Belief In Past Lives example essay topic

I have always been interested at what happens to people as they leave this life and move onto the next. Growing up I have always been familiarized with the concepts of heaven and hell. But I got thinking and soon came to realize that there are many other concepts of what happens to us after we die. So I decided I would try to show my discoveries through art and hopefully learn something new and interesting the process.

Learning about life after death will open your eyes to many religions and ways of life and in turn you will learn about yourself. The first concept I looked at was ordinary life after death. The afterlife is an area of human consciousness we all enter upon leaving the physical world at physical death. It is also an area we reach when we are unconscious, as in sleep. There are various Focus Levels. They define the specific areas of the after life: Focus 22: Within Focus 22 we often find those perhaps still physically alive who are in an unconscious state.

These people include people: - in comas - in drug induced states - who are dreaming - who are insane or deranged This is a very chaotic level. Focus 23: In Focus 23, the human inhabitants tend to be those who have become "stuck" for one reason or another. Often they are confused or unaware of their death. Many here attempt to maintain contact with familiar people or places in the physical world.

These are the ones we call Ghosts. Focus 27: Focus 27 is the afterlife area of the greatest free will choice for its inhabitants. It is an area created by humans and often resembles physical earth environments. Contact and communication is open between all inhabitants. It provides assistance to new arrivals in their adjustment to living in the afterlife. The second concept I looked at was reincarnation.

Reincarnation is the belief that when one dies, one's body decomposes but one is reborn into another body. It is the belief that one has lived before and will live again in another body after death. The bodies that one passes in and out of need not be human. Some tribes avoid eating certain animals because they believe that their ancestors souls dwell in those animals. The belief in past lives used to be a belief mainly in Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. In the eastern religions reincarnation wasn't considered a good thing it was bad.

They believed that to achieve the ultimate "nirvana" they had to escape from the wheel of rebirth. In the year 553 A.D. the doctrine of reincarnation was officially banished by the Christian church. It was banished because it was considered to be to much of and influence from the Orient. The decision enabled the church to increase power at the time.

They tightened their hold on the human mind by telling people their salvation had to be accomplished in one incarnation and in one life time, and if they didn't make it, they would go to hell. If we could understand the meaning of reincarnation, we would be able to go thousands of years into the past. We would be able to understand how we gathered as individuals and as groups. And the third concept I looked into was a meditative practice called the Jiva mala. The past lives or personalities of the individual are threaded together like beads on a string in the shape of a necklace. Each personality or "jiva" is visualized as a pearl, shining and in the shape of perfection.

The white pearl represents the lives that have been purified by memory, realization, and atonement. The dark pearls represent lives that contain destructive karma that acts like a millstone, limiting the individual in various ways even in the present life. Past passions must be realized and understood as delusion. Past sins must be realized as wrong destructive actions. Past lives must be understood as combinations of good and bad intentions, as wise choices and errors. The person must be liberated from unconscious bondage to those lives and their passions.

The process of remembering one life after another is like going from bead to bead using a rosary. Each bead contains a mosaic of memories from a previous incarnation. In this study I wanted to not only get a better understanding of the afterlife and all the other concepts but I also wanted to show that it's interesting and death is not always this horrible thing. It can be beautiful. Sad but beautiful. I also wanted to show how death has affected me and how not only me but how other people might cope with losing a loved one.

One problem I have ran into is that there is so much you can do with this topic and it's hard to just go one route and have it all relate to each other. Also another problem I had was wanting to do something really creative and not having the materials to do so. I intend to use oils and acrylics. I want to do a mixed media painting for my last one. After four months on working on this study I hope to have an open mind about different things. When it came to religions and creation and death I was really closed minded but learning about the different religions and their ways it has opened my mind.

I'm also hoping this will help me choose the religious route I want to go on and in turn I'll find myself and where I belong in this vast universe.