If you’re as keen on the topic as I am, I recommend an enlightening book called Many Mansions: The Edgar Cayce Story on Reincarnation by Gina Cerminara. Published in 1950 and read from the vantage point of my training with Linda Howe and her contemporary take on the Alashic Records, I was surprised to see how the themes of our lifetimes here on the planet echo throughout both teachings. Written in the language of the day and greatly influenced by her extensive research on the Cayce readings (which you can access yourself as a member of the A.R.E.), Cerminara’s passages mirror my own experiences.
I’ve come to realize from doing readings for others as well as teaching classes and observing the reactions of my students, that our pain and suffering all boil down to one thing really: we have made up the stories of our lives to reflect the ways in which we think we are separate from God, but which look like separation from others. For Cayce, that is the definition of “sin” (a concept I had a very different relationship to having been raised in the Catholic faith).
Here’s how this book puts it: “For man is a spirit, not a body; sin arises from his forgetfulness of this fact as he identifies himself with his body. It is against this illusion of identity with his body that he must fight…not through the negative process of denial, but through the positive process of identification with spirit.”
Each time we go into the Records (the realm of spirit), we are reminded that contrary to how the twists and turns of our lives appear, healing is not done on the level of form by changing our outer circumstances (though that may eventually be our choice), but at the level of spirit—the level of the Mind where we are one with our Creator. In an Akashic Record exploration, the Masters, Teachers and Loved Ones help us to remember. They reveal our “sins” for the illusion they are and reinterpret our perceived shortcomings through the eyes of forgiveness and perfection, under which no “story” of any lifetime holds any lasting power.
This definition of sin as separation also distills what A Course in Miracles is about, by the way.
The Bible quote (depending on the version) that Cerminara’s book takes its title from refers to Jesus saying to his disciples: “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
All of you…each of us…all the same…without exception. Welcome home.
©Maria K. Benning, M.Ed.
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