Reincarnation Taught by Jesus
By Elizabeth Clare Prophet
I have felt called to bring those true teachings of Jesus to the world since a very small child.
My first recollection of a past life took place when I was four, playing in the sand in my sandbox that my father had made for me in a little play yard all fenced in with white picket fence, and all of a sudden I was transported and I was playing in the sand on the banks of the Nile River. I was a child of the same age and I was doing the exact same thing, I was playing with the sand and the river was going by. I knew it was the Nile, and I don't know how I knew it.
But after being there for some minutes I was taken by what an extraordinary event was happening to me and somewhat frightened. So I ran to find my mother and I said, “Mother, this is what's happened to me. What is it?”
And she said, “You have remembered a past life.”
Now, that was an amazing thing for a mother to do, not to deny that memory and snuff it out. But my mother had grown up in Switzerland during the First World War. Soldiers were quartered in the homes, and the soldier that stayed in their house had the book of The Secret Doctrine of Theosophy. Quite an amazing event for a small town in Switzerland.
And so my mother would sneak in and read that book. And she decided that the teaching on reincarnation was the most logical conclusion to the injustices and inequities of life, that there was no other explanation to children born limited or maimed or harmed and others born into wealth and genius or to the other unequalities that we all experience in life.
By that experience, then, to me having lived before was a fact of life and I didn't need to think of it again. I wasn't preoccupied with it, it was simply a given. I always had a sense that the “I” that was thinking inside of me was a continuity of being, it had nothing to do with starting when this body began and it wouldn't end when this body ended.
Well, you know, Jesus taught reincarnation. I was saying this to someone a few days ago who is a devout student of the Bible. But this isn't brought out from the pulpits either.
It's a very a special moment when this, the disciples have been on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus. They see him transfigured. His garment is glistering white and they observe him. He is talking to two Ascended Masters—Moses and Elijah. He is speaking with them as naturally as we are speaking together, in that exalted state.
So when this experience is over and Jesus is infused with that light (the transfiguration is an initiation that you are called also to experience on the path of individual discipleship unto the realization of that Higher Consciousness or Higher Self who is Christ), they're walking down the mountain and the disciples curiously ask Jesus, “Well, what about the Old Testament prophecy which says before the coming of the Messiah, of the Son of God, before your coming, Lord, Elijah must first come? Where is Elijah?”
And then Jesus says to them, “He has already come and they have done to him what they would and so will they also do to me,” the Son of man. Then the disciples knew that he spake to them of John the Baptist.
John the Baptist had come. He was the forerunner of Jesus of whom Jesus said there was no greater born of woman. He had gone before him to preclaim his coming. He was fiery, a fiery prophet. And he challenged Herod for his unholy alliance with his brother's wife, and Herod had an unmitigated wrath and vengeance for John the Baptist. So he told his daughter Salome, who danced, whatever she wanted she could have. And she in her wickedness said to her father, “Bring me the head of John the Baptist.” If you can imagine such ungodliness. And the head of John the Baptist was brought in on a platter into that feast. He had been imprisoned. And Jesus wept profoundly upon the death of John the Baptist.
So that is what he was talking about. They had done to that great light, no greater born of woman, what they would. And they would do it also to Jesus.
Now, this was spoken quite naturally in conversation. It wasn't a new teaching on reincarnation, it wasn't anything they didn't understand. All he had to say was John the Baptist was Elijah come again. He has come.
Reincarnation was the ongoing awareness of Jesus' teaching to his disciples. It was a given.
I know this not only because it is in that scripture in Matthew 17 (you can read it for yourself), but because as I became older—first of all not having found Jesus' teaching in all the churches in our home town, studying the scriptures, calling to Jesus, asking him questions and he answering me in my heart and speaking to me and unveiling to me the mysteries of life all my childhood and teenage years.
But it wasn't until I met Mark Prophet, about the age of twenty-two when I was a student at Boston University, that I had quickened in me the memory of my experience with Jesus and Jesus opened my eyes that I could see that I had been his disciple Martha at the time he was on earth. Martha was the sister of Mary and of Lazarus whom he raised from the dead.
Not only did he quicken in me the memory that I had studied with him, I had cooked, I had kept that home where he visited and went for retreat in Bethany, but he quickened the memory of the teachings that he gave to the disciples and the inner circle of initiates.
