by Harold Klemp
RELIGION /ECKANKAR /INSPIRATION $3.00/USA $4.00/CAN
ECKANKAR Presents:
Great skeptics and doubters often go farthest on the path to God. Someone may ask, “Is there hope for me? I don’t buy this God stuff.” No problem, take your time, for all seekers must proceed at their own pace.
Is Life a
But one truth I can give you is the word HU, and the spiritual exercises to find God.
Random Walk?
Yet the success of these depends upon you.
Can you spend a few minutes a day to open your heart to the Holy Spirit? To do the spiritual exercises with love and passion?
To give your whole mind and heart to such a self-discipline for a few moments?
If the reply is yes, you are bound to make progress in your quest for the secret laws of life. Today’s mysteries will no longer be mysteries tomorrow.
—Harold Klemp
ISBN 978-1-57043-172-2
Is Life a Random
Walk?
Harold Klemp
~<(sl&r!=edbhcc< +Z-Ä-É-U-U
Is Life a Random Walk?
Is Life a
Random Walk?
Harold Klemp
E
ECKANKAR
Minneapolis
www.Eckankar.org
Is Life a Random Walk?
Copyright © 2001 ECKANKAR
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans-mitted in any form by any means, whether elec-tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Eckankar.
The terms ECKANKAR, ECK, EK, MAHANTA, SOUL TRAVEL, VAIRAGI, and
, among others,
are trademarks of ECKANKAR, PO Box 2000, Chanhassen, MN 55317-2000 USA.
Printed in USA.
Third Printing—2009
ISBN: 978-1-57043-172-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klemp, Harold.
Is life a random walk? / Harold Klemp.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57043-172-8 (saddle stitch : alk. paper) 1. Spiritual life--Eckankar (Organization) I. Title.
BP605.E3 K559 2001
299'.93--dc21
2001040469
This paper meets the requirements ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Introduction
Is life just a random walk? Some ana-lysts think so about the stock markets.
Perhaps this bias is a spillover from their take on life. Who knows?
Others, myself among them, say life follows a natural order. It is predictable.
While history may not repeat in an exact pattern as to place or time, the present often is a rhyme to past events.
What do you think?
If you have a strong desire to find a better, more direct way to God, read on. The truth you seek may be at your fingertips.
1
Is Life a Random Walk?
I was in the post office when a father entered with his young daughter. The tod-dler started to run back and forth in the lobby, clutching a key.
When I went to my box for the mail, the little girl followed and watched with an intent gaze as I put a key into the lock and unlocked it. She seemed fascinated by the process. It was apparent she had tried her key in several boxes without success.
Key of Opportunity
She stood and stared as I relocked my mailbox. By then her dad had finished his business and was ready to leave.
Scooping up his little girl, he made for the door, then turned back and said, “When 3
you’re that age and you’ve got a key, the whole world is a lock.”
I thought about it, trying to learn the spiritual message. It is this: The whole world is a grand opportunity, a mystery for a child, something to unlock with a key, to discover what’s there.
Do you have such a key? How does it work?
A Search for Answers
Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?
Where am I going? When? And how?
Questions, questions—but good ones.
In search of answers to these questions, you come face-to-face with the very secrets of life and death. You unearth the true knowledge that has eluded the most learned scholars of mainline religions.
Even now you stand at the foot of a new ladder of discovery.
What are the ancient teachings of ECK?
What do they involve? Can they improve your life? Make you a better person? These are all questions you may well ask yourself someday. Maybe today.
4
Help Me Remember
What God Is Like
During the mass destruction of Hurri-cane Andrew in August 1992, many people in southern Florida lost their homes and all belongings. Some ECKists also felt the bite of its destruction. One such ECK family accepted shelter with another family until money from the insurance company let them set up housing again.
Their hosts told a story about their four-year-old girl and a brand-new baby in the family. Soon after bringing the newborn home from the hospital, the hosts’ little girl made a request. Could she please spend a few moments alone with the baby? At first the parents felt reluctance. Afraid of sibling rivalry, they wondered if she might harm the infant. But the four-year-old kept begging them to leave the nursery and let her stay with the newborn.
The parents gave in, but only after turning up the volume on the nursery inter-com.
(Trust in God, but turn up the inter-com.)
5
They listened from another room, pre-pared to rush back in if needed. Instead of distressed cries, however, they heard their daughter’s soft voice address the infant.
Her words were like a prayer.
“Baby,” she said, “help me remember what God is like. I’m beginning to forget.”
Many children do, in fact, remember what God is like—at least until they enter school at age three, four, or five. Then the memory begins to cloud over. Good school-ing teaches them to be responsible adults in society, of course. Yet at the same time a priceless gift is lost—a child’s understand-ing of God.
Straight Answers
Whatever your chosen religion or belief, that choice is necessary for you at this stage of your journey home to God. That’s why you hold to it.
