Reincarnation

Today's lecture provided the answers to so many unanswered questions I had regarding reincarnation. The rebirth of our souls, over and over again, is something I have always believed in and accepted as a fundamental truth. Despite never having studied this or really knowing much of anything about it, it's just something that has always made perfect sense to me. The past two days our teacher has been discussing the three worlds and bodies, the physical, the astral, and the causal. We inhabit the physical world and our physical bodies, but upon death, our souls, which are encapsulated in our physical, astral, and causal bodies, move on to the astral world. The astral world is almost exactly the same as the physical world, but instead of being made of physical elements (earth, fire, water, air, and space) the astral world is comprised of energy and light. When our physical body dies, our astral body takes on the form of our physical body at its best (typically this is when we are between the ages of 25-30). In the astral world, things are generally pleasant and life is easy. But because of this, the spiritual development of our souls is greatly slowed down, and most astral beings want to get back down to the physical world to quicken our spiritual development.

At the moment of conception in a woman's womb, there is fierce competition in the astral world to enter the body of the new embryo. However, it is only the soul with the closest karmic match to the mother that will get to inhabit this new physical being. Thus, the purer the soul of the mother, the purer the soul of her child. And thus, a soul is reincarnated into a new life. In the Hindu tradition, it is thought that a typical soul goes through this process of reincarnation for an average of 1 million years, before it is released from the cycle of reincarnation. So don't worry, if you haven't got things right in this life, you have plenty more to try to set things straight!