Master Course Recording. Chapter 10. Defines chakras and moving awareness through them. Kashumlinga, sushumna, simshumbisi. Cycles of man's life every seven years. Defining Aum. Body as temple. Muladhara and memory patterns. Work out karma. Face karma positively. Define astral plane and astral body. Death and theories of reincarnation.

Study Guide:

Realize something new every day. Let every day be a day of discovery. Take with you something of great value each time you listen to the Master Course. It does not have to be a big or sensational discovery; it need not impress anyone else. Consider how much the Guru has brought you during the past nine weeks, and how much you have brought forth from within yourself. Appreciate the progress you have made.

Unedited Transcript:

There are seven great force centers, seven great nerve ganglia, in the physical body, in the astral body, in the body of the soul. Body of the soul predominantly uses the upper four of these centers. The astral body predominantly uses the lower three of these centers but all seven are registered and located within the physical body. And in the Sanskrit, these are called the "chakras"; chakra means wheel. These spinning vortexes of energy are actually areas of mind power. When awareness flows through any one or more of these areas, certain functions happen such as the function of memory, the function of reason, the function of willpower and so forth.

In the Sanskrit, these are called, muladhara. Located at the base of the spine, this is the force center, or chakra, of the powers of time and memory. When we're going back into our memory patterns, we're using the forces of this chakra. And if we were to look at these chakras like a seven-story building and awareness, being in a sense, in an elevator, going up and down, then that would be a good look at how they work. The next one is the svadhisthana chakra, located a little bit higher--four, five inches up the spine, maybe a little more--and within it are all the powers of reason. Reasoning with ourselves and through this we can reason that the material world is real. The next chakra is located at the solar plexus region, manipura. Within it are the forces of will. Depending on how the energy's flowing, these forces of will add power to the lower two chakras or to the two above. When awareness is within the realms of memory and reason and aggressive will, it is basically flowing through, also, the ida current, the instinctive mind. Man, therefore is quick to react and retaliate, quick to have his feelings hurt, has ups and down emotionally and couldn't live without them, suffers, looks for a way out of suffering, and enjoys suffering when it comes. He's hard-working, physically, not too interested in developing the intellect.

However, when man flows awareness through the next chakra, the anahata chakra, which is in the heart area, he gains a power of direct cognition. He moves into the intellectual mind a little bit, or awareness is flowing, at that point, in the pingala area and the willpower is moved toward the intellect. Therefore he becomes an instinctive, intellectual being, still having his base emotions and yet he can think his way out of them. His reasoning becomes keen--intuition is there, occasionally, and a vast perspective is there occasionally too--through his powers of intellect. Only when awareness flows through the vishuddha chakra in the throat, does he turn inward some, and come into inner-light experiences. Only at this area is he able to pull awareness from the ida and pingala, transmute the forces from the muladhara, the svadhisthana, and the manipura chakra, will, throws his awareness into sushumna and he begins experiencing a real, spiritual being. Even at that point, he thinks it is within himself and that he thinks he is an outer being and the inner being is an inner being. And almost comes like- becomes like two beings. When he becomes stronger and stronger in the vishuddha chakra, he realizes that the inner being is nothing but the reality of himself and the outer being is the fading being, born in time, memory patterns, put together by the forces of reason and held together for a certain length of time through the forces of will.

Through practice, working with himself, within himself, he can move awareness into the ajna chakra. That's at the third eye. There he comes into the consciousness of his soul, the body of light. And when he moves awareness deeper into the sahasrara chakra, he comes into that vast, inner space and all the wonderful things that you have been hearing about. This is the story of the states of mind, memory, reason, will, direct cognition, inner-light perceptions of the soul itself--which gives a universal love of all mankind--then the direct, psychic perception of being that body of light, and then experiencing the most refined areas of the mind itself through the powers of that transmuted energy into the sahasrara chakra.

