Over twenty percent of Americans believe in reincarnation, including people who are religious and people who aren’t.
There is a ground swell of thirst for spiritual awakening throughout the modern world. We have discovered that living in a materialistic culture doesn’t satisfy our need to believe and belong to a higher purpose.
The concept of relativism, where there doesn’t exist any concept of moral certainty, and unfettered capitalism, where the pursuit of more, at the expense of everything else, as a valued life long process, leave more and more of us cold and unfulfilled. We collectively yearn to be a part of something higher, a cause to make a difference.
Unbeknownst to us, we are part of a plan to make the world better, a plan that started with the formation of the planet. Guided by the spirit world, each one of us is traveling through multiple lives, always with the goal of improving each time. Little steps are accomplished by whole generations, with various calamities in-between, but invariably were marching forward at an imperceptibly slow pace to the objective: a just world.
What that plan is, how reincarnation plays its part and the role that you play is the subject of this book. Yes, you immortal souls, and even though you may not realize it, you are an integral fragment of the whole and without your effort, the plan struggles.
In presenting this plan we must speak of God. Yet the thought of believing in God is anathema to many, because many of us associate that belief with all of the hypocrisy of organized religions, the bigotry and smugness of those who absolutely know we will go to hell unless we believe, pray, dress, act like them. This certainty, this unwavering faith in the unprovable unnerves and repels our rational thinking and thwarts our longing to believe in a supreme power.
We associate a belief in the almighty with simple naiveté; low intelligence that we don’t wish to be associated with. The quandary is, if you believe in the spirit world, if you believe in reincarnation, then you return to the question of how can this be? How does this work? Why are we reincarnated?
If speaking of God makes you uncomfortable, then use the label of Divine Force, Supreme Being or Master Intelligence, all words I have read used to denote an organization or an entity setting the dials and pulling the levels which control our destiny. God doesn’t mind as long as you have love.
Since we don’t wish to have a religious label forced on us, we drift to spiritualism, a vague, amorphous belief that we are able to communicate with spirits. But to what purpose? Why are there spirits wandering around in the first place? This is where Spiritism supplies the how, when, why and where to your questions.
According to Spiritism, there is a plan. Until we delve into the knowledge revealed to us, we shall remain perplexed about the spirit world. We know it’s out there; after all there are too many unexplained phenomena for it to be otherwise.
How else do you explain past life memories or the similarities of near death experiences (NDE)? There are simply too many points of unresolved occurrences and testimonials for it to be a simple manifestation of hysteria. We may know a friend or have felt the unexplainable ourselves. Psychologists or other professionals, in dreaming up names like “sleep paralysis” for what happens when we wake with a visitation from a spirit and are unable to move, do little to clarify what actually transpired.
Terms like “sleep paralysis” are conveniences to cover ourselves in jargon. They allow you the distance you need, to not say it must be the workings of another world, a power that is completely unknown to us. And that place must be led by something, where for thousands of years that something has been known as God.
But in your heart you know that it is true that there is a different universe out there, which is, as yet, hidden from our instruments and telescopes. The mind wrestles to reconcile the need for scientific proof versus the inevitability that upon our death, we too shall be one with this alternate state.
It is time to free ourselves of the need to always appear in control and aloof to the mysteries of life beyond death. The stakes are too high to ignore, for there is a world beyond ours, what the Druids called the “Other World”. It has been with us before the planet was formed, and we will be part of it after our sun burns out.
The ancients from the priests of Egypt to Greece and Socrates, to the Druids and even the early Christians realized that we travel back and forth from one dimension to the other. They knew it was a requirement for all spirits that in order to grow, to learn, to love, to be fraternal, to participate in a just society, we all have to live many lives to beat out our primitive impulses within us. There are numerous ancient texts and writings hinting at this precept.
Before the advent of Christ, the religious classes of early societies hid their knowledge so they could retain power over the masses, for if people realized the true meaning of the cycle of birth, death, re-birth and on, the ruling hierarchy would quickly see their hold diminish. They could no longer sell their services to promise rewards in heaven, for all would realize that it is a personal process. How we think and act, not an external power anointed only by the priestly nobility, determines our path.
