checking every detail of his memory checked through this was a little boy of about seven who had these memories.

And these are just children, of course. Lots of people start developing memories when they go into occultism and go in for certain esoteric practices.

Unfortunately, many of these memories are merely phantasms.

Like Dr. Case, who was due to give a talk on reincarnation to the Theosophical Society one time, discovered to his horror that there were seventh Cleopatras in the audience. Each had come and told him secretly that this had been one of their past reincarnations so you see even apparently having memories doesn't necessarily make them correct memories because just like we dream we often will have experiences in order to make up for feelings of inferiority or lack of loveliness, at least from our point of view, we will make up for it by actually having what seems to us a quite valid experience, which is really a wish-fulfillment fantasy. So one has to learn how to differentiate in the long run between that which takes you back truly to past memory of your own inner life and that which is tuning into somebody else's memories and that which is fantasy fulfillment or fantasy fear dreams which people have consciously things they fear they will dream up when they take for instance drugs you'll often see things like this so not Not everything that is experienced is necessarily a reincarnational memory.

It's good to keep an open mind, but it's good not to accept everything blindly. At the same time, it's good to know that reincarnational memories have been verified scientifically and by others innumerable times, that if you need to have your faith heightened in reincarnation as a theory, it's very easy to look it up in a few books which have been written on the subject and that should be sufficient to make you work with it at least as a hypothesis now then what actually does the wheel of reincarnation indicate in terms of qabalistic thinking this is what we want to take up now we seem to have an idea many of us in occultism that when we think of reincarnation and then we consider the various relationships that develop and the problems that come up we seem to think that our problems usually are indications of bad karma that we've made in a past incarnation this is the tendency an awful lot of occultists have but incidentally it isn't true sometimes it's true but it isn't true as a continuous thing yes there are times in past incarnations for example where we have done either ourselves or another or many others an injury where in a future incarnation and incidentally not necessarily the next one not necessarily at all the attraction between the people will automatically come up because a magnetic attraction is existent between all individuals who have had any kind of emotional relationship with it whether it be pleasant or unpleasant whether it be one of for instance a rage at being cheated you automatically have a karmic relationship with someone you've become enraged that I mean both it's a mutual thing that goes on it's like a magnetic current a tie and so that we have what we might call these karmic ties towards those both who have injured us, whom we have injured, and towards those who have been lovely to us, and whom we have been lovely to, and mixtures of them. Nevertheless, our karmic relationships are not at all necessarily that which comes from reincarnational problems of the past. For example, I'll bet most of you have the idea that if somebody has a very rough incarnation you know unhappiness frustration problems things going wrong that uh probably they have they have been terrible terrible little boys or girls you know in some past incarnation maybe the last one and that this is uh paying off karma how many here have that idea would you raise your hands high so I can really get a good idea see all right now suppose I told you it isn't true you'd say you'd think to yourself oh but I read it in Theosophy or I read it maybe in Vedanta or I don't know what particular school of thought it might be well having read it wouldn't necessarily make it so would it and of course my telling you it isn't so doesn't mean that it isn't so either we'll grant that However, let's consider this together from a little higher point of view, and then perhaps it will help us to at least throw out one of the problems we have in achieving higher levels of consciousness, because this interferes rather than helps us, incidentally, having this idea.

Let's consider the idea that having a very rough, tough, unhappy, frustrating life, whether that necessarily means we've been very naughty in the last incarnation. I wonder whether you'd mind if we would ask you this question. Would you say that Jesus must have been a horrible sinner in the incarnation before he was Jesus in order to have had to go through that pain that sorrow to have had to weep and say could not watch with me for one hour to been betrayed deserted laughed at crucified five now you know that you don't think that of jesus shouldn't that itself give you a hint shouldn't that in itself be an indication to you that this is not necessarily true this doesn't mean of course that sometimes we don't have pretty rough incarnations uh because of paying off a group of karmic debts shall we say it just means that having a rough indica incarnation doesn't necessarily mean that it might and it might not that's why we shouldn't be so hasty to judge because you see in actuality the younger a soul is the less possibility of coming in with really vast and profound problems and frustrations why because a young soul isn't strong enough to go through this kind of experience what are incarnations for this is the question we want to ask ourselves and then we'll come to a better her answer we reincarnate in order to evolve isn't that correct right now what is it that evolves this is the next question we ask ourselves if the soul is at one that is the higher self is at one with the father is a part of god and therefore perfect therefore the thing that's being evolved is an instrument for this great and miraculous and wondrous thing we call I, the instrument, which is our personality. And it's this personality which gives us the ability to express in all the magical and varied ways in which we can express. And what do we do? We pick up personalities and we throw them down continuously, not only in incarnation after incarnation, What is your personality today what it was when you were a child?

