All World
Gayatri Pariwar

WHAT AM I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?

Personally, I find it impossible to accept the traditional notions about heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are real enough as states of mind - I have known people in both. But to believe in hell as an actual place where living souls are tortured eternally, you have to believe in a crueler God than I believe it possible for Him to be.

I once had a vivid vision of hell. I was outraged at the thought that the God of love whom I love could create such a place. But as the demon dragged me down into it, he said, "You don't have the right idea about this place. It's only here because you need it. If you'll look around, you'll see there is no one here except the people you think ought to be here."

As to heaven, I pray that we may one day attain it but perfect bliss would require utter selflessness and perfect love. It is pretty obvious that if we should get into it now, heaven would not long stay heavenly.

Whatever else life - present or future - may contain, it must contain change. The one essential element in life, the element that makes life alive, is change. To be what makes life alive, is change. To be what you and I are, here or elsewhere, is to change - and hopefully to grow.

I believe we are immortal beings.
"I am immortal, I aver,
For I must live as if I were."
Life does not make sense if this is all the life there is. It is too unjust, and I believe in a God who is just. Even more, He is justice. He is law. He is even the law that is love.

Hundreds and hundreds of persons have had experiences that have convinced them that life goes on beyond this one. Such an experience is individual and subjective; you cannot make it come real to anyone who has not had it. But if you ever have one - this I know - it will be the realest thing that ever happens to you.

We are on an immortal journey, children of the Eternal, we are making a voyage in time, and we have come up to here. As to the particulars of our voyage, I suppose I believe in something like reincarnation. Reincarnation seems comparatively reasonable, though personally, I don't like the word; it turns people off. Most of the world believes in reincarnation; most of it always has. The East has always accepted the idea as the most reasonable that has ever been suggested; and though it has not been the prevailing belief in the West, thousands of famous and intelligent people from Plato and Plotinus to Edison and Einstein have believed in it.

An amazing number of people do. General Patton -he hardly seems the type to be bowled over by mystical notions - was absolutely convinced he had been a soldier many times.

Many people, like Patton, have believed that reincarnation takes place here on earth over and over. As for myself, I believe God's house has many rooms in it. I believe I have lived before. I believe I will live again. As to where and how, perhaps it will be here - I love this blue-green glowing globe - perhaps it will be beyond space and even time, an inverted world where thoughts are things and things are thoughts. But since it will have me in it, it will not be too different, because I cannot be too different and still be me. The essential will remain essentially the same.

Does the thought, that you have lived many times seem strange to you? How many lives have you lived in this one? When I was ten years old, my whole life changed absolutely and altogether. My mother ran away from her marriage and took me and my sister fifteen hundred miles from everything and everyone we knew. Everybody who had been in my former life was gone, except my mother and sister. And all the circumstances and conditions changed utterly.

When I was thirty-one I had a tremendous spiritual experience. After agonizing soul-searching, I came to such an illumining realization about myself, I have often told friends that I count my true birth as from that time. I went through a gate of awareness, and life on a different plane of sensitivity began.

When I was thirty-five, I lost my first wife. That was the end of a life, too; a whole new set of people and experiences came into it.
When I was fifty-five, I began yet another new life. I started to travel and speak. Since then my life experiences have altered radically again.

And I have lived these different lives, although I have lived in one city since I was ten and done one work since I was seventeen.
What about you? How many who were an important part of your life, say at twenty, are still an important part of your life? Or when you were ten? Or at your birth? Of those important to you when you were born - a very important moment - how many are important to you still? Very, very few, I would say. Even if you are very young, very few, probably.