These chakras do not awaken; they're already awakened. They only seem like they awaken. We simply become aware of flowing our energy through them because energy, you remember, and willpower and awareness are one and the same thing when awareness goes freely through the areas of the mind. All we have to do is to detach awareness from the realms of reason, the realms of memory and that aggressive, intellectual will and that aggressive, instinctive will and become conscious of the core of energy itself and then turn inward. And we move from one chakra to another. The physical body begins to change as these more refined energies flow through the physical body. The nerve system, inwardly, become stronger and stronger as these energies flow through the body. When do they awaken? They awaken, or seem to awaken, as we become consciously conscious in them. But these force centers are always there, always available for awareness to flow through--as soon as we have awareness in a condition where it can flow freely through the inner realms of the mind. Now you begin to see how all of this fits together and the mechanics of the path that we're on.

The name for chakra in the Shum language, "kamshumalinga" doesn't mean "wheel" like the Sanskrit chakra or spinning force field. It means "a vast area of the mind" or "a vast, collective area of many, many different thought strata." A group of people, and generally most groups of people who gather, are in the- flowing through the same kamshumalinga, the same chakra, or several of those chakras, collectively. Therefore they're all thinking alike. They all have the same perspective of looking at life. When awareness is flowing through the first two or three chakras, we are in memory patterns, we're in reason patterns, we see past vividly, we see future vividly and awareness is in the conscious and subconscious area of the mind strongly. When awareness flows through the vishuddha and the anahata chakra, man sees himself as the center of the universe and he looks out into the external world and sees through it. He looks into the primal force within himself and sees that that primal force, energy, is in and through everything.

Look again at these- these chakras in relation to our immediate universe. We put the sun in the center, that is sushumna, and some of you have already seen that sun, that golden light of the sushumna current. That's the sun. The Earth is the conscious mind; moon: subconscious mind. The different planets and the vibratory of the planets are related to the chakras. The first chakra, the muladhara, to Mercury. The second chakra, svadhisthana, to Venus. The third chakra, manipura, to Mars and so forth. In this way, you can--if you know something of astrology--you can see the relationship of the influence on the planets, how it has formed the individual nature, and how these various chakras come into power, some stronger than others, depending upon the astrological sign for they are the same rate of vibration as the planets. You can see how it's all tied in together having a meditation along that line.

All through history, at each predominant age, one of these planets, or one of these chakras, has come into power. Remember when the God Chronos was in power? The mass consciousness came into memory. They started writing the history books and recording everything and looking back and saying, "Where did we come from?" And then the mass consciousness came into the next chakra, reason. And reason was a God. Wasn't that the Golden Age of Greece? I think so. And if it wasn't reasonable, it wasn't true? And the next chakra came into power. A long time afterwards, going through the ages, chakra came into power, will. Man started fighting with one another and being dominant and- and pushy and he moved ahead. Then the next chakra came into power of direct cognition, the anahata chakra. Man started to go into science, go into his own mind, look into his subconscious mind, which is actually looking into the chakras where he had previously flowed which was the manipura chakra and the svadhisthana chakra. He says, "Where was I in those chakras?" And now he's not there any more and he wants to know what happened to him, why he has these hangovers of experiential patterns still in his memory.

And now the mass consciousness is coming into the vishuddha chakra. That's the chakra at the throat. And the mass consciousness, and the forerunners of this new age, they're not worshipping memory as the great thing of the mind, they're not worshipping reason as the great thing of the mind, nor are they trying to take over another's goods. They're not worshipping science or psychology, the great thing of the mind, and they're not worshipping anyone else who's made strides in inner investigations. They are looking inward and they're worshipping the light within their own body, within their own spine, within their own head. And they're going in and in and in and in and that's what you do when you're in the vishuddha chakra. That's what happens. And that's what, especially, the younger people are doing. This chakra is coming into prominence in the new age. Doesn't mean that the other ones stopped working at all but it's coming into prominence in the mass consciousness.

