Reincarnation Perhaps it is because it appears to offer the key to so much that there should be the interest that there is at present in the idea of reincarnation. If reincarnation can be proved to exist it testifies to the existence of a process which refutes the impression created by the senses that birth is the beginning and death is the end. That, in turn, overturns the materialistic structure and gives us a glimpse of an order we want to exist but which, as attitudes become more cynical and lives more technologically determined, seems increasingly incredible. Perhaps it is, quite simply, because it is intriguing to consider that one has lived at other times and has, therefore, made a contribution to the formation of the world we now inhabit. Testimonies about former lives and sightings of ghosts must head the list of topics which have the power to arrest the attention of the agnostic, presumably because they refute the idea of death as extinction with which few are comfortable, no matter how prevalent it may have become. The prospect of death causes more suffering to more people than any other thing. People go in fear of their own deaths and in fear of the pain caused by the death of others. So much agnosticism is born out of pain and disappointment. So many spiritual concepts and so much religious talk seems irrelevant to the point of obscenity when it is required to account for the things which confront us in everyday life: illness, madness, deviancy, cruelty, grief, poverty and death. The idea of reincarnation seems to restore some optimism to an otherwise bleak scenario. For a start its very existence hints at some process which may indicate that there is more going on than birth and death with a bit of success and happiness in the middle, if you are fortunate enough to escape the rank injustice which deforms and deprives. The idea of reincarnation has the power, firstly, to arrest attention; and then, perhaps, the power to convince not only that death is not the end but that we may all be participating in something larger and more significant than the content of our daily lives would lead us to suppose. Regardless of their status as proof, the testimonies about former lives are helping to keep open a door which is reopened only with difficulty once it has slammed shut. Some, doubtless, are interesting; some more credible than others; some are so obviously an attempt to add a bit of glamour to otherwise unspectacular lives. These testimonies surely tell us more about a person in the present lifetime than they ever do about reincarnation. But they play their part in keeping curiosity and the spirit of inquiry alive. This article is not concerned with testimonies. Testimonies belong to the realm of evidence and evidence is something with which the scientist who works on this plane of existence with the five senses is concerned. And, perhaps in time, new techniques will give certain testimonies the status of irrefutable evidence as defined by scientific researchers. The spiritual seeker is concerned with resonance rather than evidence. By means of resonance the soul confirms a truth with the personality. It is the spiritual seeker's litmus paper. In order to get a handle on the reincarnating process it may help to understand what the process is trying to achieve. It is trying to return mankind to God, the place from where it came. The idea of man, as conceived by God in spirit, is a matrix with 35 properties. A man in incarnation is 19 qualities expressed through 16 chemical substances( = 35 properties). An undeveloped personality, living predominately in his physical and astral (emotional) body, represents the end of the spectrum which begins with the idea and finds its midpoint in a personality who is on the point of attaining soul consciousness. The thread of life connects the spiritual man to the personality. The connection exists in the mind of God but not in the mind of man - until that consciousness has been developed. This is the purpose of reincarnation. Over millennia of lives man, at first stranded and isolated in personality form on the physical plane, attains the intermediary stage of soul consciousness and then spirit consciousness which gives him the freedom of the solar system. In some distant time man will go on and find God Transcendent beyond these confines. We build in a lower world the body which is to be our instrument of response in the next. A 'body' should be understood as a level of consciousness. The bodies of the personality are: the physical; the astral; and the mental. Across the spectrum of humanity at this time the two subtle bodies, the astral and the mental, are in very different stages of development. Whilst in the physical body we are building through our emotional and mental experiences and reactions the means to participate in the subtle worlds. The subtle mental and astral planes, together with the physical plane are the three worlds over which the personality has to gain mastery before it can approach the Kingdom of Souls (the fifth kingdom). At the death of the physical vehicle, the man who has the means of participation passes into the subtle worlds, either the astral or the mental depending upon his level of development. If these means do not exist then there can be no participation. Then consciousness ceases with the death of the physical body, although this is close to being a hypothetical statement because most of humanity has developed the means of participating in the astral and the mental worlds, albeit if only on their lower planes. Humanity as a whole is being challenged to refine the astral and mental bodies in order to participate on the higher planes. The reincarnating process returns the human unit to the physical plane with what ever quota and quality of consciousness has been developed by previous earthly incarnations. As Djwhal Khul puts it: "As a man thinks in his heart so he is." In the subtle worlds after death, he is as he thought on earth, and with those pre-dispositions he will reincarnate. The subtle worlds may refine but they cannot change a man's consciousness. Only the