Your religion or belief is a valuable and important part of you because it reflects all your experiences from past lives.
Our spiritual heritage is far richer than a single lifetime could ever produce, the real 6
reason many enter this life with a special gift or talent without the apparent need for learning it. Some kids even reincarnate with the knowledge of a foreign language which their siblings lack. Parents who treat reincarnation as foolish may simply dismiss such a gift with an airy, “Oh, well, he sure didn’t get it from us,” and let it go at that.
They have no inkling as to where or how the child picked up such an ability.
Learning the Spiritual Laws
Whenever I look at a child, I see a little adult. Mighty oaks from acorns grow.
There’s no impulse to talk down to children once you realize they are Souls returned from an older time and place. They need today’s leg of their spiritual journey, too, the same as you and me.
Sometimes they reincarnate to wield the sword of fear or power, while at other times they come to demonstrate the Law of Love.
A child of three, four, or five will dis-play a unique personality, perhaps an out-going or adventurous one. But by age eight 7
to ten, the child may suddenly turn shy and reserved. Upon reflection you’d say it isn’t the same individual.
A young child often remembers the distant past and may well speak of it.
&n
bsp; A good question to ask a child of two to four is this: What did you do when you were big? You could be surprised if the child, in a nonchalant manner, sketches out a past life in broad details. Recognize it for that.
When people leave this physical life, they ascend to the next heaven, the Astral Plane. Some advance to a higher place, the second or third heaven. The second is the Causal Plane. St. Paul spoke of a third heaven. It is one of the regions in the up-per worlds where Souls go to rest, to learn different facets of spiritual law—including the Law of Love.
The books of ECK present these planes and laws in some detail.
How Children Enter a New Life After a short or lengthy rest in the higher worlds, we return to earth as a tiny babe. The body is a new prison of sorts.
8
This containment of Soul is the hardest part of reincarnation to deal with. In the last physical incarnation an individual was perhaps an adult in a well-trained, func-tioning body. Now, with baby fingers, he will try to pick up objects but fail in the attempt. Eyes struggle to focus and make sense of a blurry world, but for some time a scene remains a smear of black-and-white shadings. Months pass, and a perception of color dawns. Little by little, the infant’s mind develops in a heroic way to influence the brain to put it all together.
In effect, the mind commands the brain,
“OK, now sort out the light waves and make order from chaos.”
Of course, as our true, eternal Self—
Soul—we exist beyond the human mind.
From the lofty heights of Soul, we flash marching orders to our mind, which, in turn, passes them down the chain of command to our physical brain for execution.
And so the will develops. We thus move and act. We grow.
With the passage of time, the infant comes to recognize Mommy and Daddy, 9
vague forms that begin to register as real objects. It knows when the bottle’s on the way, and so forth. A baby thus learns to put things into categories or files.
Its growing ability to place a thing into a familiar slot reduces the infant’s fear, making the world a more comfortable place.
* * *
A mother observed the way her young child characterized things and put them into categories of his own making. Around the age of ten months, he began to mimic certain sounds. Sometime later, the mother noticed that every time they passed a body of water or a drinking fountain, he would say, “Mo.”
One day she figured it out.
She had been teaching him to drink water from a glass. After each sip, she would ask, “More?” The child had taken the characteristics of this wet stuff in the glass and put it into the wrong file. He thought its name was “more.” So anytime he saw water, he tried to call it by that name.
A child learns bit by bit. First on its 10
agenda is the name of basic things—how to identify the concrete objects in the world around him.
How Do I Get God’s Love?
Over time, children pick up the finer subtleties of getting along with others. If they have the good fortune of loving parents, they soon realize that as one gets love, he must also give it. Love is like water in that only so much of it fits into a glass.
Before more can go in, some must be let out. So, if one doesn’t keep giving out love,
“mo” can’t come in.
People often wonder, How do I get God’s love? You get more of it by giving of your own to others.
Spiritual School
All in all, earth is a spiritual school.
Designed and set up by God, it lets each of us, each Soul in this world, learn more about becoming godlike—becoming more like God.
The whole purpose of you, me, and every-one else is to become more godlike. It is our 11
mission, or purpose, here. It’s the key to happiness.
People may believe they’re here to mark time until the trumpets blow on the last day. At that point, having pursued a frivo-lous life, they expect the Lord to catch them up to some better world, to let them em-bark upon a useless and self-centered existence there too.
No. The true purpose of life here, there, or anywhere is to become a Co-worker with God.
Our past lives have brought experiences to polish us in a spiritual way. Like it or not, you are now the best and highest spiritual being you have ever been in any lifetime. Take a look at yourself. Like what you see? Fine. But if you don’t like the face star-ing back at you in the mirror, keep in mind that this reflection is of your own creation.
You are today the sum of all your thoughts, feelings, and actions in past lives.
I once said that sincere people who attend an ECK event—like an introductory talk on the Eckankar teachings—come because of some dissatisfaction with their 12
belief or religion. Otherwise, why would they be there?
