Karma, Reincarnation, and Schoolroom Earth

Aaron: Your earth is a schoolroom and you are here to learn-it is as simple as that! Before your decision to move into birth, and with the guidance of your beloved companions, you form a blueprint for the proposed lifetime. What is it that you most need to learn? What life situations will make that learning most accessible? That decided, you move into incarnation in this most perfect schoolroom where the lessons you need are always offered.

This is a school where no one fails. If the lesson is not learned the first time, opportunity is offered to repeat it. This is not punishment but kindness. It is as if you had studied some mathematics and taken an examination. Half of your answers are incorrect. The teacher invites you to come after school and review that work which you don't understand. When you both think you are ready, a new exam is offered. Still one third wrong? Let's try again! And again. When you've mastered the material, you will be ready to move on.

In your fear of the pain that sometimes accompanies the lessons, you view karma as punishment. Can you see that it is a gift of the universe, to offer just the lessons you most need at the pace you find appropriate?

Let us speak a moment of this pain. Yes, often there is pain in your learning. Pain does NOT teach you anything; it is just pain. Pain reminds you to pay attention and paying attention teaches you. Your lives do not have to be painful. When you learn to pay attention without the pain, you will no longer need pain.

Please do NOT interpret that statement as suggestion that your pain is your fault or choice and that you need feel guilty for it. Paying attention is hard. There is a desire to hide from difficult learning. Rather than understanding how difficult the material may be, so often you move to fear and see yourselves as inadequate, judging yourself with scorn. This is part of your humanness. You are learning that you have conscious choice, to notice fear arising and then to choose love.

A vital lesson here is compassion for this divinely imperfect human, and by extension, for all humans, not judgment for him or her. So you practice this compassion, this mercy to the self while also being as honest with yourself as you can be. No, it is NOT simple. Yes, it is possible. The Buddha is quoted as having once said, "If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it." You may wish to carry that quote in your hearts.

There is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is uncomfortable, but it is just pain, nothing more nor less. You cannot always avoid it, no matter how hard you try. Suffering is different. It grows from your resistance to pain.

Suffering is your expression of dissatisfaction with the way things are, your aversion and attachment, wanting things always to be different than they are. As you lessen your resistance and allow your life to touch you and to teach you, your suffering diminishes. Then you may come to the pain with an open and spacious heart that has room for it, without fear. The wonder is that within that newly opened heart, you find that your capacity for joy and love is as infinite as your capacity for bearing with pain.

So you are here on this earth plane. Through your life there are countless mind moments, endless acts and thoughts. Each one carries a seed. If, in any moment, you respond with love and an open heart, you plant a sweet seed of gentleness, caring, and connection. If you react with fear and anger or greed, you plant a bitter seed of separation, hatred and fear. That, in effect, is karma. Let us look closer.

The word karma means action. All acts, words and thoughts carry karma, some of it "adhering" and some of it "nonadhering." Karma is a law that says, "You reap what you sow." If you plant sour apple seeds, my dear ones, there is no way you can get a sweet apple tree, no matter how much you wish for sweet apples. The fruit grows from the seed. The only way to get sweet apples is to plant sweet apples.

Karma is never punishment but learning, like that teacher who invites you back because you still haven't understood the lesson. After a lifetime, the karma which adhered in that lifetime invites you back … says, "This and that need to be worked on." Maybe not in the next lifetime. Was this a hard one? Do you need an easier one next time? That's fine. But eventually you will need to get back to it.

After leaving the body, you look again at the blueprint, comparing the plan with the scheme of that which was actually built. You may notice that some rooms were left off entirely, or unfinished. "Patience; that needs more work next time. See how reactive I was to the catalyst of fear …" You may notice other rooms, unplanned in the original, have been beautifully constructed. "See how much I learned about fear that leads to greed; I really learned generosity with an open heart this time around. I won't need to concentrate on that so much next time …"

After whatever time you choose to spend on the spirit plane, you again reincarnate. Why? Some of you wonder, if you are not forced to return to this earth plane, why would you choose to do so? Is someone standing over you with a whip? No. There is always free will, even with karma, and this is sometimes misunderstood. You are evolving from what I've called a Spark of the Eternal into a fully evolved "sun" in your own right. That energy that you are is clarifying and purifying itself so that it may return to the Eternal as pure light, in a far more mature form than it left, its energy multiplied many fold.

To sit even in the soft shadows just beyond the direct reach of that Perfect Light is bliss beyond telling. Each of you, as spirit, yearns to return to that light, to know your perfect union with the divine. Within you is the wisdom to understand that in order to return fully mature to the Light, you must clarify the shadow within you. This move to your own perfection is a driving force, the move to Light. Thus, it is your own free will that leads you to choose the exquisite pain and love of the next incarnation.

This yearning is not a grasping but aspiration. There is no sense of trying to "get somewhere." To "get somewhere" implies that there is a self that is "getting." This aspiration I speak of comes from a level far beyond self and ego. It grows from full knowing of what you are, of the divinity of your nature and your desire to express that divinity as purely as you can, not for yourself but for all life, for all beings on every plane.

In your deepest wisdom you know that every bit of light, of purified energy, that shines from you adds light to the entire universe. To purify yourself is the ultimate path of service. To follow this path of loving service is NOT another's will or plan for you, but your own free will and plan for yourself.

However long it takes, it will take. While knowing that each lifetime is a precious opportunity to learn, also remember that there is no rush. In its own time, every being will find that perfect freedom and peace. Every being will find its way Home.