Sunday, June 30, 2013

Earthbound Souls, Suicide, and the Problem With Reincarnation


It is one's state of evolution and consciousness that determines what sort of afterlife one finds one's self in after the crossing from this world into the realms beyond it. One's spiritual progress or development is largely dependent on the degree of one's personal illumination, love, understanding and forgiveness. We will explore what happens to souls who are overly steeped in materialism or dogmatic beliefs and to those that commit suicide. Also we will try to solve the problem of reincarnation.

Why Some Souls Start Out Earthbound

Search and rescue of earthbound souls is a common and very much needed occupation as many materialistic souls (not knowing anything about the astral planes or life after death) still cling to the earth for days, weeks, even months after they die simply because they know of nothing better and would often try to get the attention of their physical relatives and friends or take free rides up and down the streets on a bus! The only real problems encountered are those souls with very strong misconceptions (such as deep religious and old, life-long dogmatic convictions) about the afterlife. They are very hard to reach and often stay earthbound much longer than most souls and usually end up in a colony on one of the "belief system territories" of the lower astral worlds along with many other souls of that same very limiting religion or belief system. They are in most cases quite happy there, so might as well leave them well enough alone!

The Problem with Suicide

Well, after knowing just how wonderful death really is, why don't we all just kill ourselves and go back to paradise? One would think, especially if one is in a terrible predicament or suffering or pain or some other severe hardship that one might as well take one's own life and get it over with. After all, so many of the souls who come through can't help but say how extremely happy they are to be free from all the miseries and complexities of physical living and that death was the best thing that ever happened to them. However, the spirits warn that to go before one's time would be detrimental to spiritual wholeness.

Would suicide ever be justified? An assisted suicide might make sense for those patients who are on the life support, in intensive care, who are being forced to hang around in a "vegetable" state of total or extreme disability and/or who are only suffering and having no chance whatsoever of any future purpose, convalescence, joy, healing or happiness while still on Earth. If the physical body is very old, completely worn out, completely useless, in a coma, etc. then why on Earth prolong the suffering? Why not allow the soul its freedom of choice so that it can go on if it wants to? To deliberately force the soul to stay stuck in a painful, agonizing existence in a completely worn-out body and non-functioning brain would not make any sense whatsoever.

On the other hand, if one is still young, healthy, and can still in any way shape or form do some sort of good or service to humanity while still on Earth, it could be hazardous to one's spiritual progress or development to commit suicide, which would rather be like quitting school before one graduates or cutting "Earth" classes before the course is over. There is no such thing as a "shortcut" to paradise. To enter paradise, one's self-concept must be very upright or full of certainty or knowing that one has done only the best thing possible while on Earth with whatever hardship or seeming injustices thrown at one and has not overindulged in too much selfish behavior to the detriment of others. One must face one's self and that is the catch. Those who selfishly commit suicide will have to "live" with all the consequences of that decision, and face all the people hurt by or affected in any way by the taking of one's own life. It is universal law that when one causes pain in others, one never gets away with it.

Regarding life on Earth, no matter how difficult, suicide is never advisable, and death is not intended or designed to solve all one's problems, which are trying to teach one some very important lessons, not to mention all the very important reasons for being on Earth in the first place. Ask any soul who had committed suicide while still in the prime of life and they will lament at all the grief and sadness they had caused others to go through, lost opportunities to love, grow, experience and really become the person they always wanted to be. Every incarnated soul has a mission of some sort to accomplish, and from what I've learned, heard and read about suicide, to find one's self back "at home" without having first accomplished all that one has intended to do on Earth could result in having to go back to Earth and start all over again in a new body. Life, whether here or hereafter is a responsibility, and that responsibility can never be escaped from without great sacrifice to one's spiritual evolution and progress toward finer levels of happiness, fulfillment and salvation.

