© 2012 Bruce Johnson – Reprinted with permission from Shining Lotus Metaphysical Bookstore Newsletter January 2012.

553 A. D. was the year the Fifth Ecumenical Council met in Constantinople at the request of the Emperor Justinian. That year Justinian and the Council voted to anathematize or curse the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul, and by implication, reincarnation. To teach, or believe in reincarnation after that date was to be solemnly cursed by the Christian church, and so its study was undertaken at the risk of one’s Soul.
The Laws of Reincarnation control an orderly process of evolving and perfecting the human personality through cyclical rebirth alternately into spiritual and physical worlds. The learning and experiences of the personality or temporary self gained in each incarnation are absorbed and integrated by the Soul or permanent Self during a rest and assimilation period in spirit between physical embodiments. The periodic incarnation of the human spirit involves the Laws Reincarnation, Involution, Evolution, and Cycles. The Wheel of Fortune Tarot card depicts these Spiritual Laws symbolically.

Studying Ancient Wisdom teachings about Reincarnation frees the individual from erroneous beliefs that empower error. Examples of such beliefs include – “You only live once.” Reincarnation can’t be true or I would remember my past lives.” “I am my body, not a spirit in a temporary body.” “Creationism is fact, evolution is untrue.”

The physical body is a garment, or temporary clothing worn by the Soul during physical incarnation, with its nature and quality determined by previous causes set in motion by that person. The parents of the reincarnating soul provide the raw materials and heredity of the physical body that is appropriate to the learning to be experienced by the incoming soul in any given lifetime. The soul, in its long course of physical incarnations, occupies both male and female bodies, balancing karma while gaining necessary experience in each. This esoteric teaching not only sheds light on the subject of human sexual preference but also shows the inherent equality of male and female forms as vehicles of incarnation.

The doctrine of reincarnation gives a much needed understanding on the subject of abortion. Abortion involves making not available a physical body for a soul to inhabit for incarnation. Contrary to the inaccurate belief that human life begins at conception, there is no set time that all souls coming in human incarnation permanently attach themselves to the fetus via the silver cord. Until that time, which is often just prior to birth, the physical fetus is symbolically a miniature house with its own intrinsic life, perhaps containing lights, heat, and plumbing, but no occupant.

The crucial truth to remember is that during incarnation, the person is a spiritual being living in a physical body, and exists separate from the physical body they temporarily inhabit. Astral projection demonstrates this fact most clearly. If death is defined as the spirit leaving the body permanently and the silver cord parting, birth must be defined as that moment when the soul permanently connects to and inhabits the body, and not when life becomes apparent in its physical vehicle.

The unnumbered abortions of past millennia have not harmed the spiritual and physical evolution of humanity, as the Laws of Reincarnation provide alternate opportunities for each very much alive spirit to be re born physically, if one door to reincarnation is closed.

Reincarnation-an East-West Anthology by Joseph Head and S.L. Cranston shows reincarnation in religions of the world.