The Spiritual Cycle – Part 2

Every incarnation is an opportunity to learn through experience and thus acquire soul knowledge. In acquiring that knowledge, we evolve to higher states of awareness or consciousness. The older a soul, not only in terms of age in that lifetime but older in terms of accumulated lifetimes, the greater the level of its consciousness.

This is why divorce is so futile, for no relationship ever completely ends. A divorce almost always leaves unresolved issues between two souls – temporarily. In order to progress further in soul evolution, these differences would have to be settled and often this involves having to reincarnate into a common group again.

Often, those two souls would re-marry or come together in some other form of close relationship, possibly as siblings, other relatives, friends or colleagues and the process of resolving differences would continue. All differences simply have to be resolved no matter how many lifetimes it takes; this is the immutable karmic law.

Vedic Astrology and Past Lives

In my years of experience in transcribing life readings by the Agastaya astrologer Sai Bharathi of Puttaparthi for hundreds of people around the world, we have seen that individuals reincarnate repeatedly in family groups, often in nuclear families in exactly the same relationships as in the previous lifetime.

One could say that souls help to pull one another up the ladder of spiritual evolution. This is because we learn through our relationships as family, friends, social groups, community and nation. When a dearly loved relative dies, it does not necessarily mean that it is a final, permanent parting. In dozens of readings, we have seen that death is only a temporary separation. Souls often come together again in other, new lifetimes in new bodies.

Most competent Vedic astrologers can go back numerous lifetimes in a subject’s cycle of incarnations. In all their readings, a competent astrologer should start by looking into the immediate past life of the subject. It will emerge in such a reading that most present-day physical and psychological problems have their roots in the immediate past incarnation and that all such problems are invariably karmic.

In one recent reading for a South African family by my Puttaparthi astrologer friend, the head of the nuclear family, a successful businessman, was murdered in what seemed to be a motor vehicle hijack. The family consisting of the mother and her two children were naturally inconsolable. The older of two children, a girl, was particularly devastated for she was extremely attached to her father.

When Sai Bharathi was contacted by the family for a reading, he found that the daughter had been closely connected to her father through several lifetimes. He also found that her parents had been married in the immediate previous lifetime. An even more surprising and comforting revelation was to come further in the reading. The astrologer found that the soul of the murdered father would reincarnate as the son of the daughter as her first child.

She was not married at the time but her marriage took place a year after the reading was done. In the following year, she gave birth to a baby boy. That child is ten months old at the time of this writing. In the coming years, the family will no doubt observe many indications that the little boy is indeed the reincarnated soul of the departed father. He already looks remarkably like his deceased grandfather. Perhaps future events will clearly show that the soul of her deceased husband has now reincarnated as the beloved first grandson of the tragically widowed mother of the family.

This is only one recent example of many such episodes that we have encountered in scores of readings over the past six years. So-called death is not the final arbiter of relationships; it is only a necessary phase in the process of life on earth. Karmic imperatives transcend the seeming barriers of birth and death.

I have learned in my years of working with the competent Sai Bharathi that death is not the termination of relationships that it appears to be. It is only a temporary parting and close relationships almost invariably continue in future incarnations.

Soul Functions

Souls continually help one another to acquire knowledge and thus grow in awareness. In innumerable readings done over the years, we have seen that souls temporarily parted by death reincarnate together in a future lifetime. This is mainly for the resolving of discord between the souls concerned.

This might take several lifetimes together. In so doing, those souls evolve towards a higher state of consciousness until they eventually achieve moksha or union with the God- head. Birth and so-called death are symbiotic; each needs the other to fulfil the celestial purpose of life on earth.

The ultimate spiritual lesson is that despite the illusion of separate souls – duality – we are in fact one complex soul, like a diamond with its myriad facets. We are all inter-related and inter-dependant. We eventually learn is that it is unselfish, unconditional love that keeps individuals, families, social groups, communities and nations – and ultimately the universe – together.

We are pure spirit, children of the universe. Wanderers through time and space, our earthly incarnations are merely temporary educational tours, however repetitious they may be. Because we are on a learning curve, we are constantly making mistakes but eventually learn right from wrong through direct, often repetitive experience. In every lifetime, we enjoy success as well as failure until the lesson is learned.

All souls have their individual idiosyncrasies and rates of learning. Some learn more quickly than others and the rate of learning often depends on soul age. Some souls are older than others. In passing, it might be mentioned that in the present day and age, there are more young souls on this planet than older ones. Being younger, less experienced aspects of soul, they are dazzled and often blinded by the novelty of gross, material things.

This accounts for the wave of criminal behaviour that is presently sweeping through the world. Older souls have learned that only spiritual knowledge is of lasting value; all else is ephemeral. This is also the reason why there are always a certain number of extremely old souls that come to this planet repeatedly to teach and to guide younger, less evolved ones.

In the nine years that I lived in Sai Baba’s shadow in Whitefield and Puttaparthi, I witnessed a miracle almost every day. At most times, these were small, seemingly insignificant events, as when the Avatar produced Vibhuti or items of jewellery out of thin air, but miracles nevertheless.