The Problem With Reincarnation (Not My Favorite Subject)

Very few souls ever want to go back to live (reincarnate) on Earth again. Some souls say reincarnation is possible, and there are many proven cases of reincarnation. According to a video of Betty Jean Eadie, author of Embraced by the Light there might be a form of reincarnation but nothing like what common eastern and popular western "New Age" concepts portray. According to the medium Robert James Lees (1849-1931), author of The Life Elysian, his spirit author (or ghost writer-ha! ha!), Aphraar states that the concept that one dies and reincarnates again and again is a distortion, in other words, there is usually no personal spirit that enters the body after its conception. He also states that there are many misled souls both on Earth and in the hereafter who will say that reincarnation is essential for spiritual and evolutionary progress, just as there are many who pass over still believing in old religious philosophies or dogmas, because no one suddenly becomes all-knowing wise and perfect just because they died.

William Charles Cadwell who is direct voice medium David Thompson's main spirit convener at the Circle of the Silver Cord, stated in one of the seances that half of the souls born onto the "Earth plane" have lived at least once before, while the other half are new souls with no past except as pure "God" energy. Getting exact, scientific knowledge of reincarnation even while in direct communication with spirits is still quite a challenge. Even though knowledge in the afterlife is so much easier to obtain and retain, the spirits can still carry with them many misconceptions and contradictions just as they had while on Earth. Other than for a great soul to come back as a teacher (like Yogananda or Jesus Christ), I would have to seriously question the reasoning of anyone who would want to come back and live on Earth again! My official view on reincarnation: it not only is possible, it is constantly occurring and is, unfortunately, essential for all souls who are still tied up with the Earth vibration. However, I personally dislike the idea of becoming physically restricted again after any period of heavenly freedom!

Anyway, I am still wondering about the sanity of those few souls on the other side who say they want to reincarnate! For example there is a Leslie Flint tape where the spirit of Annie Besant, a famous Theosophist talks for a while about reincarnation and spiritual development followed by an Italian lady named Estell (near end of tape) who wants to reincarnate so she could get married and have children which was not possible for her during her recent lifetime on Earth. (Why can't she do this on the astral plane where everyone's desire is provided for?) Annie Besant, who believed she herself would reincarnate right away (but speaking through Leslie Flint's ectoplasm 55 years after her death obviously did not!) states that there are group souls who reincarnate together to express truth and to uplift humanity. However I am a little uncomfortable and worried about what she says about reincarnation as if the time spent on Earth was so insignificant which may be true from the cosmic perspective, but from my viewpoint, just my present lifetime on Earth alone has been a rather traumatic, tiresome, unpleasant experience.

My concern with reincarnation is why do we souls seem to be such gluttons for punishment supposedly having had so many past lives many of which were quite tragic and then not even remembered by the vast majority? To willingly get reborn into a new body and forgetting everything previously learned to me is simply awful! Living lives on Earth compared to living lives in the heavenly spheres is usually much harder, often terrifying, and extremely frustrating!

At least it has been for me in both this lifetime in England and the U.S. and in previous lifetimes in Turkey and other parts of the Middle East where I was kidnapped, buried alive for several years, and then murdered while trying to escape, and in another life, I died by crashing through the top of a catacomb or abandoned well while riding a camel (along with several others in a caravan) over a desert hill which gave me nightmares for years while young and seemed to lead to severe problems in my present lifetime. I also remember a vivid nightmare where saw a man in very primitive clothing running across a barren, rocky plain so fast right in front of my range of vision that it made me laugh until the next thing I knew my head was being crushed within the mouth of a sabertooth tiger! Glad I woke up right away!

I would never, ever want to reincarnate ever again! I mean to go through all that forgetting who we really are, birthing trauma, diapers, growing up, learning how to communicate, making the same mistakes over and over, working hard for almost nothing, choking on physical food, hunger, searching for a mate, loneliness, uncertainty, suffering, disease, and dying etc. over and over again--who in their right mind would want to reincarnate?! It's a wonder I didn't crawl back inside whenever I was born! The frustrating and humiliating limitations and sufferings of physical living is this main concern that has driven me nearly insane and then to yoga, meditation and afterlife research in the first place--I really need to know for sure that I won't have to leave paradise and forget my true self again through another rudely disrupting reincarnation! This is the problem of reincarnation I have been concerned about and that has prompted much of my spiritual research in the hopes of finding a way out of this rather frightening cycle of birth, suffering and death.

