Many reasons for physical life
QUESTION: Masters, you often teach that we are here to discover who we really are and to love ourselves. Ultimately is this our only purpose and our full attention can be placed on being love and light and the embodiment of our soul, or do our pre-planned contracts and life lessons of perhaps bringing an invention into the world, teaching others, creating a community, or perhaps bringing up a family need to be completed first? ~Hazel, UK
ANSWER: When we give the above purpose we are summarizing the ultimate reason for incarnating. It is by discovering your essence and feeling the unconditional love that is your nature that you are able to complete everything else you wish to experience in a lifetime. You may work hard raising a family, but if you are unable to see a lesson you built into that task—such as dealing with co-dependency, or realizing you could leave an abusive relationship, or even accepting help when things become overwhelming—you are not working on the purpose for that particular life.
Things pop up in a lifetime because you made arrangements for them to be there. They are the situations that present lessons to you. You mentioned a series of things that deal with an individual helping society, but normally the person has to deal with basic life lessons before going into a “service” mode. Service is something some souls have in the back of their mind to engage in after completing their chosen lessons. If your unlearned lesson involved resolving trouble with your own sense of self-worth or a lack of confidence in yourself, you will have difficulty in helping others.
A soul may have chosen to be very involved with others from the beginning of its life, if the person has chosen to work on understanding ego or understanding why people help others. Teaching and creating a community can be lessons in control or discovering one’s own power or creative ability. A soul may also be having a relaxing life where lessons are not the primary reason for being here. Bottom line though: incarnation is for the soul to learn something about itself. Being totally altruistic tells you only what you can do for others, not what you can learn about yourself. It could also indicate that you are doing things to feel good about yourself because you don’t have enough love for yourself.