A Case for Reincarnation

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.