Musings on Living on Planet Earth, Part I: Decisive Historical Moments, Consciousness and Reincarnation by Antonio SolisGomez

Tohono O'Odham Rain Ceremony Painted by Michael Chiago

My recent article on the role a group of Tucson educators played in developing bilingual education elicited a comment from a friend asking why it was that those educators came together at that particular time and why them and not others. Additionally he said that he was trying to wrap his mind around “decisive moments in history”, a term applied to a seemingly insignificant act that turns out to have enormous impact on human affairs such as Napoleon’s final defeat, the result of a fatal hesitation by Marshal Grouchy, who sticks to his orders to pursue the Prussian III Corps instead of riding to Waterloo when loud cannon fire heralds the battle’s decisive moment. “For one second Grouchy considers it, and this one second determines his own fate, that of Napoleon and that of the world.” Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History. 

 One can wonder and speculate why Marshall Grouchy hesitated and be left with the inevitable conclusion that it’s impossible to know. I would contend that it is impossible to know because there is no one act that has such enormous power over human affairs but rather every event is comprised of a series of acts and events that come together leading to something that can be viewed as an eventual outcome. And it’s an outcome that is moving forward, it’s not static or frozen in time. It too usher in more events.

Closer to home we can look at Trump and Robert Mueller and ask why Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russian Investigation. Will that recusal by Sessions one day be seen as a decisive moment if Trump is irreparably damaged? Perhaps, but we who are privy to the multi-facetted action that is ongoing in the Mueller investigation, seeing the behavior of the various players who are involved, the various acts by the President himself, can we isolate that one act by Sessions and think it decisive. I think it would be a stretch.

Because the world is based on free will we can not attribute divine intervention to human events, this even in light of the fact that prayer works to heal loved ones, that rain dances by Native Americans bring forth thunder showers and that natural calamities can be mitigated. How does one reconcile the two? Quite simply, by understanding that human consciousness can affect the world we live in. It’s very similar to the extraordinary phenomena of a person lifting a very heavy object, such as a car, off of a loved one in a moment of panic or of a martial arts practitioner being able to withstand the push and pull of ten men. The consciousness of such individuals is able to call forth the energy that surrounds us. In other words human consciousness can alter events of the natural world as well as an individual’s performance.

However we are still left with the part of my friend’s question as to why those particular individuals came together and to answer this, one has to expand the concept of what it means to live on this planet of three dimensions with a strong scientific tradition affirming an existentialist philosophy i.e. my body and I are one and I live on Earth and no where else: Humans give meaning to life, no meaning exists outside of what humanity provides. Even within Christianity one cannot answer such a question without discounting that we have free will and thus interjecting the notion that God intervenes in our affairs.

However prevalent the above mentioned theological and philosophical underpinnings are in the West, they are not of much interest in India and in Asia where billions of individuals believe in reincarnation that posits that an eternal soul incarnates in a temporal body countless of times and that at the time of “death” it is only the body that dies, the soul keeps living and soon takes on another different body. There, the belief is “I am not my body”.

 I want to stress that belief in reincarnation is not a fringe belief, that it may well be that not believing in reincarnation is in actuality in the minority. There was a time that even within Christianity there was a acceptance of reincarnation as revealed with the discovery of a cache of early Christian writing, some that predate the writings found in todays New Testament.

In December, 1945, early Christian writings containing many secrets of the early Christian religion were found in upper Egypt, a location where many Christians fled during the Roman invasion of Jerusalem. Undisturbed since their concealment almost two thousand years ago, these manuscripts of Christian mysticism rank in importance with the Dead Sea Scrolls. These writings affirmed the existence of the doctrine of reincarnation being taught among the early Jews and Christians. These Christian mystics, referred to as Christian Gnostics, were ultimately destroyed by the orthodox Church for being heretics. Their sacred writings were destroyed and hidden with the belief that they would be revealed at an appropriate time in the future. The discovery in 1945 yielded writings that included some long lost gospels, some of which were written earlier than the known gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (https://www.near-death.com/reincarnation/history/early-christianity.html) 

I bring up reincarnation because without that understanding it is impossible to answer my friend’s questions and within that understanding is the acknowledgement that a person incarnates over and over with many of the same “souls” but of course in different roles, maybe in different gender and in different “races”. The group is like a class in the school of life, helping that soul realize their oneness with God, the one true purpose of life.

Thus people that have seemingly come together randomly in actuality have prior incarnations together be it as family, as friends or as foes and opponents. And a person comes into the world with certain potentials based on past life experiences, potentials that can aggregate with others that manifest as human behavior and events. This is the Law of Karma, defined in the following manner.

While our bodies may die, the soul is eternal and it continues its journey through many lifetimes. The soul creates a system of actions and reactions (Karma), throughout these lives, forming a cycle of rebirth. And the totality of our actions and their reactions in this and previous lives, determine our future. Thus — a man is born to the world he has made’. https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/the-law-of-karma-made-easy-26e25754a91d 

Historical figures and their opponents are of special interest to this discussion as they provide a different perspective to that of “decisive historical moments”. Napoleon had his Wellington, Hitler had his Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, and Trump, will his nemesis be Mueller? Every incarnated soul has created both friends and enemies in their sojourn through life that brings forth lessons helping to teach the need to learn to love unconditionally. Our opponents incarnate with us until we resolve our conflict with them and or learn through them the lesson of love.

Musings on Planet Earth Part II continues next week with The Mayan Prophesy of the Fifth World and Quantumness