It's as different as day and night. Is your personality the same today as it was when you were an adolescent?

Let's say, God forbid, when we think of some of the things we did as adolescents, we usually knew it all. I know I did. I don't know if you were as brilliant as I was, but I knew it all. And our personalities even now are utterly different but certainly they're different from incarnation to incarnation and this higher self what is it doing it is naturally learning learning how to manipulate the mental stuff of the universe into certain forms, which means first the form of the personality, which in its turn becomes the mental, emotional, and physical form that really involves the astral, incidentally. When we say personality, we usually talk about your astral vehicle which changes as your attitudes change naturally so you see it's building and shaping and filling out and maturing its instrument its vehicle by learning how to manipulate uh this you might say raw mental stuff which it is a part of in the one cosmos the one life and naturally just like a child when it's playing with clay is going to make grotesque images in the same manner the less experience we've had in manipulating with our consciousness the stuff of the mind therefore the images the more grotesque will be the results and we incarnate we incarnate we suffer the repercussions of the grotesque things that we create and we gradually learn we gradually evolve we gradually learn how to handle our consciousness in a better in a greater and more profound the more adequate manner but then finally comes the time when it when we need to develop even more than that and that is the ability to withstand withstand the impacts of the consciousness of the rest of the infants, those who become older souls. This is part of attaining to the higher.

Now, what would it mean then to be able to withstand the impact of the rest of what we often call in Qabalah the mass mind. Mind. We can call it the younger souls if we like, but we could also think of it as the mass mind, that part of consciousness which is really subconscious in nature, where all the thoughts and feelings wash back and forth like rivers between everybody. You know, since we all have our being within this one selfhood. Nevertheless, we are at different levels of self-awareness and self-awakening. We're at different levels of creativity. We're at different levels of artistry. It's one of the reasons that in Qabalah, you know, the Christ consciousness is also called beauty. Because he who really starts creating beauty, truly creating the beauty, is becoming closer and closer to the Christ. What else? And what is it to create beauty? Here is the essence of what we are trying to tell you then about a difficult incarnation which would not indicate at all that we're such naughty naughties though we're all plenty naughty enough god knows but let's not make it worse than it is at times and it is mainly this the development of the strength of our own individuality so that for instance we cannot be pushed around mentally or emotionally by the fears, rages, hatreds, competitiveness, jealousies, and envies of the younger souls that's which that which is being emanated at all time from younger souls that we cannot be pushed around by it in other words that we cannot be influenced by it anymore that something in us refuses to take it in as such that if it comes in it comes out the opposite because we have developed a strength we stand on a higher level with Christ in a really highly evolved an older soul capacity therefore when a soul reaches a certain stage of growth it is not at all necessary necessary to think, if there is a very difficult incarnation, that this particular soul is paying for having murdered or raped, stolen, cheated, and so on. It could merely be that this soul has reached such a level of strength and beauty and capacity for love and integrity of their own higher selfhood that they are coming to be tested because as you've heard us say often enough when you build a bridge you have to know how much weight that steel is going to take before it cracks and since our instrument is being shaped grown created built by the higher self pretty much the same principle exists in that area so let's if we've had a rough time stop figuring that we've been so terrible and we're paying for it and paying for it because all we're doing then is holding a negative thought of more pain and needing to pay and that's not the way we overcome these things that's one of the reasons we put so much time into the idea if it wasn't that it interfered with your growth to think these thoughts we would have just let it left it alone and gone on to other aspects of reincarnation and the understanding of the implications involved here then consider the impact of certain experiences if we permit them to push us around that is to make us bitter envious overly suspicious it's good to be careful when you're in a world of infants I mean yeah but that doesn't mean being suspicious just means recognizing you're in a world of infant be careful the infant isn't going to break your delicate china and so on and so on that's discrimination which you evolve out of your incarnations also if we're careful then not to let ourselves react in kind that is in like manner to the negative mental emotional thinking and feeling of others. This is the way we overcome our karma, which is really what we're after in a sense, so that we can be consciously and at all times creating the kind of karma we want to create. And this is what we will have to do in any case, sooner or later. Therefore, what is our primary job in terms of reincarnation? It really gets down to the same simple principle, except that we'll learn to understand it more now in terms of relationship also. And that principle is mainly this. Whatever it is you're experiencing now, of course it has to do with something that has happened previously, either in this incarnation or the previous incarnation. That is, whatever it is you're experiencing now. However, it is not necessarily, the cause is not necessarily the fact that you have been evil. The cause may be that you've reached a point of testing, and therefore, say, a thousand incarnations worth of little things have been brought together to be your testing ground at once which doesn't you see the difference it's still something you've done in the past that is or thought and felt in the past that brings your today's experience but it's very different to think of it in terms of a grouping together of many incarnations worth of little things in order to test yourself which your own higher soul chose or whether it's because you have to get over being murderously inclined or this or that now along with that then we have to recognize whatever it is we are now of course it has to do with something in the past However, whatever it is we're going to be has to do with the way we are going to react now.

