I often find the phrase running through my mind “The first two things you have to understand is about karma and reincarnation” because from where I sit, anyone without an adequate understanding of these concepts doesn’t really know what they are aiming for in their spiritual work. Why do any work on yourself if you think you are automatically going to heaven when you die? Or if you think that all ends upon death. Most people who hear the word karma think if I do something bad or good, I get a similar result (this is part of it), or they don’t believe in karma because they see evil deeds and people going apparently unpunished. When most westerners think of reincarnation, they think of a person being born again over and over as a person (also partly true). However, neither of these definitions of karma and reincarnation is complete. Also, neither can be understood without the other.
First, I wanted to say that the truth of reincarnation or rebirth has been understood in nearly all religious and spiritual traditions from Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, much of the ancient South American spirituality, ancient Egypt, Sumerian tradition, and even Christianity. In the east this is commonly accepted knowledge. In Jesus’s time this doctrine was well known. There is even a passage in the New Testament book of John where the disciples as Jesus: Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? This implies that what the man did before this birth may have caused his blindness. The bible was greatly butchered over the years. For example, in Rome at the councils of Trent, Nicaea and Constantinople it is said that over 50 books were edited or removed from the bible. The truth of reincarnation did not fit into the power the church had over the people when creating a religion. For a further example, the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which were found in 1949 as unedited Christian/Gnostic texts that are not in the bible, are well versed in the subject of reincarnation. To me personally, it always seemed strange that in this vast, eternal universe, a being would be born once, die, and have their fate determined for all eternity.
So, what is it really like in our universe? It is well known through the eastern traditions, through Gnosticism, through practitioners of western ceremonial magic and any people who have attained a certain level of spiritual realization that we are on an immense journey, stretching far beyond this lifetime. To show how long we’ve been doing this, the Buddha said take a mountain 6 miles high, 6 miles wide, and 6 miles long, and every hundred years a bird comes by with a scarf in its beak and runs it across the mountain (this would do basically nothing), as long as it would take the bird to wear away the mountain is how long we’ve been doing this thing. At one point the Buddha looked back and saw his last 99 thousand incarnations and said it was just a drop in the bucket. “I have had direct insight into the wheel of continuous birth and death and seen for myself how a lifetime is like a finger snap in eternity.”
Now the part that confuses people, is they don’t understand karma and they think being born again is in contradiction with going to heaven etc. However, this is not the case. Karma is what you take with you from birth to birth. It is the result of anything you think, say, or do, while your awareness is identified as the “doer”. Anything you do with intent, good, bad, or indifferent, has far reaching results. These results stick with you. Ram Dass, my teacher, says they are like a physic DNA code. This code determines what dimension of reality you will incarnate on. What kind of body you will have, family, personality traits, life circumstances etc. And it’s perfectly working this out with everyone else’s karma too. Karma is basically stuff, its baggage you carry with you. So those of us who tell others about reincarnation don’t do it because we think it’s a fun thing, we realized that until you break all of these karmic bonds, you’re going to keep being reborn, suffering and dying. What Buddhists call the wheel of birth and death.
Now the other important thing to remember is, we have a whole universe that is multi-dimensional. So, you can not only take birth as another species (and you have, most of us also start as forms of bacteria, rock, grass, etc.). You can also take birth in heavenly realms, hellish realms, and a wide variety of astral and causal planes. This means yes, you can go to heaven, maybe for 1,000 years or maybe for 100,000, and time functions differently at the higher densities. But as long as there is identification as a separate entity, in other words as long as the boundless God-self awareness is identified with any form, no matter how blissful or how subtle, there will still be suffering. You’ll still be in illusion.
So, the aim, and this is also the aim of ceremonial or high magick, which is the highest spiritual practice to come out of the western religious traditions, is to cross the wheel of samsara (endless suffering) and break the cycle of repeated birth and death through realization of oneself as God or your original, untarnished, and boundless nature. So now you can see why it’s so important to understand karma and reincarnation before doing serious spiritual practice, because if you don’t, you don’t have the framework of what you are working towards. Once you understand, then you start doing studies and practices in order to wake up to who you really are.
I actually bawled my eyes out when I first had deep realization into the nature of reincarnation because I could see the larger scale and how much suffering is involved in this process. It is a paradox though because perfect love and unity is also always here on another level. There was a time when the Buddha stuck his toe into the dirt and all of his disciples saw a wondrous pure land all around them. In this he showed us that perfection is also always present in the suffering. Now, we are also beyond this karmic wheel, and in fact it is ultimately an illusion, but that is from another level. First let this seep into your consciousness. I’ll do another blog post soon on the boundless nature that is beyond karma and reincarnation.
With Love,
Alex