When it gains a little more power then everything will come into a beautiful balance because there'll be a natural hierarchy of awakened people and people that aren't quite as much within and so forth. There'd be a balance and then everything will quiet down on the Earth consciousness because the vishuddha chakra is the chakra of the new age of universal love where everyone sees eye to eye and if they don't, there's always someone there to be the peacemaker. Look back through history: you'd see how these planetary influences, or these great mind strata of thought, have molded history and molded people as they have come along, flowing through these various areas.

In cycles of man's life, every seven years from the time that he is born, his awareness automatically flows through one of these chakras and then the next, then the next chakra, and then the next chakra. From 1 to 7 years of age, he's in the muladhara chakra. From 7 to 14, he's in the svadhisthana chakra asking, "Why? Why? Why?" All the time asking "Why this?" and "Why that?" And then about the time he wants to run away from home, between 14 and 21--doesn't want to be told what to do by anyone--he's in the manipura chakra of will and he's on his way. From 21 to 28, he begins realizing responsibilities and gaining a new perspective of himself and the world. That point he should be in the anahata chakra of cognition. A lot of people aren't. They're still the bull in the china shop crashing their way through the world in the chakra of will, asking "Why?" reasoning things out and recording it in memory patterns which they go over year after year after year. But, if awareness is big and full and is- has incarnated many, many times, they go on, 20 to 28, in the anahata chakra. From 28 to 35 in the vishuddha chakra, coming into inner-light experiences, assuming a spiritual responsibility for themselves and for others. And from 35 to 42 in the ajna chakra, experiencing the body of the soul, that body of light. And from 42 through 49 getting established in the sahasrara chakra in a very natural way, having had all of the responsibilities coming along through life. Under the training of the guru, this is the path that they would follow.

Normally, someone should come under the training of the guru about 14 years of age when they're just coming into the manipura chakra, the chakra of will. Then the will is directed in the inner climb rather than directed toward the outer world. Though they do work in the outer world too, become educated and all of that, but for inner motives. Then awareness flows through each of these force centers and at 50 years of age, they're ready to soar even more deeply inward in a very, very natural way.

[21:15] Bring our vibrations [??] together [in an Aum?] mantram yoga. [Aum chanting] [22: 10]

When we chant the mantram, "Aum" and we do it correctly--we pronounce the "Ah" so it vibrates the physical body, the "Oo" so it vibrates through the whole throat area, and the "Mm" so it vibrates the head--we are deliberately moving awareness out of the manipura and svadhisthana chakra. And in the Shum language, the chakras are called kamshumalinga. And we're deliberately harmonizing all the forces of the instinct and physical body, the ida force, karehana, the pingala force, vumtyeudi, with the "Ah" and the "Oo" and then the "Mm", we're bringing the sushumna, simshumbisi, into power. We're transmuting and changing the flows of all the energies through the physical and astral body and bringing them in tune, as much as possible, with the body of the soul.

The mantram, Aum, can be chanted at any time that you want. You can even chant it silently and cause the same vibration through the body without making it a sound. You can get the same vibration going by going "Aum" "Ah-Oo-Mm" without making a sound and you can begin to feel awareness moving into inner states.

The sushumna force, the ida and the pingala--and the ida and pingala are, remember--are of the sushumna, for when your awareness is centered in the sushumna, the ida force blends back into the sushumna itself and so does the pingala force and you'll actually see that happening. You'll see the pink ida current begin to blend back into the center of the spine whereas it's out running through the body on the left side. And the same with the pingala force, it moves back into the spine until you are all spine when you're centered in the sushumna. This beautiful, pure energy flows out through the sushumna and the ida and the pingala and then on out through the body. And it's called prana after, in a sense, it leaves or changed in a little way, flowing out through the first three or four chakras. It makes what is called prana. This energy runs in and through the body. It's a great mind energy which is in the world of thought. The whole- all the stratas of thought are prana. The human aura is prana. Prana's transferred from one person to another through a handshake, through a look. It is the base force of the universe but most predominantly found within the body. Prana, you really can't say too much about it to get a good understanding of what it is. It runs in and through the skin through the bone structure out into the room around the body, it's the aura, the thought strata.