People accompany us on this immortal journey, some for a long time and some but briefly. Their importance in our life does not depend on how long they are with us. They can be with us for an hour - less than that, for minutes - and be transformingly important!
A few years ago I made some talks in Palm Beach. On my last day there, I spoke at a nursing home. After I made my talk, a nurse came up to me and said, "There is a woman who has asked to see you. Could you come and see her? She is very near death." She led me down a long hall and into a room where a woman lay in bed. The moment I walked into that room, I knew why I had come to Palm Beach. It had not been to make the speeches I had made. It had been because this woman had drawn me there. Don't ask me how, I don't know, but I knew that woman I had never seen before in this lifetime - I don't even know her name -as well as I have ever known anybody in this life, better than people I have known for years and years. There is no question in my mind, that woman and I for a moment had to reestablish our relationship (don't ask me what it was, I do not know, but I know that it was there and very strong) before she could go on. And so she called me to her -and I went.

People say, "I can't believe I have lived before, because I can't remember anything about those lives." But how much do you remember about this one? Very little. On this date ten years ago, where were you? I haven't the slightest idea where I was. On this date last year, where was I? I don't know. Do you know where you were?

And when you were ten years old, what do you remember of that year? That was one of the most eventful years in my life. But I have to think and think for a few events to dribble faintly back into my mind. And of the time when you were five? If you can recall anything, is it not usually because someone later told you it had happened?

And when we were four, three, two, one? Can we remember anything?

The past has an unreality about it. A mist falls between us and the past, and the mist deepens quickly, so that the figures that move in it through our mind become but phantasms, doubtful and indistinct; which is figure and which is mist becomes harder and harder to make out.

Time writes. But also it erases -almost as fast as it writes. We think of time as a rope with the events of our life tied like knots along its length. But this is not what time is like. Time is like a bunch of keepsakes we have tossed into a drawer of our mind. There they lie tangled together. We may pull them out for a moment, but after a while we forget just when it was we threw them in.

We make our journey through time, but how strange time is. Time is important; we cannot even imagine anything happening without its taking time. But time is hard to fix or grasp. Rubbery and relative, it stretches or compresses, according to what is happening and who it is happening to and even where it is happening, conforming to all sorts of immeasurables of consciousness.

People have asked me, "If we are reborn, how long a time passes between incarnations?" I have often thought, perhaps no time at all -not in the sense of time as we mark it in the world of thoughts and things we spend this lifetime in.

And in deep sleep, does time have any meaning to us then? If it were not for clocks and the sun, would we know that it has passed? Is it more than a bodily process? Had it not been for his long beard, would Rip van Winkle have known that he had slept for twenty years?
Time is a measure of here and now. It is futile and perhaps meaningless to ask where it has gone or when it will be.

People sometimes tell me they don't like the idea of reincarnation because they want to recognize their dear ones. So do I, and I think I will. I always have. How do I recognize my dear ones? My present wife did not come to me with a sign, saying, "I am your w-i-f-e." I think she knew that long before I became aware of it. But that is not the way she came. She from Louisiana, I from Delaware, came by separate, different paths, and when we met, were drawn, not by some vague recollection, but by deep stirrings, a feeling of oneness and love; each found the other dear - that is all.

Only blood relatives come announced, and they may or may not be dear. When you were little, your mother led you toward a big woman bending down above you, and your mother said, "This is your Aunt Agatha." And you let out a scream and fled behind your mother's skirt.

No, dear ones don't come wearing tags or with a certain name or look. They come being dear. And that is the way we recognize them - as someone dear, close, loved. No one has to tell us. Heart speaks to heart, and that is a language all of us understand. That is the way it always has been, that is the way it will always be, that is the only way it could be.

I do not want my growth arrested anywhere. If an angel came and said to me, "Choose the happiest, most beautiful moment of your life, and I will let you stay there always," I would say to that angel, "Get thee behind me. I want to live now –always only now. I want to be alive and to be alive is to change and to grow."

We make an immortal journey. Through chance and change, by way of worlds forgotten and courses unremembered yet graven in my soul, I came here and I journey on.



[Excerpted from ‘Angels Sing In Me’ – Published with glad permission of Unity House, Unity School, USA – The Publishers.  – Editor]