Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00542)

Bee:

Here are some of my comments to your general questions that you
posed in response to what Rich had said.

>[Rich] said: "It seems to me that any clairvoyant who can see his (or anyone
>else's) past lives
>in detail, see what one looked like, what clothes one wore, etc., can only
>be operating on the PSYCHIC level, not the NOETIC, because the Noetic
>doesn't register such mundane details.

Seeing the physical details of a previous life has to do with sense
perception, and the natural extensions to the physical senses are their
psychical counterparts. Clairvoyance, for instance, is an extension of
the sense of sight. There's nothing wrong with it per se, calling something
"psychic" does not immediately mean that it's lower, bad, etc. What do we
see? The past no longer exists, except as images in things that continue
to exist in the present, it has no existence of its own. Just as we have
film that can record and preserve images, in the astral light there are
records of images of things that have been. The psychical senses, in
"seeing into the past", are looking at these images, I'd say, and not
literally looking somewhere where the past currently exists.

>[The noetic] retains, according to HPB in this
>article, only the spiritual essence and meaning of events, not the outer
>details of the events themselves.

Yes. Just as the astral light, out of which our physical senses ultimately
arise, record "sensory history", there is also "mindstuff" and "spiritstuff"
that records the spiritual essence and meaning of events. And just as we
use extensions to our senses to see the phsyical images of the past, we can use
extensions to our spiritual faculties to "see" the "spiritual images" of
the past.

The "recording" of what is going on at the various levels is done in what
corresponds to the Skandhas of the world in which we live.

>The higher Manas or Noetic action has no
>connection to the body directly, and can only operate through the Embodied
>lower manas or Psychic action. Under this view, almost all clairvoyants and
>other unusually gifted people today are Psychic and not Noetic."

This is just saying that our seven principles are interdependent. Each
depends on the lower ones to help it find expression in the world. The
higher principles cannot directly act on the physical without "going through"
the intermediate ones. But this statement can be misleading, because there's
not so much a sense of going from one principle to the next, in a sequence
in time, as there is of all of them acting in concert, as an inseparable unity.

>When an incarnation is over, the elements of the Groundcrew (physical,
>astral, mental bodies we use while in incarnation) are reabsorbed into the
>pool of elemental essence and do not retain the specifics of the life, only
>the general tone established by the soul in that life.

During the after-death states, we give up being fully manifested on this
plane. Our seven principles represent the basic ingredients of consciousness.
We give up the most-physical ones first, and eventually have ceased to exist
as the human personality that we had known ourselves as. Upon the death of
each of our lower principles, its respective lifeatoms and energies (Skandhas)
return to the elements; they go back to mother nature to await our return.

>If that soul had made
>spiritual gains then there is an uplifting effect on the essence and it is
>reabsorbed into higher vibrations than it was before.

The essence of our previous life is absorbed. The abstract skills of heart
and mind are retained. What is left behind is literal details of what we
had done in the life. It's like having written an article, we now are faced
with a blank sheet of paper, to start over again. But we retain the skills
and memory of what we have written before, so we're better writers than
before. The skills are retained, the previous personality we build and used
with them is left behind for a fresh start.

>The soul then spends time whereever it goes and when the desire to
>reincarnate comes over it, it may have increased its spiritual content more
>that last incarnation.

I would say that the time is not spent in new learning or experiences on
higher planes. Rather, the unfulfilled energies of the previous life need
to be dissipated before we can momentarily "drop" our seven principles, then
reclothe ourselves in them again. In the kamaloke, we dissipate the unfulfilled
desire energies. In the devachan, we dissipate the unfulfilled spiritual
energies. The length of both experiences is not based so much on how evil or
spiritual we are as it is based upon how much has been left unfulfilled at
the moment of death. A very spiritual person, for example, perhaps a Chela,
may have a very short devachan, because *he lifes out his spiritual impulses.*
On the other hand, a person inspired by the spiritual, with grand intentions
to do good in the world, may have a devachan of thousands of years, if those
intentions remain unexpressed in that person's life.

>It then picks up a Groundcrew that is a little finer
>in essence than the last incarnation but certainly no memory of the previous
>life.

