It helps to understand reincarnation if we first grasp the idea of the Group Soul, or Soul Team. A rough analogy for a Group Soul could be a pop group, or rock group, or the like. The individual members of the group have their own identity; yet the group itself has a unique identity created from their purpose and activities - which in this case would be making music together (we will leave out ‘partying’ as part of their purpose). The individual members are affected by the successes, or failures of the group. Similarly, companies, teams and other collections of individuals can have a strong identity that the members of that group share in.
As an individual in the Afterlife evolves, they tend to come across other Souls with whom they have a natural connection. These souls begin to recognize themselves as able to function as part of a Group Soul. They may team up for specific tasks, for a specific purpose, or just because there is a natural affinity between them. When working as a group, they function as; “The One in Many and the Many in One.” They still have their individuality, and can function from that whenever they choose, but they are not limited to it.
“You will recognize how greatly power of will, mind and perception can be increased through your entry into the larger self [of the Group Soul]. You continue to preserve your identity and your fundamental individuality. But you develop immensely in character and in spiritual force. You gather the wisdom of the ages, not through the continual stress and strain of hundreds of years passed in the confinement of the crude physical body, you gather it through love which has a gravitational pull and draws you within the memories of those who are akin to your soul, however different their bodies may have been when they were on earth.” — Beyond Human Personality
The Group Soul offers tremendous advantages in that members can gain directly from each others’ experience - as if they had had those experiences. If one member of the Group Soul has an experience (or is currently incarnated to have a certain experience), the other members of that Group Soul can gain from the benefits of that experience too. This allows members of a Group Soul to fully experience a life on Earth that they have not had themselves. They gain all the benefits of that life experience without having to undergo it directly themselves. In this way, someone who had never had experience of living as, say, a Japanese person can fully know what that is like - as they can tap into that experience via another member of their Group Soul who has had that ‘Japanese experience’. Group Souls tend to be composed of a diverse group as that provides the most benefits. Some Group Souls are composed of only a few members; others may have thousands of members.
“I have not noted any evidence of a continual progression of births and deaths for any one particular soul. I do not for a moment believe that the individual returns a hundred times or more to the earth. This is indeed, a wrong assumption. There may, of course, be certain exceptions which you are more likely to meet with among those primitive beings who seem incapable of aspiration - of desire to rise above their physical nature. But the majority of people only reincarnate two, three or four times. Though if they have some humane purpose or plan to achieve they may return [more times].” — Beyond Human Personality
The ability to share experiences via membership of a Group Soul makes it unnecessary to need to incarnate in order to have a particular physical life experience. Why bother incarnating when you can get the whole experience via the Group Soul? Indeed, a member of a Group Soul may well choose to have a particular type of incarnation to bring that experience to the benefit of their whole group. This means that Group Souls can go beyond sharing their experiences; they can also choose to share karma. One member of a Group Soul may choose to pick up the karma of another Group Soul member, or it might even be a collective issue for many of the members, and incarnate to work through it.
It could have been that in earlier times reincarnation was more common, because of lack of “desire to rise above their physical nature” mentioned above, and perhaps will become less common in the future as humanity evolves.
One way of understanding the Group Soul is based on this story told by a visitor to one of the higher planes of the Afterlife. A ‘master’ or teacher there explains to her his perspective on Reincarnation.
“I was particularly attracted by a vine that in appearance was not unlike the humble pumpkin that abounds on earth. It was in full bearing and for all its ethereal quality, it seemed to me to be an incongruous object in such surroundings. Leo [my guide] laughed at my astonishment and said he would ask one of the Masters to explain it. The Master’s eyes twinkled with mirth as he sensed my amazement. ‘We keep that vine for the very purpose of attracting the attention of visitors,’ he said. ‘It is such a perfect example of the logical working of the mind of God and it illustrates clearly what I am about to tell you. Here, you have an example of the one-in-many and the many-in-one. Just as the life force that gives energy to every fruit and tendril of this plant stems from the one root source, so are the many human souls infused with the emanations of one Spirit.
‘This we call the Group Soul. As you will observe, the fruits of this plant are all at different stages of development. Some have reached maturity, while others are as yet only at the commencement of their development within the flower. Yet all are united on the one vine. It is thus with [souls]. In the human garden of God, there are many such vines and in the final harvest, the fruit will be gathered together and the seeds of that which has reached maturity will again be scattered, to take root and bear fruit. Not all who are born on earth return to earth; yet, just as each individual seed of this particular vine, no matter from which item of the ripened fruit it is taken, will reproduce the characteristics of the parent source, so with the souls… This, in the latter case, you term reincarnation.” — Letters From Mother
It does seem a bit ‘inefficient’ for every person to have to evolve through every experience on an entirely individual basis. The benefits of functioning as a team, or group, are well known to us on earth, so presumably those in the next world know about those benefits too.