physical plane, where resistance is a factor, has this capacity. A new personality is fashioned for this unit of consciousness, which ensouls what he is but also includes the opportunities and trials, determined by karmic law, which will unfold during his time on the physical plane. It is this blend of the realised and the potential which a horoscope captures if it is constructed for the moment of birth. It is my intention to deal with reincarnation from the astrological perspective as a separate matter in the near future. The causal body which eventually gives the personality the means of entry to the Kingdom of Souls, is also built whilst a man is in physical incarnation, once the astral and mental vehicles are of the required calibre. The causal body is built upon the higher mental planes and its forcing agent is purpose. The highest achievement of the religious and spiritual systems of the contemporary world is to supply a purpose which will provide a structure for thought and emotion to enable the formation and development of the causal body. The causal body is the bridge between the personality and the soul. When the bridge is in place the personality can be directed and guided from the Kingdom of Souls. Development, in consequence, speeds up markedly and the spiritual identity begins to emerge through the personality like a picture from the dampened page of a magic painting book. When the causal body has become fully developed it burns itself up and the light and heat from this conflagration lifts a man into the Kingdom of Souls. The causal body, all the personalities which have contributed to its formation, and the process of reincarnation itself have all done their work: the personality has become a soul, and after the death of the physical vehicle in which soul consciousness was attained there will be no further incarnations onto the physical plane, unless the soul has a specific task to perform for humanity. The movement hereafter is upwards. The causal body is Christ consciousness. It is that to which Jesus Christ referred when he said 'No man comes to the Father except through me.' He incarnated from the spiritual realms to testify to and to give an example of Christ consciousness. It is that to which Gurdjieff, in his ceaseless war against the forces of inertia and delusion, referred when, in his characteristically merciless way, he told certain followers to stop fussing about the state of their soul as they had not got one. The causal body is built over lifetimes. It stores all that is positive from the lifetimes of what can now, by virtue of having a causal body in preparation, be called an individual. It is enriched by the individual's countless deaths and countless incarnations. 'New' souls, 'young' souls are those human units coming into incarnation without a causal body: everything is new to them because they have no individualised memory. Non-individualised, they remain the property of the collectivity which is humanity and the experiences on the physical and astral planes go to enrich the collectivity. Until the means of continuity are built there can be no continuity; until individuality has a coherence which can survive physical death then there is no individual to reincarnate. If you find this difficult to understand consider a small quantity of coloured water which is to be returned to a bucket of clear water. If that quantity of water is to retain its colour then it will need to go into a container before it goes into the bucket, otherwise it will become merged with the clear and although it will tinge the contents of the bucket and although those particles will not be lost, their separate identity will be gone. So it is with the consciousness of the personality until the causal body is in place to act as a container and provide coherence. It follows from all this that there must be walking around on the physical plane at this time, personalities who have within them the means of participating in some capacity in the subtle worlds during and after death (most of humanity at this time); others again who are members of the Kingdom of Souls; and others again - a rare few indeed - who have the means of participating in the world of Spirit. They have followed the thread which has taken them back into the mind of God. Those who take on a personality and return to earth from these high places - Christ 2000 years ago; Sai Baba in our time, to give just two examples- are here, as stated, for a definite, defined purpose. And should we encounter them in everyday life we may or may not recognise them for who they are because it is an occult fact that the lower cannot comprehend the higher. Who we can recognise and encourage are the increasing number of people in physical incarnation at his time who, like ourselves, are working on building the causal body, the means of participating in the Kingdom of Souls. The idea of reincarnation which has gained such currency in the West in the last twenty five years, as a result of the New Age movement, can be said to be a representation of the experience within the reincarnating process of those who have individualised and who are building their causal bodies. It is not all there is to the reincarnating process but it is probably the aspect of it which is most useful to be working with consciously at this time. This idea of reincarnation- the 'New Age Version' - presupposes continuity; it presupposes a process which builds, using karmic law, upon what has gone before; it presupposes individuation; and maybe, in the fullness of time it will give an increased emphasis to the role of the group in the reincarnating process. This detail at present is largely absent and its absence has a distorting effect. Rejecting the impression that physical death is extinction, the 'New Age Version should bring hope, and hope which is justified because it describes the process of building of bodies which death cannot touch. ©1999 - The D.K. Foundation. This article, including this copyright statement, may be freely distributed but not altered, expanded or abridged in any way. We thank you for respecting this request.