On the Matter of Reincarnation

Reincarnation is a fact of life held by millions of people the world over. T he people largely responsible for this philosophy's dissemination, and held in high regard for their knowledge on the subject, are Tibetan and Chinese Mahayana Buddhists, Thai, Burmese, and Sri Lankan Hinayana Buddhists, Chinese Taoists, Indian Hindus, and a seemingly endless array of homegrown pantheistic Asian offshoots which vary from town to town. It is from these Asian sources that the idea of reincarnation filtered into Western religious arenas of thought. Some of the theory came to us in complete systems, such as with the growing-in-popularity Tibetan Buddhist approach, while some of it came in dribs and drabs, snippets from mainstream religions neatly edited by the evangelist to suit the social climate and his or her spiritual capacity and conditioning.

I have spent time as a monk in Asia and was led through the training steps provided to such a person who is clearly devoted to experientially exploring spiritual realities for the sake of Enlightenment and its freedom from the whole reincarnation package, as well as for the sake of awakening others to the fact of reincarnation, its consequences, philosophy and transcendence.

I also am fully committed to the teachings within The Urantia Book. It may be of some small interest to readers off the 606 Newsletter if I outline some of my own experiences with reincarnation and The Urantia Book during the course of my spiritual development...hence this article.

Like thousands of Westerners, my first serving of the reincarnation idea came to me from the author of a number of books on Tibetan Buddhism, one Lobsang Rampa. Lobsang, about whom neither the Dalai Lama nor any others in Tibetan Buddhist ranks know anything at all, claims to have been a Tibetan Buddhist Lama early this century. He died and transferred himself into the body of a Canadian man who was himself about to die. Lobsang still is alive and well in Canada.

His books captivated a large Western audience and set many people on the path to believing in reincarnation. His was a case of the delivery to us of a dribs and drabs package and in the light of what "real" Tibetan Lamas teach on reincarnation, Lobsang didn't really do such a terrific job in his presentation of the subject. As a result of exposure to his writings however, large numbers of Westerners took up the belief, never researching the idea any further, nor even seriously questioning it. The common scenario I came across was people who had rejected Christianity here due to their feelings toward the Church's dogmatic approach and its stifling effect upon a virginal spiritual urge eager for the dynamic exploration of new horizons rich in love and nourishment, who had a vacuum to fill. Along came reincarnation, the

mystical, the spiritually appealing, the romantic, and...quite naturally...folks grabbed onto it. Most of us want to fill the vacuum created by a negative with something we construe to be a positive, and many more of us want to believe in anything at all, just so long as it doesn't accord with whatever we've previously rejected. Lobsang's teachings certainly appealed to me at that time. Reincarnation was innocuous enough, sufficiently radical, and it was buried deep in the bosom of romance itself...the aloof and mystical community of Tibetan sages, renowned for their loving kindness and spiritual expertise. It could be said that when I did trek off to be with these kindly people, my thirst was for spiritual experience in the company of loving companions and reincarnation just happened to be a part of the deal.

I arrived into their midst with ideas about life, death and reincarnation, being largely undeveloped at all. I was open to suggestion; being biased neither one way nor the other very much. I had, however, developed a psychic ability which enabled me to do "Past-life readings' for people...and seemed to be pretty good at it. I harboured a belief in reincarnation, which provided access to the Tibetan community, exposed me to people's inner world and behavioral tendencies, yet it wasn't a belief I would fervently defend...In Past-Life readings I had no explanation for the flood of information accredited to past lives. The idea of that information having its origins in actual past-lives seemed good enough at the time...until I could verify it or find a better explanation for it at some later stage of spiritual development.

