There is a place within each soul once it has left its physical embodiment that, in the presence of greater light, rejoins the greater truth of its own experience and its purpose for being. At that time, and through a sense of meditative reflection in the presence  of God and light, the soul realizes where it is in the trajectory of its own history upon the Earth, and what it needs to do next in order to create the greatest movement forward in terms of its own inherent purposes.  Such realization is not an edict followed out of obedience, but rather arises from the soul's own knowing and from its love which makes the truth available to its consciousness that  had not been available while embodied. 

At the time of such recognition, the soul is drawn to a potential next lifetime or even lifetimes which will enable it to manifest the qualities of soul that are part of its deepest nature and its purpose for being.  Such movement forward may be brought about by  many different kinds of life experiences, and it is known to the soul as it accepts the possibility of choosing one version over another, that some life experiences will be more pleasant and some more painful, with the more painful ones often leading to the greater learning and the greater healing.

However, this is not the only factor in the soul's deliberation regarding ease and hardship, pain and pleasure in an upcoming lifetime.  It is also true that the bonds of love draw the soul toward those with whom it has shared a deep connection in the past, and with whom it shares a common purpose that may or may not have been known to a group of souls. The bonds of love when great enough - and they are great enough for many who, within a given lifetime, may not have been able to experience the depth of their own love - also allow the soul to choose a life that will be of benefit to humanity as a whole, even while fulfilling the soul's own purposes for learning.

Love becomes the foundation, then, for the choice of a future lifetime in which pain or hardship will be experienced, sometimes great pain and great hardship.  Love allows the soul to choose such an experience because within the state of meditative reflection and the embrace of God's light, it knows that it is forever held in that light and that the experience while embodied will be of great service to the Earth and to itself. Thus, from the place of safety and within the awareness of eternal being, the soul may choose a lifetime in which great suffering will need to be endured, sometimes to serve more the purposes of individual learning, sometimes to serve more the purposes of helping the inhabitants of the Earth, both human and non-human.

Following this deliberation, the soul then selects the kind of body that will best suit its purposes for incarnating, and the particular group of souls that will become its biological family.  All this is chosen to serve the purposes of the soul and of God.

Great suffering that seems to human consciousness to be unendurable has thus befallen many souls on Earth, some having chosen to go through the experience primarily for their own learning, including karmic learning based on the need for self-healing, and some choosing to go through the experience out of great love for the Earth and for her children.

Once embodied, it becomes the nature of life to draw a 'veil of forgetfulness' over the soul's choice so that the embodied soul will emotionally, energetically, mentally, and physically go through whatever experience it has chosen without knowing why it is going through it.  Being in the experience is an essential part of the learning.  Nevertheless, even without knowing why, the love that has generated the choice for hardship or pain in the first place is capable of sustaining the embodied soul from within, even while the outer self may be crying out for the pain to stop.  This split between the natural human cry for pain to stop and the love of the soul that trusts the experience and endures through it, is one of the essential paradoxes that has mystified mankind.  It is only when we recognize that our human experience is happening by our own choice and that its purpose is good that we can understand how to hold suffering and how to help others hold it.  The split within ourselves allows us to simultaneously pray for others and to have deep compassion for what others are going through.  We pray for their healing and for their pain to stop, while at the same time holding in trust the reason that they are going through this pain.  This is the paradox, and it is a Divine paradox based on the history of our soul and the need to learn from embodied experience what it cannot learn in any other way. 

We who live on the Earth wish to live in a world without pain and in a body without pain, and it has been hard for us as a collective humanity to reconcile an understanding of Divine goodness with the amount of suffering taking place in the world.  Yet, beneath what our eyes can see and what our minds can know is the understanding of our deeper selves that tells us that there is meaning to suffering that is unknowable in a more conscious way, and that we can pray for all who are enduring any kind of great hardship that they be helped through it, and that extreme pain no longer need be the primary avenue of learning.

When we hold this dual perspective within ourselves more consciously, we become freer to open our hearts to compassion and to being more present with others. We free ourselves from rage and the need for retribution, and at the same time seek to aid our brother and sister souls so that they can be helped during the trials that on a soul level they have chosen.

Such a gift that we give to others is a lasting gift. It is a gift of our human self but also of our Divine self.  It is a gift of awareness that allows us to stop looking for blame when pain and suffering occur anywhere, while at the same time doing all that is in our power to do to alleviate the suffering and to help heal the pains of mankind.

Related Writings:

Sacrifice and the Soul's Choice

To Be a Lightworker

Our Relationship to Pain

Chronic Conditions of Limitation: Their Spiritual Purpose and Origin

Article Section -  A New Consciousness