And I repeat, whatever it is we're going to be has to do the way we will react now.

Therefore, it's our reaction which is everything. Everything. Our reaction to the now. That's why we work with the tarot that's why we work with the tree of life that's why we work with all the various things we do these techniques to help you train yourselves to change your now responses and your responses are in terms of patterned behavior from all your past incarnations you automatically react even now you know you get into a habit pattern and so you react therefore you have to change that habit pattern reaction and what is it to change that habit pattern reaction it involves every last detail and it has to do with beauty as we mentioned before Christ is beauty we have to train ourselves to react with beauty to everything that is happening now. For example, you can walk outside. In fact, let's give it in the way that happened. Someone very near and dear to me took a trip with someone else very near and dear to me. These two were very different temperaments. They reacted very differently to the now. One of them kept remarking about the beauty of the scenery, the sky, the hills, the quaintness of the houses. The other one kept mumbling, such poverty, such degradation, such social injustice. One saw beauty and the others saw ugliness as they took this trip across a certain country and the one who saw the ugliness spoiled it for the one who saw the beauty because beauty has a need to be shared and to have someone remarking about the ugliness yet were they in a different place no No. Another example. Two people are what, oh, from the world's point of view, might be considered poor.

Let's say they're both on charity because they're unable to work. One of them will react with mumble, grumble, that I should have come to this. Oh how my ancestors would turn over in their graves if they could see me come to this degraded place in life that I should live in this horrible ugly spot that I shouldn't have this nicety and that luxury oh it is a shame it is a disgrace and the face and the expression shows it and say another one living under the same conditions will say my God how good God is that I live in a society where I can be receiving help from the social institutions so that I can eat have clothing, shelter over my head how rich I am how good God is and this person therefore will walk out and wash the world with love and gratitude because of having this kind of wealth, this kind of good fortune, this kind of wonderful karma.

Two people are in the same situation.

Yet look at the different reactions. And these things are true that I'm telling you. I'm not making them up. I've known people from all these different areas. And so it goes on. One person will moan and groan, I'm driving a car that's four years old already and it's out of date and how why can't I afford to get another car and miserable and every time they get in that car they're full of sorrow here's one of our poor darlings who forgot the time bless your precious heart I sent you all a mental thought but I guess I wasn't strong enough enough and so as we said one person will react with bitterness because he cannot get another model car which he wants and can't afford therefore to turn this in to get the other model and another person might go along with a good rattle trap model a a Ford or something and be singing joy oh joy thou art with me I am with thee maybe even off key but I'll bet God thinks it's beautiful and think that perhaps he's the luckiest person in the world that first of all he can drive a car second of all it's in good running order and if it broke down that person would be thanking God that he'd know how to fix it I'll bet you all right here are two people in the same situation apparently but are they they're not this is the secret of your incarnational changes this is the secret of achieving perfect control of your karma and it is incidentally the only way to achieve it not in starting to picture a million dollars into this into that that believe me in the long run turns out to be nonsense it is how you react here and now to each condition each situation training yourself to respond with beauty to every moment and some moments of course we'll admit are sorrowful but even the sorrow has a certain beauty if we'll remember it is deepening the cup of our lives and our share of the sorrow of life even that can sweeten then the breath and the nostrils rather than and bitter the expression on the face and this incidentally is what brings not only control of your future incarnations, but this is what brings you to the highest kind of illuminated consciousness, eventually, if you practice it, that you can have.

