Imagine

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No Hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people
Living for today
Ah, ah, ah-ah

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
Yoo-hoo, ooh-ooh

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
Yoo-hoo, ooh-ooh

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

John Lennon

(With thanks and appreciation for Chris Bache).

**

Let's take a trip. (No, this doesn't involve 'shrooms).

This will be a journey where we let our imagination float free --- free from the prosaic everydayness of doing the dishes, laundry, cleaning, cooking, earning a living, taking care of children and nurturing ourselves. An adventure: who knows what we might find?

We will be traveling on a road with no destination. (And again, no, we will not be entering The Twilight Zone).

We will not be journeying to the center of the Earth, but rather to the center of our ourselves - and perhaps to the center of existence.

We will be dipping a little toe into the possibility of karma and rebirth.

Call it a fairy tale if you wish.

Karma and Rebirth

Let's imagine that taking birth on our planet is like an entrance exam for attending Earth School and that our lives are the curriculum.

In Lifecycles Christopher Bache suggests that we live in a field of energy - a "web of life," revealing the interdependence of all events and living beings.

This web is alive, brilliantly conscious, and interactive with everything it encompasses. Human beings make choices and it responds to our choices. And when we make more choices, the web reconfigures around us, offering us new conditions and feedback over time.

Our lives show up as part of an organic process of enormous complexity and depth. We perceive - not Newton's mechanistic, dead, billiard-ball universe - but rather a cosmos that is interested in promoting our growth.

From this perspective we take birth in order to be challenged - so we can grow. Built into the fabric of the universe (along with demise - the fact that all things pass away), growth is simply the natural order of life.

When we allow this possibility into our awareness, we begin to notice that our cosmos cannot help but respond to our efforts. As we accept opportunities to grow in wisdom and compassion, the force of wholeness gathers momentum in our life, often imperceptibly at first, but eventually gaining steam. Healing and growth, rather than stagnation or regression, simply become the keynote of our lives.

In this tale karma refers to the processes of cause and effect that govern human evolution. And Earth School is a university offering a multitude of courses containing opportunities for learning - as we live, die, and, in reconstituted form, live again.

In this story the present moment is connected to other moments in time - linked to the distant past and future. Our curriculum: making choices and experiencing the results of our choices over many sequential lives. The sequence: action > consequence, action > consequence.

In this world we have been everything to each other: mother, father, friend, enemy, associate. Is it possible that the people to whom we are closest - husbands, wives, parents, siblings, friends - we have known before?

It's all about learning in an infinite "Learning Universe." After receiving wise counsel in the realm between incarnations, we chose the outlines of our current life (as we will choose our next one). And because we only choose a general framework - geographical location, ethnicity, parents - there is plenty of room for using our free will to make decisions about how we will live.

If we all had this perception - this understanding, even this experience - what would such a world be like? Seen from this perspective, how would our personal lives play out, our social lives, our political lives? What would become of war, of political oppression, racism, greed, hatred - of love, friendship and parenting?

**

So ends this fanciful tale. Of course, such a story can generate many questions, which have been pondered centuries.

If your curiosity is piqued, there are now plentiful resources inviting us to learn more. I have included a few of these below.

Resources

Bache, Christopher, Lifecycles, 1994.

Fisher, Joe, The Case for Reincarnation, 1985.

Grof, Stanislav, The Adventure of Self Discovery, 1988.

____, Stanislav, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science, 1984.

Ram Dass, Miracle of Love, 1995.

________, Walking Each Other Home, 2022.

Ring, Kenneth, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience, 1984.

Rinpoche, Kalu, The Dharma, 1986.

Rinpoche, Sogyal, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 2020.

Stevenson, Ian, Children Who Can Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, 1987.

Yeomans, Tom, Holy Fire - the Process of Soul Awakening, 2020.

Postscript

This story presents a world-view that allows us to explore a deeper and wider view of life. Embedded here is the idea that the laws of nature are exquisite and precise; it presents the question: is it possible that the flow of events and settings in our lives are not random, but part of a larger, intricate, long-term, and perhaps beneficent design?

Perhaps the "one and done" assumptions of most western religions, along with our strongly held secular beliefs in materialism, are not the way life works at all. Perhaps instead, human life is a curriculum - through and through in which we learn as much as we can in each grade, and then either repeat the grade or are promoted to the next one.

And, perhaps, after we drop our body, we all eventually consult with our guides - beings who know us better than we know ourselves and love us incredibly. In these moments, in this realm, most of us realize that there is still much to learn. And so, we choose to return to Earth School in re-constituted form. We do so with love - seeking both our own growth and the growth of our species - realizing that every growth step we make in our own lives is simultaneously a gain for all of us.

To discern whether or not this describes our lives, each of us will need to listen to our intuitive heart.

Imagine.

(Article changed on Jun 26, 2024 at 1:41 AM EDT)