Reincarnation - Why, Where and How we have Lived Before

By Douglas M. Baker

Reincarnation - Why, Where and How we have Lived Before

With the influence of the Aquarian age now firmly upon us, growing numbers of people seek to know the answers to the apparent injustices in life - its disease, its inequality - answers which the Church is no longer capable of providing. Instead, many have turned to Reincarnation, and to its sister doctrine Karma, for it is only here that these answers can be found. In this book, Dr. Douglas M. Baker presents us with the facts behind Reincarnation, and shows us that, far from being a belief held only in the East, Reincarnation has its roots firmly planted in the West, where it can be traced throughout our rich and cultured society in the lives of its greatest members - the poets, the philosophers, and the investigator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker eBooks Publishing
• Release date: Apr 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781625690173

Douglas M. Baker

Dr. Douglas M. Baker. English born and raised in South Africa has done extensive scientific research into those hinterlands of the mind which one might call psi-semantics. He graduated in the Arts & Humanities in South Africa and qualified in medicine at Sheffield University (UK) in 1964. Having taught in the East End schools of London for 10 years, he began his tour of the Western world giving lectures and seminars in Esoteric Healing, Esoteric Anatomy, Esoteric Astrology, Esoteric Psychology, Esoteric Science and Metaphysics. He, more than any other, set in motion the trends towards alternative methods of medicine which have transformed that field in Britain today. As medical advisor to the De la Warr laboratories in Oxford, he undertook research into Biomagnetism and quantum physics their effects on the human aura and dark matter, producing the book by the same name in conjunction with George de la Warr. Through the years he has given more than 15,000 lectures and attracted people from all over the world to his Esoteric Science Festivals and International Summer Schools staged in America, Canada, England, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. His transformative experiences during the Second World War, when twice severely wounded, set the pattern for his life long investigations into the Powers Latent in Man. His extensive esoteric writings are said to be the largest collection in the world produced by a living author. He has written over 100 books, many of which have been translated into the 9 European languages at https://www.douglasbaker.com, and his list of downloadable MP3 audio lectures available at www.douglasbaker.org, include 500 live lectures given around the world and on a vast range of subjects. He has led the field in esoteric astrology, producing with a team, his magnum opus, a Dictionary of Astrology for the 21st Century in three volumes. This is in addition to the already existing 11 volume set of books on the same subject.

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Table of Contents

REINCARNATION - Why, Where & How We Have Lived Before

1. Reincarnation

Why Should We Believe In Reincarnation?

Poets and Reincarnation

John Masefield

William Wordsworth

Walt Whitman

Homer

Belief In Rebirth

The Transmigration of Souls

Faith and Immortality

2. What Is Man's Body?

The Etheric Body

The Astral Body

What Is Man's Soul?

Atma, Buddhi, Manas

Buddhi

Manas

3. Is There No Justice?

What Is Genius?

The Factor Of Sex

KARMA The Law Underlying Reincarnation

Case Example:-

Leprosy

Mongolism

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Psychosynthesis

A Hindu story tells of one way out-

4. What is Immortality?

The Great Choice

Spiritual Metamorphosis

Icarus

The Reappearance of the Christ

The Search for a Body for Christ

5. Lives of Erato by C. W. Leadbeater

Introduction by C. Jinarajadasa

Biography of John Varley

Third Root Race: Lemurian

Fourth Root Race: Atlantean

Fifth Root Race: Aryan

REINCARNATION - WHY, WHERE

& HOW WE HAVE LIVED BEFORE

by

Dr. Douglas M.Baker

B.A., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

With an extract from

The Soul's Growth Through Reincarnation:

Lives of Erato

by C.W. Leadbeater

First Published: 1981|

This Edition (Completely revised and updated): 1995

© Dr. Douglas M. Baker

Printed version ISBN: 9780906006573

Little Elephant,

High Road, Essendon,

Herts, AL9 6HR, England.

This is the only authorised eBook of the printed edition.

© Copyright Dr. Douglas M. Baker 2013

ISBN 9781625690173

Published by Baker eBooks Publishing

Many audio lectures and some of the images and charts used here can be downloaded in higher definition for free from our website https://www.douglasbaker.org.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

INTRODUCTION

With the influence of the Aquarian age now firmly upon us, growing numbers of people seek to know the answers to the apparent injustices in life - its disease, its inequality - answers which the Church is no longer capable of providing. Instead, many have turned to Reincarnation, and to its sister doctrine Karma, for it is only here that these answers can be found. In this book, Dr. Douglas M. Baker presents us with the facts behind Reincarnation, and shows us that, far from being a belief held only in the East, Reincarnation has its roots firmly planted in the West, where it can be traced throughout our rich and cultured society in the lives of its greatest members - the poets, the philosophers, and the investigator.

This book is gratefully dedicated to

Sue Ferdinand

and the staff and residents of

Brookfleld Residential Home

—to aid them on their spiritual journey

THREE GREAT TRUTHS

Hear me, my brother, he said. "There are three truths which are absolute, and which cannot be lost, but yet may remain silent for lack of speech.

"The soul of man is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendour has no limit.

"The principle which gives life dwells in us and without us, is undy­ing and eternally beneficent, is not heard or seen, or smelt, but is perceived by the man who desires perception.

