Rebirth, the Word, and Worlds
Rebirth is the primary cause of disease.  Being born without discriminating wisdom is the secondary cause; both are very significant.  Germs, cold, poor eating, etc, are lesser causes.  But whatever the causes, neutralize them all with the mantra combined with living a spiritual life.

Karma and Reincarnation require that you look into a series of prior lifetimes, which makes a lot of sense to deep thinkers.  Otherwise, God comes off as a capricious being, blessing some and cursing others, and we would not care for a God like that.  Karma is also an ennobling doctrine, because it puts all the power for change in our hands.

Karma and Reincarnation are not Absolute Truths.  But people are generally not ready for those.  They have not qualified themselves for nonduality, so these relative teachings help in the interim.

Reincarnation is not to be understood by the way the New Agers think of it, in terms of what personality you once were.  The ego is always unreal.  You cannot find what does not really exist.  The point of seeing past lifetimes is that these were all assumed by you upon the substratum called pure Consciousness.  That is the thread running through the pearls.  It is why we know who we are after awakening from deep sleep, and how we cognize the flow and sense of all our past memories.

Ignorant people do not know where they have come from.  They think they are a body that emerged from the womb as a baby.  This is called the material cause.  Look into the Vedanta and its philosophical concomitants to find that there are many other levels of causation besides that - efficient, primordial, subtle, causal, cosmic, remote - even the Causeless.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God - This means that God and His Word are slightly different.  God, Brahman, cannot be a cause of anything.  In Vedanta we would indicate the shakti power as the dynamism of the Word, and that all the worlds effloresce from there in a trickle-down effect.  Eventually, when consciousness gets sufficiently "dumbed down," you get a block of granite.

Face off with Death.  Fear of death is the lowest hell.  Say to yourself: "I do not exist, I do not have senses, body, or mind."  Be content with this.  You will end up with a simple "I am."  This is not morbidity.  Swami Vivekananda advised that if we have fear of death, we should meditate on it - face off with it.

Some people are walking around lacking control of their senses, this is called a distorted life.  Like a tone that goes out from a bell and decays, people who only go outward are constantly facing the ills and pains of birth and death.  But what if they knew that the sound is inherent in the bell, and that sounds rise out of it again and again?  When you comprehend the Word, Om, then you know that everything is nonoriginated and arises from Intelligence.  All forms are just manifestations of your own Intelligence.

We did not come out of the earth, but out of the mind.  Man is mind (manus yatvam).

The Seer merges the outside (A) with the inside (U) and rests in the third (M).  Then he transcends all three (svara/turiya).

Your practice of meditation is a practice of dissolving the mind consciously.  We do this naturally each night in deep sleep.  So simulate deep sleep, but carry your awareness inside with you.  It is not so hard to do.

Meditate on Consciousness as being seamless - to get beyond distraction and fear.

Because "chit happens" we have to make it un-happen. Your mind is constantly taking forms, so you must make it responsible for dissolving them as well.  Leaving mind outward and untended is tantamount to producing a chaotic world.

If you have practiced the three purities, you have recognized that mental asana is more important than physical asana.  Mental asana is "this Self is Brahman."  So set up this asana first, and then sit in your preferred posture.

As an individual mind you project your dreams at night.  No one else does that for you.  And as a collective mind, you create this world of your waking state.  God has no part in that, being formless and transcendent.  Beyond the projections caused by waking and sleeping lies your true Nature.

If you are unaware of your dream state and its import, or that you have a mental body, then you are relegated to thinking the physical world to be the only reality.  Further, even those who think they have a mind are only thinking about the small box of the brain.  They just have a brain-body connection, and so they do not develop spiritually, what to speak of the mind which is different from the brain.  They just pass out of the third chakra and return through there, like their ancestors.  You cannot work out karma in heaven; you have no solid body.  So then you just return to earth....and still you do not develop yourself?

Cosmic Mind refers to Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, or Ishvara (Ishvari).  Collective Mind refers to all the beings that come out of these deities.