Breath controls prana and in the Sanskrit the control of prana is called, "pranayama." Sanskrit "yama" means something like "the elimination thereof," or "the control thereof," or "the death of." So it would be the control of prana, the regulation of prana, or the withdrawal of prana from the external world back to its primal source. That is why the pranayama--and in Shum that's kalibasa--that is why pranayama is so important to practice, systematically, day after day, and regularly so we get a rhythm through the prana. We get a rhythm of the pure life force flowing through ida, pingala and sushumna, out through the aura. We gain a rhythm of awareness soaring inward into refined states of the ajna chakra and the sahasrara chakra and out into the refined states of the anahata chakra that's at the chest, or the heart center. The perspective of the perceptive areas of looking out at life as if you were the center of the universe, that's how you feel when you are in the anahata chakra. The control of prana, the regulation of prana, is guided tremendously through nutrition for meditation for the food that you eat contains a great deal of prana. Also, the air that you breathe; prana comes from trees, plants, flowers, water. It's everywhere. It's transferred from one person to another, from a person to a plant, from a plant to a person. It is the life of the world of form. The food that we eat should be types of food that contain a great deal of prana so that we're-, we're making prana ourself and yet, by eating food and drinking pure water, being in sunlight and fresh air, we're taking prana in another way.

Look at the physical body as a real temple, as a real building. It has plumbing, it has electricity, it has everything that a temple has. Try to keep it as a temple. Watch what you eat, watch the areas where you flow awareness through the world of thought so the vibration of certain thoughts don't upset the nerve system of this physical body temple. Be careful of the people that you're with so that the areas in which their awareness is flowing, and the vibrations that are set off through their aura, do not affect your temple--especially in the beginning stages of unfoldment. That's very, very important.

There's a form of mantram yoga which when practiced regulates, through tone, the ida, the pingala, the sushumna and of course all the prana within the body. And through pronouncing, properly, certain tones regularly in a rhythm, it's sort of like singing or chanting, in a way, to yourself. Daily you can organize, or cause to flow, in a certain way, the pranas of the ida current, the prana of the pingala current, the flow of prana out from the sushumna and the pranas of the aura. And always you are prepared to go inward if you practice mantram yoga--we'll learn some mantram yoga as we go on in our study.

Deep within the first chakra are all the memory patterns of past lives. These memory patterns are extremely magnetic. They cause us to have experiences; the type of experiences that we would wonder: "Why should that have ever happened to me?" "What did I do to attract that?" "What did I do to cause that?" "I don't deserve this happening to me." It was put into effect in a past life. The pranic forces deep within that chakra imprint memory patterns--and there are certain things we put into motion in past lives that we have to face the reactions of in this life--we face those reactions through other people and we face them through our own action; we're impelled to do certain things. Why? We call it karma.

Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning, "cause and effect." We throw a boomerang, it travel out into the air, turn around and come back to us with equal force; cause and effect. We cause a disruption in the flow of karma within ourselves or within others--this is imprinted in the memory pattern of the muladhara chakra--and we carry it over from life to life, from birth to birth. The reason patterns of the chakra just above it don't understand it at all because that chakra is at a different rate of vibration. So only after the happening has happened, or the impulses have come, can we reason it out or rationalize it. And since we've forgotten our past life and are only left with the- the pranic reverberations deep in the memory cells, we don't know the causes; very frustrating. But however that is karma and it is generally written off by saying: "That's karma." "Oh that's just karma and you have to accept it as that." Which isn't really a very good thing to say because you're saying that's cause and effect and it's really not at all. It's an effect to a previous cause but we in the West write it off. Anything we don't understand, we say, "It's karma." And that is- that's really good to say because that is admitting that we are responsible.

