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PAST Lives, FUTURE LIVES AND THE NATURE OF TIME PAST LIVES, FUTURE LIVES NATURE TIME AND THE Under a rational spiritual worldview based on modern scientific research into past and future lives, karma involves choices and learning rather than predestination and reactions to past events. hen I was writing my second book, Genesis Unveiled, 1 adopted a broad spiritual worldview based on the twin ideas of reincarnation and karma as the framework within which the ancient global traditions about humanity's prehistory should be interpreted. And this set off an interesting chain of events. First, my publisher insisted that a few footnoted references as evidence for this worldview were insufficient, which forced me to undertake some late additional research so that I could insert a whole new chapter containing said evidence at the beginning of the book. I was already hugely impressed by the research performed by psychologist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, into children who spontaneously recall past lives. But I also discovered, somewhat by coincidence, the work of Californian psychologist Michael Newton. At the time, I was somewhat sceptical of past-life regression in general, assuming as do so many others that it is too subjective a line of research, with too great a possibility of subjects being actively led by their regressor. But what attracted me about Newton's work was the consistency with which his subjects described the interlife, or their "life between lives" in the ethereal realms. Moreover, his transcripts of sessions seemed to preclude any significant possibility of subjective leading, inasmuch as subjects regularly laughed at or even scolded him if he said something they thought ridiculous or inaccurate. Then, when Genesis Unveiled was published in 2002, I found that a great many people were fascinated by the evidence in this new chapter. My appetite whetted, and again with a series of fortunate coincidences, I soon established that a number of other pioneering psychologists and psychiatrists had researched the interlife, many of them before Newton, and with broadly consistent results. No one seemed to have collated and compared this research before, so I felt that this was an important book that needed to be written. A variety of other factors have come into play since then. I decided to go back to basics and write a book that contained all the evidence in support of a reincarnatory worldview, even including vital near-death-experience research that turned out to provide some important corroboration of interlife experiences. On proper investigation, I also found that I had been wrong to write-off general past-life regression, for two important reasons that we shall examine shortly. So on the one hand, and unpremeditated, I found that I was building a basic spiritual framework based entirely on modern evidence rather than on "revealed wisdom". On the other, it became increasingly obvious to me that materialists' attempts to explain away these various lines of research were totally inadequate—indeed, completely illogical given the breadth and depth of evidence on the table. Although I had flirted with the idea before, this is what convinced me that coining the term "rational spirituality" was entirely appropriate. However, later on, in the final review stages of the book, I found that I was still strug- gling with the dynamics of karma and the idea that it is based upon some sort of "action and reaction" or "reaping what you sow". After much confusion and deliberation, I came to what I feel to be a vital conclusion concerning the inappropriateness of this view, as I shall explain shortly. But again, this cemented my desire to distance the spiritual frame- work I was developing from any revealed wisdom of the past. The Book of the Soul: Rational Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century, my latest book, was published at the end of 2004. In this article, I intend to summarise the evidence and analysis relating to reincarnation and karma, all of which can be found in the book with appropriate source references. Website: http://www. ianlawton.com NEXUS + 49 by lan Lawton © 2005 DECEMBER 2005 — JANUARY 2006 www.nexusmagazine.com