Genealogy: Physical and Spiritual
By William Bezanson
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. – William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” In this article, I want to suggest that spiritual genealogy is equally important as, if not more than, physical genealogy.
How else, except by reincarnation and karma, can one explain the death of an infant child, or the impoverished person born into suffering? Why should one person be so “lucky” to have fortunate circumstances, while another has “bad luck”? Why should only the orthodox Christian have the potential to be “saved,” but another who was born into a “heathen” environment and never learns of the Gospel be doomed to damnation? Such a universe would be very unjust if the whims of God caused such inequities or if God could be persuaded to change its mind by an appeal. Karma provides a much more rational and just explanation.
Wordsworth clearly knew about reincarnation. I believe that we all know about it, to varying extents.
I now have a clear understanding of six of my former incarnations. Eventually, after much study, meditation, and mystical exercises, I came to a point that my understanding of reincarnation was beyond the level of believing, to the level of knowing. I had knowledge of some of my past lives. It was a deep, inner knowledge—a gnosis—that was convincing, actual memory, not fantasy, and very tangible.
Around 1500 BCE I was a peasant sailor in China. Around 1300 BCE I was a normal worker in Egypt. Around 0 CE I was a rural woman in the Middle East. Around 1200 – 1300 I was a minor aristocrat in France. In the 1500s I was a native or an explorer in South America. In the early 1800s I was a landowner or country gentleman in South Carolina, USA.
This researching of my previous incarnations has been fascinating and gratifying.
I call this form of research “Spiritual Genealogy”. Conventional genealogy is what I would call “Physical Genealogy”. I find the former much more interesting than the latter. I really do not care who my physical ancestors were, earlier than one or two generations, say to the level of my grandparents. But I do care, quite seriously, about who I was in previous lives. My physical genetic characteristics are influenced by my physical ancestors. But as for why I was born to those specific parents, at that specific time, in this specific country, with these specific interests, memories, inclinations, aptitudes, fears, hesitations, insecurities, tendencies, affinities, abilities, and many other characteristics … , such matters are only explainable by characteristics that are brought forward from earlier incarnations.
That was I in that previous body. It was also I in other previous bodies … many of them. To achieve full understanding of my current situation, I should study not only my physical genealogy, but also, and of considerably more interest to me, my spiritual genealogy.
Incidentally, the above reasoning motivates the best answer that I can think of to the question, “Who were you in a previous incarnation?” My answer is, “I was I.” I occupied a different body, but it was I who did the occupying.
So, what are the tools and techniques of studying one’s spiritual genealogy? Essentially, it is a process of remembering, or accessing one’s memories. “Accessing” is a technique of clairvoyance that enables one to experience all sorts of psychic or spiritual information on different planes, such as the astral or mental planes, or that is recorded in various places and by various means, including:
- in our personal memories, physically, in our brains,
- in our personal memories, psychically, in our minds,
- in our personal memories, spiritually, in our soul memories, preserved intact from previous incarnations, and
- in the Cosmic memory, by natural processes, in the Akashic records.
The first method, using the brain, is straightforward, although it is irrelevant for carrying memories to a new body. The second one, using the mind, is less well understood. Only recently, say in the past 30 years or so, are neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and related fields even admitting, and studying, the separation of the mind from the brain. See, for example, Mario Beauregard’s book, Brain Wars. Techniques of accessing memories for these first two methods involve the standard, well-accepted drills of memorizing, remembering, associative tricks of categorizing and recalling information, and so on.
The third method, using our soul memories, is much more obscure and difficult to realize. There is very little written in the mainstream literature about how to access such memories. Information comes to us as intuitive flashes, daydreams, sleeping dreams, unexpected feelings of remembering, of fear, of pleasure, and so on. To the best of my knowledge, the only organizations that teach us how to access these memories are the mystery schools, including the Rosicrucian orders, to one of which I belong.
And the final method, accessing the Akashic records, is the weirdest one of all. Various mystics and psychics have written about this phenomenon. Evidently, the Akashic records are a vast memory bank on some non-physical plane that records every thing that has ever happened, every word, feeling, and action. They have been called the “Mind of God”, or a “Cosmic Library”. I am fascinated by the notion, but I do not claim any sort of skill in accessing information from them. One who seems to have done so is Rudolf Steiner, who claims to have accessed the Akashic records to obtain information for his spiritual science, Anthroposophy. See, for example, his book The Fifth Gospel, which documents some of his perceptions and revelations from the Akashic records.
There is not much that I can say about this technique called Accessing. I am still learning about it, practicing some techniques for it, and developing my skills with it.
This is a work in progress, my experimenting with spiritual genealogy. Perhaps I will have more to report in a future article or book, or, more likely, in a later life here on earth. I hope that you can track me down.
And I hope that you found this article of interest.
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About the Author
William Bezanson is a retired engineer who has turned into an author. His next book will be I Believe: A Rosicrucian Looks at Christianity and Spirituality, to be published in 2014, and from which this article is adapted. He lives with his wife in Ottawa, Canada. To learn about his books, visit his website.
For me, someone whose genealogy is filled with mental illness, resulting suicides, lives severely limited due to the severity of the illness, with enormous lifelong burdens on their caretakers. I myself having to deal with my lifelong endogenous depression, the physical and spiritual have constantly intersected, and consequently cannot be viewed as separate entities. To those who haven’t walked in the moccasins of a mentally ill person, it become sheer speculation about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, with regard to karmic outcomes. From my experience, there is no separation. I would more likely never embarked on the spiritual path, more than fifty years ago, if I weren’t at the time unconsciously seeking respite from my own affliction.
Having practiced almost every kind of major spiritual discipline, I’ve come to rest in the understanding, gained through direct experience, that the “me” of who I really am, is pure non-conceptual awareness, consciousness, presence, and being. This quality of understanding is a whole lot more operational for me, than the concept of soul.
As to luck, I’m more disposed to my experiential understanding that cause and effect occur simultaneously. Therefore the effects of causes made, even in pre-natel, and/or a past life, are actively influencing birth, and/or post natel out comes. I highly respect Mr. Bezanson’s reality, but I’m not in total agreement with it.
Lastly, Mr. B’s radical fundamentalist “hell and damanation” sermonizing, for me, has no place whatsoever in the realm of spirituality. The word sin, was originally coined in ancient archery, which predated the rise of Christianity. To have sinned, meant to have missed the mark, i.e., the target. So the archer, had another, or a number of chances to hit the mark, without being condemned as a failure, or as a lesser human being. But alas, Christianity co-opted the term, and changed it’s meaning in a nefariously condemning fashion. As I’ve said for many years, the trouble with religion and spirituality, is that it’s practiced be us human beings.