Faith in the masters

One of the big themes in my life right now is faith in my guides, masters, spirit, god, love, whathaveyou. They or that and I have a long and complicated relationship spanning many lifetimes, it seems.

A few days ago I read Brian Weiss' Many Lives, Many Masters (which dates all the way back to 1988), and found a few choice quotes:

“I have no faith in these people.”
“No faith in which people?” I queried.
“In the Masters.”
“No faith?”
“No, I have lack of faith. That’s why my life has been so difficult. I had no faith in that lifetime.” She was calmly evaluating her eighteenth-century life. I asked her what she had learned in that lifetime.

That struck a chord.

And later:

I also had to learn that I have no control over my life. I want control, but I don’t have any. I must have faith in the Masters. They will guide me throughout. But I did not have the faith. I felt like I was doomed from the beginning. I never looked at things very pleasantly. We must have faith … we must have faith. And I doubt. I choose to doubt instead of believe.” She paused.

And again:

“What lessons do you need to learn now? What is the most important thing you can learn during this lifetime so that you can continue to grow and prosper?”
“Trust,” she answered quickly. She had known what her principal task was.
“Trust?” I repeated, surprised by the quickness of her retort.
“Yes. I must learn to have faith, but also to trust people. I don’t. I think everybody is trying to do evil to me. That makes me stay away from people and situations that I probably shouldn’t stay away from. It’s keeping me with other people that I should break away from.”
Her insight was tremendous when she was in this super-conscious state. She knew her weaknesses and her strengths. She knew the areas that needed attention and work, and she knew what to do to improve matters. The only problem was that these insights needed to reach her conscious mind and needed to be applied to her waking life. Superconscious insight was fascinating, but by itself it was not enough to transform her life.

Check out the book if you're into this stuff and haven't read it yet. It's eminently readable and very interesting. It's as much about his own process of opening up to all of this weird stuff. He's a very traditional psychoanalyst, who didn't believe in reincarnation or anything like this, who happens to get a client who starts to regress in to past lives.

He's not out to convince anyone, and you get to follow along with his own skepticism as a scientist.

That helps me a lot in opening up to the possibility that this might all be real.