by Gabriele Conrad, Goonellabah, New South Wales

A recent article by Nicole Serafin – Creating a Life to Come Back to – reminded me of how much I used to be put off by the concept of reincarnation and more specifically, by the way people talked about it – and before I go any further here, let me also state that in hindsight, I have actually always known reincarnation to be true, but I was fighting it because the way it was presented to me did not ever make sense. And because I was relying on outside information and not ever trusting of what I was feeling, did not even know what that might mean and how it could possibly be achieved, I had thrown the baby out with the bath water.

I used to get quite riled over reincarnation because the way it was presented would either be in the form of humans coming back as cockroaches, rats or poodles (the poodles are my addition) or in a very off-handed manner demonstrated in throw-away remarks such as, “well, that’s great then, get it wrong this time and just come back to have another go at it next time”. I even heard arguments defending suicide based on this casual assumption. But what was this next ‘go at it’ to be based on? And if we can’t do it now, if we can’t have this life we so want and don’t have now, what will make it possible for anybody to do it differently that imagined next time? Different parents perhaps? Or a different country of birth? Possibly more money? A better education? A different job? But where was it all going to come from?

All I knew for certain was that if indeed there was a God, and if there was a creation and not just this bad and hopeless joke of an obviously useless existence, then the whole thing better be more glorious and astute than those man-made assumptions that felt a bit like really bad science fiction, and did nothing but project human frailties, shortcomings and hopes onto an imagined deity and assumed divine order. If this God thing existed, then he, she, it better be stupendous – or I wasn’t having a bar of it! And so I didn’t.

The other thing that used to really bug me about all this reincarnation nonsense was that its proponents seemed to all have been Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene or Nefertiti; there were apparently a few reappearances of Napoleon and I had heard of people who believed they were Jesus. It just made no sense and I used to ask people to please give me one good reason, a good explanation in favour of reincarnation to convince me once and for all that it existed – if only I could meet someone who would simply and honestly say they had been Adolf Hitler I used to think, and not all those Cleopatras, nuns and monks and famous warriors!

Enter Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine. The first few times Serge mentioned reincarnation, I was squirming in my seat – or falling asleep, depending on my form and food intake that day. I must have stayed awake long enough for some things to start sinking in though, because I gradually realised that Serge was doing a different take on reincarnation, one that actually made sense. Not the cockroach and poodle variety, no conventional religious take, and certainly not the shirking-all-responsibility variety that had always so repulsed me. He was talking about reincarnation as taking responsibility for me and my life at present which then and only then leads to me taking responsibility for the next round (reincarnation) and me and my life then which leads to the next round… you get the picture. He talked about reincarnation as an expression of divine love, the incredibly loving opportunity to learn and develop, be more loving myself, live more fully, joyously and consciously – and build on that. What goes around comes around, quite literally!

I learned and yet didn’t have to learn, because somehow I had always known it, that reincarnation is a law of love which allows me to return to what I truly am, even if I have no full understanding of what exactly that might be yet. But it is stupendous, that much I know for sure while I now willingly and very consciously partake of this opportunity to go around in daily, monthly and yearly cycles as does the earth around the Sun, and knowingly and willingly undo, redo, file, polish, buff, smooth and wipe the lesions, bumps and warts I keep running into and tripping over.

And the funny thing is of course that all the time, while I was waging my own private war against reincarnation – I was still coming back; in fact, hello – I was already back: just like the earth had never changed into a flat disc or swapped the going-around-in-circles-bit with the Sun, no matter how fervently it had otherwise been decreed.