Finding Ourselves in the Eyes of Others

“Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself.”
-Andy Weir

There is a lot of conversations in the New Age community about a particular concept, which can be summarized by the simple adage “we are all one”. Too often this deep and meaningful spiritual philosophy gets tossed aside as being overly incredible or outright unbelievable. So today we are going to explore this concept one more time, this time with the intention of putting a more scientific perspective on it, for those who may have previously disregarded this idea as fictional.

Let us begin by discussing the increasing number of cases which support the concept of reincarnation. We are often told that all we are is this body and once it is gone, so are you. Even in this here we must acknowledge that this idea is actually nothing but a theory, and from the evidence collected from people who have been medically pronounced dead, and then recover shortly thereafter we find staggering correlations in the experiences which transpire after our physical bodies have stopped living. The general consensus is that even after our bodies die there is still a part of us that goes into an astral form and will continue to exist long after our bodies have passed. The theory that there is nothing after we die came from the lack of evidence to support reincarnation, but as more and more of these first hand accounts explain the contrary, our theories on this topic must adapt to the new information and therefore our personal belief systems must grow and adapt as well.

Thus, it’s only logical that the first step in really understanding how deeply interconnected we all are is to realize that you are a being that is going to exist long after your body returns to dust. Millions, if not billions of people all around the world already believe this to be true, whether that comes in the form of a Christian believing in their soul living for eternity in heaven, or a Native American believing their soul will join with that of the great spirit and flow through the planet. Many faiths all support the idea of life after death and the evidence to support this claim is really mounting up.

Dr Ian Stevenson, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, spent the majority of his career searching for the evidence of reincarnation. He claims to have found over 3,000 examples of reincarnation during his time at the university which he shared with the scientific community.

Some of the evidence for this comes in the form of past life regressions, experienced by people having irrational fears of certain objects or places without any apparent reason why. Dr. Brian Weiss has been able to use hypnosis to help patients recover reasons for their phobias, and has linked these fears to past life experiences. Many similar studies are finding that things like birthmarks or even birth defects can be caused due to stress and trauma that happened either during a past life, or during the death experience which has carried through into their current life.

Jim Tucker, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia has been scientifically testing the evidence in support of reincarnation. After studying many claims of past life memories he stated “I think these cases contribute to the body of evidence that consciousness – at least, in certain circumstances – can survive the death of the body; that life after death isn’t necessarily just a fantasy or something to be considered on faith, but it can also be approached in an analytic way, and the idea can be judged on its merits.”

There are also claims which say our current medical practices of using high doses of sedatives during end of life procedures is a leading factor in much of the memory loss we experience in-between lives, and that our current birthing process also creates shock for the newborn. This results in mental and emotional defensive mechanisms being triggered, causing more attachment to the current reality and a dissociation with that of the past lives.

Once we understand that we can and will exist beyond death, we can start to ask the famous question “why are we here?” One of the simplest answers to this questions comes from the practices taught by Mahajrya, illustrated by their practice of the Ten Planes of Consciousness. We introduced this in our Four States of Being article by going over what are referred to as the ‘human planes’ but we are now going to take this further and look at the ten levels from the top down.

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