If we have memories of past lives, these are not necessarily ones we lived ourselves. Since Group Soul members are able to tap into the experience of other members of the group, then memory of a past life may well be a life that was actually lived by another member of that Group Soul. Group Souls can share all aspects of life experience including karma. We could be working out part of the karma of the Group Soul and that memory of the past life encapsulates what needs to be worked on: as well as the insights and Soul Qualities that we can learn to embody from the experience.
“if you would understand… evolution, this group-soul must be studied and understood. For instance, it explains many of the difficulties that people will assure you can be removed only by the doctrine of reincarnation. You may think my statement frivolous, but the fact that we do appear on earth to be paying for the sins of another life is, in a certain sense, true. It was our life, and yet not our life. In other words, a soul belonging to the group of which I am a part lived that previous life which built up for me the framework of my earthly life, lived it before I had passed through the gates of birth.” — Road to Immortality
Sometimes a number of different members of a Group Soul will incarnate at the same time to bring something specific into the Earth to benefit humanity such as new ideas, new technology and so on. Such people may appear as business or personal rivals in life, but are really working towards the same goal of human betterment.
Which ‘I’ am I?
In order to understand the idea of reincarnation, we need to first understand the process of incarnation. We need to know who or what it is that incarnates, before we can decide whether this later re-incarnates.
As we incarnate, and experience a level of conscious awareness of our surroundings, we pick up ideas and beliefs about who we are. I myself am incarnate in a Scottish body and I was born in the city of Glasgow. That conditions my experience of life. My ideas of who and what I am are shaped by the life I’ve had so far.
If I were having a life as an Inuit hunter in Alaska, or bushman in the Kalahari dessert, or a German Engineer, or an Arab Merchant or whatever, my ideas of who I am would be very different. Now I think of myself as “a man from Glasgow” and what I think, feel and do largely comes out of that identity.
Let’s say rebirth happens and I have a future incarnation as a woman in Paris. If as a “A women in Paris,” I had no recollection of ‘my’ life as “A man from Glasgow,” could that Scottish self be said to be incarnate? If that previous being, “A man from Glasgow,” is not incarnate, then it cannot be “re-incarnate” at least not in that life.
We could argue that it is the Soul of both personalities that continues to incarnate. I am not only incarnate as “A man from Glasgow,” I am also incarnate as a Soul. My Soul is having an experience of itself as “A man from Glasgow.” The Soul is presumably what incarnates and therefore it is the Soul that would re-incarnate.
If it is the Soul who incarnates, or reincarnates, what happens to the person we are now when we go to the Afterlife? The Afterlifers all seem to agree that individuality is maintained and is not lost. They show all the characteristics of being unique individuals with their own personalities. They are the same person one second after death as they were one second before death and that they then continue to evolve at their own pace.
“Life on earth is only a school, and only the beginning of the spirit education, only the truth, the almost tragic truth, that the soul arrives here just as it left the earth, - no better, no wiser, - and that true happiness here is in their own power, and must come from their own adaptation to the laws of spirit life.” — Life Here and Hereafter
Those who transition from Earth as children grow up in the Afterlife to become adults, so this also confirms that they also evolve as a person. Even in earth life, we experience a shift in who we think we are. At one point, we have all been 3-year-olds, 10-year-olds and so on. Your 3-year-old self is still part of you, but you are now a different person from what you were then - I hope! Some may say that the 3-year-old self has died to become the adult, but that is not really true. We move on, we change and grow but all the parts of us are still with us somehow. We are still essentially ourselves, yet we discover more about who this Self actually is. Much of the Self Help movement is about us growing beyond the limits of our early social conditioning into being a larger Self.
Imagine yourself after being in the Afterlife for a thousand years. Your attitude by then to your current self may be somewhat similar to how you now look at your 3-year-old self. Yes, it is still part of you; yet you are also much more than that. Therefore, which self would reincarnate? Would it be; the person you were when last on Earth, the person you had become in the Afterlife, or would it be your Soul?
If your 15-year-old self had asked, “Will I reincarnate?”, what would the correct answer have been? A person in the Afterlife, seeing your future, might answer “No.” They know you will soon mature beyond being the self who asked the question. Or they might say, “You will soon grow out of being your current self, therefore your current self cannot re-incarnate.” Alternatively, they might understand that your real question is, “Will I have another life?” and answer “Yes” irrespective of whether the other life is here or in the Hereafter.
Therefore, the answer to the question, “Will I reincarnate?” really depends on which self, which ‘I’, we are referring to when we ask the question. The underlying question seems to really be, ”Will I continue to exist as an individual after this life?” And the answer is a definite “Yes!” If you experience a reincarnation on earth, it will be because you choose it. However, the ‘you’ that will reincarnate will be a more mature version of who you are now, as you will have changed and grown by then – either here or in the Afterlife. As mentioned earlier, you can also choose to experience ‘reincarnation’ by participating in an incarnation being experienced by another member of the same Group Soul as yourself.
