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Understanding Reincarnation
from the physical, birth from death, or death from rebirth. It can open the door to understanding cycles within your own development. In order to understand how reincarnation operates, we must redefine the old terms of fatalism, predestination, and heredity. Fatalism is the belief that we are born into a materialistic world and that our place within that world is simply due to some kind of lottery. We have come from nowhere—by no real law of justice, love, or forgiveness— and when we die, we pass on into nothingness again. For anyone who believes in a beneficent divine force within the universe, this concept just will not work. Why strain, study, and try to do well in life if it is all for nothing? It’s a terribly depressing view of life. Predestination is the belief that, by some divine decree of God or the divine forces of the universe, some humans and angels are predestined to success and everlasting life, while others are ordained to everlasting death. Again, this is a terribly pessimistic view of life. And what truly divine force would act in such a human and arbitrary fashion? This view of predestination will be altered somewhat when we look at the laws of karma and compensation at play within the reincarnation process in chapter 2. What we hope to show within this book is that how we live our lives now sets the tone for what we will experience in the future. We predestine ourselves for good, bad, or indifference. We cannot blame it on some distant divine force. We write the scripts, and we play the parts of the scripts we have written.