Reincarnation

The common view among believers in reincarnation is that a soul is a single entity who lives a successive number of lives. The soul being undergoes some kind of learning process going from one life to the other. In the current life, the being is still under the karmic influence of its former lives. These lives can be accessed through for instance meditation or hypnosis.

I believe this view is too simplistic. As I have come to understand it, at the moment of incarnation, energy is drawn from different parts of a void of energies to a physical body. This void is an “ocean of possibilities”; nothing, yet encompassing everything in potential; Divine Mind. Incarnation is mind taking form. During one’s life, one can tune in to this void, and one is most susceptible to the “regions” of the void from which energy was drawn to the physical body in the incarnation process. Therefore one can have “past-life experiences”, but these are not one’s own. Different people can even have the same past-life experience.

The human mind however creates the illusion of reality, the illusion of a personality with a past and a future. The human mind needs this structure to create stability. Death is the reversal of incarnation: the personality dissolves and the energies will again merge with the void. The void is still the same and yet it has changed, evolved.

The many known descriptions of near-death experience, in which people go through a tunnel, perceive themselves as being a body of energy, meet deceased relatives and often meet a being of light, relate to the being still identifying itself with its physical personality. All these accounts are from people who have returned to the living. They didn’t get to the stage of the dissolving of the personality and the merging with the void.

This stage of dissolving does not happen immediately after the physical death. Many deceased human beings are still so much caught in their illusion of a personality that they can’t let go of this mind form. They “live on” in their mind after their death. This is especially the case when the death is sudden and unexpected, as for instance when somebody is shot and killed in a war. In hypnosis sessions where people tune in to a situation like this it is common that when they “re-live” the situation, they notice that they don’t realize that they are dead. A man who is shot while running will experience himself as still running, until at some point of time he turns around and —in disbelief— sees his body lying on the ground. It can take a long time till he realizes that he is dead and allows the personality dissolve to happen.

Some well-documented cases exist in which the personality is so caught in its illusion that it does not dissolve at all and reincarnates a few months or years later. These cases are generally related to a violent and sudden death of a person in a society that strongly beliefs in a succession of incarnations. A being who reincarnates in this way has a vivid memory of its previous life and can describe in detail its death, its former family and its living circumstances. This however is an extreme situation.

In general, the deceased will at some point in time realize that its physical personality is dead and will surrender to the Divine, which means that the personality dissolves and the energies merge with the void. Until this moment, it is still present in the earth spheres. A deceased can also consciously decide to “stay around” a while longer to help the physical humans in their process of grieving or to give guidance in some other way.