What Incarnates?

What incarnates reveals the relationship between what you think of as “you” and your soul. A few decades ago, your soul decided to incarnate on the physical plane to explore a facet of its own awareness, evolution, or whatever. It partitioned off a fragment of its own energy, i.e., your aura, found a suitable body about to be born to suitable parents, and attached to it, or incarnated into it. It has done this hundreds of times before in the past and will continue to do it in the future (see diagram). The fact that hundreds of “you’s” comprise your soul gives you some idea of the enormity of your soul’s make-up.

The importance of this is that, in terms of quality, there is no difference at all between your soul and the fragment of soul that is you; it’s just a matter of quantity, in that not all your soul incarnates to become “you.” What incarnates is that fragment of your soul that will become your "higher self."

The TV series Star Trek gives us a good analogy for what incarnates in those crew members “beaming down” to the surface of a planet for a remote mission, such as collecting specimens of plants and rocks. Just like you did, they leave the safety of the starship, often going into harm’s way to conduct their mission, which can only be done on the planet’s surface. The difference is that the crew members do not forget about the ship orbiting overhead, whereas we do forget about the soul plane. Why do we forget? So our mission of exploration is not compromised or diluted by the knowledge. Learning what we need to know would be impossible if we remembered all about our soul, comfortable and safe on the soul plane, and about those hundreds of other lifetimes. It’s the forgetting that allows us to treat Earth lives as real. If we remembered, we’d know that all this drama down here is just silly illusion and wouldn’t be able to take it seriously.

When your mission to the planet’s surface – whatever it is – is complete, what do you do? As a soul fragment, you simply leave your physical body and move your point of focus back to the soul plane, where you remain a separate focal point of consciousness, and continue to learn, grow and evolve on the soul plane on behalf of your soul.

Your soul, of course, uploads everything you have learned and felt on the physical plane as part of its growth and the payoff in having created the life you’re living. And it can make all that wisdom and experience available to future incarnations. This is hugely important, because as soul absorbs and embraces all the wisdom and experiences of each incarnation, it becomes successively more well-rounded and wiser. This in turn allows souls to create even wiser incarnations in the future, so this makes you a vital rung on your soul’s ladder of evolution.

So the other side of the What Incarnates? question is that the you that you think of as "you" doesn't reincarnate. When you cross over to the soul plane, you staythere for eternity. You personally do not come back; only another portion of your soul does. Does that meanthat the soul plane is getting more crowded as people die and are replaced by new incarnations? Yes, but it'salso infinitely big, so it never feels crowded.

Each identity your soul creates is a focal point of consciousness and its own sovereign entity, and still alive and well on the soul plane, as one of the many fragments that make up the soul. These fragments of soul continue in the afterlife, working on their own pet projects, and do not themselves reincarnate. When your soul decides to incarnate again for some purpose, a new fragment of its energy differentiates itself as the nucleus of that new incarnation and begins its pre-life planning. It may “borrow” characteristics, memories and skills from the other fragments (including yours) and store them in the subconscious mind that connects and underpins all of a soul’s incarnations. However, this new sovereign entity has never existed before. (This “borrowing” accounts for why people like Mozart could compose symphonies by the age of four.) In books he channeled from the soul plane, John Lennon revealed his soul borrowed heavily from its earlier musical lifetimes, notably Beethoven. And he got his poetic skill from poet Robert Browning. (John’s wife Yoko counts Elisabeth Barrett Browning as another of her soul’s incarnations, and in that lifetime, she left the Earth plane long before her husband did. In this more recent lifetime, the husband took the early exit for balance.)

What incarnates then is a separate fragment of soul each time, while most of your soul stays on the soul plane.

"What Incarnates?" is excerpted from "Death Without Fear" by Tony Stubbs ...