The groundcrew is the same Shandhas or life energies that we left behind
during the death and after-death processes. We are at birth making a fresh
start with what we left off with. We are a little finer in essence, in a
sense, than we were at the start of the previous lifetime. But at birth,
we pick up where we left off from the previous life.

>As you [Rich] said, the soul is only interested in the spiritual essence and
>the meaning of events.

The soul in this context refers to the spiritual part of us, and it
relates to things of its nature.

>So I pondered on where these past lives seen by
>clairvoyants were located and the logical answer to me was, the Akashic
>records. All we do, think and experience is imprinted in the akasha. So if I
>was able and wanted to review some previous life, I could consult the
>Akashic records for the details that my soul could not supply directly.

We also call this the astral light. In it are the images of the past.
This is not a "recording" in an abstract, perfect sense. The astral light
is "living substance" out of which physical things come into being. Its
lowest ranges might be called "the etheric" by Leadbeater, since that term
was popular in the scientific community of his age.

The "recording" of events in the astral light is not mathematically
perfect in some absolute sense. It is a process of life, subject to
the finite nature and limitations of manifest existence.

>Is this where we also consult in our soul state, the details necessary to
>organise our next life?

I'm not sure that we can exactly say that the process involves our
reviewing spiritual details to organize and plan our future lifetime.
Our urge to exist draws us into birth, and we are ourselves, and
naturally are and life a certain way. The "choice" involved in what
we become is primal, immediate, directly part of life, and not preplanned
in the way that we plan things. We "choose" the details of our next
lifetime in the same way as we "choose" our next set of parents. That
choice is something different than what we usually consider "choise"
as meaing.

>There are clairvoyants, I am sure, who only think
>they see past lives and others who really do and perhaps they actually check
>the Records for the details of past lives of people rather that get them
>from the person.

People can be trained to read the astral light. How reliable is it as
a recording media? I'd say that it varies, and the information recorded
in it is of differing quality. How reliable are the readings from it?
That varies greatly depending upon the skills of the psychic. Are we
really getting the details of the past lives of people? Yes in the sense
of some physical facts. But no in the sense of what happened in terms of
their internal, personal, subjective experience that they had. That
experience cannot be "read" by another, and is not fixed, since when
we change inwardly, we also change our personal past, which we carry
within ourselves. I would venture to say that there is no external,
objective, fixed, unchanging past, but only its effects that carry
forward, as retained in the present.

>Then how can the clairvoyant be sure that it is the lives
>of that particular person that they see?

They see bits and pieces of external images of the person's past.

>It seems to make what is seen
>rather chancy and it is mostly impossible to prove if they are right or
>wrong.

Only the person involved is the absolute source of their past. It is
carried deep within, and *changes* in a way as they change.

>Personally I have no really pressing urge to know what I was before.
>I have had some personal impressions of one or two but they are interesting
>but of little bearing on what I am about this time. They would appear to
>point to reasons for some of my peculiarities but who knows.

When writing an article, if we stop and admire our previous writings, we've
really put aside for the moment our current writing task. We could find
something helpful to reuse in the current work, but it's best to stick to
fresh writings, without recycling second-hand words. It really doesn't matter
what were the external physical details of some previous life of ours.
Our living connection to the past is carried inside ourselves. In fact, we
are the sumtotal of all that we have done before, we are the totality of
our past. How do we know that past? By looking at ourselves, and working
on self knowledge.

>The psychic abilities probably operates through the lower manas and connects
>with the manas of the other person and thereby a path to the location in the
>Akasha is opened at the 'correct page', so the speak. We all have our unique
>signature sound and this may be what is used as a guide.

The mind is used to direct the attention of our senses, as we gaze into
the astral light. We have the mental ability, mostly latent, of putting
ourselves in touch with other things and beings. We can establish a
conscious link with the other, and relate to them through that link.
This is what we do in our devachan, when we populate it with people that
we knew in life. They are not "really" there with us, but there is an
element of them in the images we have created. It is the same when gazing
upon the astral light. We make an image of the other person, and it is
partly populated or enlivened by the life energies of the other person.

>Hope this makes sense but I have been thinking about this for the last few
>days and would appreciate some suggestions. I am very interested in the
>elemental essences and their function in our lives.

Perhaps there are other comments too? Jerry S. is usually good at
offering an alternate view to many of the things that I suggest.

-- Eldon