Another serious problem regarding reincarnation one would have to acknowledge is the fact that with the ever growing population of the earth there could never be enough reincarnating human souls to occupy all those new bodies unless perhaps they come from either nature spirits (elemental thought forces or creations), fragments of one's Oversoul and/or animal spirits, Source Energy (as Abraham-Hicks would say) or simply nothing at all except some self-aware fragment of the Universal Spirit, Prana or Shakti. The recent massive surge to nearly seven billion people proves that there can't possibly be enough reincarnations from past human lives from past history to go around unless they came from some other source or even no source at all.

According to Robert A. Monroe's Ultimate Journey it is the numerous separate fragments of an Oversoul who reincarnate and never one soul reincarnating over and over. When tuning in through meditation or through dream states, these past lives of those fragments of one's Oversoul could easily be experienced or interpreted as one's own. These fragments often exist as members of like minded individuals living together in a group or community in the afterlife. I like that explanation and prefer to stick with it rather than feel I must go on and on reincarnating! This explanation is quite realistic because Robert actually met his other "soul fragments" quite frequently throughout his out-of-body adventures who were often in all sorts of states, stages and lifetimes. So have I experienced similar encounters in my dream states including fragmentary experiences of simultaneous lives in different planets, places and times as portrayed in Jane Robert's The Oversoul 7 Trilogy.

The physical reality is really only a very tiny, rather backwards and insignificant part of the "rainbow universe." In the higher levels of the vibrational spheres or universal spectrum of existence, most souls seem to enjoy centuries and centuries of very idealistic living while gradually evolving into ever higher and higher spheres and expanding into ever new dimensions of great love, understanding, experience, creativity and beauty indefinitely.

The spirits say that salvation should come naturally, and to never expect it to come from some other "God," guru, or person, but only through the direct experience of their teachings, and through one's own inner growth, meditation and evolution of the soul. Just as one can never reach the horizon, absolute perfection can never be reached, only approached. One can never actually become God, one can and does however get ever closer and closer to becoming like God (perfect love, freedom, joy and wholeness).

From the Leslie Flint tapes, it is now confirmed that souls on the lowest level of development either come back to reincarnate right away after passing over or remain in either an unconscious (sleep) state, or are earthbound (shadow being), or remain stuck in an inferior low astral vibration or state. However, most souls, and those who are more spiritually advanced live more consciously, much more pleasantly and much longer on the astral spheres before returning to Earth again. The great Christ-like yogi, Sri Yukteswar said in Chapter 43 "The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar" of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda that the average soul, after some 150 to 600 years of astral living must either move on to higher planes (spheres) of consciousness beyond the astral plane (the causal and celestial planes or spheres which are said to be the real heavens) or if not evolved enough to remain conscious in such a refined state of being, must return back to Earth or some other sphere, and repeat this cycle until the soul is in fact advanced enough to consciously exist on the causal plane after which point it will simply manifest back and forth between the causal and astral spheres until it remains permanently on the causal and finally celestial levels of consciousness as a "freed soul."

Here again is more confirmation of why it is so essential to dedicate one's life to the search for truth, meditate on Spirit for long hours, evolve spiritually, become as selfless as possible, and to free one's self from all material (earthly) desires and attachments forever. From all of the most authoritative material that I have read and listened to so far, most of us will have to come back again and again to reincarnate many more lifetimes on Earth! Even Jesus (according to Dr. Marshall as "Lucillius") will reincarnate eventually but only as an extremely advanced "helper" of humanity and only as a "freed soul" or "avatar" as described in Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda.

An alternative to reincarnation on Earth is the possibility of reincarnation on a much "easier" sphere such as Bashar's world, Essassani mentioned in some of my other articles. A very physical reincarnation can be experienced on that planet, except it is still subtle enough to not be such a traumatic limitation to the soul nor have to force one to go through any other sort of unpleasantness so often typical of life's struggles on Earth.

Interesting to see in many instances how the system of yogic knowledge and experienced astral travelers confirm all that has come through Leslie Flint and how all the more important it is to evolve spiritually or remain stuck in the quandary of spiritual ignorance and suffering of reincarnation!

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