By James Dillet Freeman
If you were to anticipate what an author would write about
to make a case for reincarnation wouldn’t the notion of death play a big
part? Well while there are many
insights Freeman brings to reincarnation, he leaves the reader with more of an
education on how to live this life than anything else. Death is nothing but the turning of a
page. This book makes no scientific case
for reincarnation. But it rather talks
about the different aspects of reincarnation.
There are many different views besides that of our western mind. Freeman is very clear in that he does not
claim to know reincarnation is a phenomenon that occurs, but he does look at it
from enough different angles that the reader would come to accept its
possibilities and be comfortable with its possibilities. Most importantly Freeman makes you feel good
about the life you are living right now…against the backdrop of reincarnation.
I picked this book off the shelf as reading filler and it
served its purpose. I captured a few
insights on life in the bibliography below.
To accept my recommendation I would need to have a mild interest in
reincarnation, or this book would seem too far fetched to have been worth your
time. If you pick it up, don’t blame me.
My favorite catch
phrase: Life is like a river. No matter how you look at it: walk along it,
and it changes with every step. Stand
still, and it changes with every moment.
Bibliography
Page 12: Like the existentialist, I don’t believe
there’s anybody who isn’t fascinated by the thought of what happens when we
die.
Page 25: When I write, I preay, ‘May what I put down
here lift the s[pirits of those who read it, given them hope and strength to
meet what they have to meet, help them to keep the faith and to find courage,
to help the above all to find meaning, for without meaning, what has any
worth? To find meaning is to find God.
Page 26: [on
hell] “ you have the wrong idea about
this place;’ said te demon, dragging me lower in to the pit. “ It is not like what you think it is at
all. There is nobody here, you see,
except those you feel ought to be here.
Look around you.” “ Hell can only last as you feel it should be
here,” the demon said..
Page 27: Heaven and hell are states in you and
me. The gulf between them is no wider
than a though.
Page 33 …more and
more people are losing faith in the probability of a spiritual world, more and
more scientists are becoming interested in the p[possibility that there is such
a world. We have a wave of
parapsychological investigations going on in scientific laboratories. I believe the reason for this apparent
contradiction is that people have lost faith in the kind of spiritual world the
traditional churches have tried to make us believe in, the quasi-physical kind
with eternal heavens and hells and devils and judgment days and the like in
it. We want to believe, but we can’t
believe in what our reason requires us to reject. So we have all this parapsychological
investigation going on.
Page 36: It is psychologically impossible for you to
believe you are a machine, however much you may theorize about it, however much
you may say you accept a mechanistic, materialistic, naturalistic philosophy.
Page 38: It is usually expressed by saying that when
energy is destroyed in one form, it appears in a corresponding quantity in
another form. In other words, in the
physical world, nothing disappears except to reappear in another form: nothing
is eliminated. Things change from one
form to another. That is all. Things change.
Page 51: [of heaven]
…where Jesus talks about it – would indicate the He was not talking of a
place in the sky, but a state within. He
said to His disciples. “…nor will the say , ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold,
the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21)
Page 52: The Greek word in the New Testament the we
translate as heaven is ouranos, and what it really means is a state of expanded
consciousness – that makes sense. That’s
not a geographical, but a metaphysical way to think about heaven.
Page 86: Belief in reincarnation does not rule out the
power of priest and religious rites to lead you to a spiritual direction –
these may have great power to keep you on a spiritual path – but it does place
your fate mainly in your own hands. Your
present life is what it is because your past lives have brought you up to here,
how you live this one. Belief in
reincarnation strips a great deal of power away from the Church.
Page 90: So the Church founded the Inquisition. The belief in reincarnation was the main
reason why the Church founded the Inquisition.
… The Inquisition was founded mainly to rout out the belief in reincarnation. It shows how powerful the idea was and how
widespread the belief in it must have been.
Page 103: ..Hopi Indians; in effect in their language
they have no way of putting an idea in the past or the future.
Page 113: But in consideration of timeless truth is its
fully function. So after death, all that
continues to exist of us is our rational soul, contemplating its own impersonal
irrationality.
Page 116: The Hindu philosophers like Sankara or Buddha
are just as subtle and just as adept at abstract reasoning as the Greeks, but
the truth they are seeking is more and intuitive one. The Eastern thinker seeks not so much to hold
truth in his mid as an idea he can analyze and handle. Instead he wants to identify with the object
of his thought.
