Question::
What is birth?
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How come birth and death are gateways in the stream of life?
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How does the ignorance of the concept of past lives makes one cynical and embitters one’s general outlook on life?
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Why can’t we access incidents/memories of our “past lives”, with complete awareness?
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What is “mental body” composed of? Why can’t an ordinary individual access it DIRECTLY, with complete awareness?
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How come our brain hinders our knowledge of ‘past lives’?
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What will be the “real memory of past lives” like?
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How come entanglement/attachment with the physical body PREVENT the release of past-life-memories?
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When can one get memory of one’s past lives?
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In what way is spiritually advanced different from an ordinary person, in terms of bodily attachment or detachment?
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Does non-access to past-lives-data, in any way, hinder ‘spiritual progress’? What exactly does ‘spiritual progress/evolution’ constitute?
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What exactly is this problem of “emancipation”? From what exactly should one get emancipated?
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Why ‘nature’ did not give access to past lives to every individual? Is it advantageous of disadvantageous?
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What happens if past-lives-data becomes available to an ordinary-individual, who is NOT spiritually oriented?
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How come “desirelessness” is necessary to handle past-lives-data?
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Why “spiritual preparation” is a must for the CONSCIOUS RESURRECTION of past-lives-memory?
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What is the condition necessary to be met in order to withstand the influence of memories of past lives?
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What does Spiritual Preparation constitute? What sort of psychological abilities does “spiritual preparation” facilitate??
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When is revival of past-lives-data, worthwhile? What is past-life-data used for?
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What sort of advantages does “past-life-data-recovery” provide, for spiritual progress?
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How does past-lives-data DETERMINE the “spiritual path” which we are to traverse? How does the Masters use that “data” to render the necessary help to the deserving aspirants?
(or)
What is the advantage of having ‘knowledge’, be it spiritual or mundane?
Answer::
(Extracted from Meher Baba’s literature, which is a copyright of Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust(©AMBPPCT), Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, Bharat/India)
Those who have immediate access to the super-sensible truths concerning the life of the soul and its reincarnation know– through their unclouded perception that– so-called “birth” is only an incarnation of the individualized soul in the gross sphere.
The unbroken continuity of the life of the reincarnating soul is punctuated by birth and death, both of which are comparable to gateways in the stream of life as it advances from one type of existence to another. Both are equally necessary in the greater life of the soul, and the interval between death and birth is as necessary as the interval between birth and death.
As is true of those who consider ‘death’ to be the termination of individual existence, those who consider the ‘birth of body’ to be its beginning are also confronted with a conflict between their ‘false assumptions’ and the ‘claims of rationalized intuition.’
From the standpoint of individual justice, the uneven distribution of good and bad in relation to material happiness or prosperity seems seriously to impugn the rationality and justification of the entire scheme of the universe.
To see the virtuous at times suffering deeply and the vicious possessing the amenities of ‘pleasure’ creates insurmountable difficulties for anyone who prefers to look upon life as being meant to fulfill an eternal and divine purpose.
Unless there is some deeper explanation forthcoming, the human mind is riddled with agonizing perplexities that tend to embitter a person’s general outlook on life and foster a callous cynicism. This, in many ways, is even worse than the deepest personal sorrow that death may cause.
But, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the human mind has in it an inborn tendency to try to restore to itself a deep and unshakable faith in the intrinsic sanity and value of life. Except where artificial resistances are created, it finds acceptable those explanations that are in conformity with this deeper law of the spirit.
Those who have direct access to the ‘truth of reincarnation’ are even fewer than those who have direct access to the ‘truth of the immortality’ of the individual soul.
The memories of all past lives are stored and preserved in the mental body of the individual soul, but they are not accessible to the consciousness of ordinary persons because a “veil” is drawn over them.
When the soul changes its physical body, it gets a new brain; and its normal waking consciousness functions in close association with the brain processes. Under ordinary circumstances, only the memories of the ‘present life’ can appear in consciousness because the new brain acts as a hindrance to the release of the memories of those experiences that has been gathered through the medium of other brains in past lives!
In rare cases, in spite of the resistance offered by the brain, some memories of past lives leak into the present life in the form of dreams that are completely unexplainable in terms of the present life. An individual may see persons in his dreams whom he has never seen in his present life. It often happens that those who appeared in the dreams were persons whom he had met in his past lives.
But of course such dreams, when they are of the ‘ordinary type’, cannot be treated as a memory of past lives. They merely indicate that the imagination at work in the dreams was influenced by information taken from past lives.
The real memory of past lives is clear, steady, and sure like the memory of the present life. When it comes to an individual, he no longer has any doubt about his having existed in several previous lives along with many other individuals. Just as he cannot doubt his own past life in the present incarnation, he cannot doubt his life in past incarnation.
The number of persons who can remember their past lives is very small compared with the vast majority, who are so completely bound to the gross sphere of existence that they do not even suspect super-sensible realities. The release of such memories is severely conditioned by the limitations of the brain, as long as consciousness is entangled with the physical body and its brain processes.