My training, as a monk is afforded far greater access to teachings and initiations than laypersons, consisted of firstly learning the principles by which reincarnation operates. Without reincarnation Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Western mystery schools, and the many pantheistic cults of the world are without their "raison-d'etre". Without reincarnation there is no philosophically debatable foundation for religious experience, nor for explanation of the human condition. Without reincarnation these religious approaches would be reduced to evangelizing spirituality for its own sake alone...and so very much of the potency of such an approach depends upon well developed faith, an attribute few of us enjoy until we have survived a great deal of soul-searching and experiential trauma. If you want to question this, notice how you, yourself appeal to someone as you evangelize. Find out what you use as leverage to convince the person to begin to draw on God in daily life. Somewhere along the line you'll use reasons such as: "Jesus died for you"; "What will happen to you after you die?"; "How do you account for synchronous events...karma?"; and so on. You use your philosophy to encourage people to "get into God"...as if God isn't sufficient reason alone. The kids' reply to "Why do you believe in God?"..."Because"..."Because why?"..."Just because”...is God for God's sake rather than God for reincarnation's sake or some other philosophical argument’s sake.

And so I was taught the foundation of Buddhism, the very reason for being faithful and clearing my way for the enlightenment event and it’s overturning of the self-identity as it generated Nirvana, the foundation

The principles I was taught agree totally with those found in all the various sects of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Western mystery schools and those presented to people through mediums and psychics in general here in the West.

The principles, surprisingly largely ill defined or unknown to most Westerners who believe in reincarnation, are as follows:

l. SELF IS REAL and self-generating. Everything else, the universes filled with life forms, the cities filled with people, the landscape filled with trees and plants and lakes and seas, your body and feelings and mind and its thoughts, what you see and hear and feel and taste and smell...all these, are unreal and not self-generating, they are selfless. Our feeling of selfhood and even our life and death itself are recognized by the enlightened mind to be nothing more than names and appearances...the substance of which remains in Self...the appearance of which however are at no time actually self-existent things. It's a bit like peeling away the leaves of an onion in search of the core being of the onion and of course finding no such thing. 2. TRUE REALITY is said to be a condition in which you, as Self, are like an immense mirror, which has no individual sense of self that can be set apart from anything., and that ALL phenomena that make up life are empty reflections, which appear and disappear in the mirror of Self. As Self you know you are, as such; it's just that you are not bound by the limitations arising from behaving according to the understanding that you are your body or your mind. Instead, you encompass them; body and mind exist within you rather than the other way around. 3. MAN'S ERROR is the belief that we are a self-feeling called "I" and that we behave according to the limitations and capacity for truth that our own particular "I" has. Enlightenment, the goal of all reincarnation theories, delivers man from his deluded notion and consequently that notion's limitations. The basis for these limitations is fear, greed, anger and ignorance of Self. 4. KARMA, meaning cause and effect, is the act of generating changes. It can be good karma, bad karma or neutral karma. The sage transforms his or her behavioral tendencies so as to generate good karma, i.e. set in motion only those things that will return prosperity to himself and all others. The ignorant person is so completely driven by the delusion of believing in personal gain and loss that most karma is bad, i.e. he sets in motion those things which result in his demise and the demise of others. Some reincarnation beliefs hold that over countless lifetimes man becomes ever-increasingly capable of generating good karma. Some, such as is commonly found within primitive Hindu and Buddhist theories hold that man is no more likely to live one step up the ladder next time around than revert to being a plant or a bug. In fact the latter is more likely.

In reincarnation-based lives, great importance is placed upon generating good karma: support priests, because they can show you the way out; do kind things for others, so you'll get it back to you in return; make bountiful offerings to gods and your ancestors, just in case they have any sway over what happens to you in this lifetime or the next ...and so on.