Page 135: When
you find myth that is told in different languages by different people, you have
not come on to a foolish fable. More
likely, you have come on to something we human beings feel to be true deep,
instinctual levels of our being, but we lack the abstract terms in which to
express it. Perhaps there are none –
this is a different kind of truth – so we wrap it in a story.
Page 140: If I am a field of force, that offers a
possible explanation, In that one first
cell that I was, there was at its center an arrangement of chromosomes. Ever
since then that same arrangement of chromosomes has been at the center of
every cell I’ve had, no matter how
different in shape those cells may appear to be/If an electrical field of force
emanates from that central chromosomal arrangement, such a field may be an invisible pattern that determines what
every cell will be and where it will be placed.
That would explains how I managed to grow to be the complex arrangement
of cells I’ve become. Yes, I can believe
I do have an aura – oops, pardon me, I mean I have a field of force. If a spirit or soul has a physical carrier,
surely it’s the chromosomal spiral that appears in the one cell we originally
were.
Page 133: The Vendanta teaches monism, that is,
everything is one. There is only Brahma
– God if you prefer the word – and God is all.
Your goal is to realize your personal non-reality and your oneness with
the One. It sounds not unlike Christian
Science, doesn’t it?
Page 149: But you are composed of constantly changing
states of being which he called skandhas.
These are your power to form a body, your feeling nature, your reason,
your instincts and subconscious mature.
At death these separate, but they are elements in the flux of being, and
just as they were drawn together to form you now, they will be drawn by the
force of their own motion and by the force of flux of being in which they move,
to form you again.
Page 152: The mystic believes that you can know and
experience reality, but you cannot adequately describe it. It is from this belief that mysticism derives
its name. Reality is beyond grasping
with your mind or putting in to words. Nothing you can sat about ;it’ suffices.
Page 157: As we consider the works and lives of
mystics, it is hard not to believe that there is an illumining, life –altering
encounter with reality open to human beings that mere intellectual effort
cannot achieve, but which can only be gained by a sincere and persistent
discipline of the soul, by giving one’s self to something higher than ones
self. This experience of truth is so
different that we cannot describe it, but we can assimilate it and be
assimilated by it, after which we live, as it were in another dimension of
being, one in which the things of this world are of small consequence, one of
such unshakable peace, power, and love that it cannot be comprehended bu those
who have not attained it.
Page 162: There
is that which we see when we look from face to face. But there is also that which we can see when
we look from spirit to spirit. But
because it’s sp easy to look from eye to eye, we’ve programmed ourselves to
experience each other just as forms and faces and voices and such. And that suffices us. But a few times in my life – they were very
anguished moment when I had to look beyond face and form, and even mind – I had
to look with eyes of love. Ah yes, we
have to look with eyes of love when we want to look that deep, that close, that
far. But a few times when I have looked
with eyes of love, I think I have seen the real self of another human
being. I can’t describe what I saw. All I can say is it was a vision of
inexpressible beauty. That’s all . I believe that is what I’d see if I saw the
real self of you, and that is what you’d see if you saw the I in me.
Page 164: Life is like a river. No matter how you look at it: walk along it,
and it changes with every step. Stand
still, and it changes with every moment.
Page 169: Well, perhaps Goes does will it. But God has to have, among other qualities,
intelligence. In fact, traditional
theology defines God, as the rational principle of the universe. There’s no way that intelligence – the divine
reason- would will anything that is unreasonable and unjust.
Page 173: In all the universe look where I will, I see
nothing fixed and finished. God does not
make things fixed. He makes us
free.
Page 182: There is a principle of indeterminancy about
the nature of things. So scientists,
instead of talking so much about fixed and rigid laws, have turned to talking
about probability.
Page 189: You are a pattern in a pattern. You become
what you are because the world is what the world is. And the world becomes what it is because you
are what you are. That’s the way your self and your life take form. …The magnet in your soul sets up the field of
force that is your own, to draw you to the events of your life….
Page 190: Imagine a stream. In the stream an eddy forms. Part of the stream, the eddy swirls along, influenced by and
influencing the stream, and slowly dissolves into yet another swirling eddy.
