Rules #26a: "You'll
Be Back: The Principles of
Reincarnation
Reincarnation is Making a Comeback
While on Earth, you are living in the
worlds of karma and reincarnation. Believe it or not, both karma
and reincarnation begin and end with love.
"The World Goes 'Round in
Circles":
As Soul, you experience a constant cycle of
births and deaths into a series of bodies (better known as
reincarnation)
until you have learned all the spiritual lessons that the totality
of all experiences have to teach you. Until you have learned all
that you need to know, you will find "the wheels of
reincarnation" will continue to spin around you.
The Rules of Reincarnation Governing
Life on Earth
#1: REINCARNATION: JOURNEY THRU
HEART OF GOD
At some point in our journey as Soul, we ask
ourselves "why am I here?" For those of us who have asked that question
many times, it changes into "why did I come back here?" The answers to
both questions are one in the same. You are here - you came back here -
to grow in your ability to love.
What we learn through our wanderings in the universe is simply this.
Life is a choice: learn to choose love in every moment. This is far
easier said than done. Think about what it means to choose love in
every moment. It means "don't cut that car off in traffic", "don't
scream at your kids when you've had a rotten day", "don't gossip about
your boss behind their back when they've 'screwed you'", etc.
Love at every moment means greeting the world with a smile when your
heart is breaking, forgiving those who trespass against you, and being
happy when there is every reason to be sad. For love is the very Heart
of God Itself and reincarnation is the journey that takes you through it.
Love is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of everything
- more than learning to be loving, reincarnation teaches us all to become
the very essence of love itself. For what is God but love?
#2: GOAL #1: BEING A COWORKER WITH GOD
"So now what?" you may ask. "If I travel
through the heart of God and 'get to the end', what more is there left
for me?" The answer is "even more love". For once you have learned all
you need to know about love, the journey begins anew as you help to guide
others along their journey.
This is what it means to "be a coworker
with God" in the majesty of His Creation. Although everyone is always
working with God along the way, for one to become a fully realized
coworker with God, all "individual imperfections" must be shed.
Reincarnation and karma are the processes that ensure this
"purification" happens for the highest good of the universe.
#3: GOAL #2: GETTING A 360° VIEWPOINT ON
LIFE
To serve God, one first must understand the
universe. Imagine the vastness of the small part of the universe
we can see from Earth and you will see understanding it is a very
great task indeed. To begin to understand the universe, one must have
experience of it from all angles so that one emerges with a 360°
viewpoint on life.
This means a person, through the trail of
many lifetimes, will be all things. They will be famous and
insignificant, rich and poor, victim and perpetrator, woman and man,
all races, religions, and creeds. They will see life from every
vantage point so that they can come to a correct understanding of it.
The more they can understand, the more they can see love in every
situation, the better they are qualified to be a fully realized
coworker with God in the unfolding majesty of His creation.
#4: GOAL #3: BECOMING TOLERANCE &
COMPASSION
"The highest result of education is tolerance."
(Helen Keller) Teaching tolerance and compassion is the purpose of the
cycle of reincarnation and the laws of karma. For what you cannot
tolerate, what you have no compassion for, what you resist or hate,
persists until the wheels of karma and reincarnation grind it out of
you.
You have come into the present life as something you
resisted or hated in a past life. What you resist or hate now, you
will reincarnate into in a future life. For example, the Women's
Movement today is populated with former Victorian men who thought
that "barefoot and pregnant" was good enough for women.
#5: WORKS #1: WHAT YOU LEARN IS WHAT YOU
LIVE
There is only one way for anyone to truly
understand what it is to be man or woman, rich or poor, in sickness
or in health, and so on. That is for someone to live through that
experience for a lifetime having forgotten that they agreed to do it
in the first place. That just makes it more real because they are
that person - for better or worse - and it is a life sentence with
no possibility of parole.
So we all must accept the consequences
of our place in life and work to create/manifest better ones - if that
is even possible. So that "what you live becomes what you learn"...
literally getting it into your body by recording it indelibly over the
course of lifetime after lifetime into your cellular memory.
Eventually you will have lived enough lifetimes to know that you have
been here before. Then you will come to the place of really knowing
that each way of life contains within it a unique and special gift
of experience. In this way, you gradually develop the 360° viewpoint on
life that is necessary for you to become a fully realized coworker with
God in the unfolding majesty of His Creation.
#6: WORKS #2: LESSONS ARE TAUGHT ONE AT
A TIME
There are so many ways of beingness in the
universe that it is not possible to experience them all in one lifetime.
That is why reincarnation is necessary: it gives you a body through
which to experience a manageable slice of lessons in each lifetime.
Although the progress of spiritual advancement looks like a wildly
fluctuating stock chart, still there is always an overall upward
trend.
Even after a life where one has taken a sharp downturn,
the drop was agreed to so that in future lives the rise in spiritual
advancement could be even greater. Yet there are always lessons in
every life at every moment no matter what the level of spiritual
advancement one achieves. And still the lessons are taught day by
day, life by life, so that they can be mastered and the way made
for more learning.