"Each man is his own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself; the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.

These truths, which are as great as is life itself, are as simple as the simplest mind of man. Feed the hungry with them.

—from The Idyll of the White Lotus.

1. REINCARNATION

WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION?

It is surprising how many famous people subscribe to the belief that we are reborn again and again. Henry Ford said:-

"When I was a young man, like so many others, I was bewildered. I found myself asking the question, 'What are we here for?' I found no answer. Without some answer to that question, life is empty, useless."

Subsequently, he came into possession of a book on reincarnation. After read­ing it, Henry Ford said:-

It changed my whole life. From emptiness and uselessness, it changed my outlook on life to purpose and meaning. I believe that we are here for a purpose and will come back again... of this I am sure. Mind and memory do not stop with death. . . they go on... they are eternals.

He said that the effect of discovering reincarnation was that it put his mind at ease. He realised he was immortal:-

I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26 ... religion offered nothing to the point... even work could not give me complete satisfaction... work seemed futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life, in the next life .. . when I discovered reincarna­tion, it was as if I had discovered a universal plan... I realised it was a chance to work out my own ideas... time was no longer the limiting factor. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock.

Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain during the most vicious years of the First World War, once commented :-

My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated ... and that hereafter we shall suffer or benefit in accordance with what we have done in this world. For example, the employer who sweats his work people will be condemned to be sweated himself in lives to come.

Albert Schweitzer, on arriving in America for the first time, was met by a large body of people. He addressed them as follows:-

Ladies and gentlemen, in my youth I was a stupid young man. I learned German and French, Latin and Greek, and Hebrew, but no English. In my next incarnation, English will be my first language.

POETS AND REINCARNATION

JOHN MASEFIELD

Most English children of the author's generation grew up with the poetry of John Masefield, the English poet laureate. His stirring poem Sea Fever ex­presses his thirst for life:-

... I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied....

Masefield believed that the thirst for life is not expunged at the moment of death, that that thirst goes on between lives, and that we are reborn:-

I hold that when a person dies

His soul returns again to earth;

Arrayed in some new flesh disguise.

Another mother gives him birth.

With sturdier limbs and brighter brain

The old soul takes the road again.

Poets have always in the past been regarded as sages, no matter what their age. They were believed to have been visited by the muses which means, in language other than mythological, that they were divinely inspired or in­formed from divine levels from where, as the reincarnationists know, the mechanisms governing rebirth operate.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

It is quite easy to point to a whole host of poets who, through their poetry, have indicated their love of this very ancient belief that man's soul is immor­tal. Certainly we should include amongst them the German poet Goethe, the English poet Tennyson, as well as William Wordsworth who describes beau­tifully in his Intimations of Immortality how the young child comes into each incarnation trailing clouds of glory from the heaven world:-

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

WALT WHITMAN

The American poet Walt Whitman also makes numerous references to re­birth. In Song of Myself he confidently affirms its ultimate end:-

I know I am deathless,

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass….

And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait…

HOMER

Ennius (239-169 BC), the Calabrian poet, introduced the doctrine of reincar­nation to the Roman people. He tells in his Annals how Homer appeared to him in a dream and told him their bodies had once been animated by the same soul.

A later life of Homer was George Chapman, the Elizabethan poet who trans­lated some of Homer's works into English. In The Teares of Peace he de­scribes how, 'on the hill Next Hitchin's left hand', he had a vision of Homer commanding him to 'English' the Greek poet, and how he was continually prompted until it was completed:-

Oh thou, that blind doth see

My heart and soul, what may I reckon thee,

Whose heavenly look shows not, nor voice sounds man?

I am, he said, "that spirit Elysian,

That in thy native air, and on the hill

Next Hitchin's left hand, did thy bosom fill

With such a flood of soul, that thou were fain,

With explanations of her rapture there,

To vent it to the echoes of the vale;

When meditating of me, a sweet gale

Brought me upon thee; and thou dids't inherit

My true sense, for time then, in my spirit,

And I, invisibly, went prompting thee

To those fair greens where thou dids't English me";

Scarce had he utter'd this when well I knew

It was my Prince's Homer.

As the translations progressed Chapman gradually identified himself with Homer. When he had completed the great work he had fulfilled his soul's purpose and knew it as he said, The Worke that I was borne to doe is done.

Homer, reincarnated today, is no poet but actively works on immense eso­teric projects associated with the World Plan.

CLINICAL DEATH

Amongst the author's own friends, who happen to be famous, are the late Peter Sellers and Barbara Cartland. Peter Sellers experienced short periods of clinical death in a Los Angeles hospital in 1964. Many people are having these same experiences in which, through a heart attack or some cerebro-vascular disorder, the blood supply to the brain is halted.

The person may drop down dead in the street. Occasionally, if help is at hand, as it was in this particular case for Peter Sellers, the individual may be revived through modem medical techniques by applying shock to the chest wall or injecting adrenaline directly into the heart muscle and even through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. However, until the heart beats again, the pa­tient is clinically dead. If the period of 'clinical death' is extended beyond eight minutes, the brain is usually irreversibly damaged through lack of oxy­gen supply