“No matter what we were in the past during any other life, we are spiritually greater today.” – Sri Harold Klemp – The Loving Heart
Do you believe in reincarnation? If so, this statement will make some sense. My religion, ECKANKAR, and it is one of the key tenets of the path. The reason is simple: Your body is not the real you. What is the real you, you ask? Soul.
You do not possess Soul, you (Soul) possess a body. It uses this body to experience and learn. Since Soul, a spark of God, is infinite in nature, these finite bodies come and go, but Soul remains. To give you an idea of what this is, think about your own thinking. The part of you that is thinking about what you are thinking is Soul.
With each life you live in this physical realm, Soul learns. Unlike the mind, which is nothing more than an automaton, the Soul remembers everything it experiences. So, even if the mind cannot understand that it existed in many forms, places and times, Soul understands.
Why don’t we remember our past lives? The mind of a newborn has to start this life like it has every other. If it could remember every single past life it ever had, it would be so overwhelmed that it could not function. Some young children remember many of their past lives in youth. But the mind, slowly develops what we call the censor. The censor blocks out things that the mind could not handle. For example, if you experienced a traumatic death in a previous life, the mind will tend to censor out those experiences because they would be too shocking to the person’s psyche. Since the censor is developed along with the child’s brain, younger children tend to have nightmares, particularly during the time the censor is developing. During this young age, the censor is undeveloped and those nasty nightmares make their way into the dream state of the young child.
As the censor develops, the nightmares disappear. Some nightmares continue into puberty and adult life, but these are part of this life, not a past life in most circumstances. Nightmares can be sourced from violent books, movies, or even video games. I remember as a child watching horror movies on the weekends with my Dad. They were nothing compared to the movies of today. I’m talking about the old black and whites like The Wolfman, The Mummy, and Frankenstein’s Monster, played by the likes of Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi.
Soul works with the mind by giving it impressions. These impressions are like feelings or prompts. These come from Soul’s huge amount of knowledge and experience—experience it gained over the many past lives you have had on this Earth plane. With each life, Soul learns. When it occupies a new body for another life here, it applies these learnings to the new life, hopefully avoiding the mistakes of past lives that may have even resulted in your untimely death. Subsequently, you are better in this life, than you were in previous lives, merely because you know more than you did before. You have more wisdom to draw on.
Does this learning ever end? Fortunately, no. I say fortunately, because if there was a true state of all-knowingness, what would be left? Nothing. When considering that Soul is infinite, it would be an absolute hell, knowing there was nothing else to learn, nothing else to experience, nothing to improve, right? This is where The Plus Factor comes in.
“The law of spiritual revolution presupposes inequality in all things and beings and their continued effort for self-improvement in life” (Klemp, 2010, p. 537). This continuous improvement occurs infinitely for Soul, as it strives for self- and God-realization. There are always new worlds to explore, new things to learn.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Until next time…
Dave
