Believers in reincarnation know that we lead many different lives in our various incarnations. Some of these lives appear to be in our past while some of our lives may appear to be in our future. We may be living some of our lives in different forms and on different worlds, somewhere other than on Earth. Have you ever wondered how are all of our different lives may be related to one another? Can we ever know? Could the belief in past lives and reincarnation become so commonplace that we may one day be required to describe our past life experiences in our resumes? It seems unlikely that we will ever have to disclose our previous lives experiences in our resumes in this world, but there may be worlds where our spiritual evolution has progressed to a degree where this is a common practice. The theme of posting our past life experiences in our resumes has already been explored in stories; those stories may very well reflect valid alternate realities. The life we are living now in this world is but one instance of infinitely many incarnations of our spirit. The nature of space-time is such that while we perceive things as being spread out in time and space, all of space-time is interconnected in a manner such that it all folds back into a single quantum state in which all the sundry parts are just one part without the properties of either space or time. In this way all of time exists concurrently in the single moment we may consider now. Consequently, all of our past and future lives are being experienced by our spirit now, even the length of our incarnate lives from our birth to death is experienced now in the context of our spiritual existence. The world our spirits appear to inhabit is a state outside of our familiar view of space-time and our spirits never leave their spirit world to be incarnated. (We really should drop the re from reincarnation because reincarnation implies a passage of time from past to future and really it is all happening now.) Sometimes I like to imagine our spiritual form as being like a sort of cloud with infinitely many tendrils that extend into an infinite number of worlds where our spirits are incarnate. Each of the tendrils of this cloud-like spiritual state of being represents a lifetime in a different world. In our incarnate lives we remain attached to our spiritual body but we may be unaware of our spirits other tendrils and we may have only a dim perception of the cloud-like spiritual being of which we are an integral part. Some people describe our death in this life as a passing away of everything we have been in this life in order to attain consciousness in our spiritual form in the after-life. They make it seem as if all that we have been here in this world will one day be gone forever. But that is a limited view which is constrained by our concepts of space-time; all of creation is actually eternal. The worldly aspects of creation which we experience here in this life appear ephemeral only because we are trained to follow time from past to future and within the context of this passage of time we may never go back. Every moment that has ever existed is a part of the eternal creation from which it sprang and every moment will exist eternally for time itself has no final end; time has only a beginning. On the spirit level we may share ourselves with many other spirits, but one of the primary means by which we share ourselves with other spirits is through our many incarnations. In the spirit world we are not fragmented or divided in any way, all of our incarnations exist as connected parts of our spiritual selves; our incarnate lives complete our spiritual lives. Our infinitely many incarnations are never separate from us in any way except in the case of our perceptions from within the context of our incarnate lives. In our various incarnations we perceive ourselves as separate beings and we are typically unaware of our connectedness to our infinite spirits. We may sometimes catch glimpses of our other incarnations from within one or another of our other incarnations. These glimpses may be of incarnations which appear to be either in our past or in our future in context to the current life in which we glimpse them. These other incarnations may be in many different worlds, rather than only here on Earth. We may glimpse the incarnations of other spirits as well as our own alternate incarnations and we may mistakenly perceive some of the incarnations of other spirits as if they were our own incarnations because the manner in which we perceive these other lives in other worlds can often be so overwhelmingly intimate and familiar to us that we identify with those other lives quite strongly. It appears to be the case that on another level all of our spirits in the spirit world resemble tendrils from one all-encompassing being which we might call god or the ultimate being. That completeness of being should not be described as a state of being, because a state of being implies other states of being and therefore separateness; this ultimate being is the indivisible sum of all of our spirits where we have all merged together. In this greater context in which we are all one we may experience the popular wisdom expressed by the rock group Gong: You are I or I am you You I am or I am you You am I or am I you You are Maya Ram are you You are my Hiram are you You am I or I am you You are Maya I am you You am I as I are you You are Maya's eye are you You are I or I am you ... (Album: You; song: You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever) So we are really both many and one. Our many incarnations are joined together as one infinite spirit, and our unique spirit is joined together with all other spirits in a unity in which we are god. However, if we were to live this unity where we are all one we would be departing from the purpose of being uniquely separate incarnate beings, so while we may have experienced or understood that we are all miraculously and intimately related to one another, in the context of our individual incarnations we have a purpose to serve in which our uniqueness should be celebrated rather than denied. |
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