Hello Lauris,

Let's imagine that it occurred to you one day that you know about the needs of homeless people, but you don't feel any compassion toward them. You decide that bothers you. "Why don't I feel any compassion? I should be going downtown looking for homeless people to help!" That shows you now feel a need for a change in your perspective, attitude, and emotions. You want to grow spiritually to be more loving and compassionate.

How do you do that?

Well, one way would be to go downtown dressed in rags and live among the homeless for a day or two. So you try that, but the first day, all you can think about is going back to your comfortable home. The second day, you know you're going home today, so you just stick around until the day is over and you get to go home.

You might be saying you'd be different, and maybe that would be true, but you've never done it. How many people out of the 6.5 billion people on the planet have done that? No one I know.

So now you're in a pickle. You want to be more compassionate and loving toward homeless people, but you don't want to go down to live with them for a couple of months or however long it takes.

To grow spiritually, we have to be in a situation where we don't think we have an out. We have to be REALLY homeless. We have to have no money, no friends, no relatives, no resources, no luck, and no hope. THEN, we can feel what it's like to be homeless. We won't be knowing it's all going to end in a day or week or month. We're homeless and hopeless. Then we learn how the homeless feel.

But how in the world do we have a situation in which we really feel we're homeless and hopeless? We would have to blank out our memory temporarily and be born into a situation in which we were going to be homeless. Our real selves would know we're not going to be homeless forever, but that self that's homeless has to really, really feel homeless. Then, after 70 or 80 years, you could come back to being who you are and look back on the experience. You could see that you came to understand hopelessness, and you came to understand what it's like to share every meager thing you have with others who are homeless. You will have grown spiritually.

For us to grow spiritually, in attitude, love, compassion, and wisdom, we have to really, really be in the situations. We have to feel the feelings. We can't think it's all a play and we're just pretending. We have to believe it because we're living it.

The Source, the Higher Power, is intent on giving us whatever we need to grow spiritually. Before we incarnated onto the Earth plane, we said, "Why don't I feel any compassion toward homeless people? I really want to feel it. I know I need to grow spiritually in my compassion." We would then make a choice to incarnate onto the Earth plane. The Source would make it happen for us. We would forget who we were and all the past lives we've lived. We would be born naked and start entirely fresh, but in a circumstance we choose. We decide to have the challenges and misery of being homeless. We are in charge of what happens to us. Then we would be in the real situation, feeling the real feelings of hopelessness and abandonment. Then we would grow. And when we transitioned out of this incarnation, we would carry with us all the growth we experienced. We would be more compassionate. We would understand what it's like to be homeless. We would learn to love more completely.

Then, in the next incarnation, we may decide humankind needs to learn those lessons of compassion we learned. And so we decide to incarnate again, only this time we want to teach others. Now, for that teaching to be real, we have to incarnate naked again, without knowledge of who we are. We have to grow up and go through life's trials and in spite of them feel the compassion we learned in that other lifetime of being homeless. And with those feelings, we could help others learn to feel compassion. We could run a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, without realizing who we were. And our genuine love and compassion would be a beacon to others. And we would speak about love and engage in others to work with us, not out of knowing we're evolved beings come to Earth, but out of coming to the struggle and overcome obstacles honestly. We would be a model because we were just ordinary people, being loving and compassionate.

And so the answer to your question is that we have to incarnate without memory in order to experience the reality of the feelings and grow spiritually. It's the only way it can be done.

Love and peace, Craig