So you see, it works in two ways. The wheel of reincarnation will continue for us, as long as there are places in our nature which are unfinished. In other words, we all have little holes in us which are unfinished. Finished. It doesn't mean that we're evil, though we'll act in very evil ways and we'll need to be punished in order to finally and gradually wake up. But we have little holes in us, and these little holes are undeveloped places. From the higher soul will cause certain desires to come, and according to our evolutionary level, these desires will manifest in certain ways. If we are on lower levels they'll desire they will manifest in low ways if we are on higher levels the same desires will seek manifestation in higher ways it's just like a very sick psychically sick and perverted soul who has a drive for love on the lowest of levels was apt to go out and commit a rape. The highest individual with a need to love, what do you think that individual would do? He would give and give of himself and his care and his thoughtfulness, his consideration and protectiveness. And yet it was the same basic desire. It's the level that the soul is on the age of the soul as to how it finds its expression and we need to take the age of our soul in hand because the age of our soul has to do with how many experiences we have had and for instance some of us may have chosen for instance I have I don't I I'm going to have my head examined by the archangelic psychiatric board when I go over next time but up to this point I I did I chose to keep coming back continuously for five incarnations now practically I didn't stay more than 20 years old on the other side at one time at all now I thought no wonder I'm so tired oh maybe it's a good excuse for laziness I don't know though I'm told I'm not but it's the amount of incarnations with the experiences we have which really determines the age of the soul and as we go along we go along in what you might call in a sense spiritual families we will meet each other over and over again though not necessarily in every incarnation we will choose an incarnation sometimes where we come into a family an alien and we know no one in our family and we will meet a friend or two who's really family and not too many of them we can come into another incarnation where we're meeting a family all over the place I mean so that can become embarrassing and truly you can so you see these things vary but on the whole we are something like a cosmic family and certain groups interwoven groups have very close relationships and in one incarnation they could be say sister and brother and on the next incarnation they might be husband and wife and in another next incarnation uh they might be uh mother and son or father and daughter and in another incarnation maybe husband and wife again another one friends or in-laws or business partners or co-reformers in something. They should need to have their heads examined on that too then.

Because usually it doesn't work out in the final analysis. But you see, the relationships are there in essence at all times. And the only way to change a poor relationship into a good one, the only way is to watch our reactions now, to refuse to react in the negative manner, and to take the positive and deliberately build its opposite. Furthermore, we should watch our words. Speech is important. This is the last thing I'll have to say because I'm speaking over time today and I'm doing it deliberately, especially for the sake of our poor darling brother who forgot to move the clock ahead with daylight savings so he could have a few things to take back. And I'm sure you don't mind sitting a few minutes extra for him. Do you now if we love each other? We shouldn't let him take the trip for nothing at all So I want to do that would bring out that Other very important point and that has to do with our speech We have a tendency not to watch our speech like we should and you've heard it say in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and Certainly we know from everything we've read and studied how important the speech is thought to be the power of the word is involved here and yet do I wonder how much we realize that every time we talk what we're doing is expressing what's inside as our basic habitual thinking feeling and this is the point we've been talking about that needs change in our reaction now if we are in the habit of using for instance vulgar words hate words condemnatory words if we're in the habit of using those words the one thing we can be sure of is that we are continuing to feed our consciousness with a powerful re-suggestion consistently on those negative levels and that will continuously attract us to those people and those conditions and social environments that have to do with it whereas if we train ourselves to use our words to watch our words so they express beauty god is beauty and we should never violate beauty every time we violate beauty by the way we use our language or our thought or our emotion and remember both being an expression we are violating beauty and we will therefore reincarnate we will be building the karma of the wheel of incarnation which keeps alive the ugliness and also the ugliness that exists between people do you want to make sure that when you reincarnate you meet love heart to heart face to face or perhaps in this incarnation you'll have to work hard though then practice beauty in your speech in your thought in your heart practice it and be sure you keep God in it and with it and in that way you will will stop the magnetic attraction that brings you to and attracts you with those levels that are the young souls who live with and still need the vileness, the vulgarities, the hatreds, and the rest that goes with it.

Not that we can avoid it altogether, but in our personal lives and in a good portion of our lives we will find it will start to melt away and so we can reincarnate on the wheel of reincarnation right here even in this one and do you know that really old souls reincarnate many times in one incarnation and if you will look back I think most of you will see that you've lived of more than one incarnation already in this one so you're on the way darlings we're out of kindergarten we're out of elementary school some of us perhaps are still in high school time to go to college don't you think don't forget the beauty