How can we work out this karma? There must be thousands of things vibrating in that chakra, in that memory pattern, that are going to bounce up, one after another, especially if we gain more prana by breathing right and by eating right and- and- then what's going to happen? True, by breathing right and by eating right and by meditating right you do get more karma and you do release, from the first chakra, these pranic forces, these ingrained memory patterns of actions that you have put into action so long ago you've forgotten when. And they begin to accumulate and you face them one after another after another after another. Someone who starts on the path to enlightenment will, in four or five years, face the karmic patterns that, normally if you never started on the path to enlightenment he might have to take two or three lifetimes, or maybe more, to face them. They wouldn't have come up. Nothing would have stimulated them. That's kind of scary.

What do we do? How do we face these patterns? They can be faced through meditation, through working with yourself. Through being the conqueror of inner feelings, inner emotions, through living within and not living with awareness always externalized. Quote: "Turn the other cheek." Unquote. Something happens to you--the result of something you put in motion in a past life--sit down, think it over. Don't strike out, work it out inside yourself. Through the powers of meditation you will have to work out the karma of past lives and transmute--again transmute--that energy back into its primal source. And in doing so, what happens? You change its consistency and you dissolve--and they fade away--all of these memory patterns. That's what happens.

Everyone lives an inner life. When we're thinking over a movie that we saw last week, that is our inner life. When we're deeply involved in a reactionary area of something that has happened or is happening to someone else, we're living inwardly the same experience that we think that they are going through. Have you ever done that? Someone that you loved quite dearly was going through an experience and you were going through even a worse experience than they were? And you know; you knew how they were suffering and you were just living it all through so dramatically. And have you ever had the experience of meeting them or talking with them on the phone and find out that they weren't taking it half as seriously as you were? And how did you feel then? Actually, what you were doing: you were experiencing the same experience that, under different conditions, would have actually been happening to you. But it was happening to you in a roundabout way through your observation and your feeling for them.

You have to pay the price. Every action set in motion will have its equal reaction. You have to face it. You have to take the rebound of that pranic force coming up within you until it's transmuted into its primal essence in the sushumna. How do you do that? If you are destined to lose your leg in this life because you caused someone else to lose their leg in a past life--if you are living as an instinctive being, with all the energies flowing through the lower chakras, the muladhara and the svadhisthana and the ida force, your actions and reactions again in this life are instinctive--that experience will come to you full force. You'll simply be running around on one leg. However, if you have your energies flowing through the pingala and you're even a wee bit inwardly oriented, you're soaring within, you do good for others, you may have helped people all along the way in your life as much as you could. You weren't necessarily on the path of enlightenment--might not have come that far along in your inner road yet--but you were kindly, your instinctive reactions were subdued by your intellect. That karma would still come back to you but you'd experience it in a different way.

One morning you'd pick up the newspaper, you read about an automobile accident and someone had lost their leg. It would hit you in the solar plexus so vibrantly you couldn't eat your breakfast and you didn't know why. You lived and re-lived every experience that they went through. You thought, "What if this would happen to me? What would I do? How would I face it? How would I adjust my consciousness to it?" Maybe three or four days before you could work awareness out of that experience. You didn't know why that particularly one tiny, little article in the newspaper impressed you so fully and then just about the time when you were working your way out of the experience, you were rushing one day and bumped into the edge of your desk and scratched your leg. The full force of the experience came but, because of previous giving of prana and giving your blessings, so to speak--the giving of prana and the giving of spiritual force is a blessing--because of that, you got the experience as a scratch and as emotional reaction and you worked it all through within yourself and you didn't have to go through the rest of the life without a leg. You actually did go through the rest of your life without a leg but on the mental plane, through the pingala force, rather than through the ida force in which we experience most things physically, dramatically.

