There is to me only one significant question worth answering and that is whether or not I have any will at all. If I have do have a will, I must find this out, for if I do, then the next question is what good is this will, why do I have this will, where does this will come from and what is its correct application.
If I exist this once, it is beyond improbable that I should not have lived before, and that I shall not live again after what is called death.
This is the basic premise beneath the idea of reincarnation.
It isn't that there is a soul that like a diamond exists imperishably beyond dimensionality.
It is more like a streaming expression of energy that is flowing from lifeform to lifeform.
Only this streaming expression of energy emerges in a condensed state out of the medium that pervades and is one with the infinite ocean of being that is the eternal cosmos.
Exactly like a spinning whirlpool in a moving ever-present river,
so too the soul spins with a certain kind of density within the ever greater medium of eternal life, which is always in motion, yet just as the river contains the whirlpool and is in motion though the background relatively is still, so too the incomprehensible backdrop of the void that carries all souls onward to nowhere and everywhere is itself relatively still. The "still" river carries the moving "image" of the whirlpool within it. That is how to see the soul. The soul and the body are one. The body is a condensate of the soul.
The mind at rest implies the peace which passeth understanding, beyond rational comprehension, because you cannot grok the infinitely deep silence of existence by the noisy instrument of thought.
Now, the soul, if I submit myself to reason without apology, is one with the Soul of the Eternal.
The Great River of Life is always there forever and ever; it is characteristically instrinsic of the order of Nature to spawn the emergence of unique and ever more complex and interesting styles, ways, or expressions of being. It is in the nature of Nature to permit the emergence of ordered patterns increasingly complex, unified, and perfect.
Now why is this?
Another good question is where does the soul come from and why does it proceed apparently along a certain path?
The problem of karma is the chicken and egg problem.
If the soul is to find its way back to the Source, this implies a journey previously away from it.
I cannot find my way back home if I have never known that home.
So why this ceaseless coming and going?
Why does this soul condense out of the mind of God/Shiva in the first place?
Again, a return implies a departure, yet a departure implies a still previous return.
Yet in this is a dangerously tricky and devious trap, or maybe it isn't, which is if I am only to depart once again from the Source after having achieved perfection and union with the Ultimate, does this negate the point of returning to the All in the first place? And if you say no, then you are perforced to admit there is no real beginning to the birth of the soul, as there would necessarily have to be infinite gradations from a beginning beyond beginnings toward an ending beyond endings.
There may as well be no beginning or ending at all!
So where am I really going?
If the Ultimate really is the Ultimate, the Final Liberation implying a total detachment from and transcendance of physical incarnation, this is actually saying there is a place or state of being that is eternal, and that can only be if the universe out of which it apparently emerges is itself eternal, and so from this can we not see the stupidity of the theory the universe comes from anywhere other than as emergent density out of the mind of God?
So the body as a condensed soul that streams as a dream across the mind of the Eternal is what we've got going on here.
"Time is the moving image of Eternity" said Plato.
Am I here because of my karma, or is my karma here because of me?
There is this body. This body is karma. It is action constantly going on.
This action can be conceptualized as occurring across time.
However this body is also occurring in space. And space is one with the Eternal Mind of Life, the great infinite river in which is carried everything over age to age. The age to age part is itself a concept like time. It literally is a fabrication, a false narrative, a line that connects age to age, moment to moment, lifeform to lifeform, because there is no actual origin to that streaming river of Eternal Life, nor destination, there never was and never will be. We are the ones that connect the dots, but the dots are just there, as dreaming nothings suspended in a still greater Nothing. That's what is meant by the Eternal Now.
There's nowhere to go because you are already there.
There is no arrival because there is no departure.
Yet this is where I have failed miserably. I have mistaken this apparent realization as a license for hedonistic abandon and wreckless abdication of responsibility adorned with pious aloofness to justify my selfish action. Sound familiar?
There is such a thing as karma. There is such a thing as tendency toward direction.
Precisely because there is no intrinsic direction of existence, there can be imposed on it directions.
Directions across space, and tendencies across time.
Does the soul that precipitates the body have a certain kind of spacetime "direction-tendency" to it?
How would it work to suddenly remember all of your previous lives? Where did they begin?
