Watch this beautiful Sunday Service talk with Nayaswami Devi, recorded at Ananda Village on November 24th, 2024. The reading for this week from Swami Kriyananda's book Rays of the One Light is

Reincarnation – the Spiral Staircase

Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.

The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.

In the Book of Revelation, Chapter 3, Jesus Christ tells us: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out.”

There is a difference between Church dogmas, which are based on reasoned deductions from Scriptural statements, and the pronouncements of wisdom, which are based on the inner realization of Scriptural truths. Reason, like a train, can only follow already-existing tracks of human experience. Human memory, being short, is seldom able to cross back over the threshold of a person’s present existence. Biblical references to previous lifetimes on earth are overlooked in the deductive process, and we find them therefore excluded from the body of official dogma. Nevertheless, such references exist. The Bible itself presents them – as does Jesus in this passage – not as abstract teaching, but as direct, personal perception of truth.

In the same way Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, silences Arjuna’s reasonable doubts on the subject not by reasoned argument, but by the frank statement contained in the fourth Chapter of that great Scripture:

Arjuna, you and I have passed through many births. I know all of them, though you, O chastiser of foes, recall them not.

Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.