Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Most people wonder about these things at some point in their lives. With past-life knowledge, we can access for ourselves the positive and life-affirming answers to those questions.
Just accepting that we had past lives immediately expands our sense of who we really are. It becomes clear that our real identity is not the everyday self that the world sees.
The characters that we become in our different lives are like outfits of clothing. At the end of every life we discard them, and take on another when we begin a new life. As we continue along our soul journey, we inhabit many different personalities. But our real identity is the inner spirit that travels from life to life. Seeing ourselves in this way transforms our entire outlook on life. We lose the fears, illusions and anxieties that go with identifying too closely with the ego self.
Past-life awareness also helps us to avoid becoming inflated by successful lives or disempowered by humble ones. In the words of Buddha, ‘Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince, for gentle worthiness and merit won. Who ruled a king may wander Earth in rags, for things done and undone.’
Knowing that our current self is part of a much larger, benign and supportive structure provides a deep sense of security. Yearning to belong to a bigger meaningful whole, many people blindly seek that in the outside world. But when we know who we really are, that old neediness withers away like an uprooted weed.
In one way, we come from the many places we’ve been to on our long reincarnation journey. The memories we gained there will always be part of us. But those places are not our true home. Our true home is in the spirit realm. This has been confirmed by the many memories that people have of the between-life worlds.
‘The Earth plane is a training school, to which we return lifetime after lifetime, each of us bearing our own spiritual satchel of inclinations, wisdom and experience garnered from previous lives,’ wrote past-life researcher Joe Fisher.
We go back to the spiritual world between every life to rest, recover and enjoy life at home again. When we’re ready to return to the school of earthly lives, wise guides will help us to decide what sort of life to take on next.
They also help us to clarify the purpose of our next incarnation. When we return, we carry that knowledge deep in our hearts. Even if we’re not fully conscious of it, that inner knowing will guide us through our lives.
Knowing about reincarnation automatically gives meaning to life. It becomes clear that even if we don’t fully understand it, there is a higher purpose to our sojourn on this plane.
There are also many individual reasons for coming here, such as:
Past-life knowledge shows us the themes and stories that we may have been exploring for many lifetimes. This helps to clarify our purpose in this life. We can then begin to answer the age-old question: why am I here?
Apart from making our lives richer and more interesting, understanding past lives also brings us specific benefits.
First, it gives meaning to our lives, and a sense of higher purpose. Being cut off from this understanding is the root cause of many psychological problems. The great psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dr Carl Jung said, ‘How often have I heard a patient exclaim, “If only I knew that my life had some meaning and purpose, then there would be no silly story about my nerves!”’
When we know about past lives, it becomes impossible to fear death in the old way again. Fear of death feeds all kinds of other fears, phobias and neuroses. When that’s gone, it releases us from a wide range of troublesome issues that can hamper our lives in so many ways.
‘The unresolved trauma of death is a primary cause of behavioural disorders,’ said past-life therapist Dr Morris Netherton. ‘Most of the problems I encounter have their source in past-life deaths. When the impact of these deaths is erased, many disorders simply evaporate.’
Studies have been conducted about the healing effects of belief in reincarnation on post-traumatic stress disorder. The evidence shows that people who believe in rebirth have more resilience. When life knocks them down, they soon bounce back again.
Reincarnation also means that there is a higher form of justice. According to the law of karma, we all reap what we sow. This means that life isn’t as unfair as it seems to be. Everyone’s deeds, both good and bad, catch up with them in the end across their many lives.
Knowing how past-life experiences can still affect us helps us to deal with them. When we become conscious of old wounds, they lose their power over us.
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, said the philosopher George Santayana. We release ourselves from the past by first becoming aware of its effects. We can then untie any knots that have been holding us back. This frees us to move forward into a better future.
Seeing the higher purpose behind an experience is one of the best ways to heal its negative effects. Jung said we reduce suffering by finding the meaning in a difficult event.
Past-life awareness shows us the inner meaning of our experiences. This helps us to transcend and transform their effects. When we understand the ‘lesson’ of an event, we stop seeing ourselves as baffled victims of life, and the old symptoms melt away.
Past-life knowledge also benefits many important areas of our lives, such as health, relationships, prosperity and self-worth.
Belief in reincarnation is not only beneficial to us as individuals, it also has the potential to sow the seeds of hugely positive future effects for the world in general.
Understanding how rebirth works leads people to identify less narrowly with their gender, social class and nationality. In different lives, we’ve all been both male and female. We’ve lived in many different countries. We’ve sometimes been wealthy and sometimes poor. Knowing this makes it difficult for people to pride themselves too much on the circumstances they were born into this time. That kind of arrogance becomes much trickier with the knowledge that in a future life the tables could so easily be turned.
As a result, there could be less temptation to despise, mistreat or oppress others who don’t currently enjoy the same advantages. In this way, reincarnation beliefs can help to starve the strangling weeds of elitism, sexism and racism in our society.
The Dalai Lama said: ‘The belief in rebirth should engender a universal love because all living things and creatures, in the course of their numberless lives and our own, have been our beloved parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends.’
As well as bringing more love, tolerance and understanding to the world, a general acceptance of reincarnation could help to foster world peace.
Successful entrepreneur Henry Ford once remarked, ‘The discovery of reincarnation put my mind at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.’
When we are at peace with life and ourselves, we are at peace with the world. If the majority of people felt like that, it would change the way the world operates.
Wars always have their overt rationales and justifications, but the hidden emotional drive behind many conflicts is a primitive fear of the enemy for being so ‘other’. When more people realize that we’ve all had lives in a wide range of diverse cultures, it will be much harder to fear and hate people for being different.
With this underlying philosophy, all kinds of potential conflicts could be more easily defused before they even start. Peace might then start to replace war as the favourite way to solve problems.
Belief in rebirth brings with it a more spiritual view of life. This has great potential to weaken the dominance of materialism – firstly in individual lives, then in society as a whole. New, more spiritually aware, priorities could then emerge to reshape our world and way of life. This too would help to create a more unified, peaceful and tolerant world.
Perhaps the greatest benefit to the world that reincarnation beliefs can bring is the affirmation of individual self-worth. The Hindu religion compares our lives to a silver string of pearls, called the Sutratma. The thread is the soul, and each life is a pearl of priceless worth. This philosophy affirms the innate value of each life, no matter how humble.
Because every life plays a part in our story, they are all important. They all have purpose and meaning. Seeing life in this way nurtures the deepest roots of self-worth. With those roots secure, it becomes much easier to flower. And when every flower is valued, a happier and more loving world becomes possible.