The heart of the belief in reincarnation, as it is experientially taught to monks, is that Self is uncreated (like the Thought Adjuster) and that what it is that incarnates over and over again is merely an "I" thought. Due to the belief in a self-existent "I" in one lifetime, those seeds sown are seeds designed to perpetuate the sense of "I". Self is responsible for generating and supporting these causes, it being utterly unmoved by any of the goings-on, which the "I" considers are real. Self has the perspective, blatantly obvious and blatantly correct once enlightenment occurs, that everything is OK and could never be anything but OK. Self doesn't acknowledge any perspective that the "I" has.... so the "I" can be scared to death, craving personal survival, fearful of extinction and busy generating all the causes that reinforce the "I", and Self doesn't give a hoot! Self is to all intents and purposes God: God the creator; God the supporter; God the lover; God who is free from the clamor for mortal strivings; God who is fully aware of what is transient and fleeting and what is eternal and enduring...and who is quite OK about letting the transient, the "flash of lightning in the dark night", be true to its nature; and God who has no impulse to muster a neatly edited selection of some of the possible phenomena around and call it "I" and belief in it to the complete forgetfulness of the reality, security, enormousness and value in being Him Self. Only we, it seems, are that silly.

Reincarnation theories consider that we have been running the "I" trip forever since an eternal past. There was no beginning to our adoption of the "I" which is responsible for reincarnating time and time again.

One of the spiritual exercises designed to generate the loving kindness which will enable the "I" to loosen its grip and thus be more inclined to awaken to Self, is the "Truth" that since we have lived forever, and in every conceivable form imaginable, every single thing has at some stage been our mother, our father, our child, our friend, and our enemy. We have deeply loved absolutely everyone at some stage, and at another

stage hated them with a vile evil to the extent that we delighted in chopping them into little pieces.

If everyone has been our mother then, it's only right to love everyone now with the love we have for our mother, or at least with the love of a mother. Yet I've come across only a few monks who live like this and

next to no lay people, Asian or Western, who strongly adhere to the belief in their own reincarnation. Most reincarnationists have the rather unnerving attitude that they can relax and take it easy during life because, when it's all said and done, Enlightenment is seemingly so impossible to attain, and life really isn't all that bad, and ultimately it's in the hands of something presumed to be spiritual and presumed to be leading the person gradually into greater proximity to the enlightenment...salvation event…which according to the actual premise for reincarnation itself, is absolute nonsense. The person merely lives with a belief that is fashionable, or comfortable, or romantic, or sufficiently mystical to appease a part of the inner-life cravings ...without ever seriously researching the belief itself...a belief that, when actually understood in its fullness, is horrific and sufficiently repulsive to make a person crave enlightenment with such an unwavering determination and such a spiritual ferocity as to bring about radical shifts in their self-identity. One of the common traits most Western reincarnationists share however is the almost total lack of drive to exit the reincarnation cycle...they have no spiritual practice in their daily lives to speak of at all. Day after day, month after month, and year after year, they go on letting their precious time here slip away fruitlessly without ever coming to anything very substantial that is capable of ACTING on their firmly held belief in

reincarnation, .except perhaps a repertoire of other possible explanations they reject with vehemence. Most Westerners I have met who harbor a belief in reincarnation pale into insignificance when compared to the true sages who share the same belief, yet who have turned their lives around and now veritably ooze the unfathomably rich self-assurance, love, and faith of a True Spirit. And ironically, it is these ones, humble in their perfection, ordinary in their, by human standards, overwhelming spiritual self identity and potency, who begin to doubt the whole reincarnation hypothesis.

In a sense it is only their perspective gained subsequent to Enlightenment that enables a person to draw on sufficiently spiritual resources to know reincarnation fully at all. And if you're enlightened, reincarnation is, as promised in the reincarnation teaching itself, the first thing to get tossed out! To the Enlightened person it is blatantly obvious that no one was ever reincarnating; no one was ever born; and no one could die. Life and death are merely empty names, names that have been ascribed to mirage-like goings-on possessing the substance of a dream or a fantasy. "I" never was real. "I" never did all those things that comprised daily life. "I" never did have all that suffering, all that confusion, and all that desperation. It all took place within Self...unmoving, eternal, self-generating, divinely wise and compassionate Self. Ha! The joke of it all. When your self-identity returns or awakens from "I" to Self, you can't help but laugh at yourself for having been so silly as to endorse your "I" as host of your life. And it is then only a matter of conditioning that determines the type of explanations the enlightened person uses to teach others. Some still employ the reincarnation-nirvana concepts, some use only the enlightened perspective (such as Zen Buddhism often does), some revert to "this is your First Life"...and so on. It's only a matter of conditioning and who it is you're teaching that determines your explanations, because when you're living from Self the daily life reality is so extraordinarily different from that lived with an "I" host that all the words and explanations are really beside the point and are seen to be more often than not a cause for greater confusion in the minds of those listening.

