Awakening Far Memory
This is something different. Reincarnation Cards: Awakening Far Memory consists of a boxed set of sixty-one beautifully designed cards, intended to evoke intuitive responses, together with a handsomely produced hardback book. In his Foreword, Professor Stanley Krippner describes the publication as embodying “an imaginative and novel technique specifically designed to probe into one’s hypothetical reincarnations.” Referring to reports of glimpses of events and activities occurring before one was born, he comments that “whether these glimpses represent past-life memories, archetypes of the psyche, or metaphors of current life activities, they can be linked with and evoked by the cards, following the suggested rituals described by the authors.”

This, however, is not the main purpose of this project, which is to provide a means of encouragement to take a fresh look at consciousness, “the pattern of awareness, intention and reflection that permeates the cosmos.” For the authors, the world is not ‘outside’ or external’, except apparently to the physical body. They maintain that consciousness is “primal and ubiquitous”, that the universe is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here’, not composed “of an hypothesised matter, but is the manifestation in time and space of one infinite superconscious Being, or Cosmic Mind.” They continue: “This Cosmic Mind, to which the individual’s conscious and unconscious egoic mind are essentially connected, contains all knowledge of all creatures and events, past, present and future, in a timeless NOW. In relation to you as an individual, high-level being, it contains, inter alia, your complete incarnational history, past and future.”

Whether or not you agree with the authors that “the reincarnation experience is a fact,”(you will need to study their chapter “The Evidence” to help you make up your mind) or whether you accept the “unimpeachable stratigraphic evidence of the presence of anatomically modern humans on this earth many millions of years ago,” the Reincarnation cards themselves can provoke you into new ways of considering yourself and lead you into areas you have never previously explored. The cards are divided into five categories: Occupation, Culture, Environment, Theme and Termination. You are advised to keep notes, state your intention, ask for guidance, shuffle the cards and allow your hand to select one from each of the five groups. Then you turn to the book and read the text associated with each card. The authors take care to advise you how to proceed by recording your intuitive responses and your impressions, the resonances that each card may evoke. They also suggest that you consider each card in the context of the others that you draw.

For every card there is an accompanying short essay which guides you in an interpretation of the information or message that the card conveys. In a final essay, the authors explain that the cards “are intended not only to help you to recall details of so-called incarnations, but also to awaken your intuition to the full, leading to a direct insight into what is ultimately real, behind all such phenomena. You will then know that, as consciousness itself, you are essentially identical to the Logos or Brahman, the One Cosmic Mind.” In the nine pages of this essay the authors develop their view of the Cosmic Self and the Cosmic Mind. They attack the common belief that the individual is an unchanging soul-personality “wandering through the incarnations in search of ‘enlightenment’”. If you believe yourself to be “a seeker on the Path,” you will continue going round in circles “until you realise who you really are and have always been.” They maintain that there is no Path, no Goal, no progress and no spiritual evolution. “The final truth is that there is, and can be, only the One Mind, the ultimate Self of All, in an Eternal Now, and you are That.” By creating Time and by focusing on “the vastly shrunken individual level,” we have forgotten who we really are.

Awakening Far Memory displays a remarkable depth of knowledge of ancient history and philosophy, much of it drawn from the authors’ extensive research library, and is buttressed by a bibliography of some 130 items. It challenges its readers, requiring them to investigate their own thought processes and to open themselves to possibilities they may never have previously considered. In this, it fully justifies its unusual presentation.

John Knowles is a Canadian philosopher and parapsychologist. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1941-45, as a Hurricane pilot and in 1944 as a Chindit operating behind enemy lines in Burma. Post-war he worked in senior posts in varying capacities for the Canadian government and the United Nations, serving in some seventy countries around the world. His philosophical essays have appeared in British, American and Cypriot journals. His interests are shared with his wife Linda, herself a published writer and lecturer, recently elected as the first foreign-born female ex-pat local counsellor in Cyprus.