I remember when I picked up Edgar Cayce’s biography, “There is a River” and was absolutely loving it.  I found such an inspiring synthesis of so many difference ideas that I had explored in my years of spiritual seeking.  But then I came across reincarnation and took pause.  I wasn’t born into a belief in reincarnation and in the time when I was reading the book, Shirley MacClaine was being lampooned in the national media for her book “Out on a Limb” and her belief in reincarnation.  I realized that I thought I would also be marginalized if I believed in reincarnation.  But as I thought more about it, I wanted to look at why so many religions include the belief in reincarnation.  What does the belief offer? First of all, if we are going to entertain a belief in God, we want to believe that God is somehow fair and just.  If we look at life in the world today, it seems anything but just or fair.  For example, I have hardly ever missed a meal. But as a child, my parents took me across the world.  I remember as a boy of 6 or 7, seeing a beggar somewhere in North Africa.  What stood out for me was how his eyes were moving.  As I looked closer, I saw that he had flies crawling over his eyes!  That memory has stayed with me since and has taught me that there is real poverty and suffering in the world.  How can life be fair if I am in my privileged life in the United Sates and there are those who are so poor and handicapped? Reincarnation offers the possibility that we have multiple turns in life and that we get to experience the gamut of life possibilities – races, genders, social standing and all the other diaspora.  That can seem to make life seem more fair.

The other belief I had in my upbringing as a Christian was that I had an eternal soul and that my soul would live on after my physical death.  Well then, what does the soul do after death and where was it before birth?  Reincarnation offers some possible answers to those questions. So slowly, though more and more exploration of the Cayce work, I came to believe in the doctrine of reincarnation and have come so far as to become both a practitioner and teacher of past life regression.  

Brain Weiss and his book “Many Lives, Many Masters” was the contemporary breakthrough book that brought reincarnation once again onto the Western stage.  He is such a credible person, like Edgar Cayce, that he has brought a generation to once again consider reincarnation as a possibility.  A recent poll by CBS News showed that 24% of American believe in reincarnation and 60% believe it is a “reasonable possibility”.

I speak regularly for the Edgar Cayce organization, the A.R.E., on the subject of reincarnation and some corollary spiritual laws, namely Karma and Grace.  From the perspective of Edgar Cayce, we are spiritual in nature and came into the earth, drawn by curiosity about this physical world.  As we delved deeper and deeper into the material, we began to lose touch with and eventually forget our spiritual origins.  As we got lost, so to speak, in the physical, we began to act “non-spiritually”. We became motivated by power, greed and selfishness.  But just as the earth has physical laws, such as gravity, so are spiritual laws also in effect.  The first law is the law of cause and effect, reaping what you sow, or as you do unto others, so shall it return unto you.  As we acted non-spiritually, we contracted these “viruses” onto the soul of selfishness and greed.  After we left the physical world at death, the soul was still tethered to the earth with these non-spiritual “viruses” that kept us earthbound.  The only way to release the viruses, was to return to the consciousness where they were created and release them through kindness, forgiveness and compassion.  The great masters throughout the ages have come to teach us just that, how to release Karma through Grace, which is forgiveness, love and compassion.

Each one of us travels in a “soul group” which is mostly our family.  In our families, we will find our greatest supports and our greatest challenges.  We are here to work through those grudges, resentments and hard feelings so that we can return to our original soul purity and eventually raise the vibration of the earth to a place of peace and harmony.

I hope to see you at one of my workshops where we will have a full day to look into these issues in more depth, have some experiences with hypnosis and past life regression and plenty of time to address any questions that will inevitably arise.