At other times, like the cloudless winter morning a group of friends and I, while discussing Baba’s mystic powers as we walked up to our dormitories after breakfast, turned around to look at His abode in Prasanthi Nilayam and saw a ruler-straight rainbow rising from its dome and fading away into the cloudless winter sky overhead, the miracles were amazing if not spectacular. I photographed that strange rainbow for I was carrying a camera at the time and also pointed it out to dozens of passing, awe-struck devotees.

The End of Kali Yuga

Although many do not realise it, great changes in the consciousness levels of mankind are now taking place. Kali Yuga, which has been with us for since the great Mahabharatha War fought by Lord Krishna and Arjuna, has just ended. We are now in the cusp between this dark age and Prema Yuga, when a golden phase in the evolution of mankind has been promised by Sri Sathya Sai Baba, the Kali Yuga Avatar. He has promised to come again in that golden age as the Prema Sai, when love and harmony will once again prevail upon this much-abused planet.

Judging from what I have seen in the years that I lived close to Sai Baba, there is little doubt in my mind that the Avatar would appear as promised and that mankind would experience even greater miracles in the promised Golden Age that approaches. But first there has to be a spring cleaning, a sweeping away of the dross and the dirt of Kali Yuga. That process has already started and would gain momentum in the years to come.

Not all at present on this planet would enter the Golden Age. Many would leave before then in the process of natural attrition and in various other ways. Eventually, only a comparatively small number of today’s massive population of some eight billions would witness the new phase in the history of mankind on Planet Earth.

The vast majority of the world’s present population was born during the lifetime of Sri Sathya Sai Baba. Perhaps this inordinate population explosion was caused by the Cosmic Intelligence to allow as many of the myriad souls waiting their turn for earthly incarnation to take full advantage of the esoteric vibrations enhanced by the Avatar’s presence on earth.

A great sifting of souls has been going on during the lifetime of the Avatar of Kali Yuga. Through their thoughts, words and deeds as the metaphorical sieve, many would have separated themselves from the grain in this sifting process, only to fall away with the chaff of a dying dark age. These souls, on leaving this earth dimension, would return in the natural scheme of things to other realms to await another earth incarnation, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years in the future.

Those who have passed the karmic tests would be among the first to reincarnate. Yet all souls awaiting reincarnation on earth would have to follow a sequence determined by their karmic obligations.

The Promised Golden Age

Sri Sathya Sai Baba repeatedly promised a soon-to-come, one thousand-year Golden Age for mankind. It is only logical to assume that only the most advanced souls would reincarnate in that age, to lay the foundations for other successive ages when the younger souls which had gone to other dimensions from these present times would return in future ages (yugas) to once again continue to evolve on the earth plane.

Meanwhile on earth, a collapsed world economy and financial system, dropping fertility rates, new diseases and epidemics, widespread famine, wars, accidents and other natural and man-made contingencies would restrict and reduce population growth. These events would be essential to the spring cleaning between yugas, a vital step to the promised golden age.

The process of reincarnation would be severely constrained by the scarcity of available bodies on earth as a result of these various impediments. This would eventually eliminate Planet Earth’s present over-population crisis.

This in itself would allow time for Mother Earth to heal herself of the painful duress inflicted on her by a misguided and abusive mankind in the latter years of Kali Yuga. Through their mad materialism, selfish men and women themselves would have unwittingly created the climate for their ultimate salvation. We ourselves determine the course and quality of our lives.

The underlying truth in all this is that we are essentially spirit of the universe, collectively the constantly growing universal consciousness. As soul, we are integral to the entire universe and not merely to Planet Earth.

On this watery blue planet, small in size but of towering spiritual stature, we are merely temporary visitors. No matter how praise-worthy and commendable our earthly achievements and possessions may appear to be, these are maya and therefore of no real worth for we are in reality only transitory spirit visitors from the cosmos. Eventually even these repetitious visits to earth will come to cease.

Even in the coming Golden Age, the process of enlightenment and evolution would continue. Eventually we would have collectively learned and evolved enough through our repeated lifetimes to reach a stage when reincarnation of the soul on earth in its present form is no longer necessary.

Then our age-old spiritual journey will have achieved its singular purpose: the completion of a great cosmic cycle in preparation for the start of a new one. In the cosmic order of things, nothing lasts forever, yet everything that exists is cyclic.

Eventually, the most important truth that unconditional love is the superglue of the universe and all within it will become known to all that exists. It is then that mankind as a whole would realise that it is in reality the One Soul that it calls God.

Then, in some distant future, the evolutionary process on Planet Earth would have contributed the maximum required for the optimal development of the spirit of the universe in its present state of evolution, and this planet and its solar system would perhaps sink into a black hole of super-consciousness, when all that exists would disappear into seeming oblivion, only to reappear elsewhere in the universe in a pristine, new form.

After all, matter is energy, and as Einstein argued, energy is indestructible.