Out of the obviously infinite potential paths the soul can have streamed down across the river of spacetime with a certain direction-tendency to it, why that particular way? The karma I have accumulated since forever-ago, is still wtih me. If I remembered everything, would I even be operationally functional? Is there a reason there is a such an idea as a master and his inner circle of disciples? Think about it! Who would be prepared to remember all the horrific things they must have done in previous incarnations. Who could possibly bear the weight of guilt probably attendant with those memories, just like we are burdened of guilt associated with certain memories in this lifetime. Some say it is the mercy of Nature that we don't remember. That this is actually a very good thing and is 'not built into' but intrinsic to the order of Nature. Now here is the fact : you as body made manifest out of soul; that soul is one with the Soul of Nature, and as we observe beauty in the world, which serves as the perfect evidence of a system tending toward more beautiful symmetries of order, we observe actually a law in eternally continuous and manifesting effect.
The beauty and the law are one. Except beauty is what we see by the eye, and the law is the same thing as seen by the mind.
There is no disconnect between my soul which is one with the Soul of God, and your soul which is one with the Soul of God. Therefore, my light is your light, and your light mine, just as your darkness mine, and my darkness yours. There is no way out of it. It simply is. There is an order to what we see. It doesn't really take much effort to infer there must be a perfect harmony to this law that is existentially operational everywhere.
Why is this law so important? Because we are trying to understand karma.
Why do we need to understand karma? Because it is obvious there is no way there has been only this appearance in form in the singular.
The body is male. The soul is female. The divine mind is union and transcendence. This mind in us, in human beings, is divine. It is something incredibly special, something so precious it is a terrible terrible nightmare we have forgotten to appreciate this miracle.
To be able to think, to reason, to choose. That is the basis of will. Which is the sail on the sailboat of your soul. The will is what gives a direction-tendency to your soul, gives it a certain kind of character, which is identical to karma, which equates to action.
The karma that bears fruit as they say would simply be as consequence of action that bore positive fruit in the common Soul of us all.
We are all echo chambers of each other, because beneath every echo chamber is the grand auditorium of the Mind of God.
If my soul becomes in increasing resonance with the resonating vibrating order of Nature, then more order is established in the world, and positive karma results. It's not do it now, and it'll manifest sometime later. It's not an investment. It's immediate. The returns are immediate.
But you have to pay the price. Or better to say, surrender eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the midst of the garden of eden.
So the fact that certain teachers of humanity have left their teachings behind, and have positively impacted countless numbers of souls that discover their writings, they incurred positive karma, because they have brought more resonance, more order, more harmony to the world, through bringing even by a distance from beyond the "apparent" grave their thoughts and powerful Reason which give sense and clarity to minds in confusion and disarray, reciprocally connected to bodies in corresponding states of dis-ease.
All that must be done is to find refuge in the truth, which is discernable if one but thinks it over very carefully looking at the facts as they are before him. Reason is not the enemy. The mind is not the enemy. It is your most powerful ally. It is the faculty which gives the incredible power to actually steer the direction-tendency of the soul consequently effecting karmic outcomes which are entirely under your control if you can but manage and direct Nature's life energy, the regenerative life force that exists within us all. What would it be like to conduct the full current of Life that is available? They say after twelve years of brahmacharya a certain nerve power in the sushumna is built up, the central canal of the spine, that gives a perfect memory. Swami Vivekananda was once such person. He could read books and books and books and remember what was written on every single page verbatim. He was a super genius. Or maybe he was just activated. He renounced. He channeled his energy. He conquered his inner nature.
This is the method of remembering all those past lifetimes. And this is the answer to karma and why we do not remember. Well, we can remember, but there is a price. Memory is expensive. It costs something. Now attention is energy. If I remember something, I am exchanging the currency of my attention, which is my life energy, for the memory. So it makes since doesn't it that to remember something so far back as previous lifetimes, that it would indeed at least in theory take a long time to build up the nerve power in the brain to be able to "detect", "retrieve" or "connect to" those memories, as it could be the brain doesn't store memories but actually merely retrieves them, re-animating them before the present mind's field of view. And so it would seem like a flashback. You just remember, and it's there, no question about it. We've all had the experience of having remembered something forgotten. How do you know what you know anyway? How do you know what you don't know? The fact is, you don't know anything until you remember it, and to remember anything at all requires energy. So to remember far far back to recall what I have done over the course of the streaming River of Eternity I have to increase my energy and not only that but to build it to a level that is at present to me incomprehensible and impossible. Therefore I can see why to undertake this practice is done only by a few, and that is an extreme few, and why there would exist such things as masters and disciples. There must be lineages, because it makes sense that there would be.
Speaking from 318 Dwapara Yuga, 2018 AD.
Genesis is Now, the Mind is Incarnate.