Well you can take that theory and expand on it. You've all had it happen to you. You've had it happen to you more than once, I'm sure. Expand on that experience. You can work out karma through the pingala force. You can work out karma through the sushumna by simply- When a reaction comes up to an occurrence, that could happen to you, or has happened to someone else, and you're reacting to it in the same way, simply become conscious of the power in the spine that's not reacting at all. And even more quickly will you work out the very seed of that karma and transmute that core energy from the muladhara chakra back to the primal force of the sushumna. Meditate on that. How to carry the laws of karma into meditation and handle karma positively. "Yes, I am the master of my fate!" That's how you become the master of your fate and the ruler of your own destiny. Through meditation you can bring everything to the now.

When you finally, and this question would be asked, "What- what happens when I work out all the karma of all my past lives and finally bring myself up to the now? Then what happens?" Well then I would say, "You would be an expert, an absolute expert at working out karma on the mental and spiritual levels. And you really should begin immediately to help me work out karma for other people." Karma is transferable. That point you could take on the karma of other people and work some out for them. Make their karmic burden a little bit easier for them. Our ministers and our priests are trained to help with the karma of other students. They're trained how to work it out within the inner realms of themselves in a very positive and a very, I would say, powerful way. And that is how you carry the karma of someone else.

Death. What is it? The dropping off of the physical body is the time when all of the actions of making karma go back to seed in the muladhara chakra, into the memory patterns. All of our actions and reactions, things we've set in motion in the pranic patterns in this life form our tendencies of our nature in our next life. The tendencies of our nature are the ways in which awareness flows through the ida, the pingala and the sushumna force in a current life. These tendencies of man's nature, also, are carried into the astrological signs in which he is born. Man comes through an astrological conglomeration of signs, or an astrological chart, according to his actions and reactions and what he set in motion in the seed karmic patterns of his past life. So we are always a sum total, a collection, of all of the karmic experiences, all of the seed patterns that have always happened, or that have happened to us, or we have caused to happen through the many, many lives. Now we are a sum total and we're always a sum total. The past looking at the past and saying, "That was a past life so many years ago." Not the way to look at it. It's now, each life is with- inside the other but they are all karmic seeds that pop up in the pranic force fields in our life now. When we die, or when we drop off the physical body, that's the end of a chapter and when we pick up a new physical body that is the next chapter that's always referring back to the last chapter. And that's the way the entire story makes sense.

What happens after we die? We simply step out of the physical body and we're in our astral body and we carry on as usual. Because simply because the physical body drops off, the mind doesn't stop, the ida force becomes more refined, the pingala force becomes more refined. The sushumna force, it's right there like it always was. And there's another body which was always right inside the physical body that we use all the time anyway. If we didn't use astral body on a daily basis, we couldn't move the physical body. It's not the physical body that moves, it's the astral body that moves within it. When we step out of the physical body into the astral body, we can't move the physical body. We have to get back inside it. So we're more on the astral plane, so to speak, than we are on the physical plane. Only when the astral body and the physical body are connected do we seem to be in a physical world.

On the astral plane, being a higher rate of vibration, or a more intense rate of vibration, and the prana flows a little freer and faster, we have everything that we have on the physical plane but it is created by the mind. But on the physical plane it's created, so-called, by the mind too but it takes more time to create because we have the first chakra. The first chakra is not so dominant on the astral plane, therefore we're in reason and we're in will. And if we want to build a house, we just think about it and a house gets constructed within a matter of minutes on the astral plane whereas it's a matter of months on the physical plane. On the astral plane, also, you don't have to have money unless you think about it and then you do have money. Or you don't have money if you think that you don't. And it's a world just like this one. You can travel from country to country on the astral plane.