#7: WORKS #3: LEARNING CAUSE AND EFFECT
(KARMA)
There is no better or fairer way to learn
lessons than for you to experience the direct effects of the causes
you have set in motion. In other words, what you have done to others
("as you sow") in this or past lives, you will have done to you ("you
reap") in this or future lives. When viewed in the context of a string
of lifetimes, what happens to us all is always totally fair and
completely just.
For example, there are no innocent people in
prison. If they "did not do it" in this life, they were sure to have
"done it" in another life where it seemed that they "got away with it".
Yet the Lords of Karma are totally patient - time being nothing to
them - and eventually those who have sown the wind will reap the
whirlwind. This is not to punish but to teach them the laws of life
and the laws of love.
For a loving and compassionate God treats
all His children equally. He does not give some a life of ease and
others a life of sorrow in just one lifetime. He lets each live
according to their own state of consciousness in many lifetimes and
allows each to have the experiences which will benefit them the most
karmically.
If this means a life of ease in one incarnation,
it also means a life of sorrow in a past or future one. Again the
point is to give everyone what they need to become a fully realized
coworker with God. If some achieve this "sooner" in linear time,
all will achieve it eventually and it will unfold for each Soul in
divine timing.
#8: RESULT #1: DEVELOPING DISCERNMENT
Discernment is the art of having learned what
love is and what it is not. As we go through our many incarnations, we
explore love in all it's aspects so that we can develop discernment and
understand what it means to love like God.
Loving like God means
loving another for all that they are - the good and the bad - and
standing back to allow them to have their own experience. It is so
easy to want to reach out to another and say to them "do this, don't
do that because...". It makes us feel better but it does not help
the person as much as we think. For when we are gone and we can no
longer steer loved ones through the pitfalls of life, we have left
them ill equipped to handle life on their own without us.
It is much harder to stand back and to watch them stumble and fall,
knowing that they must learn the lessons of life as we have done... by
true experience. The simple fact is that each soul must learn to stand
on their own and to develop their discernment the only way they can -
through success and failure, tragedy and triumph, mistakes and miracles.
Think of how much love God has for all His children to stand back and
watch everyone make their own way through life.
#9: RESULT #2: DEVELOPING DISCIPLINE
Part of the development of discernment is
the development of discipline. For discipline is the art of doing
what you have to, especially when you do not want to.
For when
you think about it, the central problem of human existence is laziness
and the only way to overcome it is discipline. For example, if not
for the pleasures of sex, people would not make the effort to procreate
- it would be too much trouble. If not for the need to eat and to
shelter our bodies, we would not be motivated to work - it would be
too much trouble. In the process of meeting our basic needs, we must
learn some discipline even if it is as little as applying for welfare.
As we go through many lives, we soon see that our success in any area of
life is directly linked to our discipline in pursuing it. Try running a
winning army without the discipline of academic and field training. Try
running a prosperous business without employee policies to enforce the
disciplines of daily attendance and the minimum achievement of work
objectives. Try developing spiritual discernment without discipline and
see how soon the "Dark Night of Soul" will stop you. Do any of those
things as you will soon see how necessary the development of discipline
is.
#10: RESULT #3: DEVELOPING DETACHMENT
Part of the development of discipline is the
development of detachment. For both discernment and detachment are
necessary for keeping discipline in balance. Too little discipline,
and the achievement of discernment is unlikely. Too much discipline,
and it is impossible to achieve the balance which is an integral part
of detachment.
For detachment is the art of letting the will of
God ("Thy Will") become your own ("my will"). Which only make sense:
for if the ultimate goal is to become a coworker with God, that implies
complete acceptance of and surrender to His Will. Accepting His Will
is only possible when one detaches from their own finite expectations
to participate in the infinite manifestation of the Divine Plan.
#11: REINCARNATION IS "THE MEANS" OF EVOLUTION
When a Soul has mastered the "three D's" -
discernment, discipline, and detachment.- it then that the individual
realizes they are spirit having a human experience and not a human
being having a spiritual experience.
Reincarnation works to
strip them of false illusions so that they can see the perfection of
their own creation by God ("Self Realization") and how they have
served/serve/will serve the Divine Plan ("God Realization"). For the
evolved Soul knows that there is no "we" and "they", no "friend" and
"foe". There are only Divine sparks of God all connected together
and all separate at the same time. There are only those who serve
God and those who know His love. And "We" are "they".
#12: REINCARNATION IS "THE END" OF AWARENESS
"We shall not cease from exploration and the
end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know
the place for the first time." (T. S. Eliot)
This is what Soul
awareness is... to really understand all that we encounter in all it's
aspects all the time. It is like looking down the hall of mirrors to
see ourselves looking at ourselves farther than the eye can see, more
precisely than the mind can know, more compassionately than the heart
can feel.
It is approaches - but never reaches - knowing what
God knows. It is something that can be better imagined than described
by those of us still wandering around the earthly realms. As Henry
Ward Beecher said, "and now the mystery..."