Chapter 13
REINCARNATION
Charles Fillmore
Keep a
True Lent
THE WHOLE MAN--spirit,
soul, and body--must be lifted up into
the Christ consciousness of life and
perfection, which is the goal of man's
existence.
The Western world in
general looks on re-embodiment, or
reincarnation, as a heathen doctrine.
Many people close the door of their
minds to it, without waiting to find
out what message it may bring when
interpreted in the light of Truth. It
is the object of this article to set
forth the Unity teaching concerning
reincarnation; to show why we consider
it reasonable and to explain its
relation to, and its place in, the
Christ doctrine.
The teaching of Jesus is
that all men shall, through Him, be
made free from sin and be saved to the
uttermost--spirit, soul, body. But
until this salvation is attained, there
is death. To give men opportunity to
get the full benefit of salvation, life
is necessary, and a body through which
to express life is also necessary. So,
when man loses his body by death, the
law of expression works within him for
re-embodiment, and he takes advantage
of the Adam method of generation to
regain a body. Divine mercy permits
this process in order that man may have
further opportunity to demonstrate
Christ life. But generation and death
must give place to regeneration and
eternal life. The necessity of rebirth
must, therefore, pass away with all
other makeshifts of the mortal man. It
will have no place when men take
advantage of the redeeming,
regenerating life of Christ and quit
dying.
Re-embodiment should not
be given undue importance, because it
is merely a temporary remedy to be
followed by the real, which is
resurrection. The whole man--spirit,
soul, and body--must be lifted up into
the Christ consciousness of life and
perfection.
Jesus teaches that
rebirth or reincarnation is the
unifying force of nature at work in its
effort to restore man to his original
deathless estate. Man, through his
disregard of the law of life, brought
death upon himself, as taught in the 3d
chapter of Genesis. But a single span
of life, from the birth of an infant to
the death of an old man, does not
constitute all of man's opportunity for
living. Life is continuous and in
harmony with the wholeness of Being
only when it is expressed in a perfect
body; hence man must have a body in
order to gain an abiding consciousness
of life. Through repeated trials at
living, man is finding out that he must
learn to control the issues of life in
his body.
The objections that the
natural man raises to re-embodiment
arise largely from the fact that he
lives in the personal consciousness and
cannot see things in the spiritual and
universal. He thinks that by
re-embodiment he loses his identity.
But identity endures. Personal
consciousness does not endure. The
personal man is not immortal, and he
dies. This is clear to anyone who is
willing to give up his belief in the
reality and importance of the personal
consciousness.
The personal man with
all his limitations, all his relations,
must give way to the universal, the
Christ man. The privilege is ours to
give up or forsake everything--father,
mother, husband, wife, children,
houses, lands--for Christ's sake and so
enter into the consciousness of eternal
life. By doing this we come into the
realization of eternal life and receive
a hundredfold more of the very things
that we have forsaken. If we refuse or
neglect to make this "sacrifice" and
prefer to live in the narrow, personal
way, and cling to the old personal
relationships, there is nothing for it
but to meet the result of our choice,
and to sever all those relations by
death. It is just a question of giving
up a little for the all and gaining
eternal life. So if re-embodiment frees
one from the old, personal
relationships, it is not such a
dreadful thing after all, for it gives
us new personal relationships. Rising
out of these into the universal is a
work that everyone must do willingly
for himself. Death and re-embodiment do
not give redemption. Reincarnation
serves only as a further opportunity to
lay hold of redemption.
The pure, incorruptible
substance of Spirit, built into the
organism through true, pure, spiritual
thought and word, makes the body
incorruptible and eternal. As the mind
changes from error to Truth,
corresponding changes take place in the
body, and the ultimate of these changes
is perfection and wholeness in every
part. Therefore those who are trying to
lay hold of eternal life have ground
for their faith in the promise that
they will be saved from the
grave.
Knowing that spirit,
soul, and body are all necessary to man
and that he cannot truly be said to
live except in their conscious union
and expression, the error of believing
that death is the open door to a higher
life, the gateway to heaven, is easily
seen. There is no progress in death.
Death is negation. The demonstration of
eternal life can be made only in
life--soul and body together working
out the problem and together being
lifted up.
Sense consciousness has
no power to lift itself out of
ignorance and sin, so the mere matter
of repeated births has not taken the
race forward. It is the descent of
Spirit from time to time, as the people
have been able to receive it, that has
made all progress. As men's growth has
made it possible, new truths have been
discerned and new dispensations have
come. When the time was ripe, Jesus
came and brought the good news of
salvation from death. But His words had
to work in the race consciousness for
nearly two thousand years before anyone
was sufficiently awakened and quickened
to believe in a complete redemption and
to strive to lay hold of it. The
promise is that the leaven of the Word
will finally leaven the whole of the
human family and that all people will
come into the light of spiritual
life.
