Reincarnation — Spotify from the CEC Library

The topic of reincarnation arose from a question: over the course of our lives, are the cruel things we do to others recorded so that we later return to make amends in a subsequent life—which would be the payment of karma? Reincarnation is not a mandatory process. If it were, there would be no free will, and we would be unable to grow and evolve. Upon reaching a certain point in one's evolution, there is in fact no longer any need to reincarnate.

We reincarnate for several reasons. First, we reincarnate because we believe that we must reincarnate, since this is what we learned. Another reason is that we believe we must pay our debts. You reincarnate and imagine someone with a ledger saying, "Here you must make amends for the previous life." We also reincarnate because of attachment. Attachment to all the things we experience in this life—whether needs or desires that human beings have, such as money, physical contact, sexuality, and immense neediness—causes us to reincarnate.

Another reason for reincarnating is that when we leave a family, we tend to return to the same family. This is a process that is clear when we are in the spiritual dimension, but upon reincarnating we no longer truly know that it is the same family. We perceive this only because we study spirituality.

The reincarnation process does not follow a defined path. People often say, "We reincarnate after a particular length of time." It does not work that way. Each of us is a distinct being with specific difficulties and work. Imagine that Chico Xavier relinquished his physical body and went to the other side, where he must certainly be working because that is what he always did: continuous work, a constant effort on behalf of life. It is impossible to determine how long it will take, whether five hundred, four hundred, or three hundred years.

Reincarnation varies. You can disincarnate one day and, after one month or one week, be back here if you have sufficient consciousness to make this return to Earth. If you are very clouded and very numb from everything you experienced here, it will certainly take longer. I remember a situation that happened to me: my spiritual helpers asked me to guide a group of people who had gone a very long time without reincarnating. At the time, I told my partner that I would go into the living room at exactly eight o'clock to speak with the spirits and guide them.

It was a group of spirits who had gone more than three hundred years without reincarnating. I was sitting in a room whose armchairs formed a square. It turned out that all the spirits were sailors. They did not reincarnate because they were numb. After so much time, when they reincarnated they would see buildings whose height they would not understand, airplanes flying, enormous ships made of metal and iron, and a great deal of technology. They would have a serious problem and feel like foreigners in a place that was in fact their own planet, their own world. They needed guidance in order to understand these things better.

It was a surreal situation: I spoke with them, explaining what had happened and what things were like at that moment. The world had grown, evolved, and discovered various things; ships were no longer ships of the kind they knew. I told them a great deal of information so that they could prepare to reincarnate without suffering the trauma of being in a completely unknown place and without facing a very serious emotional problem, because it would become a pathology, some kind of syndrome. The person is in a place they cannot understand, no matter how much they want to, because the last information they received does not correspond. It is all a continuity.

For these consciousnesses to be able to reincarnate, I held several meetings with them. The first took place physically in the room so they could have contact with the most physical aspect; later, I carried out the work in the astral dimension. My current work involves incarnation and disincarnation. One should not assume that being able to perform a lucid astral projection and undertake actions that benefit others means that one has merit. The more one learns, the more one realizes how small one is and that one must do the utmost. Countless people on this planet live in very difficult conditions and do not have even a notion of spirituality.

Our growth depends on becoming better and on the liberation so often preached: to become free, we must leave dependencies behind, and our primary dependencies are emotional ones, which are countless. Recently, at an event at St. Damian, several people from different places requested help in achieving astral projection. Self-knowledge depends on our own effort, not on someone else's effort. On another occasion, in Rio, someone said, "Make me achieve an astral projection so that I can demonstrate everything I am capable of doing." I replied that to accomplish anything, one must begin by showing oneself to oneself.

It is an effort, the effort I mentioned some time ago. I have told this story so many times, but I consider it fantastic: a person approaches a wise man and says, "Look, I want to be wise." The wise man replies, "It is easy; there is no problem at all. Do you want to be wise? Then come with me." He points to a well full of water and says, "Put your head in the water." The person put their head in the water, and the wise man held them there. At first, everything was fine, but then the person became short of breath, grew desperate, and began to struggle. Suddenly, they shoved the wise man, knocked him to the ground, and said, "Look, you do not want to teach me to be wise; you want to drown me." The wise man replied, "Look, on the day when you want to be wise as much as you want to breathe, you will be able to become wise. That is all."

Those who want to perform astral projection need to be determined and say, "Yes, I want it; I want spirituality; I want to follow this path." I know doubts get in our way. We are speaking about reincarnation. We think that when we do something—for example, betray someone, kill a person, or mistreat someone—there is an entry in the Black Book of Reincarnations and that the account will have to be paid in the next life. It does not work that way.

We truly are our own heirs. What happens is that you encounter what you are. If you do cruel things, if you are ill-tempered, if you feel anger toward people, you do not expect things around you to become good, do you? It would make no sense. As a result of what we have learned in life, we are accustomed to being extremely angry or ill-tempered, or even bitter and hurt by life. Suddenly, you choose a saint, God, Christ, or Buddha and ask that figure to fix your life. We ourselves are the ones who must fix our life.

All the higher spiritual consciousnesses will be watching, and they can strengthen our joyful work and our work of positive expansion. But they will not strengthen our work of ill temper, unhappiness, or anger toward others. They certainly will not be nearby. It is important for us to understand this because reincarnation is a learning process. You come to Earth and, with the physical body, face situations that are very difficult for human beings, such as birth and death, which already constitute learning. During this journey between birth and death, you relate to yourself and to all the people around you. With all the frankness of my heart, this is not simple.

Why? Because we have our emotional process, which we have augmented and overloaded throughout various reincarnations. If you want to become better, you will have to understand yourself very well; the other person is not to blame. You are the one who needs to correct and reconsider yourself so that you can leave the cycle of reincarnations, which is a process of repeating the things we truly do not understand. This is important to know.