As you can imagine, with my father in hospice, death and faith are on my mind. It seems fitting that my book club read Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss this past gathering. In case you don’t know this classic spiritual book, it’s about a psychiatrist who, after conventionally treating a 27-year-old patient, Catherine, without success, resorts to hypnosis. During these hypnotic treatments, Catherine recounts many lives and deaths, 86 in total. Over the course of these hypnotic treatments, Catherine becomes completely symptom-free as her phobias and anxiety seemingly melt away. I know, I know. I can just hear what you are thinking….
No way.
What a crock of crap.
WTF?
That “doctor” must be a quack.
Julie must be a quack to have read it.
I get it. I can see why people don’t believe in reincarnation. Is there really an energy force or a gray-bearded guy in the sky organizing our lives so we meet just the right people at the right time? If we don’t get the lessons this time around, do we really get to come back for a second, third or 86th try? Does this God really care enough to bother with setting all this up? And with approximately 7.8 billion people on the planet, how is this even possible? When you think about it and do the math, it seems impossible. Kind of like Santa.
But belief isn’t based on math. It’s based on faith: faith in the unknown, the not-totally-sure, like not knowing with absolute certainty there is a heaven, karma or rebirth. Maybe reincarnation is just another name for heaven, or karma or rebirth for that matter. Not knowing for sure is part of the fun.
But if you don’t believe in an energy force, a gray-bearded guy in the sky or any other unknown entity, can you live your fullest life? Does faith in something make life even more worth living? Can life really be nothing more than working, acquiring things, having experiences, developing relationships and death?
I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that. Because I know otherwise.
Believing gives you YOUR why. YOUR why is what develops this world and those around you. You were born with it and it’s your job to uncover it. It’s special to you. Imagine if all of us listened to the calls of the why, how amazingly perfect and synchronistic our world would be, kind of like the rest of the animal kingdom. They are all doing what they are supposed to be doing, living their destiny. They don’t choose faith. They are born with faith. That is why the animal kingdom is so perfect. The squirrel doesn’t question gathering food for the winter. She knows what she is supposed to do. Animals are born with their why. If only we had the internal compass the animal kingdom was gifted. This is where the work comes in. Figuring out how to tap into our destiny. We have free-will and with free-will comes the choice to believe or not.
Free-will determines our destiny. Our lives are formed by the choices we make: our experiences, our reactions, the consequences, the chance encounters, the relationships we build or are given at birth. What if these choices, every relationship, every encounter was a chance to learn something? What if we approached life believing everything is conspiring for our benefit, every single day? If we believed in our why and the whys of others, ourexperiences would guide us, gently nudging us into the direction of our birth-right destiny, like Fall for the squirrel.
And maybe, by acknowledging the fact we all have whys and those sacred contracts we agreed to before we got here, we would believe in each other. And maybe, just maybe, something bigger than us brought us together to teach us something, so we can evolve, be better humans having a spiritual experience and achieve our greatest potential. Just look at our amazing animal kingdom and it’s synchronicities. Who or what created THAT? They’ve got it right. So maybe if we don’t learn this time around, we get a next time. Whether you believe in reincarnation, Santa Claus, the gray-bearded guy or something else, it’s belief that helps us fulfill our destiny.