From the standpoint of
creative Mind it is plain that
re-embodiment serves a purpose in
affording opportunities for spiritual
development. All that is gained in
spiritual growth in one's life
experience becomes part of the
individual's real identity; and if he
is faithful, he will finally gather
such a store of spiritual power and
wisdom that he can demonstrate
salvation of his body through Christ,
who is "able to save to the uttermost."
But, we would repeat, reincarnation is
only an opportunity.
"The hour . . . now is."
Right now the resurrection work is
going on, and men and women are
awakening to a new consciousness of
life, understanding, and bodily
perfection. This resurrection work must
extend to every member of the Adam
race, whether he is what we call alive
or whether he, as Jesus said of the
dead, sleeps. All must be awakened and
be unified in soul and body.
Many of the present-day
ideas of resurrection have come down
from past centuries of ignorance and
have been accepted without question
because they seem to be supported by a
literal interpretation of certain Bible
texts. But in these, as in all
Scripture, we should go back of the
letter and see the spiritual meaning of
the parables and the symbols used to
teach the truth about the raising of
the dead. Thus we shall find unfolding
day by day in ourselves the awakening
and resurrection of thought that we
once supposed would come in a single
day to the bodies of those in the
grave. When this raising of our dying
and dead thoughts has gone far enough
in us, we shall find ourselves
gradually slipping into continuous
health; that is, we shall realize that
our bodies are self-renewing and
therefore naturally immortal. Such a
mighty and far-reaching work would be
included in the promise "Greater work
than these shall he [man]
do."
Mention is also made in
John's Gospel (King James Version) of
"the resurrection of damnation."
Damnation is condemnation. Paul makes
it very clear that, by Adam's
transgression, condemnation came on all
his race. As death has no power to help
anyone, the condition of the Adam man
is not bettered by dying. Therefore,
when people are re-embodied they "come
forth . . . unto the resurrection of
damnation," in other words,
condemnation or correction. Everyone
begins where he left off. But though
one may have died in condemnation and
been re-embodied in that state, he has
opportunity, when re-embodied, to come
up into Christ (in whom is no
condemnation), identify himself with
the Christ race, and demonstrate
through Him the deathless life. So is
proved the divine justice of including
all in sin in Adam, that all may be
delivered in one, even Jesus
Christ.
Everyone who would
demonstrate that he is risen with
Christ must first lay hold of life by
faith and affirm without wavering that
he is raised out of sin and
condemnation and death into eternal
life. Then the word of life carries on
day by day the resurrecting, redeeming
work in the mind and in the body. "I
die daily," I am raised daily. Every
day some old limitation or error loses
its hold and passes away and the
imperishable, incorruptible substance
of Truth becomes a little more firmly
established in consciousness. In this
way the body is transformed and raised
up in honor, incorruptible, immortal.
This is the raising of the dead, as
commanded by Jesus.
However, some of the
details of this great work must of
necessity be, at this time, mere
speculation. It is not profitable to
allow our minds to dwell on mortal
questionings about how the work of
Spirit is to be done in and through us.
It is our place to hold ourselves in a
positive life thought, realizing always
the omnipresence and perfection of life
in God, thus bringing perfect life more
and more into manifestation in
ourselves and in others. When we
realize how much our faithfulness means
to the race, we shall rejoice in being
true to the great principles of Truth
that will bring to pass the time when
death and the grave will be no more.
"And death shall be no more; neither
shall there be mourning, nor crying,
nor pain, any more: the first things
are passed away."
That you do not remember
your past lives proves nothing. Neither
do you remember the day on which you
were born, but you do not on that
account question the fact of your
birth. Comparatively little of your
present life is remembered, but this
does not alter the fact that you have
lived. Memory, to the natural man, is a
matter of physical brain records,
photographic or phonographic in
character. The memory of experiences in
past lives is not clearly recorded in
the new brain structure of the infant.
Such memories are usually in the nature
of vague impressions; the sense of
identity is blurred. But in the book of
life, the great mind of the universe,
all identity is sharply marked, and as
the individual becomes quickened and
raised out of personal consciousness
into the universal, he will be able to
bridge over the breaks in personal
experience. He will come to himself.
Realizing his spiritual identity as a
son of God, he will not entangle
himself with either present or past
personality, but will claim and
demonstrate his divine sonship. He will
no longer limit himself to a brief span
of life, beginning with birth and
ending with death, but will live in the
consciousness of eternal life, which
has neither end nor
beginning.
