By MINDY MALECKI

Reincarnation, the return of the soul to life after death, is often mistaken as only a way out theory and reasoning of it is rarely explained.

Some people will cling to the idea as a key to solving the mysteries of religion and the purpose of life. Others will brush off any thoughts of "returning from the dead" simply because modern, space‑age times have formerly conditioned us to believe that anything stemming from the supernatural cannot possibly occur.

First, one must understand the meaning of reincarnation. When a child is born, we take for granted that its awareness was created with its body. We see the development of the awareness with the growth of the body and in old age the disappearance of the awareness with the death of the body. From these changes we receive the impression that the brain produces consciousness, but this is not the only explanation of the fact.

The first fundamental fact of reincarnation is that the human consciousness exists before birth and even before conception. An infant is young in body and uses that body to learn through the use of the brain and nervous system. However, the entire system is run by a mature consciousness which has had much human experience in the past during other lives on earth.

Another fundamental fact of reincarnation is that the soul is "perfect" at the beginning of its human experience and develops over a period of tens of thousands of years until it reaches maturity. Each life is a step to greater knowledge. In other words, the purpose of reincarnation is education.

Irving Cooper, author of Reincarnation states that "Just as a child goes to school day after day, learning lessons, gathering experience and passing from grade to grade, so do we in our greater soul‑life come here to earth many times, learning lessons, gathering experience, and passing from one social grade to another."

People more educated than we are have only reached that level because their development started at an earlier period than ours did.

If we have lived before, why don't we remember? Edgar Joyce, famous for his psychic powers, compared the problem to an unpleasant experience under water. "Let us call your diving suit the physical body which the soul inhabits on earth. If all goes well with it while the currents and light are just light. But you find yourself fighting against a strong current, and the ocean floor be comes grey and murkey. Your simple task underwater is now complex. You begin to feel short of breath. Time stands still. The only reality is the battle you are waging not to be pushed this way and that by the currents. On your way back to ship, you are more dead than alive. In the period it takes you to recover, the memory of those terrible hours down below, in their turn, become a vague dream.

The unreality now is the period you spent on the ocean door; the reality is now the deck of the ship and the security you feel in the companions around you.  In a like manner does the human soul reenter the living world. . . having forgotten that the two separate worlds coexist, and that one is just as real as the other"