So, in a nutshell, that's pretty much what reincarnation is about as it's taught as the source, by those "in the know" whose spiritual lives depend on it utterly...and there is no truer origin to derive such teachings from here on this planet.

In the course of my training then, I was taught all the above and more experientially...I experienced each exercise in the teachings. And I quite fancied it too. I was taken through the Bardo, the post death event. I was taught how to willfully die, how to willfully be born again. I was taught how to experience the "truth" that Self is host and "I" is just a fleeting guest in my mind. I was taught how my delusions about "I" wreaked unimaginable havoc in my life and the lives of everyone else.... and I experienced it. I was taught the "truth" about reincarnation, the "truth" about our human condition...and I believed it. Well, I could prove it. I had experienced absolutely everything, except Enlightenment, involved in reincarnation's premises. Reincarnation was an obvious fact of life to me because I could recount any of the infinite past lives I had already lived, as well as recount those in any other person for them. And that's pretty convincing.

But then along came the Urantia Book, a wordy, heady immensity that, I must admit, didn't grab me much at all. However, I saw a bit on Thought Adjusters and, although not reading that part in any coherent way for at least another two years, I had a mild interest in the book because I thought it might have something to say on "Buddha Nature"... Self.

A number of years passed before I could actually understand the terminology and concepts employed in the book. One day I found something written about how mind communications are made in mortals. The words stopped me in my tracks because here was somebody writing about things I could do, and had worked extremely hard to be spiritually able to do so. I knew that this was not something the average person could perform, and so the author must have at least spiritually developed to my own stage. Yet when I read the words before me I saw that he was writing with such an expertise on the subject... something I could in no way achieve. My next deduction was that this author must be writing the truth. If he can be so authoritative on such highly classified and secretive and spiritually demanding matters that I had become familiar with, and there's no conceivable way that I would or could knowingly lie or exaggerate to others on such matters, there's no possible way for him to lie either. And so I tentatively gave The Urantia Book an opportunity to teach me.

All went well until I came across the First Life notion, no previous lives...ever! That was a bit disturbing. I knew these authors must be writing the truth simply because much of the content of the book was far too lofty for the average person to have such an in-depth knowledge of. So I was in a position of having my foolproof, still enlightenment-less spiritual reality in a dilemma. I have unquestionable faith and admiration for anyone who can prove their spiritual older brother-ness to me, their one-step-or-more-further-down-the-track-than-I-am qualities. These authors demonstrated this to me in no uncertain terms. But still I could not address the First Life issue satisfactorily. Out of a genuine thirst for Truth in my very being I scoured every possible avenue and resource inside me to resolve this dilemma...to no avail. I read and re-read The Urantia Book for some indication that they had meant First Life in some other context than no previous lives ever...to no avail. And all the while my spiritual reality was becoming more and more in line with the consciousness of and conscious communication with what I have come to call my Thought Adjuster. I began to experience wholly new and refreshing insights into the mortal condition and more impressively, my own spiritual identity... in far more real ways than I had ever previously known.

There came a day when, having already tried conscious communication with my Thought Adjuster and numerous personalities outlined in The Urantia Book, I addressed them saying: "I cannot resolve this dilemma of past-life: First Life. I have done my best. I need something more than what I have to work with in order to solve it. If you want me to believe what you are teaching me in this Urantia Book then you come up with the goods that'll help me to resolve this dilemma so that I can progress in my spiritual journey...otherwise you and your book can take a hike!" And three days later the most extraordinary thing happened tome. The goods arrived.

