Course XXXVI - Teaching 15: The Reincarnation

A being has to evolve through numerous incarnations to reach liberation.
If it is true that a man does not recall his past existences, he preserves however the experience of his journeys.
It is impossible to enumerate lives of a being, but we know they had a beginning when the soul was entirely ignorant; and they will have an end when the soul gets rid of all desires, which are chains that periodically return it to the Earth.
Insufficiently evolved souls quickly return to Earth, impelled by low passions that impede them to go up to higher planes. Many times, after a very short rest on the sixth astral plane, the look anxiously for a physical above, and they reincarnate.
But, also quite evolved beings can return quickly to Earth, when they have to perform certain especial mission. Then they do not come attracted by the physical matter but because they leave the subtle body to acquire a physical body.
Usually, men reincarnate periodically every seven hundred years; but the most evolved take a long time to reappear in the frame of human life, because they wait for the collective to which they belong in order to go down. Sometimes, entire races appear as a whole.
In some exceptional cases, certain persons would recall exactly their previous life, developed many years ago. It is an astral anomaly. They are beings who die, but do not move to the sixth astral plane or get rid of the ethereal body, and return quickly to the Earth and recall their previous life.
In most cases, beings reincarnate seven times with feminine aspect, and seven times with male aspect, with the exception of Great Initiates, who take the most suitable aspect to achieve their mission.
A being never reincarnates in the same race or in the same people, but in those cases were the being has left unfilled the word assigned to it in his previous life. Many times, certain works started in one existence are finished in another, and certain labors need several lives for their achievement. Beings do not return alone to life, but along with certain group of souls, and have links of family, friendship and affections with the latter. Many souls develop together the same labor for several incarnations.
Those who are here reunited do not know each other today or from yesterday, and death will not impede them to be reunited. Certain beings still not liberated, do not return to the Earth any more because now they are fit to continue their work from astral planes.
The belief in reincarnation, settled in so logical bases, is extremely comforting, for it explains the reason of human inequalities.