Hello Steve,

You wrote,
How do we as eternal beings come into existence? I believe we are given the gift of eternal life, with individuality (although we are all basically one as we are infinite expressions of God) and free will, but I wonder if we had a celebration of birth from God in the spiritual world and then later at some point when we were ready, we volunteered to incarnate on this planet, which is basically a school?

We don’t know the answer to that. Our ability to understand is too limited. I know that’s not a satisfactory answer, but it’s simply true. We can’t imagine a world without time and space, where eternity isn’t measured in revolutions around the sun. We live in the physical realm, the world of beginnings and endings; everything has a beginning—everything has an ending. And yet we can stretch ourselves to imagine what eternity might be like. There are around 6 billion people on the planet today, and billions more preceded us. Imagine that in eternity we live the lives of every person who lives or has ever lived. And we’re different enough from our little selves now to be able to recall and learn from every life we’ve ever lived. I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just saying that the alternatives for eternity are so vast and the possibilities so different from what we can envision that eternity could be virtually anything.

Look at the difference between our consciousness and a cat’s. When my cat walks across the page of the book I’m reading on quantum mechanics, what does the cat know about sub-atomic particles? What does the cat know about books and words? The cat couldn’t even ask questions about it. They’re entirely out of the realm of its consciousness. And in the same way, an earthworm’s consciousness (if I can use that term loosely) is vastly different from the cat’s.

Then imagine that the beings we will be in a million Earth years will be as different as the consciousness of an earthworm is different from our consciousness today. Then imagine that the being we’ll be in a billion Earth years will be a thousand times greater in difference than that. We can imagine only how unimaginable eternity is.

And so, it is very likely that consciousness has always existed and always will continue to exist, entirely outside of the Sun years we’re accustomed to now. And we certainly will never be able to envision what that will be like for an eternity of changes. We just don’t know and couldn’t understand it if someone told us about it.

You wrote,
Do we have soul contracts to fullfill certain missions or goals while we are here? Do some souls return again and again until they have accomplished their intended tasks while others come only once or twice?

Yes, we’re told that we may choose to reincarnate on Earth, both to learn lessons and to serve others in some way. But we choose. We aren’t sent through school. We evaluate our learning and where we want to be and we decide whether to reincarnate. At that time, we may choose our circumstances to learn the lessons we need to learn or fulfill our mission. Some say we actually choose our parents, while others say we just choose the general circumstances. But we decide whether and when to reincarnate.

You wrote,
Do we incarnate on other planets at other times?

Yes, we may choose to incarnate on other planets or other spheres of existence outside of our understanding now. We will do so to learn lessons or serve.

You wrote,
Is there a Karmic law that requires reincarnation to balance out bad Karma accumulated in past life times? For example, could a child viciously murdered in this lifetime be a soul who himself, viciously murdered a child in a past life and in order to balance the negative Karma, agreed via soul-contract, to face a similar fate?

Absolutely not. That’s very clear from everything those on the next planes of life tell us. We are not forced to learn a lesson because of our failings in a past incarnation. We do review what happened in the incarnation, but to learn and grow only. And during that review, we may feel all the feelings others involved in our life events felt. However, we may decide that we want to incarnate to feel the feelings of a person like one we treated cruelly. I can’t imagine why, though. I don’t think anyone would choose to be murdered. But whatever we choose, it’s our choice to make based on our accumulated experiences and spiritual growth. And when I say “we” and “our,” I mean the individual we are now and the person on the next planes of life who is able to recall and benefit from other incarnation memories and experiences.

Karma is misunderstood. In the West, people transform it into the Christian tradition with judgment and punishment. That’s not what it means in the East, although the meaning does differ among the Eastern traditions. Instead, Karma means our totality of being; it’s who we are and where we are spiritually. There is no “bad Karma.” There is only Karma. In the West, we know from Yeshua’s (Jesus’) teachings that the Kingdom of God is within. Actions in the physical realm aren’t spiritual or unspiritual. Thus, the person we are is the eternal self, and that self is at a level of spiritual development that is like Karma.

It’s difficult in the West to leave that feeling of a need for condemnation and judgment. That’s not what Yeshua taught. The church added that. There is no judgment. There’s only who we are at this moment in our spiritual growth.

Love and peace, Craig