relevant excerpt

[ssake]

I'm in the process of researching for an article, and ran across a passage I'd like to share from a biography of my spiritual master, Meher Baba, called "Lord Meher". I'm always a bit shy about sharing my own path for fear of being seen as proscelytizing, but bear with me as I think this is directly relevant to Carol's work.

(quoting from Page 1255)
"Someone had witnessed a fatal car accident near his home, and asked Meher Baba, "What happens to those persons who die in this way, or by some other accident, before their natural death?"

In reply, the Master explained:

If a person dies by a sudden accident before his natural death, he immediately takes birth again and completes the remaining time of his past life, after which he dies. Some live for one, two, three, four or five years; and after finishing the remaining period of their past life, they take another body according to the *sanskaras* [mental impressions] of the life which ended suddenly by accidental death. However, they cannot live longer than it takes to complete this remaining time. This is why some children die--some in a few days, some in a few months, and some after a few years.

Geneally, children up to the age of seven do not incur sanskaras. Their life until seven years of age is passed through according to, and depending on, the *push* of the sanskaras of their previous life. They are happy or miserable in accordance with the push being smooth or violent."

(end of quote)

This quote is from 1929.

Now, my son Daniel died at 7-1/2 months. He was like a little adult, who was frustrated by being in a child's body. I mean, he tried to play the piano, he tried to type, he concentrated, studying an object much longer than you'd expect a baby to do. So all this makes perfect sense from my experience with him.

It also relates to Carol's observations that children's past-life memories appear to fade at around 7 years at the latest.

Steve S.

 

[sirona86]

this is an interesting idea, but a touch disturbing for me. I know that in my previous life i died in some kind of accident, probably in my 30s.

 

[patam]

Hi ssake

Your post brings up a question I have been thinking about for some time.

There are supposedly no accidents in the universe - so how can accidental deaths happen?

P.

 

[ssake]

"Accidental" would be in the point of view. For us they are accidents. According to Meher Baba, and no doubt other teachers, there is a supervening order of laws. So in one set of laws it can be accidental (or miraculous, on the positive side), but it is really a matter of a supervening layer or level of laws intervening. So the layers I'm aware of are the natural law of cause and effect, karmic law, and Grace. Each supercedes the next-higher one. But there may be more subtle layering in there than these basic three. I think we have to face the fact that when you get into trying to understand things like fate and karma, it is an extremely complicated subject, as Sri Aurobindo indicates in his book "The Problem of Rebirth". I agree, you'd think in a neat and tidy universe everybody would just naturally wrap up their karma at the end of their natural span and there wouldn't be "leftover" karma.

But there is this matter of free will and how we have exercised it in previous lifetimes. I think that's where the catch is. A certain exercise of free will in a previous life, when it "comes around again", becomes an "accident" in this life. I'm am guessing, and this is just an intuitive guess, that if you could investigate many cases of "accidents" in previous lives, what you would find is that the person knowingly did something they already knew better than to do. I am guessing that acting in a way you know from previous experience is wrong, will create these kinds of scenarios in future lives. It may not be the only cause, and again, this is just my feeling about it, an educated guess.

Then of course the whole issue of free will comes up. I have some ideas on that--Sri Aurobindo goes into it in depth in the above-cited book--but that would take a really lengthy response here, and it's really something that's over my head anyway. I'm going to assume for the sake of discussion that at the level we live, there is at least a limited degree of free will and if you deliberately misuse it, you create some strange, seemingly unnatural scenarios in a future life (because, misusing your free will this way is inherently unnatural, so the karmic repercussion is also seemingly unnatural).
Steve S.

 

[ssake]

Here is another excerpt from the same book, this one from the late 1920's or early 1930's:

"Leaving Madras on March 3rd, they proceeded to Bangalore. On the way, Sadashiv told Baba, "There is a person in Mysore who remembers his past lives. I've read that he recognizes his previous parents, their home and every detail."

Baba commented briefly:

There are such people who abruptly remember events of their past lives. They generally are those who die in a sudden accident, the shock of which has such a force on them that it leaves impressions of their last birth which they remember in their present birth. But this has nothing to do with realizing the Truth or advancement on the planes."



Note that a reference to a "Stevenson-like" case also appears as a footnote in Paramahansa Yogananda's "Man's Eternal Quest", from, as I recall, about 1925.

While Dr. Stevenson's work has been extremely important, especially as the first Western scientist to study that phenomenon scientifically, I think it's important to remember he didn't *discover* it.
Steve S.