Yet they may be aware only in part of the pressing nature of their search. But Soul, the True Self, has heard and is yearn-ing to go home.
It’s simply a matter of time before a seeker’s search begins in earnest—perhaps a week, a month, a year, fifty years, the next lifetime, or later—it matters not. Yet this may be the lifetime that a seeker ad-mits, “I sense having lived many times in the past. I may be the best I’ve ever been, but I want more. Much more.”
“I Want to Go Home”
A child we’ll call Debra, for the sake of privacy, was born with a valve defect in her stomach. Doctors were at a loss whether she would outgrow the condition. All dur-ing Debra’s childhood, her parents had introduced her to strangers: “Our daughter was born with a stomach defect. She doesn’t keep food down very well.”
Negative comments like that added an extra burden to this poor child’s youth.
13
One day the problem reached a crisis.
Debra’s parents found her turning blue and rushed her to a hospital. By luck and divine grace, she pulled through. The doc-tors who treated her predicted that the stomach valve, which they fixed, would cause no future problems.
Now, Debra’s older sister took a fiend-ish delight in making fun of her. Soon after Debra returned from the hospital, her sister picked a fight. Family rules kept the older girl from giving the younger one a physical beating, yet verbal abuse and name-calling did the job. They left no visible scars. On that particular day the younger girl simply got tired of the hazing and turned on her sister. She beat up her tormentor. Outraged, the elder ran and told their father. The wisdom of Solomon he had not, so he sent Debra to her room.
Debra was recovering from a serious condition, her sister had started the fight, but she’s the one banished to her room. She lay weeping on the bed, crushed by the in-justice of it.
“I want to go home,” she cried. “I just 14
want to go home.” In a spiritual sense her heart was saying, “I want to go home to God because of my unhappiness.”
Each of us is Soul. Once we laughed and sang in the high heavens of God’s pure Light and Sound—at play in the park. But without the discipline or need to serve others, we (Soul) served ourselves. So God sent us to earth for the rich experience of liv-ing in a world of duality, to suffer and en-joy extremes like heat and cold, wealth and poverty, or love and hate. It was all to learn the true nature of love.
That’s our mission. The first big lesson is to learn to love ourselves.
So when young Debra cried, “I want to go home; I just want to go home,” her plea was in a spiritual sense. In her abject mis-ery the faint, but not extinguished, memory of Soul’s onetime home flooded in upon her.
She remembered that her true home wasn’t on earth. She was but passing through.
Accept Life for What It Is
As Debra heard the sound of her own words, she snapped from her self-pity and 15
returned to her human cage, timeless ages—yet a mere heartbeat—from bliss in the heart of God.
I am home, she realized.
This time, she didn’t mean her heavenly home, but earth. Hard, merciless, uncaring ea
rth.
“I’m as home as I’m going to get,” she said aloud. “It won’t get better here. So I may as well wipe my tears and plan for the day I’m old enough to leave.” She stopped crying then. A key realization had stolen in upon her: Conditions might stumble along at home, but truth to tell, they were well within the limits of endurance. This suggested the need to accept her station in life.
What an important realization for a child!
The Hand of God
Debra grew up, married, and endured hardships that led to a budding maturity.
Losing her firstborn son, the marriage missing a breakup by a narrow margin, and other such suffering took her to the brink 16
of hopeless abandonment.
One day, depressed and despondent, she sought refuge in church. Catholicism was the faith of her youth. Now she had hit rock bottom. Inside the church, a prayer service was in session, and worshippers all around murmured soft prayers. At that moment, sunk in the depths of despair, she felt a hand of comfort come to rest upon her shoulder. Her eyes flew open in surprise. She glanced back to bless that gentle Soul’s touch, but empty air greeted her wid-ened eyes. No one stood near.
In a way, you could say it was the hand of God through the personage of a divine messenger. God Itself—in ECK we neither say Him nor Her—does not descend into the human theater to move among people in the normal sense.
Yet the Deity does send spiritual messengers, often perceived as angels, saints, and the like. Debra realized it in a heartbeat. A guardian angel had indeed placed a hand of reassurance and comfort upon her.
Debra’s story is a wonderful example 17
of how you, too, may experience a gentle nudging from Divine Spirit (ECK) to help you on your journey home to God.
Even before leaving church, she knew that a gift of grace had touched her with a special blessing. This extraordinary moment of realization was the assurance of an ancient truth: life is more than a random walk. A divine presence had graced her. As a Catholic more grounded in the physical side of life than the mystical, she was startled by such a realization of grace.
It’d come through the touch of a gentle, al-beit invisible, hand.
Eternity Here and Now?
The years passed. In time Debra bore a second son we’ll call Jim. Once grown he took an interest in spiritual things. Debra did too, though life’s trials left raw wounds that begged for more time to heal. She still exercised caution about religion.