The process of incarnating into all sorts of human beings and situations over and over teaches us tolerance. Having many past lives gives credence to the saying, “Walk in my shoes awhile and you’ll understand.” The reality of reincarnation is that indeed we have walked in many shoes. With each experience, the scope of our awareness broadens.
Once we start looking back at our different past lives, we can know first hand what it is like to be the opposite sex of what we are right now. We can understand what it means to be rich and poor, to be single and married, to be of a different race, to live in different parts of the world, and to die in a variety of ways. One of the ways in which we find clues that we all change our identities in different past lives is through a study that Helen Wambach did. As a psychologist and college instructor, she hypnotized and regressed 1088 people. Of the 70% who were able to access past lives, the descriptions of the lives they lived fell into the established statistical pattern of historical times. Therefore, the probability that we each have experienced all these different situations is high – or we will in a future lifetime.
I recently made a presentation at a retirement community about how reincarnation gives meaning to life. The repetitive cycle of lifetimes provides us with many opportunities for our souls to mature and develop. Someone in the audience made the comment that reincarnation can be a healing process. We are not limited to one lifetime to make it the best we can and that is the only chance we have. Rather, we have many chances to fix the mistakes we made in previous lifetimes. That is how our souls learn. Compare this process to what our children go through. Each child has his or her experience and must learn to deal with it. Out of those trials, the child learns; it doesn’t help to shield the child from all such experiences because then the child would not learn and evolve.
I was led to review a past life recently. In this previous lifetime, I was a black man who lived during 25,000 BC, in what is now Africa. I engaged in a ritual that was part of my religious belief and took pleasure in being a faithful participant. This ritual wasn’t something that would be acceptable in today’s world, but back then it was the norm. The purpose for my recalling this past life was two-fold. First of all, I needed to appreciate the positive legacy of my soul’s desire for a deep religious belief and my faithfulness to it. Secondly, understanding the wide gap between my behaviors back then and now increased my tolerance for differences.
With each lifetime, we can increase our tolerance. We know what it is like take on different roles. We know what it is like to have good intentions and yet fail. We know what it is like to live in all kinds of circumstances. We’ve walked in those shoes. How can we be prejudiced when we’ve been that, done that?
Next time, I want to write about prejudice, those instances when our souls don’t learn tolerance.
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