Finally in the 1850’s all was exposed. The spirit world, sensing that our culture and technology was ready, disclosed the process of our climb toward perfection. Allan Kardec’s codification of “The Spirits Book” was no accident; it was one step in the plan to afford humanity a chance to gain maturity. The revelation was called Spiritism.
Spiritism
Spiritism burst onto the world scene in the 1850’s. Allan Kardec (a penname he was told to use by the spirits), who was not a medium, noticed that when he was present during séances, the mood was serious as opposed to the lighter amusing conversations with more frivolous spirits. Being a methodical person, who wrote text books, taught science classes, and provided free courses to the underprivileged, he arranged a series of questions to be put to the spirit world. Allan Kardec did not just use one medium or one answer. He utilized mediums throughout Europe and didn’t include any responses unless he had multiple instances of similar answers from different mediums, all without knowledge of one another.
“The Spirits Book” was the result of his investigation. In it and his four other books is the full context of who we are, why we are here and what our goal in life is.
1. Who we are – We are immortal spirits. How we originated is unknown, even to other spirits, but we know we emerged as primitive intelligence.
2. Why we are here – In our early stages we were placed on primitive worlds to begin to learn the basic lessons of how to survive in a primeval society. We are now on a planet of “atonement”, where we reside until we awaken to a higher level of thought. We shed our basic needs for survival and start to grow in our awareness of the needs of others.
3. What our goal is – In our quest to free ourselves of our basic instincts, we are sent to earth to learn the teachings that we require and to learn from our mistakes we made while previously incarnated. The ultimate goal is to reach perfection, but our intermediate goal on earth is to become a well-rounded, loving, and honest person so we may advance to live on a “regenerative” world, where there is social justice and where envy and wars are mostly a thing of the past.
Does Spiritism purport to be a religion? No. According to Wikipedia, “Spiritism is not a religious sect but a philosophy or a way of life by which its followers live. They have no priests or ministers and do not follow any religious rituals in their meetings. They also do not call their places of meetings churches, and instead call them by various names such as center, society or association. Their activities consist mainly of studying the Spiritist doctrine, applying spiritual healing to the sick and organizing charitable missions.”[i]
While the study of Spiritism and all of its facets could fill volumes, here we shall concentrate on the full explanation of reincarnation. Without understanding our central role in the entire panoply of the spirit world, the other aspects of Spiritism become mere distant concepts which have no relevance to our daily life.
The big secret is this: we are the entire focus of the spirit world. Our improvements, our successes, our failures, our wars, and so on are the daily concern of the representatives from God, under the leadership of Jesus. Does this focus of attention from powerful beings mean that all of us are valuable? In a way, yes, but in reality they are guiding us with the same concern with which the administrators and teachers of an elementary school love and guide their precious students. Make no mistake; they love us, for all have been in our position before.
Who Believes
One of the most iconic inventors in American History believed in Spiritism, Thomas Edison. He actively sought ways to communicate with the spirit world. There was an article in the October 1933 edition of Modern Mechanix; “This article purports to have been written about a secret meeting in 1920 in Edison’s lab where he tried to communicate with the dead. Complete with illustrations describing how Edison set up a beam projector and photoelectric receiver with delicate instruments that would register anything (including smoke) that would cross the beam’s path. This group of scientists sat there for hours and nothing happened.”[ii]
Thomas Edison worked on various devices to speak to the spirit world until his death in 1931. When he was on his deathbed, the following was purported to have occurred; “Before dying, Edison briefly came out of his coma and said to his wife, Mina, who was keeping vigil at his bedside, and his doctor that “It is very beautiful over there!”[iii]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series of stories, was a believer in Spiritism. He wrote a novella, The Land of the Mist, that revolved around spiritualism and he wrote a book, The History of Spiritualism, in 1926. In it, he devoted a chapter to Allen Kardec’s Spiritist Doctrine.[iv]
He attended séances to further his communication with the spirit world; however certain mediums took advantage of him and used tricks to fake conversations with the dead. He attended at least one séance with the wife of Dr. Carl Wickland, the chief psychiatrist at the State Psychopathic Institute of Chicago[v], who was a believer in the spirit world even though he did not believe in reincarnation.
