OUR LONG SCHOOLING

OUR LONG SCHOOLING Around the Year with Emmet Fox June 30 Why is reincarnation necessary? Why do we come back for short excursions of perhaps seventy or eighty years instead of, let us say, living one very long lifetime of perhaps a thousand or even several thousand years? The explanation lies in man's reluctance to adopt new ideas and adapt himself to changing conditions. In each new experience however, he wants to do things in new ways, then as the years of his maturity go by, the strong race suggestions all around him gradually get their way. He begins to acquire vested interests (mentally) in the status quo. The only remedy, when crystallization sets in, is to remove him from the earth plane altogether; send him to the etheric planes for rest, reflection, assimilation, and general readjustment; and then bring him back once more as a baby, to experience a new youth and a new period of true spiritual production. There are other reasons why multiple lives are necessary. You need to develop every side of your character. You need to learn lessons of discipline and self-restraint, and you need to learn to use authority in the right way. You need to learn the lesson of getting on with other people, and you must also learn to be alone. You must learn to bear failure and disappointment with fortitude and you must learn to stand success without allowing your head to be turned. You have to learn both patience and the lesson of enterprise and adventure. Above all, you have to move about in time and space so that you may learn that nothing God made is really foreign or separate— and this could not be done in one lifetime. "Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ . . ." Galatians 3:24