It is probably worth mentioning first, before going further into what happened then, that during the previous years of spiritual development I had discovered hand in hand with The Urantia Book what appeared to be mind circuitry. This circuitry was a communication circuit I was "plugged into", was global and I found my consciousness was expanded to include being responsible for my place on the whole planet, not just my locality. Things in my life changed accordingly. I found the types of needs people brought me, for healing or counseling or teaching, were suddenly globally oriented. But after some time I was plugged into another circuit of even broader dimension. This circuit seemed to all intents and purposes to be a Morontian circuit, and over a period of a couple of years this circuit seemed to enlarge as if it came to embrace all of the Morontia circuits up to and including Jerusem.

It was from living as if I was a Jerusemite that my request for "the goods" was made. My perspective had changed enormously. I was able to perform spiritually in markedly different ways from when I was only

globally plugged in. Things were becoming more real for me. My spiritual efforts were somehow more easily coming to fruitition, and those fruits were holding their ground and not seeming to slip back under a mire of mortal slag-energy that had been my constant and frustrating companion for ever so long. Spiritual self-identity and spiritual responsibility had become tangible things, clearly defined and clearly ordered within me...thanks solely to these Morontian circuits I had access to or had won. I was still unenlightened and had only vague notions about the reality known as Adjuster-fusion, although my commitment to the will of my Adjuster was firmly fixed...I would do the best I could given what I had to work with.

And so three days after I made my earnest request the goods arrived. I found myself stopped in my tracks. I suddenly noticed the presence psychically of a spiritual person, of a species I had never before encountered. He appeared to be a resident far from my home shores of Urantia and even far removed from Jerusem. He had a spiritual luminosity and consciousness so extraordinarily out of place here...like a physics professor turning up in the arithmetic class of 7 year olds...a person with resources far in excess of the immediate needs and in years to come. And he addressed me.

Silently, wordlessly, we engaged a state of worship together. My whole being filled with an indescribable joy and dignity. We remained like this for quite some time until at length he, again wordlessly, communicated to me deep within my being that he knew of my request to understand this matter of reincarnation...and that he knew that I had exhausted all of my resources in this quest...and that he wished to enlarge my consciousness to a level compatible with his own...as it is for him, yet at the same time holding my mortal framework intact so that the new meanings I would discover might be meaningful to me in my mortal station rather than as one of his order...and did he have my permission to do this?....Oh boy! Did he ever! Let's go for it.

Then we seemed to proceed on a lengthy journey through space together. I noticed that we seemed to go far beyond the spatial locations, the worlds, myself I noticed a certain feeling of entering an entirely new

Territory; one wherein who I was and how I behaved and thought was almost infantile compared to the light this greater reality and consciousness my teacher was so at home in.

And then at length we came gently to a halt somewhere seemingly far out in space beyond both Urantia and the Morontian worlds and their levels of reality. Yet, where ever we were, it somehow seemed closer to the

Centre of things than anything I had previously experienced... and all the while my physical senses and reality were no different from normal daily life here on Earth.

Then this wonderful being, obviously a master at communicating with mortals when the occasion arises for him, asked me to turn around and face the direction wherein Urantia and my whole life lay. And shortly

after doing this he asked me to pose my question to myself again; the one about if there was reincarnation or if my life on Urantia was indeed my First Life. I did this an instantly there came the unmistakable deeply known recognition that, and I cried it out aloud, "There is no possible way that reincarnation CAN exist!" My guide just smiled and left me alone in my thoughts and deliberations as I clearly saw my world, far off as it was, in the light of this exalted reality of his. My thoughts, deeply moving my very essence, moved over extremely convincing perceptions and understandings. Things came to a completion within me in a way that was so exquisitely divinely co-coordinated. The mechanism of life does not have a reincarnation element within it on Urantia. It's not that reincarnation is a possible, or a likely; it simply is utterly absent.