Reincarnation seems to be more of a Soul issue, or Group Soul issue and it seems to be this deeper sense of self, this deeper “I” that actually reincarnates. The Soul can presumably involve a personality or character that it developed in a previous incarnation in that new incarnation if that personality is willing to co-operate. However, perhaps we will really only understand Reincarnation when we see it from the perspective of the Afterlife.
Male, Female and Transgender
The Afterlife offers interesting slants to Sexual Equality. Since the Soul in not specifically male or female, it has the qualities of both. Therefore, we tend to have the qualities of both in us.
“It is regrettable that God or the Eternal Spirit should have been given a masculine denomination. For the idea that divinity is pre-eminently male conveys a suggestion of inferiority in women, which, through the centuries, has had an injurious effect upon their character. Their gifts have often been allowed to atrophy, their ambitions have been thwarted… discarnate beings are forced by their experience to take the larger view. For we realize that, in connection with birth and death, in the majority of cases the soul which has been a man in one [if they choose to reincarnate] becomes a woman in the next earthly existence.” — Beyond Human Personality
This raises the issue of what to do if a someone feels themselves to be of a different sex from the type of body they are born into. If someone is born into a male body, then this is a good chance for them to cultivate male qualities; if born into a female body, it is a good chance to cultivate female qualities. I suspect that from a Soul’s perspective, it is more about cultivating the relevant qualities than it is about body type. However, the body type we are born into is probably at least a very strong hint, and a strong disposition, towards the qualities our Soul would like to cultivate this time around.
If someone just cannot stand living in the body type they are born into, then it is understandable that they would want to go through sex-change processes. Whatever choice they make around that, it behooves them to deliberately cultivate the qualities of the body type they are born into. Otherwise, they run the risk of getting out of balance and stuck in a rut of being either too developed in their male qualities, or too developed in their female qualities. To truly express our Soul, we need to be able to express both male and female qualities. An over-development of one set of qualities at the expense of the other reduces our ability to live our Soul's purpose in the world. To truly embody the Soul in daily life, we need to be able to balance dynamic qualities of boldness and courage, with more reflective qualities of kindness and sensitivity.
It seems possible that people may sometimes feel uncomfortable if they find themselves in a body type of the opposite sex of the one they had in a previous life. Yet, that does not necessarily mean there is something wrong – even if it feels ‘wrong’ to them. Whether it is possible for a Soul to intend to incarnate as one body type and end up as another, I don’t know. It is probably impossible to make hard and fast rules about such things, but it seems wise at least to hold off any sex-change procedures till the person has reached a reasonable level of physical and emotional maturity. In any event, it is only to the extent that we are aligned with the purpose of our Soul in a particular lifetime that the lifetime will have any real value.
This is an example of a man who was undertaking rebirth as a woman:
“During the time of this preparation before rebirth, the spirit, or Light from Above… sought the earthly conditions which would be best fitted to develop his nascent desire for improvement, and which would also help to enlarge his outlook and enrich his nature. It was decided therefore, that his soul should now inhabit a female form, that he should be born into poverty and meet with insuperable difficulties at nearly every step of his road. Still more importantly, because he had despised and rejected Love, he must now be refused it and in loneliness learn the lessons which only adversity can teach… Thus, by going back, he made a step forward, and in this new incarnation was able to harvest far richer potentialities f
or existence on a higher level of consciousness. Through trouble he carved and reshaped himself, increasing his capacity for living in a finer world beyond the grave.” — After Death: Letters from Julia
Memory of Past Lives
Becoming aware of 'previous lives' has become part of the healing process for some and is often achieved via hypnosis, or it can arise spontaneously. Yet not everything that we experience as a past life is actually that. The way that our inner self, our Soul, communicates with us is very similar to some of the ways that people in the Afterlife communicate with us and it can be easy to mix up the two. An Afterlifer might communicate by sharing their experience of their life with us, and we may feel as if it had been our own life owing to lack of skill in handling such subtle forms of communication. Their memories may arise in our mind and we might feel as if they are our own memories.
Also, we could be tapping into a life experience that another member of our Group Soul has gone through, and interpreting that as our own. The way such experiences are sometimes resolved in a healing occurring may also not be purely personal as we might have taken on a karmic role for the Group Soul.
One way that communication occurs in subtle realms is through the direct sharing of experiences. This allows a person to communicate an experience so fully that the recipient feels that they had that experience. This can also take place between Afterlifers and people on Earth. A sensitive person, especially if untrained, can pick up impressions, ideas, feelings, memories, and even the full experience of a situation, from a discarnate being in their vicinity and make the wrong assumptions about their source. The arising of these experiences can seem very real; yet they are not personal. It can take a person with a strong sense of self to realize that such experiences are not theirs being remembered from a past life, but are someone else's. Therefore, lack of training in dealing in subtle energies and the need for more personal development in some areas of our character can cause us to misinterpret the true source of such experiences and to incorrectly assume that they were our own personal experience.
Afterlife Adventures Page 19