Another major 20th century figure who believed in spiritualism, not particularly in Spiritism, was Carl Jung. He recognized the need to identify one’s life as part of God’s plan. He would recommend that some patients pursue spiritualism to assist their journey for a cure. In fact, “Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III) suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.”[vi]
There are many instances of well-known rational and highly intelligent people who believe in an unseen world that lies amongst us, a world that Francisco C. Xavier, also known as Chico, who was recognized as Brazil’s greatest medium, said begins at the tip of our nose.
Why I believe
Suffice it to say, I am not one who had a near death experience or even a personal spiritual encounter. Nor was I even of a religious inclination to begin with. I grew up going to the Episcopal Church, although my parents stopped going early on and of course I did too. Needless to say, I much preferred my Sundays to myself, playing with my friends.
My parents were friends with the Reverend of our Church and we used to be together at a beach house for a week or so at a time. I do remember him as the nicest man and I have never met a kinder, gentler person in my life since. Plus, and this is a test for many, all of his children were wonderful people.
I came to Spiritism because of a journey of discovery. I was driven to ascertain how the future could be foretold. If the future is known, then we don’t live in a non-deterministic universe, but one where the term fate has meaning. Our random collection of life experiences are not really random, but must have been planned or even possibly guided.
My wife was told of certain events to happen in the future, more than fifteen years before we would meet. Extremely specific events did occur, which could, in the scheme of things be mathematically possible but certainly not probable. One instance foretold the consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Very personal events unfolded that I did not believe at the time, even though my wife told me, in advance, the exact sequence which would occur.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to write down the prophecies and put them in escrow for proof. I have no physical evidence whatsoever, only my desire to understand how someone could, with no knowledge of the American banking system, be so accurate.
Once the covers are partially pulled back to reveal a mystery, all other preconceptions must be re-analyzed. This is where I stood, profoundly affected; my haughtiness of thinking that I was the master of my own destiny was shattered. Something out there had power over me; over me! Not an impersonal God, who I once thought may be some remote divinity that had most probably had forgotten about us here on earth. After all, weren’t we created from random flotsam and jetsam that combined into amino acids, then proteins and took off from there?
To be clear, the Spiritist Doctrine does say we are the product of evolution from primordial elements. However it clarifies that the earth was guided in its evolutionary path. Humans were always in the plan.
The search for how I could have been manipulated (or so I thought) into taking the steps to lead me where events foretold came true brought me, finally, to Spiritism. After researching countless other ideas, such as the theory that the universe is a hologram and we are actually like a DVD where you can fast forward and reverse but the actors can only play the part that was selected, all left me cold. Only when I first started reading The Spirits Book, in pdf format on the web, did I then have my moment of clarity, for not only is the question of pre-determination answered, but the entire reason for the world being as it is, is explored and explained.
In the Doctrine of Spiritism, one of the central tenets is reincarnation. The presence of reincarnation explains why we are reborn and for what purpose. By fully realizing that purpose, you will comprehend why your life has played out in the fashion that it has. You shall understand the bad times were necessary. You will perceive that whatever situation you find yourself in, there is always a solution, because no trial is created without the possibility of victory. Old age won’t mean that our wishes and ambitions must be buried as unattainable. Lastly, the looming specter of death won’t be seen as a tragedy, but as a new beginning and one more step toward perfection.
Find out more about the inner workings and the process of reincarnation - what you do as a spirit and as a physical human being. Read The Case for Reincarnation - Your Path to Perfection.
[[i]] Wikipedia, “Spiritism”, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritism, (accessed September 18, 2014)
[[ii]] ITC voices, “Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead: Myth or Fact?”, n.d., http://itcvoices.org/thomas-edisons-telephone-to-the-dead-myth-or-fact/, (accessed September 20, 2014)
[[iii]] ITC voices, “Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead: Myth or Fact?”, n.d., http://itcvoices.org/thomas-edisons-telephone-to-the-dead-myth-or-fact/, (accessed September 20, 2014)
[[iv]]Wikipedia, “Arthur Conan Doyle”, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle, (accessed September 20, 2014)
[[v]] Wikipedia, “Carl Wickland”, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wickland, (accessed September 20, 2014)
[[vi]] Wikipedia, “Carl Jung”, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung#Spirituality, (accessed September 20, 2014)