When consciousness is emancipated from the limitations imposed by the brain, it can recover and re-establish the memories of past lives, which are all stored in the mental body. This involves a degree of ‘detachment’ and ‘understanding’ that only the spiritually advanced can have.
The memory of past lives can come with full clarity and conformity, even to those who are still crossing the inner planes of consciousness but have not yet become spiritually perfect!
The memory of past lives does not come back to a person, except in abnormal and rare cases, unless he is sufficiently advanced from the spiritual point of view. This provision made by the laws of life, secures unhampered spiritual evolution of the individualized soul.
At first view, it might seem that the loss of memory of previous lives is a total loss, but this is far from being so. For most purposes, knowledge about past lives is not at all necessary for the guidance of the onward course of spiritual evolution.
Spiritual evolution consists in guiding life in the light of highest values perceived through intuition, and not in allowing it to be determined by the past. In many cases, even the memory of the present life acts as an obstacle for certain adjustments demanded by the spiritual requirements of the changing situations of life.
The problem of emancipation may in a sense be said to be a problem of securing freedom from the past– which, in case of those who are bound to the wheel of birth and death, inexorably shapes the present life.
Life would be infinitely more complicated, if one who is not spiritually advanced were burdened by the conscious memory of numberless past lives. He would be dazed and unsettled by the diversity of settings in which persons would appear to him in the light of his memory. He is not called upon to face such confusion, however, because he is shielded from the resurrection of the memory of past lives.
Things and persons come to him in a limited and definite context and setting with the result that he finds it easy to determine his actions and responses in the light of what he knows from the present life.
This does not mean that his actions and responses are entirely determined by what he knows from his present life. All that has happened in past lives ALSO has its own unconscious but effective share in determining his actions and responses.
In spite of the actual influence of past lives, the fact remains that– since, he is shielded from the resurrection of conscious memory, his consciousness is not subject to the confusion that would result if the conscious memory of past lives were among the data he had to consider for the purpose of determining his actions and responses.
The resurrection of the memory of past lives can be faced without confusion or loss of balance only when the person has become “desireless” and has lost all feeling of “mine” and “thine.” Those whom he once looked upon as belonging to him might be seen in the present life belonging to someone else. And, if he were to continue his attachments and supposed claims, he would create untold complications, misery, and confusion for himself and others.
“Possessiveness of all types” has to be purged from the mind if the aspirant is to be spiritually prepared to WITHSTAND the disturbing influence of memories from past lives.
When an individual is spiritually prepared,
- he is completely “desireless” and full of impersonal love.
- All entanglements of the ‘personal ego’ have disappeared from his mind.
- He can look upon his old friends and enemies with the same EQUANIMITY.
- He is so lifted out of his limitations that he is the same to relations and non-relations from his past and present lives.
- He is free from the idea of any pressing claims and counter-claims on his part against others, or of others against himself, because– he has realized the deeper truth of the unity of all life and the illusoriness of mundane happenings.
It is only when a person is spiritually prepared that he is unaffected by the revived memory of past lives. Only then is it worthwhile for him to have access to it. For he can then have that cool and unerring judgement and pure incorruptible love that enable him to make RIGHT and WISE use of the new knowledge gathered through the resurrected memory of past lives.
This knowledge opens to him a great deal of information about his own incarnations and those of others connected with him in past lives. It not only enables him to advance further on the spiritual path by conscious karmic adjustments but also to help others on the path by directing them in the light of their past lives.
The speed of spiritual evolution is faster after the natural recovery of the memory of past incarnations.
- Disentanglement from mundane things is facilitated by conscious knowledge of the history of the development of such entanglements.
- Spiritual evolution, which was mostly unconscious of the limiting past, now becomes conscious of it.
- The obstacles as well as the facilities created by the past are now within the reach of consciousness and therefore are capable of being intelligently and carefully handled.
- Inarticulate intuition is supplemented by rationalized data. Therefore action has less possibility of error and becomes more potent in producing desirable results.
The Masters of wisdom, having become spiritually perfect, have no special interest in past incarnations, which are among the many unimportant facts of mundane existence. If they make any use of their knowledge of the past lives of a person, it is only to help him on toward the eternal Truth. Their knowledge of the past lives places them in a special position to give an aspirant JUST THE GUIDANCE HE NEEDS.
The details of the aspirant’s ‘spiritual path’ are often determined by
- the incidents of the past,
- the manner in which he has sought the highest Truth in his past lives, and
- the obstacles or facilities he has created for himself through his past doings.
All these things, which are hidden from the aspirant, are open to the unclouded perception of the Perfect Master who uses his knowledge in order to accelerate the spiritual progress of the seeker of Truth.
The Master leads the aspirant from the place in which he has landed himself through the experimentation and search of several lives. In spiritual matters, as in mundane matters, greater and unerring knowledge means economy of energy and time!
– Meher Baba
Source::
Discourses, Pg: 313-318
© AMBPPCT, Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India/Bharat