At the same time as I was bringing up my dilemma to completion I came to the unmistakable conclusion that in truth there is no possible way any of my fellowmen and women on Urantia could ever be one hundred percent sure about the same question on reincarnation unless they asked the question in this or a similarly transcendent state of mind. They just simply didn't have the consciousness resource-pool to draw on which would enable them to come to a universally acceptable conclusion unless they could plug into something that could augment their Urantian and even perhaps their Morontian communication/perspective circuitry. So back home on Urantia centuries may pass and still the belief would persist in the minds of the mortals and we would have nothing much to work with that could "prove or disprove" reincarnation once and for all. Most people who would believe me in First-Life would never have anything much to back that up with. And most people who would believe in Past-Life would equally never have anything much to back that up either, except a few rather flimsily wrought excuses created out of the very matrix that cannot survive the dynamics of eternally oriented energies and careers.

Both the belief in First-Life and Past-Life are constructed from the same matrix on Earth...and life in its deepest, most eternally nourished, and most personally fulfilling is not a matter for belief systems and words and philosophies. Rather it is a concern of the inner depths, the wordless, the quiet, that reality within us which knows direct rapport with the First and only Source of everything in heaven and on Earth.

What this means to us is that, because we function on many psychological levels, some more conscious and word based, some deeper and less word-based, we are capable of living from different capacities for meaning of our lives. In a sense the meaning we are capable of giving to our lives is directly related to the type of "circuits" we're plugged into; a circuit with more of a universal consciousness is going to enable us to create an entirely different scope of meaning than that which we could create from a circuit which is only locally orientated. The outcome of either circuit is that when we endeavor to research in ourselves any questions whose answers will provide the fabric of our beliefs, we can do so only within the parameters of the circuits we have access to...and our beliefs will reflect that fact. Many of the circuits we use as building blocks for more universally mature beliefs, beliefs that make us capable of eternal life, are in fact incapable of surviving our deaths or translation from the planet. In the same manner, many of the building blocks we use which are Morontian circuits will fizzle out when we have the need for circuits to enable us Local Universe reality values..."When I was a child I played with the things of children, but now I am a man I have put away my toys for the things of men" (or something like that!) It does make one wonder about the obvious immense universal comprehension and capacity for meaning used by the authors of The Urantia Book papers.

Turning our attention to those events and experiences here on Earth which contribute to our interest in developing faith in reincarnation, we find only a handful of such items: They are: l. People who truly

believe they have lived before because they visit a place or experience something, which is a deja-vu for them. 2. Past-Life regression sessions out of which we find data coming to mind, which we identify with, and attribute to "memories" of times past, times historically dated prior to our present birth. 3. Infants who display all the behavioral tendencies of known deceased predecessors, such as are most common in the Asian cultures and is THE significant factor in the Tibetan practice of discovering reincarnated monks. 4. Clairvoyantly derived data, either personally obtained or given us by psychics/mediums who believe in reincarnation themselves. 5. Books on the subject by so-called authorities: Lobsang, Claire Prophet, Edgar Cayce, Alice Bailey, various Buddhist and Hindu authors etc. etc. Theosophical bookshop shelves are abundant in authors expounding the virtues or logistics or reincarnation.

All or some of the above we have experienced ourselves, or we believe that truly someone else has, and it is our firm conviction in this faith that enables us to believe in reincarnation. But the interesting thing is that the belief does not make it real...just as the “Cargo Cult” belief, that life can be more prosperous by praying for the Cargo planes of World War II who accidentally dropped a few tons of supplies into the isolated villages of primitive peoples, to return and deliver the people an abundance of goodies, is real. The planes are all scrapped. The pilots are ignorant of any of the natives' prayers. No one is supporting the system, which the natives are using as their "spiritual" foundation for life. The system doesn't exist.

