Yes, You Did Ask to Be Born!

by William Bezanson

Many parents have to face the profound exclamation from a frantic four-year-old, along the lines of, “I didn’t ask to be born! Why was I born, anyway?”

Well, little Johnny or Susie, you did ask to be born. You may not remember it, but you really did choose to born here, with me as your mother, and at that time, about four years ago, as an intelligent, healthy, boy or girl.

Of course, I’m not really suggesting that you have such a profound conversation with little Susie or Johnny. One day, they may be ready for it, but not at such a young age. But, who knows? Maybe your children are so very bright and intelligent that they are actually ready to learn about the Really Big Picture.

Who I’m addressing is not the four-year-olds, but the forty-year-olds. If one of those adults moans about not wanting to be born, they deserve to be responded to as an adult, “Yes, you did ask to be born!”

What I’m referring to here is the Law of Karma in action, which requires that each of our words, thoughts and actions be compensated: good with good and un-good with un-good. In both the East and the West, all sorts of people accept the notion of cycles of rebirth – of reincarnation and karma. Even though the Law of Karma is impersonal, not caring who you have been in the past, but only how you behaved, it is still open to influence from you.

Between lives, on the spiritual plane, you spend some quality time considering your past lives on the physical plane – even though time has no meaning on the spiritual plane – and you work with karma in choosing the circumstances of your next life. Karma works toward providing the circumstances that best allow you to compensate and grow from your behavior in your previous lives, and you work toward attaining a life that seems pleasing to you. You can’t change karma, but you can influence how it will manifest in your future.

I can’t remember my own time between lives (I do remember seven of those lives, but not the time in between them), but I have talked with two women who have clear memories of being in that spiritual state and conscious of their impending rebirths. In one case, she felt frantic as she felt a sucking feeling, pulling her towards a mother during childbirth, not wanting to be born into that family. In the other case, she was content as she saw the family that she would be born into, and she cooperated with the process of incarnation. In both cases, I have the sense that they recognized the need for being born into a new body, and that they wanted to influence the karmic process for optimizing their chances for success in growing spiritually in that new form of life.

Beyond that, I have no real experience in how the Law of Karma chooses for us, and how we cooperate with it in order to achieve the proper new life on the physical plane. There is much written about reincarnation and karma, but not much about how the process unfolds or whether it can be influenced. In my own case, I have that process on my list of research interests. My preliminary hypothesis is that Karma is one of the Laws of Nature (i.e., the totality of physical and spiritual laws of nature, which I refer to as God), and thus the process of karma is completely natural, not supernatural. Such an explanation is more pleasing to me than appealing to a deity to choose in which bodies and when and where we are to be born. So asking to be born is simply cooperating with Nature.

Of course, I interpret the “asking” in a global, big-picture sense: not “Please let me be reborn,” but more like “I accept the karmic need for rebirth, and I will make the best of this new life.” For the two examples that I cited above, one was reluctant and the other co-operative. I have no idea what the overall proportions are, but I would be fascinated to research and learn more about this topic.

With that being said, I would like to suggest, even if you don’t believe that you asked to be born, that you reflect and meditate on it for a while to see if you can learn something from your distant memory or from you accessing a higher level of memory in order to explain this aspect of the Law of Karma. To my own way of thinking, we all did ask to be born.

Click HERE to Connect with your Daily Horoscope!

About the Author

William Bezanson is a retired engineer who has become an author of systems design and world stewardship books. His latest book is, I Believe: A Rosicrucian Looks at Christianity and Spirituality. His website is www3.sympatico.ca/bezanson1. He lives with his wife in Ottawa, Canada.