Lessons

Suppose reincarnation is real. Suppose you die and then you're born again. But suppose that in your next life, you're born into a poor family in a poor country and you grow up struggling just to survive. Suppose you fall in with a group of gangsters, like many do in our big cities right here in the US, and therefore you become a gangster. You're young, but you're stealing cars, robbing drugstores, selling dope, and maybe you have to kill someone, because it's either them or you. Do you think you would turn out to be the same person you are now, who knows right from wrong, who knows where the line is and doesn't want to cross it?

I'm asking if you think you have a soul and whether that soul has learned values that it will carry with it into another life. Values: like good and bad, right and wrong. 

I ask that because I think we do have souls, and some of us have lived many lives and been through many experiences, both good and bad. And some of us are young souls, and like a toddler bumping into furniture as he struggles to walk, some of us with young souls are bumping into "the rules" and bumping into "laws" and end up hurting people and ourselves. But do we learn, and do we remember?

Do the lessons get more difficult as we move from life to life? When you learn to be a good person, do you then learn what it feels like to be a paralyzed person, or a falsely-accused prisoner? Do we have to go through every conceivable situation in order to reach perfection?

Now some people will say, no, we only live one life and then we are judged. What kind of judgment is fair when everyone has a different starting point and some have a smooth road while others have a road full of potholes? Where is the fairness? There is none. Either there is no judgment or the judgment comes after many, many lifetimes are lived. I believe the latter. 

I'm a long way from perfection. I don't even know which way to go to reach perfection. But I know when wrong is being done, and I know when good is being done. I know that some people do good and other people do bad. Is it what they were taught? Or is "knowing right from wrong" something they have learned by living hundreds of embodiments on this earth?

I suspect we live hundreds of lifetimes, and I suspect that each life we live is judged. But not judged by a Supreme Being, but rather judged by our higher selves, the spirit that exists within each of us. I think we know when we've done wrong. We learn something in this life, we are born again, and we learn a new lesson in our new life. Wash, rinse, repeat, until we get all the stains out. That, I believe, is our human existence.

Don't judge others. Some are just starting their journeys and they have a long way to go and much to learn. You're here on earth, so you're still learning lessons, too. We're all learning lessons. Be kind to others and remember that they're just learning, so sometimes, like all of us have done, they make mistakes.

I made a little slideshow to wrap up this blog post. View it here.