The New Commandment - a prerequisite for remembering past lives.

Why don’t we remember past lives? Well, some people do, but most of us don’t - consciously at least. The reason is simple; we don’t love enough. Not just any love, but a special kind of love which Jesus spoke of when he said “love one another as I have loved you.”

Not being able to remember our past lives means that we don’t understand reincarnation and therefore don’t see it mentioned in the Bible. The main reason we don’t understand reincarnation is because we are lack awareness of our spiritual vision. Our vision is confined to what we can physically see and touch.

Yet within the physical lies spirit, spirit gives physical form and life.
When we die spirit leaves this form an empty, lifeless shell.

The best way to understand this is to contemplate the life cycle of a butterfly; compare the pupa to our body and the butterfly to our spirit.

Thank you for the great photo Learn About Nature

Watch this time lapsed video Amazing Life of a Monarch Butterfly

When we consider spirit, and the spiritual worlds, we need to think of spirit as an invisible force within us and around us - giving us life and form - not something “out there.” When we begin to traverse the boundaries of what we can see and touch, we realise that one of the most spiritual things we do in life is to love. Love is not something “out there,” it is an activity we constantly experience in one form or another. We can’t touch love, but we can see it in the expression on people’s faces and in their gestures.

Through love spirit reaches out to touch us.

Love is a complex and even mysterious feeling. It has many layers and different expressions. We can even disguise our hatred as love. In the Bible, we see how love plays out in the life of the man Jesus as he took into himself the Cosmic Christ. Even though he was berated, mocked, scorned and immobilised on a cross, he never stopped loving.

Jesus is the role model for our own journey of spiritual growth; we can apply his experiences to our inner self, within our consciousness. Our inner Jesus is that part of us that always tries to act in a higher way, that part of us yearning for purity, purity necessary before the Christ impulse will become an active part of our consciousness. This is not a straightforward process as we soon discover.

As we begin to commit to a higher expression, something within us then mocks and immobilises us. We hear an inner voice saying, “Don’t be such a goody-two-shoes, you could be bullied for that.” In this way we are mocking, scorning, and crucifying our inner Jesus.

This leaves us asking the question: how was it possible for Jesus to love so much that he could bear all that he bore on his journey to the cross? The answer tells us how we can recognise the presence of Christ in this world, in us and in each other.

The New Commandment is the answer:

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Jn 15:12

Innocence (L'innocence) - William Adolphe Bouguereau (1893)

Love is not a simple straightforward feeling; it has different expressions. The Greeks used four different words for love.

1.      Eros is erotic physical love. Eros is the Greek god of fertility. This is passionate love involving sensual desire and longing. This kind of love leads to procreative urges to ensure the survival of the species.

2.      Philia is the love arising in friendship and even in business connections. There is mutual admiration that can be supportive and nurturing but also exclusive. If the usefulness of the relationship changes, so can the relationship.

3.      Storge is the love of family, tribe and nation. It can be defensive and aggressive to those outside the group. This is the kind of love we also find in the animal kingdom.

4.      Agape is the highest love. We can call it divine love, Christ-ened love. This love is expressed by those who experience the highest in themselves - which they also see in others. It speaks of unification and intense compassion. This love is expressed without fear or favour and therefore it is not sentimental. It may not always be interpreted as love because it can cut like a sword.

In the New Commandment the word used for ‘love’ is agape, “that you agape-love one another as I have agape-loved you.” This is the only love strong enough to see our own past lives. Why? Because seeing our past lives requires agape-love to be able to deal with our karma - the consequences of our actions in a past life.

Generally, we respond to our karma by blaming the other person for what they have said or done to us. For example, if someone undermines us, we need to look for the cause in our own actions in a past life - perhaps we caused them to fall through a floor, or lose their footing somehow.

Facing our karma takes courage and it takes agape-love for self. St Paul knew this which is why he wanted to record these words for perpetuity.

“Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Gal 6:7

There are many quotes in the Bible about reincarnation, and many references to agape-love. When we truly understand the purpose of living repeated lives on this earth, we come to understand that karma is a blessing; it enables us to act in a higher way. It also enables us to experience agape-love. The higher our response to our karma, the closer we come to a true experience of Christ Jesus.

First published on Huffington Post

Reincarnation

Many interpretations of Bible texts are alienating; do this, don’t do that. Often we reach superficial conclusions about the meaning of Bible texts.

More than ever, we need to crack the code and get into the Bible to see how it is relevant for our modern lives. Otherwise, the Bible is just a relic.

The Bible is certainly not a tool to moralize; it is a tool for personal development. Nor is it a means to fantasize about a God we know very little about. We will never achieve lasting personal development based on a skewed interpretation of sin and faith. If we unlock the true meaning of the words in the Bible, we will develop our capacity to think things through to the truth of the matter. The trouble is, we often find thinking painful, feeling is much more fun. Test this out by reading aloud the next sentence.

The single most important piece of information missing from our daily lives is an understanding of reincarnation.

There are texts in Bible that make much more sense if we apply the principle of repeated lives. I know that many people find the concept of repeated lives on earth difficult to understand. However, we have reached a point in our development where we can begin to remember snippets of our past lives. These are the déjà vu moments. Déjà vu, according to Wikipedia, is a French phrase meaning "already seen", and it refers to the experience of believing that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously.

Here is a brief explanation of reincarnation for those unfamiliar with the basic concept. Our actions in previous lives cause consequences in future lives – we can call this karma For example, if we stole from others in a previous life, people may steal from us in this life, not just possessions but stolen time, stolen effort, stolen ideas etc. If we looked down on others in a past life, in this life we might be short so that people physically look down on us. If we didn’t take in what we heard in a past life, now we may be deaf. Isaac Newton’s third law of physics, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” echoes the ancient mystery teaching about reincarnation.

We can bounce around with actions and reactions or we can embrace our experiences and be in harmony with them.

The eighth Beatitude speaks about reincarnation.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 5:10

This is not speaking about being a martyr, as we shall see when we look at the meaning of the Greek words. The ‘ones having been persecuted’, dediogmenoi in Greek, indicates the ones who are driven away. Who do we drive away from us? The ones we have difficult karma with, the ones who cause us to react.

If we think about reincarnation in terms of the age of the human race, then we have incarnated many times, so many that most of the people we meet have a karmic connection to us. This karma needs balancing. This makes sense if we think about the way friends can fall out and marriages can break down.

If we place the word dediogmenoi, driving away, in context with righteousness a very different story emerges. Righteousness is dikaiosune, which means justice or being just, balanced and in harmony. The scales of justice give us a good understanding of the meaning of righteousness. Justice is a continual series of adjustments to restore balance and harmony. This also means that we have the ability to judge when things are ‘just right’.

If we want to understand our own past lives we need to look for clues. One big clue is this: notice how we are attracted to some people, and repelled by others. There are so many clues in even the smallest events in our lives.

Another clue can be found in facial expressions. Some people have an uncanny resemblance to people who lived long ago. Obviously only the faces of famous people have survived, and not all of us were famous people in past lives, but the similarity can be uncanny.

When Prince died recently my friend Adriana Koulias discovered that his facial features were a very close match to those of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who died around 1335 BC. She then looked into the lives of these two men and discovered many similarities - many actions and reactions.

Prince and Akhenaten: Tales of Karma and Initiation

If we act on these ideas instead of reacting, we can make a great deal of sense of world events as well as events in our own lives. This brings us peace and harmony and a deep respect for the wisdom of the universe - “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

First published on Huffington Post