The Cycle: Lessons Learned and Not Learned
At the beginning, before any of this was written, Jordan outlined the entire book. During a session of channeled writing, he named each chapter and described its contents. It took five minutes.
As I write this, I’m sad because we are reaching the end of our work.
Jordan says:
Remember all those times I sat in the chair in your office? All those conversations? They will never end. This book is one small part of our conversation. It started lifetimes ago; it will continue after the last star goes dark. Souls who are joined in love keep talking, keep holding each other. Look at the night sky, Dad. The afterlife is so much closer than those lights. It is next to you; I am next to you.
I ask Jordan about the cycles of life, this chapter’s focus. He says:
Reincarnation and the cycle of life are something most souls do for a long time. We start, in early lives, by learning how to manage the impulses of a highly reactive body and mind. We also learn how not to act on emotions that drive us to do extreme things. Our bodies seek to make life about pleasure and pain — avoiding what hurts and galloping after all that feels good. A lot of early learning is not to trust what the body demands.
In later incarnations, we grapple with desire — learning to recognize the venial desires that push us toward pleasure, the compensatory desires that drive us toward whatever relieves pain, and the consuming desires that sweep away everything that lies in their way. Consuming desires are the most destructive, and souls can spend many lives learning to tame them.
In time we begin to see the most beautiful form of desire: the desire born of our purpose in being here. We learn to listen to its whispering voice. And it directs us, unerringly, toward people, places, and work that are aligned with purpose.
The development of a soul — in the arc of a single life, and over many lives — grows from choices. Events don’t matter. The narrative doesn’t matter. The response to each event is what matters. The moment of choice — the path that forks toward love or compensatory acts, toward a sense of thou or mere pain management — is what matters.
As we develop, each incarnation requires the soul to struggle with a key flaw (for example, addiction, shame, fear, hubris, narcissism), which, in fact, is a gift. It is the illness we have chosen, the work we have selected to do. The flaw both drives us to catastrophe and lights a path toward the learning we came here for.
Our virtues, which we celebrate and weave into our identity, are less important than the flaw. Our virtues are the toolbox we were given for the struggle. But it’s the struggle itself — and the choices we make — that matters above all.
Each new life is a return to school. The pain is nothing — momentary if you remember why we’re here. When you look at a sunset, it is a beautiful end: a day that is over, where every choice has been made and cannot be made again. Death is the same: the choices of that life have been made and cannot be made again. And yet…on the next day, or in the next life, they can be made again. That is the cycle — learning on the next day what was bollixed on the day before, discovering in the next life a choice that eluded us in the life before.
There is no end to the time allotted for learning. Each of us — and all consciousness — will keep learning for all eternity.
Religions use the word eternity to mean an endless state of either reward (as in eternal reward, eternal rest) or damnation. But there is no eternal rest, no eternal reward. There is just an eternity of learning. Growing. Seeing new things.
I ask Jordan, Why are we doing this, learning forever?
The universe, all of consciousness, needs us to do this. We are each here to do something that only we can do and that needs to be done. We are here to learn something — different from what every other soul is learning — that all of consciousness needs to know.
No one else can learn — in quite the same way — this lesson; no one else will discover this precise truth or the wise course each of us must find. So the lessons must keep showing up until we find a new response.
Karma
I ask Jordan, Is there any difference between karma and learning?
Karma is essentially the momentum of learning. The lesson presents itself, over and over, until our choices change. It continues until we abandon the old, habitual response for something new. The lesson must continue — karma requires it — until we have sought and made a wiser choice.
Suppose you have, over the years, tended to withdraw from people in pain. You’re protecting yourself from their torment, but at the same time you’re abandoning sister and brother souls. You are breaking these connections; you are failing to learn how to love in the face of pain. The momentum of your learning — karma — will keep bringing these same, needy people across your path. You will be a magnet for them until you find a response that includes love.
Jordan is reminding me of a dear friend — Mary — whose desire to help others has been tempered by their overwhelming needs and pain. Mary has learned to “give them my fingertips.” By this she means that she extends her love to them but does not let them grab and pull her under. Mary has learned to hold a loving connection without letting herself be consumed by another’s pain.
Jordan says:
As old karmic lessons are completed, new challenges will show up or even present themselves before the old lesson is learned. We are often working on more than one core lesson in a life. Just as some lives have more pain than others, some may also have more karmic challenges. This isn’t a sign of failure or of a stubborn soul who isn’t learning. The exact opposite may be the case. Often, lives with multiple challenges indicate that a soul has chosen a body and environment that will provide great and rapid learning.
