problems and issues in your life by using the Attitudes, Conditions, and Tendencies list.
Change Your Emotional Condition
The sixth key is to discern where your underlying attitudes are taking you. The Karmic Dictionary is arranged alphabetically for easy reference, and allows you to look up the meaning of difficulties as they arise.
Apply the Lessons of Your Life
The seventh key: use this meaning, or underlying emotional condition, to implement your Life Lessons.
Follow your road with understanding, discernment, and an open heart, and see where it takes you. Don’t be surprised if it takes you where you want to go.
As above, so below
We are all one
God is in all of us, and in all things.
—Anonymous
Religions on Reincarnation
Buddhism: Incarnations are caused by karma and earthly cravings that must be overcome in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. Liberation from rebirth is achieved when one overcomes the “three unwholesome roots”: desire, hatred, and delusion—and attains nirvana, or enlightenment, a state of ineffable peace.
Christianity: While early versions of the Bible confirm the theory of reincarnation, no mainstream Christian denomination officially supports the concept.
Hinduism: Reincarnation is caused by imperfections of the soul; ignorance and desire perpetuate the need to reincarnate. The soul perfects itself by purifying and realizing itself, shedding earthly desires.
Islam: The Koran: “He brings back to life the dead earth, similarly ye shall be reborn.”
Judaism: The early Jews believed in transmigration, or the passage of a soul upon death into another body. —Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience
CHAPTER 2
The Life of the Soul
Our Ultimate Purpose
I was a teenager when I first got my driver’s license. My mother saw that as an opportunity for me to deliver to my dad anything he might have forgotten to take to work, including his lunch, sweater, hat, scarf, or gloves. My dad was the pharmacist at a large mental institution on Long Island in New York, and my mother always admonished, “Don’t walk through the wards. Just park outside the pharmacy and please just drop this off to your dad. Don’t stop to observe, bond, or talk with the patients!” She knew me so well. She knew that I found this institution and the people it housed fascinating. I would park far away from the Pharmacy Department, and enter through any doors that might have been left open. Sometimes, I found myself walking through wards where the patients were heavily drugged and in a deep-sleep state. They would be sitting around, watching television or playing cards. Some were wandering through the halls. I noticed something very strange about many of the patients. Some were in period costumes. Some women wore flowing robes and gowns. Some had high pointy hats with veils, while others wore crowns, skull caps, and a wide array of odd-looking head gear. The variety of garb was impressive and intriguing. I wanted to know more. Through the years, I thought often about those patients. As I studied metaphysics and learned about the continuation of existence through many physical lives, I came to realize that these people were reliving existences from previous incarnations. I learned that over-indulgence in alcohol or mind-altering drugs can break through our protective shield, or aura. The damaging of the protective veil that separates our present consciousness from our past-life memories can cause a confused state of mind. We all have that electromagnetic shield, or aura, surrounding us. It can be seen by some psychics and can be photographed using Kirlian photography. When this aura is damaged by drinking excessive alcohol, shock treatments, or use of certain drugs, we can enter a reality that is more of a past-life memory than the present. We can leave ourselves open to the intrusion of disincarnate entities that influence our behavior and cause undesirable and dangerous actions. These visits to the state mental hospital had a profound effect on me and contributed greatly to my desire to learn more about our prior lifetimes, and helped begin an intense search for the truth about life and the possibilities created by reincarnation.
The great mystic, Paramahansa Yogananda, said that we would probably go insane if we had clear recall of our past lives. “God, in His grace and infinite wisdom, pulls down the shield that closes off the memories of our prior incarnations.” The fact that we may remember past lives in bits and pieces, as some did in the mental institution, fascinated me. I began to look for other ways our previous incarnations crept into our present life, perhaps in ways we were totally unaware.
As I quoted Paramahansa Yogananda earlier in this book, “. . . faith in divine protection, and right use of man’s God-given will, are forces more formidable than are influences flowing through the heaven. The starry inscription at one’s birth, I came to understand, is not that man is a puppet of his past, its message is rather a prod to pride; the very heavens seek to arouse man’s determination to be free of every limitation. God created each man as a soul, dowered with individuality . . . His freedom is final and immediate, if he so wills; it depends not on outer but inner victories.” He is stating that while astrology presents a basic pattern, man’s unique individuality and free will give him the power to overcome any obstacle that may be in his path, with the result of becoming a pillar of strength, or that of a parasite, completely his own doing.
Nonetheless, I found, the influences present from our past lives can prove to be powerful impediments to our success as individuals, and to the fulfillment of our potential. These influences can create cyclical behavior that hinders us from attaining happiness, fulfillment, and joy. What if, I wondered, we had a way of identifying these past-life influences, and overcoming them?
If you are still stuck on the issue of reincarnation, then I hope you realize that as humans, we are much too profound and complex to have lived only one lifetime. Look at the many instances of child prodigies, or of young people who remember specific incidents, people, or locations from prior lives. How about the many individuals who find they are able to speak languages they have never studied?
As for experiences or actions from previous incarnations that have created karma affecting us now, you may wonder why you should be held responsible for past-life actions that you can’t remember. Many people think this is unfair. Why be physically or emotionally challenged, or in some way handicapped in the twenty-first century for mistakes made perhaps hundreds of years before? Who remembers these things? Is each new baby actually carrying eons of lifetimes of experiences into each new incarnation, both good and bad?
Yes, we carry our past deeds in our “soul memory.” The Egyptian Book of the Dead refers to this soul memory, or soul record, as the Akashic record. If we don’t learn the lessons that we should have learned at a certain point in our soul’s development, it’s possible to accrue and experience “karma.” Karma can be rough, but it can also be rewarding. It depends upon the growth of the soul, and your ability to understand, respect, and practice the universal laws.
Balance and harmony of the soul’s energy is important. If we become too out-of-balance, perhaps with too many lifetimes of wealth and extravagance, our Higher Intelligence, or the God within, may encourage us to choose a lifetime of poverty and deprivation for the soul’s greatest growth experience. I like to call these adjustments “soul tweaking.”
We incarnate as male and female, because we must experience and know the nature of