While I was studying on the island of Ceylon, people living in America used to come and visit me on the island of Ceylon, on the astral plane and I'd see them in their astral bodies. And when I returned to America, people from Ceylon used to come on the astral plane and visit me in America and I'd see them in their astral bodies. I even introduced two people in their astral bodies while I was in Ceylon, one to another. Was one yogi from the Himalayas--I told him to go and meet someone and came back and he described the person, what their conversation was. When I returned to America, the person that he met said, "Who was that- that being that I met? And he was-" Described him perfectly and described the conversation. And that's the absolute truth. The astral plane is right there and when you drop off the physical body, you're in it. You're in it now. Why don't you know you're in it now? Because you haven't been taught to think about it, you just heard about it. Now you know you're in it.

There's a lot to be said about death and reincarnation. Most people are afraid of it because it's the most dramatic experience that has happened to them during a lifetime. And it put a stop to a lot of aggressive prana going out through a physical body. That prana had to immediately contract and go to seed. I won't talk too much about it but I do want to go into one or two things. On the astral plane, we see other people. Other people that have died and do not have a physical body and people that do have a physical body but have just left it for a time. They've left their physical body sleeping, they're on the astral plane. So, therefore, it's a more populated plane than this plane. But there's more room on it, I suppose, being a lighter substance. We don't remember our astral experiences generally because the astral brain, the physical brain are of two different rates of vibration. So therefore, when we return to the physical body after being in the astral body, any knowledge that we would have gained on the astral plane would sort of seep through into the physical--and it takes about 4 days to do this so it'd be cumulative--and we just sort of call it an inner knowing; things would just sort of come to us. We actually learn and discuss them on the astral plane.

People generally that meditate do not go on the astral plane at all. They don't use their astral body very much. They go deeper within when they go to sleep at night and go into the beautiful body of the soul, into superconsciousness and there they communicate with other people who are in the body of the soul. On the astral plane you, in a sense, talk and transfer thoughts for it is in the world of thought but, on the inner plane of the soul, you transfer intelligence, one to another through light vibrations; it's a beautiful, beautiful form of communication. Now this body of the soul can also appear on the astral plane and communicate with states of awareness who are functioning in their astral bodies but it's a more refined body. So these two bodies are predominantly used. The intellectual body is generally used through the day when we are awake, so-called, and not asleep, so-called. And the physical body of modern man is generally not used very much. It sits, it walks around a little, occasionally it exercises itself and that's about all. Our astral body, body of the soul, and the intellectual body which are very definite forms in the inner ether, are mostly used. To understand them, we have to forget the way we usually think about things; think about them a little different and from a new perspective we then gain insights.

Where are we born after we die? How do we get born again? You get born again just like you died. Finally the astral body can't stay on the astral plane any more. And these seeds of pranic motion have to be expressed on the physical plane again. So therefore you enter a physical birth generally through a child's body. But a more advanced soul who has his spiritual body well developed can pick up a body which is 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old or even older and go right along from there. These are some of the theories of reincarnation. In what country do we become born? All depends on what country you were thinking about when you died. If you've always wanted to go to South Carolina, you'll be born in South Carolina next time. If you'd been thinking about going to South America a year or two before you passed away, you'd be reincarnated in South America; that was your destination. If you were very much attached to your own particular family and you didn't want to leave them, you'd be born back in that immediate family again because your desire is there. The astral body is the body of desire.

Reincarnation and karma are practically one and the same thing. It has to do with the pranic forces and these bodies of the external mind. But our quest is the Self, Self Realization. But to make that realization a reality, we have to consciously be conscious of working out these other areas. Why? Because the ignorance of these areas hold awareness and confuse awareness, so to speak, and we cannot be in inner states long enough to attain the ultimate goal of that samadhi, Self Realization. So little by little, as you go on in your esoteric understanding of these mechanics, will you unwind and re-educate the subconscious mind so that you can become consciously superconscious all the time, so that you have the power to move the energies and awareness itself out of the ida, out of the pingala, into the sushumna, into--and then the kundalini force, that vapor-like life force merges into its own essence.