We don’t careen from one life to another without pause. We need the life between lives to review and digest what we’ve done. We need to review the tape of the Akashic Record to see every choice, every word spoken, and what it wrought. It’s during this review process that lessons become clearer, choices are finally understood, and the damage we may have done can finally be faced.
So the cycle is absolutely necessary — from embodied life, to review in the spirit world, to a new incarnation — in order to gather wisdom and see deeper into the truth.
When the Cycle Ends
Jordan explains:
At some point the cycle ends. A soul has learned as much as the physical worlds can teach. There is a feeling of satiety, a sense that the physical realms of beauty and pain have been visited enough. The soul is no longer attracted to the waiting body. It no longer wants a part in the play.
And now the soul turns more completely to service — as a guide, healer, or creator in the world of spirit. It has new tasks, new things to learn. And in a rhythmic merging and unmerging with the whole, each spirit absorbs the truth of god, the truth all consciousness has gathered. The fruit of all our lives becomes the substance of consciousness, the light of the universe, the wisdom that breaks the barriers to everything as yet unknown.
I ask Jordan, What do we do with everything we learn? What does it mean to light the universe? Somehow this seems beautiful but insubstantial to me. Just words.
But Jordan is very clear. He says:
We learn in order to:
• love more deeply and completely;
• find more light, truth;
• and create the next universe.
Initially, this doesn’t seem any clearer or more specific to me. I ask for more details, and he talks about love:
We are all working to expand the meaning of love. Love is the energy that supports the spirit world and the life between lives. But there it is pure, untouched by pain or loss. The experience of pure love, the golden light that awaits souls at the threshold beyond death, is beautiful but not enough. It is love without cost, without disappointment, without hunger. It is love without the struggle to see and know, without, to use Rumi’s metaphor, the wound that lets in light.* So we incarnate to know a love that’s held at great price, a love of the heart and the breath, a love of reaching arms rather than telepathy.
My love for you, Dad, is expressed by telepathy. But when you send love back, it’s the image of hugging me, feeling my head against your cheek. And that is exactly the difference between love expressed in the spirit world and love expressed on Earth. The former is open, direct, and effortless. The love on Earth requires intention and choice. And the choice to love often brings pain — as your love for me must always be marbled with sadness and missing.
So love is a bigger challenge for incarnates, and in some ways it is more beautiful. In the cycle of life and the life between lives, love is constantly redefined by the presence or absence of pain. The cycle also deepens our capacity to see and know one another.
The light of the universe is conscious seeing and learning — which is the foundation of love. And the dark in the universe is what we have yet to know and love. As each succeeding universe grows more luminous, souls grow more luminous — with new love and knowledge.
In this way, the universe is nothing more than knowledge (truth) that generates love. It is nothing more than conscious thought.
Truth is an infinite wellspring that can never be completely known by the whole (meaning collective consciousness or god). Each of us gathers small particles of the truth in each life. These particles, which are eventually held by all souls and all consciousness, populate the universe — and each new, more perfect universe. Our work, the work of all consciousness, is never done. We go on gathering truth and wisdom across countless cycles, across the millennia on this planet and others.
But learning is not all that we do, not the only function of consciousness. Consciousness also creates. We incarnate to create new forms of beauty and truth. New thoughts and images.
In fact, everything we learn creates. Everything we learn makes something new. If you and I are talking, Dad, and you discover something, you will make a new experience from that. What you create could be a new sweetness in your relationship to Mom, a new poem, a new therapy method for your clients. And those new thoughts — yours, mine, and every reincarnating soul’s — allow collective consciousness to make new things. New natural laws, a new physics, new forms of love, new ways to enter and know one another, new ways to heal, new forms of humor. Do you see? Everything we do, in every life, teaches us — individually and as a whole — something that in turn powers more beautiful creations. It is an endless cycle of choosing, learning, and making.
And when this life is over, when you return to me in the spirit world, we’ll show each other what we’ve learned. We’ll hold it so it will never be lost. Then we’ll go out again to take our parts in a new play, with new lessons.
Dad, here is what you’ve learned in this life: I will never leave your side; nothing can separate our souls. You can still hold me, as you did at Saul’s. We will keep talking forever. We will learn from each other forever. Long after we have stopped coming to this planet, we will be making things together. This book and the long, beautiful conversations we’ve had in this life are a moment, a bead in the endless string threaded by love.
* Jalal Al-din Rumi, “No Room for Form,” in The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 142.