The Future Life Screening Room (Upper Mental Plane, Causal Body)
AC 242: February 27, 2005 (Boston)My friend Elizabeth asked me some questions about reincarnation last night over dinner and I was telling her about things I’d read in the writings of Eknath Easwaran. He says that in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, your next lifetime is determined on the basis of your last thought in the lifetime you’ve just left. This last thought usually reflects the compulsions that drove the previous life, but may also consist of regrets over things that were done or not done in that life.
Elizabeth asked me a few questions that I could not answer. So I had an adventure in consciousness this morning in response to our conversation. I awoke from it at 5:45 A.M.
The AC concerns my Uncle Gerry. At first I saw him on horseback, riding through a beautiful Western landscape, such as Canyonlands National Park (or Zion or Bryce Canyon) in Utah. Then I saw him with a group of young people on the side of a river flowing through a canyon. The group appeared to be rafting down the river. They were now on shore, scouting out a strong set of rapids that they were preparing to run.
Uncle Gerry looked like a young man, and yet also like the man I knew while he was alive. He dove into the rapids a couple of times--a risk that no one else in the group was willing to take.
At one point, he surfaced and the whole image dissolved, just like a film that has become overheated by the projector lamp and melts. The next thing I knew, I was with Uncle Gerry and another presence in a huge control room.
This other presence was an odd little man. He was the size of a ten-year-old child, but had a full beard. He was beautifully formed, but seemed to be a lot older than he looked. Over the course of the ensuing scene, I began to think of him as the “Little Professor,” because he seemed to be so knowledgeable.
Uncle Gerry and the Little Professor were sitting in front of a large television screen. The Little Professor was working the controls. The scene I’d just witnessed had evidently been projected onto the screen. But Uncle Gerry and I had not just been watching it, we were also in it.
The Little Professor turned to Uncle Gerry and said, “So, in your next lifetime, you’ll be born in Rochester, New York, as a male, to parents who life on S___ Street. [All I got was the S.]
“You’ll have a strong draw to the landscape of the Western United States, without really knowing why. Of course, in your previous life, recently finished, you lived in Sun City West, in Arizona, and one of your children still lives in Wyoming with her family.
“You learned to love the Western landscape as a result of being exposed to it in this way, but you were too old to enjoy it in the ways you would have liked, as an outdoor enthusiast. So, in your next life, as a young man, you’ll do everything you can to get out West and explore the backcountry, in as many ways as possible, such as horseback riding and whitewater rafting.
“You’ll be something of a loner, a bit inclined to depression. This is another carryover from the previous life. You held in your feelings in that lifetime. When you were dying, you were unable to speak because of a stroke. That led to a great feeling of regret over all of the things you could have said to your family about who you were, what you believed, how you loved them.
“In the next lifetime, you’ll need to examine the roots of this tendency to remain silent in depression that will begin in your early years and see whether you can prevent it from silencing you in the new life too.
“While you’re exploring the West, you’ll be driven by a sense of looking for something that you’re never quite able to find or put your finger on. That’s the part of you that still wants to communicate with your family from your previous life.
“You won’t be likely to encounter them or to know what to do if you did. But the drive will remain, because it was so strongly a part of your consciousness while you were dying. It will only be assuaged by attempts that you make in your next life to communicate your feelings to others, especially someone that you love.
“You’ll have to be careful about something reckless in your nature that will amount a to a death wish. You’ll take a lot of risks in that lifetime--and some of them could easily bring you back here before your time.
“Depression will drive you to do so. But the depression will be alleviated by speaking truly and authentically about what you feel to others. That’s the direction of healing you need to go in to compensate for the ways your silence in the last life hurt yourself and your family, which could never be sure that you truly loved them.”
By the time the Little Professor had finished, I realized that we were in a Future-Life Screening Room. My name for the Little Professor seemed to be perfectly apt, since he seemed to know everything about both the previous lifetime and the lifetime to come. His appearance, too, may have been an expression of his dual knowledge. The beard was a symbol of the mature man my uncle had been in his previous life, representing the wisdom he had accumulated during his seventy-five years on the planet. His size, however, represented the boy he would eventually become in his next lifetime.
My uncle seemed to be in awe of the Little Professor. After having heard what the latter had to say, Uncle Gerry slumped back in his chair and said, “You’re utterly without mercy.”
I hadn’t found anything to be depressed about in what the Little Professor has said. It all seemed eminently useful--and quite logical as an extension of my uncle’s previous life. But Uncle Gerry seemed to take it hard.
The Little Professor replied, “Keep in mind that I’m only informing you about the ways in which your last lifetime will inform the next. I didn’t choose them for you. They were determined by the state of your consciousness at the moment of death, as a compensation for what you were feeling then, an opportunity to learn and grow and avoid making the same mistakes again.”
“But it seems so unfair,” my uncle said, lapsing into sullen silence.
“What’s unfair about having to learn to speak about your feelings so you won’t feel depressed?” the Little Professor asked. “The fact that silencing yourself leads to depression is a universal human law. Don’t take it personally that you fell afoul of this law and there were negative consequences in your past life for yourself and your family. Learn how not to violate this law in your next lifetime and you’ll have a lot of adventures in beautiful wilderness, not just in the American West, but all over the world.”
My uncle remained slumped in his chair, as if asking him to speak about his feelings were some kind of death sentence. With great compassion, the Little Professor said, “You’re just upset because we’re sending you back to Earth sooner than you wish. You’d rather stay here in the Afterdeath Zone as long as possible.
“It’s true that you’re going back a lot sooner than some people do--but that’s because all the conditions are right. Don’t take it personally. We’re not punishing you. And be careful about resenting being there because you would rather be here, or getting back here will become an obsession, resulting in the death-wish that I mentioned.”
The Little Professor now produced a large, empty glass vial with a white top and a plastic Ziplock bag that seemed to be filled with a glowing golden paste, the color of honey and the texture of miso. He said, “Now, the first thing you need to do is label this vial with your name in the new lifetime, John ____. Then you’ll need to take some of this paste and put it in the jar.
“What I have in this bag is God consciousness infused with human consciousness. It’s like miso, in that the human consciousness is the grain base from which miso is made and the god consciousness is the living bioactive agent that transforms it.
“With each new life you’re given another dose of God-consciousness, like sourdough starter. It lies at the core of your being. Your decisions in that life cause it to expand and take you over, in which case your spiritual growth is hugely accelerated; or you develop something like an immune-system reaction to it at the ego level that keeps it in check. In rare, cases, your obsessions with what will make you happy, if they become self-destructive, will destroy it.
“This is the gift we give to everyone who is about to begin a new life, so that their yearning to remain connected with the Source, as they’re connected in between lifetimes, doesn’t overpower them while they’re on Earth, resulting in an overwhelming desire to get back here at any cost. As long as you seek to expand this core of God-consciousness in yourself, you’ll be free of the death-wish I mentioned earlier.”
At this point, I awoke.
[The Little Professor was what Theosophy would call a deva, a nonhuman consciousness, one type of which helps us plan our future lifetimes when we're in between lives.]