Another, and probably prior criterion for us believing in reincarnation is THAT WE WANT TO. And if we want to, we will look through those rose-tinted glasses and make sure we have sufficient support to back up our beliefs. One of the most supportive supports is in numbers...millions believe in it, so it must be true. However, there are probably only one or two people who believe in you, but that doesn't make you unreal or invalid. The biggest difficulty facing the person, who believes in reincarnation and wants to honestly check out whether or not it is our life condition, is the authority he has invested in his source of information. Is Edgar Cayce capable of really knowing about reincarnation, outside of the fact that he is obviously capable of believing in it? Just because the Tibetan spiritual program generates extraordinary personal power and psychic skills, does that mean that although they believe in reincarnation, and eagerly look for its existence in anything that crops up, that reincarnation itself exists? Or is reincarnation an inherited belief that is part and parcel of an explanation package no one dares or wishes to challenge because to do so, at first, appears to be more risky than believing in it? Yet, no one will answer their own "reincarnation" question satisfactorily until they can act utterly free of all authorities on the subject.

When, if you do ignore all of the world's numerous and difficult not-to-believe-in authorities on reincarnation, you'll find that such a step alone will doubtless bankrupt your investigative resources. This stage then is the appropriate time to ask for a circuit or some resources that are not generated by your own bias. It is only at such personally bankrupt levels of honesty and earnestness that truth can be revealed... whether on reincarnation or anything else. When we read and study The Urantia Book we have two choices in our approach: A. Hear what it says and test it out, or... B. Hold on to our own possibly untested beliefs without allowing room for spiritual growth in regions beyond our already well defined parameters that The Urantia Book lessons might provide.

Two years ago my own enlightenment experience occurred. "I" vanished and "Self" became the conscious host of my life. With this rather extraordinary awakening came a flood of realizations about the matters

of reincarnation, God, religious practices and philosophies, etc.

To the enlightened mind there is no reincarnation; there is no one to reincarnate; no one Enlightened or unenlightened. This view is held by all those who share enlightened minds' One-Mind perspective, however in order to communicate with people concerning their spiritual realities, many expedient measures are employed...reincarnation being one of them. Judda Krishnamurti was probably one of the first, certainly one of the very few, ever to go against the tide of popular belief in reincarnation. Hosts of us here on this beautiful planet recognized that here was an exceptionally beautiful and enlightened human being who frequently openly decried the entire reincarnation hypothesis. He was the friend of all who elected spiritual freedom over the comfortable drowsiness of following traditional beliefs unquestionably. He was a thorough nuisance and embarrassment to all the teachers who taught their flocks the traditional and somewhat inert spiritual lessons most people preferred. When the communication/perspective circuit is far-ranging enough, reincarnation theories are recognized to be merely expedient measures to stimulate people into some form of spiritual commitment. When the communication/perspective circuit is local, the reincarnation theories are the Truth. Ironically though, Truth seems more to be a matter of the capacity of the circuits we have access to rather than the content we ascribe to our lives through their usage.

I have found nothing in the available proof presumed to validate reincarnation, which cannot be fully and satisfactorily ascribed to the nature of mind, and First-Birth here. In the process of plummeting the very quiet and subtle depths of mind all of the mechanisms involved in creating "Past-Life" readings is found. There are similar explanations for all the other phenomena, which people ascribe to reincarnation.

Most people, who believe in reincarnation here in the West, seem to hold the belief that they are embracing a belief that is larger, more generous, more truthful, more resourceful and more spiritual than any other presently on the planet. But I say quite categorically that all of the beliefs available for us to invest our faith in and to trust our spiritual careers with, reincarnation is THE most crippling, THE most stifling, THE most confusing, THE most evasive, and THE most spiritually deprived of all ...even if it is a little more psychically tantalizing than the rest. But these words are only one person's findings and opinion. If you are an Urantia Book reader the odds are that if you also believe in reincarnation, you'll be having some difficulty accepting the book in its entirety, and hence the fullness of your own Faith's expression. Perhaps you might consider asking, like I did. Perhaps you might be interested in challenging both The Urantia Book and your beliefs by laying them both on the line and letting someone more divine and more Enlightened teach you the truth.